Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: A Speculative Adventure in Research-Creation
... Even in recent turns toward participatory (Clapp, 2016), dynamic (Beghetto, 2019), sociocultural (Glăveanu, 2010), and experiential (Glăveanu & Beghetto, 2020) accounts of creativity, questions of nonhuman agency and multispecies interdependence have been elided, if not completely ignored. We argue that such omissions must be redressed if the field of creative education studies is to tackle the experiential complexities and contingencies of life in the Anthropocene (Harris, 2021;Rousell, 2021a), where more-than-human relations of ecological care have become matters of planetary survival (Bignall & Braidotti, 2018;Haraway, 2016). ...
... Although a rigorous critique of humanist education remains a core project for many posthumanist scholars (Snaza, 2019), what is politically at stake for posthumanist studies of creativity in education is not an abandonment or a devaluing of human experience but a radical expansion of what registers as creative experience in a world that is clearly so much more-than-human (Harris, 2021;Rousell, 2021a). There is now a wealth of posthumanist scholarship that has reconceptualized experience in more-than-human terms, including theories of experience as agentially distributed (Barad, 2007;Bennett, 2010), atmospheric (McCormack, 2018, environ/mental (de Freitas et al., 2019), creative-relational (Wyatt, 2018), and transcorporeal (Alaimo, 2016), to name but a few examples. ...
... The sustained relevance of Deleuze's philosophy in education has also helped spark resurgent interest in the earlier process philosophies of Whitehead and Bergson, which are now becoming critical theoretical entry points for process studies of creativity in education (cf. Atkinson, 2017;de Freitas & Ferrera, 2015;Harris, 2021;Rousell, 2021a). ...
This chapter explores the urgent relevance of posthumanist theory and practice for democratizing creative educational experiences in 21st-century schools, universities, and informal learning environments. Posthumanism challenges the myopic centering of the human in creative education in an age of climate change, artificial intelligence, and zoonotic disease, where nonhuman agencies are intricately imbricated in human cultures and lives. Using a cartographic methodology, the chapter critically maps key theories and debates in posthumanist creativity studies across four substantive fields of inquiry: (a) process philosophy, (b) affect studies, (c) place-based education, and (d) creative ecology. Drawing links between theoretical concepts and practical examples of creative experience across formal and informal education contexts, the chapter scopes an alternative agenda for critical studies of creativity in light of the posthuman turn.
... Our approach to assembling and writing this article follows a process of sensory and conceptual mapping which has been previously theorised as a postqualitative practice of 'immersive cartography' (Rousell, 2020(Rousell, , 2021. This approach to inquiry does not follow a predetermined method, nor does it apply theory from the outside (like a 'lens') to interpret what happens during the research. ...
... (Chang, 2021, pp. 26-27) While Chang refers to immersion as a corporeal state that 'transcends' discursive binaries and rational thought, Rousell (2021) conceptualises immersion within an immanence of events that precondition the possibilities for thought and sensation through an 'open series of interpenetrating fields of experience' (p. xvi). ...
This paper considers experiences of speculative immersion as artists and children map the multilayered sonic ecology of Birrarung Marr, a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We explore how speculative practices of immersion shaped the mapping of precolonial, contemporary, and future soundscapes of Birrarung Marr, and the ceremonial burial of these sonic cartographies for future listeners. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of immersion in mutually respectful and purposeful conversation, we work to re-theorise immersive experience as a process of ecological multiplicity and affective resonance, rather than one of phenomenological containment. By approaching immersion as both a concept and a sensation that ruptures the boundary between body and environment, we follow how immersion ‘drifts’ across porous thresholds of sensing, thinking, dreaming, making, and knowing in situated environmental education contexts. In doing so, the paper stresses the importance of speculative immersive experience in cultivating liveable urban futures under conditions of climate change, and responds to the need for new understandings of immersion that take more-than-human ecologies of experience into account.
... This has often been characterized as a paradigmatic shift away from previous movements that sustained critical focus on the agency of language, text, knowledge and discourse in constructing social formations and identities (Snaza et al., 2015;Taylor & Bayley, 2019), including movements associated with poststructuralism and critical theory, pedagogy, and curriculum studies. This shift has also been described more broadly as an 'ontological turn' in education research (Rousell, 2021a;St Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016), through which epistemological questions of human knowledge and agency are being displaced by ontological questions of morethan-human relationality and becoming. New concepts are being invented (or re-appropriated from the histories of philosophy and science) to account for the materiality of discourse and the discursivity of matter, with portmanteau terms such as 'materialdiscursive' (Barad, 2007) and 'material-semiotic' (Haraway, 1997) effectively blurring normative distinctions between language, thinking, sociality, politics, ethics, materiality, embodiment, cultural production, and the natural world. ...
... New concepts are being invented (or re-appropriated from the histories of philosophy and science) to account for the materiality of discourse and the discursivity of matter, with portmanteau terms such as 'materialdiscursive' (Barad, 2007) and 'material-semiotic' (Haraway, 1997) effectively blurring normative distinctions between language, thinking, sociality, politics, ethics, materiality, embodiment, cultural production, and the natural world. This has called for a near-total revaluation of what matters in/as research in education and the social sciences more broadly, including the call for the development of alternative (or 'new') empiricisms that refuse any a priori split between matter and meaning, knower and known (Cotterill, 2009;de Freitas, 2016;Rousell, 2021a;St Pierre, 2019). ...
