Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation
Abstract
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, the book outlines research-creation as transdisciplinary praxis embedded in queer-feminist anti-racist politics. It provides a methodological overview of how the author approaches research-creation projects at the intersection of literary arts, textuality, artistic practice, and pedagogies of writing, drawing on concepts related to the feminist materialisms, including speculative thought, affect theories, queer theory, and process philosophy. Further, it troubles representationalism in qualitative research in the arts. The book demonstrates how research-creation operates through the making of or curating of art or cultural productions as an integral part of the research process. The exemplification chapters engage with the author’s research-creation events with diverse participants all focused on text-based artistic projects including narratives, inter-textual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts.
The book is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers who mobilize the literary arts, theory, and research in transdisciplinary settings.
... To bring research-creation 1 to life, we re-turned to three encounters from our individual research enquiries that spoke to datafication discourses. In doing so, we enacted researchcreation by the making of artistic responses to represent and make what it is we want to enquire about (Truman, 2022). In collating and arranging images, text and memories, we attempt to imagine what might be extralinguistic and 'brings making to thinking and thinking to making' (Manning, 2016: 13). ...
... In collating and arranging images, text and memories, we attempt to imagine what might be extralinguistic and 'brings making to thinking and thinking to making' (Manning, 2016: 13). Through such immanent processes, we notice what was sensed, felt and emerged (Truman, 2022). ...
... The seeking, making and talking through the artistic responses was our way of bringing doings into research-creation (Springgay and Truman, 2018). Our approach to analysis was ongoing, to see what emerged or unfolded in relation between the human and more-than-human participants through the timespaces of our work (Truman, 2022). ...
In this paper, we ponder the ecologies of spacetimematterings folded into resistance practices and their relationality with figurations of agency outside and beyond datafication agendas. Accountability cultures bound up with datafication have consequences that include a diminished agency for both children and educators. We take inspiration from the idea that enactments of resistance can cause cracks to appear that forge creative spaces where different kinds of doings related to agency emerge. The context, potentiality and storyings of cracking encounters is where our interest lies. To ponder crackings, we play with feminist posthuman and materialist the-orising with research-creation approaches to notice resistances as material-discursive intra-actions amongst the lively materiality of educational life. From there we notice resistance practices as ecologies. Those ecologies are complex and lively yet often concealed in more-than-human cracks by the grand narrative of datafication. Through storytelling, we reimagine these cracks as dynamic resistances, often unresolving the relationality between power and the collective more-than-human modes of resistance we witnessed. Different kinds of noticing mattered and amplifying the sharing of resistance stories brings attention to hopeful agencies already and always at work. Sharing stories can strengthen the connectivity of resistances to datafication and build a
stronger autonomy and agency for early childhood education and care. Our provocation is to pay attention to the spacetimematterings of ecologies where resistance practices are already at work cracking cracks for different doings. From there, further activisms can mobilise a larger fracturing to the dominance of datafication narratives.
... Future Studies welcome speculative pedagogies that can keep the path open to unknown potentialities of students' and teachers' encounters. In fact, both Future Studies and speculative pedagogies draw on the idea of embracing the "not-yet-known" (Kuby and Christ 2020, 143) or imagining "what could be" (Martin 2017, 6): through speculation, we are always materially shaping the world and ourselves (Truman 2021). Such a path demands thought, inventiveness, and venturesome experimentation (Atkinson 2021;Carstens 2020), as the vision raising from speculation informs choices in the present time (Inayatullah 2022). ...
... Feminist speculative thinkers theorize speculation as an ethics of affirmation, that is, a way to overturn the future by working at changing the conditions of the present (Braidotti 2013). Feminist thought has always been speculative (Truman 2021), as it envisions a utopian future where the world can be otherwise (Martin 2017). Following this idea, we approached data analysis with a focus on teachers' speculative narratives generated by pedagogies of care. ...
In the majority of Brazilian public schools, poverty and social injustice prevail. Most students come from disadvantaged realities, and their future seems to be already defined by a lack of social mobility, exclusion from civil rights, and violence—a situation that has worsened with the global pandemic. Rooted in ethnographic research in public schools in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, this paper explores the role of pedagogies of care in creating alternative, possible, and preferable narratives about the future of these students. By using the metaphor of “school as soil”, the study identifies care in four dimensions: time, heterogeneity, mattering, and fertility. It draws on 12 semi-structured interviews with teachers from eight different public schools that were part of a larger doctoral project. By researching school as soil, we examine how pedagogies of care encourage teachers’ speculation about preferable imaginaries for the future of their students. Results show that despite precarious resources and scarce institutional support, pedagogies of care appear in multiple reported situations, aiming to inspire learning processes, give voice and agency to the socially marginalized, and allow for ways of thinking that offer alternatives to the seemingly ubiquitous oppressive relations.
