Bronwyn Davies

• PhD UNE, Honorary Doctorate Uppsala University
• Professor Emeritus at University of Melbourne; Western Sydney University

The authors take up the challenge of Goodley and Runswick-Cole’s call to dismantle the ability/disability binary such that those now called ‘disabled’ can unproblematically join the ranks of those who will be counted as human. Using the methodology of collective biography, the six authors explore their own memories of becoming abled, and find in th...

In this article, we put new materialist concepts to work in an experiment in thinking-with-matter. We write our way into an encounter with two artworks by Australian French Impressionist John Russell, hanging in an exhibition space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In being-with and becoming-with the pictures, we go off the beaten track, not c...

In this article, we begin with a story in which a teacher is perceived as cruel, a boy experiences exclusion, and a support worker feels guilty for not responding. Working together with students, we have written a play script that explores the entangled intra-active perceptions of the various players. The script was used in the professional develop...

This essay explores the encounters through which individuals and their communities are territorialized and deterritorialized. Thinking through Henri Bergson's lines of ascent and descent, this article looks at migration and seeking refuge. It makes links between the colonization of New South Wales, Australia, and its people in the late 1700s, and t...

In this essay, the four authors explore the material and affective agency of art-making in a collective biography workshop. We work with our memories of the death of someone close to us, through stories, and through making art. Collectively we explore a specific, embodied moment of the particular deaths we have each experienced. The substantive foc...

In this article, I explore the implications of the current political situation for qualitative inquiry. I look at some of the historical roots of neoliberalism, and of qualitative inquiry, and at the clash between them that is evidenced in the Trilateral Commission’s governability report. That report found, in the mid-1970s, that the citizens had b...

The movement towards inclusion comes together with a neoliberal audit mentality whereby individuals are held responsible for the transformations. The Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) are seen as ‘change agents’ whose task it is, to support teachers in adapting their approach to optimise the chances for children with special needs in...

This article works with the methodology of collective biography to explore the space-in-between normativity and difference/disability. Working with the memories of the participants, collective biography explores the processes of subjectification through which individuals are made social, and through which they are discursively and intracorporeally...

In this chapter, I will examine four current challenges in the conduct of feminist research in the early childhood arena. The first challenge is to move beyond categorical analysis. Rather than categorization we need concepts that focus on movement, on what Barad (2007) calls the entangled enlivening of being. Our second challenge is to simultaneou...

This paper engages in a Deleuzian analysis of play and its relation to the assemblage of gendered subjects. It explores the way gender and play intra-act with each other, asking how playful encounters might create and maintain the gender order and at the same time how they might also play a part in disrupting that order. Drawing on small stories of...

Working with a letter written in 1799, the author turns to a post-humanist diffractive methodology to work with both the material specificity of the one who wrote the letter, the letter itself, and the lines of force brought into play in the letter-writer’s account of himself. Arguing the necessity of moving beyond representationalism, the author s...

The purpose of this chapter is to examine ways in which classroom discourses and practices are implicated in the construction and maintenance of a conventional gender order where each gender is formed as opposite to the other, with male identity ascendant and female identity subordinate. This gender order has been contested and also to some degree...

Drawing on memory stories told in a collective biography workshop about children’s encounters with schooling, this paper experiments with re-imagining the child-student-subject as an ‘emergent intracorporeal multiplicity’ [Fritsch, K. 2015. “Desiring Disability Differently: Neoliberalism, Heterotopic Imagination and Intra-Corporeal Configurations.”...

Working with memories generated in a collective biography workshop on difference/disability and drawing in particular on Shildrick’s (2002) analysis of monstrosity, this paper analyses the ambivalent processes through which difference is othered and abjected. It argues that through the process of abjection we disown for ourselves whatever qualities...

This paper explores the relation between poststructuralist theorising and new materialism with a particular focus on the work of Barad. Tracing the lines of thought, particularly as they relate to ethics, through the works of Foucault, Butler, Cixous and Deleuze the paper finds a range of concepts that anticipate and link directly with Barad’s work...

The purpose of this chapter is to examine ways in which classroom discourses and practices are implicated in the construction and maintenance of a conventional gender order where each gender is formed as opposite to the other, with male identity ascendant and female identity subordinate. This gender order has been contested and also to some degree...

This essay takes up the concept of “thresholds” as it was developed in the Spring 2014 issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research. It opens up a fertile seam of thought about encounters with people labeled as “disabled” and with one's own child in particular. The article troubles the processes of normalization, and opens up the space of d...

