Rethinking community-engaged pedagogy through posthumanist theory

ABSTRACT

This paper presents research on a posthumanist approach for reframing community-engaged pedagogy. We employ posthumanist theory as a way to examine the educational possibilities of ethically engaging with technologies and materials as a means to build and sustain community partnerships for social justice. This research project employs a diffractive inquiry involving interview encounters with 20 college writing instructors. The posthumanist approach presented in this paper provides a window into understanding how a myriad of human-material assemblages, response-able designs, and affective encounters shape and transform community-engaged pedagogy. In the context of community-engaged writing, the posthumanist approach oftentimes coincides with the use of multiple modes of communication, such as text, image, sound, and video, to foreground marginalized communities and their perspectives. Through allowing for the expression of multiple voices and perspectives, including those of non-human entities, this approach further challenges and disrupts traditional human-centric and dualistic views of community-engaged pedagogy.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-engaged writing
• posthumanism
• assemblage
• response-ability
• affect
• diffractive analysis

Introduction

This paper adds to the ongoing conversation surrounding the significance of posthumanist theory for higher education practices, particularly within the context of community-engaged pedagogy. Community-engaged teaching and learning, also known as service-learning, is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes collaboration between teachers, students, and community partners. In service-learning courses, students use writing to learn about and engage with the community, while also reflecting on their experiences. In recent years, scholars and teachers have increasingly embraced service-learning as a viable teaching method. Scholars in writing studies and literacy research have championed service-learning as a socially responsible and community-centered approach (Baca 2012; Deans, Roswell, and Wurr 2010; Garza 2013; Holmes 2016; Lovat and Clement 2016). Deans, Roswell, and Wurr (2010) emphasize that a crucial objective of service-learning teaching methods is to have a balance between community outreach and academic inquiry. Community-engaged courses require more than just taking students to community spaces. Garza (2013) further delineates that service-learning in writing classes should not be seen as a means to an end, but rather an opportunity for students to learn through working with community partners on actual projects.

Within higher education, there has been a flourishing of theories and research surrounding the impacts and implications of community-engaged pedagogy. For instance, an increased scholarly attention has been paid to the integration of multimodal tools and digital technologies for fueling community partnership (Lee, Wilder, and Yu 2017; Tan, Lo, and Alharbi 2020; Tham and Jiang 2022). As a form of service-learning, community engagement is distinct from traditional service in that it creates a two-way partnership that benefits everyone involved. This approach involves a change from just ‘doing for’ a community to ‘doing with’ the community (Lee, Wilder, and Yu 2017). Community engagement is gaining prominence across different academic disciplines in both private and public colleges as a means of offering students practical and experiential opportunities. For instance, the current body of literature (Salam et al. 2019) demonstrates that the disciplines that most frequently employ service-learning in their curriculum include, among others, health sciences and nursing, business and economics, computer sciences, sociology studies, and teacher education. By participating in community-engaged projects, students can not only support the needs of the community, but also improve their understanding of course content and gain valuable hands-on experience by actively participating in genuine projects.

While analyzing community-engaged collaboration through the prisms of human subjects, such as teachers and students, is highly significant, the idea that individuals are the sole agents of collaboration may not be sufficient. We question if the narrow focus on individuals in research is driven by researchers relying on theories that depict individuals as independent from a myriad of other agents and relationships crucial for understanding such a pedagogy. In other words, we are interested in investigating an assemblage of forces involved in the process of community engagement and how they affect community partnership. To do so, we begin with feminist posthumanism as the theoretical lens through which we view community-engagement actions.

Feminist posthumanism is a philosophy and cultural movement that combines the principles of posthumanism with feminist theory and activism. This approach seeks to challenge the traditional human-centered perspective and promote a more inclusive and equitable understanding of the world (Åsberg, Cecilia, and Braidotti 2018; Braidotti 2018). In recent years, there has been a surge in theories and research surrounding the implications of posthumanism for higher education. Scholars researching a wide array of educational issues have started to engage with posthumanism in their research studies, including early childhood education (Leander and Ehret 2019; Lenz Taguchi 2010; Kuby 2017; Zapata, Kuby, and Thiel 2018), adolescent literacy (Lenters 2016; Spring and Huddleston 2019), and adult academic learning (Charteris, Nye, and Jones 2019; Chappell, Natanel, and Wren 2021). The concept has also been taken up in higher education to inform studies of student mobility (Pitt and Moss 2019) and pedagogical innovation (Gourlay 2019; Gravett and Kinchin 2020; Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021). Posthuman ethics aims to challenge and disrupt the traditional human-centric view of the world by valuing and recognizing the perspectives and contributions of non-human entities, particularly those that have been marginalized and oppressed. This paper contributes to the growing dialogue on the relevance of posthumanist theory in higher education by examining college writing instructors’ experience with engaging community-engaged pedagogy.

