Adventures in Posthumanism

A well-established transdisciplinary research group
Horizontal image of trees growing around electrical wires
Adventures in Posthumanism is a well-established transdisciplinary group run by the Plymouth Institute of Education .
The aim of the group is to share and develop ideas, research and work inspired by posthuman thinking. We run annual programmes of seminars/webinars, workshops, reading groups and doctoral conferences. Members are academics and doctoral students from across University of Plymouth, and other universities both nationally and internationally. All are welcome to take part.
We currently have around 200 international users signed up to our mailing list, and welcome new subscribers.
Please email Dr Joanna Haynes or Professor Jocey Quinn if you would like to join and receive updates, news and event information.
 
 
 
Shadows of two people, one with arms above their head
Art by Sarah Blissett - posthuman bodies - hand holding a rock
White and grey dog with its tongue out
 
 

Catch up on our past events

2024

Waves of flickering murmurs in everyday life: playing between ages
Wednesday 4 December 2024
The paper presented here explores the experiences of a collective writing project, unfolding through an anecdote involving Charlie, a young boy who creatively disrupted conventional photography methods. This incident, during an evening promenade by the sea in Ericeira (Portugal), epitomises the project's embrace of exploration and diverse perspectives—materialised through Charlie's insistence on experimenting with different camera angles. The event embodied the group's approach to writing, leading to a collective inquiry into the interplay of ages, angles, and other themes like waves, threads, shadows, and liminal spaces.
Influenced by the Between Ages Collective's collaborative spirit, these contributions explore the concept of 'between ages' – a metaphorical and literal space of transition and fluidity. The writing tries to capture a sense of openness and curiosity, embracing the uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in the process. The works do not strictly adhere to conventional academic or narrative forms but rather emerge from the collective's shared experiences, including cooking, eating, swimming, and walking together. These writings are not meant to be definitive or conclusive but invite readers to engage with the mundane and profound textures of everyday life.
The Between Ages Collective, led by Joanna Haynes, Magda Carvalho, Viktor Johansson and Tiago Almeida explores intra-generational relations as powerful potential spaces of learning and conviviality, questioning discriminatory assumptions about age, capacity and how intra-generational activity matters. The work of this international collective is an ongoing experiment in reading, thinking and writing together. Contributors to this paper were invited to craft pieces that delve into the 'between ages' theme, often exploring serendipitous moments that transform interactions and experiences. In the paper presented here, each piece offers unique insights into the fluid and often blurred boundaries between different states of being. This openness to the in-between spaces brings into question the notion of fixed identities and experiences, inviting a more nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics that shape existence. The aim is to allow readers to delve into these narratives and engage with the myriad ways they resonate with broader themes of being, storying, and connecting.
The paper has been accepted for publication by Childhood and Philosophy and we are expecting it to be available online by the end of November, 2024.
We are grateful to the University of Plymouth for funding the first project meeting and also to the University of Lisbon, University of the Azores and Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto (FIL/00502) – RG Philosophy and Public Space, and the KiBB research group at Nord University in Norway. Members joined the Collective from many different countries including The Azores, Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, Ivory Coast, Portugal, Norway, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden.

Paradise lost? Dark pedagogy beyond alienation – Antti Saari

Integrating multispecies justice perspectives in environmental education – Maria Saari

Q & A with Dr Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Professor Erin Manning
23 May 2024
Part of our Posthuman Decolonising Dialogues sessions.

Posthuman Decolonising Dialogues doctoral and post-doctoral hybrid event
22 May 2024
We were delighted to welcome an international panel of keynote speakers for this event:
  • Professor Erin Manning, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.
  • Dr Asilia Franklin-Phipps, New York University, USA.
  • Professor Jayne Osgood, University of Middlesex, England.

Presentation from Dr Helen Bowstead
1 May 2024
Encouraged and emboldened by her fellow adventurers in posthumanism, Dr Helen Bowstead 's doctorate explores the extraordinary potentiality of writing to the ‘not-yet-known’.
Reframing the thesis in terms of what it can do rather than what it is, Erin Manning’s philosophical projects of research-creation, artfulness and thought-in-motion find expression through the ordinary, the everyday, and the mundane. Exploring writing as immanent doing, Helen’s work proposes a tentative exemplification of the speculative potential of force and form and, by generating a joyful-artful engagement with the PhD process, the very act of writing emerges as a powerful antidote to constraints of the neoliberal, neurotypical university.
Helen’s most recent publications are: ‘Doctoral Thesis as Entangled Becomings: Moments That Tremble with Potential’, which appears in the International Review of Qualitative Research, and a contribution to a special edition of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodologies, entitled, ‘Not-knowing-in-advance: Trying to think and see as if not doing a PhD’.

