People keep asking how my PhD is going. It’s a legitimate and infuriating inquiry. How to explain the research da(y)ze? Here’s one in 100 words.
It was never going to be easy: this spinning hyper-real simulacra imaginarium. Breathe in. Passionate tears during compost therapy. Breathe out. A research assistant job comes through. Vegetarian dumplings. Whispers of theoretical (in)security. Omissions, occlusions, occasions. Frangipani’s first buds. A maelstrom of attunement as I grip my red pen. Personifying landscapes, fast-forwarding childhoods, (re)working images, terraforming heartbreaks. Screaming all the while. Riding wild horses. An unoriginal miscellany. Embolden by Kathleen Stewart and my broadcasting sister’s birthday, I take solace in Manu’s grey bicycle T-shirt. Cheers all round. When all else fails, winter dog walks and melted cheese toasties.
I’ve had a few people contact me asking how the trip went. Below is a snapshot of my bicycle PhD project, the context and what I did during my PhD fieldwork in Lunsar, Sierra Leone.
The amazing FNM SIG group: discussing readings and my bike fieldwork
My NM SIG discussion notes
Some of the realia I bought in from my fieldwork
Here’s some highlights of my fieldwork presentation (more details in slides below).
Opening: An Acknowledgement of Country, Diversity and Inclusion and that Matter Matters and thanks to the local Lunsar chiefs and the amazing people who have been instrumental in helping make this project happen.
Researcher positionality: Who am I and how did I come to this project
Research context background : 5 intersections of Girls unfreedoms
Girls Ed Lit Review: Current directions in NGO Literature on the topic
Establish Space: Key Project that opens up my research space – completed in 2010
Confirm & Extend: Follow up – a specific project on girls bicycle projects in Lunsar – completed 2016
Established gap leads into my research questions (no slide for this = top secret!)
My Study Design: Aims, Methodology and theoretical framing (NM)
Fieldwork details: Tech Matters and other research developments/considerations
Country context: Background to Sierra Leone (very general history & context)
Site Location: Background and context about Lunsar (my fieldwork location)
Research partnership case study: Intro to Village Bicycle Project (organization) Stylish (host/research participant/all-round incredible man!)
Fieldwork ‘Data’: list of all the research data/activities achieved (so busy!) and other events, opportunities and visits – so busy!
Present some ‘Data‘: I showed some fieldwork bike ride footage for discussion (no slide – top secret)
The return: Now I have returned, I outlined my next steps and questioned how/what to do to start ‘data analysis’
Q&A: Open discussion and suggestions on entry points for data analysis using NM approaches.
Aside from being able to share my fieldwork experiences with others, it was also great to get stuck into some rigorous academic discussions and come away with a number of productive and tangible ideas to apply for data analysis.
Most satisfying of all though, was seeing how interested people are in Sierra Leone and having the opportunity to promote and celebrate the beautiful people, places and experiences I had there.
Researcher positionality: Who am I and how did I come to this projectResearch context background : 5 intersections of Girls unfreedomsGirls Ed Lit Review: Current directions in NGO Literature on the topicEstablish Space: The Child Mobility Project – Key project that opens my research space. Completed 2010Confirm & Extend: Lauren’s Hof follow up: a specific project on girls bicycle projects in Lunsar. Completed 2016My Study Design: MethodologyFieldwork details: Tech MattersFieldwork details: Other research developments/considerationsCountry context: Background to Sierra Leone (very general history & context)Site Location: Background and context about Lunsar (my fieldwork location)Research partnership case study: Intro to Village Bicycle Project (organization) and Stylish (host/research participant/all-round incredible person!)Fieldwork ‘Data’: list of all the research data/activities achieved (so busy!) and other events, opportunities and visits – so busy!The return: Now I have returned, I outlined my next steps and questioned how/what to do to start ‘data analysis. Q&A: Open discussion and suggestions on entry points for data analysis using NM approaches
AARE is Australia’s premier network for educational
researchers. A key aim for AARE is to inform and improve policy and practice in
education – and share these insights with other interested parties.
AARE blog is where experts share opinions, raise questions and explore education themes and issues.
The annual conference is the most popular AARE offering. Each year, local educational professionals from Australia and around the world come together to network, share ideas and hear about the latest educational research, projects and approaches. Here are some keynote presentations from past conferences and some past papers.
AARE 2019 Conference
The theme for this conference was ‘Education for a Socially Just World.
The sessions on offer are extensive (dare I say overwhelming?).
The truncated program of abstract titles only alone is 274 pages – click here.
The complete program (full abstracts) is a whopping 1162 pages – click here.
