Abstract
Contemporary student academic engagement and textual practices are theorised and imagined in a range of complex and contradictory ways in Higher Education research, policy and practice. In this paper, I aim to explore these tensions, and draw out the effects that flow from what I argue are misleading, overly-abstract and ideologically-freighted humanist assumptions about the nature of texts, devices, the writer and the notion of authorship in the digital context in particular. I will trace what I characterise as a series of moves in the literature from a rejection of humanist abstraction towards a posthuman framing. In doing so, I review the contributions and ongoing diffractive potentials of New Literacy Studies (NLS), Actor-Network Theory (ANT), and theoretical challenges to the notion of spatiality and temporality as ‘context’ to practices. Turning to the work of Karen Barad, I consider the constructs of both phenomena and the apparatus, and the extent to which they may allow us to advance this theoretical move more fully, towards a recognition of the relationships between matter and meaning-making in the digital university and beyond. I conclude with implications for policy and practice.
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Gourlay, L. (2019). Textual Practices as Already-Posthuman: Re-Imagining Text, Authorship and Meaning-Making in Higher Education. In: Taylor, C.A., Bayley, A. (eds) Posthumanism and Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_14
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