Speculative Fabulation: Authoring Ourselves Into Stories That Were Not Written For Us
by José Ramón Lizárraga (aka Dr. ThemBot)
There was something familiar about the sudden shift to remote participation at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The isolation and the fear, while novel and unprecedentedly global, was not something new to those of us who are part of communities that have endured multiple pandemics throughout our lifetimes.
I found myself reacquainting myself with old practices from when I was a queer Latine youth, searching for community, affinity, and for love while living in the rural agricultural terrains of the Salinas Valley in California. Similarly, I used social media and networked gaming to maintain connections with my friends, family, and loved ones. And just like that young Dr. ThemBot, I also felt a sense of safety and relief in not having to experience the daily barrage of homophobic and racial microaggressions of living in physical worlds that didn’t really want me in my full Fem and Brown existence.
In my recent piece in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, I highlight how learners from non-dominant communities socio-technically reconfigure themselves to author themselves into worlds and narratives that are not necessarily designed for us. Here is the abstract:
Background
Everyday digital technologies play an important role in mediating human activity that is socio-political and humanizing. The everyday cyborg engages in speculative fabulation that is about fantastical new world-making in times of multiple crises. The work presented in this article builds on previous projects that have examined how everyday cultural practices mediate consequential learning that is transformative for communities of color.
Methods
Two social design-based studies draw from ethnographic analysis of two teacher education courses as well as two after-school programs focusing on digital fabrication and making and tinkering. Participants included 22 undergraduate pre-service teachers and 10 middle school students from schools in Latinx communities.
Findings
Collaborative cyborg activity, where expertise is distributed, emerged as pre-service teachers and youth collectively engaged with everyday socio-political issues. This article highlights cyborg sociopolitical technical reconfigurations, where learners assembled ideational and material tools to craft objects of learning activity that went beyond those established by schooling and imagined new possible futures.
Contribution
Designing learning ecologies for the everyday cyborg, in this case pre-service teachers and non-dominant youth, fosters an engagement with everyday dilemmas in ways that serve as catalysts for further learning and the new world-making of speculative fabulation.
This builds on work that I have done with colleagues in the development of a Historical Actor framework. It is my hope that this article inspires readers to consider how everyday digital practice can signal agentic moves towards imagining and planning for new social futures.
Read Cyborg sociopolitical reconfigurations: Designing for speculative fabulation in learning here.