Un-containable Affects: Disability and the Edge of Aesthetics

A review of Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, New York, 2007)

Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have putwords to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can’t describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can’tbe described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a routetowards understanding children’s bodily experience and expression, in ways that havebeen made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship

‘Students that just hate school wouldn’t go’: educationally disengaged and disadvantaged young people’s talk about university education

This paper contributes to a growing body of literature on widening university participation and brings a focus on the classed and embodied nature of young people’s imagination to existing discussions. We interviewed 250 young people living in disadvantaged communities across five Australian states who had experienced disengagement from compulsory primary and secondary schooling. We asked them about their education and their educational futures, specifically how they imagined universities and university participation. For these young people, universities were imagined as ‘big’, ‘massive’ alienating schools. The paper explores how the elements of schooling from which these young people disengaged became tangible barriers to imagining and pursuing participation in university education. The primary barrier they described was their relationships with school teachers. Our analysis shows how relationships with teachers can impact the imagined improbability/probability of university participation. We offer suggestions for how barriers to university created by poor relationships with teachers may be overcome

Family stories as resources for a decolonial culturally responsive pedagogy

Engagement with family stories, religious and community practices can change a teacher’s conception of thought. We propose teaching as thinking-with the world and teaching as thinking-with others. These terms draw on the philosophy of new materialist thinkers in expressing the ontological impacts of context and materiality. We explore the relationship between teaching and thinking as a distributed and engaged practice by investigating family stories as an avenue for teachers to pedagogically engage with student’s lived experiences. We work with students as valued contributors to the learning environment, irrespective of academic achievements. We argue that engaging with family and faith stories as constitutional of thinking about, and doing, pedagogy can challenge the persistent racism. We are interested in experiential ways of knowing and modes of paying attention to the social and emotional learning that takes place as part of a pedagogic culture of care

The Practice of Dorothy Heathcote as a Pedagogy of Resistance

Educational Drama pioneer, Dorothy Heathcote, worked in new and innovative ways which were, even in the progressive times in which she was working, considered against the grain. This chapter examines her practice as a pedagogy of resistance and goes onto explore how, with the use of technology, Drama Education students carry on this resistant practice in new and challenging contexts. Heathcote's 'Rolling Role' model is explored by the students as a way of discovering their own resistant practice and re-discovering the freedom to learn for themselves and their pupils

Nuevo materialismo, etnografía, y Práctica social comprometida: pliegues espacio-tiempo y la agencia de la materia

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. sEste artículo es una investigación sobre la agencia de la materia y una exposición de los nuevos métodos materialistas que he venido desarrollando como parte de una etnografía multisituada y transnacional que se distingue por las prácticas de arte socialmente comprometidas entre técnicas etnográficas más tradicionales y cualitativas. Creo que, a través de la agencia de la materia, y considerando la temporalidad de la materia como parte de su agencia, se pueden comprender sus agentes como características constitutivas de la investigación de recopilación. Recurriendo al trabajo de campo etnográfico en el Reino Unido, investigo cómo la materia del espacio-tiempo puede impactar sobre los procesos del hacer social. Desarrollo recursos teóricos para hacer avanzar al campo. 

Chapter 4, Challenging the myth that ‘the parents don’t care’: Family teachings about education for ‘educationally disengaged’ young people,

This chapter focuses on families as sites of pedagogical work. We take up a focus on the pedagogical work of families in relation to formal education and educational exclusion. When describing families' pedagogical work in relation to formal education, we pay particular attention to their teachings about the school and university. Family pedagogies that impact upon educational participation and exclusion are important to consider in parallel with this book's focus on family pedagogies in relation to health. This is because there is a close relationship between levels of educational attainment and health; the more years of formal education that a person experiences, the better their health outcomes (ABS, 2013; Cutler and L1eras-Muney, 2010; Egerter et al, 2006). Our aim is to demonstrate that family pedagogies of formal education are key to practices of educational inclusion and exclusion and as such they are important to understand, and to reconsider in educational theory. It is simply not the case that all young people who are disengaged from education (either not attending at all or attending sporadically) have a background lacking in family pedagogies connected with education. Young people who are educationally disengaged or at the margins of formal education are rarely consulted in educationalliterature and policy-making (Bland, 2012; Duffy and Elwood, 2013; Harwood and Allan, 2014; Morgan et al, 2008). It is not surprising, therefore, to find that while there is a rich literature on families' pedagogical work on young people's position in education (Brooks, 2003; Lucey et al, 2006), less iIterature is available on pedagogical work of families of young people not engaged in education (Stein, 2006). This lack of attention is gradually being redressed. Yet there are assumptions we encounter anecdotally in our experience with teacher education students (in the UK and Australia), that these parents 'don't care' or they set 'bad examples'. Such anecdotes echo literature that describes teachers' deficit understandings of socioeconomically disadvantaged and 'disengaged' children and young people (Comber and Kamler, 2004; D'Addio, 2007; Machin, 1999). This chapter seeks to contribute an understanding of the pedagogical work of families of young people who are currently disengaged from or at the margins of formal education. The young people in our study are, hereafter, summarily described as 'disengaged' from education because they all experienced precarious relationships with mandatory schooling, further and higher education. The school-aged participants were not attending school or attending sporadically, they were excluded from schools, or they were pursuing alternative education programmes. Those participants who were legally old enough not to attend school were also not participating in further or higher education. Whilst we are not claiming that post-school pursuits other than further or higher education lack value, we can state that participants were not involved in post-school formal education options and so may still be described as not educationally engaged. We discuss how these educationally disengaged participants' family pedagogies relating to education are not homogenously negative. We will argue that their pedagogical work is varied, complex and often positive. Following a brief description of the study, the chapter is structured into three sections that reflect the findings from our data: families as sites of pedagogy and learning about 'education'; families' implicit teaching about education; and lastly, families' explicit teaching about education. Theoretically, we use Cambourne's (1995) Conditions of Learning to think through the family's explicit and implicit teachings

Nye fortællinger om digitale seksuelle overgreb

Omtale af Signe Uldbjerg: Rewriting Victimhood: Stories of digital sexual assaul

Carbon fiber masculinity: Disability and surfaces of homosociality

In this paper I am concerned with instances in which carbon fiber extends performances of masculinity that are attached to particular kinds of hegemonic male bodies. In examining carbon fiber as a prosthetic form of masculinity, I advance three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fiber can be a site of the supersession of disability that is affected through masculinized technology. Disability can be ‘overcome’ through carbon fiber. Disability is often culturally coded as feminine (Pedersen, 2001; Meeuf, 2009; Garland-Thompson 1997). Building on this cultural construction of disability as feminine, in and as a technology of masculine homosociality (Sedgwick, 1985), carbon fiber reproduced disability as feminine when carbon fiber prosthetic lower legs allowed Oscar Pistorius to compete in the non-disabled Olympic games. Secondly, I argue that carbon fiber can be a homosocial surface; that is, carbon fiber becomes both a surface extension of the self and a third party mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface that facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies. I examine surfaces as material extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fiber surfaces as vectors of the cultural economies of masculine competition to which I refer. Thirdly, the case of Oscar Pistorius is exemplary of the masculinization of carbon fire, and the associated binding of a psychic attitude of misogyny and power to a form of violent and competitive masculine subjectivity. In this article I explore the affects, economies and surfaces of what I call ‘carbon fiber masculinity’ and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fiber, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability