Is this Choreography?: Choreographing conditions for innovative practice in everyday work

The article introduces some of the concepts from experimental contemporary dance and choreography, such as “body and materiality”, the “method of practice”, and “undoing everydayness”, that have not been addressed much in the “dance and organization” theory. It expands the application of dance methods from the predominant field of leadership practice towards the innovation management and development of innovative competence of employees in organizations. The concept of “body and materiality” suggests that employees could focus more on engaging the body and materiality when innovating in order to balance the external drivers of innovation (such as market trends, user needs, and increase of shareholder value) with their own needs, desires and well-being, but also to make use of the vast possibilities of embodied knowledge that is often excluded from innovation processes. The “method of practice” proposes to give more attention to the process rather than just the performance or result of innovating, using methods, such as “doing less” to create more time to reflect, finding “meaningful questions” to innovate around, and using “improvisation” as a method to develop new ideas through the practice of spontaneous experimentation. It shifts the idea from using innovative competence to perform a desired effect through prescribed top-down innovation projects towards developing innovative practice through durational bottom-up exploration. “Undoing everydayness” hints that innovation can come closer to everyday work routines of all employees, by challenging existing norms and combining critical thinking with exploration of potentiality in everyday work. Concrete examples of activities through which these concepts were materialized in a choreographic intervention at the Art of Management conference 2016 are described and their potential to be applied in organizations discussed

Sociomateriality and disabled individuals’ identity work: a critical poststructuralist research agenda

This paper responds to calls to rebalance the role of materiality in identity work. Taking a critical poststructuralist approach to identity work and a relational ontology perspective on sociomateriality, we explore how a ‘disabled’ person’s identity work is shaped by and responds to the influences of embodied practices and material arrangements within the workplace. We achieve this by reviewing the notion of sociomateriality as a "constitutive entanglement" (Orlikowski, 2007: 1437) of the material and the human. More specifically, we discuss how disabled individuals are constituted through sociomaterial relations and practices involving the body, assistive technology and mundane artefacts. This paper, therefore, contributes to the emerging interest, in identity studies, on the role of the material within identity work, and, in Disability Studies, to the entanglement of the social and material in constructions of disability as difference

Material murmurings

This thesis, Material Murmurings, comprising of exegesis and creative practice, focuses on the central research question: “How do we understand the materiality of glass and what happens when said materiality is approached through feminist scholarship?” This question forms the basis for an investigation through creative practice and analysis via an interpretive framework of feminist knowledges of the body. The creative practice embraces glass as the central medium with a series of exhibitions that responded to the interpretive paradigm. It is expected that Material Murmurings will highlight and make evident the value of post-technical approaches in glass art which have only recently become an acknowledged form of contemporary visual arts within Australia and, to a lesser degree, the broader international context. The intention of this thesis is to address the lack of dialogue surrounding glass as a contemporary visual arts material by discussing how female artists have been using glass within their practice through a paradigm of feminist scholarship of the body. A lack of formalised inquiry into the material depth of glass exists. Through formalising this discussion via a framework of feminist knowledges, the study will open up the possibilities for writing about glass, allowing for the expansion of the dialogue surrounding contemporary glass art. The study will also make visible and highlight the breadth and diversity of contemporary glass works being produced particularly by female visual artists, embracing the material itself for its depth and wealth of possible meaning. The exegesis pays particular attention to the work of female artists who have embraced glass for its materiality. Materiality is understood as the insistence of meaning that a material contributes to a work of art; the qualities, history and function beyond the decorative or aesthetic value that the material contributes to the artwork. My feminist visual arts praxis has provided the motivation for this exegesis and my obsession with glass has driven the choices of artists and theorists discussed. The exegesis demonstrates how glass can be interpreted/read/understood within the visual arts through a feminist lens. Various exhibitions through the research period culminated in a final exhibition titled Material Murmurings (2013). These exhibitions revealed different ways of critically interpreting and locating glass works beyond the traditional craft paradigm. This research has responded to the contemporary scholarly call for a need for visual arts critical review to be more inclusive of contemporary glass works, and has provided through practice-led research that is inclusive of materiality, praxis and process, a basis for this, with significant outcomes exhibited as artefact/object/publication

