I’ll be delivering a Keynote and working with JustEd at the University of Helsinki. Here’s a link to the event: http://www.justed.org/seminar-working-with-and-for-social-justice/
My Abstract. In this paper, I consider how literacy, and education more broadly reflect and reproduce world views and communicative practices rooted in the western epistemological conceptualization of ‘Man’ (Wynter, 2003). I ‘frictionally’ (Puar, 2012) think-with more-than-human theories including Wynter’s (2015) ‘hybridity’ of bios and logos (mythoi), the inhuman, and affect in relation to an empirical research study with youth. Significantly, I show how refusal can operate as productive force that subverts dominant uses of writing, and education practices that operate through rhetoric of rehabilitation and inclusion of ‘inhuman’ others. Finally, I engage with Sylvia Wynter’s (2015) homo narrans which is the idea that we became who we are as a species in part through storytelling. While this storying capability has been used to uphold and reinforce the dominant world order, it also has the potential to undo it through what I call minor literacies.