... This article charts a project that brings together the three of us, a class of nine-and ten-year-olds in Delft, and two undergraduate students, Scarlett and Will, in Bristol to explore mapping as a research event (Truman 2021). We deliberately use the term event as opposed to data collection to signal the active, relational and improvisational nature of the research. ...
The project featured in this article experiments with mapping methods as part of a research-creation approach to exploring spaces, times, and movements within materialisations of self. Bringing together adults and children across two cities during lockdown, the project problematises a stance on ‘learning loss’ during the pandemic and instead focuses on the potential of the experiential blurriness of analogue and digital spaces. Rather than seeking to control and structure online learning – thereby denying and limiting its possibilities, explorations, and senses of self – three researchers set out on a speculative approach that acknowledges the dynamic complexity of physical and virtual ways of knowing and being. The article discusses the affordances and challenges that the methodology offers and concludes with the broader implications of this research for reimagined post-pandemic pedagogies. In the end, we advocate for mapping as a way of generously creating spaces and activating meaning-making in diverse learning contexts.
... Gatherings of affects, spaces, and bodies can also become felt as atmospheres which can be shifting, conflicting or ephemeral (Stewart, 2011, Anderson & Ash, 2015, and yet compose force fields that have clear ethical/political consequences. The perspective of affects and atmospheres situates the politics of academic practices in place and time, offering new sensitivities towards the ways materials and discourses create force fields in situations, enabling some thing or some body to become capacious while preventing other capabilities to become (Clough, 2007;Truman, 2021). ...
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 media conversations, and literature, as well as recent discussions on conferencing and peer review practices, we analyse how historically shaped linguistic privilege and linguistic divides continue to be lived at the level of the body, affects and affective atmospheres. Language is not just language, rather, seemingly practical decisions about language always involve the aspects of material labour, time, money, and careers: they shape researcher subjectivities and entire domains of scientific knowledge. However, we also highlight the potentials nested in the emergence of minor language and the deterritorialising forces of humor. Articulating the speculative lines of what if, we propose more care-full academic linguistic practices.
Creative Urban Atmospheres explores the potential for urban planners, researchers, and artists to intervene in the atmosphere of spectacle dominating current neoliberal urbanism strategies through sensory and sound-based artistic interventions drawing from Tactical Urbanism and Research-Creation. This book equips readers with tools and insights needed to address the pressing challenges of urban livability and inclusiveness in the face of neoliberal urbanism.
Through engaging discussions and a case study conducted in Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles, the book demonstrates how sound-based and sensory interventions can reshape urban atmospheres, fostering cohabitation and inclusiveness for diverse populations. Key features include an interdisciplinary emphasis on the intertwinements of academic research, artistic practice, and participatory community engagement, ensuring that readers gain both theoretical understanding and practical approaches. With its focus on innovative methods such as Research-Creation and socially engaged art, this book not only critiques existing urban strategies but also empowers planners, artists, and communities with tactics for collaboratively transforming underused urban spaces into vibrant, livable, and inclusive social environments.
This book is designed for a diverse audience deeply invested in the future of urban spaces. It will be of interest to urban planners seeking innovative approaches to address urban polarization and promote inclusiveness, as well as academic researchers in urban studies and geography exploring the intersections of Tactical Urbanism and sensory interventions. Artists, designers, and architects will find inspiration in its emphasis on creative, participatory approaches while policymakers and community advocates can draw practical insights for fostering livable, inclusive cities. It also speaks to anyone with a vested interest in the challenges facing contemporary cities, including gentrification, touristification, and neoliberal urban pressures on the most marginalized groups.
This paper explores how ‘what matters’ can surface in multisensory arts‐informed projects as ways for young people to survive and stay with gender and sexuality troubles that are always more than theirs. Situated in an ex‐mining post‐industrial locale, we make an agential cut in a longitudinal research and engagement project called Unboxing Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) to open up a rare case study of entangled ‘creative coproduction’ (Renold and Ivinson forthcoming). Supported by an artist‐in‐residence teacher assistant, composer and filmmaker, we explore the making and mattering of a clay sculpture, the Bruised HeART, created by Alys (pseudonym, age 13) which we theorise as a ‘dartaphact’ (a concept combining ‘data’, ‘art’ and ‘act/ivism’ to register the posthuman participation of arts‐based data). We follow how the heART continues to matter through film and a second dartaphact made from barbed wire and skewered fragments of Alys' instapoetry. Drawing upon the concept of The Fold we compose three figurative folds (crushing matters; crystalising matters; carrying matters) to draw connections between Alys' activist mining ancestors, the silencing of queer violence, and her collection of locally sourced crystals – situated practices generating resourceful posthuman companions to manage multiple troubles. Each fold is composed for its passageway potential to glimpse at our ethical‐political praxis of attuning to and making‐with troubles already in motion and how dartaphacts might propel new ways of understanding and doing relationships and sexuality education Otherwise.
