Reciprocal Literacies: A Post-Qualitative Case Study of Artists’ Ephemeral and Matterless Connections Amongst Place

Meaningfully connecting with our social and natural environments becomes challenging in an increasingly digital and globalized world. Affective language and literacy practices carry potential for affirming and fostering generative entanglements amongst people and places; furthermore, such relationships are important to the well-being of the individual participants and the collective community of human and more-than-human. Beyond traditional, text-based literacies, ephemeral and matterless literacies offer modes of positive reciprocal interactions within assemblages. The literature review considers Indigenous and posthuman theories as they relate to literacy, place, and research approaches. The studied assemblages include the human and more-than-human participants of creative contexts in Southern Alberta, including a photographer, a musician/painter, an installation artist, and a performance artist. The methodological approach reflects ethico-onto-epistemological commitments to the openings and transformation Indigenous and posthumanist theories suggest. The multi-case study illuminates and sparks potentials existing in creative, cultural, and communal practices when constraints of educational institutions are removed and textless communication is emphasized. Attending to these literacies requires that literacy researchers and educators reconsider institutional concepts of literacy / literacy spaces focused on culturally biased, individual, text-based performance, and begin afresh. The study explores and describes the flows of intention and surrender that inspire and incite ephemeral and matterless communicative practices existing in adult lives and in doing so, imagines pedagogical possibilities to honour reciprocal relationship with places, in the dynamic and all-encompassing sense of the word