Drawing upon a research project examining writing instructors who collaborated with community partners, this paper employs a diffractive inquiry which involves interview encounters with 20 college writing instructors. The theory of posthumanism is offered in this paper as a way to understand community partnership in the context of college writing education. More specifically, we approach community partnership through the theorizations of assemblage (Bennett 2010; Deleuze and Parnet 1987; DeLanda 2019), response-ability (Barad 2014; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Haraway 2016; Lather 2016) and affect (Ahmed 2004; Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Massumi 2015). Reading these theoretical concepts alongside interview encounters enables us to become attuned to the intermingling of interview participants, their assignments, technologies, multimodal texts, and design artifacts in the research assemblage of this study. Ultimately, we pay special attention to how community-engaged writing projects are shaped and reframed by the assemblage and entanglement of various agents, both human and non-human. In the context of community-engaged writing, the posthumanist approach encourages the use of multiple modes of communication, such as text, image, sound, and video, to create a more inclusive and diverse articulation of the community and its perspectives. It allows for the assemblage of multiple voices and perspectives, including those of non-human entities, which can challenge and disrupt traditional notions of power and representation. Furthermore, posthumanist community engagement focuses on creating connections and fostering a response-able dialogue between the writer and the community. This approach enables teachers and students to gain an affective, reflexive understanding of the community and its perspectives and use this understanding to create a more inclusive pedagogy. Our analysis in this paper argues for a posthumanist rethinking of community-engaged pedagogy, which has the potential to create new openings in community partnerships.

Assemblage

In posthumanist theory, assemblage is a theoretical framework that posits the world as composed of a variety of different elements, or ‘assemblages,’ that come together to create complex, emergent, and ever-changing systems. As defined by Deleuze and Parnet (1987), an assemblage is ‘a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures’ (69). Put otherwise, an assemblage is a mixture of diverse elements that form connections and relationships across different categories like age, gender, and nature. The mechanism that holds the elements of an assemblage together is their mutual functioning, making it a symbiotic relationship. The theory of assemblage views entities as constantly shaping their surroundings by creating collections of things, including both human and non-human elements, that can be either physical or intangible (Deleuze 1988). These groupings are unique to a specific context and their participants, both human and non-human, are considered equally important without any hierarchical relationships. Bennett (2010) expands on Deleuze and Parnet’s (1987) concept of an assemblage by focusing on a combination of both living and nonliving components, known as an ‘agential assemblage’ (See Jackson and Mazzei 2016, 99–100). When mapping an assemblage, it will encompass humans along with signs, objects, events, practices, and expressions, but the focus is not solely on the human contribution. In the context of posthumanist research, the theorization of assemblage is manifested in the interaction of different elements in an assemblage and their collective agency. Rather than attributing agency solely to people, assemblage theory recognizes the role of non-human elements and their dynamic impact (Jackson and Mazzei 2016). This approach views agency as not confined to a single entity, but as intricately bound to the assemblage in its entirety. As a result, assemblage theory recognizes that human actions are only one part of the larger picture, and other elements must also be taken into account in the analysis.

In terms of higher education pedagogy, the posthumanist approach means that the academic community is not a homogenous entity, but is made up of a variety of different individuals, groups, and organizations with their own perspectives and experiences. Assemblage theory emphasizes the idea that elements, or agents, come together in a variety of different ways to create different outcomes. Viewing teaching as an assemblage means examining the different elements that make up a classroom setting and recognizing how they work together to influence the teaching process (Charteris, Nye, and Jones 2019; Jiang 2020; Jiang and Tham 2022; Strom 2015). Assemblage theory also highlights the unexpected forms of de-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Fox and Alldred 2017; Jackson and Mazzei 2016) that transform and reconfigure the assembling of community relations. According to Jackson and Mazzei (2016), ‘the assemblage is that which creates a territory and the potential for re- and/or de-territorialization–not an individual, intentional subject’ (103). Thus, the relationships within assemblages undergo a dynamic process of reorganization and transformation, continually in flux. In the context of community-engaged writing, posthuman ethics involves rethinking the teaching of writing as being equivalent to a collection of ever-changing social and material connections. Quinn (2016) observes that ‘using a posthuman lens reveals the student and the university are porous, subject to tidal rhythms and waves of transformation’ (217). This perspective views the students, the teacher, the content, the classroom environment, and other components as interconnected and interdependent, rather than as separate and isolated entities. By considering the various components as undergoing constant reorganization and transformation, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances of the teaching experience.