This paper is written in memory of our friend and colleague, Elmarie Costandius, a visual artist and academic, whose untimely and unexpected death deeply affected us. While we had worked with Elmarie in various research projects, short courses, and workshops, over a period of ten years or so, in this article we refer to a series of encounters, in which we came together to explore a decolonial and post qualitative inquiry practice as part of a South African Swedish Universities Forum (SASUF) project (2020 - 2022). Entitled (Re)configuring Scholarship in Higher Education, the project focused on alternative ways of doing pedagogies and inquiry in the current context of higher education precarities and the consequent imperative for transformation. We wanted to explore how feminist new materialist imaginaries could be put to work with affective embodied practices to expand our thinking and reconfigure our scholarship. Guided by Elmarie’s experimental arts-based approach, we opened ourselves to the affordances of playfulness, creative, serious and experimental thinking-making-doings, and the vulnerabilities of these embodied, relational scholarly praxes. Stopped in the middle, we show how our entangled thinking-making-doings continue Elmarie’s legacy.
En este artículo se analiza la obra teatral La Manzana de Eva como una práctica de investigación-creación, con el objetivo de conectar el proceso con las fabulaciones feministas, por medio del análisis del guion y la autoetnografía. Asimismo, se propone que esta práctica logre salir de los lugares comunes asignados a las víctimas de violencia de género. Mediante la parodia, los afectos y la performatividad, las intérpretes habitan la categoría de víctimas desde nuevos significados y se arriesgan a hacer gestos especulativos que las sitúan como protagonistas de su historia.
Using assemblage as a conceptual framework, I articulate the entangled relationality of graphicality when perceived as a postdevelopmental sociomaterial practice outside of developmental stage discourses. Considering multiple practices, from children drawing, to mark making with mechanized drawing machines, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) image platforms, I identify matters of concern that relate these varying practices in graphicality to question our conceptions of graphicality and creative expression. I consider Drawing Together, which is a series of workshops in performing techno-mechanical markmaking, questioning our ethical commitments through material engagement, and speculating on the pedagogical force of these types of techno-aesthetic making. I glean from this analysis an approach to gain perspective on the emerging sociomaterial practices of generative AI in considering issues of access, prompt engineering, and the carbon footprint of AI computing.
Since the 1990s Estonia has been characterized by the acceptance of neoliberal values, as an antidote to the Soviet past. Neoliberal practices, like quantification and market- orientation, have permeated most spheres of society, including academia. There has been very little critical reflection on the epistemic inequalities created by this academic model for Estonia as a semi-peripheral country. In this article, the authors aim to place the neoliberalization of academia within a broader framework of colonial practices within global knowledge production, continuing their previous work on the blind spots of transnational feminism and intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism. Building on insights developed within transnational and decolonial feminism, the authors propose three interventions into neoliberal academic culture: telling better stories, practicing slow scholarship to tease apart complex colonial entanglements and using creative writing practices.
Since its founding in 1994 as an online bookstore, Amazon has “revolutionised” not only the market for literature but also expanded aggressively and transformatively in sectors including consumer retail, film and television, groceries, logistics, robotics, surveillance, AI, and web services. This growth and expansion is grounded in the firm’s internal and outward-facing rhetoric about its leading contribution to a brighter future, a narrative deeply inspired by the genre of science or speculative fiction (SF). But Amazon’s utopian vision is largely experienced as a dystopia by most of its rank-and-file workers, who labour under exploitative conditions of surveillance, robotization, and relentless managerial control. Hence our team inaugurated the Worker as Futurist project to support rank-and-file Amazon workers to read/watch SF stories to collectively understand their employer and its world, and also to write short, SF stories about “the world after Amazon.” In this preliminary report on the project, we explain the inspirations for the project and reflect on some of what we have learned from the participants, as well as some implications for the futures of platform workers generally.