Our paper is a poetic conversation that breaks open places and practices where thought might become clichéd and repetitive, and enters into the affective flow among art-works, ideas, and ourselves. Deleuze invites us into a conceptual playfulness that loosens the binds of quotidian modes of enunciation and subjectification. Deleuze and Guattari cha...

In this paper we discuss the lives of academics as they are constituted in and through neoliberal time(s). We discuss those lives in relation to this present historical moment, with its particular features, emphases, and practices of government, and in this context explore the way time is constituted by academics and the way it constitutes those li...

This chapter examines the resurgence of empiricism in educational research and the desire for research that predicts and controls. It traces the historical move away from empiricism and deconstructs some of the arguments that have been put forward to legitimate it. It then put sforward an argument for a different approach to legitimation from a pos...

In this article, the authors respond to Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition. The book's authors (Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, and Bronwyn) and two discussants (Elizabeth St. Pierre and Norman Denzin) consider questions such as the following: What does this book open up? How might it help us to think differently (e.g. abou...

This article is an experiment in diffractive analysis. In a diffractive analysis, research problems, concepts, emotions, transcripts, memories, and images all affect each other and interfere with each other in an emergent process of coming to know something differently. The substantive topic that is worked with to open up this experiment in thought...

The cover feature of Time, “Oscar Pistorius and South Africa's Culture of Violence” (Perry 2013), assembles the shooting body of Oscar Pistorius and the dead body of Reeva Steenkamp in and as the body of post-apartheid South Africa. In analyzing this cover feature, mobilizing Deleuzian concepts, we consider how the bodily presence or absence of Osc...

Becoming Girl interrogates the everyday of girlhood through the collaborative feminist methodology of collective biography. Located within the emergent interdisciplinary field of girlhood studies, this scholarly collection demonstrates how memories can be used to investigate the ways in which girlhood is culturally, historically, and socially const...

Through a series of exquisite encounters with children, and through a lucid opening up of new aspects of poststructuralist theorizing, Bronwyn Davies opens up new ways of thinking about, and intra-acting with, children. This book carefully guides the reader through a wave of thought that turns the known into the unknown, and then slowly, carefully,...

This paper opens the space of post-qualitative research through an exploration of how acts of recognition and non-recognition work on and through the bodies of individual subjects. Using stories generated in a collective biography workshop and drawing on concepts from Foucault and Butler, and also, in contrast, Barad and Deleuze, the paper explores...

This article analyzes a series of stories and artworks that were produced in a collective biography workshop. It explores Judith Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix combined with a Deleuzian theoretical framework. The article begins with an overview of Butler's concept of the heterosexual matrix and her theorizations on how it might be disr...

In this paper we explore the very particular forms and productive possibilities of collaborative writing that are generated in collective biography workshops, focusing in particular on the collaborative generation of memory stories. Drawing on conceptual resources from Deleuze and Barad we work our way through the paradox of working with intensely...

Drawing on Badiou’s [Badiou, Alain, 2002. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (P. Hallward, Trans.). Verso, London; Badiou, Alain, 2009. Theory of the Subject (B. Bosteels, Trans.). Continuum, London.] theory of the subject and his ethic of truths, this paper extends the analyses made by Foucault [Foucault, Michel (Ed.), 1975. I Pierre Ri...

Foucault's (1975) edited book, I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother… A case of parricide in the 19th century, includes the court documents and newspaper reports from the 1835 trial of Pierre Rivière, Pierre Rivière's memoir written while in prison, and the “analytic notes” written by Foucault and his colleagues....

The reformed neoliberal universities, with their micromanagement of ever-increasing productivity, competitiveness, and individualization, have recently been described as unhealthy institutions, creating conditions that incite incivility, workplace bullying, and other forms of employee abuse. In this article, the authors employ collective biography...

This article sketches out a philosophy and practice of open listening, linking open listening to Bergson’s (1998) concept of creative evolution. I draw on examples of small children at play from a variety of sources, including Reggio-Emilia-inspired preschools in Sweden. The article offers a challenge to early childhood educators to listen and to t...

This article offers a critique of the individualisation and pathologisation that underpin most current working definitions of bullying. In lieu of this usual mode of thinking about bullying, this article draws on concepts from Foucault, Deleuze, Butler and Badiou, to re-cast bullying not as pathological, but as an excessive and misguided defence of...

