For this session, we were delighted to have incredible minds behind the Melbourne-based PlayTank Collective – Alicia Flynn, Sarah Healy and Allie Edwards present a session entitled: Lessons from the Play Tank: Adventures in playful scholarship.
Abstract
In this session, we will discuss a workshop that was created to enact NM theories and provide a playful and collaborative space to re-think, re-imagine, re-( ) research for participants at the AARE 2019 conference. Working between the disciplines of art education and design, we embraced the opportunity to create this workshop in a way that attended to the joys and curiosities that we experienced while working/playing together in a material way. This collaboration was intentionally responsive and response-able, allowing us to experience a different way of being academics together, and enabling us to create a workshop that offered the same opportunity for those joining us in our session.
We will share some of the insights from our process of creating the workshop, some highlights and images from the workshop, and pose the question we now have:
What does this workshop make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?
Is this a method that allows people to practice more affirmative and ethical ways of working/playing/being together?
Twitter: @PlayTankCo
Alicia Flynn @LeishFly
Sarah Healy- @eduTH1NK
Alli Edwards – @allinote
Session highlights
Sarah and Alli (and Alicia) not only presented, but also took us on an engaging 2-hour journey through their ideas, inspirations, readings, discussions and no less than two 100s (Stewart, 2010) writing activities (see image) and left us with the enticing thought:
What does this experience make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?
Part of the framing for this session was this incredible piece that Alicia read out:
“Imagine a pattern. This pattern is stable, but not fixed. Think of it in as many dimensions as you like – but it has more than three. This pattern has many threads of many colours, and every thread is connected to, and has a relationship with, all the others. The individual threads are every shape of life. Some – like human, kangaroo, paperbark – are known to Western science as “alive”; others, like rock, would be called “non-living”, but rock is there, just the same. Human is there, too, though it is neither the most nor the least important thread – it is one among many, equal with the others. The pattern made the whole is in each thread, and all the threads together make the whole. Stand close to the pattern and you can focus on a single thread ; stand a little further back and you can see how that thread connects to others; stand further back still and you can see it all – and it is only once you see it all that you recognise the pattern of the whole in every individual thread. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the whole is in all its parts. This is the pattern that the Ancestors made. It is life, creation, spirit, and it exists in Country” (Kwaymullina, 2005, p. 12).
*Kwaymullina, A. (2005). Seeing the light: Aboriginal law, learning and sustainable living in country. Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6(11), 12-15
For this meeting we had 2 readings:
Braidotti, R. (2009). On putting the active back into activism. New Formations, (68), 42. doi:10.3898/NEWF.68.03.200
Stewart, K. (2010). Worlding refrains. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 337 -353). Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
Session note: A great question from last meeting that emerged out of the readings was: What is ‘the second corporeal turn in social theory’ referred to in Taylor and Ivinson (2013, p 666)? This question stemmed from this quote here: “Such moves reinforce earlier feminist theories (Butler 1990; Grosz 1994), and speak back to the second corporeal turn in social theory (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Foucault 1979; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1968; Shilling 2008) and within education (Evans, Rich, and Davies 2009; James 2000; Prout 2000; Walkerdine 2009). We indend to discuss this further!