Washing lines, whinberries and reworking ‘waste ground’: Women’s affective practices and a haunting within the haunting of the UK coalfields.

This article reflects on a series of ‘Ghost lab’ events (Bright, 2019) with local people where creative memory work – stimulated by songs, films, and readings from a pack of what we have called a “Community Tarot’ cards (our main focus here) – was used to register aspects of what, following Gordon (2008), we are calling a ‘social haunting’ of former coal-mining communities in the north of England and the valley communities of south Wales. The events were part of a joint 2018-19 research project called Song lines on the road – Life lines on the move! (On the Road for short) that sought to share two independent strands of longitudinal, co-produced, arts-based research in which we have developed approaches aimed at amplifying how living knowledge flows on in communities even when the shocks and intensities of lived experience defy articulation and representation. During the last decade or so both of us have worked with artists to co-produce research projects that enable young people and marginalised adults to communicate with and challenge authority by drawing on the affective power of art. Independently of each other until now, we have both been using creative/affective methodologies to understand how gendered circuits of affect both reproduce and reconfigure vernacular bonds of solidarity and practices of wellbeing in multiply impoverished coalfield communities

Inequality, Poverty, Education : A political Economy of School Exclusion. Francesca Ashurst and Couze Venn Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (2014) pp. vii-195 Hardback. £58 ISBN 978-137-34700-8

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Instructional and regulative discourses: a comparative case study of two classroom settings designed to ameliorate boys’ underachievement in English

Bernstein’s distinction between instructional and regulative discourses provided an analytical tool for investigating the orchestration of two year 10 classroom settings in which teachers had introduced ameliorative strategies to address boys’ underachievement in English. Bernstein’s description of the pedagogic device has been used to compare how English was recontextualised in two classroom settings, one all boys’ class, and one co-educational class. Moscovici’s theory of Social Representation was introduced to account for how social structures become psychologically active for individuals as knowledge is recontextualised. Detailed classroom observations over a series of consecutive lessons were carried out. Empirical observations, interviews with teachers and students were analysed to demonstrate how classroom settings, made up of regulative and instructional discourse, influenced the way subject knowledge was recontextualised in a time of moral panic about boys’ underachievement

Horse-girl assemblages: towards a post-human cartography of girls' desire in an ex-mining valleys community

The paper works with queer and feminist post-human materialist scholarship to understand the way young teen valleys' girls experienced ubiquitous feelings of fear, risk, vulnerability and violence. Longitudinal ethnographic research of girls (aged 12–15) living in an ex-mining semi-rural community suggests how girls are negotiating complex gendered and sexual mores of valleys' life. We draw on Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of ‘becomings’ emerging in social–material–historical ‘assemblages’ to map how the gendered and queer legacies of the community's equine past surfaces affectively in girls' talk about horses. Our cartography traces a range of ‘transversal flashes’ in which girls' lives and their activities with horses resonate with a local history coloured by the harsh conditions of mining as well as liberatory moments of ‘pure desire’. We creatively explore Deleuze and Guatarri's provocation to return desire to its polymorphous revolutionary force. Instead of viewing girls as needing to be empowered, transformed or rerouted, we emphasise the potential of what girls already do and feel and the more-than-human assemblages which enable these desires

The Research Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy: A Report from One of the BERA Research Commissions. Summary Report

No abstract available

Moving with the folds of time and place: exploring gut reactions in speculative transdisciplinary research with teen girls’ in a post-industrial community

The chapter focuses on a gut holding mannerism, observed in an improvised movement workshop with teen girls living in an ex-industrial town in South Wales (UK), as a vantage point from which to explore what more the gesture might be telling us. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1993) readings of Leibniz concept of ‘fold’ as a differential, we speculatively explore scalar orders of time, space and matter. Using a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008) with a transdisciplinary compass we offer three speculative journeys that fold outwards from the gut-holding mannerism: folds of time and place; gender unfolds and gut reactions. By taking the gut holding mannerism as a fulcrum we imagine folds that become larger and larger expanding into space, place and the universe, or become smaller and smaller by focussing on corporeal-movement, psycho-dynamic experiences and the ‘thinking gut’ (Wilson, 2015). We question what more the gut mannerism can illuminate, what more girls can be, and what more ex-mining communities might become

The Research Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy: A Report from One of the BERA Research Commissions. Final Report

No abstract available

Moving with the folds of time and place: exploring gut reactions in speculative transdisciplinary research with teen girls in a post-industrial community

The chapter focuses on a gut holding mannerism, observed in an improvised movement workshop with teen girls living in an ex-industrial town in south Wales (UK), as a vantage point from which to explore what more the gesture might be telling us. Drawing on Gille Deleuze’s (1993) readings of Leibniz concept of ‘Fold’ as a differential, we speculatively explore scalar orders of time, space and matter. Using a diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008) with a transdisciplinary compass we offer three speculative journeys that fold outwards from the gut-holding mannerism: folds of time and place; gender unfolds and gut reactions. By taking the gut holding mannerism as a fulcrum we imagine folds that become larger and larger expanding into space, place and the universe, or become smaller and smaller by focussing on corporeal-movement, psycho-dynamic experiences and the ‘thinking gut’ (Wilson, 2015). We question what more the gut mannerism can illuminate, what more girls can be, and what more ex-mining communities might become

Emplaced activism: what-if environmental education attuned to young people’s entanglements with post-industrial landscapes?

Cultures that recognise the many forces and memories held in landscape can make important contributions to climate emergency. We argue there is another group which has knowledge to call upon; young people growing up in post-industrial places. In this paper, we draw on over 10 years of research with young people to speculate about the potential of outsider knowledge as the basis for emplaced activism as an original and significantly new approach to environmental education. The first part of the paper presents the argument, concepts and methodology for thinking about environments as lived experience. Next we introduce the place where capitalist and industrial forces are knotted with the distinctive histories of post-industrial communities. Place is explored through stories of the geological and historical legacies of south Wale’s valleys in sections titled: Earth Matters; Industrial Matters; Affective Matters and Matters of Decline. Next, three lines of flight that took off in creative workshops with young people: Troubled Landscapes, Embodied Landscape and Activist Landscapes are presented. Finally, we set out a new approach to environmental education and research by asking what if environmental activism starts from young people’s troubled experiences of living in marginal and forgotten places

Posthuman co-production: becoming response-able with what matters

Purpose This paper introduces the concept of posthuman co-production. It explores how processual and relational onto-epistemologies inform an artful, response-able (Barad 2007) feminist new materialist praxis that decentres the human and re-centres matter. Design/methodology/approach Posthuman co-production gives prominence to crafting “dartaphacts” (Renold, 2018); creative research artefacts, carrying “what matters” and enacting change that can be mapped across time and multiple “problem spaces” (Lury, 2020), as an expansive, post-qualitative praxis of slow, co-production. Findings The paper stories this praxis across three “fugal figurations” providing glimpses into the post-qualitative journeys of assembled dartaphacts in the policy and practice field of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Wales. Each fugue hints at the polytical, resourceful and living potential of dartaphacts in the making and their mattering over a period of six years. Collectively, they chart a rhizomatic journey that re-configures co-production as a response-able, becoming-with what matters. Originality/value As more-than-human forces for change, dartaphacts continue to surface “the cries of what matters” (Stengers 2019) for children and young people well beyond the periods of funded research and engagement, giving new meaning to the sustainability and material legacies of research impact