So instead of having our usual guest presenter, we thought we’d use the recent conference to hold a Popcorn Session.
Popcorn Sessions are where we watch and discuss NM ‘research clips’ such as conference recordings (15-20 mins long each) to think-with creative and cutting-edge NM ideas and experiences.
These research clips explore a range of different ideas and approaches and are lead by some of the world’s leading posthumanist and NM scholars/researchers – so we are very lucky!
The focus for this popcorn session is taken from the ICQI session called Entanglements in the World Becomings.
July Popcorn Theme: Entanglements in the World Becomings.
Recognition, Creative-Rationality, Writing and the Excess of Inquiry – Jon Wyatt (Uni of Edinburgh).
Crafting a New Materialist Becoming – Lise Jean Claiborne (Uni of Waikato).
Slow Dancing and kinship. The Holly Oak, the horse chestnut, Bronwyn and Jane. Jane Speedy (Uni of Bristol) & Bronwyn Davis (Uni of Melb. and Western Sydney Uni).
NM SIG Discussion points and lines of flight
..if we only write for ourselves (or for other NMs) is that limiting?
….what is the purpose?
…….delighting in ‘swerving off course’
………….human ‘desire lines’
…………….a picture I drew about my PhD research
…………………I couldn’t stay longer
…………………….contact – what is your ‘best’ contact?
…………………………the importance of …(more).. thoughtful relationally
……………………………I don’t mind staying
………………………………..Does NM work best when it is unseen and hidden?
……the Holly Oak …….. the horse chestnut ……. the table top……
Below are two 100-word wordings I wrote based on my discussion notes and reflections from participating and thinking-with this NM SIG Popcorn Session.
Coextensions swerving off course
Births of practicality. Limitations of relations, power and ethics. Does ‘anything’ really ‘go’? Using ‘swamps’ to describe things. Leaving marks and theory debt. The uncomfortable possibility that what we reject, we have actually adopted. Discovering Rautio’s four balancing arts. Interweaving the academic and the everyday. Audacious engagements are more-than-method. We are crafting a New Materialist Becoming. Ethical propositions transforming behaviour. The delights of swerving off course. Human desire lines and co-extensions. Considering how to make our work ‘speak to’ other-than scholars. The performativity of being and academic. People want to stay later – there is so much more! Nothing is ordinary.
Slow Dance and Kinship
We’re in the private world of two scholarly lovers: a voyeuristic delight of intellect and intimacy. Slow dance and kinship. Paramours from opposite sides of the world exchange thoughts, writing, photos, drawings, and poetry. They sit under special trees, thinking deeply about each other and the world. Intraspecies tree empathy, tabletops, and hospitalisation for a stroke. Frothy entanglements with nomadic feminist scholars, grainy wood(ly) figures, solitude, ‘eyeless’ gazes and being bodily compromised. Our ancients believe. Vulnerability and the interconnectedness of all things. Pink and purple lines with green dots trace the hidden, yet (un)known. Mycorrhizal assemblages of love.
As well as the erasure of other-than-European contributions within research, I am concerned about the (in)visibility and (de)valuing of female scholarship.
My current research into how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to education has a strong gender theme – and I read a lot.
Who is writing about West African female experiences is revealing. It is difficult to find literature on this topic written by African scholars – and even less so, work by female African scholars and knowledge holders.
Overwhelmingly, work in this area is by white, European males.
Female authorship has always been under-represented – in all fields.
There is historical and current systematic bias in scientific information production and recognition for male scholar-authors, (Mathew Effect), while in comparison, female scholarship is still often ignored, denied credit or goes largely unrecognised (Matilda Effect).
And this is not only an academic issue. There are many international movements working to redress the erasure of women’s current and historical contributions – take Women’s History Month or the WikProject Women as examples.
The Reading with Reciprocity invite was the perfect opportunity to put into action more publicly, some In(Citing) experiments I’ve been working-with exploring how I might better support, promote and recognise female scholarship in my work.
Image: Andrea Piacquadio
Two approaches to (In)Citing Feminist Scholarship
In my book response (forthcoming – I will link here when made public), I used two approaches to make academic female contributions more visible.
1. Including first and surnames for in-text citations
First, I included the first and surname for all female (and other) scholars cited.