Response-ability

A second aspect of posthumanist theory, response-ability, is primarily concerned with the ability and willingness to respond to the needs, perspectives, and experiences of others. Coined by Barad, the term refers to the capabilities that arise from shared responses. Response-ability has a strong connection with posthuman perspectives on agency and ethics (Barad, in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). According to Barad (2014), agency and response-ability are intertwined, as agency is about the possibility of mutual response and acknowledging power imbalances. Agency is not something possessed by humans or non-humans, but rather is a result of an action. Along a similar vein, Lather (2016) sees the relationship between agency and response-ability as the ability to act and reconfigure entangled relationships while acknowledging the complexities of power dynamics. Both determinism and free will are re-evaluated, and response-ability is assessed by focusing on the field of forces involved. Haraway’s work, particularly her concept of response-ability, also has had a significant impact on developing a feminist posthumanist perspective on knowledge grounded in ever-changing relationships. As such, the concept of response-ability moves beyond dualistic and human-centric approaches to relations that place a strong emphasis on self/other dichotomy. In Haraway’s (2016) words, ‘Response-ability is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying – and remembering of who lives and who dies and how in the string figures of natural cultural history’ (28). Through this lens, response-ability refers to a mutual relationship, where there is an awareness of the power imbalance, but still a capacity for response from the actions of both self and others.

Response-ability propels into the limelight our capability to respond, act, and become more attentive to others, as opposed to the traditional idea of responsibility which suggests control over others. Haraway (2016) embraces an ontology of response-ability that recognizes the importance of context in shaping our practices (See Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021). Through rejecting dualist ideas and viewing knowledge as inherently relational, Haraway (2016) considers a more relational way of engaging with the world. In posthumanist thinking, response-ability and education are linked, as they work together to bring about social change in higher education by shaping social, political, and material connections (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017, 64). In theorizing posthuman ethics in education research, the concept of ‘response-ability’ is relevant to the relationship between humans and non-humans (Taylor 2020). Shifting away from responsibility and toward response-ability, the posthuman ethical framework is based on principles of reciprocity, mutual presence, sensitivity, and openness. In this light, such an ethical practice is a continuous accountability within an emergent and evolving relationship building process, operating beyond dualistic ethical concepts.

In community-engaged writing, response-ability refers to the writer’s ability and willingness to listen to and respond to the needs, perspectives, and experiences of the community they are writing about. One of the key principles of response-able writing is the idea of ‘writing with’ rather than ‘writing about’ the community. This approach encourages writers to actively engage with the community and take their perspectives and experiences into account when creating their writing. Writing with the community requires a high level of response-ability in pedagogical design (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017), as it stresses the importance of listening to the community and responding to their needs and perspectives in a sensitive and respectful manner. Through our interviews with research participants, we come to the realization that the instructors and students in community-engaged courses have worked on creating response-able designs through actively responding to communities’ needs.

Affect

Posthumanist theory further attends to affects, which offer a fresh perspective on emotions, feelings, and sensations, viewing them not solely as experiences of individuals, but as products of the interactions between different bodies. Different from emotions, or conscious thoughts, subjective experiences, and normative judgments of the individual, affect pertains to the prepersonal forces and intensities that never fully reach the level of an emotion (Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Massumi 2015). Deleuze and Guattari (2014), influenced by Spinozian philosophy, view affect as the ability of bodies to affect and be affected, to experience emotions and take actions. They believe that affect is not located in either subjects or objects, but is instead produced from encounters between different bodies. In Deleuze’s (1988) words, ‘A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (127). At the heart of affect theory is the idea that emotions, feelings, and bodily sensations are not just experienced by individuals, but are a product of interactions between various entities, both human and non-human. By considering the role of non-human entities in shaping our emotions, the affective approach sheds light on the ways in which the world around us influences our experiences and vice versa. Ahmed (2004) further highlights the idea that emotions and affects involve embodied processes of both affecting and being affected, forming what she calls ‘affective economies.’ In these economies, ideas, values, and objects circulate and become associated with certain bodies, leading to varying affective responses in different contexts. For instance, Following September 11, feelings of fear and disgust have linked bodies that appear ‘Muslim’ or ‘Middle-Eastern’ with ‘terrorism’ and potential ‘terrorists,’ producing stereotypical portrayals of racially marginalized groups in the affective economy.