The postapocalypse as a mobilising discourse for climate action operates largely out of anger over experienced and anticipated injustices as well as paradoxical hope that fuses loss and grief with freed-up solidarities in support of liveable futures. However, negotiating this emotional tension can be both draining and isolating. Here, we examine how white settler populations in Western Australia balance grief and hope in places they hold dear and the role emotions such as sadness, worry, disappointment, joy, and pride play in relational place making. Through an innovative in situ and mobile methodology we call Walking Journeys, we trace how participants navigate their climatic-affective atmospheres and make sense of their agency in changing ‘Places of the Heart’. We find evidence for emotional complexities of solastalgia where pessimistic outlooks for the future are wrapped up in prefigurative visions of a better world. By holding the tension between paralysis and restoration, urban and rural residents explore affective co-existence and differential belonging in their homes and the landscapes around them. We highlight the challenge of enfranchising emotions beyond individuals and conclude by endorsing entangled, reflexive, and (re-)generative responsibilities for hopeful postapocalyptic journeying.
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 productions. The song discussed in this article, “Cosmic Beavers,” proposes a queer counter-mythology that reimagines the historical, colonial archive by foregrounding the stories of giant, trans-dimensional beavers who shred Lewis and Clark and use them to reinforce their Time-Dam. Drawing on this song, as well as queer theories of time and anti-colonial thinkers, the authors suggest that artistic interventions invoke speculative lures that, while not changing history, can complicate state-sanctioned archives and narratives of the past and future: they frame this intervention as a queer counter-mythology.
We are living climate change. The unchecked acceleration of globalisation, colonisation, and extractivism create a world in dire need of change if we are to survive. Crucial now, are critical, geopolitical, and biopolitical discussion and an urgent need for diverse methodologic and pedagogic strategies for action across micro to macro scales. Research-creation, practice-led approaches to action, that work across and with artistic practice, scientific data, and critical and cultural theory can spark activist pedagogic experiences for change. The effective potential of such methodologies is explored via inefficient mapping; a counter-mapping, methodologic protocol, and its use in ‘Mapping Extinction’, a project into the catastrophic biodiversity loss due to the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires. The protocols and visual works produced facilitate discussion on creative practice as educational research into the real impacts of climate change.
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 governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines—particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.
In this article, we propose ‘literacies of immanence’ as a term for sensory-laden, embodied multimodal practices that happen when researchers get out of the way to allow for modal diversity in meaning making. The learning encounters that we observed during our research combined senses with a kaleidoscope of modes that were hard to describe through more traditional multimodal methods. Literacies of immanence is the most fitting phrase for these practices because they were fluid, open, and they did not rely on written and spoken texts. Researching in a primary and secondary special school that are part of an academy trust in the southwest of England, the research team engaged in research-creation propositions (Truman, 2021) where we watched and built on multimodal meaning making supplementing it with story-making activities. Writing and sharing fieldnotes and filming interactions, we abandoned original plans and instead shaped methods and theoretical framings around the population of learners we met. Fieldnotes were shared on a blog and filmmaking helped us to describe and draw out multimodal, immanent literacies and their epiphanic qualities. This article features fieldnotes along with images of multimodal-sensory encounters and ways that they helped us relate to the learners, their teachers and Head Teacher as well as each other as researchers. The article is of relevance to researchers looking for ways to capture visible and invisible modal practices at work across settings and a movement away from a definite or true-false rendering of multimodality to one that allows for divergent ways of being with modes.
This paper contributes to decolonisation theory and debates in Higher Education by thinking from the practice of diversifying subject reading lists. To illustrate the scene within which diversification efforts unfold I draw on primary research designed to explore the function of a subject canon (Urban Studies). Researched and written as an autoethnographic rhizoanalysis, I show that texts’ meanings are intertextually established through hegemonic processes of canonisation, which are curricular in effect; and which draw in readers as nodes through which the assemblage proliferates. Using Karen Barad’s concept of intra-activity to better articulate the materiality of this curricular assemblage and our inseparability from it, I critique the common practice of adding more diversity for its failure to attend to underlying logics and its edging out of more radical responses. I then discuss the decolonial openings that intra-action makes possible, focusing on its potential for producing different knowledge(s) through reading and research.
What happens with ethical response-abilities that linger in early childhood education documentation practices? Thinking-with research-creation, I problematise the human focus of three and four-year old children caring for eggs in a classroom hatchery. Foregrounding non-human life (and death) brings an ethical disquiet that sticks around. Instead, the past-present-future becomes blurred with ghostly matters. What is particularly haunting is the disposability of non-human life after human educational events are over. Haunting data that is not easy to think with and irritates through time is conceptualised as a data-ghost. Through methodological creative experiments inspired by digital visualisations of non-human data-ghosts, I ponder with the minor of what is unthought, half-said and non-documented when chicks are returned to commercial hatcheries. Posthuman praxis leads me to trouble the human-centric focus of documentation practices and wonder what new questions are generated for multi-species flourishing when the foreground slips and flips to the non-human.
