I got an email yesterday saying that my abstract submission for the 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference of Reconfiguring Higher Education has been accepted!
Woohoo!
This conference will be held at University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa) from 2-4 December 2019.
This is great news!
I have been working furiously on my Ethics Submission. Ethics continues to be an epic mission because of the international fieldwork aspect where I will be bike riding with locals (the Ethics board want Risk Assessments, Ethics for me, the project and the locals). This means an added level of evaluation, justification and paperwork, more so than if I just had local Brisbane participants. But I am up for the challenge!
So for this event, aside from the opportunity to participate in an international theory/practice conference, I am also engineering this trip to work in with my fieldwork.
I am very excited! There are a few big NM names also presenting, including:
Conference Streams
There are 6 conference streams this year. They are:
- New materialities, decolonialities, indigenous knowledges
- Slow scholarship
- Arts-based pedagogies/research in HE
- Neurotypicality, the undercommons and HE
- New materialist reconfigurings of methodology in HE
- Political ethics of care, the politics of affect, and socially just pedagogies
My Abstract
Title: An athlete-teacher-researcher mountain bike race (re)turned: entangled becoming-riding-with
In this paper, I share how engaging with new materialist approaches have enabled me to think deeply and disruptively about my unfolding athlete-teacher-researcher performativities and methodology. Using as a starting point a ‘moment of rupture’ (Lennon, 2017) during a popular female-only mountain bike race, I problematize how representation, subjectivity and embodiment matters in my research with respect to my own athlete-teacher-researcher-becoming entanglements. In doing this, I draw on Wanda Pillow’s (2003) concept of ‘reflexivities of discomfort’ and Karen Barad’s (2014) diffractive ‘cut together-apart’ to reframe critical becoming-riding-with moments in alternative ways. In doing so, I delve into some messy and destabilizing ways of becoming-to-know and knowing as I continue to experiment with foregrounding the agential force of bicycles within my research unfolding.
Conference Info.
Taken from the official conference website: Annual New Materialisms Conferences have been organised since 2009 by an international group of scholars who received the EU’s H2020 funding from 2014–18.
The conferences are meant to develop, discuss and communicate new materialisms’ conceptual and methodological innovations, and to stimulate discussion among new materialist scholars and students about themes and phenomena that are dear to the hosting local research community as well as interdisciplinary new materialist scholarship.
After having visited many cities across Europe, as well as Melbourne (Australia), the conference will come to Cape Town (South Africa) in 2019 in order to discuss the dynamic higher education landscape that we find ourselves in today. The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have, in particular, set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.
This has raised important questions regarding knowledge production beyond the South African context, particularly in relation to the use and value of western theorists in local research and curricula, as well as who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.
On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures between pedagogy and the new materialisms, including the use of Deleuze and Guattari in education studies. 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 as well as be further improved and made more precise by engagements with transformation toward accessible, Africanised and decolonised curricula, and research agendas and practices.
It seems fitting, then, that the 3rd South African Deleuze and Guattari Studies Conference will be held directly after the 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference as we grapple, together, towards new ways of being and seeing in relation to higher education.