Historically, the academic writing-citing convention is to only cite surnames. It looks like this:
With no first name to distinguish otherwise, absolute supremacy of male linage and masculine privilege is reinscribed and unchallenged. So, I include the first name of female authors to destablise this conventional and draw attention to, identify and validate – female author within the male (sur)name convention.
This works best for author-prominent citations.
So my citations then looked more like this:
Glenda Dunne (2018) …..
or
……… (Glenda Dunne, 2018).
2. Include the academic position of female author-scholars
I also included the current academic position of the female scholars cited, not just the honorific “Dr.” as is convention.
“Dr.” is an educational qualification for people conferred with a PhD or doctorate, whereas Assistant Professor or Professor is an academic position grade within the academy – it denotes authority, seniority and status.
Far too often, women are note recognised in attaining the academic standing they have.
So, to counter this, instead of:
In this book, Dunne (2018) explores…
or
In this book , Dr Dunne (2018) explores..
My work started to integrate something more like this:
In this book, Prof. Dunne (2018) explores..
So now, I try to use more author-prominent in-text citations so I can apply first AND surname (see above) AS WELL AS deliberately insert the academic position of the author.
So now my citations look like this:
In this book, Prof. Glenda Dunne (2018) explores ...
This is definitely an unconventional move.
Academic positions can change if the person assumes a new roles or moves universities. ‘Dr.’ always stay the same (if given at all) no matter where you go, so that is the conventional default honorific.
This meant I had to do a little more research.
I had to look up the scholar and double check each female scholar’s current position for accuracy.
This additional ‘work’ helped keep me accountable to the feminist imperative of going the extra mile to learn more about the women scholars I was investigating and is a good reminder to be accurate and ethical in my representation of them.
I include the author’s academic titles as a deliberate push to draw attention to the advanced positions the female academics cited/referred to have achieved through expertise, knowledge and research. The title of Dr is not adequately meritous for such positions.
This is something I have been doing for a while in my academic work (like publications), but I am usually told to revert back to Dr or remove all honorifics.
(Note: I was asked by the editors of the feminist project I was writing for to add a (foot)note explaining to readers the reasoning for using these approaches as part of my final book response release.)
Else where in my workshops, Teaching and Learning sessions, and on this blog I have progressively been using this approach as my default – see for example: A/P Chelsea Bond BAM! on World Bicycle Day post.
And I will I continue to apply these (In)Citing techniques where ever possible.
My execution of these two approaches maybe a little clunky at times, but that is also because we (are all) so (un)used to a particular type of (In)Citing!
This experiment is also a long-term commitment… and a process – one that will no doubt change, morph, stumble, be updated and tuned up as my feminist engagement, ideas and experience flexes and fades, and expands and contracts.
For me, it is the engaging-experimenting-doing of feminist imperatives differently (such as greater reciprocity and visibility for female scholarship) that is most interesting in this endeavour.
It has been a very strange two weeks. I’ve tried to keep quiet and focused: thinking, writing, researching and working. I continue to learn a lot. Every day, I have my mind stretched and pulled in new and provocative ways – here’s a recent example in 100 words.
Geotracing Data Flavours
It’s been a busy week. Guarding alpacas and reading mushrooms. Being caught in a self-important fray with Cynosura. Tangling cosmologies with interrupted futurities to form bubbles that pop and fizzle and boil. Embroiled in sometimes clunky-relations that rely on motley sources. Summer’s easy riches buoyed by interludes of precarity and irregularity. Data flavours explode on hungry tongues, then blow down empty academic hallways, alone and unwanted. Visiting human-disturbed environments, ideas and bodies. (R)Evolutions patchy mimicry. Geotracing daunting resources that nurture the most private sensibilities and desires. And all the while, inhabiting moments speckled with capitalism, shamanism, and wild women.
For this month’s NM SIG meeting, we are putting to work New Materialisms differently. We are using NM to consider more deeply some of the wider and pressing current affairs and social movements of our day. There is much happening locally and globally that is troubling and significant – and these dynamics demand our attention and engagement as compassionate human beings, community members, ethical researchers, and citizens of the world.