This article explores how artistic research practice, as a thinking through art, generates different understandings of the world. Having come to higher education through my visual arts practice, I trace threads of thinking-making practices that, while seeded in the studio, continue to generate new connections and concepts that in/form my PhD inquiry into different ways of learning in South African Higher Education contexts. Guided by Manning’s conceptualization of research-creation as an ecology of practices operative within the interstices of making and thinking, I show how artmaking as an intuitive process nudges my thinking through-and-around concerns obliquely, attuned toward different registers and levels of intensities, cutting across normative accounts of what it means to know. Referring to two bodies of my work, sum of the parts (2010) and Evidence of Things Unseen (2014), the article shows how materiality and making conjugate new languages that give expression to the ineffable obscured in the name of Science and Fine Art. Exploring the diffractive entanglements of thinking-making practices in the “between” of writing and drawing, the article shows how writing-with, drawing-with, doodling-with, and scrawling-with activate and agitate the spaces between words and images and do inquiry differently.
In this article, we take our thoughts for a walk through our three different doctoral journeys and experiences with the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry Webinar Series (2020–2021). The webinars presented an example of Slow scholarship, enabling us to think deeply and differently from others and develop new ideas to take further. The online connections offered opportunities for extending learning spaces beyond traditional bounded structures. Here we explore the rich learning gained from each other’s experiences of research, learning, and teaching in different higher education settings and ways in which these intersected with the webinars during the global COVID-19 pandemic. We contend that the generosity of senior academics in leadership positions who embraced global networks of communication, connected students with experts, and learned with and from their students through communal egalitarian spaces has enormous potential to support students as they traverse often demanding and challenging doctoral journeys.
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 Indigenous voices are currently manifest in classroom contexts. We then propose Indigenous relationality as the foundation and frame for new ways to read literature and understand the world. We consider the ways in which Indigenous cli-fi texts refuture relations and invite new modes of reading, focussing specifically on the way the concepts are taken up in Wright’s Carpentaria.
This editorial lays the groundwork and context for this special issue addressing a range of posthuman ecological approaches to the study and theorization of creativity, and its potential to transform understandings of 21st-century learning events and environments, including cities, schools, museums, parklands, digital environments, wild places, and more. Importantly, this collection establishes an ethics and politics of posthumanism as it intersects with creativity, including attention to the necessity and ethics of the ways in which Indigenous knowing and knowledge creation are changing and expanding traditional academic framings of arts-based research, creativity, and posthuman scholarship.
In this paper, I propose "A/autisms" as an organizing concept for considering the complex intersection of Autistic identity, autistic disability, and the contingency of the diagnosis "autism" in educational research. I draw from Neuroqueer(ing) Noise-my doctoral research-creation project in an integrated, mainstream early childhood classroom-to consider how this intersection might help us orient towards A/autisms as artists, researchers , and teachers. Moreover, I suggest that A/autisms might be understood as a methodology for reorienting toward the human subject in the ontological turn. This paper is of relevance to researchers in the field of critical autism studies, as well as educational researchers interested in "post"-humanism, feminist materialisms, and arts-based research.
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 the special issue engages critically with walking methodologies and the concept place from oblique angles.
This article conceptualizes the notion of magic(al)ing in relation to post-pandemic ways of thinking about data production and analyses. Revisiting old data produced pre-COVID-19 and engaging with new data produced during COVID-19, we consider the possibilities and potential of magic(al)ing as a theoretical concept. We think with several ideas informed by feminist ‘new’ materialists and post-inspired philosophies to conceptualize magic(al)ing: monism, spacetimemattering, blooms spaces and the pedagogy of an affective world. Over a year, we embarked on a reading/thinking inquiry about magic and literacies and their combined strength in locating literacies as embodied, relational, and sensory. Magic(al)ing has the potential to frame literacy moments as socio-material instances filled with affective flows and intensities. The concept of magic(al)ing fosters a space to not only rethink literacy but also to explore humans in relation to literacies. Kuby returns to an orange-paper-frog-puppet , a magic(al)ing moment that she often comes back to when thinking of the be(com)ing of literacies, especially in the uncertain times we find ourselves in a pandemic. Rowsell returns to a flowery artifact by a little girl who took part in a makerspace study in April 2019, speculating on how the same research could be conducted during lockdown. We also think-with new, unexpected data produced during COVID-19. As we engage again with these magic(al)ing moments, we explore the guest editors’ question: What methodological approaches are possible, and which kinds of research collaborations are appropriate?
