Relational Methodologies for Mobile Literacies: Intra-action, Rhythm, and Atmosphere

Abstract

In this chapter, we develop methods of interaction analysis to address how contemporary new media making with iPads and other mobile devices involves the body, its mobilities, and its inextricable relationship to place. To analyze the social, cultural, and (im)material assemblages that emerge during mobile new media making with iPads, we pivot from interaction to intra-action in order to feel and move alongside the numerous bodies that come together—and affect one another—in experiences of making new media. In contrast to interaction analysis, intra-action analysis contests anthropocentric notions of being and place that stabilize on the human as the center of all reality. Providing an example of intra-action analysis, we therefore disrupt the common human-centered interactional perspectives on new media making in literacy studies. The application of our developed method to a case of adolescents making an iPad-produced digital book trailer illustrates the potential of intra-action analysis to illuminate new media making as an emergent, felt, and relational process of bodies moving within and across multiple production settings