So we are taking some time to check-in and think-with some of the current ‘big themes, events and issues’ in the news and media, in particular:
Women’s issues/rights and recent protests
COVID-19
Climate Change
…and to consider the human and non-human aspects of current events/news to tease out the ways these issues are entangled.
The highlight of this meeting is an interview with Dr. Adele Pavlidis – where we chat about a recent paper she co-wrote with Prof. Simone Fullagar that took an NM lens to the early days of COVID.
We also invited members to bring ideas about these current social issues with the purpose of linking them to our research.
Thinking through the disruptive effects and affects of COVID-19 with feminist New Materialisms
Dr. Adele Pavlidis is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University. She is a social scientist and writer who draws on a range of methods to better understand the world we live in. Her work examines the ways sport and leisure can be understood as spaces of transformation and ‘becoming’. Influenced by Deleuze and Guattari, Irigaray, and contemporary feminist writing on affect (Probyn, Ahmed, Blackman and others), Adele’s intellectual concern is with the possibility of a feminine cultural imaginary and a future open to possibility.
What happened in this meeting?
We had a great time! Lots of generative discussions.
Below are two 100-word worldlings I wrote as a summary of: 1) the interview and 2) the subsequent discussion.
Excavating the ‘no global’.
Thinking-with Adele’s disruptive effects and affects of COVID-19 and ‘the women’s problem’. Relationships between price, value and ‘what you get’ in (re)turn and environment. Quality, care, potentiality, privacy and openness. There is nothing wrong with being angry. Privileged intersections: Instagram’s ‘Advanced Style’ sans @suekreitzman. Loving the multiscalar. Considering Janelle Knox-Hayes’ ‘value of markets’ and the time-space sociomateriality of organisations and natural environments. There is no such thing as ‘the global’. Theresa’s feeling that this thinking is like GIS – layering data on top of each other, then exploring the multi-lens/scale mess reminds me of Karen Barad’s ‘stratification’. Purposefully ‘plugging in’.
Climate change inequities.
Climate change is a product of inequality. If we look at inequality as a practice that is connecting us or an outcome of/or a network of relations… or as predetermined/context/flows…. response-ability… can we flip inequality? What about inequality as something we are responsible for? Colonialism and modern economies of slavery. Emma Dabiri says Do not touch my hair and has great suggestions for What white people can do next – moving from allyship to coalition. Making visible individual actions and larger structures that remove agency. Moving to individual actuals as objects of inequalities. Challenging amnesias and re-collecting Feminist New Materialisms elsewhere.
Resources
For this meeting, we suggested the below resources to get the juices flowing.
Fullagar, S., & Pavlidis, A. (2020). Thinking through the disruptive effects and affects of the coronavirus with feminist new materialism. Leisure Sciences, 43(1-2), 152-159. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.177399. This paper (see above to download) focuses on the disruptive biocultural force of the coronavirus highlights the value of more-than-human perspectives for examining the gendered effects and affects on our everyday lives and leisure activities.
For a pure theoretical provocation, try this YouTube Karen Barad clip of a paper on troubling times/(Un)doing the future (31 min)
This session: Key to addressing human impacts on climate change is changing human demands on ecologies. My project is exploring how participating in ocean sports shapes peoples’ relationships to and knowledge of ecologies, and their ways of thinking about our responsibilities for environmental care (Olive). In particular, this project is aimed at challenging white-settler relationships to place (Kimmerer, Kwaymullina), and the ontologies that underpin how we understand ourselves in relation to the world.
Swimming and surfing remind us in deeply personal ways that we are part of ecologies, not separate from them. This includes learning to make kin (Haraway) with threatening aspects of place and space, such as sharks and various forms of pollution (Tsing).
For this discussion, I have suggested a lot of quite short readings, often from much longer texts. I have also set a recent essay that gives a good overview of my current work. You might not get to them all, but reading across at least a few of them will be helpful.
As part of this meeting, we dicussed: How can we better communicate knowledge with relevant communities and the public?
Image: Rebecca Olive
My session notes and thoughts
Below are two worldings I wrote about this session to give sense of what emerged.
