Image: Art of Quantum 2021. Eddleman Centre for Quantum Innovation, UC Santa Barbara
Undertaking a PhD is a constant mix of wild emotions, academic tensions and ever-present confusion.
Here is an example from today in 100 words.
Revisiting Chapters
It’s a strange feeling….being back at the research desk. Revisiting methodology. Trying to produce my first ‘real’ full chapter. I need to send this to my supervisors in 10 days. Throat is tight and house needs cleaning. I force myself to stay with it. Where did I leave off a month ago? Mmmm…there it is…now that bit is okay ….interesting… actually, I wrote more than I thought! There are some nice sections. Time to kill my darlings. Yellow highlights for gaps yet to fill. I add content from two years ago – surprised at its eloquence. It’s kinda coming together. Potential.
In this session, we are truly transcending time, space, place and bodies as we explore the NM potentialities of reimagining an inspirational, yet relatively, unknown WWII story.
We are very excited to have guest presenter Jenny Ginsberg (University of La Trobe) presenting key insights of her recent Master’s research.
Jenny is putting together a PhD submission and is keen to discuss this opportunity with the SIG to garner some initial New Materialisms ideas and suggestions as a launching off point for this exciting next step.
…and yes, as you might have noticed from the similar surname, Jenny is my Mum!
This session’s provocation was:
What new possibilities might emerge from a New Materialist ‘return’ to the inspirational flight and return of the Danish Jews 1943-1945?
The Civilizing Process: moving from sociological understandings to Posthumanist materialities.
Abstract
The genesis of this research lies in an extraordinary moment in history. It was one in which lives were saved; when courage, creativity and social cohesion combined and triumphed.
This research merges a fortuitous and rare meeting of a wartime story of escape and return. It is the story of the flight of the Danish Jews in 1943 and their return home in 1945. Nearly 8,000 Danish Jews escaped directly to Sweden while 470 were imprisoned in Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp. This project traces the extraordinary and unparalleled rescue of those imprisoned in Terezin, as well as the survival of more than 95 percent of the Jewish population of Denmark – a remarkable achievement at the time that was unmatched by any other Nazi-occupied European country.
In her Master’s, Jenny used Norbert Elias’ concept of national habitus to foreground relational, long-term state formation processes as part of a theory of The Civilizing Process (Elias, 2000). Jenny’s project uniquely put to work national habitus to argue that the events of 1943 flight and the 1945 return, must be considered as an ‘entangled’ experience. This enables a close relational understanding of the significance of this point in time with(in) the inclusive and compassionate Danish national ‘habitus’ at that time. This project looks at the multiple figurations found in Danish society and the crucial role they played in the successful escape and return of the Danish Jews.
Of particular interest for the NM SIG is the recognition of the often overlooked and under-appreciated contribution of Danish women to the wider occupation historiography, which was largely written and curated by men. Jenny invites the SIG to engage in the yet-to-be-explored materialities of this story – such as the boats used in the escape, letters, clothing, symbolisms and defiant collective practices adopted by the Danes – and myriad other material-affective-discursive forces and most notably, those co-contributing to the unified and compassionate leadership and the sustained, collective response to the urgent needs of fleeing and captive Danes.
Some session snapshots
We had an amazing time! The warmup activities got us thinking beyond and making links that we were not able to arrive at individually. Jenny’ session was expertly put together and she is a highly engaging storyteller.
The rich materiality of this era gave us much to discuss and there were some great ideas on how Jenny could move forward using a posthumanism and/or New Materialist approaches.
Below are a few session highlights.
NM SIG Activity
To start, we did a few collaborative thinking-writing activities. The first was a collaborative poll of keywords and ideas (see above). We then did a responsive, collaborative writing task using the chat box. That was great fun! Below is what we cocreated (names removed for privacy).