Working from a speculative, more-than-human ontological position, Inefficient Mapping: A Protocol for Attuning to Phenomena presents a new, experimental cartographic practice and non-representational methodological protocol that attunes to the subaltern genealogies of sites and places, proposing a wayfaring practice for traversing the land founded on an ethics of care. As a methodological protocol, inefficient mapping inscribes the histories and politics of a place by gesturally marking affective and relational imprints of colonisation, industrialisation, appropriation, histories, futures, exclusions, privileges, neglect, survival, and persistence.
Inefficient Mapping details a research experiment and is designed to be taken out on mapping expeditions to be referred to, consulted with, and experimented with by those who are familiar or new to mapping. The inefficient mapping protocol described in this book is informed by feminist speculative and immanent theories, including posthuman theories, critical-cultural theories, Indigenous and critical place inquiry, as well as the works of Karen Barad, Erin Manning, Jane Bennett, Maria Puig de la Bellacassa, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, which frame how inefficient mapping attunes to the matter, tenses, and ontologies of phenomena and how the interweaving agglomerations of theory, critique, and practice can remain embedded in experimental methodologies.
The rapid shift to online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the penetration of an algorithmic world view into education systems around the world. Promoted by a burgeoning educational technology industry, platforms that use algorithms to structure and monitor teaching and learning have been presented as technical solutions to systemic problems. But they have also created new problems and reinforced existing inequities, stirring up public and political backlashes. Beyond its immediate effects during the pandemic in 2020, the expanded use of algorithm-driven learning management systems backed by major corporations has major implications for the future of global education.
This article proposes the inhumanities as an analytic to address the material confluences of race and environment in the epistemic construction of the humanities and social sciences. As the Anthropocene represents an explicit formation of political geology, from its inception as a means to frame a crisis of environmental conditions to the characterization of future trajectories of extinction, I argue that centering race is a way to reconceptualize and challenge the disciplinary approaches of the humanities, humanism, and the Anthropocene (e.g., the environmental humanities and geohumanities ¹ ). Foregrounding the conjoined historic geographies of racialization and ecological transformation through the discipline of geology, within the context of colonial and settler colonial extractivism, sets the conditions for thinking materially about decolonization as a geologic process. I make three interconnected points about the Anthropocene and inhumanities. First, the Anthropocene names a new field of geologically informed power relations that focus attention on the geographies of the inhuman, geologic forces, and the politics of nonlife. Second, the framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position that curates racialized geographies of environmental concern, impact, and futurity. Third, the inhumanities makes visible the historic double life of the inhuman as both matter and as a subjective racial category of colonial geographies and its extractive afterlives. In conclusion, I consider the emergence of geopower as a political technology of racial capitalism and governance of the present. Geopower, I argue, is the product of historical geologies of race that subtend a particular form of life marked by extractivism enacted on racialized geosocial strata.
This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement.
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 material world. This paper explores the power of speculative fiction to help us rethink empiricism in posthuman ecologies of the Anthropocene, in the midst of post-truth conditions and growing science denialism. We foreground speculative fiction as a way to open up scientific imaginaries, rethinking the relationship between nature, technics, and human “sense” making. We show how such texts offer alternative images of research methods for studying pluralist ecologies and new forms of worldly belonging.
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 across these three geographies and what I’ve come to describe as a feeling of affective white déjà vu. Affect theory, as I will discuss below, concerns atmospheres, surfaces, bodies, emotions, moods, vicinities and capacities. Sometimes affect clings to a body; other times it slides past it, landing elsewhere. Drawing on affect theory, critical race scholarship and discussions of whiteness, I argue that despite continued local attempts at diversification of English literary education, whiteness continues to circulate through and cling to many of the core texts, narratives and messages that make up English literary education. This whiteness is general and specific, global and local, obvious and hidden. Rather than attempting to discuss the literary canon as a whole, I focus on a specific literary text as an example of how whiteness circulates as neutral or normal in literary education, even in a text that’s often framed as helping (white) students learn about racism.
Working through four key tenets of Deleuze–Guattarian theory, the authors describe how contemporary affect theory offers a radically different perspective on reading. Asking how we can conceptualize reading differently if we conceptualize affect differently, we argue that possible meanings of reading or experiences of reading must be considered not as inherent to internal experiences of reading but as composed and recomposed in sets of affective relations. Using an example of two children reading, we consider how reading, as a material doing, takes up and is taken up by bodies, materials, spaces, histories, feelings, and ideas. To consider affect as the property of sets of present relations rather than of the individual prompts us to consider how the various elements assemble and break apart to produce intensities in which reading participates. Deprivileging human intentionality or motivations, we ask, “In a given instance, what conditions of possibility are being produced and for whom, and how are participants taking up or being moved by those conditions?” We conclude with suggestions for how contemporary affect theory can reorient our understanding of reading research.
