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Abstract
This dissertation research represents an attempt reckon with chaos—both what it is and what it does—in digital literacy learning and educational inquiry. Specifically, I explore how a philosophical and pedagogical orientation towards chaos offers unique insights for educators and researchers working to support creativity and relationality among young people in literacy learning spaces. Guided by Deleuze+Guattari’s writings about chaos in What is Philosophy? (1991/1994) and Prigogine and Stengers’ (1984/2018) theory of dissipative structures, I present a chaozmatic account of data curated at the Giga-Games Camp (pseudonym), a series of three week-long residential video game design camps for adolescents. Through analysis of Giga-Gamers’ contributions to the camp’s Discord server alongside video and artifactual data, I offer the concepts of the hyper-channel and dissipative design as tools for thinking about the spontaneous and improvisational forces that circulate in—and sometimes disrupt—formal and informal learning contexts.