So many great sessions to choose from – and some very big names.
In order to save my sanity, time and effort I just decided to stick with seeing what the Post- Structural Theory SIG had on offer – and then go to any other sessions/speakers who caught my eye.
Here, in no particular order are some of my hot tips for AARE 2019 sessions:
Sarah Healy (Melbourne Uni), Alli Edwards (Monash Uni), Alicia Flynn (Melbourne Uni). Welcome to the Playtank! Re-_____ing research.
David Bright (Monash Uni). Qualitative inquiry and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: In which I consider verisimilitude as a criterion for judging the quality of qualitative writing with reference made to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5 albeit not really in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore. (I went to this session and it was amazing! It ended up winning the Best Session Award 2019 for the whole conference – and rightly so!).
Parlo Singh (Griffith Uni) and Gabrielle Ivinson (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Radical Inclusion Research in/with Schools Serving High Poverty Communities.
Sarah E. Truman (Melbourne Uni), David Ben Shannon (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Queer textualities and temporalities: speculating-with Alpha Centauri.
Lucinda McKnight (Deakin Uni), Melissa Wolfe (Monash Uni) and Bronwyn Davies (Independent scholar). Is new materialism incompatible with social justice? Panel Discussion with Professor Bronwyn Davies.
Maria Ejlertsen (Griffith Uni). “I don’t fit in, I fit out”: Enabling more-than inclusive spaces for student belonging and engagement with school through attention to more-than-human entanglements of spacetimematter.
I went for the full three days and to as many sessions as I could (these were just a few).
I also went to the below session which was the first in a series of AARE Post-Structuralist SIG Event Series feat. Professor Bronwyn Davies funded by AARE Poststructural Theory SIG Major Grant 2019. See abstract below.
Exploring the poetics and the ethics of new materialist inquiry: Professor Bronwyn Davies
As researchers, our task is to get inside the processes of those materialisations of the world that
we encounter (where encounter is not a collision but a mutual affecting and being affected); it is
to find or generate the concepts that will enable us to see those encounters not in normative,
already-known terms, but in ways that open up new possibilities for sensing and responding, for
becoming sense-able and response-able. That is the ethics of new materialism.
And what of the poetics? New materialist research is necessarily playful. It crosses disciplinary
boundaries, messing those boundaries up; it works with new and emergent philosophical
concepts, bringing them to life through art, poetry, literature; it enters into the very specificity of
sensual existence as it is caught in a moment of spacetime and simultaneously opens up, or finds
its way into life itself. Through such explorations it seeks to break loose from old dogmas, old
methods, old binaries—all the paraphernalia of a normalized set of thoughts and practices that
place the individual human above and separate from the world, and that constrain research
through the repetition of the already-known. It seeks to open up thought, giving space to
emergence of new ways of understanding, new ways of becoming, throwing off the shackles of
the clichéd conventions of rationality and order.
In the workshop following this paper, I will present one or more of my own explorations that begin with where I am, or slip right into the middle, and then reflect on what was involved in going there. What re-conceptualising was involved? What new practices? What ethics? What poetics? I will then open up that exploration with the audience, inviting them to shift from being audience to becoming participants, giving them an opportunity to talk and write about something that matters to them in their encounters with more-than-human relationality, that called/calls on their sense-ability and response-ability.
This blog post comes from an email I recently received from fellow PhDer Janis. Janis’s research investigates the heritage of Queensland’s Woollen Textile Manufacturing industry, so she has a particularly keen eye for stories about fabrics and textiles. So when she saw this fabric-and-bike-related content, she sent it over to me. This content about the ingenious cyclewear Victorian women invented to navigate social mores, comes from a 2018 Guardian article by sociologist Dr Kat Jungnickel. Thanks so much for sending this through Janis!
Image: Kat Jungnickel
Kat Jungnickel was researching modern-day cycling and in her interviews, people (especially women) kept mentioning the role that clothing had on cycling identity, participation and enjoyment. So she started to investigate a very particular period of UK clothing design innovation for women’s cyclewear from 1895 to 1899.
Dr Kat Jungnickel is a senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. More about her research, including re-creations of convertible costumes and free sewing patterns inspired by the patents, is available at her website and in Bikes & Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and their Extraordinary Cycle Wear, out now through Goldsmiths Press.
In her article below, Kat explains how patents by female inventors from the 1890s reveal the creative ways women made their body mobile through clothing.