This paper addresses the irruptive potentiality of language in rethinking pivotal concepts in pre-service and in-service teacher education. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s reconceptualization of language, we undertake a radical undoing of dominant concepts of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment as ‘order-words’ that variously segment, delimit, and potentialize lines of subjectification and signification in professional learning settings. We argue for a speculative and affirmative engagement with the complex trajectories of teacher education in light of this post qualitative turn, focusing on how Deleuzoguattarian concepts decouple the act of teaching from the ‘teacher’ as personal subject, and resituate the event of teaching within assemblages of felt transitions and vital forces. Working through vignettes that affirm transversal alternatives for exploring how teaching ‘thinks’ through events, we conclude by considering ways that teaching approaches the immanent outside of language, or what Deleuze simply referred to as ‘a life’.
... Following Manning's (2016b) conceptualization, I understand research-creation as a scholarly, pedagogical, and mode of expression/ artistic practice. Arts-based education scholars have similarly emphasized the inextricable link between artistic and pedagogical practice, embedding their work within research-creation frameworks (Rotas, 2021;Rousell, 2021;Shannon, 2023;Springgay & Rotas, 2014;Truman, Bozalek & Kuby, 2023). Using research-creation as a theoretical and practical tool was useful for the project because it provided opportunities to create research that connects philosophical concepts with education and artistic expressions like painting. ...
In this essay I use posthuman theories and research-creation methodologies to explore the tensions between two disciplines (science and art) alongside children. Through a short video clip and still images of children engaging in abstract painting using magnets, washers, bolts, and nails, I showcase the importance of learning with and through art, and I argue that posthuman arts education enriches the pedagogical environment beyond core academic skills.
... This challenges the way we design and implement identity registration and management platforms and technologies. After losing modern innocence regarding the neutrality of technologies, it continues the mapping (Rousell, 2021) of the actors involved -human and other-than-human -their modes of relationship and agendas of power. With mapping we go beyond the map that stabilizes those it represents but one that traces the becoming of relational ways of being. ...
... 'The Riddle of the Spirit' became an affective pedagogy during our inquiry by entangling the children's current classroom activities with memories and stories from the past and imaginings of the future. Thus, during these activities, the more-than-human world of mythical nature spirits and materialities emerged as creative and affective aspects of the children's speculative fabulations (Rousell, 2021). In line with recent research, our study suggests that an affective approach that embraces non-human perspective-taking challenges us to work with and become attuned to the complexities, unsureness and fluctuating moments in children's encounters with socio-ecological worlds Merewether, 2020). ...
Drawing on Donna Haraway's notion of speculative fabulation, in this study the authors investigate how a pedagogy grounded in mythical nature spirits, children's imaginative explorations and storying activities created spaces for children to explore socio-ecological worlds. Their inquiry draws on an ethnographic case study of three children (aged seven to eight) in a Finnish primary school who participated in a cross-curricular unit framed by a set of pedagogical materials called ‘The Riddle of the Spirit’. Their inquiry shows how speculative fabulations emerged into performing spaces, in which imaginary fabulations of humans, spirits and places created alternative narratives about more-than-human relations. Such fabulations emerged when the children became spirits, when the spirits were transformed from kings to queens, and when trees that humans had cut down could be revived and returned to the forest. Thus, the authors’ inquiry suggests that myths embedded in storying activities can offer unexplored educational opportunities to invite children to attend to and imagine socio-ecological worlds.
... This, again, is quite a different understanding of "concept creation" as developed by many neo/post-qualitative research agendas. Few researchers achieve this level (Rousell, 2021). The muon initiative, to make its breakthrough, requires reaching exhaustion in its quest for a new physics. ...
This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.
... This makes affect inherently political, as the specific unfolding of each affective relation alters the political potential for a body to think and act (Massumi, 2015;Protevi, 2013). What we describe here as an "investment of affect" therefore describes an investment of desire, vitality, and feeling into circulation within a complex ecology of felt relations and intensities (Rousell, 2021). ...
Set within a theatrical unfolding of global youth climate movements, this paper explores the role of digital media in staging new possibilities for climate change education and activism. We engage Deleuze’s method of dramatisation to theorise how young people are using digital platforms to perform climate activism and construct new political subjectivities through affective investments. We develop these ideas by describing the process of co-developing a climate change education App with young people. This co-design process brought together elements of climate education, environmental science, speculative fiction, gaming, social media, and hacktivism as techniques for dramatising climate change through digital practices of fabulation. We argue that climate change is a complex philosophical problem that needs to be dramatised – and that young people are currently using digital media to elaborate speculative performances of this problem through the cultivation of a minor politics.
Temporality, and its critical function in the emergence of matter and meaning, has profound implications—ethically, politically, materially. It is implicit in processes of change and becoming, and in supporting our relational entanglements and sense of belonging with(in) the world. Yet, these implications are frequently overlooked. Emerging in dialogue with temporal reconfigurations put forward by T. S. Eliot in Burnt Norton, this chapter proposes that what subsequently emerges is an ethico-onto-epistem-ological imperative towards a radical relational praxis—one that can support embodied, situated and multispecies meaning/knowledge/world-makings. Interlaced with the theories of Gilles Deleuze, and further supported by thought from posthumanist scholars and practitioners such as Karen Barad, this chapter demonstrates how Burnt Norton supports the break from humanist traditions, embodying the reality of lived experience as an intricately intra-dependent emergence that actively reconfigures possibilities of knowing and doing in, and beyond, educational research and practice. Moreover, in contending that a prerequisite of expansive place-time understandings is a shift away from a static and individualist metaphysics, questions surface regarding the limits of knowability in relational praxes, and ultimately suggests the ubiquity of epistemological ambiguities in such endeavours.
