J J Thiel
Biographic Data
| ID | 58427 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J J Thiel |
| GIVEN NAMES | J J |
| FAMILY NAME | Thiel |
| SIGNATURE | THIEL J J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Georgia |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8361-3560 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 16 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 15 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Heath, Shirley Brice
Shirley Brice Heath (1939– ), a linguistic anthropologist, works at the macro and micro levels to study language in political and sociocultural contexts.
Following the witch’s flight: Reimagining professionalism in early childhood literacy education
Amidst renewed “reading wars,” censorship debates, and yet another “crisis” in literacy, early childhood educators are facing increased pressure to develop and demonstrate professional dispositions that are linked to content knowledge, values, attitudes, and ethics. This article explores professionalism otherwise in early childhood literacies—as a post↔feminist↔“witchy”↔assemblage. We think-with the figure of the witch as a heuristic to highlight…
The indeterminacy of atmospheres with/in youth geographies: Desire, destruction, and detachment
This theoretical essay (data-story) analyzes monstrous acts of rebellion performed by a group of 16-year-olds at a community makerspace. Focusing on three specific incidents when youth – (1) drew a penis on the side of the community center building, (2) set off firecrackers on the center playground, and (3) demolished picnic tables at the center – I explore how these actions can be understood as infrastructural resistance. These acts of rebellion…
Literacies of Indigeneity at the Children’s science museum: Playing with pixels
Using a feminist-new materialist lens, this paper attends to child-digital interactions in fostering Indigenous literacies, by focusing on the Quantum Sandbox exhibit in the Digital Immersion Lab at a Canadian children’s science museum. Analytically, this paper explores how a digital exhibit ( Quantum Sandbox ) creates a space for young learners to engage with both quantum science concepts and Indigenous worldviews through a combination of digita…
(Un)Learning Archival Methods From Young Archivists: A Lesson in Spatiality, Vitality, and Reciprocity
Finding inspiration from recent calls to consider the body, affect, movement, and otherwise as/in archives, this article focuses on events that took place with young archivists engaged in the act of drawing at a community center. These data-stories are put in conversation with spatial theory, children’s geographies, and feminist new materialisms to make sense of child-created archives and to offer researchers a way to (un)learn archival methods b…
Twitter, #PreKWeek, and neoliberal childhoods: Posthuman reimaginings of a sigh
This article concerns itself with the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research might continue to attend to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the child subject. To do so, the author employs thinking with theory as an analytic process to make sense of a world where humans and more-than-humans are seen as commodities for economic gain. Focusing on a tweet sent out by a US state-led organization duri…
Communing to re-imagine figured worlds
The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders’ re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities…
Playrevolution: Engaging Equity through the Power of Play
This special issue continues a two-year conversation about a #playrevolution in literacies research, theory, and practice. The juxtaposition of play and revolution is intentional, highlighting the tension between play's prosocial benefits and collaborative production and the rapid change, uncertainty, and violence in today's schools, where we desperately need more humanizing elements that build people's connections to one another. The #playrevolu…
“What happens in the fort, stays in the fort!”: Awakening Embodied Play Literacies through Fort Building in an Early Childhood Methods Classroom
Background/Context Neoliberalism has both feet firmly planted in educational contexts around the globe (United States, Australia, United Kingdom). Due to the precarious nature of unstructured play and its unwillingness to fit neatly into a neoliberal framework of quality and high returns on investments, play for play's sake has taken a backseat to standards, “evidence-based” curriculums, and high-stakes testing. These changes are often justified …
Red circles, embodied literacies, and neoliberalism: The art of noticing an unruly placemaking event
This article presents a data story that illustrates unruly placemaking from an event that unfolded during a six-year research enquiry exploring the out-of-school literacies of young people in an informal neighbourhood making space. Specifically, I analyse the happenings between a four-year-old boy and a red marker through theories of critical posthumanism and companion species to illustrate how the white space of paper and the marks made on that …
Refusals, Re-Turns , and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale
In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory…
Digressive Methodologies: Inviting the Aesthetic and Material Into the Phenomenological
In this article, we invite the concept of digression into methodological endeavors through the phenomenological tradition of postintentional phenomenology. Using five modes of inquiry-unsettle, unrest, untether, unearth, unfold-and the premise that "(m)ail art is a catalyst," we invite readers to reconsider methodologies as joyfully and generatively digressive, while also unearthing possibilities to abandon the confines of hypercapitalism found w…
Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education
This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing throu…
Diana Masny, Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari perspective
Working-class women in academic spaces: Finding our muchness
In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own much…
Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education
This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing throu…
Digressive Methodologies: Inviting the Aesthetic and Material Into the Phenomenological
In this article, we invite the concept of digression into methodological endeavors through the phenomenological tradition of postintentional phenomenology. Using five modes of inquiry-unsettle, unrest, untether, unearth, unfold-and the premise that "(m)ail art is a catalyst," we invite readers to reconsider methodologies as joyfully and generatively digressive, while also unearthing possibilities to abandon the confines of hypercapitalism found w…
Working-class women in academic spaces: Finding our muchness
In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own much…
Diana Masny, Cartographies of becoming in education: A Deleuze-Guattari perspective
Working-class women in academic spaces: Finding our muchness