Ingenious Victorian cyclewear for women
Much has been written
about the bicycle’s role as a vehicle of women’s liberation. But far less is
known about another critical technology women used to forge new mobile and
public lives – cyclewear. I have been studying what Victorian women wore when
they started cycling. Researching how early cyclists made their bodies mobile
through clothing reveals much about the social and physical barriers they were
navigating and brings to light fascinating tales of ingenious inventions.
Cycling
was incredibly popular for middle- and upper-class women and men in the late
19th century, and women had to deal with distinct social and sartorial
challenges. Cycling exaggerated the irrationality of women’s conventional
fashions more than any other physical activity. Heavy, layered petticoats and
long skirts caught in spokes and around pedals. Newspapers regularly published
gruesome accounts of women dying or becoming disfigured in cycling crashes due
to their clothing.
Fortunately,
little was going to stop women riding and they rose to these challenges in a
plethora of ways. Some took to wearing “rational” dress, such as replacing
skirts with bloomers. While this was safer and more comfortable for cycling,
dress reform was controversial. It was not unusual for onlookers who felt
threatened by the sight of progressive “New Women” to hurl insults, sticks and
stones. Other women adopted site-specific strategies to minimise harassment,
such as cycling in conventional fashions in town and changing into more radical
garments for “proper riding”.
Some
pioneering women came up with even more inventive strategies. Remarkably, some
Victorians not only imagined, designed, made and wore radical new forms of
cyclewear but also patented their inventions. The mid-1890s marked a boom in
cycling and also in patenting, and not only for men. Cycling’s “dress problem”
was so mobilising for women that cyclewear inventions became a primary vehicle
for women’s entry into the world of patenting.
The
patents for convertible cyclewear are particularly striking. These garments
aimed ambitiously for respectability and practicality. Inventors concealed
converting technologies inside skirts, including pulley-systems, gathering
cords, button and loop mechanisms and more, that enabled wearers to switch
between modal identities when required.
Alice
Bygrave, a dressmaker from Brixton, lodged a UK patent in 1895 for
“Improvements in Ladies’ Cycling Skirts”. She aimed to “provide a skirt proper
for wear when either on or off the machine”. Her parents owned a watch- and
clock-making shop in Chelsea and her brother and sister-in-law were
professional cyclists. Her invention brings all of these influences together in
an ingenious skirt with a dual pulley system sewn in the front and rear seams
that adjusts height according to the needs of the wearer. Bygrave also patented
her invention in Canada, Switzerland and America, and it was manufactured and
distributed by Jaeger. It was a hit and was sold throughout the UK and America.
It even made its way to Australia.
Image: The Guardian. Patent illustrations accessed in the European Patent Office Espacenet Database.
Julia Gill, a court dressmaker from north London, registered her convertible cycling skirt in 1895. Her aim was to “provide a suitable combination costume for lady cyclists, so that they have a safe riding garment combined with an ordinary walking costume”. This deceptively ordinary A-line skirt gathers up to the waist via a series of concealed rings and cord into what Gill called a “semi-skirt”. The lower flounce, when made from similar material to the jacket, creates a stylish double peplum. The inventor also recommended combining the skirt with some rather splendid “fluted or vertical frilled trowsers”.
Image: The Guardian. Patent illustrations accessed in the European Patent Office Espacenet Database.
Mary and Sarah Pease, sisters from Yorkshire, submitted their patent for an “Improved Skirt, available also as a Cape for Lady Cyclists” in 1896. As the name suggests, this is two garments in one – a full cycling skirt and a cape. The wide waistband doubles as a fashionable high ruché collar. This garment is one of the more radical designs of the period because the skirt completely comes away from the body. Cyclists wanting to ride in bloomers could wear it as a cape or use the gathering ribbon to secure it to handlebars, safe in the knowledge they could swiftly replace the skirt should the need arise.
Image: The Guardian. Patent illustrations accessed in the European Patent Office Espacenet Database.
Henrietta Müller, a women’s right’s activist from Maidenhead, registered her convertible cycling patent in 1896. Unusually, the inventor addressed an entire three-piece suit – a tailored jacket, an A-line skirt that can be raised in height via loops sewn into the hem that catch at buttons at the waistband, and an all-in-one undergarment combining a blouse and bloomer. Müller was committed to the idea of progress for women, and not content with trying to fix one element when she could see problems with the entire system. She was acutely aware of the politics and practicalities of pockets for newly independent mobile women. As a result, this cycling suit features five pockets, and Müller encouraged users to add more.
Image: The Guardian. Patent illustrations accessed in the European Patent Office Espacenet Database.
These
inventions are just some of the fascinating ways early female cyclists
responded to challenges to their freedom of movement. Through new radical
garments and their differently clad bodies they pushed against established
forms of gendered citizenship and the stigma of urban harassment. Claiming
their designs through patenting was not only a practical way of sharing and
distributing ideas; it was also a political act.