The view of affect as a process of both affecting and being affected is also reflected in Massumi's account. Moving beyond Cartesian dualism, Massumi (2015) articulates that the mind is interconnected with experiences and relationships, making it impossible to attribute thinking solely to the brain. He emphasizes that affect theory considers the body and its movements as part of thinking and places thinking in the world rather than within a psychological subject. In other words, affect refers to events, not objects or subjects, meaning thinking-feeling is constantly evolving and cannot be captured in a fixed manner. Building upon Massumi’s theorizations, Zembylas (2022) turns toward an application of thinking-feeling in higher education contexts, with a strong focus on cultivating students’ emotional reflexivity. According to Zembylas (2022), teachers and educators could apply thinking-feeling through a variety of teaching activities. These activities might include analyzing how critical voices are being given credibility in different social and political contexts; fostering a supportive emotional environment in the classroom that encourages critical reflection on emotions related to political protests; and examining how critical thinking in university life is shown to be a collective effort demonstrated through political activism and social movements.

Research assemblage: interview encounters with college writing instructors

Informed by the theoretical understanding of posthuman ethics, this paper aims to explore ways that posthumanist theory is supported and ethical behaviors are invoked through community-engaged writing projects. The interview data shared in this IRB-approved study is a portion of a larger research project based on interview encounters with 20 college writing instructors. Viewing our research project as an assemblage, we outline and employ a diffractive analysis that shifts qualitative research toward posthumanist engagement. Diffraction is concerned with ‘differences that our knowledge-making practices make and the effects they have on the world’ (Barad 2007, 72). Different from human-centric research methods, diffractive analysis involves ‘plugging’ and interweaving data into theory (Mazzei 2014), resulting in a multiplicity of perspectives and a sense of ambiguity. Building upon the works of researchers who have conducted diffractive inquiries in sociology (Fox and Alldred 2017, 2023) and literacy education (Jackson and Mazzei 2012, 2016; Lenz Taguchi 2010), we activate a diffractive rethinking of research as a micro-political assemblage. This research assemblage (Fox and Alldred 2017, 2023) includes the affective relationships and economies of both the event assemblage (such as teachers, students, and locations) and the research assemblage (such as researchers, methods, and tools). The interaction between these two elements guides the tracing and description of the material, emotional, and embodied emergence of community-engaged writing, which is crucial for understanding and reshaping pedagogical practices for social justice.

Literacy scholars in the vein of posthumanist research (Jackson 2013; Jackson and Mazzei 2012, 2016; Kuntz and Presnall 2012; Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre 2017; Mazzei 2014) are known for their creative interview techniques. The traditional interview method creates an unequal balance of power between researcher and interviewee; however, Fox and Alldred (2017) suggest that researchers should engage interviewees by focusing on diverse voices and perspectives. Kuntz and Presnall (2012) also view interviews as an intersection of matter and meaning, focusing on the embodied and holistic aspect of interviews such as walking as a means of mobilizing the interview process. In our diffractive inquiry, we understand voice as situated, embodied, and embedded in complex power relations and research assemblages (Jackson 2003; Robinson and Taylor 2007). Specifically, we place emphasis on the voices of the participants. The interviews also allowed us to cross the boundary of theory and practice, since theoretical concepts, different from traditional research methods, ‘act as practices that reorient thinking, undo the theory/practice binary, and open inquiry to new possibilities’ (Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre 2017, 643). While engaging with the interview data, we became reflective about the way that the research project is assembled. Coding and grouping data into themes may invite the danger of reducing ‘the complexity of an event by aggregating data in ways defined by the analyst’ (Fox and Alldred 2017, 160). Similarly, Zapata, Kuby, and Thiel (2018) caution against ‘comparative analysis’ and ‘categorizing through codes,’ delineating that a diffractive analysis would entail thinking with theory. Since coding and grouping data can lead to oversimplification of complex events, we were aware of this risk and chose to remain conscious of the multiple bodies and affects that exist in the economy of our research. Through this effort, we traced and examined the evolving encounters with interviews in relation to various bodies, materials, and agents. Through our analysis, we remained conscious of the interview participants, their assignments, technologies, and design artifacts that intermingle in the affective assemblage of this research study.

