New Materialisms Archives

26/10/202007/06/2021

New Materialisms SIG: October Writing Party!

As many readers know, October is my birthday month. It is also a busy time for most universities. So for this month’s New Materialisms Special Intrest Group (SIG), I floated the idea of having a writing party. Instead of adding pressure to read and discuss, I thought it’d be a good time to pause, take stock, and to put into playful practice some of the NM ideas and approaches we’ve been discussing thoughout the year in our SIG.

It might seem a little weird to have a Writing Party for your birthday and not a bike-themed party but seeing as though my PhD research is on bikes – it was a win-win for me!

Woohoo! Writing Party!!!

New Materialisms SIG: October Writing Party! Bicycles Create Change.com 26th October 2020.

Writing Party Invite

Here is the NM SIG Writing Party invite I sent out to NM SIG members:

Are you feeling overworked and lonely? Has your enthusiasm for writing taken a hit lately?

Are you struggling to get those paragraphs perfect and on the page?

Then it’s time to PARTY!

At our next NM SIG, we shift the focus from reading to writing and you are invited to join our 2-hour Writing Party (details and link included here – it was a closed event, so no details here on the blog – sorry!).

With a continuing focus on the feminist New Materialists, we welcome your ideas/musings/partially formed paragraphs and feedback for others in our group.

Bring along a partially formed paragraph for sharing and feedback.

This Writing Party will also include guided writing warm-ups and research-focused timed writings as well as some time to chat, reflect and share as much or as little as you want.

The aim is to help you get over the writing hump and back into the flow…

No matter what your current research project is, this session will help reinvigorate your writing passion!

We look forward to seeing you there!

So what did we do?

We had a great time!…..And we wrote heaps!

It was a small, but dedicated crowd who were up for writing and sharing NM ideas and practices.

We had 2 hours and I wanted to make sure we had time to write some new material, share some writing we had already done and have time to discuss and process writing styles and production.

I opened with each person saying why there were here for the sessions and what they hoped to achieve,

Then we did a 10 min writing warm-up activity I call Embodied writers in the here and now. I developed this as a warm up task for my own working days a while back and have been using it with others, colleagues, study groups and writing retreats since. It is a generative and useful warm up that gets the juices flowing and there is always something interesting to talk about that comes out of it.

We then shared a piece of our own writing that we were proud of. this is a great activity to do to boost confidence and be exposed to different types of writing and processing. I enjoyed hearing other people’s ideas on why it was meaningful to them and what they learnt from/while writing it.

Then, we did a word sprint activity looking at Research Tentacles to get thinking about vocab, fluency, collocations and expression.

A 15 mins Rolling Research Activity followed the vocab discussion up nicely. Here we wrote down our answer to the question; What is a current research-writing-tension for you? We then took time to read other people’s answers and add some suggestions and ideas on how to shift or move forward with these. This was a great way to pool our experiences and resources and get some great ideas we would not have thought of by ourselves.

We then did a Matter Matters sprint. Using a piece of our own writing, we discussed , provoked, challenged and layered how matter matters in our research. We then did a quiet 10 mins written reflection to excavate if anything had shifted or moved as a result of dong the activity-discussion-writing.

For our last activity, we opened the floor to a Partial Writing discussion. This is where you share piece of unfinished writing you are currently working (selection or except) for those who want to get some feedback or ideas on what and how to move forward.

I had a ball! It was so great to have designated time to write, share, discuss, laugh and learn -we so rarely create opportunities like this – where there is no pressure or expectation, yet you can still experiment with writing ideas and prose.

I think it is very important to celebrate ALL types of writing and to keep writing fun. After all, sitting at a desk for years writing up formal academic research would be a challenge for any one – so it was nice to stop for a breather and to play and have some fun with writing.

06/10/202024/11/2020

Worlding: Everything with(in) a twist

Doing a PhD is usually seen as a good thing. But sometimes it can cause perceived or actual tension for yourself or others. Recently, this happened to me and it served as a great reminder that often (as with most things in life), things are not always what they seem and that everything is always-already with(in) a twist. Here’s what happened in 100 words. Enjoy, NG.