These
stories add much-needed layers and textures to cycling histories because they
depict women as critically engaged creative citizens actively driving social
and technical change. Importantly, they remind us that not all inventions are
told through loud or heroic narratives. These inventors put in an awful lot of
work to not be seen. They were successful in many ways, yet the nature of their
deliberately concealed designs combined with gender norms of the time means
they have been hidden in history – we have yet to find any examples in museums.
As such, they raise questions: what else don’t we know about? How can we look for other inventions hidden in plain sight? And if we learn more about a wider range of contributors to cycling’s past, might it change how we think about and inhabit the present?
For this last meeting we did things a little differently!
Instead of having a guest presenter, we invited everyone to present.
In the spirit of New Materialisms, we wanted to hear, seem think-with lots of different voices, perspectives, approaches and ‘data’.
So , we asked attendees to bring a piece of data that ‘glows’ and that they would like to re-turn-with other members of the SIG.
The idea here is that we are all working on different research projects, with different applications and with different data. As we break for the holidays for the end of the year, we thought it might be interesting for participants to share a part of their research with others as a way of mining alternative insights.
We asked participants to chose a data’ selection’ that was digestible in a short time frame (i.e. within 2 minutes to present to leave time for discussion).
An example of this might be 100 words of writing/transcription or an image or an object.
And we had a great time!
Participants shared all kinds of ‘data’ – photos, images, artwork, audio, moments of research(er)-becomings and other material. I won’t share people’s content here as the material is often confidential, part of resarch project (covered by Ethics) or personal – you had to be there!
It was lovely to have the time and space to share work and ideas and get some inspiration to tide us over the holiday – and to get some fresh eyes and ideas to look anew at the content and ideas we were working with.
What a way to end the year!
Below are some moments from the workshop – it was super fun and inspiring!
Image: Night Owl City
Reading material for this meeting
There are two readings for this SIG meeting were selected as they attempt to articulate the difference between fNM approaches and other (post)qualitative approaches.
Jackson, A. Y. (2013). Making matter making us: Thinking with grosz to find freedom in new feminist materialisms. Gender and Education, 25(6), 769-775. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.832014.
Hughes, C., & Lury, C. (2013). Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a social to an ecological epistemology. Gender and Education, 25(6), 786-799. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.829910.
Lately, I’ve been craving extra time and space to explore New Materialist more generatively, At uni, the time is limited and often, more senior academics take-over theory session. .. and the HDRers still left with answers.
So instead of relying on supervisors, I decided to invite five trusted New Materialist and Posthumanist PhD friends for a day-long study group/workshop in my garden where we could all collaborate to create and share knowledge.
I planned the day so there was room for sharing, discussion, thinking, writing and activities -and also time to do some gardening! I had organized a full-day program (see below).
Each participant nominated an NM tropic to share/teach the group.
New Materialism is an umbrella term for a range of theoretical perspectives that share a re-turn focus on matter. Recently, feminist New Materialisms (fNM) has gained momentum due to a unique consideration for the agency of all matter. In fNM understandings, habitual human-centric ways of thinking, doing and being are disrupted as an ethico-onto-epistemological approach emerges.
FNM is exciting, complex and emerging – and a challenge for PGs. Because it is so difficult to understand, PGs often rely on supervisors and academics as ‘experts’ for ways to understand and apply fNM. This reliance bypasses autodidactic learning. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were disrupted and reframed? Inspired by the fNM central ethical tenet of flattening power hierarchies within and across the Academy, I am hostingThe New Materialist’s Garden.
This research session is an independent, one-day, fNM theory/methodology ‘study group’ held in my garden. The garden provides an alternative ‘learning context’ that deliberately disrupted and displaced traditional notions about academic knowledge, performances, educational spaces and who is ‘an expert’.
The aim of this day is to see what insights and ‘wonder’ (McLure, 2012) might emerge when HDRs collaborate to share and reframe experiences of ‘thinking-doing-being’ fNM research and what it is to be ‘experts-becoming’.
I hope this experience will help/encourage/inspire (post)grads to trouble the ways they are ‘thinking-doing-being’ theory and who are ‘research experts’.
Expert ‘queering’ is a significant shift for PG and emerging researchers to contend with, but even more so as they transition beyond candidature.
Hopefully, such reframings will not only aid in their current research, but also enable more (post)grads to view themselves as ‘experts/researchers-becoming’ rather than ‘student/candidate-unchanging’.