Annual online doctoral event
17 April 2024
Our contributors were responding to the theme of the keynote as shared with us through her abstract by Sarah Truman titled Climate Fictions, Climate Crises, and Literary Education.
This paper argues that the climate crises we see around the globe correlate with a colonial crisis of literary imagination. I engage with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the curriculum and research methods, and particularly in the English literatures taught in school. I then engage with theorists, and some exemplars from my current research projects to argue that to access literature’s speculative potential to imagine different (climate) futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.
Dr. Sarah E. Truman is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Education and co-director of the Literary Education Lab. From 2022-2025, Dr. Truman is an ARC DECRA Fellow conducting research in Australia, Canada, and the UK with high school students, teachers, and interdisciplinary scholars. The DECRA project focuses on the potential of speculative fiction as a transdisciplinary method for thinking about the world. Dr. Truman’s latest monograph is Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation (2022). Other past and ongoing collaborations include: Oblique Curiosities, an electronic music duo and WalkingLab a SSHRC-funded international network of artists and researchers interested in walking as a critical research methodology.

A conversation about Invisible Education with author Jocey Quinn

Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage
8 February 2024
Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage: Responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability in contemporary times
  • Professor Vivienne Bozalek – University of the Western Cape, South Africa and Rhodes University
  • Professor Michalinos Zembylas – Open University of Cyprus and Nelson Mandela University, South Africa and University of South Australia
The presentation considers how higher education is entangled with coloniality and ecological damage and elaborates on how this entanglement plays out in relation to responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and responsiveness. It considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in feminist new materialist and care ethics ideas has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric which are prevalent in higher education. The presentation also examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. Further, it considers a number of response-able practices that higher education may make to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. We consider examples of three experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation. Finally, the presentation thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and care ethics to develop alternative practices in academia.
Vivienne Bozalek is Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape and Honorary Professor at the Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. She holds a PhD from Utrecht University. Her research interests and publications include the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, post-qualitative research and innovative pedagogical practices in higher education. Recent publications include Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education (co-edited with Michalinos Zembylas and Joan Tronto) (2021), Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives (co-edited with Bob Pease) (2021), Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come (co-edited with M. Zembylas, S. Motala and D. Hölscher) (2021) and In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism (co-edited with Karin Murris) (2023). She is editor-in-chief of the journal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning (CriSTaL).
Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, an honorary professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and an adjunct professor at the University of South Australia. He has been awarded a Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Chair for 2023–2026. Zembylas has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include Affect and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism: Pedagogies for the Renewal of Democratic Education and Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come (co-edited with V. Bozalek, S. Motala and D. Hölscher). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

2023

Melting Glaciers: Ice writing and soft sculpture
14 December 2023
Presented by Dr Natalie Pollard, University of Exeter
Images of melting glaciers are frequently used in the media to convey the scale and urgency of climate crisis. However, they tend to present glacial ice as passive, static, empty, remote and vulnerable, based on longstanding colonial modes of representation. This is the case even in the some of the most well-meaning environmentalist iconography. How are artistic and literary projects around the world challenging and reframing these norms? In what ways do creative works push back against the discursive connections between the life of ancient ice and Global North constructions of glacial wilderness and remoteness? How should I imagine glaciers otherwise?
Looking at contemporary creative interventions that engage with the thick complexity of livelihoods, cultural and knowledge practices intimately connected to the cryosphere, this talk will focus on activist work by the Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña, in dialogue with installations by Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and soft sculpture around the world.
Biography Dr Natalie Pollard is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of Exeter. She has active research interests in the intersections of the (social) sciences, arts and humanities, as well as geology. Natalie is the author of two monographs on contemporary visual arts, sculpture and poetics. She is completing a new book project on art and writing that challenge Global North icons of ecological and climate emergency, including ‘drowning’ islands, melting glaciers, and extinction.

