While studies of the literacy practices of participants in online fanfiction communities have been done, researchers are left with questions on the ability to bring these types of out-of-school literacies into the classroom. Students, teachers, and researchers express doubts about the ability to bridge out-of-school and in-school literacy practices as decontextualizing these practices could be appropriative or remove some of the context that creates the authentic and social elements of New Literacies (Korobkova & Black, 2014; Lubke, 2013; McWilliams, Hickey, Hines, Conner, & Bishop, 2011; Thomas, 2006). For example, asking students to use Instagram, a photo sharing social media site, to document a research process may antagonize students rather than interest them, making it seem like the teacher is trying to invade their world rather than incorporate their interests. Additionally, if documenting this process is not something typical to Instagram, the interaction from others on the site may dwindle, removing some of the elements that make Instagram an example of New Literacies. It seems that what we learn about the rich literacy practices of online fanfiction or other New Literacies cannot be easily decontextualized and used in new spaces, and a call for more research in this area is clear. The ELATE Commission (2018) from NCTE clarifies this call:
English and literacy researchers should:
· consider how existing paradigms such as New Literacy Studies, New Literacies, and the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies can help to understand how students themselves experience technology, as well as how to use technology to enhance student learning.
· develop research agendas that examine best practices in K-12 classrooms where teachers leverage the power of literacies and technologies to help foster student voice and activism. (n.p.)
With this call, a new materialist lens may lend fresh insight into “how students themselves experience technology” and how “teachers leverage the power of literacies and technologies” (ELATE Commission on Digital Literacy in Teacher Education, 2018, n.p.). In fact, New Literacies and New Materialism share many connections. Just as New Literacies are dynamic and deictic, in New Materialism each material under study cannot be studied in isolation because each material constantly changes when coming into contact with other materials. This is called intra-action (Barad, 2003). While a New Literacies text evolves and depends on context, the subject of a New Materialism study is ever evolving with its context. Just as New Literacies are multimodal, in New Materialism any and, as much as possible, every type of material should be included in a study, including sounds, smells, physical objects, and humans. Each material changes and is changed by the others and cannot be separated from the whole. Just as New Literacies involves ways of reading and interacting with texts by designing new, non-linear routes through them, New Materialism involves new, non-linear ways of approaching research that view the research subject as a rhizome that can be approached and followed in any direction, through any “line of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While New Literacies texts involve a collaboration among multiple people to create the text, New Materialism’s involves multiple materials “entangle” to create a “newness” in a similar way. Materials “congeal” or participate to create a collaborative new phenomenon or “newness.” Table 1 condenses these similarities between New Literacies and New Materialism.
Overall, New Materialism works toward making no distinction between subject and context. No subject has essential, fixed qualities, but rather “people, animals, objects, nature, discourses and so on proceed together in relation to and with one another” (Smythe et al., 2017, p.20). In this way, nothing can be studied without attention to all contextual factors that contribute to its being. Because New Literacies are so dependent on context (Leu et al., 2013), a New Materialist framework that seeks to study the way the subject is created through the contextual factors with which it intra-acts is best suited to form a clear picture of the literacy practice. This assists in the goal of ensuring that New Literacies practices are not decontextualized to insert into the classroom, but rather that the most authentic versions of the practice can be taught.
For fanfiction in particular, a New Materialist lens directs that we cannot study online fanfiction, discover its essential nature, and recreate it. Rather, online fanfiction is always becoming, as are its participants and source material. Through a New Materialist lens, analyzing the intra-actions among participant, fanfiction, and source material gives a more contextualized understanding of the literacy practice to create a more accurate picture and, therefore, a better chance of incorporating it into the classroom in an authentic way, not robbing it of the contextual elements that make-up the New Literacies practice.
The primary theoretical framework for this study is an emerging approach to the social sciences that is just now coming into use in education fields. New Materialism shifts study away from both language and human subjects and toward the material. Below are outlined key concepts and theorists of New Materialism.
Deleuze and Guattari
Researchers in New Materialism cite Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as the post-structuralist root of their approach. In the fields of philosophy and psychiatry respectively, these authors’ concept of the rhizome was influential on post-structuralist thought and, eventually, on New Materialism (Mills, 2016; Smythe et al., 2017). Post-structuralism turned focus away from how different structures affected a subject or phenomenon and turned toward an analysis of how various structures interacted in a phenomenon (Clarke, 2010). In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, for anything one wishes to study, one must view it not as a single entity, but as a rhizome, a kind of root that grows horizontally with many offshoots (Dimitriadis & Kamberelis, 2006). According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “any point on a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (p.7). With this idea, nothing can be studied in isolation, but rather in connection to the many different things it interacts with that constantly shapes it.
