Carol A. Taylor

University of Bath | UB · Department of Education

What do doors do? Open Close Invite In Shut Out Jam Stick Wedge open Welcome: Entice and Invite Offer a glimpse into Bar SLAM SHUT Get kicked in Get kicked shut Splinter Warp Hang Sit ajar Gently linger in our minds Cause hurt and separation Affecting thoughts Moments of joy or pain Longing, Waiting Fearful longing, Fearful waiting, Anticipating Wo...

We write as a collaborative mode of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We write as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions a...

This article takes off from a project entitled Get Up and Move! which used walking as a methodology to envisage research in higher education beyond the human and outside individual, instrumental and competitive codings. The Get Up and Move! project activated new research possibilities for walking as an attentive, situated, emplaced and embodied pra...

This article explores questions of im/probability of/as post/authorship in postfoundational inquiry. Inspired by Deleuzian philosophy, the article instantiates post/authorship and academic writing otherwise as a means to interrogate, critique, and undo the representationalist modes of normative authorship. Through a series of playful im/probabiliti...

The words ‘criticality’, ‘critical’, and ‘critique’ can often summon up painful, exposing, and difficult experiences. In a higher education system shaped by hierarchical cultures, abuses of power, performative metrics and competitiveness, many of us are often positioned as (and internalise a sense of ourselves as) lacking. This imputed sense of ‘la...

Educational practices and learning processes are entangled with a multitude of objects but these objects are often positioned as dull, inert matter, disregarded as mundane, left unnoticed, and made subservient to the proper business of educating. The authors see them a vital intra-acting bodies that help scholars to think differently about pedagogy...

This article uses the figuration of the volcano to demonstrate the disruptive and irruptive power of post-qualitative research. The article’s volcanic irruptions aim to keep data on the move, to show how data continually and slowly proliferate in rhizomatic, nomadic, and unforeseen ways via different, ongoing experimentations, instantiating the pro...

Welcome in a new societal and scientific era. Welcome to digitalization and the possibilities it creates for meeting up with each other in a different space and timeframe. It won't go back to what it was. But in the absence of a clear vision of what it can become we can just step in, step up or stumble into this new dimension. We live in a societa...

This article explores string – what string does, makes possible, and makes happen –as lively matter in co-compos(t)ing human-nonhuman objects, bodies and space. Based on the happenings-doings-thinking generated from a recent workshop, and taking a line of flight with-from Haraway’s (2016) Staying with the Trouble, the article considers how string f...

Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come (2021) (Routledge), Edited by Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas Siddique Motala & Dorothee Hölscher.

This article engages posthuman theory to propose a rethinking of the theory and practice of relational pedagogies within higher education (HE). There has been renewed emphasis within HE discourses on the significance of relationships within learning and teaching as a means to offer a counter-view to an uncaring marketised HE system. This article ar...

For centuries the autopsy has been a key technology in Western culture for generating clinical/medical as well as cultural knowledge about bodies. This article hails the anato-medical autopsy as a generative trope and apparatus in reconfiguring Western humanist knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge and takes up the possibilities of working wi...

In higher education institutions (HEI), whose primary functions are oriented to the activities of learning, teaching and research workspace kitchens are disregarded spaces. Yet kitchens do vital but unnoticed work in everyday institutional life. This article develops a post-human, post-disciplinary and post-methodological analytical framing to give...

This chapter attempts to hail love back into view in pandemic times. In searching for how love appears and what love can do, it asks how enactments of love in learning and teaching, in our work as journal editors, and in our writing collaborations might work as a potentially hope-full feminist materialist response to the desperate and damaging time...

This article offers a novel foray into international mindedness and posthuman theory. International mindedness underpins the International Baccalaureate’s aim to achieve a better and more peaceful world. However, in a global context of planetary emergency and widening inequalities, it seems imperative to rethink international mindedness within a po...

This article attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of “the academic conference” and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal, and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work...

This article focuses on academic temporalities to consider the rhythms, repetitions and discontinuities of academic work. Using a photo-serial methodology which generated an archive of images taken at the same time of day for a fortnight, we take up material and affective theories to rethink academic work as assemblages or micro-worlds that emerge...