Descriptions of the interview encounters are presented in the following section. Our study included 20 college writing instructors, 17 of whom worked at public universities and three at private institutions. Six of the projects discussed by the instructors focused on rhetoric and writing courses and 14 on conventional technical and professional writing courses. During the time of this study, the instructors partnered with community members and non-profit organizations to address a variety of social justice issues, including, among others, racial justice, gender equality, disability justice, cultural diversity, and environmental justice. To preserve their identities, we have assigned pseudonyms to the participants. Alongside the interview recordings and transcripts, we also collected sample assignment sheets and students’ artifacts as part of the community-engaged projects. Through our diffractive analysis, we remain conscious of the instructors, their bodies, and design artifacts that intermingle in the affective assemblage of this research study. We also traced and analyzed the ongoing and evolving development of human-material assemblages, response-able designs, and affective encounters in relation to multiple bodies, materials, and agents.

Tracing human-material assemblages in community-engaged writing

Tracing human-material assemblages is crucial for exploring an admixture of entities and elements that shape community-engaged pedagogy. Emphasizing both human and non-human agents, this paper reports on the symbiotic relationship and human-material entanglement (Bennett 2010; Deleuze and Parnet 1987; DeLanda 2019) manifested in community-engaged writing, conjoining multimodal texts (brochures, videos, web pages, and technical documents), technological platforms (Google Suite, Canva, Zoom, and digital studios), bodies (humans, non-human, and animal), instructional design materials (syllabi, assignments, and scholarly texts), and community partners (nonprofit organizations and members from marginalized communities). One example of such an assemblage can be found in Ellie’s community partnerships. Ellie and her class paired with a nonprofit organization that trained dogs for individuals with disabilities and provided resources about service dogs to the public. As part of the project, students tinkered with a myriad of technologies and applications, such as brochure design and video editing platforms, to help the nonprofit organization promote their services about service dogs. Ellie attributed the success of her community partnership to the combined contributions of various technologies and materials. For instance, through creating and editing their ‘pitch’ videos featuring a mix of service dog’s images and students’ embodied reactions, the students were able to articulate what they enjoyed about the projects, and more importantly, how and why the nonprofit should use their work. In Ellie’s own words, ‘It was interesting to see all these elements come together and see the students excited and interested in it.’ Both human and non-human agents intermingle in the production of community-engaged writing projects for social justice.

In addition to the dynamic role played by the various material resources in invigorating community-engaged work, this study also highlights the unexpected forms of de-territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Fox and Alldred 2017; Jackson and Mazzei 2016) that disrupt and reshape the assembling of community relations. These de-territorialized relations in community engagement, especially those initiated by technological agents, provide new and different possibilities for engaging the pedagogical activities and remapping the assemblage in which community partnership is happening. Lilly and her students collaborated with an environmental conservation agency to produce an instructional video about ecosystem protection. Due to the inability of the students to do further video editing for the video to appear on the nonprofit organization’s website, the students’ work ended up not being adopted by the community partner. Lilly mentioned that ‘the fact that the students finished the class and they scattered, and I was unable to reach them to do any further work.’ Despite these unexpected outcomes, Lilly also shared the positive outcomes of the community-engaged pedagogy: ‘I’ve still got the video. My community partner and I still share it sometimes for conference presentations as an example of what can be done with student groups.’ Through this lens, a de-territorialization of preexisting assemblages helped to create new openings for collaboration and alternative ways to remap community-engaged pedagogy.

Issues with the COVID-19 pandemic, along with the practices of moving face-to-face conversations to digital meeting platforms such as Zoom, further reshaped and reframed traditional modes of community collaboration. During their partnerships with educational nonprofits for young women, Karen and Zamiar noted the inconvenience caused by the use of online meeting platforms. Karen stressed that ‘face to face is simpler in scheduling meeting times with clients’; by contrast, online meetings ‘have been super time consuming, because I have too many partners.’ Similarly, Zamiar experienced a de-territorialization of her pedagogy and recalled how ‘antithetical’ it had been to conduct Zoom meetings with community partners:

And doing a lot of anti-racism work has impacted me the most. Students love it. We meet with executive directors, two to three times a semester, for half an hour to an hour at a time. They love getting that face time with them and it makes them feel like what they are doing is more important. They see the person they are writing for. For community engagement, Zoom feels antithetical. Students are supposed to meet the community partners in person, and are supposed to see sites. Driving through the city on its own is an important part of the community engagement. It’s an experience that we then talk about. But now we don’t get to do that.

