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Against Binaries: Images, Affects and Sites of Engagement
Abstract
In this chapter we explore material and discursive risk assemblages and reflect on our attempts to develop culturally responsive pedagogies that interrupt risk discourses. We draw on arts-based ethnographic data from a school in a deprived area of Manchester to consider how materialities, discourses and practices come together to make the risk discourses that position youth as being on the edge. Through the concepts of material and discursive assemblages we investigate how social and cultural edges are constructed, and by whom. We acknowledge the relationship between discourses of youth at risk and the possibility of being ‘on the/an edge’. Through data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we illustrate material assemblages of risk through which children are entangled in a racialised politics of schooling, we show how school spaces impact on researchers’ and students’ subjectivities and, in disrupting these material and discursive risk assemblages through arts-based methods, we show how parents’ knowledges and art practices can be mobilised to create discursive and material assemblages of culturally responsive pedagogies.
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This conceptual work examines the misappropriation of culturally responsive pedagogy by identifying ways in which misappropriations commonly occur in urban teaching and learning environments. They include culturally responsive practices as a smokescreen of good intentions, culture as a hook to gain students' attention, and culturally responsive pedagogy as a tool of assimilation. As teacher educators, we see a need to critically examine pedagogical approaches to specifically identify the perpetuation of historical inaccuracies, harmful stereotypes, and masks of good intentions. Three premises are proposed that reflect a commitment to defining and identifying culturally responsive teacher education practices.
Global neoliberal imperatives that numerically measure student success through standardized testing undermine the educational outcomes of students, in particular Indigenous students, and construct a seemingly fixed reality that avoids State responsibility to address structural inequality in Australia. Achievement gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous school students in mathematics have become an urgent international problem. Although evidence suggests that culturally responsive pedagogies (CRPs) improve student academic success for First Nations peoples in settler colonial countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, less prominent is a focus on how CRP is enacted and mobilized in Australian classrooms. Although some initiatives exist, this article explores how creative and body-based learning (CBL) strategies might be utilized to enact CRP. Using an ethnographic case study approach, we examined how two early career teachers serving Indigenous and ethnically diverse students implemented CBL to reengage students with mathematics. Findings suggest that the teachers were able to mobilize a number of CRP principles using CBL strategies to facilitate engagement in mathematics for urban Aboriginal students. Specifically, when teachers repositioned students as “competent” and designed embodied learning experiences that connected to their cultural backgrounds, students let go of their cautious learner histories and remade themselves as clever and competent.
This paper brings together two different ways of knowing failure, with a view to offering epistemological, methodological and ontological resources for undertaking feminist research. The idea behind ‘two ways of knowing failure’ is to make a point about the kinds of knowledge, data, and methods that are legitimate and valued in the research assemblage, while showing how a feminist ethnographic position can leave one vulnerable to feeling your whole person is a failure if parts of one’s research do not work. On face value, readers could be excused for thinking this research experience really does not matter: who cares if I feel like a failure? Especially when all the experiences of failure end up creating a portfolio of successful ethnographic work?
I maintain that recognition of the complexity of the research assemblage and the gendered nature of the research assemblage does matter in terms of supporting the work of emerging feminist ethnographers, who surely have similar experiences of feeling like a failure, experiences that are not necessarily echoed in the existing literature on methods and failure. Another way of saying this is that I am going on record talking about research failure so that women who fail in aspects of ethnographic research methods can understand their failure as normal, as something others have experienced, and perhaps as a step to success. Failure and success are enmeshed, although experiences of failure do not make this clear. Through putting academic and esteemed ‘theories of failure’ alongside first person, methodological experiences of failure in fieldwork, I mean to suggest that it is popularly seen as acceptable within social research assemblages to write about the political significance of failure (see, for example, Halberstam 2011), but not to actually do fieldwork that fails. Doing fieldwork that fails is somehow taboo, despite the gains made towards appreciating the political significance of failure in queer and disability theory.
While this paper is about methodological failure, it arises from a broader project working with responsive ethnography to explore the common ground between people of different faith backgrounds. The substantive content of my research project on religion is not taken as the focus of this paper, as I am arguing that methodologically, ethnographic work blends one’s experience of fieldwork with one’s sense of self and that this presents particular challenges and vulnerabilities for feminist researchers. In being and becoming a responsive ethnographer, one cannot always plan research: one must often relinquish control. Not being in control often feels like failing. The experience of being a woman researcher, and an outsider trying to belong to a culture that is not one’s own, can also at times feel like failure. Being brave enough to experience failure, then, is perhaps a pre-requisite for undertaking feminist ethnographic research. In developing a feminist ethnographic perspective, on running a trans-national empirical research project, I have come to appreciate the epistemological resources that feminist literature on failure provide for those of us who agree with critiques suggesting happiness and mindfulness can be neoliberal technologies; but more than this, I’ve had to live with feeling like a failure while assessing data sets that contain moments of failure that are often methodologically significant and aesthetically interesting. The project on faith, belonging, community and identity about which I write is a very successful project, in the respect that the research methods broadly work well and I am obtaining rich data as well as impacting the communities in which I work. Sometimes I believe the methods I have invented will outlive me as a person. I explain these methods in other publications (Hickey-Moody 2017 & 2018; Hickey-Moody & Harrison 2018) and give a little more detail in what is to follow, but this paper is not about what I see as being ‘successful’ about the way they work. This paper is an expression of my desire to speak to the magnitude of my experience of the utility of accident, the labour of gender, utility of vulnerability and the significance of responsivity.