This article ponders two questions: What does “postqualitative” mean to you? Why do you think the “postqualitative” movement is important to the field of qualitative inquiry? In response, it poses a method/ology of errancy—a flipping methodology—that locates postqualitative research as an ethico-onto-epistemological political project of opening the...

We are, according to Braidotti (2013, p.2), already living in a posthuman world and this has introduced a ‘qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.’ This chapter considers what this qualitative shift means in t...

What is feminist transdisciplinary research? Why is it important? How do we do it? Through nineteen contributions from leading international feminist scholars, this book provides new insights into activating transdisciplinary feminist theories, methods and practices in original, creative and exciting ways – ways that make a difference both to what...

This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of 'the academic conference' and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work tha...

This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the p...

This article makes the case for Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography (PIE). In doing so, it builds on and diverges from Dorothy E. Smith’s post-structural work on Institutional Ethnography (IE), and speaks into recent discussions on the contested nature of ethnography. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Jane Bennet, and on empi...

The contemporary university privileges speed, precarity, competition, and performativity; it operates through modes of accelerationism, work intensification and productivity; and it is oriented to producing academic subjectivities rooted in self-commodification. Much of this is antithetical to feminist ethics and working practices which focus on ca...

The theme for this year’ conference was Qualitative Inquiry towards Sustainability. Inspired by conference participants’ voices and reflecting the United Nations’ (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all, we wanted this conference to be an opportunity to demonstrate how QI can address global c...

This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a...

Universities are dominated by marketisation, individualisation and competition, forces inimical to individual flourishing and collaborative endeavours. This article presents four stories from a collective biography workshop in which a group of women academics explored everyday moments in their university lives. The stories are grim tales of damage,...

Relational materialism was first articulated and framed within Actor Network Theory. In educational research, the concept has emerged with the growing influence of Agential Realism and New Material Feminism, and in the engagements in the “turn to materiality” and/or “turn to ontology.” A relational materialist approach to educational studies can be...

This chapter uses an affirmative speculative feminist lens to rethink the history, purpose and future promise of Bildung. It uses a concept as method approach to trace the pedagogical life of Bildung. It maps its proliferations in discourse and discusses how it helped shape educational practice, particularly by producing unequal educational opportu...

Summary Gender in Learning and Teaching brings together leading gender and feminist scholars to provide a unique collection of international research into learning and teaching. Through dialogues across national traditions and boundaries, the authors provide new insights into the relations between feminist scholarship of pedagogy, gender and didact...

This chapter introduces and compares key areas of concern, contention and interest to those writing and about gender and learning and teaching from a European didactics tradition and those writing from a Anglophone Feminist perspective. It sets the context for the book and introduces the chapters.

Gender in Learning and Teaching brings together leading gender and feminist scholars to provide a unique collection of international research into learning and teaching. Through dialogues across national traditions and boundaries, the authors provide new insights into the relations between feminist scholarship of pedagogy, gender and didactics, and...

Neoliberal ideologies, marketization and performative regimes associated with recent reforms in universities have exerted considerable pressure on academic working conditions and subjects in recent years. While analysing these pressures is important, it is also productive to consider the ways in which academics engage in moments of resistance by mo...

This article argues for a shift away from the measurement and metrics discourse of ‘satisfaction’ and towards more nuanced understandings of ‘happiness’ in relation to part-time doctoral students’ educational flourishing. Grounded in empirical data and using the concept of ‘material moments’, the article brings to the fore the complex nature of stu...

This chapter provides a theoretical-practical introduction to the book and an overview of the book’s contents. Written as an un/en/folding, the chapter discusses the promises, possibilities and pains of posthuman higher education pedagogy, practice and research in relation to a range of key concerns, contestations and imperatives which currently sh...

Author 1: They say they want to disturb the AcademicConferenceMachine. Author 34: What is an AcademicConferenceMachine? Author 2: Please do not go in that direction. Ask, for example, what does an AcademicConferenceMachine do? Author 51: Ok, so what does it do? Author 6: AcademicConferenceMachines are becoming so regulated and standardized that the...

This book explores ways in which posthumanist and new materialist thinking can be put to work in order to reimagine higher education pedagogy, practice and research. The editors and contributors illuminate how we can move the thinking and doing of higher education out of the humanist cul-de-sac of individualism, binarism and colonialism and away fr...