Book launch presentation: Invisible Education
October 10 2024
Invisible Education: Posthuman Explorations of Everyday Learning.
Professor Jocey Quinn, University of Plymouth, UK
This original and challenging book introduces the ground-breaking concept of ‘invisible education’, theorising it with critical posthuman concepts and demonstrating it through a wide range of empirical research. Invisible education is the learning that happens in everyday life: it is invisible because it is purposively ignored and devalued, and it is education because it is powerful and formative. Far from being marginal, this is where the future is being formed. The book challenges the feel-good fiction of social mobility through formal education, replacing it with the new concept of future mutabilities, shaped through invisible education. The book is the first to bring together lifelong learning and critical posthumanism and does so in ways that are mutually illuminating. The book draws on a wide range of funded empirical research on invisible education: exploring landscapes, animals and things (material, immaterial and uncanny), activism, volunteering and work, home lives and care, and global contexts of conflict. It charts how invisible education plays a crucial role in the lives of marginalised people, including young people, activists, postverbal people, carers, women escaping domestic abuse and many others. Combining posthuman ideas with memoir, poetry, art and fiction, it is creative, intellectually stimulating and readable.
Professor Jocey Quinn is Professor of Lifelong Learning at Plymouth Institute of Education, University of Plymouth, UK. Her research is transdisciplinary and focuses on marginalised adults and their learning. She has published widely and led many international and national research projects. She has been working with posthuman ideas for the past ten years and is a joint co-ordinator of the Adventures in Posthumanism International Network.

Spiralling crochet as a time of childhood with Dr Rose-Anne Reynolds
20 September 2022
I crocheted a blanket during the process of writing/thinking/doing/being my PhD. The double-knit stitch used throughout the crocheted blanket looks the same ‘in front and at the back’ so the piece is never right way up – for which way is that? Deleuze and Guattari draw a comparison between knitting and crochet, suggesting that, “in knitting the needles produce a striated space; one of them plays the role of the warp, the other of the woof, but by turns. Crochet, on the other hand, draws an open space in all directions, a space that is prolongable in all directions—but still has a center” (1987/2014, p. 476). This open space of the crochet is an irregular, rectangular interrupted spiral, but the piece grows outward. I think, pick up, am attached to, wool sliding and gliding through my fingers to dance with the other stitches joined together. It thinks with me as the stitches form and grow and grow and grow. There is no crocheting without touch. Fingers poke, wool wraps around and the touching continues. Each different spiral produces stories, questions which reveal, unfurl, emerge, bringing forth light, shadow, colour and choice? There is tension though, which carries itself through the wool through the crochet hook, through the picking up and letting go. This thesis/my life embodies this tension, these inconsistencies. Other questions arise. How do some materials matter more? Paper that has marks drawn on by adult counts more than paper that has marks drawn on them by child? How hooks, needles and wool matter less than paper, ink and books over and over again? Alongside the tension there is also joy as the colour, the weight, the indeterminacy and instability, the puzzlement signal a different way to be in the world. What Kohan in conversation with Kennedy (2008. p. 6) argues passionately for – a time of childhood. Join ‘me’ as ‘we’ (learn to) crochet together as a way of “learning to (re)member the things we have been taught to forget” (Dilliard, 2012)…and think/do/become with the possibilities of spiralling crochet as a time of childhood.
Dr Rose-Anne Reynolds has a PhD in Education from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and is a Childhood Studies lecturer in the School of Education at UCT and values the Transdisciplinary nature of postgraduate programmes in the ‘field’ of Education. Rose-Anne’s PhD thesis is entitled, A Posthuman Reconfiguring of Philosophy with Children in a Government Primary School in South Africa. Some of her research interests include Philosophy with Children (P4wC) and Communities of Philosophical Enquiry, the Philosophy of Child and Childhood, Childhood Studies, Early Childhood Education and Postqualitative Research.
Rose-Anne continues to make time to work with children, their caregivers, parents, and teachers to explore ways to listen to children differently and think together about ‘learning’ in ways that do justice to all educational encounters. Rose-Anne theorises teaching and learning as political (across all ages) and using emergent, experimental, experiential, enquiry-based pedagogies in her lectures and workshops. She can often be seen walking into lecture theatres and seminars with picture books, oil pastels, playdough, crayons, card and wool.

Discussion following Dr Rose-Anne Reynolds presentation
22nd September 2024
This was a hybrid session where people spent time crocheting, knitting, unknotting and knotting wool and thread….making, thinking, talking.