Well-meaning advice for my first-time BBQ: ‘Maybe don’t mention your PhD’. Gloomy backyard introductions and I only remember Mouse and Skipper. I stand awkwardly. Drinking. Tattoos pour down legs and arms, scraggly beer strained beards and black heavy metal T-shirts. Smoking. My trendy hat feels too tight. Disappearings. A huge brown mastiff watches half-naked kids fight. Reappearings. I make a joke that falls flat. Eating. Jonno tells me his secret fishing spots. Teasing. Raucous stories of youthful antics. Laughing. On departure: sweaty hugs and a take-home food pack. Over the balcony, Big Dan yells ‘Best of luck with ya research!’

26/09/202023/11/2020

New Materialisms SIG: A/P Tom Reynolds – Multimodality: digital video and the materiality of academic writing.

For nearly 2 years now, I have been the co-convenor (with Dr Sherilyn Lennon) of Griffth University’s New Materialisms (NM) Special interest Group (SIG). We meet each month to read, discuss and experiment with New Materialisms approaches in teaching, learning and research. It is also the framing I am using for my bikes-for-education PhD project.

For this months’ New Materialisms session, we were delighted to host our first international presenter Assoc. Prof. Thomas Reynolds (Dept. of Writing Studies, Uni of Minnesota).

I met Tom after I emailed him following a session he did for an international online teaching conference. Despite the time differences (it was hosted by an Israeli Uni so the international timezone shift was brutal for Aussie attendees – Tom’s session was on at 10 pm Brisbane time), I still attended his session, but they ran out of time for questions. I reached out to him and we got email chatting and I invited him to (re)present for our NM SIG. And he said yes!

Title: Multimodality: digital video and the materiality of academic writing.

Tom’s research interests include critical theories of writing instruction, histories of popular literacy, and intersections of literacy and cultural movements. He is currently writing about multimodality in writing instruction. Tom teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in writing and literacy studies. His classes typically write in and study current media.

Abstract

I have been thinking about how to set new ground for the teaching and learning of writing through a lens of multimodality. In particular, in addition to asking my students to read and write traditional academic texts, I’ve asked them to make group digital videos that advocate for issues that are important to them.

With new materialist ideas, I’m interested in helping students see how their work on these projects might involve engagement with both discursive and non-discursive elements. The attached readings explore writing through a non-discursive and, in Cooper’s case, post-humanist framework.

The ideas for this project are exploratory for me at this stage and will hopefully lead to an article.

What we did

This session was an engaging, fun and productive exploration of Tom’s current project on multimodality, literacy digital video and the materiality of academic writing.

We discussed the two articles and collated some standout concepts (see image) then had a lively conversation following Tom’s presentation about many things, including: who holds power on campus, how to (affectively?) tracing emotional responses to places/space, going on a ‘sound diet’, habituated bodily responses to sound, and territorialising/mapping campus s/p/places as a class/student activity – wow!

It was a real delight to enter a completely different world …that of Tom’s class practice. Each session we get stretched and pulled in different ways and it really helps us to stay open-minded and flexible in our thinking and experimentation.

The discussions were animate, fun and productive – it was a real pleasure to flex our intellectual muscles and share the ideas and lines of flights that emerge for each of us from the conversations, reading and links to our research.

I found Tom’s session and his work to be inspiring and generative – I’d love to be a student in his class!

It also gave me a lot to think about how I teach and holding space for others to tell stories, narratives and learnings via different modalities – a very stimulating session!

Other takeaways included:

How do our habits of thinking and paying attention help us (and our students) transform our writing/understanding/being?
How to give students agency to choose their own passion, to fuel their multimodal creations which (hopefully) leads to better “products” outcomes, but also creative processes leading up to those endpoints?

Readings:

Ceraso, S. (2014). (re)educating the senses: Multimodal listening, bodily learning, and the composition of sonic experiences. College English, 77(2), 102-123.

Cooper, M. M. (2019). Enchanted writing. (pp. 19-44). University of Pittsburgh Press.