This chapter continues Chap. 5’s close reading of educators who develop childhoodnatures. What is the posthuman child? There is a section called querying childhoodnature research. I end the chapter with the question ‘is an ‘end to childhood’ upon us as? which is the paradox of a gerontomorphic neoteny.
This chapter looks at Whitehead philosophy and reason why it has come to play a key role in the post-Anthropocene. I also look at a pedagogy of immersive cartography that utilizes his philosophy. I especially look at ecological aesthetics which is Whiteheadian in intent. ‘What is a pedagogy of the senses’ is explored utilizing the Deleuze and Guattari philosophy. I end by raising the question of ‘God’ in Whitehead in relation to Deleuze’s position.
This piece considers what it might mean to do something called soundwriting, doing qualitative research in ways that further articulate the sonic rather than reproducing ocularcentric framings that often recreate false binaries or enunciates privileging taxonomies of knowledge and care. To these ends, this article is divided into two overarching sections. The first section attends to questions of what it might mean to theorize processes of qualitative writing in general, what qualitative writing can do and the ethical commitments such writing should likely engage as matters of course. The second section presents the kinds of possibilities and challenges soundwriting can engender. This section underscores connections to fields of sonic study, how sounds can interrupt qualitative research’s often ocularcentric understandings while maintaining continuing discussions of ethical commitments to ecologies and the things that comprise them, including (more than) human animals. Rather than a polemic, this piece seeks to address what soundwriting can do as well as what might be gained for qualitative researchers and our audiences through such intentions, attentions, and expressions.
In this chapter, we map a walking experience with undergraduate art education students and explain how encountering a familiar daily path on campus in a different way generates the potential to create a new form of mapping that is relational and entangled with more-than-human materiality. As an expression of affective cartographies, this mode of mapping began by walking with public art on the downtown campus of Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, where buildings are connected by underground tunnels due to inclement winter weather. This inquiry generated new territories in which body, object, environment, ideas and ways of ‘doing’ art education were reimagined as an assemblage of embodied experience. This kind of relational mapping of the tunnel as a site of inquiry allows the purpose of the tunnel to escape its attributed purpose as a connector and become a zig-zagging series of movements, or lines of flight in a Deleuzian sense, between nodes of learning (physical buildings) in which new corporeal understandings materialized. Through co-creation with students Chantal, Leya and Camila, we map the emerging concept of ‘Re’ as a result of negotiating viewing and Re-viewing, engaging and Re-engaging and thinking and Re-thinking with a tunnel, public art, self and architecture.
This transdisciplinary, international collection is situated within a genealogy of experimental walking practices in the arts, arts-based research, and emergent walking practices in education. It brings together emerging cartographies of relation amongst walking practices ranging across arts-based, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthumanist modes of inquiry. Its particular investment is in the proliferation of artful modes of inquiry that open up speculative practices and concepts of walking as an orientation for pedagogy, inquiry, and the everyday, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of human and nonhuman life processes. This is important work for the burgeoning demand for creative methodologies in the social sciences, and more specifically, for arts-based educational research [ABER], which is pushing creative methods of inquiry into zones of contact previously siloed by disciplinary boundaries.KeywordsWalkingCritical walking inquiryArts-based educational researchWalking as inquiry
Wearable biosensors are becoming increasingly prevalent and agentic social technologies, used primarily to serve dominant medical, health, and commercial agendas. This chapter explores alternative possibilities of wearable sensory technologies as creative media for walking-based research and pedagogy with young children. Drawing on experimental practices of urban sound walking developed in a project called the Listening Body, we describe a series of walks that explore the use of wearable technologies as devices for collectively attuning to the more-than-human environment. In these sound walks, wearable technologies augmented our collective capacity to sense the urban environments we encountered with children, while also generating data related to the vibratory relations between bodies and environments in movement. Bringing together theoretical perspectives from bioaesthetics, posthuman media ecology, and biosocial studies in education, we outline some of the implications of wearable technologies as creative media for a vibrational pedagogy that extends beyond the limits of the human sensorium.KeywordsWearable technologiesWalkingSound artAffectPedagogyBiosensingMedia ecology
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many countries adopting containment measures. This transcontinental, transdisciplinary study draws on arts-based research to explore the value of connecting through ‘disease’ at the moment of disease during the COVID-19 epoch. The four researcher-author-educators engaged in collective memory work and drew on collaborative artful practices to create connections and deepen their learning of their home-work transgression experiences. As makers and creators, they participated in and produced a poetic assemblage which involved a netting and knotting process of “becoming”. Leveraging the stories and images, pantoum poetry were then created in a poetic inquiry process that enabled further exploration of the lived experiences of working in home locked down. The picture-like pantoum poems tripped their tongues with phrases, concepts, words and ideas, reflecting and refracting from each gem—glints of gift offerings. Each poetic iteration, strangely unique, but unsurprisingly magical as they held in a web of sameness, concepts connected to their lived experiences. While the poetry enabled lines of flight, the photographs which juxtaposed the pantoums territorialised the imagery, with their iterations of home and a retreat to the ‘iso garden’. Thus, home was placed under erasure.