Place pedagogy change is a work of creative experimentation in which we explore the ways in which pedagogies of place can enable the relational learning of connections between people, places and communities. In adding the element of place to the dynamic relations between teacher, learner, and knowledge, we articulate a pedagogy of ethical uncertain...

The place writing that we have each included in the first part of this book was integral to the place pedagogy work with our secondary teacher education students. This chapter is the story of those students learning place pedagogy through translating it into their own teaching practices. We included earlier versions of our place writing in the read...

Violence in schools has been the subject of a great deal of empirical research since the early 1970s. This research has informed the development of intervention strategies that do not appear to make a lasting difference, as David Galloway and Erling Roland demonstrated in their meta-analysis of bullying programmes: ‘The general picture has been one...

This paper teases out some of the common threads between two separate traditions: zen buddhist thought as it is interpreted by Thich Nhat Hanh and by Allan Watts, and poststructuralist thought as it is interpreted by Gilles Deleuze, and by Henri Bergson. Despite some semantic differences, zen buddhism and deleuzian thought are found to have a great...

In this chapter we go back to the group of students we introduced in Chapter 7. This small group of seven students was enrolled in an alternative Professional Experience unit offered to secondary teacher education students at the University of Western Sydney (UWS).This alternative practicum, Professional Experience Three, or PE3, was designed to gi...

In this chapter I make a space to think about the underlying principles that inform my own transgressive, emergent, experimental writing—in particular, a radio play about the place in which I live. In order to help me do this thinking I draw on poststructuralist writers, such as Barthes, Cixous and Deleuze, who suggest that it is in literary and ar...

Place pedagogy change is a book that explores new ways of learning and teaching about place. We are not interested in passing on a fixed body of knowledge about place, but in developing ways of knowing that are emergent in, and responsive to, particular places. We are interested in ways of knowing that change the knower– that generate a critique of...

In this article the authors take up the invitation to respond to the previous articles in the special issue. They discuss why it is so difficult to speak and write about gender and sexuality, and difference more generally, in the neoliberalised university. They make the case that the neoliberal university engages and uses categorical difference, an...

In this paper we enter into the debate about the place of poststructuralist theorising and its relation to educational and psychological practices. We argue against a definition of poststructuralist theory as generating inaction and as antithetical to concepts such as ''agency'' and ''choice''. We suggest that poststructuralist theory may well have...

This article involves four writers exploring together the insights into collaborative writing that Deleuze can offer. Jonathan and Ken in the United Kingdom and Bronwyn and Sue in Australia have separate histories of collaborative writing, and in this collaborative project, they extend their thinking about Deleuze and work reflexively with his conc...

This paper re-visits the problem of how we re-conceptualize human subjects within poststructuralist research. The turn to poststructuralist theory to inform research in the social sciences is complicated by the difficulty in thinking through what it means to put the subject under erasure. Drawing on a study in a Reggio Emilia inspired preschool in...

A major strength of qualitative research is its capacity to re-theorise a particular field through examining the discursive constructions that underpin a particular body of research. The empirical research literature construes student violence generally, but bullying in particular, as a psychosocial problem arising from individual and family pathol...

In this paper the four authors explore the experience of school bullying, drawing on stories of bullying generated in a collective biography workshop and on fictional accounts of bullying. They counter the current trend of reading bullying as individual or family pathology with a post‐structuralist analysis of subjectification and power.

This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the concepts of 'inclusion' and 'mastery' using memory stories generated in a collective biography workshop. The five authors analysed their memories from childhood and adolescence on two separate and competing concepts that currently inform educational practice: inclusion and mastery. These stories...

This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also ex...

A more careful delineation of the ideal-typical marriage allows the flaws in Berger and Kellner's article to be examined. These flaws stem both from a rather too easy assumption that marriages are egalitarian relationships and that equality means sameness of experience between husbands and wives, and from the use of sexist language combined with a...

Following the discursive or poststructuralist turn, accounts of “experience” can no longer be read by those social scientists who have taken that turn, as straightforward descriptions of “an individual's being or consciousness.” Nor can readings of accounts of experience produce any final analysis of the meaning of the “real person” who made the ac...

The discourses and practices of neoliberalism, including government policies for education and training, public debates regarding standards and changed funding regimes, have been at work on and in schools in capitalist societies since at least the 1980s. Yet we have been hard pressed to say what neoliberalism is, where it comes from and how it work...