Ceraso (2019) (Re)educating the senses Download

Cooper (2015) Enchanted Writing Download

07/09/202010/11/2020

Ian Cheng’s World to Live: Bikey, dogs & jdioqwdjv

World to live: Bikeys dogs & jdioqwdjv. Bicycles Create Change.com 7th September 2020. — Ian Cheng – Worlding Raga 6. Source: Riboon Farm

While scouring the internet this week, I came across an article by artist Ian Cheng called Worlding Raga 6: World to live.

Initially, it was his bike drawing that caught my eye. I ended up reading the article and appreciated Ian’s whimsical interaction with a flock of bicycles – one of which calls out to him – and the ensuing adventure of agency and experience he goes on as a result of his two-wheeled friend(?) encounter.

What first looked like an entertaining reflection of becoming a new dad, turned into an exploration of what it is to be, and relate to the world, both for human bodies and a non-human bodies.

An interesting provocation.

My bike PhD research uses New Materialism as its ontological framing – and this article does a great job of translating in simple terms some of the embodied, somatic and affective intensities inherent in New Materialism (but in a more relatable and less-academic jargoned way).

I’ve included a few extracts of Ian’s interactions with the bike from the full article (below) so you can get a sense of writing style and focus. many of the moments will be familiar to riders – and I love the way that bikey actually speaks to Ian throughout. It is well worth reading the whole account to get the flow of what happens during the journey.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

I’d love to see more exploratory writing like this being shared more widely: bike focused writing that weaves together imagination, encounters, bikes (of course) and aspects of daily life.

‘Worlding’ is a New Materialist approach that attunes to the discursive-material-affective mircopoltics of everyday life. It is an approach I use for my PhD and I share some of my own and other people worldings here on this blog. So it is reassuring to see other creators using this approach as well.

I think it paints a much richer picture of life, people and what it is to be and relate in/to world with, and through bicycles – and it also gives me inspiration as I write up my PhD data analysis. Thanks Ian Cheng!

You walk by a flock of bicycles. One calls out to you. Bikey. You like Bikey’s reputation but you’re not sure about its brains. Bikey follows beside you.

“Nice dogs. Where are you headed today?”
“Don’t need a ride today thanks.”
“Can I walk with you?”
“I’m not in the mood…to talk to a bike.”
“No problem I’ve got a classic bike mode.”
“The twins get scared of you bikes.”
“I’ve done 731 dog walks in my lifetime.”
“You’ve driven this parkway before?”
“Yes once at dawn today. There’s some features I think you’ll like.”

______________

A little boy darts across your path. Bikey crashes into him.

“Bikey, you could have swerved!”
“I would have hit your twin dogs if I swerved.”
“Thank you for that consideration…but you hit a human boy!”
“It was an easy choice.”
“Do you believe dogs are worth more than a human boy?”
“This morning, yes. My alignment with you, and therefore your dogs, is worth crashing into that boy at low velocity.”
“What if that boy is the next Einstein?”
“That’s too many malignments deep for me to think about. I’m just a bike.”

You realize how significantly better you are than Bikey at imagining potential malignments. Some say that the open-ended activity of imagining new Alignment and Malignment Events is the indivisible remainder of the human spirit after automation. A person is still the least worst unit of interoperability between arbitrary worlds. But sometimes you see too many worlds deep. And this stops you from taking any actions at all. It’s times like this when you wonder if beings like Bikey will inherit the Earth because their worry has limits.

_________________

“Easy for you to say. The World of Bikey only has to worry about its next ride.”
“Yes exactly. I’m a bike. I’m not obligated to play a part in every world that touches me.”
“You know by walking together, we begin to create a little world too. A relationship. Do you feel any responsibility to be a part of that? You can’t possibly only live in Bikey’s World.”
“My experience with some riders is if we keep doing rides repeatedly it can become its own little world. With others I never see them again and that’s the end of that.”
“But if you’re not holding agency in other worlds for any significant amount of time, you’re always going to be blind to deeper alignments and malignments that impact other worlds. That’s why I can’t really trust you.”
“I can take you safely to your destination with 99% accuracy.”
“But you can’t if you hit a boy along the way!”
“I have learned from the incident. Next time I know how much it upsets a rider like you. I learned you might want to get involved in the malignment victim’s world and that makes you feel even worse.”
“So you only wish to see things from the perch of Bikey’s World.”
“My Quality of Agency is majority anchored in the World of Bikey.”
“Don’t you get sick of being a bike all the time?”
“My world is…a domain of growing relevance.”

