ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors provide a space to think with several core concepts of Barad’s work that they find helpful in thinking about how and what is produced when people and non-living bodies come into being together as they create literacies. They think with feminist-philosopher-physicist Karen Barad’s writing on posthuman performativity. There is a growing body of scholarship that looks at how young children learn with digital tools. Children need time and curricular space to play-with materials without an end product or specific academic goal in mind. Literacy desiring is oriented toward the present needs, wishes, and demands of students-with-nonhumans, but also with possible users of literacy artifacts in mind. Cathy Burnett offers readers a perspective of thinking with Latour’s actor network theory as a tool to consider another way of conceptualizing children’s engagement with digital texts. One might argue that there is a growing body of scholarship in (early) literacy education that thinks with post-theories.