Professor Jayne Osgood's keynote
18 April 2023
Adventures In Posthumanism Doctoral Conference 2023 (followed by presentations)
Professor Jayne Osgood's keynote
The paper offers a Playful Archive which t(h)reads a path through research undertaken in childhood studies over the past decade. The intention is to weave the promise of post-qualitative inquiry through a series of provocations and propositions. The partial glimpses offered through images and poetry gesture towards the potential that doing research differently can make in pursuit of making a difference in the world. Complexifying what research is, how it is done, and what it generates involves bringing matter, affect, philosophy, ethics and theory together to push aside taken-for-granted practices.
Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research and Scholarship, Middlesex University; and Professor II at Hogskolen a Innlandet University, Norway. Her work addresses issues of social justice though critical engagement with policy, curricular frameworks, and pedagogical approaches in Early Childhood Education. She is committed to extending understandings of the workforce, families, gender and sexualities, ‘child’ in early years contexts through creative, affective methodologies. She has published extensively within the post-modernist paradigm with over 100 publications in the form of books, chapters and journal papers; her most recent books include Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods; Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art. She has served on the editorial boards of several journals and is a long-standing board member and guest editor at Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. She is currently an editor at Gender & Education Journal, and Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology Journal. She is also Book Series Editor for both Bloomsbury (Feminist Thought in Childhood Research; Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood; and for Springer (Keythinkers in Education).
Jayne’s talk was followed by presentations from Megan Curet (University of Plymouth) En Ritmo/In Gathering: Disrupting the North American Approach to Dance Training a feltness: disrupting knowability and linearity – worlding in changing worlds; then Gail Flockhart (University of Plymouth) The Entangled Self-Assemblage: Becoming-Otherwise; third are Veronique Rousseau and Professor Fiona Blaikie (Brock University, Canada) Playful, caring, scholarly, and reckless adventures in posthuman doctoral research and supervision. The final presentation is a film made by Rachael Allain (University of Plymouth).

Re-CAP: Reconfiguring Child Agency through Play – Professor Karin Murris
1 September 2023
In my talk I re-turn to some of my experiences of writing an Advanced grant proposal for the European Research Council (ERC). I outline this five year project that draws on other research projects on (digital) play and posthumanist projects in South Africa. I share what we are going to do, its importance and my passion for it if we get this €2.5 mil grant, but I also diffract through the three months it took me to write it and how this diffractive process itself changes the project. Re-CAP is a meta-methodological project. Using philosophical, quantitative and (post)qualitative research approaches, it troubles theory/practice binaries and reimagines methodology, data generation and analysis. Re-CAP puts childing and the more-than-human methodologically at the heart of an iterative process of scientific renewal. I argue that digital experimentation will help to create a global decolonising paradigm shift in how child subjectivity and agency are theorised and enacted, thus reconstituting play. Foregrounding multiplicities of time and space, the ERC project will challenge the developmental and linear discourse of scientific progress itself.
Professor Karin Murris' research is inspired by her work with children, parents and teachers as a trained youth librarian and educational consultant. Her disciplinary background is philosophy, philosophy of education and children’s literature which has inspired her unique posthumanist approach to childhood studies and postqualitative research methodologies. She moved to the University of Oulu in Finland from South Africa in 2020 to take up a position as Professor of Early Childhood Education. Originally from Amsterdam, she has lived and worked in England and Wales for 22 years and in South Africa for 12 years, also raising 5 children together with her husband Simon. She is also Emerita Professor of Education at the University of Cape Town.

Posthuman Revisioning of Age and Learning
7 June 2024
This symposium brings together diverse ways of re-thinking age, from multi-species, intra-generational, cyborg, and activist perspectives and drawing on multiple sources. It asks what a posthuman revisioning of age implies for how, when, and where we learn; and from whom and from what.

Speaker 1

Nick Jenkins, Sociology, University of the West of Scotland
Ageing (With Animals): A Multi-Species Approach to Intercorporeality
Ageing is a relational process. Within liberal humanist approaches to care and education, however, the only forms of relating that appear to matter are inter-personal forms of relating, in which human Selves and human Other(s) engage in symbolic communication. We know, however, that many people age-with and age-alongside members of other species. This paper, therefore, presents a multi-species understanding of intercorporeality and considers how this may help researchers, educators, care practitioners and others explore the ways in which relations across species boundaries affect the ageing process.

Speaker 2

Joanna Haynes, Plymouth Institute of Education, University of Plymouth
Learning Between Ages
Joanna will talk about her work on children’s philosophies, playing with age and the imagination of post-age pedagogies. These interests, alongside experiences of age/ing and everyday life, have drawn her into the exploration of intra-generational relations/learning, and the creation of a new collaborative research project: Between Ages.

Speaker 3

Marie Lavelle, Plymouth Institute of Education, University of Plymouth
‘Planning your retirement’; a consideration of algorithmic encounters in the creation of aged expectations.
This session will consider how aged expectations are encountered, embodied, resisted and reworked in our daily lives. Using digital, on-line interactions, algorithmic profiles are created, with the resulting bombardment of messages about how and what we should be doing, wearing, eating, at particular ‘times of our lives’. With the potential to change the way we act and think, through digitally manifested identities, like Haraway, I am both troubled and challenged. Playing with Haraway’s ‘the cyborg’ the session asks how Haraway’s work might help us to rethink age in a digital world.

