Sarah E. Truman

• PhD
• Associate Professor and ARC DECRA Fellow at University of Melbourne

This paper considers how literacy and education more broadly reflect and reproduce world views and communicative practices rooted in the western epistemological conceptualization of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man”. I frictionally think-with Wynter’s hybridity of bios and logos (mythoi), and more-than-human theories in relation to an in-school study...

Feminist new materialisms are a porous field influenced by feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, transgender and queer studies, and affect studies. In qualitative research, the feminist new materialisms are often linked to discussions of the posthuman, object-oriente...

Interest in new empiricisms and transdisciplinary methods has led many social inquirers to engage with 20th-century post-classical physical science. Many of these projects have focused on alternative matter–mind mixtures and in/organic variation, concerned that past theories of sociality have dismissed the vibrancy and animacy of the nonhuman mater...

This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that...

In this article, the authors introduce the concept of a “queer counter-mythology.” They do so by discussing a speculative song they wrote as an enactment of research-creation. Research-creation names an interdisciplinary scholarly praxis where artist-scholars create the artefacts they want to think-with, rather than analysing existing cultural prod...

As part of the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry interview series, Sarah E. Truman discusses research-creation at the intersection of arts, theory, and research, and what it may offer traditional qualitative research. Truman gives a theoretical orientation and talks through some research events as exemplifications.

As a curriculum area, English has been foundational to empire, invasion, and colonisation of Indigenous peoples the world over. It therefore requires considered scholarship to reimagine how to engage with and teach literature in English. In this article, we explore the enduring problem of English and its inheritances, as well as the ways in which I...

In this paper, we discuss the tacit agreement to use English as lingua franca in global academia. Our interest is in how Anglocentrism manifests within academic practices-seminars, conferences, and academic publishing-all of which are marked by neoliberal assumptions of mastery, quality, and efficacy. Drawing on autobiographical narratives, social...

In this Editorial, we discuss WalkingLab’s approach to critical walking methodologies grounded in queer-feminist, anti-racist praxis, and argue for the need to critically account for understandings of place in times of ongoing crises. We then introduce the articles featured in this special issue. Authored by international scholars, each article in...

Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique introduction to research-creation as a methodology, and a series of exemplifications of research-creation projects in practice with a range of participants including secondary school students, artists, and academics. In conversation with leading scholars in the field, th...

This paper thinks with the concept of intertextuality to consider the multiple intersecting power structures inside and outside of literary education in secondary schools that continue to dominate text selection policies and teaching practices. We draw on our research with in-service teachers to reconsider how intertextual networks circulate on mul...

This paper is prompted by my experience as a researcher of English literary education in three different geographies over the past three years: Canada, the United Kingdom and now Australia. In response to the call to consider Futures for English for this special issue, I begin by thinking about the English literary inheritances I’ve experienced acr...

The following roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of research-creation within Canada.

This article draws on the ideas of Bruno Latour to examine the nature of science dis/trust and denialismin times of crisis. We argue that Latour’s image of science creates new demands on public trust, shifting the focus from ‘trusting that a particular scientific claim is true’ towards an engagement with Gaia (earth) where scientists encounter and...

The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers ref...

Despite ongoing attempts to disrupt the white cis-hetero-masculine nature of the literary canon the secondary school English curriculum remains tethered to its lineage. In conversation with feminist new materialist scholars who argue that the stories we read and write have material affects on who we are becoming, this paper argues that in order to...

In this article, we take up feminist new materialist thought in relation to our music research-creation practice to problematize the white, en/abled, cis-masculine, and Euro-Western methodological orientation often inherited with sound methods. We think with our music research-creation practice to activate a feminist new materialist politics of app...

This article pivots on three public walking research-creation events curated by WalkingLab [www.walkinglab.org]. WalkingLab is a queer, feminist collaboration co-directed by Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman. WalkingLab organises International walking projects and collaborates with artists and scholars to realise a number of site-speci!c walk...

This article outlines a method we call Queer Walking Tours as site-specific research-creation events. It gives a brief overview of the Queer Walking Tours as method and then describes one specific tour that explored the concepts ‘Migration, Militarisms, and Speculative Geology’. Queer Walking Tours offer cultural geography and a range of other disc...

In education, walking has typically been used as a pedagogical strategy to move student bodies from one point to another, emphasizing creativity, discovery, health, and mobility. Although there are important reasons to advocate for walking in schools, the tenuous link between walking and creativity can be easily commodified and normalized by neolib...

This article draws on Donna Haraway’s call for feminist speculative fabulation as an approach to qualitative research methodologies and writing praxis in schools. The first section of the article outlines how I conceptualize speculative thought, through different philosophers and theorists, and provides a brief literature review of speculative fict...

This article examines two walking events that explore questions of sovereignty, borders, histories, and time through strategies of speculation, counter-cartographies, and anarchiving practices. To the Landless by Dylan Miner and Miss Canadiana’s Heritage and Cultural Walking Tour: The Grange by Camille Turner ask us to imagine a past, present, and...

Feminist new materialisms are a porous field influenced by feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, transgender and queer studies, and affect studies. In qualitative research, the feminist new materialisms are often linked to discussions of the posthuman, object-oriente...

Walking in nature has long been associated with creativity. Yet walking’s associated research and artistic practices remain dogged by representationalism. Concomitantly, intersectional concerns of race, gender, and dis/ability determine what kinds of bod- ies are allowed to walk where (and in this case, the where is Brexit-era Britain). This articl...

As a research methodology, walking has a diverse and extensive history in the social sciences and humanities, underscoring its value for conducting research that is situated, relational, and material. Building on the importance of place, sensory inquiry, embodiment, and rhythm within walking research, this book offers four new concepts for walking...

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, t...

This article responds to agitations occurring in qualitative research related to the incompatability between methodologies and methods, the preponderance of methodocentrism, the pre-supposition of methods, a reliance on data modeled on knowability and visibility, the ongoing emplacement of settler futurity, and the dilemma of representation. Enmesh...

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that...

New materialist approaches to educational research require us to rethink cultural productions—whether artistic, linguistic, or philosophical—as material rather than representational practices. In this chapter I discuss a multiparticipant and multimedial art and philosophy project titled Intratextual Entanglements. Although philosophy is historicall...

Excavating what Jeffrey Cohen [2015. Stone: An ecology of the inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] calls ‘lithic ecomateriality’, in this paper we illustrate how rocks have traditionally been conceptualized through three tropes: rocks as insensate; rocks as personified; and rocks as transformative. We take up the concept of inhuman...

In this article the author combines Chinese literary theory and new materialism with her ongoing research into creative writing. In the opening section, the author discusses how language and writing can be approached using new materialist theories. She then enters into a creative non-fiction “research-creation” piece that explores how creative writ...

Walking as an artistic and participatory practice is re-emerging in various disciplines, including its intersections with social science and humanities research methods and methodologies (see walkinglab. org). Some of this interest stems from the fact that walking can be an embodied and sensory way of enacting research. In this chapter we discuss h...

The Pedagogical Impulse (TPI) was a 3-year research-creation project that initiated a series of artist-residencies across a variety of educational sites in Toronto, Canada. In this chapter we examine the primacy of movement as a proposition of research-creation through a ‘case study’ of one of TPI’s artist-residencies in a secondary school and argu...

This article treats the act of writing about past experiences as a material influence on the 'self' I am becoming, particularly the 'self' I call English Teacher, and explores how language is a material component in the 'new materialist turn' in the humanities. The vignettes in this article describe experiences in my past, each with its own self-co...