Session Information
31 SES 14 A, Innovative Methodological Approaches to Investigate Literacies and Languages Learning in Education
Symposium
Contribution
This paper turns an analytic lens onto ourselves as researchers. We treat academic texts as socio-material objects that evolve and contribute to meaning construction. We draw upon meta-ethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988) to investigate how scholarly texts operate as artifacts through the metaphors used, reused, revised, rejected, revived, and morphed at different points in time and in conversation with multiple voices. Thus, texts inform and influence scholars, their actions, and their understandings. Barad (2013) challenges binaries distinguishing matter from meaning arguing that objects contribute meaning that affects people, their actions and their understandings. Barad’s conception of intra-activity suggests confluences and disfluences among organisms and matter that have force and effects. Significantly, intra-activity occurs constantly and at various intensities propelling, redirecting and/or stifling processes of being/becoming. In particular, Barad (2013) argues, that “matter does time” (p. 16). Specifically, texts and their meanings continually materialize and unfold. Through our meta-ethnography (Noblit & Hare, 1988) focused on family literacy scholarship, we explore how a small set of highly-cited scholarly texts do time. Specifically, we focus on texts and the metaphors operating within and across texts as meanings continually materialize and unfold. To conduct our analysis, we identified key metaphors, in highly-cited family literacy research studies to trace the development, refinement, and expansion of ideas that have informed and continue to frame family literacy scholarship. We recognize and treat metaphors as intra-active agents, that elicit multiple meanings and are continuously susceptible to the effects of multiple beings/times, where futures and pasts are diffracted into moments of meaning emergence. We describe the use, reuse, revision, rejection, and revival of metaphors that scholars use to discuss and describe relationships between children’s homes and classrooms. Specifically, we track home and school relationships, as presented in scholarly literature that range from home and school as separate and disparate to images as home and school as connected, intertwined, and interactive. This meta-ethnography reveals changes and development in the meaning across voices and across time exposing consistencies, changes, revisions, and emerging lines of argument that are often invisible. By exploring the emergence of ideas and meanings across decades of scholarship, we become increasingly aware of our own contribution to that scholarship and to how we intra-act with words as we participate in polyphonic meaning-scapes that define what we think of as academic knowledge.
References
Barad, K. (2013). Ma(r)king time: Material entanglements and re-membering cutting together apart. In P. Carlile, D. Nicolini, A. Langley, & H. Tsoukas (eds.), How matter matters: Objects, artifacts, and materiality in orgnizational studies (pp. 16-31) Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans/Matter/Realities and queer political imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2/3), 387-422. Noblit, G. W. & Hare, R. D. (1988). Meta-ethnography: Synthesizing qualitative studies. Newbury Park, NJ: Sage Publications.
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