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 form alliances with agencies alive with trickster motive. We use the science fiction novel The Three-body Problem to explore the specific challenges to scientific authority within this relational ontology, under various climatic regimes. We show how the SF novel offers insights into Latour’s proposal for science as a risky diplomacy in a metamorphic zone.
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-oriented ontology, and the ontological or vital materialist turn. As these theoretical turns are activated in qualitative research, they in turn upset classical notions of positivism, directly implicate researchers in the research process, attune researchers’ attention to more-than-human agents, challenge representationalism, and recognize that thinking-with theoretical concepts is also “empirical” research.
A common recommendation in critiques of datafication in education is for greater conversation between the two sides of the (critical) divide – what might be characterised as sceptical social scientists and (supposedly) more technically-minded and enthusiastic data scientists. This article takes the form of a dialogue between two academics representing these different perspectives – Dragan Gasevic (a data scientist who is one of the founders of the ‘learning analytics’ field) and Neil Selwyn (a social scientist and long-time critic of educational technology). Over the course of a six-month email exchange, we explore various arguments for and against the datafication of higher education. Thus, we are able to add a computational dimension to well-worn social criticisms of data representativeness, reductionism and injustice, as well as exploring social tensions inherent in technical claims to data-based precision, clarity and predictability. Crucially, these exchanges allow us to explore ways in which our two viewpoints converge, and therefore highlight opportunities for productive inter-disciplinary exchange and collaboration.
The Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) is used in thousands of universities across the United States and internationally, with a strong and growing presence in K-12 and higher education markets. Analyzing the development of the Canvas LMS, we examine 1) ‘frictionless’ data transitions that bridge K12, higher education, and workforce data 2) integration of third party applications and interoperability or data-sharing across platforms 3) privacy and security vulnerabilities, and 4) predictive analytics and dataveillance. We conclude that institutions of higher education are currently ill-equipped to protect students and faculty required to use the Canvas Instructure LMS from data harvesting or exploitation. We challenge inevitability narratives and call for greater public awareness concerning the use of predictive analytics, impacts of algorithmic bias, need for algorithmic transparency, and enactment of ethical and legal protections for users who are required to use such software platforms.
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 refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution‐focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co‐opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures.
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 approach, unsettling sound studies' inheritances that seek to separate, essentialize, naturalize/neutralize, capture, decontextualize, and represent. We unsettle these inheritances with six propositions: imbricate, stratify, provoke, inject, contextualize, and more-than-represent. These propositions, and this article's uptake of research-creation, hold implications for scholars interested in critically enacting sound studies research as well as qualitative and post qualitative research in general.
This photo essay demonstrates how arts-based methods can translate walking practices into an immanent and ethical research practice. Inefficient mapping brings arts practices and speculative theories together through critical, creative praxis, thereby creating a geontologic methodology for theorizing life in the current ecological crisis. The images convey how mapping the non/in/human while walking, extends awareness of rights, histories, presences and the impacts of settler colonial occupation on lands and inhabitants.
From the following open source journal:
http://www.publicpedagogies.org/journal/?fbclid=IwAR1DAnpz5Le12HCRwWKmrtgBnBTzaN_xoNeWir5JVQOOX7OxQhvpcyd_JbM
This article extends recent attempts to think (post)qualitative research together with decolonial, postcolonial and other critiques – as a frictional, fraught encounter. I review how the concept of voice has been used in past and present research with children and young people: from research speaking about children and young people, dialogical speaking with the ‘agentic’ young person, poststructural refusals of ‘raw voices’ speaking for themselves, and (post)qualitative onto-epistemological experiments with utterances spoken in research assemblages. Reading one of my research practices – the mis/use of cloth puppets with high school students – through recent critiques of (post)qualitative work, two particular concerns materialize: accounting for relations between past and present research, and accounting for what comes to matter during and after research encounters.
This article examines student teachers’ investigations of issues related to writing pedagogy, response, and evaluation in an English methods course, including their use of descriptive review of student writing (Carini, 2001) to analyze adolescents’ work collaboratively. Beginning with an examination of prevailing understandings of writing assessment and common instructional models in schools, the article explores critical inquiry–based approaches. This research documents how collaborative investigations encouraged student teachers to explore meaning and intentionality in student writing and to regard students as authors with intentionality and purpose. Findings substantiate adolescents’ and student teachers’ intellectual and experiential resources, suggesting how these can be a foundation for expanding conceptions and practices related to writing pedagogy, assessment, inquiry-based teaching, and teacher education.
Twelve visions of the future—by turns hilarious, frightening, and relevant—from new and established voices in science fiction.