This article contributes new insights to research on citizenship and young citizen subject formation in the context of the posthuman condition. Bringing a feminist materialist sensibility to bear, we explore citizenship as materially mobilised and produced. Considering the constitutive role that embodied and affective phenomena play in this production, we attend particularly to acts of citizenship. We show by way of vignettes how human subjects and material and natural objects ‘intra-act’ to produce civic capacities and bring citizen subjectivity into effect. The forces by which these capacities are produced come into view inviting challenge to normative, human-centred framings of (youth) citizenship. The forces in question are various—affective, corporeal, temporal, spatial, spectral—but it is affect that provides the main impetus to action. Supplementing the more conventional frame of citizenship as belonging, we propose a framework of citizen becoming as a generative way to think and do citizenship in the posthuman present. The argument is made that analytic frames that attune to citizenship as an affective movement of becoming best address current conditions for producing citizen subjects and usefully extend individualised models of citizenship that have long influenced education.
Writing at a time in which speculative ways of thinking appear to be undergoing a reprise across the social sciences and humanities – whether through engagements with speculative cosmology (Stengers, 2006), speculative empiricism (Debaise, 2017), speculative fabulation (Haraway, 2011), speculative research (Wilkie et al., 2017), or speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011) – in this chapter we introduce Speculative Geographies and our motivation for assembling the collection as a way of considering what concepts and practices of speculation might mean for geography, and how speculation might itself be conceived as geographical. In approaching the relationship between speculation and geography, we introduce the book as a collective desire to complicate the modes of thought used to evaluate experience by crafting alternatives, pluralising perspectives, and thereby problematising the immediately given. Far from abstract thinking, in this chapter we conceptualise speculation, after A.N. Whitehead, as a task of thinking abstractions – a style of thinking that prioritises an openness to what thought might become, and which therefore reconfigures empirical problems beyond what seems given in an immediate experience. The chapter traces key genealogies of this speculative practice including speculative philosophy, speculative fiction, and speculative design. Finally, we provide an overview of how the three themes of the book – ethics, technologies, aesthetics – speak to the chapters making up this edited collection.
This editorial lays the groundwork and context for this special issue addressing a range of posthuman ecological approaches to the study and theorization of creativity, and its potential to transform understandings of 21st-century learning events and environments, including cities, schools, museums, parklands, digital environments, wild places, and more. Importantly, this collection establishes an ethics and politics of posthumanism as it intersects with creativity, including attention to the necessity and ethics of the ways in which Indigenous knowing and knowledge creation are changing and expanding traditional academic framings of arts-based research, creativity, and posthuman scholarship.
As a principle of unrest stirring at the heart of events, Whitehead’s concept of creativity proposes a novel togetherness of creaturely experience where nothing has executive control, and everything that happens bears the mark of a creative accident. Drawing on stories of return to Bundjalung Country in New South Wales, Australia, this article explores the speculative potentials of Whitehead’s creativity for sensing creaturely relations at the nexus of artistic practice and more-than-human social life. Ranging from termite-riddled book collections to environmentally degraded art installations, each story opens onto a problematic field of creative activity that generates novel contrasts and intensities of experience.
Defined as the power to increase or lessen the capacity to act, affect is purported to be pedagogy’s first lesson. In this article we explore the work of ordinary affects in relation to oppressive social norms with particular attention to race. Using feminist new materialist concepts, we trace the capacities of these affects as they play into two pedagogic encounters. We show how pedagogies of response-ability form through affective transmission and material practice. Race presents as an affective and material event that plays out differentially through bodies. Responsible pedagogy hinges on maintaining the ability of people in association with objects to respond to the learning possibilities that pedagogic encounters provide. Responsive to the humanand the non-human, pedagogies of responsibility and the affects that attend them matter on several fronts. They engender ethical subjectivity, unsettle dominant structures of power, and loosen the grip of the ontological privilege accorded the human.
Feminist new materialisms are a porous field influenced by feminist science and technology studies, the environmental humanities, the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, transgender and queer studies, and affect studies. In qualitative research, the feminist new materialisms are often linked to discussions of the posthuman, object-oriented ontology, and the ontological or vital materialist turn. As these theoretical turns are activated in qualitative research, they in turn upset classical notions of positivism, directly implicate researchers in the research process, attune researchers’ attention to more-than-human agents, challenge representationalism, and recognize that thinking-with theoretical concepts is also “empirical” research.
Abstract
Both new materialist philosophy of science and Indigenous studies scholarship have developed theories about the
agency of non-human things. There has, however, been relatively little articulation between these two literatures in the
qualitative social sciences. This essay looks at the possible reasons for this lack of engagement–including the relatively
recent emergence of new materialism, pervasive racism within the academy, and foundational differences in the priorities
and philosophical assumptions informing these two literatures. Addressing new materialist scholars, the essay inventories
the ethical, political, and intellectual reasons social scientists using Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism should also be
reading and citing Indigenous studies literature on agent ontologies. It makes the case that the Indigenous studies literature
on agent ontologies have strengths in precisely some of the places new materialist social science is facing challenges.
Examples are provided and the broader political implications of such work are examined.
This article examines the relations between human children and other than human animals in a multispecies ethnographic study conducted in an unofficial educational zoo established in a greenhouse in a lower secondary school. The specific focus is on the practices in which the students become responsible carers of animals. The analysis employs the theory of care (de la Bellacasa) and a storytelling approach (Haraway) to develop the concept of multispecies childhood and to offer ways to account for the complexities of lives shared across species.
Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author’s new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights.
Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book’s drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry.
With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.