Collaborative chat box writing activity
My 100-word worlding for this session
Jenny’s telling untold stories again. The WWII flight and return of Danish Jews. Snippets of materialities: no yellow stars, food parcels, clothes, boats, Red Cross visitations, propaganda films and the king defiantly riding his horse down Copenhagen’s main street. Ignoring German soldiers in bakeries. Leadership agreements. Unspeakable everpresent brutality. Inescapable – ineluctable. A nation-wide underground resistance: all locals were in on it. National Habitas. Protect all Danes. Homes preserved (not looted), goods boxed up, gardens watered for those ‘away’. Rescue missions, drunk signatures and white buses sweep for ‘others’. Secret fishing boat crossings. Flowers, chocolates and K1,000 compensation on return.
*Postscript: As of March 2022, Jenny was accepted to do this topic as her PhD.*
CONGRATS to Jenny….
…and a massive thank you for sharing her hard work and this most remarkable story.
Presenter Bio
Jenny Ginsberg is an educator of 40+ years, a social activist and an artist. She has taught at a range of Melbourne schools, including MLC as a leading teacher in gifted education and oral history. This September, Jenny is submitting her Master’s by Research (School of Social Sciences at La Trobe Uni, Melbourne) and is looking to undertake a PhD in 2022.
She aims to use the PhD to deepen and extend her Master’s project (see abstract below). Jenny’s research interests include the sociological theories of Norbert Elias, an emerging interest in Feminist New Materialisms, long-term historical/sociological processes, leadership, and the interconnectedness of all things.
As a mature-age researcher (74), she is growing old, with the emphasis on growing, and brings a wealth of knowledge and life experience to her work.
and what does gender and sexuality have to do with it?
We were very excited to have guest presenter Assoc. Prof. Alyson Campbell from the School of Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) to lead us on this curious and provocative journey.
Artist-scholar-makers: Thinking about affect work to queer performance.
My understanding of affect draws on Brian Massumi and cultural theorist Jeremy Gilbert. I’ve built on this general line of thinking to explore more particularly concepts and strategies for queering performance. This all springs from working with Reza Abdoh in Los Angeles in the early 1990s, where I encountered live performance in a way I never had before. Abdoh’s play Bogeyman was dealing with the AIDS pandemic and it has taken me many years to try to find ways to articulate how its queerness was based on something far beyond its content; it was the experience of it, or, in other words, its affect. I’m still trying to understand that interrelationship in my own and others’ work. One strand of this links directly back to Reza in thinking about affect as viral (Viral Dramaturgies, co-edited with Dirk Gindt, 2018) and another strand is as erotohistoriography (Freeman, 2010; e.g. Campbell 2015). As an artist-scholar the whole thing converges in trying to find specificity in language for this (e.g. through musicology/musical thinking, e.g. Campbell 2012) and rehearsal/making strategies.
My question for the session is: What are the gaps in the discourse around affect in performance?
What we did in this session…
… er… how to summarise this session … is very hard… we did so much!
It is so hard to explain all we covered and what stuck for each of us. I loved how Alyson took the time to just think-out-aloud her ideas and explain her motivations, musings, work, and connections – for me, that was so interesting and inspiring (we so rarely have those personal insights as to the process-thinking that goes into academic and performance work!).
I did capture some of what we did, discussed, thought-with, and activated in this session in a few 100-word worldings I wrote from this session. Here are my worldings:
Seek the Affect mechanism.
Freefalling with A/P Alyson Campbell’s Queer Dramaturies. Director process(es) unfolding: pertinent theatre movements, Phenomenology, Massumi’s ‘Affect’, Gormley’s ‘body’s first way of knowing’, Gilbert’s ‘affective specificity’, and Epstein’s ‘shaping affect’. More important than describing affect (as end point), is seeking the mechanism by which it is structured. Not ‘supposed’ to talk about the ‘real’ journey/process/practice. Various maker book think-throughs: Practice-as-research (Practitioners), Affect Explorations (Theory), or Queer Encounters (Personal). More on intersectionality, form and hybridity… maybe queer hybridity? How long does it take for language to move? Pondering practice-theory as contagion or miasma. A juggernaut of multiple threads.
What’s missing in Affect.
