Strange Assemblage

This paper contends that the power of Deleuze & Guattari’s (1988) notion of assemblage as theorised in 1000 Plateaus can be normalised and reductive with reference to its application to any social-cultural context where an open system of dynamic and fluid elements are located. Rather than determining the assemblage in this way, this paper argues for an alternative conception of ‘strange assemblage’ that must be deliberately and consciously created through rigorous and focused intellectual, creative and philosophical work around what makes assemblages singular. The paper will proceed with examples of ‘strange assemblage’ taken from a film by Peter Greenaway (A Zed and 2 Noughts); the film ‘Performance’; educational research with Sudanese families in Australia; the book, Bomb Culture by Jeff Nuttall (1970); and the band Hawkwind. Fittingly, these elements are themselves chosen to demonstrate the concept of ‘strange assemblage’, and how it can be presented. How exactly the elements of a ‘strange assemblage’ come together and work in the world is unknown until they are specifically elaborated and created ‘in the moment’. Such spontaneous methodology reminds us of the 1960s ‘Happenings’, the Situationist International and Dada/Surrealism. The difference that will be opened up by this paper is that all elements of this ‘strange assemblage’ cohere in terms of a rendering of ‘the unacceptable.'

Cartographies as spaces of inquiry to explore of teacher's nomadic learning trajectories

This paper is part of a research project, in which secondary teachers were invited to generate cartographies, and participate in conversations about the scenarios and where they learn and the movements they make, inside and outside school. They were also invited to think about what they valued of this performative act as a source of knowledge and experience. By generating cartographies, as a visual and textual epistemological and methodological move, we inquire those interstices, displacements, instable journeys, ways of knowing, assemblages and entanglement through which teachers explore and perform their nomadic learning paths. The main aim of this research process it is no longer about getting results but generating and putting into action concepts such as rhizome, intensity, affect, gesture, displacement, metaphor. Concepts that are helping us to think about how learning gets through teachers' movements and trajectories. Specifically, in this paper, we reflect on how nomadism localizes learning not as an outcome but as an activity staged within a processual, relational and performative ontology of becoming. In addition, we consider how all these processes affect us, as teachers and researchers

Writing and monitoring in International Standardization, Theoretical Choices and Methodological tools

Normalisation, fouille de textes, ontologiesInternational audienceMany organizations are in charge of global security management. This paper outlines and argues for the construction of a theoretical and methodological framework in order to critically assess the new technopolitics currently being developed in the field of global security and which are materialized in standards. The main purpose is to design both a methodology and specific text mining tools to investigate these standards. These tools will be implemented in a platform designed to provide cartographic representations of standards and to assist the navigation of an end-user through a corpus of standards

Mater and matter: a prelimary cartography of material feminisms

Recientemente, ha habido un nuevo interés en la materia y la materialidad en la investigación feminista. El artículo sitúa a los feminismos materiales contemporáneos en relación con tradiciones más antiguas en las cuales se han establecido aproximaciones entre el feminismo y el materialismo. Aborda cuatro rasgos distintivos que considero como importantes mejoras teóricas y perspectivas políticas prometedoras de los feminismos materiales: (1) un mayor compromiso con la ciencia; (2) la apreciación de la agencia material; (3) el surgimiento de una perspectiva posthumanista; Y (4) una reevaluación y revisión de la ética. El artículo proporciona una cartografía provisional o cartografía preliminar de esta reorientación teórica y empírica, a la vez que apunta a algunos problemas teóricos y posibles inconvenientes en los actuales debates feministas y académicos.Recently, there has been a new interest in matter and materiality in feminist scholarship. The article situates contemporary material feminisms in relation to older traditions of feminist engagements with materialism. It discusses four distinctive features that I take to be important theoretical improvements and promising political prospects of material feminisms: (1) a stronger engagement with science; (2) the appreciation of material agency; (3) the emergence of a posthumanist perspective; and (4) a reevaluation and revision of ethics. The article provides a provisional mapping or preliminary cartography of this theoretical and empirical re-orientation, while pointing to some theoretical problems and possible drawbacks in current feminist debates and scholarship

Semantic-Enabled Contacts as part of an Art Project Management tracking tool: Case of Re-Source project