As regular readers of this blog know, I am undertaking my bicycle PhD with Griffith University, School of Professional Studies. I am using Feminist New Materialisms (FNM) to explore how bicycles enable or constrain rural African girls’ access to education. I need to better understand FNM (which is essentially Quantum Physics applied to Social Science/Education). To do this, I want to read, talk, process and write about FNM with others who know what the heck I’m on about as a way to bounce ideas around and learn more.
We
meet once a month and the time came around pretty quick for our September
meeting.
I
was delighted!
2nd Feminist New Materialisms Special interest Group (FNM SIG) Meeting
In keeping with the ethical intent of fNM, Sherilyn and I intend using our forum as a way of flattening power hierarchies within and across the Academy. (We are currently co-authoring a publication on this exact topic).
This means that, as our meetings progress, we will be showcasing research from experienced (academics) and emerging researchers (candidates). So we invite all the participants to let us know if they would like to present their research ideas/dilemmas to the group for some open and honest feedback, or as a way to process and work through areas of research ‘stickiness’.
At
this FNM SIG meeting, we have a guest presentation by Prof Simone Fullagar and
Dr Wendy O’Brien (and Dr Adele Pavlidis who unfortunately could not make it) whose
book, Feminism
and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, has just been published.
See more about the book at the end of the post.
Congratulations!
Image: Palgrave
After their presentation, we had open question/discussion time before moving into a group activity in order to collate some key terms that have emerged thus far.
The stimulus materials (see 2 attachments) for this meeting were provided by Prof Fullagar. The materials are an extract from their new book (Introduction) and an article that is structured around an interview with Karen Barad – a much quicker way of accessing her ideas than reading Meeting the Universe Halfway.
In their informal presentation, Prof. Fullagar and Dr O’Brien shared insights about what it was like to conduct the research, how the process impacted them and some ‘moments of rupture’ they experienced.
The discussion was super interesting as different people were triggered by different aspects of what was shared. I am very keen to hear more about how people are actually applying FNM approaches in practice. This is one of the first opportunities I have had to read FNM work (readings) and then directly question the researchers who have undertaken a full-scale FNM framing. Insightful and inspiring!
We
all felt the time went too quickly – we could have talked another 2 hours at
least!
It
is an aim of mine as co-convenor of the SIG to have an activity that collaborately
produces some sort of output for each meeting. For this session it was a Wordle – Word Cloud.
We
wanted to capture some of the key terms or concepts that the participants are
aware of – or that came out of the readings. Here is what we created:
GU GIER: FNM SIG 2nd Meeting. Wordle
It was a very moving, inspirational and generative session.
Like many other who attended, I went back to my desk and made
copious notes about what had bubbled up for me and what aspects has resonance with
my own bicycle PhD research project.
Here is more info about their book: Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression.
Rather than reducing experience to discrete biological, psychological or sociological categories, feminist thinking moves with the biopsychosocialities implicated in both distress and lively modes of becoming well. Using a post-qualitative approach, the book creatively re-presents how women ‘do’ recovery within and beyond the normalising imperatives of biomedical and psychotherapeutic practices.
By pursuing the affective movement of self through depression this inquiry goes beyond individualised models to explore the enactment of multiple self-world relations. Reconfiguring depression and recovery as bodymind matters opens up a relational ontology concerned with the entanglement of gender inequities and mental (ill) health.
My abstract for the upcoming Pedagogies in the Wild Conference has been accepted!
This is great news because I already have an abstract accepted for the international 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference(Dec 2-4th 2019) and this conference follows straight after (4-6th December) and is at the same place – the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa).
I am working towards a research trifecta: 2 conferences and fieldwork in the one trip.
This conference is being affectionately referred to ‘the D & G conference’.
That is because it focuses on integrating the work of two highly influential scholars whose work is transdisciplinary and has had ‘epic consequence’ in many fields – Deleuze and Guattari. Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher and Felix Guattari is a psychoanalyst. Some their most influential works are: Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus. They have written extensively together on an array of topics. In particular for my project, their work has been foundational in extending New Materialists understandings.
The Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019 is being run for the third time and is solely focused on unpacking, exploring and apply Deleuze-Guattarian thinking and approaches.
As many regular readers of this blog know, my research is complexified by interrogating various aspects of power relations – such as gender in/justice, post-colonialism, and what/who are academic/research/educational ‘experts’.
The session I will be presenting is based on a publication I currently writing with my amazingly brave PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon.
Title: Cycling-with-through-and-on the edge of the PhD supervisor-candidate relationship: A post-humanist bike ride to a different place.
