Regular readers of this blog know that I am doing a bike-focused PhD in Education. In a nutshell, my project explores how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education.
It is a great project and I love working on it.
I’ve been developing a research methodology called velo-onto-epistemology (VOE) as part of this project. I know it is a mouthful, but the article explains what it means.
I am delighted to share my latest publication which introduces my novel bicycle-focused research approach for the first time.
I wrote this paper with my incredible supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon. In this paper, I take Sherilyn for a bike ride as a way to put to work my VOE research methodology and destablise the traditional power hierarchy of the PhD candidate-supervisor relationship.
To show how velo-relationality works differently, we juxtapose – or ‘recycle’ our experiences next to each other (see below) in what we call ‘tandem writing’.
This article is an engaging read.
It is theoretical enough to be rigorous and interesting, but relatable for the everyday reader-rider.
Below is the abstract and a copy of the paper.
Feel free to download a copy (third icon on right below).
Check it out!
Ride on!
Enjoy!
ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is predicated on a supervisor as teacher/expert – candidate as learner/novice model. But what becomes possible when the materialities of this power dynamic are destabilised and reimagined? This article draws from emerging feminist ontologies to introduce the concept of velo- onto-epistemology [VOE] as a means of re-cycling candidate- supervisor-relationships. VOE acknowledges the agency of the bicycle in moving and being moved. This novel approach is used to explore how stor(i)ed encounters and in-the-moment bodily responses enact current-future becomings. Through re-cycling, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is dis-articulated and re- articulated in ways that enable alternative and more equitable understandings of the world to emerge.
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.
What a perfect time to explore haunting and ghosts!
For our final NM SIG for this year, we are focusing on ghostly matters, and in particular Barad’s (2010) Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations.
Barad explores the disjointedness of time through electron behaviours, the nature of entanglement and the ethics of the Bohr/ Heisenberg Copenhagen meeting during WW2.
An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future. As the quantum eraser experiment shows, it is not the case that the past (a past that is given) can be changed (contrary to what some physicists have said), or that the effects of past actions can be fully mended, but rather that the ‘past’ is always already open to change. (Barad, 2010, p.266)
We are coupling this with the paper of Lisa Blackman (2019) exploring the organizational dynamics of knowledge and scientific truths in a digital age and the hauntological implications inherent in such processes.
To help us work with the haunting nature of our research, bring along a ghostly image or story to contribute to the mix.
What we did in this session
Janis did a wonderful job of preparing and hosting this session.
After our introduction, we did a series of warm up activities:
We then each had time to share our Ghostly Images.
Everyone had something different to share.
Some quick notes during this discussion:
Locations with histories and personalities, wants and needs, reverberations with bottle trees that ring and chime and send out affective resonances with musical sounds to alert, soothe and repel.
Hanging in the tree – like words hanging in the air…things unspoken and ghastly or ghostly
I cannot pass on until I have completed this task
Humans being so reliant on the visual – with the unseen, the ‘dis’embodied’, the othering is more acute and ‘real’? How can that be…the less concrete it is, the more real the impact?
We scare ourselves
We spook ourselves and others
Haunted by visions and experiences (PTSD), haunted by/in ‘life’
Haunted\haunting keeps returning to a moment??
Ghost is morally changed
Have intention to scare
Giving them agency to haunt us
Alan Soko – quantum gravity nonsense findings
Salvia Kind – a taxidermist bear in a playground
The Bridge to Terabithia & euphemisms apolitical and no-biological…adults conversations about death with children – so interesting!
Geoff Bright and Gabrielle Ivison – Ghost Labs & Social Haunting socialhaunting.com
How NOT to be a mountain biker – My Ghostly Matters
For my contribution, I shared a popular MTB YouTube video which had recently been amended to blur out some content that at the time the video was published in 2013 was published in full, yet more recently has been picked up and challenged in 2021. The section in question explains MTB trail terminology by using a derogatory term for trans people as a joke.
Instead of removing the whole video, the producers chose to blur out the audio and visuals for that section only, leaving an eerie, ghostly trace of what was before. This elision and its haunted digital edited intervention speak to how/why content might/is changed and what is made un/known in the process. Such questions are very in line with Lisa Blackman’s work (see the reading).
For those interested in knowing more, my source comes from the extremely popular video called How To Be A Mountain Biker by IFHT Films. This video has more than 7,194,034 views since being released 24th October 2013.
The ghostly data section is at: (Step 18) 2.25mins – 2.34mins and looks like this:
Here is the current, redacted video in full:
Stretching and Murmuring
This session was really inspiring and thought-provoking. Each participant brought something completely different and I felt my brain being stretched and poked into new and interesting directions.
I came away from this session with much to think about.
Here are some of those murmurs from the Barad reading:
“Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are. What if we were to recognise that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments?
An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future.
Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world (as if ‘fact’ and ‘value’ were radically other).
Entanglements are not a name for the interconnectedness of all being as one, but rather specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. Entanglements are relations of obligation – being bound to the other – enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other’, entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other’, who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’ – a diffraction/dispersion of identity.
