‘Interface Fictions’ and ‘Cyborg Sense-Making’: Troubling Literacy for Language Education Under Postdigital Cultural Conditions

Abstract This conceptual article explores how literacy in language education might be reconfigured under postdigital conditions in which meaning-making is increasingly entangled with algorithmic processes that are not fully accessible to human sense. It begins from sociocultural and sociosemiotic approaches to literacy, asking what happens to established orientations to communicative competence and meaning-making when computational processes also prefigure the conditions under which meanings become perceptible, actionable, and negotiable. Drawing on Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, the article develops cyborg sense-making as a literacy response to this condition: an attunement to algorithmic entanglement, agency that cannot be located in human actors alone, and the demands of acting accountably without expecting such entanglements to be fully resolvable. Cyborg sense-making is not proposed as a replacement for established literacy orientations; rather, these orientations are read diffractively through one another to consider what their interference makes visible for pedagogical design. This reading is staged through three interface fictions: Bury Me, My Love , Her Story , and A Normal Lost Phone . As comparatively bounded algorithmic forms that stage fictional worlds through simulated digital interfaces, interface fictions provide a pedagogically productive site for dwelling with relations among meaning, agency, opacity, and interpretation in the language classroom.