Thought-provoking contamination

• Main Author: Nara Hiroko Takaki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Estadual de Campinas 2019-08-01
• Series: Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada
• Subjects: Posthumanism; Multiliteracies; Technology
• Online Access: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/tla/article/view/8654719

This paper purports to present some characteristics of the posthuman perspective and relate them to contemporary understanding of applied linguistics and literacy studies with preliminary activities in this direction and interrogations for future studies. As interdisciplinary studies, posthumanism draws on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage (2005) and has been gaining relevance according to theorists such as Barad (2007), Bennet (2010), Braidotti (2018) and Pennycook (2018), among others. One of their concerns is the future of language research, teaching, learning and enacting in philosophical, transcultural and educational ways. Barad (2007) and Bennet (2010)) use the terms humans and nonhumans while Braidotti (2018) and Pennycook (2018) write humans and non-humans. At times, Bennet (2010) prefers human-nonhuman(s) to emphasize the idea of assemblage. They consider such agents in vibrant interconnected assembles within a broader range of semiotic, spatial and ethical complexities in the emergence of posthuman humanism as Braidotti (2018) argues. This calls for applied linguistics and literacy studies willing to recognize that they themselves are products of such entanglements for which a revision of ontologies influencing epistemologies and methodologies might be productive.