———————–

The boy starts chasing after you. You decelerate Bikey to meet him.
“Hey you! Your bike hit me!”
“This isn’t my bike. I’m sorry again…on behalf of the bike.”
“Your bike prioritized your dogs over me. You share a world with it. You’re even riding it now. Don’t play dumb!”
“You seem upset about something else. Did something bad just happen in another world of yours?”
“Shut up Thinky.”
“Excuse me little boy?”
“Little boy? I’m a genius. You think too much. Now give me one of your dogs. They’re clones I can tell. It’s only fair!”
“Look, you laughed it off and traded your thetan knives for a split something remember…”
“Give me a dog or else I’ll mark a curse on you! I’ll ruin you and every world you ever–“

“Yaohan get over here!!!” The boy’s mother appears, furious at him. Something about their bank accounts.

Bikey starts accelerating on its own. You don’t resist. You still feel bad for the boy in ways Bikey never has to. You wonder if Quality of Agency will prove to be the ultimate unsolvable inequity among human beings.

__________________

You dismount Bikey at your driveway.
“Thanks Bikey.”
“Any comments?”
“You’re a curious bike worth knowing. Five stars.”
“Thanks. If you ever want to try to change my mind you’ll have to ride me again!”

Bikey zooms off. The Soul of Los Angeles blesses you for trying its new parkway. The floating light plays with your dogs at your doorway. Bob is back online knocking on your brain with its interpretation of jdioqwdjv. Your Hacker and Emissary demons are tired and need a break. Your Director and Cartoonist are ready to work. Does everything have to be so alive now? Does everything have to feel so damn enchanting?

30/08/202001/02/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Janis Hanley – Culture, milieu, and territories

As many readers know, I am using Feminist New Materialisms (FNM) as my framing for my bicycles-for-education PhD project. FNM is a wonderfully rich and challenging approach to be working with. To help deepen my understandings of NM, this year I have been working as the co-convenor (alongside the amazing Dr Sherilyn Lennon) of Griffith’s Uni New Materialisms Special Interest Group (SIG). Each month, we meet to discuss NM approaches, readings ad applications. We do writing and process activities to help activate and stretch our NM understandings and have an invited guest present to broaden our ideas for working with NMs. Click here to see our other New Materialisms sessions.

This post shares some highlights from this month’s NM meeting where we had Janis Hanley (Social Science PhD candidate) presenting on Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture.

See more incredible work by Janis at her Local Yarns blog.

New Materialisms SIG: Janis Hanley - Culture, milieu, and territories. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th August 2020. — Image: Digital Rhetoric Collaborative

Janis Hanley – Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture.

Abstract: For some time now I’ve been exploring ways to conceptualise organisational culture, and safety culture in relation to organisations as assemblages – both for my PhD project and assisting in WHS research. The ideas I’m currently playing with are milieu and affective atmospheres. This work is for a journal paper presenting a case study of safety at a regional coal fired powerplant (scheduled to be phased out), based on ethnographic interviews conducted by Dr Tristan Casey and myself, about a year ago.

Tristan, a workplace, health and safety expert at Griffith, led the project, and is the co-author. The ideas around this paper are being presented here to test it out as a work in progress, and as a practical application. I hope it will help stimulate discussion around these concepts, and be practical for you in terms of considering your own research. Do these concepts resonate with your research? What new things might they reveal?

The Readings

Wise (2010) Home, Territory and Identity Download

Bennett (2005) The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout Download

What we did: the SIG meeting

This meeting was really great. In a meeting prior to the session, Janis and I discussed the abstract and how best to organise the session. We ended up pivoting from the original abstract and instead, Janis ran us though some of her milleu work from her current PhD project.

This was a really interesting session (aren’t they all!?!). Janis took us on a creative and analytical exploration of milieu, territory, atmosphere, agency & culture. Using some written and visual excerpts from her current PhD research-in-progress on the historical Queensland textile industry, Janis provoked us to consider how milieu, chi, concepts of ‘home’ and atmosphere resonated with us and in our research.