Nature returns revisited
We’re discussing nature revisited and tainted returns. I’m traversing Ecofeminisms and thinking in habit(at)s. ‘Proper’ places. Sarah Jaquette posits climate anxiety is a white-person’s phenomenon. A culture of denial. Our vulnerability offsets our humility. Confusion about Margaret Howe Lovatt and Peter the dolphin’s more-than-pleasurable interspecies relations. People actively speaking about creative connections and kinships beyond family and humanness. Healing traditions. Tsing’s challenge of ‘living in the precarious ruins’. Reassuring exclusionary ethical participation. Hydrofeminisms. Definitions and distinctions between ‘locals’ and ‘imports’. PolesApart. Activists, stewards, custodians, collectors. Val Plumwood resituates humans in ecological terms. Putting humans back on the inside of nature.
Surfing ontological waves
I’m considering Rebecca Olive’s work. Surfing intensities. Reflecting on human impacted climate change and changing human demands on ecologies. Briny netroot polemics. Explorations of environs question peoples’ relationships, knowledge and responsibilities of ecologies and environmental care. Transnatural perspectives.Much needed challenges of white-settler relationships to place and the ontologies of how we understand ourselves and our actions in relation to the world. Moving Oceans. Natural environments affect us in deeply personal ways. Making kin. We are ecologies-with, not ecologies-from. Facing fears.Choices that either support or threaten ourselves, each other, creatures, plants and environments. The benefits of swimming with sharks.
ICQI 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry
ICQI…..you know….only the largest ……. and most respected qualitative research conference IN THE WORLD! … and with all the biggest names!
My PhD supervisor said I should consider submitting an abstract for this conference.
Doing so is a VERY BIG DEAL – this congress is the pinnacle in my field. I’ve never presented at this conference.
For the first time ever, the ICQI 2021 will be held online. This is a super attractive feature for me as it will mean if I get an abstract accepted to present, I wouldn’t have to spend the extra money to travel to the USA as was required for all previous (and probably subsequent) ICQIs. If I ever wanted to give ICQI a solid shot – this is it!
So I did – and my abstract got accepted! Woohoo!
My ICQI 2021 Abstract
Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research. This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.
The 2021 Congress theme is: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry.
The rapidly changing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are inescapable as we endeavor to move forward. The pandemic has also amplified hard truths about everyday life: the ongoing historical devaluation of teachers, nurses, and service workers, and the precarity of the working classes, the unyielding privileging of business and the free market as the answer to all social and health ills, the differential experience of the virus relative to race, class, and gender dynamics, including as related to co-morbidity and mortality rates, access to care, and visibility, the rise of right-wing populism and its deleterious impact on positive governmental responses to pandemic conditions, the prominence of conspiracy theories in mainstream and social media discourse (e.g., masks don’t help, virus is man-made, etc.).
At the same time, we cannot overlook the broader context in which the 2021 Congress will take place: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo creeping authoritarianism, environmental crises, economic shocks to higher education and continuing public health crises.
Collectively and collaboratively, this moment calls for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present.
We need a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going.
We cannot go at it alone.
We need to imagine new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism. New ways of representing and intervening into the historical present. New ways to conduct research, and a rethinking of in whose interest our research benefits.
Sessions in the 2021 Congress will take up these topics, as well as those related to and/or utilizing:
feminist inquiry
Critical Race Theory
intersectionality
queer theory
critical disability research
phenomenology
Indigenous methodologies
postcolonial and decolonized knowing
poststructural engagements
diffraction and intra-action
digital methodologies
autoethnography
visual methodologies
thematic analysis
performance
art as research
critical participatory action research
multivocality
collaborative inquiry
………..and the politics of evidence.
Sessions will also discuss:
threats to shared governance
attacks on freedom of speech
public policy discourse
and research as resistance
Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation.
Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference.
As critical scholars, our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.
ICQI provides leadership to demonstrate the promise of qualitative inquiry as a form of democratic practice, to show how qualitative inquiry can be used to directly engage pressing social issues at the level of local, state, national and global communities.
The Congress sponsors the journal International Review of Qualitative Research (IRQR), three book series, and occasional publications based upon the more than 1,000 papers given at the conference each year. It the largest annual gathering of qualitative scholars in the world.
Our New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) is back on!
The March NM SIG is our first meeting back for 2021. I’m so happy!