This article develops a series of speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics that is responsive to the challenges of the Anthropocene epoch. The article is framed within a new materialist approach to environmental education, and specifically works to re-imagine the notion of justice in terms of performative gestures, multiplicities, processes, and speculative thought experiments. Drawing on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy in conjunction with recent new materialist thought, the article proposes the concept of ‘doing little justices’ as a way of enacting micropolitical interventions into everyday patterns of environmental thought, learning, sociality, and behaviour. The concept of ‘little justices’ is further elaborated through the analysis of vignettes that problematise issues of climate change, human exceptionalism, ecological sovereignty, and environmental justice with university students in the fields of education and the philosophy of law. The article concludes that an immanent ethics cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values or prescriptions for environmental education, but should proceed through a speculative process of creative experimentation and negotiation in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and potentials for co-existence.
Aboriginal Australian peoples have a continuous oral culture, which has changed over millennia, and continues to develop in contemporary Australia. Despite political movements towards reconciliation, and the recognition of Aboriginal cultures and rights, educational curriculum in Australia fails to engage with the a priori profundity and depth of living Aboriginal cultures. In order to address the profound disconnect between Western and Aboriginal philosophies, this chapter considers the arts-based Aboriginal onto-epistemology of ‘thinking through Country’ (Somerville, 2013) alongside a ‘flat ontology’ derived from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy. The aim is to propose ways to transform the Australian educational curriculum at the intersection of Western and Aboriginal understandings of coming to know the world. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Christopher Naughton, Gert Biesta and David R. Cole.
The social, political, and cultural consequences of attempts to cheat death by freezing life.
As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are widely used as a means of preservation. Technologies of cryopreservation support global food chains, seed and blood banks, reproductive medicine, and even the preservation of cores of glacial ice used to study climate change. In many cases, these practices of freezing life are an attempt to cheat death. Cryopreservation has contributed to the transformation of markets, regimes of governance and ethics, and the very relationship between life and death. In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means.
The contributors examine how and why low temperatures have been harnessed to defer individual death through freezing whole human bodies; to defer nonhuman species death by freezing tissue from endangered animals; to defer racial death by preserving biospecimens from indigenous people; and to defer large-scale human death through pandemic preparedness. The cryopolitical lens, emphasizing the roles of temperature and time, provokes new and important questions about living and dying in the twenty-first century.
ContributorsWarwick Anderson, Michael Bravo, Jonny Bunning, Matthew Chrulew, Soraya de Chadarevian, Alexander Friedrich, Klaus Hoeyer, Frédéric Keck, Eben Kirksey, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Deborah Bird Rose, Kim TallBear, Charis Thompson, David Turnbull, Thom van Dooren, Rebecca J. H. Woods
This book is the first general book to look at the current philosophical trend known as Speculative Realism. It also compares this philosophy to the work of early-twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Speculative Realism insists upon the actuality of things or objects apart from the ways that our own (human) minds relate to them and understand them; it is thus part of what has been called the Nonhuman Turn in recent thought. The book gives an explication of the main tenets of Speculative Realism, and engages in close examination of several of its main figures: most notably, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux. It juxtaposes their thought to that of Whitehead, who anticipated many Speculative Realist ideas, but gives them a very different focus. In the course of this discussion, the book also touches upon other philosophical themes of contemporary concern: panpsychism (the thesis that mentality is incipient in all entities), ecological thought (increasingly necessary in this time of crisis), and aesthetics (which is presented as not merely a human concern). The book serves both as an overall introduction to Speculative Realism, for those who have not encountered it previously, and as a series of arguments within Speculative Realism. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary academic and extra-academic audience; particularly to those in the fields of literature, continental philosophy, post-structuralist theory, art and architecture, and environmental studies.
This book engages with how affective encounters are shaped and conditioned by interfacial events. Together, the chapters explore the implications of this on a micro-perceptual and macro-relational level through an experimental middling of approaches and examples. While broadly departing from a Spinozist and Deleuzian theoretical foundation, the book weaves together a compelling number of conceptual and empirical trajectories. Always attuned to the implications, modulations and tonalities arising in the readings through art, journalism, bodies, an/archives, data and design, Affects, Interfaces, Events allows for a truly transdisciplinary resonance driven by theory, technology and practice.
Recently the fields of architecture, media studies, and education have begun to converge through the proliferation of mixed reality technologies and interfaces. This convergence is widely described as offering new opportunities for immersive, seamless, decentralised, and environmentally distributed learning experiences. This chapter contributes to a growing body of research exploring the transformation of learning environments through distributed media networks, digital databases, and innovative pedagogical interventions. It develops a theoretical framework for researching the interconnections between the built environment, mixed reality technologies, and place-based learning experiences and pedagogies. The second part of the chapter focuses on the development of the CubeWalk network, which involved a series of site-specific architectural installations, digital interfaces, and pedagogical interventions on a university campus in New South Wales, Australia. Two case studies are presented which describe the co-design and evaluation of mixed reality tutorial walks across the university campus. Drawing together insights rendered through the case studies, the chapter offers a series of theoretical propositions for a ‘mixed reality pedagogy’ that is distributed across 21st century learning environments and media networks.
A new philosophy of movement that explores the active relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media.
With Relationscapes, Erin Manning offers a new philosophy of movement challenging the idea that movement is simple displacement in space, knowable only in terms of the actual. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought through the prisms of dance, cinema, art, and new media, Manning argues for the intensity of movement. From this idea of intensity—the incipiency at the heart of movement—Manning develops the concept of preacceleration, which makes palpable how movement creates relational intervals out of which displacements take form.