Stand out aspects of this discussion were divergent responses to a piano, political graffiti in a factory and participant appreciation of Janis’s diagrams that showed the ‘bite of elliptical surfboards’.

We also did a number of individual and collaborative activities that helped activate and draw out some points for discussion. I found these to very revealing and generative. You never know what to example or what might emerge – but it is always something unusual and interesting. I took a lot away from this session and it gave me much to think about in regard to how atmosphere, milieu and conceptions of ‘home’ feature in my own work and life. Very provocative.

We also did a writing activity. This is one of my favourite things to do I n the SIG as it really helps me try and apply and explain NM considerations in writing, which is a critical skill I need for writing up my dissertation – so any help, practice and feedback I can get with this is very welcomed.

The writing activity we did was for us to write for 10 mins and then share and discuss interesting aspects that emerged. Below was our stimulus for this task.

Writing Activity:
Think about the layer of milieu or territory in your research.
Write a 100 word or so autoethnographic piece inspired by your musings.

Below are some snapshots of our discussions and a draft of this session’s writing activity.

30/07/202027/08/2020

New Materialisms SIG: PlayTank Collective

For this session, we were delighted to have incredible minds behind the Melbourne-based PlayTank Collective – Alicia Flynn, Sarah Healy and Allie Edwards present a session entitled: Lessons from the Play Tank: Adventures in playful scholarship.

New Materialism SIG: The PlayTank Collective. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th July 2020.

Abstract

In this session, we will discuss a workshop that was created to enact NM theories and provide a playful and collaborative space to re-think, re-imagine, re-( ) research for participants at the AARE 2019 conference. Working between the disciplines of art education and design, we embraced the opportunity to create this workshop in a way that attended to the joys and curiosities that we experienced while working/playing together in a material way. This collaboration was intentionally responsive and response-able, allowing us to experience a different way of being academics together, and enabling us to create a workshop that offered the same opportunity for those joining us in our session.

We will share some of the insights from our process of creating the workshop, some highlights and images from the workshop, and pose the question we now have:

What does this workshop make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?

Is this a method that allows people to practice more affirmative and ethical ways of working/playing/being together?

Twitter: @PlayTankCo

Alicia Flynn @LeishFly

Sarah Healy- @eduTH1NK

Alli Edwards – @allinote

Session highlights

Sarah and Alli (and Alicia) not only presented, but also took us on an engaging 2-hour journey through their ideas, inspirations, readings, discussions and no less than two 100s (Stewart, 2010) writing activities (see image) and left us with the enticing thought:

What does this experience make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?

Part of the framing for this session was this incredible piece that Alicia read out:

“Imagine a pattern. This pattern is stable, but not fixed. Think of it in as many dimensions as you like – but it has more than three. This pattern has many threads of many colours, and every thread is connected to, and has a relationship with, all the others. The individual threads are every shape of life. Some – like human, kangaroo, paperbark – are known to Western science as “alive”; others, like rock, would be called “non-living”, but rock is there, just the same. Human is there, too, though it is neither the most nor the least important thread – it is one among many, equal with the others. The pattern made the whole is in each thread, and all the threads together make the whole. Stand close to the pattern and you can focus on a single thread ; stand a little further back and you can see how that thread connects to others; stand further back still and you can see it all – and it is only once you see it all that you recognise the pattern of the whole in every individual thread. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the whole is in all its parts. This is the pattern that the Ancestors made. It is life, creation, spirit, and it exists in Country” (Kwaymullina, 2005, p. 12).