What if the ghosts were encountered in the flesh, as iterative materialisations, contingent and specific (agential) reconfigurings of spacetimematterings, spectral (re)workings without the presumption of erasure, the ‘past’ repeatedly reconfigured not in the name of setting things right once and for all (what possible calculation could give us that?”
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.
Regular readers of this blog know that I have been working with Griffith’s Indigenous Research Unit (IRU) and Kungullanji as an Academic Skills Advisor for the last 4 years. But this is the first time I have put in to be a project mentor.
Image: Griffith News
Recently, Kungullanji announced their Summer Expressions of Interest (EOIs). These are small research projects that will be offered to Griffith’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students for the Summer 2021- 2022 Program. Students get to pick which project they would like to work on. The projects need to be achieved within eight weeks (over Summer before T1 starts). Usually, projects include field work, laboratory work, data analysis and statistics, literature review, case studies, method development, and/or product design.
So, I thought I’d through my hat into the ring this year.
It is an unusual project with experimental methodologies – so it’s a long shot that it will be attractive for an undergrad – but you never know! There might be a brave researcher out willing to try something a little different! We’ll see!
The process of writing up the abstract alone was a really helpful activity in helping me clarify aspects of the methodology and thinking through how to explain what VEO is in clear and simple terms.
Below is what I submitted.
I’ll find out in 6 weeks if a Kungullanji student-researcher chooses my project.
EOI: Project description
Title: Cycle Shiftings: Reconfiguring First Nation presences in Morton Bay Bikeway
Project supervisor: Nina Ginsberg (School of Education & Professional Studies)
Project description:
Bike riding is a ubiquitous part of modern life and offers significant social, economic, environmental and health benefits. However, there is ‘an unbearable whiteness of cycling’ (Hylton, 2017) that is keenly evident. Bicycle trails are not free from the history, culture and politics in which they are built and used.
This project focuses on one section of a popular bikeway located on Narlang lands of the Quandamooka peoples (commonly known as the Morton Bay Bikeway (MBB), Wynnum-Manly, Brisbane). This bike path is the focus of this project which uses emerging mobile ‘riding-with’ research approaches that work to decolonise place. ‘Riding-with’ research approaches are unique as they consider what bicycles can ‘do’ and ‘be’ beyond being just objects of transportation, utility or recreation.
This means paying close attention to what is seen, said, remembered, thought, felt, understood and experienced while bike riding researcher-community members move through particular environments – and in this case specifically, the Moreton Bay Bikeway. This project fits into an exciting and newly established research space that uses embodied and mobile methodologies to destablise current settler-colonial bike path logic and praxis – to look at what might be learned or discovered by cultivating more First Nations experiences as/into bike paths. The underlying aim is to bring forward possibilities for identifying and refiguring what is considered ‘normal’ on bike paths by promoting and celebrating First Nations presences – and that doing so will broaden and bolster similar conversations elsewhere.
The Kungullanji researcher will be encouraged to actively co-contribute to all aspects of the project process. There are opportunities for the researcher to communicate work undertaken (ie via publication, community bike tour, etc) which is highly encouraged, given time and interest. This project would suit a motivated, curious, mature and open-minded researcher who is interested in working with innovative research skills. The supervisor, Nina Ginsberg, will provide guidance at all stages of this project.
Student responsibilities:
Research mobile methodologies and local First Nations presences (around Wynnum-Manly area)
Write short summaries/narratives based on key research themes
Co-develop (with supervisor) an approach to action key research themes
Develop and experiment with riding-with approaches
This project involves being able to go for regular bike rides along Wynnum-Manly foreshore (accessible by train)at a leisurely pace with regular breaks for about 10 kms. Must have a general level of fitness and know how to ride a bike safely. Ideally, the Kungullanji researcher will have their own bike (in good working order) and safety gear (if not, Nina can help arrange this).
Meet with Supervisor at least weekly for bike ride-meetings to discuss findings, progress and next steps.
Opportunity for a co-authored publication (Kungullanji researcher and Supervisor) and/or community bike tour to share findings (if time/interest allows).
Morton Bay Cycleway. Image: Visit Queensland
The Kungullanji Program
The Kungullanji Research Pathways Program raises aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students by providing an undergraduate research experience, professional development, and connections to the broader Indigenous research community. The idea is to provide an introduction to research and develop valuable skills for students to start their research journey.
The idea is that First Nations undergrads work alongside research staff (who may be an academic staff member, research fellow, postdoctoral fellow or HDR candidate) to gain hands-on research. Supervisors provide regular and ongoing mentorship, guidance, research-specific training, and experience.
This award-winning program is a key part of Griffith University’s strategy to “grow its own” First Peoples higher degree research cohort.
Kungullanji is an Aboriginal word from the Yugambeh language that means ‘to think’ – and this service is specifically for undergraduates.
Kungullanji offers practical research experience and opportunities to develop research skills and confidence not found elsewhere for undergraduates. Students receive a scholarship and are provided with online and in-person research skills training, cultural experience activities, a transdisciplinary art-based workshop, and Peer Mentors provide additional guidance and support.
