Posthuman texts: nonhuman actors, mediators and the digital university

Abstract

The study of academic reading and writing has moved away from a predominantly cognitive focus, towards one which views meaning-making as a complex set of socially situated practices. It is acknowledged that literacy practices enrol social actors via a range of semiotic resources, also recognising that these take place in increasingly multimodal digital and analogue contexts. However, the agentive role of nonhuman actors and artefacts has received less attention in the literature. Within the contemporary university, textual practices have become saturated by digital mediation, raising questions about the role of objects such as laptops, notebooks, mobile phones and books. Drawing on posthuman and actor-network theories, this paper will report on a funded project, which investigated the day-to-day embodied and textual practices of 12 adult postgraduate students over a six-month period, using multimodal journaling and in-depth interviews. It will explore in particular the trans-contextual boundary of digital / print and how objects act not only to create new assemblages – complex and evolving networks of human and nonhuman actors – but also to enable transitions across contextual boundaries, leading to blurring of binaries around authorship, presence and persistence of text.