Academic Literacies as Documenting Becoming Through Mixed Genre Texts

The research for this study began with certain poststructural and postmodern readings and philosophical inflections that suggested, in various ways, that subjectivities are fluid, multiple, and complex. I arrived at the idea that one way of capturing the complexities of subjectivities is documenting becoming; this insight, in turn, led me to investigate the literature on academics who experience problems with representing, and on models of writing in higher education. However, the literature does not locate either the problem of representing or its resolution in the practices of academics struggling to write about the world in and through their subjectivities. In addition, the academic literacies model of writing in higher education does not take into consideration the crisis of representation, in the sense of how one writes. I employed a case study methodology. I also undertook document analysis of several disruptive poststructural autoethnographic (DPA) texts. The analysis indicated that writings that detail becoming capture the space of mind in the Deleuzian sense of affect, which is aligned with the body’s answer to particular received data beyond one’s control. These received data lead to the formation of mental assemblages in the Deleuzian sense of percept. The result is ongoing, unpredictable transformation within the person in the Deleuzian sense of concept. Using DPA texts with these Deleuzian concepts helped me open up new ways of seeing. Academics who write these texts go through a type of catastrophe and confront chaos to become artists in the Deleuzian sense, leaving traces in their writing by using different genres, layers, truths, and points of view.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph D

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor dc:publisher

The University of Western Ontario

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Amirmooradian Malhami, Ani

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kathy Hibbert

• Academic literacies/writings
• poststructural
• documenting becoming
• crisis of representation
• higher education
• Deleuze

Language dc:language.iso

en_ca

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14721/35769

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uwo.scholaris.ca:20.500.14721/35769