International audienceAt the beginning of the ReSource project, is the observation that Art World is now fully 2.0, facing challenges such as transparency, reflexivity and participation. Mnemotix, a digital cooperative society, has been working for 2 years in partnership with the Contemporary Art Foundation Lafayette Anticipations and Alexandre Monnin, on an innovative application aiming at documenting in real time the collective process that leads to the production of works of art. Based on semantic technologies, tailor-made ontology and thesaurus, this application chain proposes to highlight the community of actors and skills involved in artworks production. We will present in this article our innovative custom-made tool for collaborative storytelling of Artworks, the dedicated ReSource ontology as well as its use in a semantic annotation interface to promote Artworks monitoring and visualizations of the interactions between members, contacts, resources and projects within the Contemporary Art ecosystem

Queering Media Archaeology

This contribution outlines a theory of the performative nature of queer media agency. Drawing on key concepts in the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, it looks at how media themselves can be queer and act subversively in relation to a historically contingent discursive order as well as on the impact of the continuum between material bodies and media as they are reconfigured in the digital. It highlights repetition and reproducibility as shared core concerns of queer theory and media archaeology and seeks to show that the former has a lot of bearing on the latter. Queer theory also allows for a more radical understanding of the body as medium, an understanding with implications for where we draw the line between body and medium, between organic and inorganic matter. The construction of bodies and their coming into being through a discursive configuration is deeply intertwined with media in several ways. Media are performative in the sense that they enable technical repetition – creating habits, orientations, expectations and rules – that produces discourse. The quantitative intensification allowed by digital media draws this performative aspect to the front. Finally, the article offers new perspectives on the issue of sensory perception in the medianaturalcultural continuum

Affection as a movement of desire bound to pedagogical relations

In this article I present my journey through the pedagogy of affection, starting from a conjuncture that made me pay attention, in the teaching of Psychology of Art, Contemporary Visualities and Arts-based Research at the Faculty of Fine Arts, to the entanglement between desire and pedagogical relations. From this crossroad, I consider pedagogical relations (inspired by Bernard Charlot, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Alfred Porres and Max van Manen) as part of an encounter between subjects and knowledge that affects the positions of students and teachers and challenges thedualism ‘them and us’. Desire (based on Gilles Deleuze and Jacque Lacan) emergesin pedagogical relations as an agency that needs to leave behind the obsession to reproduce and, mainly, to interpret, diagnose and classify the student. At this crossroad between pedagogical relations and desires, affects appear when an experience of encounter of subjectivities (how we know and narrate ourselves) and knowledge (how we link ourselves to what we know) takes place. To illustrate this entanglement of pedagogical relations, desire and affects, I present two examples connected with my roles of teacher and researcher. The first one links with an Arts- based Research course where teachers and students learn horizontally and differentially. The second one, focusing in a cartography make by a secondary school teacher to give an account of her learning path, is part of a larger research project "How do teachers learn: educational implications and challenges for social change". Both examples contribute to explore the notion of affection as part of a substantial change in the relationships around politics, research, and pedagogy

Affection as a movement of desire bound to pedagogical relations

In this article I present my journey through the pedagogy of affection, starting from a conjuncture that made me pay attention, in the teaching of Psychology of Art, Contemporary Visualities and Arts-based Research at the Faculty of Fine Arts, to the entanglement between desire and pedagogical relations. From this crossroad, I consider pedagogical relations (inspired by Bernard Charlot, Elizabeth Ellsworth, Alfred Porres and Max van Manen) as part of an encounter between subjects and knowledge that affects the positions of students and teachers and challenges the dualism 'them and us'. Desire (based on Gilles Deleuze and Jacque Lacan) emerges in pedagogical relations as an agency that needs to leave behind the obsession to reproduce and, mainly, to interpret, diagnose and classify the student. At this crossroad between pedagogical relations and desires, affects appear when an experience of encounter of subjectivities (how we know and narrate ourselves) and knowledge (how we link ourselves to what we know) takes place. To illustrate this entanglement of pedagogical relations, desire and affects, I present two examples connected with my roles of teacher and researcher. The first one links with an Artsbased Research course where teachers and students learn horizontally and differentially. The second one, focusing in a cartography make by a secondary school teacher to give an account of her learning path, is part of a larger research project 'How do teachers learn: educational implications and challenges for social change'. Both examples contribute to explore the notion of affection as part of a substantial change in the relationships around politics, research, and pedagogy