With a new artist-scholar friend, we discuss what is missing in Affect. Thoughts disperse and range from uncomfortable school-based moments, to performance making, to the inescapable hard lines of capitalism, to points of deficit in myriad forms. A strong conversational start. Body sameness and what (im)presses. Someone mentions ‘anti-lack-thinking’. I like that idea. I settle into queering beyond what I think and know – and I’m excited by new viral suggestions. We talk of the joys of popping fuchsias and what is learned from migrating bodies. The importance of ‘accepting your in-thereness’ and of (missing) laughter. ‘Not just’ embodied jerks.
Bound up with affect.
I’m leaning into intense inquiries of somatic means and translations. Being led, hand-held, through body-emotion(s) that disregard mental training. I’m ‘bound up’ with affect, constipated by shifting ‘pulling a(part)s’. I’m intrigued by In your face theatre as an attempt to synthesize smaller audiences, funding, and affective capacities – and the aesthetics of what that might mean and do. I see inchoate segregised resistance, near-Punk tendencies, and pre-queering workings (t)here. Not just relying on arguments between characters or choreographies to drive dramatic interest. Activating experiential theatrics and what that actually means when working through ideas, bodies, and hearts.
Grokking 4:48 psychosis.
Moving within/without a binarized sociality bites. Invitations to re(un)see Amelia Carvello’s extraordinary bodies. Being crossed out and knowing the marginalia is where it is at. Meeting a lang-scape for the first time. Considering body-affect as thinking-of-performative ‘affect’, or as queer dramaturgy applied to worlding and how to shape it all. The ‘roomness’ of the room stands out. Grokking 4:48 psychosis. Theories only get you so far, but new meanings and makings lead naturally into methodological spaces, processes, loops, actions, ambiguities, openness and speculations. Uncovering universal ‘truth(s)’ of research-making becomings seasoned with psychological implications and pre-intentional purpose.
Alyson’s main areas of research and supervision are in gender and queer theory/performance, directing and dramaturgy, phenomenological approaches to performance, social justice and disability in the arts. Alyson’s focus is around the representation of women and the nexus of queer theories and feminism. She is committed to developing modes of practice led/as research throughout her teaching at all levels. Alyson is a freelance director and dramaturg with an astounding 30-year career, and teaching credits that feature the School of Creative Arts, the University of Melbourne, Queen’s University Belfast and Brunel University, London.
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.
New Materialisms is the ‘theoretical framing’ I’m using for my bicycle-centered PhD. Being the co-convenor of Griffith’s New Materialisms (NM) Special Interest Group (SIG) has helped me get a better handle on this tricky and exciting work and think more deeply about how it relates to different educational contexts.
For this month’s NM SIG we are very excited to have Catherine Thiele and Dr. Stephen Heimans as our guest presenters.
Attuning to/in School Data (Wall) Events
In this session, we discuss the process of coming to do research about the use of data walls in schools. We detail the critical qualitative/ post qualitative shifts towards being-with teachers in the affective intensities of data wall research encounters. We detail the theory-methods enacted in attuning to/ in the ‘data-affect-events’ that problematise school-data and research-data practices. This immanently evolving research inquiry destabilises both the critique and valorisation of teachers’ data (wall) practices. In the emerging affective intensities, relational knots and vibrant mattering of data-affect-events, a fielding of attention ‘par le milieu’ of generative (re)emergence arises. Amidst school and scholarly datascapes, the (un)certain affective capacities of data-affect-events are minor (re)beginnings to the flow of thought and being. In these a ‘more-than-metricised’ emerges, thought entangles the ‘nexts’ in the intensities of post critique and post (qualitative) inquiry.
Presenters
Catherine Thiele is an educator, lecturer, researcher and the Professional Experience Coordinator for the School of Education. Since beginning her career over 20 years ago, Catherine has taught in primary schools and tertiary institutions. Through her various academic roles and research interests, Catherine contributes to deeper understandings about the affective experiences of standardized data interactions, preservice teacher preparation (particularly for rural and remote education) and mathematics education. Catherine is currently undertaking her PhD “The affects of effects: S(h)ifting conversations around standardized data”.
Stephen Heimans is a Senior Lecturer in The School of Education at The University of Queensland. He writes and teaches about education policy/ leadership enactment, education research methodology and schooling in underserved communities. He is interested in the post-critical possibilities of Jacques Rancière’s thinking and the philosophy of science of Isabelle Stengers – especially experimental constructivism.