Abstract: Traditionally, the PhD supervision relationship is predicated on a supervisor as expert – supervisee as learner/novice model of knowledge transmission. Most of the supervisory work is performed either on the university campus or via digital channels that allow the ‘expert’ to direct the conversation and establish the performance expectations for both candidate and supervisor. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were to be disrupted and reframed?
This session presents insights that emerged when a PhD candidate and her Supervisor shared a bayside bicycle ride in Brisbane, Australia, to see what would happen. While the candidate was an expert
bike rider, her Supervisor was far less experienced and somewhat anxious about
her (st)ability. The bicycle ride was viewed as a
way of deliberately disrupting and displacing traditional notions around
academic performances, spaces of learning and who gets to navigate.
What emerged was surprising,
revealing and uncomfortable.
The bicycle ride enabled
encounters with/in the world/self that worked to queer the way in which both
Supervisor and candidate understood their relationship. We contend that the
candidate/supervisor relationship is an iterative and dynamic entanglement of
forces wherein subjectivities, bodily performances, past experiences, fears,
technologies, planned and unplanned encounters are forever and always
entangled.
Influenced by Baradian philosophy,
this session focuses on the material-discursive-affective phenomena that
emerged as the experience of riding-with the candidate/supervisor. In this way “systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy” and “instigate codes of conduct and…exclusionary practices that can limit how academic knowledges…are produced” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 2) are able to be troubled, re-thought and re-balanced.
My PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon and I on our bike ride. Sat. 22nd June, 2019.
What is Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019?
Here is more about the conference: The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.
Similar movements have reverberated across the globe,
addressing issues of neoliberalism, for example in Canada, the UK, the
Netherlands and Chile; racism, as in Ghana and the US; and curfews on women
students in India.
This has raised important questions regarding knowledge
production; continuing structural racism, patriarchy, homophobia and
transphobia; the use and value of western theorists in research and curricula;
and who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.
On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures
between pedagogy, education studies and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
In particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal
theorising, rhizomatic learning and nomadic thought in socially just
pedagogical praxis.
These junctures and innovative genealogies and
methodologies can both address these issues and be further improved and made
more precise by engagements with what it means to transform and reconfigure
pedagogies and practices in higher education.
Image: Pedagogies in the Wild 2019
My Conference Stream – Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling
Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling: Places of/and/un/Learning in Higher Education
How can we challenge assumptions
such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of
materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
Expanded Conference Topic 2
Higher education spaces are usually considered in relation
to how they optimise student learning and, increasingly, how they optimise
marketing potential to attract new students.
In addition, meanings of ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘environment’ and
‘context’ are often elided, and it is taken for granted that learning happens
in classrooms, seminar rooms and lecture halls.
Such discourses take space for granted as a neutral background
on which human endeavour is located.
Unschooling (in a meta sense rather than the narrow sense of
homeschooling) resists this kind of pedagogy in favour of building real
communities and replacing dry, nationalist agendas with different kinds of training
programs, learning opportunities and methodologies, apprenticeships,
internships and mentorships.
Unschooling thus represents a material politics aimed at
genuine social freedom and enjoyable learning. Normative ways of understanding
space and schooling are challenged by Deleuze-Guattarian understandings which,
instead, conceptualise space as an entangled ‘constellation of human–nonhuman
agencies, forces and events’ (Taylor, 2013: 688) within which objects, bodies
and things do surprising and important if often unnoticed and mundane work as
material agents and actants.
Theoretically, such work draws on and takes forward the rich
traditions of feminist and postmodernist understandings of space developed by
Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of space and
striation.
This theme therefore wishes to open up debates about higher
education spaces by considering questions such as:
What is the role of architecture, design and infrastructure in higher education?
How might the materialities of higher education spaces and places be conceptualised via inter-, multi- and post-disciplinary frameworks?
How can we take account of the importance of places of informal learning?
How does the iterative materialisation of space-time-matter come to matter in higher education spaces?
How is higher education being spatially reconfigured in relation to global flows of bodies?
Which/ whose bodies matter in higher education spaces?
What new spatial imaginaries are needed for higher education to thrive?
How can feminist new materialisms in its overlaps and divergences with Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy aid us to produce new understandings of space-place-matter entanglements in higher education?
How can we challenge assumptions such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
What kinds of material and affective potential does unschooling offer us for thinking about curriculum development in Higher Education.
The theoretical framing I am using for my bicycle-education PhD is feminist New Materialisms (fNM). Actually, it is more than just a philosophical perspective and as a doctoral researcher, I have to understand this ethico-onto-epistemological approach super well in order to apply it to my PhD.