Because we are reconvening after the New Year break, we wanted to offer the opportunity for participants to reconnect more directly. So instead of going straight into guest presentations, we decided to have a writing-process open forum to ‘warm-up’ our ideas, discussion and writing-with NM approaches.
So, in this session, we gave breathing space for a topic we all wrestle with: how to ‘write up’ or ‘present’ New Materialisms research.
We invited participants to bring a piece of writing/data/something you are working on to share.
This NM forum encouraged cross-pollination, stimulate new ideas, spark some inspiration, offered some new skills and probed what im/possibilities might emerge for stretching your NM research writing-data.
In this meeting, we asked: How might researchers who are working with New Materialisms ‘write up data’?
We had two readings to get the juices flowing.
Readings:
Somerville, M. (2016) The post-human I: encountering ‘data’ in new materialism, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29:9, 1161-1172, DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1201611
Niccolini, A. D., Zarabadi, S., & Ringrose, J. (2018). Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy. Parallax (Leeds, England), 24(3), 324-343.
5 mins warm-up: Delicious Research(er)s. NM SIG March 2021.
March NM SIG notes
Our warm-up NM writing activity was on: Delicious research(er)s. I developed my Delicious Research(er)s warm-up into a 25mins, 100-word worlding – and this is what emerged:
Delicious research(er)s.
Delicious research(er)ing is an open-ended kitchette of inquisitiveness, capabilities, ingredients and alchemy. Folding, passing, mixing and blending: foundational blisters pop into syrupy-sweet intellectual nectar. Flavour(ful) data fragments over tongues, in eyes, and on minds. Delicious researchers are lightning rods for the unexplained. They stand tall: chins up, ears swivelling, noses twitching, eyes roving and skin electrified with buzzing intensity. They dive deep into salty pedogological soups, spin with umami-rolled embodiment, and languish in astringent-infused relationalities of common wor(l)ds. Delicious researchers are sexy, amorous, desirable and magnetic, heated yet ‘cool’ – and prone to spontaneously combust in moments of exquisite flambé rupture.
See images below for some of our other NM lines of flight.
Spinning Yarns. NM SIG March 2021.
Post-human ‘I’. NM SIG March 2021.
Discussing NM problematics. NM SIG March 2021.
NM SIG collaborative notes. NM SIG March 2021.
NM ‘data’-research-writing discussion. NM SIG March 2021.
In anticipation of Griffith’s New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) starting back up very soon for 2021, I’m looking back over what we have done so far.
I am the co-convenor of Griffith’s New Materialism SIG. The aim of the New Materialisms Special Interest Group is to provide asupportive space for students, HDR candidates, ECRs, mid-career and more senior Academics to explore, discuss, experiment and share complex and emerging post-qualitative/post-humanisms ideas, methods and approaches.
I am particularly proud of the diverse and transdisciplinary nature of the current group which includes members from the Health Sciences, Humanities, Education and Psychology and from multiple Universities Australia-wide and internationally.
This SIG is a fertile environment for sharing ideas, research experiences and synergies with multiple projects and possible papers benefiting from the ideas and expertise made available.
We started out with 13 members in 2019 spread evenly across Griffith University and other Universities in South East Queensland (UQ, QUT, Sippy Downs). After four 2019 monthly meetings, interest in the SIG expanded significantly as word spread.
August 2019 – Inaugural meeting
The inaugural session of the Griffith New Materialist (NM) Special Interest Group came together to support researchers and academics to engage more deeply, critically, collaboratively and creatively with NM thinking and practice. This first meeting was semi-structured with the readings and discussion focus being on: The emergence of feminist New Materialisms.
In this second NM SIG meeting, we had a guest presentation by Prof Simone Fullagar and Dr Wendy O’Brien whose book (cowritten with Dr Adele Pavlidis who could not make it), Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, had just been published. In this meeting, we discussed feminist New Materialisms and how 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.
In this session we had PhD researcher Geraldine Harris share some of her emerging New Materialisms thoughts, approaches and inroads from her research looking at early intervention and prevention strategies for child-centered leadership. This meeting was called Diverse plateaus + visualisations of place-based child-centered leadership and it was a great presentation for many reasons. Geraldine shared some of her unique data analysis visualisations that have helped her think-with, process and communicate the complexity of her work (they were amazing!). We also got to hear about her current PhD musings and emerging NM understandings, as well as tips, challenges and blockages she has experienced using New Materialisms approaches in educational and workplace settings.