Higher education (HE) is in the grip of an unprecedented level of attention to quantitative performance indicators. Measurement imperatives are positioned in policy discourses as key to the generation of market competition and institutional differentiation. But beyond government policymakers, many are sceptical about their use and value, particular...

Postqualitative research-creation improvisations offer new possibilities to explore method/ology. In this article, we question how bags, as seemingly mundane objects, work as ontologically lively matter—as active agencies—to choreograph human–nonhuman relations and heterogeneous materialities. Working from three questions—How might a bag become? Wh...

Bodies do inventive, dynamic and productive work in classrooms. This paper argues that bodies are vital players in pedagogic encounters, informing how gender identities are shaped, how power operates, and how pedagogies are enacted. It uses a range of theoretical resources – on space (Massey, 2005), corporeal geography (McCormack, 2013), material f...

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear te...

A (mis)organized stream at a recent academic conference adopted a post-qualitative (in)sensibility in experimenting with how intentionally non-normative practices (more properly practicings) and a play with material objects might disrupt the smoothness of the academicconferencemachine. One such experiment witnessed the re-assembly of fragmented mal...

My central argument in this article is that the notion of Bildung may offer conceptual sustenance to those who wish to develop educative practices to supplement or contest the prevalence and privileging of market and economic imperatives in higher education, which configure teaching and learning as an object available to measurement. I pursue this...

This article brings together the authors’ previous work on co-created curricula (Bovill, 2013a, 2014; Bovill et al., 2011) and on partnership and ethics (Taylor, 2015; Taylor and Robinson, 2014), to develop the concept of co-created curricula as an ecology of participation. In doing so, it deploys Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to form...

In the acknowledgements page of my doctoral thesis after thanking various humans – academics, family and friends – I wrote the following: “Final thanks go to the furry guru and the daily fun and games which helped me live in the moment and retain perspective during the long doctoral journey”. I wrote that a long time ago when Hermann, aka the furry...

In recent years, ‘post-qualitative new empiricist’ research has been gaining ground. Such work questions the humanist ontological and epistemological orientation of much mainstream qualitative inquiry and insists on the need to take into account the more-and-other-than-human. Post-qualitative research draws on an eclectic range of theories as a mea...

This article draws on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to reconceptualise transition to Higher Education. In doing so it contributes a new theoretical approach to understanding transition to Higher Education which largely remains under-theorised, uncritical and taken-for-granted. Drawing on data from two projects, the article activates Deleuz...

This article proposes a novel theorisation of higher education classroom spaces by bringing Arendt’s concept of the space of appearance into relation with Guillemin and Gillam’s notion of ethically important moments. The main arguments are first, that a focus on ethically important moments within the higher education space of appearance enables a f...

For a number of years, new material feminists have been developing new theoretical tools, new modes of conceptual analysis, and new ethical frameworks. Object-oriented ontology, part of the speculative realism “movement,” has been engaged in something similar. Yet these endeavors have often taken place in “parallel universes,” despite sharing—or at...

This article emerged as the product of a collaboration between two individuals at different stages of our academic careers, one a beginning researcher and the other a senior academic. Written as an experimental bricolage, the article weaves together two main threads to chart our engagements with feminist research and with writing practices, both of...

Doing posthumanist research in education is a challenge. At the present time, education operates within a largely performative context, in which regimes of accountability, desires for a quick and easy relay from theory to practice, and the requirement that ‘evidence’ — the most valorized form of which often comes in the shape of large-scale randomi...

Doing posthumanist research in education is a challenge. At the present time, education operates within a largely performative context, in which regimes of accountability, desires for a quick and easy relay from theory to practice, and the requirement that ‘evidence’ - The most valorized form of which often comes in the shape of large-scale randomi...

How do we include and develop understandings of those beyond-the-human aspects of the world in social research? Through fifteen contributions from leading international thinkers, this text provides original approaches to posthumanist research practices in education. Contributors respond to the following questions: What do empirically grounded explo...

The paper analyses the impact of a higher education (HE) funding mechanism, the ‘High Grades’ policy, introduced as part of a student number control regime in England that was introduced in 2012/13 and withdrawn after only two years. This marked the end of an experiment in market making based on quality and price within a fixed student number cap....