Dramatizing an Articulation of the (P)Artistic Researcher’s Posthumanist Pathway to a ‘Slow Professorship’ Within the Corporate University Complex

Within academia, the practical arts researcher endures an unstable status owing, in part, to the diverse research methodologies gathered underneath the umbrellas of Practice-[led/based/as/for]- Research. (P)Artistic Research is difficult to define, no less validate, in a result-oriented, data-driven, ‘performance’-measuring culture. The (P)Artistic Researcher embodies dissent in such contexts, as the nature of most artistic research is process-oriented, collaborative and solution-finding. In response to Berg and Seeber’s pleas for ‘slowness’ in The Slow Professor, this chapter reflects critically on the author’s habits and history as a (P)Artistic Researcher while moving through a ‘gap’ in employment, from a dramatic resignation at one institution to an acceptance of a new post at another institution, one year later. This writing is contaminated by aspects of the author’s ‘playwrighting’ practice, becoming a posthuman ‘playper’ in which forms of writing are intertwined, and structure, layout and grammatical positioning are used innovatively to produce new knowledge which is not ‘in-prism-ed’ by the narrow perspective of the corporate university. The content of the ‘playper’ offers a malleable frame with several pedagogical points of entry, including prompts, provocations and practical exercises which intend to slowly contaminate the classroom with a conscientious commitment to a posthuman understanding of the world

The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices

© 2020 The Authors. Reading Research Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Literacy Association The authors considered the capacious feeling that emerges from saying no to literacy practices, and the affective potential of saying no as a literacy practice. The authors highlight the affective possibilities of saying no to normative understandings of literacy, thinking with a series of vignettes in which children, young people, and teachers refused literacy practices in different ways. The authors use the term capacious to signal possibilities that are as yet unthought: a sense of broadening and opening out through enacting no. The authors examined how attention to affect ruptures humanist logics that inform normative approaches to literacy. Through attention to nonconscious, noncognitive, and transindividual bodily forces and capacities, affect deprivileges the human as the sole agent in an interaction, thus disrupting measurements of who counts as a literate subject and what counts as a literacy event. No is an affective moment. It can signal a pushback, an absence, or a silence. As a theoretical and methodological way of thinking/feeling with literacy, affect proposes problems rather than solutions, countering solution-focused research in which the resistance is to be overcome, co-opted, or solved. Affect operates as a crack or a chink, a tiny ripple, a barely perceivable gesture, that can persist and, in doing so, hold open the possibility for alternative futures

Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic life everywhere and all the time

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life

Posthumanist Education

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Meat Your Enemy: Animal Rights, Alignment, and Radical Change

Radical change can be conceived in terms of the reconceiving of ontological distinctions, such as those separating humans from animals. In building on insights from French pragmatism, we suggest that, while no doubt very difficult, radical change can potentially be achieved by creating “alignment” between multiple “economies of worth” or “common worlds” (e.g., the market world of money, the industrial world of efficiency). Using recent campaigns by animal rights organizations as our case, we show how the design of “tests” (e.g., tests of profitability, tests of efficiency) can help align multiple common worlds in support for radical change. Our analysis contributes to the broader management and organization studies literatures by conceiving radical change in terms of changing ontological categorizations (e.g., human/animals vs. sentient/ non-sentient), and by proposing that radical social change agents can be helpfully conceived as opportunistically using events to cumulatively justify the change they desire overtime

Is a posthumanist bildung possible? Reclaiming the promise of bildung for contemporary higher education

My central argument in this article is that the notion of Bildung may offer conceptual sustenance to those who wish to develop educative practices to supplement or contest the prevalence and privileging of market and economic imperatives in higher education, which configure teaching and learning as an object available to measurement. I pursue this argument by making the case for an ethical posthuman Bildung which recognises the inseparability of knowing and being, the materiality of educative relations, and the need to install an ecology of ethical relations at the centre of educational practice in higher education. Such a re-conceptualisation situates Bildung not purely as an individual goal but as a process of ecologies and relationships. The article explores Bildung as a flexible concept, via three theoretical lenses, and notes that it has always been subject to continuing revision in response to changing social and educational contexts. In proposing the possibility of, and need for, a posthuman Bildung, the articles offers a critical review of the promise of Bildung and outlines some of the radical ways that a posthuman Bildung might reinvigorate conceptualisations of contemporary higher education. Keywords : Bildung; posthumanism; higher education; ethics; ecology

Children of an Earth to Come: Speculative fiction, geophilosophy and climate change education research

Over the last three years, the Climate Change and Me project has mapped children and young people’s affective, creative and ontological relationships with climate change through an emergent and child-framed research methodology. The project has involved working with 135 children and young people from across Northern NSW, Australia as co-researchers responding to the rapidly changing material conditions of the Anthropocene epoch. In this paper, we position speculative fiction as a mode of creative research which enabled the young researchers to inhabit possible climate change futures. This node of the Climate Change and Me research was initiated by co-author Jasmyne, who at the time was a year seven student at a local high school. Through an ongoing series of visual and textual posts on the project website, Jasmyne created an alternate world in which children develop mutant forces and bodily augmentations that enable them to resist social and environmental injustices. Drawing on these visual and textual entries in dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy, we consider ways that speculative fiction might offer new conceptual tools for a viral strain of climate change education that proliferates through aesthetic modes of expression

Inhuman forms of life: On art as a problem for post-qualitative research

Researchers navigating the ontological turn in educational research have increasingly looked to art as an alternative to conventional modes of qualitative inquiry. However, the rapprochement between art and post-qualitative research remains problematic. While some see this turn coinciding with established genealogies in arts-based research, others suggest that existing models of arts-based inquiry are largely incompatible with the radical onto-epistemological orientations associated with post-qualitative research. This paper argues that the integration of art into the social sciences is far from settled, while also offering a series of speculative propositions for an inhuman aesthetics that is responsive to the ontological turn. This inhuman theory of art is elaborated through Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, and extended through an analysis of collaborative artworks produced by undergraduate visual art students. This leads to a consideration of how post-qualitative approaches might enable mutual activations between art, philosophy, and social research

Returning to Text: Affect, meaning making and literacies

Existing work on literacy and affect has posed important questions for how we think about meanings and how and where they get made. The authors contribute to such work by focusing on the relation between text and affect. This is a topic that has received insufficient attention in recent work but is of pressing concern for education as text interweaves in new ways with human activity, through social media, surveillance capitalism, and artificial intelligence—ways that can be unpredictable and poorly understood. Adopting a sociomaterial sensibility that foregrounds the relations between bodies (people and things), the authors provide conceptual tools for considering how texts affect and are affected by the heterogeneous entanglements from which they emerge. In situating their argument, the authors outline influential readings of Spinoza’s theories of affect, explore how these have been mobilized in literacy research, and identify how text has been accommodated within such research. Using texts from a political episode in the United Kingdom, the authors explore the idea of social-material-textual affects to articulate relationships among humans, nonhumans, meaning making, and literacies. The authors conclude by identifying four ways in which text participates in what happens, raising questions about how different materializations of text (or indeed “not text”) are significant to the diversifying communicative practices that inflect social, cultural, economic, and political life