Drawn from a decade of refugee studies, this book offers a wealth of insights on arts-based methodologies. It explores exciting new prospects for participatory and culturally safe research, and will be a reference resource for researchers of all levels and community practitioners.
The book tackles questions of meaningful research practice: How do people with lived experiences of forced migration—Knowledge Holders—lead the way? Can arts-based methods bring about policy and social change? And what of ethical issues?
By reflecting on the strengths and limitations of four research methods (digital storytelling, photography, community music, and participatory video), readers are invited to craft their own approach to arts-based projects.
This article is an investigation of the agency of matter and an exposition of the new materialist methods I have been developing as part of a muti-sited trans-national ethnography that features socially engaged arts practices alongside more traditional ethnographic and qualitative techniques. I think through the agency of matter and consider the temporality of matter as part of its agency, understanding these agents as constitutive features of the research assemblage. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from the United Kingdom, I examine how matter’s space-time can impact processes of making the social. I develop theoretical resources for moving the field forward.
Negative outcomes for students of color and those who are economically disadvantaged are troubling patterns in schools nationwide. Systemic racial disparities, including disproportional poverty, are part of the problem. Regardless of their race, however, children who live with poverty often have heightened exposure to adverse experiences. Implementing a culturally responsive trauma-informed approach to understand and respond to students can address the impact of disparities, teach resiliency skills, and promote the wellbeing and achievement of all students. This study describes a school-university collaboration to develop such a model. Findings explore school personnel’s perceptions about race, trauma, and the stressors their students face in the context of the developing model.
How are the arts important in young people's lives? Youth, Arts and Education offers a groundbreaking theory of arts education. Anna Hickey-Moody explores how the arts are ways of belonging, resisting, being governed and being heard.
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Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.
Pictures can represent more than one entity, and they can also represent literal or nonliteral concepts associated with a referent. In two studies, we examined whether 4-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and adults can view pictures as both literal and nonliteral when they are presented with different contextual cues, which would indicate representational flexibility. In Study 1, children and adults were asked to name iconic pictures after hearing a story explaining how a fictional character had created or used a picture in, for instance, a literal context (e.g., a girl used a picture of a crown to represent what she wanted for Christmas) and a second story on how the same artist produced or used an identical picture in a nonliteral context (e.g., the same girl used the picture of a crown to represent what she wanted to be when she grew up). After each story, the picture was shown and participants were asked “What does this mean?” The 6-year-olds and adults, but not the 4-year-olds, showed representational flexibility in their interpretations of pictures across contexts. Study 2 provided evidence of flexible pictorial interpretations, even for the younger age group, when children were presented with a game in which they were asked to select a suitable picture to represent a nonliteral referent. Taken together, our results suggest that the conditions under which representational flexibility is elicited influence the developmental progression observed.
“Flying soccer balls that are ice-cream factories inside, cars with wings, mobile recycling plants, streets that are rivers. These are the inventions children have offered up to Hickey-Moody. This is because she deftly uses arts-based methodologies to provide resources for engaging with children and communities to examine social issues such as belonging, community cohesion, faith and attachment. This book will appeal to those who wish to work with arts practices to explore similar themes in complex social circumstances, either as 'research' or as 'community engagement.' Hickey-Moody is an international leader in arts-based methodologies, if you're interested in how to do them well—you should read this book.”
—Mary Lou Rasmussen, Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, Australian National University
This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with children by drawing on five years of the authors’ experience carrying out arts-based research with children in Australia and the UK. Based on the Australian Research Council-funded Interfaith Childhoods project, the authors describe methods of engaging communities and making data with children that foreground children’s experiences and worldviews through making, being with, and viewing art. Framing these methods of doing, seeing, being, and believing through art as modes of understanding children’s strategies for negotiating personal identities and values, this book explores the value of arts-based research as a means of obtaining complex information about children’s life worlds that can be difficult to express verbally.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
Young people in statutory care and protection interact with social workers, who hold potential to provide a supportive adult role in their lives. Many however, run away at an early age and end up on the street trading sex for money or other favours. There is potential to improve outcomes for young people in care if the relationship between young people and their social workers is better addressed. This paper uses data from a qualitative study of 14 young people who traded sex and who had experienced interactions with social workers. A thematic analysis identified three themes: the rigidity of social work practice; contesting the family situation; and resisting the at-risk label. We argue that to have any impact on outcomes for young people in care, social workers need to prioritise relationship-building above the need to conform to organizational protocols and guidelines. Such guidelines assist the social worker in assessing whether family situations pose high risk for a young person, but the “at-risk” label is contested by young people, which results in a lack of trust and a barrier to relationship building.