Speaker 4

Jocey Quinn, Plymouth Institute of Education, University of Plymouth
“I think things are still popping up, so I’ll pop along with them!” Exploring age and everyday learning with older activists.
Jocey will use British Academy/Leverhulme funded research with older activists as a springboard to explore entanglements of age, activism, everyday learning, public and private spaces, play and wisdom. She will use posthuman ideas, memoir, fiction, poetry, and art as prisms through which to see these relations.

Mary Garland book launch
3 May 2025
Animating potential for intensities and becoming: challenging discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia.
This book tells the story of the writing of a doctoral thesis (read the full thesis online) written for all those denied a second chance in education. Storying both an initial event leading to a sixteen-year-old’s withdrawal from a Further Education college on her first day, and an imaginary second chance to support her ten years’ later whilst at university, this is a collection of post qualitative inquiries which offers challenge to discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia. This work adopts posthuman approaches to theorising in inquiries aiming to decentre individual ‘lecturer’ and ‘student’ identities.
Drawing from the theorisings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ken Gale, Jonathan Wyatt, Erin Manning, and others, movements and moments quivering with potential for change are illuminated. Hoping to consequently generate genuine second chances for all, there is a focus on exemplifying different approaches to writing which trouble academic constraints by fostering inquiry and speculation. Through moving away from ‘what is’ towards ‘what if’, towards writing as immanent doing incorporating speculative and experimental approaches, it is hoped to animate potential for intensities and becoming in writing, offering opportunities and glimmerings of the not-yet-known. There’s something about writing books that is out of time. As though the writing only really knows what it’s after once it has begun to make its way into the world (Manning, 2016: ix)
Mary is an alumni research fellow with the University of Plymouth, UK. She taught in Adult, Further and Higher Education institutions before pursuing her dream of being a PhD student in the Plymouth Institute of Education. Mary’s forthcoming book, Animating potential for intensities and becoming: challenging discursively constructed structures and writing conventions in academia, is due for publication by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2023.

Adventures In Posthumanism Doctoral Conference 2023

Session one schedule
  • Philippa Isom, Massey University of New Zealand. Andrew Gibbons, Auckland University of Technology
  • Peter Maslin, Bethlehem Tertiary Institute
  • Two doctoral students and one supervisor walk into a bar…
  • Ruth Gailey PhD student University of Edinburgh, School of Health in Social Science, Scotland
  • Exploring arts-based method in liminal healing space: short film. (film shown in session 5)
  • Charlotte Marshall, Nottingham Trent University, England
  • We run as Wolves
  • Winne Wong, PhD student and Professor Dr Cathryn Magno, University of Fribourg Dept of Education Sciences, Switzerland
  • Supervision and symbiosis
  • Sharon Louise Smith, University of Birmingham, England
  • How was supervision?
Session two schedule
  • Helen Bowstead University of Plymouth, England
  • Boning the corset
  • Claire Walsh, University of Plymouth Institute of Education, England
  • Knowhere: A story of many stories
  • Mandy Andrews, University of Plymouth Institute of Education, England
  • A non-abstract
  • Lois Peach, University of Bristol, England
  • Attuning to methodological memories: stories from doctoral research of an intergenerational music programme
Session three schedule
  • Katherine Porter, PhD candidate, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
  • ‘I don’t know’: using scenic writing to capture the classroom
  • Hannah Gardiner, University of Plymouth, England
  • The world is always moving, so how can I move with it?
  • Charlotte Hankin, Hannah Hogarth, Elisabeth Barratt Hacking and Other Kin, Department of Education, University of Bath, England
  • Disrupting and reimagining doctoral ethics and supervisory relations in always-moving worlds

Ken Gale book launch
8 March 2023
Writing and Immanence: Concept making and the reorientation of thought in pedagogy and inquiry.
This book does not offer solutions or answer questions. It is a book that is attentive to the unabatingly potent, sometimes agonistic, forces at play in the continuing unfoldings of crises of representation. As immanent doing, the writing in the book writes to destabilise the orthodoxies, conventions and unquestioned givens of writing in the academy and, in so doing, is troubled by the ontogenetic uncertainties of its own writing coming into being. In the always active processualism of presencing, the fragility of word and concept creation animates, what Meillassoux has described as ‘the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything’. In working to avoid the formational and structural linearities of a series of numbered consecutive chapters, the book is constructed in and around the movements of the always actualising capaciousness of Acts. In offering engagements with education research and pedagogy and always sensitive to the dynamics of multiplicity, each Act emanates from and feeds into other en(Act)ments in the unfolding emergence of the book. Hence, in agencement, the book offers multiple points of entry and departure. In this, it is a book that writes to create discomfort for the logic and mediations of the neurotypical; it is a book that welcomes the insurgencies created by the always shifting forces of encounter and action of the neurodiverse. Deleuze has said that a creator is ‘someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities…it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through.’ Therefore, the writing of this book writes to the writing, pedagogic and research practices of those in education and the humanities who are writing to the creation of such impossibilities.
Ken works in the Institute of Education in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Plymouth in the UK and has published widely and presented at a number of international conferences on the philosophy of education, research methodologies and collaborative approaches to education practices. His forthcoming book, Writing and Immanence: Concept making and the reorientation of thought in pedagogy and inquiry is published by Routledge.

