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

Once upon a crush story: transforming relationships and sexuality education with a postqualitative art-ful praxis

This paper shares a rhizomatic unfolding of how a creative, post-qualitative praxis for becoming adventurous in the field of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) can unfold in a conducive policy and practice context (Wales, UK). Specifically, we focus on the making and mattering of what we call ‘Crush-Cards’. These are a suite of illustrated data calling-cards designed to re-animate research findings and stay close to the ways in which children and young people are entangled in, and navigate their way through, complex human and more-than-human gender and sexuality assemblages. Each section progressively provides a glimpse at how our art-ful rhizomatic praxis has evolved and how the resource and emergent CRUSHing pedagogy is becoming resourceful in unexpected ways

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

Becoming eventful: making the ‘more-than’ of a youth activist conference matter

This paper theorises the speculative process of how an arts-based online youth activist resource, AGENDA (www.agendaonline.co.uk) is becoming eventful and re-mattering youth voice on gender and sexual violence. Utilising the concept of the ‘cwrdd’ – a Welsh word for gatherings made, found and stumbled upon – we explore how our AGENDA cwrdds attune to, nurture and platform a range of micro-political moments across performances and workshops that entangle human and non-human participants. Inspired by Erin Manning’s concept of the ‘more-than’, we illustrate how the cwrdds carry the past-present-future potentials of what has mattered and is mattering to young people

What if?: becoming response-able with the making and mattering of a new relationships and sexuality education curriculum

This paper maps the development of a response-able (Barad 2007), crea- tive professional learning programme for in-service teachers of an unfold- ing relationships and sexuality education (RSE) curriculum in Wales (UK) where the authors are uniquely and deeply entangled. We chart crucial aspects of the ethical, political and creative praxis informing this journey and explore how the post-qualitative concepts of darta and dartaphacts (Renold 2018), through creative audits facilitated by teachers that sur- faced what students know and wonder about RSE, challenge assumptions about ‘what matters’ in RSE for children and young people. We diffrac- tively analyse teachers’ experiences of conducting creative audits across three post-qualitative vignettes and a poem. These dartaphacts-in-the- making offer glimpses at the boundless potential of making student voice matter, which we argue can spark and sustain a co-produced curriculum that comes from and stays close to ‘what matters’

What More Do Bodies Know? Moving with the Gendered Affects of Place

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. It starts with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gendered body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos (room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and dance of the not-yet) are presented. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place and the virtual potential of what movement

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