theoretical framework for reading and literacy education research informed by neonaturalist trends in the social sciences, with an emphasis on current motifs in developmental psychology. Specifically, the author demonstrates that a framework intentionally located within a contextual organicist world hypothesis can complement currently competing paradigms in the reading and literacy education community by making sense of cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural phenomena in terms of the selforganizing dynamics of living systems. This narrative avoids the reductive and deterministic accounts of sociobiology as well as the dualism and essentialism inherent in mechanistic organicist and mechanistic contextualist world hypotheses entertained by cognitive and sociocultural researchers respectively. As a narrative, it links naturalistic discourses with themes in anglophone poststructuralist epistemology. It thereby provides a means of incorporating new insights from the neurosciences, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence, cognitive ethology, sociolinguistics, cultural and biological anthropology, dynamical systems theory, and evolutionary, ecological, and developmental psychology into theory and research in reading and literacy education. It is suggested that such a narrative can readdress questions about agency, motivation, socio-emotional development, personality, and identity in new ways for reading and literacy education theory and research. Five previously published papers touching on aspects of socionaturalism are included to demonstrate the acceptability of this narrative in peer-reviewed publications of reading and literacy.