Presentation from Line Mastad – University of Agder, Norway
I use knitting as my artistic expression, and the use of the craft tradition brings a narrative meaning into the artwork together with other symbols from our spaces of common cultural symbol systems. One of the characteristics of contemporary art, is that the big stories related to mythology and religion are replaced with other “big stories” related to social conditions. Migration and integration are typical “big stories” in my artwork. I use my work for different didactical purposes such as learning about craft traditions, learning about new big stories, letting the audience express themselves and take part in relational artworks.

2022

Still/Moving performance lecture
17 November 2022
Our collective practice aims to create social and ecological change through questioning established modes of thinking and behaviour. Our projects are developed through a process of collaborative and participatory dialogue and activity among each other and externally. Inspired by the artist Louise Bourgeois who said: ‘It is not about the medium, it is about what you are trying to say’, our work emerges in diverse forms, including sculpture, film, photography, performance, installation, the spoken and printed word. Our shared methodology comes from collaboratively testing modes of accumulating or disseminating information and from meeting people. Our work with community groups, scientists, politicians, academics, climate activists or children often involves creating stories, finding common ground, listening and co-creating new knowledge. In the same way that as a collective we come with our different experiences and understandings, so too is this process repeated beyond.

Biographies

Still/Moving is composed of three artists, Laura Hopes, Martin Hampton and Léonie Hampton, who met when they were 13. Living in Devon, UK, their collective practice aims to create social and ecological change through questioning established modes of thinking and behaviour. Projects are developed through a process of collaborative and participatory dialogue and activity among each other and with partner communities. Léonie has an internationally acclaimed fine art practice. She studied Art history, specialising in contemporary European and American art, and is an AL at UAL London. Martin is an award-winning filmmaker who co-founded Squint/Opera with architect Will Alsop. He studied Architecture at The Bartlett, UCL, specialising in speculative designs for extreme locations such as the moon and intertidal zones. Laura is an artist, lecturer and post-doctoral researcher, whose PhD thesis Being Vulnerable: Distances of the Sublime Anthropocene focused upon the entangled relationship between climate change and colonisation.

Doctoral Conference – session one
5 May 2022
Session one, chaired by Mary Garland
Ryan Thomas Green
Elucidating a Posthuman Music Driven Theatre
Helen Bowstead
Refuse. Refuse. Re-fuse: Communing with cephalopods
Jo Dorothea-Smith
What is a molecular account of vision?
Lois Peach
Letting stories emerge: re-configuring possibilities for intergenerational research through storying

Doctoral Conference – session two
Session two, chaired by Ken Gale
Jayne Osgood and Sid Mohandas
The Promise of the ‘material memoir’ for posthumanist childhood studies
Sharon Smith
Being mum: approaching the subjectivity of parents of disabled children through conversation
Claudia Blandon
The vibrancy of Tex(t)iles and letters that don’t leave me alone: exploring notions of vulnerability and materiality in displacement
Rosamonde Birch
Art Earth Walks: Entanglements of place, presence, and dialogue

Doctoral Conference – session three
5 May 2022
Professor Maria Tamboukou’s keynote address
Maria talks about her research for the book ‘Revisiting the nomadic subject’ (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). This book follows the stories of forcefully displaced women and raises the question of whether we can still use the figuration of the nomadic subject in feminist theories and politics. This question is examined in the light of the ongoing global crises of mobility and severe border practices. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, what I argue is that in recounting their stories migrant and refugee women appear in the world as ‘who they are’ — unique and unrepeatable human beings —and not as ‘what they are’ —objectified ‘refugees’, ‘victims’ or ‘stateless subjects’. Moreover, women’s stories leave traces of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil and patriarchal disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. What emerges from the encounter between theoretical abstractions and women’s lived experiences is the need to decolonize feminist theories and make cartographies of mobility assemblages, wherein nomadism is a component of entangled relations and not a category or a figuration of a subject position.