In this book, new and established voices in science fiction come together to offer original stories of the future. Ken Liu writes about a virtual currency that hijacks our empathy; Elizabeth Bear shows us a smart home tricked into kidnapping its owner; Clifford V. Johnson presents, in a graphic novella, the story of a computer scientist seeing a new side of the AIs she has invented; and J. M. Ledgard describes a 28,000-year-old AI who meditates on the nature of loneliness. We encounter metal-melting viruses, vegetable-based heart transplants, search-and-rescue drones, and semi-automated sailing ships. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening, and always relevant, Twelve Tomorrows offers compelling visions of potential futures.
Originally launched in 2011 by MIT Technology Review, the Twelve Tomorrows series explores the future implications of emerging technologies through the lens of fiction. Featuring a diverse collection of authors, characters, and stories rooted in contemporary real-world science, each volume in the series offers conceivable and inclusive stories of the future, celebrating and continuing the genre of “hard” science fiction pioneered by authors such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein. Twelve Tomorrows is the first volume of the series to be published in partnership with the MIT Press.
Contributors Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds
This book explores the experience of dehumanization as the privation of speech. Taking up the figure of silence as the space between human and animal, it traces the potential for an alternate political and ethical way of life beyond law. Employing the resources offered by deconstruction as well as an ontological critique of biopower, this book suggests that humAnimal, as the site of impropriety opened by racism and manifested by silence, can be political and hazardous to power. Through the lens of such works as Coetzee’s Foe, Chesnutt’s “The Dumb Witness,” Dr. Itard’s “wild child,” and aerialist Philippe Petit’s Man on Wire, this book brings Derrida’s concept of the trace and his theory of sovereignty into conversation with Agamben’s investigation of the analytics of power. The task is twofold: on the one hand, to question the logocentric presumption that determines the separation between human and animal, and on the other to examine the conflation of this separation as an instrument of power in the practice of racism. The book details the differences and intersections between Derrida and Agamben in their respective approaches to power, claiming that to think simultaneously within the registers of deconstruction (which conceives of power as a symptom of the metaphysics of presence) and biopolitics (which conceives of power as the operation of difference) entails a specification of the political and ethical consequences that attends the two perspectives. When considered as the potential of language to refuse the law of signification and semantics, silence can neutralize the exercise of power through language, and this book’s inquiry discloses a counterpower that does not so much oppose or destroy the politics of the subject but rather neutralizes it and renders it ineffective.
Enlivened by queer and feminist enactments of new materialist, posthuman and affect theory, this chapter explores what has become possible with speculative pARTicipatory activist encounters with young people, educators and politicians in the field of gender and sexuality education in Wales (UK). Sparked by a throw-away comment of how some boys use rulers to lift up girls’ skirts, the chapter maps what else a ruler can do through a series of five ‘ruler-skirt risings’. Each rising provides a glimpse into the agency of ‘d/artaphacts’ (arts-based research objects) across micro-resonating moments to macro force-fields of change. From fashion activism to curriculum and national policy, every rising takes form and shape to in-form and reanimate how sexism, sexual violence and sexuality education might be felt, noticed and engaged with differently, but never in ways known in advance and always on the move.
In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.
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.
At the invitation of Professor Carlson, this paper responds to his questions regarding the meaning, value, and the future of (post)qualitative research, and takes up some of the issues and provocations I raised with his graduate students: reciprocity, relationality, stewardship, and an ethics of care. These conditions, or what I call feltness, are deeply embedded and entwined in my doings of research, or more specifically the practice of research-creation. This feltness shifts research to become a practice of intimacy. The paper commences with a brief introduction to research-creation which is potentially a parallel methodological intervention to (post)qualitative research, as it challenges what counts as disciplinary and academic knowledge, and inherited forms of value in the institution.
Archives, as repositories of culture and knowledge, are closely linked to colonial power, control, hegemony, and conquest. In recognizing the limitations and problems of conventional archives, scholars and artists offer counter-archiving as a method of interrogating what constitutes an archive and the selective practices that continuously erase particular subjects. Unlike static, stable, and linear colonial archives, counter-archives are grounded in accountability and reciprocity. Similarly, the anarchive is concerned with what it can do in the present-future. As such, anarchiving is less a thing, then a process or an action. This article examines anarchiving as research-creation practices through three provocations: anarchiving as indeterminate transformation, anarchiving as felt, and anarchiving as response-ability. We examine a particular anarchiving project Instant Class Kit dedicated to radical pedagogies and social justice. Anarchiving is fundamentally about practicing an ethics based on response-ability, stewardship, care, and reciprocity that center relationships to land, territory, human, and more-than-human bodies.