De-territorialization in community-engaged writing can refer to the breaking down of established ways of thinking and doing. The process of de-territorialization is ‘intrinsically political, always on the side of freedom, experimentation and becoming, always opposed to power, territory, and the fixing of identity’ (Fox and Alldred 2017, 18). Taken in this light, a posthumanist approach for community engagement can be a powerful tool for exploring new ideas and perspectives and can provide a space for community members to engage in this type of intellectual exploration. Even though instructors initially felt uncomfortable adapting to the online meeting spaces, they were also prompted to develop alternative and effective approaches for community-engaged pedagogy. By bringing together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, the assembling and reassembling of community-engaged writing can help to challenge dominant ways of thinking and promote new and more creative ways of engaging community-engaged work.

Creating response-able writing projects using technologies and materials

Aside from human-material assemblages, we are particularly attuned to the response-able means of pedagogical design (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017; Gravett, Taylor, and Fairchild 2021) whereby teachers encourage students to use specific technologies and writing genres that are tailored toward community partners’ needs. Lydia’s students and her students created video clips that were shared in Spanish to advocate for language rights. Lydia pointed out the importance of ‘really working with an organization to figure out what they need. Not imposing the mode on the project, but really thinking about what is the most rhetorically effective choice regarding mode and modality.’ Furthermore, students in Melanie’s classes collaborated with a labor organizing group as well as a summer learning program for teens at a public library. Melanie pointed out how her students’ choice of technologies and genres was geared toward the needs of her community partner. The instructor recalled the process of negotiation that instigated response-able collaboration in community partnership. More specifically, Melanie stressed that first-year students did not always know everything that they could accomplish; partners also did not always know what they could ask for. After mentioning to the community partner that her students all had experience creating short videos, the community partner said the following ‘Oh, do I need a video? Hmm, maybe I do! I bet I could get them to do that.’ Through open multimodal options, Melanie noted that students were able to help partners in really interesting ways and to gain a lot of ‘really cool experiences’ that they probably did not gain as much before taking the class.

Another way that response-ability can be applied in community-engaged writing is through engaging the community in the writing process, allowing them to have a direct say in how their perspectives and experiences are represented. For example, teachers and students can conduct participatory workshops or focus groups with community members to gain a deeper understanding of their perspectives and experiences. This approach allows college writers to respond to the community’s needs and perspectives in a more direct and meaningful way. As a case in point, Sandar and her students collaborated with nonprofit organizations to provide literacy and learning support for immigrant communities. The students made observations of the organization to identify a real rhetorical need that they could help serve. According to Sandar, ‘it was delightful for them to see their project in action. Seeing their stories, picture books, and other things being used was rewarding for them.’ The students also talked to the supervisors, teachers, organizations to come up with a project idea, received and addressed feedback from community partners, and later learned that the nonprofit organizations were actually using those projects.

Turning toward response-able pedagogical design suggests that teachers and students engage in an evolving and ever-changing process of building relationships with community partners and responding to their needs. Sandar reflected that a collaborative project could be most successful if students found a real exigence from dialogues with the organization. She considered ‘going in with preconceived ideas’ to be less concrete and less usable for community partners. Instead, Sandar stressed that among the students in her community-engaged classes, ‘students who made genres from a concrete need of the organization had finesse, sophistication, consideration about audience and were the most successful.’ In their pedagogical practices, instructors also frequently mentioned how the students had to make changes to their original work plans and shift to different genres of writing, with aim of better addressing community members’ needs. For instance, Helen collaborated with a nonprofit innocence project, an organization that used lawyers, policymakers, and law students to try to overturn wrongful convictions. Helen described the ways that her students engaged in an ever-changing process of relationship building and tailored their writing approaches toward the community’s needs:

For example, one of the initial pitches a student had was to make a digital form for incarcerated folks to ask for help from the nonprofit innocence project, but those students quickly realized, absolutely not. The written form is what they’re families, caretakers, or their communities can send them when they’re incarcerated. They don't have open access to a personal device or the Internet. In their methodologies it was really interesting to see their thinking and how they thought technology would solve it, but it didn't at times, and they had to find a solution.

Response-ability in community-engaged writing is a powerful approach that challenges and disrupts traditional human-centric views of the world and instead, promotes an understanding that values the perspectives and contributions of all entities, including non-human materials, technologies, and genres. Response-able writing projects encourage an evolving process of relationship building to create a more inclusive and diverse articulation of the community. This approach allows for a deeper understanding of the community and its perspectives and for the creation of a more inclusive representation.