As part of this meeting, we will be discussing: How can we better attune to affect and relationality as educator-researchers?
Session overview
This project puts to work affect theories in practice – in classrooms and schools. I really like these kinds of sessions because they are working at the pointy end of applying theory and ideas into the ‘real world’. There is much to learn from what is enacted, applied and implemented – and what is more conceptual. As a teacher, I was particularly keen for this session as it directly speaks to my professional experiences.
It turned out our presenters were double booked, so we appreciated that they still made time to come to the session and present key ideas (while in the next room another meeting waited for them!).
The discussion that followed the presentation was also enlightening. It was great to hear the non-teaching SIG members talk about what popped out for them and how they might make links to their own research projects that are often so vastly different from high school contexts. Super interesting!
Here’s a 100-word worlding I wrote as a session summary:
Attuning in/to data walls.
I invite two researchers whose conference session I attended to present at our SIG. The topic is ‘attuning in/to data wall events’. Its a small group, but discussion is robust. We unpack the differences (and challenges) between ontological anchors and ontological signposts. Tenticular conversations bloom. The ‘ideological push’ and the in(cap)ability of school (re)research(ers). Datascapes and translator guides. The ethics of making school-our-other data and research public. Destructive emotions and flattening intensities. The role of time, colour and ‘them’ – and how the data always/never lies. Problematising youth, power and publicness is messy and confusing.
Session Reading: For something different, we have The ICQI 2021 Program (see attached) as our stimulus. Have a look through to see what catches your eye and what session you would like to find out more about!
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)
Dear Reader. If this is your first time on this blog – it is best not to start with the post below. This post is a disruptive edit expert-iment that begins ‘in the middle’. It will not make much sense if you’ve not seen some of my previous posts. Some of these posts (like the Geography and Collective Memories post – which you should check out) are getting increasingly ‘loose’ and ‘messy’ and working with ‘in-progress’ sensemaking – thus leading into more disruptive edits like this one. If you are new, perhaps start with the ‘clean and tidy’ version of this post – it is called Mother’s Day 2021 and is the precursor-basis for the exploration below.
If you are up for something different, read on!
*NB: this post is best read on a desktop – might be a little (more) odd if on a mobile device*
This post is not what it seems…well…. it is… and it isn’t.
What started out as a ‘normal’ post morphed into something else. Usually, blog posts are straightforward: informative, factual, opinion, or instructional. While I was writing on the topic ‘Mothers Day’ for this post – disruptive ideas and opportunities emerged. So… instead of ignoring or disregarding them, I embraced them. You could say this was also an experiment in applying diffraction thinking-doing (my theoretical approach I am using for my PhD) to other-than academic writing. This is new territory for me (to write) and for you (to read). What diffraction writing means here, is that instead of only sharing the usual polished final blog post, I’ve experimented with folded into the blog post my thinking-process-editing as I am writing it – a kind of disruptive writing-with blog post process. It might be a little weird and may or may not work. there will be typos and mistakes – some parts will just be notes or ‘snaps’ – resist the urge to edit for ‘correctness’. But I like the idea of doing something new and challenging what I think writing, especially such public writing! is or should be, going ‘beyond’, and being (more publicly) transparent with writing-as-process expert-iments. To try and show how this is working, the blog post content is in black text and the process content is in superscript like this. It would be easier to do this in a word document with track change comments which I have included below as a file for those interested in seeing it, but the here challenge is to see how it works within the functionality of a Word Press.org blog post.
Insert image of mum. Use creative commons to support alt artists. Attribute/link to promote photographer – preferably female. Use an image of other-than mainstream blond mum stereotype (in this case a redhead!) = have some sort of diversity to show a greater range of mums (blond mums already have a strong presence and representation online). See ‘undisrupted’ version of this post for alt (M)othering image
Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents
8th May is Mother’s Day.