Discussing her theory of incipient movement in terms of dance and relational movement, Manning describes choreographic practices that work to develop with a body in movement rather than simply stabilizing that body into patterns of displacement. She examines the movement-images of Leni Riefenstahl, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Norman McLaren (drawing on Bergson's idea of duration), and explores the dot-paintings of contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists. Turning to language, Manning proposes a theory of prearticulation claiming that language's affective force depends on a concept of thought in motion.
Relationscapes takes a “Whiteheadian perspective,” recognizing Whitehead's importance and his influence on process philosophers of the late twentieth century—Deleuze and Guattari in particular. It will be of special interest to scholars in new media, philosophy, dance studies, film theory, and art history.
An investigation of the “occurrent arts” through the concepts of the “semblance” and “lived abstraction.”
Events are always passing; to experience an event is to experience the passing. But how do we perceive an experience that encompasses the just-was and the is-about-to-be as much as what is actually present? In Semblance and Event, Brian Massumi, drawing on the work of William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and others, develops the concept of “semblance” as a way to approach this question.
It is, he argues, a question of abstraction, not as the opposite of the concrete but as a dimension of it: “lived abstraction.” A semblance is a lived abstraction. Massumi uses the category of the semblance to investigate practices of art that are relational and event-oriented—variously known as interactive art, ephemeral art, performance art, art intervention—which he refers to collectively as the “occurrent arts.” Each art practice invents its own kinds of relational events of lived abstraction, to produce a signature species of semblance. The artwork's relational engagement, Massumi continues, gives it a political valence just as necessary and immediate as the aesthetic dimension.
In this article, we discuss a series of artistic interventions in a university museum co-created by young people, researchers, and museum curators. We focus on the co-development of techniques for disrupting and re-imagining museological spaces and times, while exploring young people’s shifting sense of inheritance in relation to the “Anthropocene” as a particular figuration of the current epoch. Drawing together an eclectic range of sources at the intersections of schizoanalysis, posthumanism, decolonial studies, and surrealism, we argue that young people’s interventions in the museum constitute micropolitical nodes of resistance to the colonial-capitalistic capture of subjectivity that dominates the current epoch.
This article explores the affective dimensions of comedy education and performance through workshops with undergraduate acting students in Manchester, UK. Drawing on Suzanne Langer’s process philosophy and recent research in affect studies, the authors compose complex mappings of affective intensity as it circulates through stand-up comedic performances, using new empirical methods to combine ethnographic accounts with data from electro-dermal activity (EDA) sensors worn by students. Moving beyond reductive interpretations of laughter as a function of stimulus-response, the authors assemble the concept of ‘fielding hilarity’ to better account for the atmospheric circulation of affects through comedic learning processes and performances.
The following roundtable conversation, initiated by Sarah E. Truman activates a discussion on research-creation’s potential and limitations as a research method/methodology, complicates cursory references to it, and demonstrates the already robust and nuanced theorizations of research-creation within Canada.
This article offers an induction into “immersive cartography,” an emerging approach to inquiry that incorporates the environmental arts, philosophy, and social sciences. Drawing together Deleuze’s propositions for a cartography-art with elements of Whitehead’s speculative empiricism, the author elaborates on the co-creation of a “cartographic network” that can be entered, activated, and extended along a multiplicity of trajectories, opening the inquiry process to more-than-human ecologies of participation. The second part of the article grapples with the complex proliferation of data that immersive cartography sets into motion, developing the concept of the “data event” through an engagement with Whitehead’s theory of prehension.
This paper is about the ontology, the materiality and logical structure of art. While I am not trained in the visual arts or architecture, nonetheless I see there are many points of overlap, regions of co-occupation, that concern art and philosophy, and it is these shared concerns that I want to explore. I want to discuss the ‘origins’ of art and architecture, but not the historical, evolutionary or material origins of art – an origin confirmable by some kind of material evidence or research – but rather, the conceptual origins of art, what concepts art entails, assumes and elaborates. These of course are linked to historical, evolutionary and material forces, but are nevertheless conceptually, that is to say, metaphysically or ontologically separable from them. Art, according to Deleuze, does not produce concepts, though it does address problems and provocations. It produces sensations, affects, intensities, as its mode of addressing problems, which sometimes align with and link to concepts, the object of philosophical production, the way philosophy deals with problems. Thus philosophy may have a place, not in assessing art, but in addressing the same provocations or incitements to production as art faces, through different means and with different effects and consequences.
Our aim for this special issue of Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies is to engage with current influential texts in Science Studies, addressing the urgent need to rethink the role of the sciences in transdisciplinary possibilities for social inquiry. In this introductory essay, we underscore the political stakes of this kind of work, and we focus on a few key themes that run across the collected articles, situated as they are within what scientists call the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene names the epoch wherein humans have become the main geological agent on the planet’s surface. But which humans, and since when? Dating the onset of the Anthropocene is a political and ontological as much as a scientific act. This essay argues the Anthropocene is inexorably racial because it flows out of a capitalist system which requires racializing populations and environments from early modernity to the present and into the future. The essay contends that racial capitalism should be a central category in explaining the onset of the Anthropocene. The focus will be on investigating whether it makes sense to take the European discovery of the Americas and the genocide against its original inhabitants as threshold of a new geological epoch. Following the radicalization of Marx in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, it will be suggested that though colonization and slavery were essential for modern globalization to emerge, capital embarked on its self-perpetuating destructive trajectory through industrialization. Structural racism was transmuted and continues to characterize the global ecological crisis.