What really matters? The elusive quality of the material in feminist thought

The concept of the 'material' was the focus of much feminist work in the 1970s. It has always been a deeply contested one, even for feminists working within a broadly materialist paradigm of the social. Materialist feminists stretched the concept of the material beyond the narrowly economic in their attempts to develop a social ontology of gender and sexuality. Nonetheless, the quality of the social asserted by an expanded sense of the material - its 'materiality' - remains ambiguous. New terminologies of materiality and materialization have been developed within post-structuralist feminist thought and the literature on embodiment. The quality of 'materiality' is no longer asserted - as in materialist feminisms - but is problematized through an implicit deferral of ontology in these more contemporary usages, forcing us to interrogate the limits of both materialist and post-structuralist forms of constructionism. What really matters is how these newer terminologies of 'materiality' and 'materialization' induce us to develop a fuller social ontology of gender and sexuality; one that weaves together social, cultural, experiential and embodied practices

Literacy for digital futures : Mind, body, text

The unprecedented rate of global, technological, and societal change calls for a radical, new understanding of literacy. This book offers a nuanced framework for making sense of literacy by addressing knowledge as contextualised, embodied, multimodal, and digitally mediated. In today’s world of technological breakthroughs, social shifts, and rapid changes to the educational landscape, literacy can no longer be understood through established curriculum and static text structures. To prepare teachers, scholars, and researchers for the digital future, the book is organised around three themes – Mind and Materiality; Body and Senses; and Texts and Digital Semiotics – to shape readers’ understanding of literacy. Opening up new interdisciplinary themes, Mills, Unsworth, and Scholes confront emerging issues for next-generation digital literacy practices. The volume helps new and established researchers rethink dynamic changes in the materiality of texts and their implications for the mind and body, and features recommendations for educational and professional practice

New Materiality in Intimate Care

Textiles have a long history of supporting personal health and wellbeing, and textile innovations concerned with the body abound. This paper delves into the biology of the body and brings to the fore its materiality as embodiment to reimagine modes of knowing in intimate care through textiles. It introduces two designerly studies of intimate care in women to advance that material engagement enables knowing and that the fabric of the body is a material of care in itself. In this paper, I embrace an epistemic practice that entwines a feminine sociocultural imaginary that challenges traditional approaches to health and care and, nonetheless, the design of textiles

“MacGyver-Meets-Dr. Ruth”: Science Journalism and the Material Positioning of Dr. Carla Pugh

This article examines the rhetorical consequences of foregrounding female scientists\u27 materials through an analysis of seven news articles on Dr. Carla Pugh, a surgeon who designs medical patient simulators. Journalists foreground Pugh\u27s materials by positioning her as both “MacGyver,” creatively assembling simulators from everyday objects, and “Dr. Ruth,” willingly discussing intimate parts. These positions avoid focusing on Pugh\u27s personal life or body but still ultimately gender her and her work. The MacGyver position associates Pugh with gendered activities, objects, and spaces while undermining her affiliation with the technical aspects of design. Meanwhile, the Dr. Ruth position implies Pugh\u27s knowledge comes from inherent bodily expertise, making certain scientific fields appear more natural for women

Metaphor and Materiality in Early Prehistory

In this paper we argue for a relational perspective based on metaphorical rather than semiotic understandings of human and hominin1 material culture. The corporeality of material culture and thus its role as solid metaphors for a shared experience of embodiment precedes language in the archaeological record. While arguments continue as to both the cognitive abilities that underpin symbolism and the necessary and sufficient evidence for the identification of symbolic material culture in the archaeological record, a symbolic approach will inevitably restrict the available data to sapiens or even to literate societies. However, a focus on material culture as material metaphor allows the consideration of the ways in which even the very earliest archaeological record reflects hominins’ embodied, distributed relationships with heterogeneous forms of agent, as will be demonstrated by two case studies