Attending to the affective politics of community-engaged work

Affective politics (Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Massumi 2015) can also be vividly glimpsed in community-engaged writing, especially considering the use of visual and auditory elements to evoke emotional responses. For example, the images and videos in a written piece can create a visceral response in audiences, drawing them into the community’s stories and making them more likely to engage with the community. One of the things that Helen’s students noticed while doing a heuristic markup was that the original site for the nonprofit innocence project had some navigational elements that were unreadable. Thus, changing some of these colors was really helpful in making the site more accessible. According to Helen, ‘I was happy with the alignment proximity hierarchy that they [the students] used in this document with their headings.’ Helen also described that it was ‘fun’ to be able to update the students and tell them that their colors and fonts were being used by the community partner. The community partner provided positive feedback on the students’ writing project and thought it was more accessible and helpful. In a nutshell, Helen’s affective experience with her students’ multimodal texts can be synthesized as ‘fun’ and ‘happy.’ The dynamic interplay of colors, fonts, and visual design elements co-created a positive emotional response, helping audience members to connect with the video on a visceral level.

Another way that affective politics can be activated in community-engaged writing is through the use of language itself. The choice of words and phrases can evoke certain emotions in readers, such as fear, hope, or anger. Additionally, the tone and style of writing can also create emotional responses, including stereotypical representations of members from marginalized communities. By understanding how language can evoke emotional responses, students can develop more effective community-engaged writing projects that resonate with readers and encourage them to take action. Lydia and her students used to work with an organization for children of migrant farm workers and to help minority college students enroll in health insurance at her university. Despite her overall positive affective responses to the students’ works, she did experience pushback from the community partner, since according to her community partner, the promotional content was ‘too childish,’ and may unintentionally perpetuate stereotypes. According to Lydia, ‘My students in the first draft of their technical documentation for the students who were children of migrant farm workers included teddy bears and included things that seemed childish.’ Lydia further asserted that her students assumed lower literacy levels in their peers from migrant families.

That is to say, the students, through using ‘childish’ language in technical documents for marginalized populations, unintentionally reinforced racial and cultural stereotypes about the community members from immigrant families. As such, these documents transmitted negative emotions to the community partner and members, unveiling the urgency to cultivate students’ ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Zembylas 2022) through critical reflections on the impacts of emotions in sociopolitical work. Similarly, during her partnerships with nonprofit organizations providing culinary education for women of color, Zamiar sought to develop a pedagogy around the topics of cultural competence and racial justice. Zamiar reflected that a large number of students in Zamier’s classes did not come from the communities they were serving. Therefore, the students were also confronted with the affective challenges of dealing with issues related with their own identities and understanding how to not become a savior when entering the community to do service. While designing and implementing her community-engaged pedagogies, Zamiar also cited incidents where the genre of grant writing may result in a deficit portrayal of community members:

How do you train professionals when the deficit model is the standard? The idea of when you write a grant proposal, you write with deficit language. Because you are being asked what the deficits are in the community, and how is the organization going to solve these deficits? If I had the time, I would have students write a brand new grant proposal with no deficit language, a proposal that is strengths based. I think I need to incorporate this more into my teaching and how to rethink the language being used.

Affect is a valuable framework for understanding the emotional and embodied experiences of individuals and how they shape their perceptions, behaviors, and relationships. In the context of community-engaged writing, affective thinking-feeling can be used to understand how writing, along with multiple forms of communication such as linguistic, visual, and auditory elements, can evoke emotional responses in audiences and reshape students’ emotional reflexivity in their engagement with communities. Such an understanding can lead to a more complex and nuanced articulation of the community and its perspectives, rather than a simplified or stereotypical portrayal.

Moving toward a posthumanist approach for community-engaged pedagogy

This study contributes to the growing conversation regarding the relevance of posthumanist theory for reconfiguring higher education practices, foregrounding the transformative potential the theory holds for community-engaged pedagogy. Considering the observations made through this study, we recommend a posthumanist perspective for higher education professors and professionals who are interested in teaching community-engaged projects. Indeed, integrating posthuman theory into community-engaged pedagogy can present various challenges, as some individuals may be unfamiliar with posthumanist concepts or are hesitant to embrace different perspectives. In what follows, we offer suggestions and implications that foster a critical engagement with posthumanist theory in teaching and learning.