Young people with tenuous relationships to schooling and education are an enduring challenge when it comes to addressing social inclusion, yet their experiences remain overlooked in efforts to widen participation in higher education. The Politics of Widening Participation and University Access for Young People examines the existing knowledges and feelings these young people have about higher education, and, through the authors’ empirical research, demonstrates how sustained connections to educational futures can be created for them. Drawing from an empirical study with nearly three hundred young people who have precarious relationships to schooling and live in disadvantaged communities, this book offers new insights into their subjects’ experiences of educational disadvantages. It explains the different ways the university is constructed as impossible, undesirable, or even risky, by young people experiencing educational disadvantage. The book brings their stories into focus to offer new ways of thinking about the educational consequences of alienation from school. It shows how our understanding of the politics of experience of these young people has an important impact on our ability to develop appropriate means through which to engage them in higher education. This book challenges and significantly advances the popular frames for international debate on widening participation and the ethical right to educational participation in contemporary society. As such, it will be of be of key interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of higher education, sociology of education, anthropology of education, cultural studies of education, sociology as well as to those concerned by the impact of disadvantage on young people’s understandings of, and aspirations towards, education and attending university. © 2017 Valerie Harwood, Anna Hickey-Moody, Samantha McMahon and Sarah O’Shea.
This article examines how stereotypes operate in the social construction of African Canadian males as “at risk” students. Cultural analysis and critical race theory are used to explain how the stereotypes of the youth as immigrant, fatherless, troublemaker, athlete, and underachiever contribute to their racialization and marginalization that in turn structure their learning processes, social opportunities, life chances, and educational outcomes. The article concludes by suggesting that addressing the stereotypes is not only a task for educators but also for society as a whole.
This paper builds upon the edict for self-determination in El Plan de Santa Bárbara: a Chicano plan for higher education (1969), which calls for “strategic use of education,” by placing value on needs of the community (La Causa, p. 9). For me, this passage translates into valuing needs of community-college students entering my classes and life. I believe it is my obligation, as an educator, to problematize ways in which knowledge has been defined, framed, presented, and researched by dominant ideologies informing institutions of learning at all levels. In essence, this work is a meditation allowing readers to witness how I am weaving together various strands of myself including the personal, emotional, professional, intellectual, and spiritual. It captures how my participant-observation of MAS-Tucson educators, while describing their use of barrio pedagogy and critically compassionate intellectualism, has been enhanced by my re-reading of Elena Avila’s (2000) Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. This paper represents an ongoing epistemological exercise about my own teaching and scholarship, resulting in an emergence of my own modality as an apprenticing practitioner of Chicano-Indigenous pedagogy.
In Britain over the past 12 years, despite the normalising of sex and reproduction outside marriage, and contrary to the evidence that there are fewer teenage parents than in the past, teenage parenthood has become amplified as a social problem. The existence of such a paradox suggests that this problematisation has captured a number of significant political and social dynamics and anxieties, in particular, the co-existence of widespread concern with social disorder and moral decline with the recognition that past forms of social and moral ordering have an alienating rather than a cohering effect. This paper explores: how the problem of teenage pregnancy has been both amplified and redefined; the role of public health discourse in de-moralising the problem; expanding notions of harm to the child; the construction of the teenage mother as lacking in rational and moral agency; and the construction of her and her child as a social threat. Through an engagement with critiques of teenage pregnancy policy, risk theory and recent developments within the study of ‘parenting culture’, this paper seeks to explain why the ‘teenage mother’ has such symbolic power despite an apparent de-moralisation of sex.
Youth ‘at risk’ is the currently favoured label used in Australian policy for youth whose educational outcomes are considered too low, with an emphasis on the risk of not completing senior secondary education. Although some research has identified factors contributing to this risk as stemming from complex interactions between individual and family circumstances as well as characteristics of schools and society, policy identification of youth ‘at risk’ has tended to simplistically focus on personal attributes of young people. Moreover, this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic minority versus a ‘normal’ majority. Thus, the dominant conceptualization of youth ‘at risk’ draws attention to what is wrong with these youth, rather than to what may be wrong with schooling. This paper examines both empirical observations and discursive conceptualizations to critique the ‘youth at risk’ label, and proposes use of the concept of ‘marginalized students’ instead, which identifies individuals not through their personal characteristics but through their relationship with schooling. This approach allows recognition that marginalization is at least in part a product of schools and society, and requires action in those arenas.
Questions abound in the U.S. based teacher education literature about the kind of knowledge teachers should possess about learning and academic achievement that will enable them to provide all students with an equitable, effective schooling experience. This article examines how a group of preservice teachers—enrolled in a teacher education program that challenges deficit thinking—understand and talk about academic achievement, paying particular attention to the extent to which the candidates account for academic achievement and recognize potential academic risk. Based on the paradoxical stability and tentativeness of teacher candidates' talk about risk, academic achievement and the deployment of the “at-risk” category, I suggest the need to illuminate the complex body of knowledge that informs teacher candidates' understanding, particularly the knowledge deployed in teacher education curriculum.
Conventional risk discourse and the proliferation of fear
- R C Schehr
Toward an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy: A narrative review of the literature
- A Morrison
- L.-I Rigney
- R Hattam
- A Diplock