The techno-ecological practice as the politics of ontological coalitions

The paper focuses on the art projects aimed at visualizing (grasping) the physical or biological phenomena through interfaces and / or installations designed specifically for such purpose. Such works often mirror the post-­digital condition of our time where the digital technologies constitute the common background for everyday activities, no longer having the allure of "new" and "exciting" (Berry, Dieter et al., 2015). In this process, both the networked technologies of wireless communication and the act of crossing the boundaries between the digital and the physical play the crucial role as the post-­digital networked imagery increasingly becomes directly connected to the physical environment. I would like to ponder on the questions of processuality and relationality involved in such instances where the complexity of the hybrid works of art clearly transgresses the paradigm of representationalism (Thrift, 2008;; Anderson and Harrison, 2010;; Kember and Zylinska, 2012). The particular attention is given to the fact that such artworks bond different ontological realms (discursive, physical, digital) and different agents (human and non-­human, carbon-­based and software-­based) forging “ontological coalitions” (Malafouris, 2013). Throughout the article the mutlirealist and relational perspective is offered, inspired by the propositions of Gilbert Simondon and Etienne Souriau. Based on the research project supported by National Science Centre Poland ("The aesthetics of post-­digital imagery: between new materialism and object-­oriented philosophy", 2016/21/B/HS2/00746)

The Refrain of the A-grammatical Child: Finding Another Language in/for Qualitative Research

The article critically interrogates the figure of the child in Deleuze and its relation to language as an entry point to the question of what a materialist theory of language might involve and how it might be put to work in qualitative methodology. The Deleuzian child is a figure of destratification and resistance to dominant narratives—a resistance that is inextricably bound up with the materiality of the child’s body and its relation to language. Not yet fully striated by the rules of grammar that order and subjugate the world, children challenge “the hegemony of the signifier” by remaining open to multiple semiotic connections. What would it mean for qualitative methodology to engage its own “becoming-child”

Diffractive Pedagogies- dancing across new materialist imaginaries

This paper outlines the affirmative potential of diffractive pedagogies, presenting learning through dance as its central empirical focus. Drawing on data from the university classroom and new materialist scholarship, we consider the problem of learning through the body for university students. We argue that embodied creative processes within pedagogical contexts can liberate those who learn from reproducing, or being reproduced, as the finite set of reductive yet historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to them. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. Learning in higher education is popularly thought as pertaining to the transfer of abstract knowledge, and this process typically occurs in ways that largely ignore the physicality of learning. A pedagogical system which presents repeated structures and patterns of discourse as more valued vehicles for learning than experimentation and creation recognises only preconceived, representational models of thought and expression. This philosophical imaginary therefore requires reconfiguring, to allow for embodied and creative learning processes that are open-ended, nomadic and affirmative

Embodied encounters with more-than-human nature in health and physical education

Despite the importance of interactions with natural environments for personal and social well-being, there is only limited evidence of the relationship between the environment and health as an idea or area of study in school education in Australia. Logically, the place for such a study, at least in Australia, would be within the Health & Physical Education (HPE) key learning area. However, in HPE, alternative ways of considering health beyond the dominant ‘healthism’ discourses which privilege physical activity, fitness, food and nutrition struggle for any kind of existence. Gruenewald (2004. A Foucauldian analysis of environmental education: Toward the socioecological challenge of the earth charter. Curriculum Inquiry, 34(1), 71–107) suggests looking to the margins of a field to see what knowledge is silenced or subjugated in order to open up new conditions of possibility. This challenged us to look beyond taken for granted ways of thinking about health to identify other resources, perhaps unrecognised as yet, that teachers might draw on to constitute their knowledge of health. To do this, we look to interview data collected when teachers were asked to talk about their personal experiences of the relationship between the environment and health. The analysis of the interviews demonstrated how the teachers conceptualised the relationship between the environment and health by drawing on embodied experiences and affective encounters with morethan- human nature. By theorising these encounters through a posthuman, new-materialist lens, we demonstrate how their corporeal knowledge, developed through embodied experiences, has the potential to assist teachers in formulating less institutionalised health understandings. We argue that these encounters with more-than-human nature can serve as alternatives to those dominant healthism discourses that invoke problematic risk, fear and crisis responses