ABSTRACT
The author articulates theoretic propositions through revisiting his experiences of literacy events with 12-year-olds Cole and Ella in a children's hospital. George Saunders's speculative act of creation as both analysis and expression of an event in his writing process is a far more intuitive approach than is common in literacy research. The critique of social life through the mediation of culturally determined, representational units of analysis such as texts, practices, agency, artifacts, and contexts, therefore remains essential for literacy research, especially in challenging pervasive educational inequities across the globe. The affective tonality of literacy through the event, within and across event-times, is therefore one way of dealing with the problem of continuity in process ontologies without succumbing to representational or linear images of time. In the context of literacy research, speculative propositions function to attune us to events-in-the-making, where the potentials for relational transformations that make a difference in where we might go with our literacies are only just becoming.