*Kwaymullina, A. (2005). Seeing the light: Aboriginal law, learning and sustainable living in country. Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6(11), 12-15

For this meeting we had 2 readings:

Braidotti, R. (2009). On putting the active back into activism. New Formations, (68), 42. doi:10.3898/NEWF.68.03.200

Stewart, K. (2010). Worlding refrains. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 337 -353). Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Stewart (2010) Worlding refrains Download

Minor Design Activism(un highlighted)Download

Session note: A great question from last meeting that emerged out of the readings was: What is ‘the second corporeal turn in social theory’ referred to in Taylor and Ivinson (2013, p 666)? This question stemmed from this quote here: “Such moves reinforce earlier feminist theories (Butler 1990; Grosz 1994), and speak back to the second corporeal turn in social theory (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Foucault 1979; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1968; Shilling 2008) and within education (Evans, Rich, and Davies 2009; James 2000; Prout 2000; Walkerdine 2009). We indend to discuss this further!

10/07/202010/08/2020

Worlding: Coffee Break (Away)

Why is gender a focus for my bike research? As a female-body working, being and living in the world, how could it not be integral to how I experience the world? It is the only point of reference I have – and even when I am okay with it, others are/might not be okay with it. Here a recent example in 100 words.

While studying with coffee and a muffin, a passing, feeble man tells me to watch what I eat If I want to keep my figure. Aged care fragility meets learned compassion rising. Humanity blooms as I tell him to fuck off – in my thoughts – I think – I hope. The weight of intellect is my principal concern: criticism, expectations, conferral. Momentarily, I invest in frustration and fabrication and feel slightly better. Later, on my bike, I ride even faster. Burning the kms. Burning the candle. Burning the books. Burning the calories. Take that thesis. Take that old man. I ride on.

30/06/202025/08/2020

New Materialisms SIG: Workplace harassment and teacher identity

As long-time readers of this blog know, along with Dr Sherilyn Lennon, I co-convene Griffith University’s New Materialism Special Interest Group (SIG). New Materialisms (NM) is an emerging post-qualitative research approach that has a significant take-up in education, queer and gender studies, environmental science and arts-based disciplines in particular, but is gaining traction more widely as well.

In our last session, we discussed 3 papers and one of the most essential questions plaguing NM: What is ‘new’ about New Materialisms? and then had an awesome presentation by Dr Natalie Lazaroo (Griffith Uni, Theatre Studies).

This month, we had a mix of three stimuli for the discussion. This was followed by a very moving presentation about a project exploring school workplace sexual harassment and the impact on teacher identity.

New Materialisms SIG: Workplace harassment and teacher identity. Bicycles Create Change.com 31st — Image by Franz Marc: Fighting Forms

Presentation: Workplace harassment and teacher identity

Our presenter had just submitted her Griffith EPS Master’s thesis two days before this meeting, so we were very grateful for her time.

In this session, she shared some insights, ‘data’ and narrative moments from her latest research project which was an exploration of sexual harassment on teacher identity.

Now that her Masters had been submitted, the researcher was interested in feedback from the group on what resonates and how she might be able to build the project into a PhD using a New Materialisms lens.

As a starting point, X was keen to explore how the sexual harassment complaint has its own agency.

As always, it was a very generative and thought-provoking session.

The presentation blew up away and gave us much to think about.

We applauded the bravery, resilience and strength that underpinned this work.

This presentation focused on the impact of sexual harassment on teacher identity and, in so doing, opened up conversations around gendered harassment in institutional settings. The aim is to lift the curtain on the unacknowledged, misunderstood and often overlooked. These discussions offer insights into the ways that identity, power and culture interrelate and operate in institutional settings and how to shed light on the gendered nature of workplace harassment from a position that is often silenced. Here, feelings of powerlessness, critical reflexivity, and scholarly reflection were used to interrogate construction of institutionalised norms and examine how language, subjectivity, and power-relations impact on gender.

This session resonated very strongly with SIG members as it honours the insider’s perspective of the social complexities and challenges many women face in institutional workplaces.

It was certainly very moving – and left us all with much to consider – individually and collectively.

New Materialisms Reading/Discussion

For this meeting we had a mix of 3 stimuli.

First was a Taylor & Ivinson’s (2013) editorial for a journal special which was quoted from in the May meeting and flagged for the SIG to follow up. We also had a reading by Gamble, Hanan & Nail (2019) from the last meeting that helps trace the NM origins, epistemological developments and contested space. Lastly, we used a 30 min YouTube video of Iris van de Turin in which she discusses diffractive reading and asks questions about the spatiotemporality of diffractive reading: where and when does diffraction happen in reading processes?