Our SIG New Materialisms Garden Retreat was for HDRers only. This was a special event. For the NM Garden Retreat, I invited five New Materialist and Posthumanist PhD friends to a full-day group/workshop in my garden where we collaborated to create and share knowledge. I wanted to get out of the uni confines and have the (literal) time and space to work, think and share more generatively and deeply with others – without time constraints or other pressures. 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’. Each participant nominated an NM tropic to share/teach the group. We also had time for writing, teaching-learning discussions and reflection. We had a musician friend of mine come to play and stay for lunch and the afternoon (so awesome!). Everyone brought a lunch plate to share and each participant went home with a garden box bursting at the seams. A wonderful day of collaborative NM work.
Instead of having a guest presenter, we invited everyone to ‘present’ by bringing a piece of data that ‘glows’ for them – a piece they would like to ‘re-turn’ with and share with some suppotive-critical friends. The idea here is that we are all working on different research projects, with different applications and with different data. This was our last meeting before the holidays, so we thought it might be interesting for participants to share a part of their research with others as a way of mining alternative insights – and to give each researcher some fresh ideas and considerations to mull over during the holidays. It was a huge success and wonderful to hear what everyone was working on, wrestling with and how they were thinking-with and processing. Super helpful and inspiring! A great end to our first year as a SIG!
Some people are still away in January. February is busy orientating and getting prepared for the year, so we start our SIGs in April after people have had a chance to settle back in at Uni.
In 2020 we had 6 meetings from March – November and our membership expanded to 40 members – not only Griffith and other Queensland-based universities, but Australia-wide and internationally.
April 2020
I had just returned from my bicycles-for-education PhD fieldwork in West Africaand the other SIG members were keen to hear how it went and what/how I was thinking of moving forward to frame the experience as a posthumanist research project. Great questions! So, to kick off the NM SIG for 2020, I presented my project to date. I outlined what I did during fieldwork and some initial ideas for moving forward and putting to work NM approaches. It was wonderful hearing people ideas, comments and suggestions on possible ways to process and think-with all that had transpired. I brought a lot of (actual) materials and realia from Sierra Leone – and my bike – into the session.
In this session, we had Dr Lazaroo return to her PhD work (two years ago) to untangle the mess in order to make new discoveries. Her project was: Making Noise: An Ethnography of a Community Performance Project between Vulcana Women’s Circus and People with Disabilities. In this session, Natalie 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.
Our presenter (referred to as X) for this session had just submitted her Griffith EPS Master’s thesis two days before this meeting. In this session, X shared some insights, ‘data’ and narrative moments from her latest research project which was an exploration of workplace sexual harassment on teacher identity. Now that X’s Masters was submitted, she was interested in feedback from the group on what resonates and how she might build the project into a PhD using a New Materialisms lens. Specifically, X was keen to explore how the sexual harassment complaint has its own agency and to get feedback from the SIG on how she might approach this. A very unsettling and moving session for all.
For this session, we had the incredible Melbourne-based PlayTank Collective – Alicia Flynn, Sarah Healy and Allie Edwards present a session entitled Lessons from the Play Tank: Adventures in playful scholarship. In this session, we discussed enacting NM theories and how to provide a playful and collaborative space to re-think, re-imagine, re-( ) research for others. We looked at using art education and design as opportunities to create workshops that attended to the joys and curiosities experienced while working/playing together in a material way. A key focus was on collaboration, intentionally responsive and response-able practices. And we had lots of fun playing, making and learning!
For this session, we had Griffith PhD candidate Janis Hanley take us on a creative and analytical exploration of Milieu, Territory, Atmosphere, Agency & Culture. Using 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. We did a number of individual and collaborative activities that helped activate and draw out interesting aspects such as how a piano, political graffiti in a factory and participant appreciation of research diagrams reveal new opportunities. We also looked at how conceptions of ‘home’ feature in our own work and life.