This article is a slight revision of a keynote lecture presented at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Illinois in 2019. It argues that to experiment and create the “new” in post qualitative, post humanist, and other “new” forms of inquiry invented for the 21st century, social science researchers may well need to refuse conventional humanist social science research methodologies created for the problems of previous centuries.
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 among art, philosophy, and social research.
The recent more-than-human turn has increased interest in writing about relations between humans and other animals. In addition, scholars have called for a need to complement the animal turn with a turn to microbes. Microbes entangle all life in relations and participate in processes of living and dying, but thus far, they have been largely absent in environmental education research. This article attempts to think with microbes in environmental education by zooming into the phenomenon of ‘moldschools’ in Finland. Employing the concept of agencement, the article first explores how school buildings, toxic molds, and humans have effectuated each other and introduces the idea of indoor climate crisis. Then the article explores the complexity of everyday life in one moldschool, asking, how was the school becoming felt and practiced differently by children and teachers in relation to material-discursive mold. Finally, the article asks what moldschools might teach us or ask from us in terms of environmental education and ethics. The notion of schools as always already more-than-human agencements is offered to make space for hesitation and curiosity on various scales of connection.
What are the problems to which materialist methodologies are posed as a solution? In this book, Aaron M. Kuntz maps the impact of materialism on contemporary practices of inquiry in education and the social sciences. Through this work, the author challenges readers to consider inquiry as a mode of ethically engaged citizenship with implications for resisting our contemporary moment towards a more equitable future.
The author engages his own inquiry as radical cartographic work, drawing forth distinctions between dialectical and dialogic formations of materialism in order to develop what he terms relational materialism—an engaged orientation to living that dwells in the entangled relations of affirmative ethics and enduring practices of resistance and refusal. Drawing upon examples from higher education, contemporary culture, and normative assumptions of governance, the author considers the potential that we might generate living alternatives to the contemporary status quo; daily practices no longer dependent on binary division or standardized calculations of what "matters." As such, the author advocates for practices of virtuous inquiry (future-orientated ethical assertions of what one should do) that orient inquiry as materially ethical activity.
Despite the often-overwhelming state of inequity and exploitation in our contemporary world, Kuntz generates an affirmative ethical stance that we can become relationally different, guided by a virtuous determination to articulate inquiry as the cartographic work of disruption and imagination. This text will prove valuable to graduate students and faculty who take inquiry seriously and seek the means to understand their work as engaged in the necessary challenge for material change.
Though to deny the geological impact of human force on nature is now essentially quasi-criminal, many theorists (mostly in the humanities) remain, nonetheless, unimpressed with what this “new era” has afforded us in terms of critical potential. This article is concerned with what Srinivas Aravamudan deems “the escapist philosophy of various dimension of the hypothesis concerning the Anthropocene.” Following Erik Swyngedouw's indictment of apocalyptic discourses' vital role in displacing social antagonisms and nurturing capitalism, this article argues that the new regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness have been powerful in disavowing racial antagonisms. It discusses the ways in which Anthropocene ethics have foreclosed proper political framings by promoting a moral philosophy unequipped to face the racial histories of our current ecological predicament. It contends that the “political Anthropocene” (if there is or ought to be one) will remain an impossibility until it is able to wrestle with the problem of black suffering.
Despite recognition of the gender dimensions of climate change, there is little attention to racism in climate justice perspectives. In response, this article advocates developing an ecologically informed intersectional approach designed to disclose the ways racism contributes to the construction of illegible lives in the domain of climate policies and practices. Differential impacts of climate change, while an important dimension, is ultimately inadequate to understanding and responding to both climate justice and environmental racism. What is required is a rich understanding of the histories and lineages of the deep incorporation of racism and environmental exploitation. To catalyze such an approach to climate justice, this article develops an analysis of three instances of the intermingling of racism and environmental exploitation: climate adaptation practices in Lagos, Nigeria; the enmeshment of race and coal mining in the post–Civil War United States; and the infusing of precarity and rainforest destruction in Brazil.
Subjectification in environmental movement education comprises an influx of more-than-human ‘others,’ including the classical elements: air, water, earth, fire. In this conceptual article, I consider what environmental movement education research, which includes inquiring into processes of political subjectification, might entail, when thinking with the elements. As part of this focus, I identify and propose thinking alongside an ‘elemental Deleuze,’ by attuning to how the elements thread through Deleuze’s many works. Thinking with the elements alongside the field of elemental media studies, I turn to a series of examples from research conducted on subjectification and education in anti-oil pipeline movements in British Columbia, Canada, to suggest that the elements are productive media of atmospheres and affects that generate political ‘life.’ My objectives in this article are to articulate implications and ways of engaging with more-than-human forms of subjectification in environmental movements, and the implications for environmental education research.
This article develops the concept of the “parental milieu” as a theoretical tool for biosocial research in environmental education and the emerging field of critical life studies. Using the concept of milieu as a catalyst for theoretical inquiry, we map several movements and variations of the term through the 20th century works of von Uexkull, Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. This results in the development of four propositions that connect the parental milieu with the territorial milieu of the animal world; the technical milieu of ubiquitous digital networks; the metabolic milieu of consumption; and the trans-qualitative milieu of fluid relations and queer kinships. We conclude with a call for transgenerational research that addresses the ways that the parental milieu intersects with children's environmental learning and ethico-aesthetic sensibilities.
