ABSTRACT
What does it mean to challenge or usurp the word as the world of children’s literacies? What does that work entail? What does it demand of us? What comes about as a result of doing this work, of thinking about literacy as a posthuman practice? And when we are prompted to discern, create, and hold together new, different, and othered material incompatibilities, what literacies come to matter? Moreover, how might these literacies help us learn to be affected in new ways—creatively, morally, and socially? In pursuit of these questions, this chapter attends to an event that occurred on the playground of a small preschool in the countryside of central Sweden, whereby the untimely death of a bird emerged an occasion for the children to encounter and recognize in play the agential kinships of life and death and the complex ways that posthuman tales come to offer “new” literacies for creative, moral, and social hope.