I am lucky that my supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon is already immersed in this field and has been an invaluable resource and guide in unpacking FNM complexities.
In a recent meeting, I said to Sherilyn that I wanted/needed more time to process and experiment with fNM approaches. I asked her if there was any academic Special Interest Groups (SIG) she knew that I could join. She had been part of an informal fNM SIG previously, but it had disbanded due to lack of official support. So, the opportunity and need was there to establish an official fNM reading/discussion group at Griffith Uni.
Success! We now have an official FNM SIG at Griffith!
We plan to start
with a monthly reading and discussion group and then see what organically
happens as opportunities present and requests are made.
Our first meeting was on Thursday 1st August 2019 and we had 12 attendees.
The first meeting
was semi-structured with the discussion focus being: The emergence of feminist
New Materialisms.
The two stimulus resources
were:
Reading: Pierre, E. S. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward “post inquiry”. Journal of curriculum theorizing, 30(2).
We started with a welcome and an introduction of attendees: name, connection to Uni and how we plugged into fNM – and an acknowledgment that ‘matter matters’ to set the scene.
We wanted to keep the discussion open to whatever came up, so we had three questions (traffic light ) for people to think about and write their answers down on coloured post-its. Teachers call this a ‘think, pair, share’ activity, which is great because everyone contributes individual ideas to the collective discussion.
Here are our traffic (green = enabling, yellow= interesting, red =constraining) light questions and responses.
Red responses
Orange responses
Green responses
‘Traffic light’ questions
Then we formed smaller groups to share and discuss
our answers – and whatever else bubbled up.
Each group discussed different aspects and ideas.
We put all the stick notes on the wall to create
a gallery walk so we could pass by and read other people’s thoughts and ideas.
It was a way to see what other groups discussed and it was super interesting to
see what other people were wrestling with.
Sherilyn pulled one idea off the wall for the whole group to discuss in more detail.
Dr Sherilyn Lennon
The time went so quick!
Sherilyn and I wanted the meeting to honour central fNM tenets – like being open to change and what emerges in a moment. I also really like the idea of not just discussing ideas, but also actively and collaboratively producing something original (gallery wall) that did not exist before.
It is very FNM to recognise and (re)produce matter that can only be created in that very particular ‘entangled’ moment made up of the room, ideas, bodies, histories, location, identities, artefacts, concepts and all the other processes and practices that made the meeting what it was.
The meeting was a great start and we got very positive feedback.
It will take a few meetings to get into the
groove, but I like having a semi-structured activity (with an collective production)
that can then opened up and modified as the groups see fit.
We will be having one meeting each month for the rest of 2019 and I am very much looking forward to it!
A massive big thank you to all the participants and to GIER for their support.
Over the past 20 years, New Materialism has become an umbrella term used to represent a range of theoretical perspectives that share the re-turn to a focus on matter. It is an emerging theoretical field that encompasses four main streams: Speculative Realism, Object-oriented ontology (OOO), Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and feminist New Materialisms (fNM).
In the last 15 years in particular, fNM have gained considerable attention as a consequence of a unique approach to considering the agency of all matter. In using such understandings habitual human-centric ways of thinking, doing and being are disrupted as an ethico-onto-epistemological approach emerges. This approach is capable of bringing together multiple disciplines as it redistributes agency through material, discursive and affective forces.
European Universities (in particular Utrecht Uni which has a New Materialism Research Centre) have enthusiastically adopted fNM and are currently the most active researchers in the field. While Australia has a growing pool of fNM scholars, a similar uptake is yet to be seen here. This is surprising considering that the movement has been primarily driven by a number of internationally-celebrated Australian feminist scholars including Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Vicki Kirby, Bronwyn Davies and Jane Kenway.
As an emerging methodology, fNM is being taken prominently in the field of educational research. Those working in this field are contributing significant insights while laying the foundations for a profound shift in the way we come to understand educational issues, teacher education, and professional and educational practice-based learning.
At Griffith, we have a number of academics working with ANT, but few engaging with fNM. My supervisor, Dr Sherilyn Lennon, is publishing in this space and I am using feminist New Materialist thinking in my PhD. Given the excitement and emerging nature of this way of thinking, a fNM SIG at Griffith University provides an opportunity to directly engage in the discussion and lead a feminist New Materialist Research Group that will brings together PhD Candidates, academics from Griffith and other institutions, scholars and interested parties to more deeply, critically, creatively and actively engage with fNM. The field of FNM is still being chartered. This makes it an emergent and dynamic space in which to be researching.