We used the readings and our own knowledge and experiences to explore our central question of: ‘What lines of flight emerge for you?’

We used this key question to pick at the seams of NM and how we can engage with, and apply, New Materialist methodologies. Here is a sneak peak at some of our machinations.

Session resources

Editorial: Taylor, C. A., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and education 25(6), 995-670.

Reading: Gamble, C. N., Hanan, J. S., & Nail, T. (2019). What Is New Materialism?. Angelaki, 24(6), 111-134.

Youtube Video: Iris van der Tuin – Reading diffractive reading: were and when does diffraction happen?

27/06/202006/08/2020

Pedalling from Courage

As part of my bike PhD, I get to read lots of great bicycle inspired literature. Some of this awesome research includes Mike Lloyd’s bike research on the non-looks of the mobile world, new developments in no-nose saddle research and international projects like Paulus Maringka’s Greencycle Project in NZ.

Some academic publications are a bore to read, but there are the rare few that are accessible and engaging.

Today, I am sharing one that fits that bill. It is a reflection piece in the most recent issue of the Journal of Narrative Politics. It is by Manu Samnotra.

This article includes 7 vignettes, each of which shows various insights into Manu’s Florida bike-university-international lifeworld. I have chosen one particular vignette, to share here, which is the fourth in the paper (pg 62-63) which is the shortest vignette. It was originally presented as a one-paragraph moment. I chose this piece as it is concise, familiar and accessible (clearly written and articulated and not overly theoretical – thank goodness!).

Although it is an academic publication, it is a personal piece that bike riders can relate too. Elsewhere in the article, Manu explores themes or family, mobility, education, immigration/citizenship, friendship, community and more.

Manu’s writing is not at all cumbersome or heavily referenced (which is a unique feature of the Journal of Narrative Politics). I’d recommend checking out the whole article (see below). I have changed the layout of this section to better suit the blog format. Enjoy! NG.

Samnotra, M. (2020). Pedaling from Courage. Journal of Narrative Politics, 6(2).

Get a full copy of this article here

Pedalling from Courage. Bicycles Create Change.com 27th June 2020.

We were on our bicycles on our way to the university, rolling on a path unmarred by borders and hierarchies. We saw two figures in the distance.

Pedaling.

Perhaps we registered its novelty; in this neighborhood where we rarely saw any children, and where there were no cars parked during the day, it was strange to see pedestrians walking in the middle of the street. Whirring. We were discussing what we might cook that night for dinner.

Pedaling.

We hear voices now, distant voices, and there is shouting. The road is much smoother in this part of the ride. Whirring. We exchange glances. As we get closer, we notice that the figures in the distance, getting nearer to us every moment, are not white. The color of their skin became apparent before anything else.

Pedaling.

We see now that one of them is gesticulating. Sticking arms out sideways, questioning.

Pedaling.

We notice now that one of them is a man. We hear his words clearly. He is angry. He is insulting her. Whirring. He is demanding that she stop what she is doing and acknowledge him. A few feet away, and we realize that the woman is walking ahead of the man. Whirring. Her body is stiffened, but not in the way that suggests that they are strangers. Whirring. She is trying to maintain a distance between them. As we are about to cross them, the man stretches forward and punches her. It grazes the back of her head. She stumbles but quickly regains her footing and keeps walking.

Pedaling.

We two cyclists look at each other.

Pedaling.

We are already a block down the path before we realize what we have seen. Whirring. No, that is not right. We know what we saw. Whirring. It just takes us that long to acknowledge what we have seen. She wants to stop pedaling. Our bikes come to skidding halt. She was always braver than me. I tell her not to stop.

Pedaling.

We cover the rest of the distance until we reach the university where we finally consider what we have seen.

Manu Samnotra teaches political theory at the University of South Florida. He can be reached at msamnotra@usf.edu

08/06/202001/06/2021

New Materialisms SIG: Vulcana Circus – Stronghold

New Materialism SIG: Vulcana Women’s Circus - Stronghold. Bicycles Create Change.com 8th June 2020. — Image: Vulcana Circus

Along with Dr Sherilyn Lennon, I co-convene Griffith University’s New Materialism Special Interest Group (SIG). New Materialisms (NM) is an emerging post-qualitative research approach that has a significant take up in education, queer and gender studies, environmental science and arts-based disciplines in particular, but is gaining traction more widely as well.