In this paper the authors analyse a university–school partnership that went awry. It was designed to develop a new set of philosophical principles to inform work with violent student behaviour in schools. The project brought together a team of researchers from the university and school sector with a strong record of examining and improving the mana...

In this paper, we analyse the links between subjectivities as they are constructed through the intersecting discourses of gender and literacy, and we situate this analysis in the context of the current neo‐liberal social and economic order. We begin with a discussion of the background to the gender and literacy debates. We then describe what neo‐li...

Postmodern, post-structural, and critical theories In this chapter, we explore, both separately and together, the emergence of postmodern, post-structural, and critical theories as they have been taken up in feminist research. These three theoretical positions are vital to feminism in that they offer radical strategies for bringing about change. Th...

In this chapter we extend our concern with the regulatory discourses and practices of neo-liberalism in academic workplaces, and we generate strategies for interrupting and decomposing them. Barthe proposes 'decomposition' rather than destruction: 'in order to destroy' he says 'we must be able to overleap. But overleap where? Into what language? In...

In this paper I explore the process of subjectification (sometimes also called subjectivation, or simply, subjection) through which one becomes a subject—a process that Butler describes in terms of simultaneous mastery and submission, entailing a necessary vulnerability to the other in order to be. I examine the conceptual work Butler has undertake...

The controlling strategies of neo-liberalism, designed to constitute academics as economic units supporting the designs of government, are contrasted here with the creative and transgressive elements of a more Deleuzian approach to writing that opens things up, that brings thought to life, that makes the familiar, predictable order tremble. The art...

The rise of neo-liberal universities over the last 15–20 years has been characterised as an inevitable effect both of globalisation and the associated dominance of capital. In this article we will analyse that rise, seeking to understand how it has come about and its impact on intellectual work. In the final pages of the article we turn towards its...

In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist th...

In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist th...

This article examines the discursive shifts in the story The Fairy Who Wouldn’t Fly, written and illustrated by Pixie O’Harris in 1945 and then retold by David Harris in 1974. The article examines the changes between the 1940s and the 1970s in the broader social world, in particular the ways the correction of children (or bringing children into the...

In this article five women explore (female) embodiment in academic work in current workplaces. In a week-long collective biography workshop they produced written memories of themselves in their various workplaces and memories of themselves as children and as students. These memories then became the texts out of which the analysis was generated. The...

In this paper a critique of neoliberal regimes within universities is developed. Neoliberal discourse is deconstructed and the dangers of it for intellectual work are considered. Neoliberal subjects (those subjected through neoliberal discourses) are defined and guidelines for thinking about education within (and against) neoliberal regimes are dev...

Reflexivity involves turning one's reflexive gaze oil discourse-turning language back on itself to see the Work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that refl...

In this article, the author develops a critique of new managerialism and of its implications for the professional work of scholars and teachers. She then critiques 'evidence-based practice' as it is being developed for schools. She argues that it is only possible to make sense of the policies and practices of the evidence-based practice movement wi...

In this paper we map the traces of power and knowledge as we read them at play in our own memories and as we make sense of them from a Foucauldian perspective. Our question here is twofold: how might we use Foucault to read our embodied memories of power and knowledge; and how might we use the analysis of those stories to enable us better to see th...

In this article, the authors examine the concept and practices of subjectification; that is, the processes through which we are subjected, and actively take up as our own the terms of our subjection. They use Judith Butler's theorising of subjection both as a starting point for working with their own memories of being subjected in school settings,...

Our focus in this paper is on the collectively available discursive strategies through which women constitute themselves and are constituted as recognisable and recognisable desiring subjects. Desire, we find, is a way of naming the possibilities of who we might be. and what we find, in listening to women talk about desire, is a gap between desire...

In this paper an analysis is made of 15 minutes in a year 12 health and Physical Education class, 2 weeks prior to the final exam. The text of student and teacher talk is analyzed to show the ways that a semi-literate male teacher is supported and assisted by an orally competent group of female students to produce himself as a competent, authoritat...

This article presents and compares three analyses of qualitative data drawn from an ethnographic case study using distinctive theoretical approaches. The article shows the power of theoretical approaches to constitute the “subject” of a study and to constitute the character of the social world in which such a subject is situated. The three readings...

This is a response to a Review Essay (McFarlane, 1998) of Shards of Glass (Davies, 1993). The reviewer questioned whether the misogynist language of primary school boys in the study had been exaggerated by the research method, which used mixed-gender group interviews. We consider some of the ethical difficulties involved for researchers working wit...