Image: Griffith News
Postscript: This year there was a remarkably high number of EOIs submitted (the highest ever!) – which speaks to the growing recognition and high caliber of this program! Ultimately, 46 projects were submitted. There were 23 students. My EOI was not selected – another time!
For our August New Materialisms SIG, we were delighted to have Dr. Theresa Ashford (USC) share some of her current NM research considerations, thoughts and processes.
In this session, we explored how ethics feature in New Materialisms research.
NM Session: Ethics in/with classrooms, comics and computers.
This session explores the idea of New Materialisms and ethics. This is a tricky space that tests emergence and experience. In this session, Theresa used several key papers as a way to continue working-with how to pull these aspects together in some (in)comprehensible form.
Bio: Dr. Theresa Ashford is a Geography and Sustainability Lecturer in the School of Law and Society (USC). Her key interest is investigating human-non human ethics and responsibility – response(ability) in the world. Her undergraduate and postgraduate education is in Geography and spans physical and human geography domains. She has worked in the regional planning field in Canada and her Masters research explored the use and role of public spaces in the support and co-construction of homeless punk youth identities in Winnipeg, Canada. Dr. Ashford’s Ph.D. research (2018, Education, UQ) used Actor-network theory to investigate the emergence of digital ethics in 1:1 classrooms and the active role of technology mediating, supporting, and translating human behaviour and understandings.
In this session, Theresa deep-dived into Ethics and how it has been bubbling up in her work wide-ranging research.
Theresa set the ethical scene and outlined the Artistolian entry point she was using to discuss ethics.
She then led us through a series of ‘searching for ethics in awkward places’.
Theresa used the metaphor of a ‘Mud Map’ to introduce herself and establish how her background as a human geographer and teacher informs her concerns for the state of inequity in the world and across human-nonhuman spheres of doing. She also outlined her particular interest in phronesis (practical wisdom informed by a sound understanding of ethics, the world and humans), and how she uses Aristotelian means to navigate the excesses and deficits in life and theoretical applications in the world.
We then turned to (Bruno) Latour, ethics and technology.
Theresa spoke of the New Materialisms tenets of decentring anthropocentrism, reconfiguring subjectivity, and elevating the role of non-human actors.
She problematized this type of ‘rethinking’ as it extends to sources of ethics – to the extent of which she argued, could be considered a ‘breaking point’.
Theresa also spoke about the cultivation of ethics grounded in care for the world. Here, we were provoked to consider how we enact and perform care (recognizing it is a network effect) what is derived in a positive ethos and practices of cultivation (requires awareness/wisdom), ideas on care in the human estate – and our “manifold entanglements” with non-human, and how we might reorient ourselves profoundly in relation to the world, to one another and to ourselves (Coole & Fox, 2010) and bioethics.
Collaborative NM SIG word association
There are four main NM streams (see here for more on this). I sit with the feminist New Materialists within the Baradian tradition, so it was really enjoyable to learn more about the Latourian approaches to New Materialisms, such as how ANT:
Sees technology as a mode of existence (exploring existence and being)
Technology as ‘fold’ – time, space and actants – it keeps folded heterogeneous temporalities (materials, modes, memories, mobilities)
Technology extends potentialies unrealisable without its presence
Affordance – schemes of action – permission and promise – a new entity together
Tech mediation – inadequately captures the new possibilities created
Teresa used three data vignettes from her research (a school daily internet bandwidth usage, Women Woman Stuff, and student-Apps), to highlight some of the ethical sticky points and moments of insight that come from looking at these educational situations from an Ethics and ANT New Materialisms POV.
After this incredible presentation, we had a lively Q & A and an open forum to unpack some of these vexing and encouraging connections between ethics and New Materialisms.
Below are a few ideas from Dr. Ashford’s presentation. I’ve deliberately not included the full PPT to respect and protect Dr. Ashford’s intellectual property and current research.
It was an exciting, robust, and thought-provoking session – so much to think and talk about!
A massive thanks to Theresa for sharing her ideas and experiences so generously.
Theresa’s Publications
Ashford, T., & Curtis, N. (2020). Wonder woman: An assemblage of complete virtue packed in a tight swimsuit. Law, Technology and Humans, 2(2), 185-197. doi: 10.5204/lthj.1593
Ashford, T. (2021). App-centric students and academic integrity: A proposal for assembling socio-technical responsibility. Journal of Academic Ethics,19(1), 35-48. doi: 10.1007/s10805-020-09387-w
Readings
Blackman, T. (2020). Experiences of vulnerability in poverty education settings: developing reflexive ethical praxis. Postcolonial Directions in Education, 9(2) 198-225.
Waelbers, K., & Dorestewitz, P. (2014). Ethics in Actor Networks, or: What Latour Could Learn from Darwin and Dewey. Science and Engineering Ethics, 20, 23-40, doi: 10.1007/s11948-012-9408-1
All images from Dr. Ashford’s presentation (attributed in-text) unless otherwise specified.
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)