Biography

Maria Tamboukou is Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of East London, UK, and has held visiting research positions in a number of institutions in the UK and overseas. Her research activity develops in the areas of philosophies and epistemologies in the social sciences, feminist theories, narrative analytics and archival research. She is the author and editor of 14 books and numerous journal articles.

Doctoral Conference – session four
5 May 2022
Session four, chaired by Joanna Haynes.
Mandy Andrews
Landscapes of Play, Playing and becoming
Meghan Judge
Sense Palette: Waterline. Please visit the recording of Meghan’s soundscape
Mitali Dutta, Hannah Hogarth and Joy Cranham
Relational Researchers: collaging complex and entangled adulthoods – the technology proved tricky in this part of the session and sadly we do not have a recording of the workshop. To find out more about their work contact Mitali, Hannah and Joy at University of Bath. We look forward very much to hearing from you again at next year’s conference.
Rachael Allain
Risky encounters in adventuring with posthumanism, with the not-yet-known. Find out more about Rachael's practice led and multi-disciplinary arts research.

Knowing Sight: Visual Culture in Troubling Times
3 June 2022
We were delighted to welcome back Asilia Franklin-Phipps from the School of Education, SUNY New Paltz.
She writes:
Race draws our attention to some things and away from others. Race is both visual and sensory. Objects, sounds, smells, and styles, are raced particularly when those things are associated with racial others. In a segregated culture and society, visual culture gives us information about racial others. In the U.S., there is an established visual culture invested in the production and reproduction of antiblackness. Visual culture can both reinforce and resist hierarchies of humanity. I purposely say visual culture because it can include anything in the visual landscape—from memes and YouTube videos to prestige television and visual art. Many in my generation watched music videos and films and read magazines. Today people of all ages are awash in the visual images of digital media. Our ways of seeing are inherited but also disciplined and maintained by the images of visual culture. Black aesthetics, Black popular culture, and Black art have historically refused, troubled, and resisted inherited images. Yet, many people do not encounter those resistant images or, if they do, may not know what to do with such images.
I am interested in thinking through the pedagogical potential of staging encounters with visual culture in the field of education. Such encounters allow students and instructors to have collective, affective, and embodied experiences with the ongoing violence of social hierarchy through images. By paying attention to how we encounter the visual, even in disciplined historically unconcerned with these issues, we might better engage things like perspectives and gazes. This has implications of how we conceptualize representation, experience, knowledge, and subjectivity.
Campt, T. M. (2019). Black visuality and the practice of refusal. Women & Performance, 29(1), 79–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2019.1573625
Dahn, E. (2014). “Unashamedly Black”: Jim Crow Aesthetics and the Visual Logic of Shame. Melus, 39(2), 93–114. https://doi.org/10.1093/melus/mlu010
Fleetwood, N. R. (2011). Troubling vision performance, visuality, and blackness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Isherwood, M. (2020). Toward a Queer Aesthetic Sensibility: Orientation, Disposition, and Desire. Studies in Art Education, 61(3), 230–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2020.1778437
Knight, C. (2019). Feeling and Falling in Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death. The Black Scholar, 49(3), 36–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2019.1619120

Biography

Asilia Franklin-Phipps is an Assistant Professor in Education Studies and Leadership, with an affiliate appointment in Art Education. Asilia graduated from the University of Oregon with a Ph.D. in Critical Sociocultural Studies in 2018. Asilia worked in the Teaching and Learning Center at The Graduate Center, the City University of New York as a postdoc for two years, also teaching courses at Brooklyn College, Hunter College, and School of Visual Arts. Currently Asilia is interested in expanding spaces for Black life, which include rest. Asilia is currently writing about Black geographies, street art, visual culture. Asilia’s work is informed by Black feminist concepts of care, exhaustion, and self-preservation.