In Atmospheric Things Derek P. McCormack explores how atmospheres are imagined, understood, and experienced through experiments with a deceptively simple object: the balloon. Since the invention of balloon flight in the late eighteenth century, balloons have drawn crowds at fairs and expositions, inspired the visions of artists and writers, and driven technological development from meteorology to military surveillance. By foregrounding the distinctive properties of the balloon, McCormack reveals its remarkable capacity to disclose the affective and meteorological dimensions of atmospheres. Drawing together different senses of the object, the elements, and experience, McCormack uses the balloon to show how practices and technologies of envelopment allow atmospheres to be generated, made meaningful, and modified. He traces the alluring entanglement of envelopment in artistic, political, and technological projects, from the 2009 Pixar movie Up and Andy Warhol’s 1966 installation Silver Clouds to the use of propaganda balloons during the Cold War and Google's experiments with delivering internet access with stratospheric balloons. In so doing, McCormack offers new ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmospheres in which life is immersed.
In addressing the need for a more robust engagement with aesthetics in posthumanist studies of childhood and nature, this chapter makes some tentative steps towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. In doing so, the chapter takes an alternative theoretical approach from much of the ‘common worlds’ scholarship that has emerged in recent years, while making the case for a new aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to the accelerating social, technological, and environmental changes of the Anthropocene epoch. Our approach foregrounds the singularity of children’s aesthetic experiences as relational-qualitative ‘intensities’ that alter the fabric of nature as an extensive continuum held in common. We therefore argue that every moment in the life of a child is an uncommon and unrepeatable occasion through which the common world of nature is felt, perceived, and experienced differently. This eco-aesthetic approach is developed further through the analysis of photographs taken by children as part of the Climate Change and Me project, which has mapped children and young people’s affective responses to climate change over a period of three years in New South Wales, Australia. Rather than working with images as representations or analogic signifiers for children’s experience, we analyse how each photograph co-implicates children’s bodies and environments through affective vectors of feeling, or ‘prehensions’. This leads us to reframe aesthetic notions of image, sensibility, perception, and causality in relational terms, while also acknowledging the individuation of childhood experiences as ‘creaturely becomings’ that produce new potentials for environmental thought and behaviour.
In this final section of the Handbook, we turn to ecological aesthetics in response
to radical changes in both the nature of childhood and the nature of nature in the
contemporary world. Artistic and aesthetic approaches have become increasingly
relevant as children encounter a world typified by the acceleration of social,
technological, and environmental change, and the mutually reinforcing conditions
of planetary instability, inequality, and precarity. Anthropogenic climate
change, the mass extinction of plant and animal life, and the chemical contamination
of air, food, soil, and water resources are transforming not only what we
might think of as “the environment”, but also the aesthetic qualities and environmental
sensibilities that constitute the experience of being alive. For many
scholars these changing conditions of Earthly life have taken on the name of
‘Anthropocene’, an epoch defined by the total imbrication of human life withmore than human planetary systems and technologies. The authors in this section
take up ecological aesthetics as a relational, experimental, and theoretically
adventurous field which aims to grasp the experiential qualities of life under
these changing conditions, and to imagine alternatives.With chapters focusing on
the role of movement, nature-study, poetry, pattern, sense-awareness, and the
creation of experimental works of art, this section highlights interdisciplinary
research and pedagogy which attends to richly textured compositions of
childhoodnature experience through a diverse range of material, social and
conceptual practices. In drawing together a range of Indigenous, speculative,
sensory, cultural, empirical, and artistic approaches, the range of chapters collected
in this section attests to the diversity and emergent shaping of ecological
aesthetics as a field that is still very much in the making.
This title is part of American Studies Now and available as an e-book first. Visit ucpress.edu/go/americanstudiesnow to learn more. In the last decade, public discussions of transgender issues have increased exponentially. However, with this increased visibility has come not just power, but regulation, both in favor of and against trans people. What was once regarded as an unusual or even unfortunate disorder has become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism and political recognition. What happened in the last few decades to prompt such an extensive rethinking of our understanding of gendered embodiment? How did a stigmatized identity become so central to U.S. and European articulations of self? And how have people responded to the new definitions and understanding of sex and the gendered body? In Trans*, Jack Halberstam explores these recent shifts in the meaning of the gendered body and representation, and explores the possibilities of a nongendered, gender-optional, or gender-queer future.
Because post qualitative inquiry uses an ontology of immanence from poststructuralism as well as transcendental empiricism, it cannot be a social science research methodology with preexisting research methods and research practices a researcher can apply. In fact, it is methodology-free and so refuses the demands of “application.” Recommendations for those interested in post qualitative inquiry include putting methodology aside and, instead, reading widely across philosophy, social theories, and the history of science and social science to find concepts that reorient thinking. Post qualitative inquiry encourages concrete, practical experimentation and the creation of the not yet instead of the repetition of what is.
In our everyday, multispecies worlds most of us encounter and sometimes sensorially interact with myriad invertebrate species, yet critical humanities and social science research tends to ignore humans' relationships with invertebrates more generally, and especially those involved in food production. Here, I begin by drawing on theories of animal performativity to foreground socioecological learning with invertebrates in a community garden space. I then describe the research site and methodologies employed to study the affective and performative dimensions of human-invertebrate relationships. Next, I examine how human material and discursive performances and invertebrate performances intersect in a suburban community garden in California, shaping affective relations between them. By focusing primarily on one undergraduate student's ontological shifts that include some invertebrate others, I demonstrate how the development of compassion and care for invertebrates is limited in complex ways by invertebrate performances interpreted as undesirable. I conclude by drawing out the implications of this research for educational studies, especially the interdisciplinary subfields of animal-focused education and critical food systems education.