Happy Mother’s Day mums – and dads and significant others and carers who also fill maternal roles. Dads and other/carers: I added this is it did not feel right to only single out ‘mums’ as there are many ‘others’ who are not officially a’ mother’ – yet who equally fulfil a similar role. A homage to my commitment to better recognizing the fluid and diverse experiences of what ‘mothering’ is – and I was raised by my father who was a consummate ‘mother’ and father and many other things…
For a previous Mother’s Day, I wrote about the issues I had with some Mother’s Day ‘suggested gifts for cycling mums’.
If you haven’t read my post Happy Fearful Mother’s Day Cycling Mums! check it out here – it’s well worth the read!Internal Hyperlink: I link back to my own blog to promote past writing and keep readership ‘inside’ my website where – also helped remind me of the amount of work I have already done and share from the archives … I LOVE the image I sourced for this hyperlinked post
I appreciate the sentiment of Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day) in taking time to recognise and celebrate the input and work mums do. I didn’t want this post to be ‘too negative’ or ‘down with Mum’s day’ – that’s not what I think or mean – I wanted some balance and make sure I acknowledge the positives of Mother’s Day.
I like to think that mums are always appreciated as they are on Mother’s Day (ie for the other 364 days of the year as well) – not just one day a year … anyhoo…
Mums have it especially? tough.
Women are advantaged in society and mothers in particular face enduring and unfair social and corporate pressures and constraints around childcare, unpaid labour, taking the load for emotional labour (the unpaid job men still don’t understand) and ‘being a good mother’, inequitable divisions of household labour, the hidden and overlooked value-cost-effort of stay-at-home mums and that working mums (well…all women) on average make only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Christine Carter articulates these frustrations well in her piece: All I want for Mother’s Day is an equitable division of labour. Wanted to synthesis some facts into the post AND source more widely (ie not only read academic lit) AND get some mums voices in here. I’m hyperconscious that I’m not a mother, so am only presenting my POV on gender issues – not commenting on what it is like to BE a mum as that is not my direct, personal lived experience so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that – so I made a point to look for mums who have written on this topic and found this great article on emotional labor. It fit in beautifully. So funny – I had a conversation with a dear friend on this very topic…I think I’ll flip her this link as well! And yes… it is ‘a thing’…still!
With much work needed to address these systemic gender inequities, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise these issues and celebrate mums and other female carers.
Traditionally, this means breakfast in bed, flowers, or lunches out with loved ones. link back here to ‘presents’ and conventional Mother’s Day approaches to lead into my final takeaway idea/content.
For cycling mums, it’s an opportunity to think more thoughtfully about the cycling presence and presents we give to mums and what these ‘gifts’ communicate, expect and perpetuate.
As I was writing this post, I’ve changed the title a few times. The changes reflect the different ‘moves’ I went through in writing the content – so in the spirit of transparent disruption – I am including that process here as well. It was at this stage of writing the post that I looked a the title and thought: ‘that title doesn’t fit anymore. The following section is a brief behind the scene thinking-editing-doing that went on at this stage. For reading ease I have not super-scripted this section despite it all being thinking-writing-as-process content.
I like the image above. It presents a not blond, white mum(gender?) House is a little messy and not presenting a ‘perfectly’ curated photo/family and the black LHS is suggestive of the ‘dark side’ of family life – fits well with overall post themes. It also helps break up blog content and helps separate the next section which is a new and different idea/focus.
Title: re-writing and re-righting
Initially the title was: Mother’s Day –more thoughtful presents, please!
It was tight and communicated the initial content main ideas. But it only named the ‘presents’ aspect, which was a very minor idea and didn’t fully capture the relational, non-commercial call to action I was putting forward.
So the next edit was: Mother’s Day –more thoughtful presents and presence, please!
I liked the homonym and alliteration of presents and presence – it fitted well with what I wanted to highlight. I looked at the order of the two keywords ‘presents’ and ‘presence’ and wonder how changing their placement might change the impact of the meaning of my overall message. I swapped them around to see that changed. I wanted to start with the known (presents) and end/lead into the blog main idea (presence) – so that was the final word order I chose.
Then: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents, please!
So I removed the: , please. It is a stronger statement – declarative and instructional, not a request and thus leaving open the final decision as to whether to act on this ‘request’ or not to other-than-the-mother-saying it .
Note to self: remove (more): , please(s).
