Reassembling Space, Practice, and Digital Selves

The ongoing digitization and platformization of our practices have been a steady driving force behind the increasingly distributed ways in which our learning, literacy, and communicative activities are situated across spaces and platforms. A growing body of research is drawing attention not only to how digital technologies, platforms, and practices allow us to do things, but also to how learning, literacy, and communicative activities are experienced and embodied, and how notions of the self are (re)assembled through practices (Erstad & Silseth, 2023; Leander & Boldt, 2012; Leander & Burriss, 2020). Rather than treating these concepts as stable categories, this Research Topic asks how tools, bodies, texts, affect, and technologies are (re)assembled through multimodal discursive practices: through writing, interaction, attention, and intellectual labor across entangled digital and physical spaces. This perspective enables us to understand learning, literacy, and communicative practices as situated, relational, and emergent effects of participation in sociomaterial arrangements (Burriss & Leander, 2024; Fenwick, 2015). This raises questions about current and emerging digital literacies, such as: • How are digital selves assembled through participation in sociomaterial practices across platforms, spaces, and times?• How are learning, authorship, and participation redistributed across material, digital, and hybrid spaces?• How are practices of writing, collaboration, and intellectual labor reassembled through engagement with digital tools and platforms? • How do algorithmic systems shape attention, visibility, and participation, and how do participants negotiate these sociomaterial conditions and ways of being in practice?Taken together, these questions raise issues around learning and literacy as emergent, relational, and situated practices of participation in evolving sociomaterial arrangements that reconfigure space, practice, attention, and intellectual labor. This Research Topic draws inspiration from posthumanist and sociomaterial perspectives (Barad, 2007; Fenwick, 2015; Jones, 2025; Leander & Burriss, 2020), and spatially oriented approaches to discourse and practice (Latour, 2005; Scollon, 2001, 2014). We invite contributions that highlight the relational, situated, and emergent nature of learning, literacy, and communicative activities, and that critically engage with the ways in which social, material, and technological factors assemble and reassemble in increasingly technologized and digitized contexts. This focus includes both documenting the systematic patterns of practices and trajectories and attending to the unpredictability that makes these practices possible (Fenwick, 2015). In this Research Topic, we are particularly interested in studies that adopt posthumanist and sociomaterialist frameworks and that explore questions concerning the distributed nature of learning, literacy, and communication. Specifically, we encourage work that:• investigates how multimodal practices emerge across digital and physical spaces• explores material-discursive entanglements in learning, communication, or cultural practices• examines how technologies, social norms, and social and digital infrastructures reciprocally shape attention structures, engagement, and agency• offers empirical, theoretical, or methodological insights into how situated practices are transformed, reassembled, or layered across contexts• explores approaches to multimodal data collection that capture the spatial, temporal, and participatory characteristics of situated practices and digital selves.Submissions may address education, fan cultures, identity work in digital social practices, collaborative digital work, online-offline communities, and multilingual/multimodal communication, among others. While emerging technologies such as generative AI are an integral part of the technologies that shape our practices, this Research Topic is does not focus on AI per se, and we discourage submissions centered exclusively on survey-based and attitudinal studies of AI. Topic editors: Freek Olaf De Groot, Andrew Jocuns Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79280/reassembling-space-practice-and-digital-selves