The aim of this fNM SIG is to:
To build a vibrant and productive community of FNM researchers and professionals who cross-pollinate ideas while growing new research projects
To participate and contribute in this emergent theoretical field
To bring together researchers with trans-disciplinary and cross-institutional knowledge as a means of creating hybrid rigour
To support GU HDR candidates who are using FNM thinking
To grow research, researchers and research practices and networks
Establish Griffith/GIER as active in the FNM space
Leverage and extend Australian feminist scholarship
Being a PhD candidate means access to some pretty
cool events. Last week, I attended a critical feminist Arts/Research and
Zine making workshop called Affect, Knowledge and
Embodiment (AKE).
The focus of the workshop was to collaboratively experiment
with sociological fiction, participatory visual methods and zine making as a
way to further explore themes of affect, knowledge, and embodiment.
This AKE workshop is for established social researchers as well as postgraduate students who are interested in a practical introduction to arts/research methods.
In the workshop, we explored ways of practically extending critical and feminist social research– specifically through photos, writing and zine making. These arts practices are valuable for opening up how to critically explore, analyse, collaborate on, and share experiences and understandings of the social world.
The workshop had 3 talks (see abstracts below) – each followed by some activities and discussions: we did three generative writing activities after Ashleigh Watson’s sociological fiction. Then in pairs, we discussed/shared photos we had brought after Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro’s participatory visual methods session. The last session was Samantha Trayhurn’s zine history and culture presentation – and for the rest of the workshop, we worked on creating our own page to contribute to a collective workshop zine.
The idea for the zine was to produce a A4 page that synthesised the pre-workshop lecture by Sarah Ahmed ‘On Complaint‘ (which is incredible!) with materials presented in the workshop – alongside whatever else we wanted to include.
To produce the zine page, no perfection or prior artistic skill required, just a willingness to experiment, explore and express an idea – awesome!
It was great to see what people did for their individual pages – and then to see the final collated product was even more impressive. See link below.
I had a great time at this workshop. It was great to meet new researchers from different fields and different universities. I only knew two other people when I first arrived, but make a point of chatting to those I didn’t know.
It was also great to have a mental and creative break from the usual solitary read-and-write research work that most of us do. And so awesome to collaboratively produce an official publication by the end of the session!
A massive big thank you to Ashleigh, Laura and Samatha for putting on such an interesting and productive session. And to all the participants who contributed ideas, energy, points for discussion and their pages to the zine – it was a delight to meet you all! Thanks!
This zine is a ‘curated sociology’ of photography, research writing and fiction interventions and was published with Frances St Press. AKE Zine is a collaboratively produced critical feminist arts/research publication (ISSN 2651-8724 [Online]).
For more info about the AKE sessions, contact: ashleigh.watson@unsw.edu.au.
Affect, Knowledge and Embodiment Presentations
A Critical Feminist Arts/Research
Workshop Series
‘Working within entanglement: Considering epistemologies in participatory visual research’ Dr Laura Rodriguez Castro
Participatory
visual research centres epistemic questions about power, ethics and
positionality. Drawing from my experiences collaboratively organising and
curating two photographic exhibitions with Campesina women
in rural Colombia in 2016, and with participatory visual projects embedded in
decolonial feminist epistemologies, I explore the entanglement of emotions,
bodies and worlds in academic, artistic, and community research and engagement.
These entangled experiences reveal political and practical implications about
negotiating power, spatiality and creativity. Thus, I also discuss the
implications of considering epistemologies for doing and curating public and
creative research.
‘Sociological Fiction’ – Dr Ashleigh Watson
Sociological
fiction opens important avenues for creativity in analysis and engagement. In
this talk I chart a background of social scientists who have written fiction,
discuss So Fi Zine and The Sociological Review’s new
fiction series, and outline some stylistic criteria for writing and evaluating
sociological fiction. These criteria include characterisation, voice, poetics,
aesthetics, and verisimilitude. Using these criteria I make practical and
conceptual suggestions for aspiring sociological fiction writers.
‘Body/Text/Form: Analogue Zine Making’ – Sam Trayhurn
When French philosopher Helene Cixous declared that we ‘must write the body’ she called for a literary practice that transcended binary classification and spoke from within a spectrum of bodily forms. Here, I will discuss how my investigation into corporeal writing and corporeal philosophy led me to the practice of zine making as an extension of these ideas. In a fast moving digital age, analogue zine making encourages increased presence, and an increased connection between writing and the body, as the physical act of creation manifests itself as a unified object. I will discuss how analogue zine creation is rooted in a praxis of rebellion that questions and challenges political/social norms, and provides legitimate alternative modes of presentation for literary and academic purposes.