In the Burton, T., dir. [2010. Alice in Wonderland (Film). Burbank: Walt Disney Pictures] cinematographic reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, there is a moment when the Mad Hatter looks sincerely at Alice and tells her that inside her, something is missing – that she used to be much more muchier – that she has somehow lost her muchness. Seeing middle-class upward mobility within academia as a precarious space in which I must negotiate my own much…
Childhood Geographies and Spatial Justice: Making Sense of Place and Space-Making as Political Acts in Education
This post-qualitative research analyzes the spatialized practices of young people within a working-class community and how those guided the opening and facilitating of a local community center. Seeing place-making as a social and political act, the authors were inspired by Heath’s classic study and argument that children’s education might be better served if educators understood and built on their community-based language practices. Writing throu…
Red circles, embodied literacies, and neoliberalism: The art of noticing an unruly placemaking event
This article presents a data story that illustrates unruly placemaking from an event that unfolded during a six-year research enquiry exploring the out-of-school literacies of young people in an informal neighbourhood making space. Specifically, I analyse the happenings between a four-year-old boy and a red marker through theories of critical posthumanism and companion species to illustrate how the white space of paper and the marks made on that …
Refusals, Re-Turns , and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale
In this article, we playfully revisit the same data scene, but from three different perspectives. We call these revisits re-turns to data. These re-turns draw upon moments with young boys playing at a makerspace located in a multiracial, working-class community. This idea of re-turn is not simply about revisiting a data scene; it is about re-sensing the social and what it means to be human through feeling with blackness. We offer Crawley’s theory…
Digressive Methodologies: Inviting the Aesthetic and Material Into the Phenomenological
In this article, we invite the concept of digression into methodological endeavors through the phenomenological tradition of postintentional phenomenology. Using five modes of inquiry-unsettle, unrest, untether, unearth, unfold-and the premise that "(m)ail art is a catalyst," we invite readers to reconsider methodologies as joyfully and generatively digressive, while also unearthing possibilities to abandon the confines of hypercapitalism found w…
Playrevolution: Engaging Equity through the Power of Play
This special issue continues a two-year conversation about a #playrevolution in literacies research, theory, and practice. The juxtaposition of play and revolution is intentional, highlighting the tension between play's prosocial benefits and collaborative production and the rapid change, uncertainty, and violence in today's schools, where we desperately need more humanizing elements that build people's connections to one another. The #playrevolu…
“What happens in the fort, stays in the fort!”: Awakening Embodied Play Literacies through Fort Building in an Early Childhood Methods Classroom
Background/Context Neoliberalism has both feet firmly planted in educational contexts around the globe (United States, Australia, United Kingdom). Due to the precarious nature of unstructured play and its unwillingness to fit neatly into a neoliberal framework of quality and high returns on investments, play for play's sake has taken a backseat to standards, “evidence-based” curriculums, and high-stakes testing. These changes are often justified …
Twitter, #PreKWeek, and neoliberal childhoods: Posthuman reimaginings of a sigh
This article concerns itself with the everyday politics of childhood and the ways research might continue to attend to inequities while simultaneously engaging in an ontological flattening of the child subject. To do so, the author employs thinking with theory as an analytic process to make sense of a world where humans and more-than-humans are seen as commodities for economic gain. Focusing on a tweet sent out by a US state-led organization duri…
Communing to re-imagine figured worlds
The importance of community has been widely recognised in the field of early childhood education. However, the various ways it has been conceived, together with taken-for-granted notions of education, have made it difficult to actualise the processes involved in contextually meaningful ways. This article draws on cultural models theory to explore educational leaders’ re-imagining and redesigning of early childhood educational learning communities…
(Un)Learning Archival Methods From Young Archivists: A Lesson in Spatiality, Vitality, and Reciprocity
Finding inspiration from recent calls to consider the body, affect, movement, and otherwise as/in archives, this article focuses on events that took place with young archivists engaged in the act of drawing at a community center. These data-stories are put in conversation with spatial theory, children’s geographies, and feminist new materialisms to make sense of child-created archives and to offer researchers a way to (un)learn archival methods b…
Literacies of Indigeneity at the Children’s science museum: Playing with pixels
Using a feminist-new materialist lens, this paper attends to child-digital interactions in fostering Indigenous literacies, by focusing on the Quantum Sandbox exhibit in the Digital Immersion Lab at a Canadian children’s science museum. Analytically, this paper explores how a digital exhibit ( Quantum Sandbox ) creates a space for young learners to engage with both quantum science concepts and Indigenous worldviews through a combination of digita…
Heath, Shirley Brice
Shirley Brice Heath (1939– ), a linguistic anthropologist, works at the macro and micro levels to study language in political and sociocultural contexts.
Following the witch’s flight: Reimagining professionalism in early childhood literacy education
Amidst renewed “reading wars,” censorship debates, and yet another “crisis” in literacy, early childhood educators are facing increased pressure to develop and demonstrate professional dispositions that are linked to content knowledge, values, attitudes, and ethics. This article explores professionalism otherwise in early childhood literacies—as a post↔feminist↔“witchy”↔assemblage. We think-with the figure of the witch as a heuristic to highlight…
The indeterminacy of atmospheres with/in youth geographies: Desire, destruction, and detachment
This theoretical essay (data-story) analyzes monstrous acts of rebellion performed by a group of 16-year-olds at a community makerspace. Focusing on three specific incidents when youth – (1) drew a penis on the side of the community center building, (2) set off firecrackers on the center playground, and (3) demolished picnic tables at the center – I explore how these actions can be understood as infrastructural resistance. These acts of rebellion…
Sociology (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Political science (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Aesthetics (6 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (6 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Pedagogy (5 works)