Thinking with the world – to explore the becoming of phenomena

This article discusses how it is possible to think with the world in educational research. How can this thinking with the world generate knowledge about the becoming of phenomena? To answer this question this paper undertakes a diffractive reading of selected texts from Niels Bohr, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres. This diffractive reading reveals that the world becomes with itself contributing to an internal principle or an inner self-differentiation. This means that all phenomena can be understood as related to the world in one way or another. This paper contends that the researcher body is important to investigations of the becoming of phenomena with the world, therefore a haptic sensorium is developed as a means to visualize bodily affects and to recognize limit values to the world, for example, background noise. The article concludes with a discussion about creating knowledge of this process as a rhizome. The article attempts to illustrate that thinking with the world can generate new knowledge to understand the becoming of phenomena, which can contribute to the development of educational research.

Alexander Technique as an auto-ethological mode of differing inquiry

In practice, the work of F.M Alexander can sometimes facilitate, enliven or accentuate embodied experience and awareness (Dimon, 2015; Jones, 1976). It can also provide a means whereby the ‘psycho-physical instrument of self’ becomes more readily co-ordinated within its own system of organisation and simultaneously, in relation to whatever it encounters in the world. McCormack’s (2013) reading of Dewey’s “ethology of experience” is salient here, where experience is conceptualised as open-ended, affective, and ‘radically experimental’. Our interest lies in the subtle, barely-perceptible difference/s that sometimes emerge/s when we contemplate/engage a thought, an object, a connection, or an encounter with a freshly-attuned, embodied instrument. Experiencing these differences might also point to some unexplored ways of being in, and coming-to-know, the worlds we inhabit and inquire into.

The Ethos of Citation in Qualitative Research Methodology

Framed through Kenneth Burke’s famous parlor metaphor, this article considers how decisions related to citation are foundational to scholarly communication, with particular emphasis on qualitative research logics. Each citation decision implicates academicians in complex rhetorical and ethical situations that have material impact on other scholars, students receiving curriculum, and even existential notions related to the very survival of ideas. Believing that the texts we produce matter—both as objects of care and material constructions in themselves—this inquiry walks through theoretical and practical considerations for citation. Additionally, this article incorporates writing activities, and three writing artifacts from contributors, into the text to explore simple ways to play with citation in the classroom and research.

Anglocentrism in the Academy: On Linguistic Privilege, Mastery and Hoito

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.

Editorial

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From swings, through physics, with pendulums, to gendering: Re-turning diffractive analyses on science and gender in preschool

In this paper we re-turn (Barad, 2014) parts of the diffractive analyses conducted in a research project on science and gender in preschool (Günther-Hanssen, 2018, 2020; Günther-Hanssen, Danielsson, & Andersson, 2020). In our first re-turning, we explore how a swing and scientific phenomena in the data co-created the knowledge construction in entanglements with the researcher. To do this, we engage with how embodiment and re-actualized experiences of swinging came to matter. We then re-turn how certain events in the data are always part of other events, both in time and space. For this task, we elaborate with writing different situations from the data through one another. As we continue re-turning the analysis, new diffraction patterns emerge with each turn. By the end of the paper, our diffractive writings and readings have been re-turned into explanations of how pendulums can be used to think-with and approach gendering in preschool

A tale of grappling: Performative duoethnography as expanded methodological thinking

This article is a tale of two researchers, teachers, and artists grappling and playing with duoethnography. By expanding the methodology, we aim to bridge duoethnography into pedagogy. Grappling with the methodological to pedagogical bridge, we found that intertwined performative aspects of doing a duoethnography could challenge our knowledge production and roles as researchers and the current and more dominant practices that we operate within. We engage with a performative paradigm (Bolt, 2016) and lean on relevant theories from new materialist feminist thinkers such as Karen Barad (2003, 2007), Lenz Taguchi (2009, 2012) and Tami Spry (2011, 2016), while dialoguing with Joe Norris and Richard D. Sawyer’s (2012) tenets of duoethnography. Our embodiment of these tenets, intertwined with our theoretical positioning, allows our investigation to expand into a performative duoethnography. As an end, we propose duoethnography as a critical performative pedagogy (Pineau, 2002) and offer this article as a playful impulse connecting methodological considerations with pedagogy.

Water as Artist-Collaborator: Posthumanism and Reconciliation in Relational Media Arts-Based Education

The global climate change-related water crisis, disproportionately affecting peoples marginalised by ongoing settler-colonialism, challenges us to take up a new ontology beyond the Anthropocene. Recognising universities as ethically entangled, my PhD praxis process aimed at engaging universities in reconciliation – of peoples and ecosystems – as a practice. This practice takes the form of a relational university course that involves intra-actions between students, water bodies and technology (audio/video as relational texts) to co-construct water narratives as films. In this paper, using posthuman theories to read the data, I uncover what/who is being changed in this course and how. Most notable of these changes is that of water as becoming collaborator in artistic/knowledge co-production, where students think with water. I argue this renders possible reconciliation understood as a material-discursive practice, with water, (re)configuring relationality to decentre humans and their ways of knowing/being/doing, and to co-constitute more equal power relations between bodies (both human and nonhuman).

How to expand the boundaries: feminist posthumanist elaborations on change in education

Change is a vital matter connecting to key educational concerns of teaching and learning and also involves questions of ethics. By deploying a feminist posthumanist framework, this paper elaborates change together with the notions of boundaries and responsibility. This is done by exploring moments from a collaborative research project conducted in a Swedish upper secondary school concerning a teaching unit focusing on equality and norms. The questions guiding the paper are: How is change enacted within the teaching? And, how to unfold the responsibilities the teaching entails? By working within the interplay of empirical enquiry and theoretical elaboration, the paper addresses how a multitude of encounters become involved in enactments of change. Further, it unfolds how change entails both unpredictability and responsibility for teaching and learning. In the concluding notes the ambiguities of change are stressed addressing the call within posthuman ethics of how to expand the boundaries.

Change at the Museum - The Knowledge Production of Human Evolution

Museums today play an important role as a space for learning about science and the world. For this article, the phenomenon of human evolution is explored as an example of knowledge production about change. Empirical materials on exhibitions of human evolution were collected from visits to 25 historical and natural history museums. The empirical materials are analyzed together with a posthuman version of evolutionary theory, with a focus on aspects of change. This is based on a post-anthropocentric and relational approach to human evolution and change. The analysis shows that (i) museums face an anthropocentric tension, (ii) evolutionary change is seen as both an inherent quality of the individual species and as an entanglement of humans and the natural environment, (iii) the notion of ‘the first human’ produces various and contentious versions of knowledges about evolutionary change.