Beyond having to study connections, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) were anti-essentialist, positing that, “a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo… the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, ‘and…and…and…’” (p.25). In a sense, there is no boundary, whether it is a human or an object to be analyzed, between it and the outside world. As Dimitriadis and Kamberelis (2006) explained, “the person is not to be found inside the body, composed of autonomous, self-sustaining, and organized internal forms. Instead, the person/body is interconnected, exterior, open, multiple, fragmented, provisional, and interpenetrated by other entities” (p. 96). Deleuze and Guattari broke down traditional dichotomies between subject and environment and even subject and observer.
The post-structuralist thoughts outlined by Deleuze and Guattari focused on how structures interacted, analyzing a connected body rather than a segmented, isolated subject. New Materialism takes this concept and inverts it. Rather than focusing on one subject that is made up of interconnected, contextual parts, New Materialist attempts to draw attention to how each contextual part is changed. In a sense, where post-structuralism focused on how a subject is created by its context, New Materialism finds everything to be a subject, nothing is mere context. The following sections will outline the New Materialist turn more fully.
De-centering the Human
Taking the works of Deleuze and Guattari as a foundation, one of the key concepts of New Materialism is what researchers are calling the “spatial turn” or “material turn” (Jones et al., 2016; Justice, 2016). New Materialist researchers call for de-centering the human in research to pay more attention to the interactions among materials, including humans. Mills (2016) phrased this distinction saying that “humans are not regarded with greater attention than the object with which they interact” (p.117). Smythe et al. (2017) saw this turn as “a rejection of traditional philosophical dualisms and the hierarchies that often accompany them (human/non-human, thinking/feeling, male/ female, mind/body, research/practice and so on)” (p.19). As previously stated, New Materialism, like Deluze and Guattari’s rhizome, rejects essentialism, the idea that any human or non-human has fixed qualities, but rather states that, “people, animals, objects, nature, discourses and so on proceed together in relation to and with one another” (Smythe et al., 2017, p.20). For this reason, one cannot understand an isolated human or object. One can only understand a person or object in relation to other humans and objects within the context.
Becoming and Intra-action
Stemming from Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, New Materialism studies “invite us to refrain from positing a priori individuations (or boundaries) between things, such as people, tools, furniture and so on” (Smythe et al., 2017, p.20). Because of this lack of boundary, the idea of “becoming” is important to New Materialism. Smythe et al. (2017) saw this approach as, “emphasizing the emergent as well as relational nature of entities that are always in a state of becoming” (p. 21). Materials, including humans, are always becoming through the process of intra-action. Barad’s (2003) intra-action is distinct from interaction as interaction “presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata” (p. 815). Rather, intra-action shows that materials change within themselves while in entanglements with other materials. Smythe et al. noted that “intra-action shifts attention to the relation, and conceptualizes the relation as the unit of analysis” as any specific material cannot be analyzed without the materials with which it intra-acts (p. 25).
Where a post-structuralist study might observe a child with difficulties reading and ask, “what personal and cultural factors are converging to affect this child’s literacy?”, a New Materialist study would look at the same situation and ask, “what materials are intra-acting to create this literacy experience?” Rather than focusing on the child and seeing the different contextual elements as influencing her as post-structuralism might, New Materialism would not place primacy on the child but look at all elements of the situation, the text, the noise level in the room, objects and people in the room, clothing, etc. as not just influencing the child but as influencing and changing one another. In this way New Materialism expands the concept of post-structuralism by attending to and placing primacy on what may otherwise be considered more minute details, not often factored into a conceptualization of an experience. This is not to say that New Materialism completely disregards cultural factors necessarily, but rather that these are seen as part of only one material in the intra-action, the human.
New Materialism is fairly new to education fields with few published studies citing New Materialism as a framework and some articles overviewing what New Materialism make look like in the field of education. Among these works a few key areas of research emerge.
Policy
Several New Materialist education studies are policy focused (Anwaruddin, 2016; Charteris, Smardon, & Nelson, 2017; Miller, 2017; Ulmer, 2016). Anwaruddin (2016) used what he called new materialist discourse analysis to examine the ways in which publications about a well-regarded English language teacher education program (English in Action) addressed or failed to address the context and material reality of teachers’ experience, ultimately finding “the discourses that English in Action uses are detached from the material reality in which teachers live, learn, and work” (p. 260). Anwaruddin (2016) discusses how this lack of connection to the material reality ensures the failure of the policy, and, moreover, that education policy should take into account the material reality of the settings in which it will be applied.