Apply liberally – in general and elsewhere.
So then it was: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents!
This was closer to the sentiment I wanted to convey. It is short and punchy and fits into (no more than) two lines of text as a heading – which is a good ‘grab’ for the WordPress RHS margin widget ‘Recent Posts’. The exclamation mark as an end made it read more of an imperative – but perhaps a little shouty – so I removed it. But then it was left hanging. I also wanted to give some notice as to the type of presentation/format this also helps with search features later on So I added: (Disruptive Edit) at the end. I added ‘Give’ at the start as I wanted to include mention of the action that was the crux of the post giving is a nice thing to do! I wanted the title to include someone doing something – and it read-felt much better with ‘give’. Then I stopped. gotta know when to stop! send it out now – share your process work, resist being ‘correct’ ‘right’ and ‘good’ just get it out there – it is in-process and raw so no more tinkering!
Final title: Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents (Disruptive Edit)
..then finish the blog content and close on a positive!
Interesting to note that WordPress backend drafting notifications (like the readability analysis, SEO, suggested ‘revisions’) are going crazy pining me to check and recheck. I have a list of sad red face emojis letting me know NEEDS IMPROVEMENT! – its the algorithm reminding me that this type of post ‘won’t work’ and is ‘not normal’ writing and formatting. I am ingoring them all.
(*PHEW*)
…and that dear reader is a little sneak-peak into some of the in-process ideas, considerations and edits that happen during the construction of blog posts!
Thanks for coming a long for this experimental ride into a disruptive edit!
I am recovering from a 3-week intensive marking bender.
My eyes are itchy, my lower back aches and my approachablity is incendiary.
A tight uni turnaround to mark 28 x 6,000-word research reports and 28 x 2,000-word workplace assessments (both Masters level and worth 80% of the total course!) PLUS 21 x 3,300-word undergrad mixed-method research reports (worth 50%). Epic!
I am grateful for the work. Like many others, I’ve had no uni teaching or lecturing for Trimeter 1 due to university COVID response measures. No sessional work, only marking. Thank goodness for my educational consultancy. Tough times.
The students worked hard and so did I. There’s a lot riding on these assessments – and I take the job seriously. I’m not the kind of academic who breezes over assessments and gives 3 comments like: good or need more work here and interesting point– what the hell kind of feedback is that? So unhelpful! I am NOT that kind of marker – I hate that shit! So, I put in the work and gave each assessment my full attention.
So in a similar mood for @Artcrank, I looked for a new source to lift the spirits and remind me of the creative playfulness betwixt bikes, community, action, spaces, materiality, bodies and brazenness.
Here is a 100-word worlding I wrote after seeing @bikeart.gallery for the first time.
I love bikeart, too.
Eyes itchy, shoulders aching and approachablity is incendiary. Time for bike art. @bikeart.gallery – newly discovered on Instagram. Stickers, prints, icons, charcoals, photos, cartoons, designs, and paper cuts. I love bikes and I love art, too. Some super progressive bikeart, others not so. Hypersexualized disembodied females with-on bikes (really? still?!) – cringe-worthy. Elsewhere, I marvel at super spunky rider couples, surreal adventure rides, fantastical bici creaturing, and cheeky postmodern velo classical reinterpretations. A few memes. Close-ups, portraits and movement. Audaciousness. Lego, flames, tattoos, air travel, and (Fr)eddie Merxc(ury). @jctdesign’s spontaneous napkin doodle ‘unplug and ride your bike’ is good advice.
Image: @andy_warlord
Image: Rachel aka @rachpetru!
Image: IG @artbike.gallery
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @AlvaroLopeMoralesQuevado
Image: @tadapota
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @bazasportpenza
Image: @josekoebrugge
Image: @abphart
Image:
Image: @hello_mrbaker
Image: IG @artbike.gallery
Image: @daemoncycling
Image: @kosuke_masuda_5
Image: @lbbjkt
Image: @bikeart.gallery
Image: @eila_kai
Image: @davidlgill
Image: “Organic Growth” art installation (umbrellas & bicycle tires) by @izaskunchinchilla (account not longer exists) at Govenor’s Island.
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.
