FreshLines 2019 Symposium Abstract

FreshLines is an annual multi-day symposium run by Griffith HLSS postgraduates for postgraduates. It offers oral presentations, keynote presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and opportunities to network. This event is specifically designed for Griffith HLSS HDRers and is funded jointly by Griffith University’s School of Humanities, Languages & Social Science and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research.

I was approached by one of the organisers to submit an abstract for the symposium. Since I am not attending the Griffith Education and Professional Studies (EPS) Research Conference this year, I decided to take the offer! FreshLines will be held over two Griffith campuses (Gold Coast and Nathan) on 23-25th October 2019.

My submission has been accepted and I’ll present on Thursday 24th October.

Symposium Topic

Productive Tensions: Working across Disciplines and Identities

Session Title

Skills, spills and thrills: reconciling bicycles, African girls’ education, materialist cartographies and ethical expert-iments.

Abstract

Academic: I am an athlete-teacher-feminist undertaking a posthuman-educational-emplaced qualitative study. First Date: My PhD explores how bicycles feature in rural African girls’ access to secondary schooling.

This means my study frays the seams of politics, economics, geography, sociology, education and mobility. Instead of using human participants, my PhD positions bicycles as my ‘more-than-human’ research ‘subject’.

My choice to advocate greater critical pluralism of nonhuman agency has unearthed myriad gendered, political, ethical and processual im/possibilities.

This endeavour is both exciting and exasperating.

In addition to more apparent critical race and post-colonialist challenges of being a privileged, white, Australian female researcher undertaking embodied fieldwork in rural sub-Saharan Africa, working with feminist New Materialisms further charges me to engage with multi-sensory, ethico-onto-epistemological complexities (Barad, 2003) that continuously require me to (re)question ‘different ways of becoming’ (Colebrook, 2006).

How do you make sense of yourself (researcher-becoming) and your PhD (academic-assemblage), when you/r (re)search is disciplinary promiscuous and actively working to dissolve traditional academic ways of thinking, knowing and being?

Using key examples from my current PhD project and professional INGO work, this session will share some of my ethical and methodological skills, spills and thrills of applying feminist New Materialisms to trans-disciplinary practice.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in culture and Society, 28(3), 801-831.

Colebrook, C. (2006). Deleuze: A guide for the perplexed. London/New York: Continuum