Charteris, Smardon, and Nelson (2017) asked similar questions of innovative learning environments (ILEs), asking “what sorts of relationalities are produced in ILEs between entangled: objects, spaces, policy discourses, practices, students and teachers” (p. 809). To address this question, the researchers interviewed principals who worked with ILEs. Part of the data analysis consisted of coding related to entanglements, spaces, and materials referenced by the principals in discussing ILEs. They found that in switching disciplinary, individual classrooms to modular shared space principals generally found that relationships among teachers and between teachers and students were enhanced by the shared space. However, while principals saw that the change in space led to a change in practice, many feared that, eventually, teachers may funnel back into their own spaces, cordoning off space within the shared space. Overall, a change in space and dispersion of materials affected practice and human relationships.
In an examination and defense of participatory action research (PAR), Miller (2017) explained how New Materialism’s post-structuralist approach can serve to combat neo-positivist and neo-liberal views of research that exclude the “ indeterminate, unpredictable, sometimes contentious, always elusive, often unknowable, and always changing entanglings of subjectivities, encounters, contexts, desires, and shifting relations of power, among myriad other exigencies” that PAR can help delineate (p. 500).
These articles provide examples of the ways in which New Materialism has come to influence policy research by focusing on the ways in which policy cannot be isolated in study. Polices themselves, implementation of policies, and research into policies must all take into account the way in which the multiple facets of material context influences outcomes.
Learning Experiences
New Materialism has also been used to study classroom intra-actions (Ehret, Hollett, & Jocius, 2016; Jones et al., 2016; Smythe et al., 2017). Ehret, Hollett, and Jocius (2016) studied the intra-actions that took place while middle schoolers created a book trailer. Describing one intra-action among students, space, and book, the authors stated:
One of the RMCs then hands her the paperback, and after flipping through it for about
a minute, Domiana leans forward on the edge of her seat and attempts to gain the attention of the group by raising her hand. She conspicuously flips the pages again, and the response from the other members of the group is immediate—both RMCs and all students—save Marcus—instantly direct their eyes toward the book-as-thing.
The ceiling fan muffles Domiana’s voice, and as the participants lean forward, gazing
at the paperback, her words take on an intense presence, a heft that is louder, and
heavier, than the immediate resonance of their soft sound. The book-as-thing is attuning
bodies in the circle to its emerging affective heft. (p.359)
In this example of intra-action, the authors take note of how the course of the book trailer project changes through the ways in which one student holding a book affects the others students’ engagment with ideas. Even the environment, such as the ceiling fan, is taken into account as affecting the way the students act and how the final product comes together.
In other studies, Smythe et al. (2017) described the intra-actions among elementary students and a childcare center with a bioreactor and intra-actions with a toddler and the ocean in learning to swim. In both of these examples, the environments affected the development of the children’s actions, and, in turn, the children manipulated the environment around them. These explorations of New Materialism in education focus on observing intra-actions of environment and children in educational settings.
Digital Materiality
New Materialism and New Literacies have also started to converge. Leonardi (2010) stated, “materiality is not a property of artifacts but a property of relationships between artifacts and the people who produce and consume them” (n.p). In this view, digital spaces and tools can be seen as a material with which intra-actions can be studied. Justice (2016) used the term digital materiality suggesting that it is “an assemblage that accounts for the affordances of digital tools” (p.59). Law and Hetherington (2003) outlined forms of materiality such as materials, bodies, and texts, the last of which includes internet sites and other digital material.
Studies of digital materiality in educational settings is limited, but some do exist. Smythe et al. (2017) wrote about two studies including children intra-acting with a math iPad application, other children, and the classroom space as well as a study of adults intra-acting in a technology learning and help center with tutors and public access computers. These studies took place in a physical location and studied the intra-actions with technology and other materials in the space using observation. In both of these studies, the object was not to which objects had the most effect on what was learned. Rather, each described and mapped how the physicality of the technology and the people using the technology combined. For instance, the children interacting with the math application reacted with excitement at seeing the number zero in a large number, falling to the floor with laughter. The adults in the technology learning center took places at the same computers each session to keep a similar orientation to the screen and its icons. For both of these studies, the findings were about how intra-actions among materials affected the experience – which intra-actions existed and changed the directions of the event.
