ABSTRACT
This chapter presents analysis of data from one walk, chosen because these data seemed to reveal particularly interesting relations between sound and literacy—relations that were also apparent in data from other walks but in a less richly detailed way. Conceptualizing literacies as skills-based practices separate young children’s communication not only from its socio-political context but from the materiality of literacy practices, which are always about parts of a physical body moving and vibrating in place. Understanding that sound occurs without humans and that it may be beyond or at limits of human perception decenters words, repositioning them as just one small subset of a wider world of vibration. In relation to literacy, sound can be heard as meaningful but also as more than that—floating free of its moorings in specific words and worlds, becoming a spark for the imagination, a carrier wave for all kinds of affects and associations, and a way of reconfiguring relations through the play of vibration.