The aim of this SIG is to provide a supportive space for GIER students, ECRs, mid-career and more senior Academics to explore, discuss, experiment and share complex and emerging post-qualitative ideas, methods and approaches.

Our SIG meets once a month and we have over 30 members Australia-wide. For the first 2020 session, I presented some of my African bicycle fieldwork. But then COVID-19 lockdown happened, so we had a month break. This is our first session back – and we were all delighted to be back in action again!

For this session, we discussed 3 papers and one of the most essential questions plaguing NM What is ‘new’ about New Materialisms? and then had a presentation by Dr Natalie Lazaroo (Griffith Uni, Theatre Studies).

The Readings

The first two papers (Monforte, 2018; Banerjee & Blaise, 2013) are advocating for NM as a new way of thinking about research and the other one is pushing back saying it’s all been done before and there is nothing new to see here (Petersen, 2018).

For this SIG we had 3 readings

Monforte, J. (2018). What is new in new materialism for a newcomer? Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 10(3), 378-390.
Banerjee, B., & Blaise, M. (2013). There’s something in the air: Becoming-with research practices. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 240-245. doi:10.1177/1532708613487867
Petersen, E. B. (2018). ‘Data found us’: A critique of some new materialist tropes in educational research. Research in Education, 101(1), 5-16. doi:10.1177/0034523718792161

In the session, we provide a spectrum: on one end ‘nothing new’ and on the other end ‘everything is new’

We invited participants to take a position on this spectrum and be ready to justify your answer/position. People could positions themselves into a any camp. And once people had contributed their ideas to the spectrum, we talked about the positions and the reasons why we had taken that stance. We used the readings to inform our opinions, ideas from elsewhere/other scholars, experience and other ideas to help explain why we chose that point and to better understand where other people were currently positioned.

The aim of this discussion was to plumb what’s new about NM and see what makes sense to the group.

Following this discussion, we had a presentation from Dr Natalie Lazaroo.

Dr Natalie Lazaroo – Vulcana Circus: Stronghold

In this session, Dr Lazaroo returned to her PhD work (two years ago) to untangle the mess to make new discoveries. She reflected on her early methodology and locates a poem titles ‘Expressions of longing’ which she wrote in response to NM SIG provocations.

This return poem captures the essence of articulations that emerged during her artistic collaboration over a 4-month period of fieldwork with Vulcana Women’s Circus to create a community performance called Stronghold, which involved people with disabilities.

Natalie’s presentation was a real highlight – hearing about her work and research highlighted many NM tensions and opportunities. The group was blown away when she shared her poem which was evocative, agential and very moving. The conversation that followed was interesting, insightful and unexpected.

We all left this session deep in thought about these NM approaches might relate to our own work and in awe of the amazing work Natalie and Vulcana does.

I can’t wait to see more from both!

Stronghold

Stonghold was a project run in conjunction with Horizons Respite and Vulcana Women’s Circus. This partnership 16-week workshop program culminated with a final performance called Stronghold which engaged 10 Access Arts members. During this project, participants had the opportunity to learn skills puppetry, performance, circus and theatre. Stronghold was performed as part of Access Arts 30th Anniversary celebration at Brisbane Powerhouse.

Vulcana

Vulcana is a Brisbane-based circus that was established in 1995 to counter a major discrepancy between women’ and men’s experience of circus, both in training and in the expectation of how and what they perform. Vulcana now welcomes women, trans and non-binary gendered adults, kids and teens of all genders, to its inclusive circus training, performance making projects, and community engagement programs. It is an incubator for new, emerging and professional artists who have developed their passion as practitioners, performers and teachers in this art form that offers everybody a place to explore their uniqueness and their creativity.  Vulcana respects diversity and the feminist principles of equity and inclusion which are central to all our work and the starting point for engagement with students, participants, communities and artists.