Somewhat different is Justice’s (2016) study of the implementation of digital making technologies at one school. This study mapped digital learning pedagogy in a physical location with observations, interviews, and artifacts. While this study took place over a longer period of time and involved more than just observation, it is important to note that it was still bound within a physical space. Similar to Smythe’s (2017) described studies, Justice’s (2016) study mapped the intra-actions that happened, what he called “contact points,” and described how tools, space, teachers, and students intra-acted. However, Justice (2016) also provided implications for practice born out of these descriptions. Noting how the sudden insertion of technology into a school caused disruptions for both students and teachers, changing the perceived locus of instruction, Justice (2016) recommended a gradual introduction to technological tools. Beyond gradually introducing physical objects, the theory behind materiality and digital materiality should also be introduced to teachers:
Teacher education might benefit from an emphasis on material learning as a way of knowing and, importantly, as a way of doing teaching. Material learning holds content acquisition as a feeling of knowing that emerges from and with enacted encounters with materials, where insight or innovation arrives sometimes as if by accident, by surprise, or as if from the materials themselves, whether those materials be paint, clay, cardboard, bitmaps, 3D polygons, vector data, or virtual reality immersions, or documents from the Revolutionary War, poetry from the Han Dynasty, or a bacterial smear in a petri dish. (p.239)
Justice (2016) suggested that coming to view curating materials as a way of teaching rather than a relinquishing of teaching is key. Understanding materiality can assist in this. Justice (2016) explained that rather than focusing on “what tools do, or what you can do with a particular machine,” ideas around materiality help emphasize “the narratives that tools and materials make available to learners” (p.239).
For all of these New Materialist studies of technology, we see the focus is not on what technology does or what human do with technology. Rather, these studies describe what happens when technologies are placed certain material contexts and people. While studies of technology in education often focus on effectiveness of a tool devoid of context or even perceptions of a tool, with New Materialism provides a much more inclusive and contextualized understanding of digital tools.
As New Materialism is just emerging in educational research, new methods and combinations of data collection and analysis are also emerging (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015). New Materialism calls on qualitative researchers to rethink the ways in which we imagine the methods and subjects of research, the way in which we report findings, and our own role in research, focusing on material intra-actions (Smythe et al., 2017). This rethinking proves helpful in tackling the complex ways adolescents interact with both traditional and New Literacies. The complexities of interactions and the full context of these literacy practices must be understood in order to be of use in the classroom. For this reason, answering the research question “how do adolescent, print book, and online fanfiction space entangle to create the newness of a hybrid traditional-New Literacies practice? ” is served by a New Materialist methodology, attending to all the materials and their intra-actions. In the outline of methodology and methods that follow, I describe the New Materialist framing for each element.
In representing a rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari (1980) call for “a map and not a tracing” (p.12). Instead of beginning with an existing pattern to analyze a subject, a tracing, we should instead depict a configuration of it through mapping. Dimitriadis and Kamberelis (2006) explain that “a map produces an organization of reality rather that reproducing some prior representation of reality” (p. 90). Because of this, a case study is appropriate, as Stake (2006) described a case study researcher as needing to “generate a picture of the case and then produce a portrayal of the case for others to see” (p.3). The case study researcher approaches a case in order to describe or map a subject and its context. Hatch (2002) described case studies as “a special kind of qualitative work that investigates a contextualized contemporary (as opposed to historical) phenomenon within specific boundaries” (p. 30). These definitions show the attentiveness to context with which case studies operate. However, for a New Materialist case study, subject and context are not only studied together, but rather studied as one. For example, rather than viewing a child who has difficulty reading as a case and the classroom, home, and reading materials as the influential context for the case, a New Materialist lens may focus on a literacy event itself, with the child, the materials, and the setting all as equally important aspects of the case.
Defining a case is particularly difficult from a New Materialist perspective as the driving force behind the perspective is taking everything in the environment into account. Smythe et al. (2017) describes this difficulty, addressing how the “selective gaze” of the researchers defined what was considered learning and part of the class project they were researching and what was not (p.73). While classroom observations from a New Materialist perspective may attempt to be as limitless as possible in inclusion for a study, even these research studies must be attentive to the ways in which boundaries are imposed by the researcher. Other New Materialist studies, such as the policy studies described in chapter two, are more definitive in their boundary-making, limited by more clearly bounded methods such as document analysis and interviews.
