Faculty/Staff Detail

Katie Silvestri, Literacy Department, co-authored an article about positioning theory, multimodality, and embodiment in educational spaces recently published in a special issue of the Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. Co-authors are Mary McVee and Kelly Schucker at the University at Buffalo SUNY as well as Aijuan Cun at the University of New Mexico. The article advocates that any analysis of positions and storylines should consider multimodal perspectives, artifactual knowing, and embodiment, rather than simply speech found in conversational interactions. We consider how the embodied actions and the artifacts produced by individuals can be analyzed. The paper includes data‐based examples of embodied interactions related to artifacts and multimodal communication in a children’s engineering literacy club. The examples demonstrate the ways in which moral orders are created and represented through multimodal interactions with artifacts as well as gesture, speech, and embodied actions.