Moving beyond human-centric ideologies, the posthumanist perspective views community engagement and service learning as an assemblage of relationships, tools, and processes. The non-human material agents that facilitate these relationships should be given close attention as they are capable of affecting the outcome of the community partnership. As reflected by multiple participants, the human-material assemblages (Bennett 2010; Deleuze and Parnet 1987; DeLanda 2019) in social justice projects form a symbiotic relation between writers and their writing activities. Instructors and educators who aspire to incorporate community-engaged learning projects in their courses should pay attention to the human and non-human dynamics in service-learning work, including bodies, technological platforms, multimodal texts, instructional materials, and community roles. Specifically, we recommend that instructors focus on:

• Considering the ever-changing human-material assemblages in community-engaged work (i.e. how the makeup of the ‘community’ involves the larger ecological system);

• Acknowledging the agency of non-human actors such as technologies and platforms in shaping the community’s dynamics and learning experiences;

• Recognizing the multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and fostering diverse forms of knowledge and expertise;

• Adopting modalities that facilitate more inclusive learning and co-creation (such as non-conventional expressions, design, and content); and

• Attending to the entanglements of these above activities within instructional design of community-engaged pedagogy (including course objectives, logistics, and assessments). Such entanglements can directly influence the results of community-engaged project.

Additionally, posthumanism takes into account the technological agency of tools and platforms through which community-engaged writing is performed. In the examples we featured, participants called out specific challenges and de-territorialization brought about by the tools that facilitated community collaboration. Instructors, students, as well as community partners were affected by the technological agents engaging with service-learning projects (e.g. video editing software, virtual meeting platforms). These agents actively shape and frame community collaboration. Instructors who design community-engaged pedagogy need to understand and acknowledge not only the functionality of tools but also their agentive abilities in steering the teaching and learning experience. A posthumanist approach for community-engaged pedagogy recognizes the impact of technology and digital media on communities and seeks to integrate these tools and platforms with service-learning activities in symbiotic ways. Viewing them as co-creating and co-participating agents, instructors can leverage the agential potentials of technologies to engage students and communities.

Contrary to theories that portray individuals as detached from various other actors and relationships essential for community engagement, the posthumanist approach challenges dualistic assumptions about self and others in community partnerships and invites critical and response-able evaluation of the goals of community engagement. Participants in this study have expressed motivations for situating writing within the community as well as concerns about the dynamics between students and community partners during these projects. These concerns require viewing students as individuals capable of forging relationships with the community partner while assessing their own positionality with the collaborative project. We note, particularly, that community-engaged pedagogy enables posthumanist response-ability (Barad 2014; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Haraway 2016; Lather 2016) in students, i.e. promoting their ability and willingness to respond to the needs, perspectives, and experiences of others. Posthuman response-ability also accounts for social, political, and material connections to community partnership. With such views in mind, instructors of community-engaged courses may emphasize active listening by encouraging students to engage community partners with sensitivity and to align the use of technologies and genres with community needs. Apart from the conventional methods for community-engaged teaching and learning, such as observation and interviews, instructors may incorporate design methods, including participatory workshops, focus groups, or other experience-based approaches within the community-engaged learning projects to help students achieve emotional connections with the community.

When applied to community-engaged work, the posthumanist perspective attends to the affective politics of situating such projects within the realm of emotions, feelings, and sensations. All parties involved in these projects can be affecting and affected by the transformative process. One dominant aspect of affective politics (Ahmed 2004; Deleuze and Guattari 2014; Massumi 2015) in community-engaged learning for social justice is the emotional work that is required of teachers, students, and community partners. Our participants have highlighted the viability of multimodal display––including visual, aural, and interactive elements––in capturing the thinking-feeling of students in community-engaged writing. While our findings have pointed to the overall positive emotional impacts of student works, these public-facing writing projects can also run the risk of transmitting negative emotions to the audiences and perpetuating the stereotypical portrayals of community members. The affective impact of community engagement is thus influenced by the larger social and cultural context in which the activities take place. Issues of race, class, gender, among others, affect the dynamics of students, instructors, and community partners. The affective and embodied experience with organizations or individuals faced with marginalization and injustice provides the opportunity for cultivating emotional reflexivity in the students. Following this aspect of the posthumanist approach toward community-engaged pedagogy, higher education instructors can design course activities that motivate students to tinker with multiple modes of expression as a way to leverage the emotional impact of multimodal work. Instructors may also encourage students to compose critical articulations of their experience vis-a-vis the affective politics of community engagement. This approach has the potential of fostering a transformative experience for teachers, students, and community members engaged in partnerships.

Ethics statement

This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Texas Tech University. The IRB reference number is IRB2020-130.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Council of Teachers of English.