Because this study, similar to the policy studies previously mentioned, is not bound in a physical space but rather in cyberspace, it is necessary to outline the specific materials that will be considered the case under study: the adolescent participant, the young adult novel, and the fanfiction space itself. While other materials undoubtedly play a role in creating this hybrid traditional-New Literacies practice, materials such as type of technology used and access to that technology, the space in which the adolescents access the technology and reading materials, the type of reading material (physical, electronic, owned, borrowed, etc.), other humans who participate in the activity with them, etc, these material considerations take a secondary role in this study to the three main materials by nature of the research question. The question, “how do adolescent, print book, and online fanfiction space entangle to create the newness of a hybrid traditional-New Literacies practice? ” certainly does not exclude these other materials from consideration, but it does focus the study on the three materials on which I elaborate in the following sections.
It is important here to note my own role in the entanglement of materials in this study. From a New Materialist perspective it is impossible to completely separate the researcher from affecting the materials studied (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Dimitriadis & Kamberelis, 2006; Mills, 2016). By asking questions and reading documents, I am intra-acting with the materials in this study. In this sense, my position as an “aca-fan” may prove helpful in not adding too much of an outsider perspective into the entanglement (Jenkins, 1992). However, in entering the entanglement through asking questions of the adolescents and through my own intra-action with the young adult novel and the participants’ fanfiction, I am altering the space. While I attempted to pose questions that are as broad as possible, the focus on the specific intra-actions in my questions affect the response, imposing my own bounded ideas onto it. Additionally, by merely approaching fanfiction writers as a researcher who has taken interest in their work, I may cause more positive feelings on the process. In fact, in one case a participant said she would post new stories she had written but had not yet posted because I was studying them. In this way, no matter how much I am fluent in and a part of the fanfiction space, entering the space as a researcher does have an effect on each of the materials under study.
Multiple cases. Having defined the deliminations of a case in this research, it is necessary to describe the nature of the multiple case study design. To answer the research questions, I plan to conduct what Stake (2000) called a collective case study. This method of inquiry uses multiple cases to come to a better understanding of a particular target which Stake (2006) called a quintain. According to Stake (2006), a quintain is the "collective target, whether it is a program, a phenomenon, or a condition" that is the focus of the multiple case study research (p. 6). For this study, the quintain will be the intra-action among adolescents, fanfiction, and young adult books, and the individual cases will be the specific assemblages of those intra-actions for the different adolescent participants.
This collective case study will be instrumental rather than intrinsic. Stake (2000) implies that all collective case studies are instrumental rather than intrinsic since they serve to examine not the cases themselves, but rather the quintain. However, Stake (2006) later suggested that this depends on where the researcher falls on the "case-quintain dilemma" - which piece of the collective case study, the individual cases or the quintain, is to be emphasized. For this study, the quintain, the intra-actions, will be emphasized, making this an instrumental case study. Beyond this, this study is instrumental in that it seeks to answer a narrow research question and how "the concerns of researchers and theorists are manifest in the case" (Stake, 2000, p. 439). I will be specifically looking at how the young adult series, fanfiction, and adolescents intra-act within each case and the quintain as a whole.
While an instrumental study may seem counter to New Materialist perspectives that seek to “map” with open observation and description rather than to “trace” with too specific of a research question or limitation already in mind, Mills (2016) found this not to be the case saying that New Materialist studies, “can address issues such as how to integrate technologies into literacy curriculum in ways that interpret educational innovations with their socio-material relations. The materiality of literacy concerns how literacy practices connect to other entities, and the performance of the human and non-human in the social practices of literacy” (p. 117). As Mills (2016) suggests, I am addressing a specific question about socio-material literacies in order to integrate technologies into the classroom better by bounding the collective case study to specific intra-actions. However, I am still seeking to map the assemblage of adolescent, fanficiction, and young adult novel by attending to each intra-action to create the over-all picture and then again attending to each assemblage case to map the quintain, maintaining the New Materialist perspective.
Along with New Materialism seeking a balance between bounding a study and openness to seeing everything as important, Stake (2006) called for a balance in both the case-quintain dilemma and in focusing too much on specific research questions citing Firestone and Herriott (1984) and stating that "too much emphasis on original research questions and contexts can distract researchers from recognizing new issues when they emerge. But too little emphasis on research questions can leave researchers unprepared for subtle evidence supporting the most important relationships" (p. 13). Keeping this in mind, the methods and analysis I will use for this New Materialist collective case study will stem from an instrumental methodology, but will leave room for discovering relevant intrinsic information as well, including moving beyond the three main materials under study.