For this session, we had our first international guest presenter, A/P Tom Reynolds (Dept of Writing Studies, Uni of Minnesota, USA). Tom’s interested in critical theories of writing instruction, histories of popular literacy, and intersections of literacy and cultural movements. He is currently working on multimodality with his students, who are making group digital videos that advocate for issues. In this session, he shared some ideas (and wanted feedback for) how these projects might involve greater NM engagement with both discursive and non-discursive elements. Hells yeah! Did the SIG have some good ideas on how to do that!
For this session, we held aNew Materialist’s Writing Party!This session provided time and space for thinking-writing-playing and to shift the focus from ‘academic’ reading and presentations into a different positive and exploratory space. Many of us are hard at work writing alone at our desks, so this was an opportunity to come together, share ideas and get some serious NM writing done. I hosted the party – it was close to my birthday so it was an extra academic birthday treat and celebration for me! We had a few fun warm-ups, a few open-ended guided writing activities, and some research-focused timed writing time. We also had time to chat, reflect and share as much or as little as people wanted. Great fun!
For our last session of 2020, we had Patricia Ni Ivor who works in Project Management at RMIT (Melbourne) present a session with the amazing title: Feeling success in project teams: Travelling from the domain ruled by the supreme God-of-Things to the fresh air of Sensation and the Ineffable. Patricia explored the concept of affect as used by Deleuze and Guattari, drawn from Spinoza’s Ethics and the work of Henry Bergson. She outlined the fit between the theoretical paradigm of Self-inquiry (Spinoza’s synergy with eastern spiritual traditions and Bergson’s notions of consciousness) and how the emphasis on embodiment or somatic inquiry reflects the yogic basis of Self-inquiry (central to Patricia’s thesis) and more recent theories in social science, psychology and physical movement studies in art and wellbeing. The participants got to practice with one of Patricia’s self-inquiry/meditation exercises during the session.
Being an open and inquisitive researcher means I attend a wide range of SIGs, workshops and seminars. I’m open to lots of new ideas. Recently, I went to a feminist research group where a PhD candidate presented their work. The presentation gave me much to think about – and below is a 100-word worlding I wrote that explains why.
ATR WFU Women Leadership. Source: Worker’s Control
Cooperative Gap-ness
Passionate work to accelerate fair and (just) transitions to climate action using a grassroots union of Western Australian youths. Encouraging and political. Using Feminist Participatory Action Research and Cooperative Inquiry to be more culturally responsive, ethical and inclusive. Emotional labour. Green and ‘sustainable’ as false solutions. Extractivism of volunteers. Research(er)ing through-with-and-as ‘storying’. As insider-researcher-activists, I suggest Sherilyn Lennon’s ‘Unsettling Research’. Nicely messy. Critical cusps of Hope. Anna Tsing says hope can obfuscate activism. Astrida Neimanis and Jen Hamilton question hope, turning instead to desire. Tactical gap-ness. Expectant tool-processes of change and reviving neglected knowledges. Wrangling manageable recuperative action.
This time last year I was in Lunsar (Sierra Leone) undertaking my bikes-for-education fieldwork.
I often think of what I saw, felt, learnt, and experienced there.
The trip was exciting, profound and challenging.
I sift through my research journal and field notes, diving into them, drinking in the details of memories brought back to life in full technicolour.
So many significant moments that won’t make it into my thesis.
Moments like Mariama and the Addax Aunties singing me in.
Addax school distribution. Girl-student-new bike. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
It is late afternoon and everyone is hot. We are in Addax and have just finished a long day delivering a school bike distribution program at the only high school for miles around. We are far from anywhere. It took a long, rutty, dusty trip squished between Kao (precariously pillion-perched behind me) and Ben upfront. I marveled as Ben cheerfully bounced the struggling moped over the dirt road to get us here, two at a time, earlier this morning. He made numerous trips shuttling all the staff members to the school collection point. I admire his skill and grace as he navigates the precarious transfer in such harsh conditions – hard work(er) indeed. It is so remote. There is no way to walk the distance or drive on this surface. Access is so limited. As I wait for the others, I think of the isolation and the implications of this walking-world for the women and girls who live here. Inconceivable. Humbling. Unsettling. I wonder what it’s like for school girls riding bikes here.
After a day at the school, Ben ferries us individually to a family a few kilometers away to gather, rest and await our return transport back to Lunsar. We will be here for a while. As the ‘guest’, I was the first of Ben’s deliveries, but on arrival I see Jak magically got here before me. I wave to him from the other side of the yard. I watched him do great work today, explaining in Kriol basic bike maintenance to the students. He was a superstar. He smiles and nods to me and accepts a drink of water as he collapses into a nearby plastic chair. Ben grins and tells me to wait here and rest: he is going back for the others. No problem I say. He takes off in a cloud of red dust. I look around me.
I see a young girl approaching me. It takes me a moment to realise she is one of the students from the school. She was in the workshop we ran. Attentive and confident, she had shuffled students around to position herself to sit next to me all morning. I liked her bold style. She had smiled shyly at me the whole time. Walking towards me now, she has changed out of her school uniform which is why I didn’t recognise her. Her clothes are oversized, stained and threadbare. A dirty white singlet hangs limply over a patched-together skirt. The material seems awkward on her lithe frame. Barefoot. She looks so vastly different from her clean, coordinated, green school uniform replete with white socks and lace-up black brogues. It’s hard to believe she is the same girl from an hour ago. Her name is Mariama. It means ‘gift from God’. She gives me a glorious smile and takes my hand.
Family hub: the cooking shelter. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
Mariama leads me to a shelter to meet her family. There are many of these ‘family clusters’ around here – hidden, unknown, near-inaccessible. ‘Here’ is a grouplet of three ‘dirty brick’ huts. I’m surrounded by extreme poverty. The huts are dotted around a cleared centre which is the hub of all family life. In the middle is the cooking place. Under a corrugated iron roof held up by poles, I take my lead from the older women and join them around the open fire pit.
Mariama is animated as she tells the women about me. They smile while looking me up and down. Small groups of young children appear and mill around, watching, listening, whispering, giggling. Some of the kids sit on their mothers and watch the braver ones sit near me. An overheated dog snoozes as a wretched little chick walks over it. A rubbish pile smoulders nearby. An assembly line of freshly made mud bricks is drying off to the right, and a collection of single-use alcohol sachets are littered on the left. Flies buzz. Everywhere I look, skin sparkles as sunlight catches diamonds of sweat. The fragrant, sweet smell of red palm oil simmering in a cauldron wafts through the compound. I hear birds calling in the surrounding bush. Clumps of overgrown tallgrass tower at the edge of the clearing and rustle noisily in the wind. The women are clicking their tongues, quipping in Temne, and raising their eyebrows in my direction. They find me amusing. I sit down quietly on the closest stone.
Snoozing dog and wretched chick. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
Mariama’s English is good and she translates our introductions, adding explanations and embellishments freely. We chat, suspended in time. Refreshments materialise. We talk about family, life and women’s business. After a while, I feel a shift in the mood. The conversation peeters out. Silence. I wait. Mariama’s mother nods to her daughter, who turns to me with a massive smile. Something has transpired, but I’m not sure what. I hold the moment, and the other women do the same.
Mama looks directly at me. I meet her gaze and hold, watching her intently. She has my full attention. She nods at me then closes her eyes. I watch her breathe. Time flattens. Tenderly and gently, Mama starts to clap. Refrain. Then she starts to sing in Temne. Lowly evanescence. Her lilt is stirring and ephemeral. The Aunties are nodding. The wind stops to listen. Mama’s voice is clear as it reaches out, rising and falling, pouring in and spilling over, flowing between and rippling through. I feel her voice seep into my bones. The Aunties join in. Snoozing dog opens an eye, sighs contentedly, and returns to slumber. The singing is rich and resonating, full of emotion and vitality. My heart pines. The timbre is achingly melodious. I listen, transfixed. After a few rounds, the lyrics change. I hear my name, ‘Nina’, included. My scalp tingles. All the women watch me as they increase in volume and enthusiasm. I am barely breathing. Mariama is singing too. She turns to me with bright eyes – what an angelic gift. The singing is still building. I feel what she is going to say before she says it. I don’t need words to know what is happening. ‘It’s for you’ she says, ‘they are singing you in.’