Re-membering as a sacred practice
12 April 2022
Dr Rose-Anne Reynolds, University of Cape Town
The title of the presentation comes from Barad (2017, p.76). I write a partial telling, a “re-membering as a sacred practice” because I will not be going back in time, but embodying and enacting a material reconfiguring of the life I lived as a child and an adult, in South Africa.
I grew up in Apartheid South Africa. I endured Apartheid education and compulsory schooling as a child and teenager. I then became a teacher in this same system, on the same colonised land, divided, carved up and scarred by Apartheid policies and practices. The memories I will share in this presentation are alive, continuous enactments of a changing universe. I do not turn back to look at these memories and they do not drop into ‘this’ present, they are already here, but gone, already past, but different. This presentation is not a story or a sanitised history, but a re-membering of a life as a child of Apartheid and a teacher growing out, through and beyond that system in ‘post’-Apartheid South Africa.
Entangled in this presentation is how the concepts of child and childhood can be re-imagined through tracing the entanglements of the delicate complexity of my childhood that is not past or gone, and my adulthood that is not fixed or stable. I use “travel hopping” (Barad, 2017) which can be understood as temporal diffraction, as a methodology.
This presentation troubles the lines and the material-discursive practices about child and childhood they allow to emerge. I think with the child, me as child, in 1981, 1985, 2007, 2017. I think with and through the lines of childhood, apartheid, colonisation, racism, apartheid and the violence these lines enact in and through a specific image of child.
Through deliberately chosen photographs and specific memories I trace entanglements with schooling and the land. Bodily borders are defined and performed by humans. Borders are drawn on maps to be enacted on land, or in the air, or in the sea, and even in the cosmos. They come into existence as they are performed. I read a map-drawing as text through Karen Barad’s work (2007, 2010, 2014, 2017) for the more-than-human is part of the phenomenon. I also pay attention to how this map works to disrupt the ideas of time and space being containers and why this is important for child and childhood education. The map-drawing is not a container, and therefore does not just contain the historical factors of the Group Areas Act and Apartheid South Africa, but also (and not limited to) geopolitical, economic, social, psychological and educational factors.

Biography

Dr Rose-Anne Reynolds is a Foundation Phase/ Early Childhood Education lecturer in the School of Education, at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Her research interests include Philosophy with Children (P4wC), the Philosophy of Child and Childhood and Inclusive Education including Disability Studies. Rose-Anne holds an MEd in Applied Language and Literacy studies, with a focus on the language socialization of bilingual children in bilingual families. Rose-Anne is a Level 1 Philosophy with Children trainer and co-ordinates the Southern African P4wC network.

Jonathan Wyatt
The breaking body: Everyday tales of the lost and found
As part of my work towards a new book, ‘Writing, the Everyday, and Creative-Relational Inquiry’, this paper will inquire into the everyday body, a body “as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in relations” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 3), in all the body’s losses, joys, mess, beauty, and contradictions. It will be a paper about how a(n ageing, White, male) body breaks, how it might (or might not) heal, what a body in its everyday movements remembers, knows, conveys, carries, mourns; what is lost but present. It will be a paper about how difficult it is to write about the body, however much scholars make claims (as I do) for ‘embodied’ scholarship. It will trouble and explore how we conceptualise ‘the body’. Bringing to the page the everyday poetics and prosaics of the struggling, soaring, body, and the legacies it holds, it will be a paper that looks for creative-relational possibilities for writing the in/corporeal.
Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1-25). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Biography

Jonathan Wyatt is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and Director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh where he is also Programme director of the PhD in Counselling Studies and other post graduate programmes. Jonathan gained his Doctorate in narrative and life story research in 2008 at the University of Bristol and has since published and presented widely in this field. Jonathan’s book, ‘Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing: Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry’ was published with Routledge in early 2019.

Out of the Clear
3 February 2022
Dr Erin Manning – watch the session recording
“When there is nothing to govern, nothing to secure, there is blackness”
(Moten and Harney 2021: 84).
Clearing produces property. Property produces dispossession. “All property is loss because all property is the loss of sharing” (Harney and Moten 2021:14). The accursed share of all that exceeds interpersonality, mediation, whiteness, logisticality, of all that cannot be accounted for, sickens the field. And sometimes rejuvenates it. The force of the transindividual, of all that exceeds and precedes the individual, does rewild. But its vitality is weakened, and as perception is honed to single out the individual over the field, the human more and more becomes the focal point and soon man becomes synonymous with life. This is how the logistics of genocide – the genocide of relation – does its work, behind the scenes. Out of the Clear begins here. It asks what the failure of mediation, and its insistence, leaves as its scar on the land. It asks what is at stake when the presupposition is that to make way for life you must first clear. It asks what practices, what architectural procedures – following Arakawa and Gins – can open the way for a mode of existence out of the clear.

Biography

Dr. Erin Manning holds the Research Chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy and is Director of the SenseLab at Concordia University, Canada. Find out more about Erin

Simone Eringfeld: Hello, can you hear me?

18 January
Podcasting and ‘data music’ as digital sonic methods for post-Covid research.
Covid-19 has required us to look for new ways of teaching, learning and doing research, often via digital means. Yet while we have largely been able to continue with our core academic activities of reading and writing, the lack of face-to-face interaction has made it a lot more difficult to continue speaking with and listening to one other, or to engage in conversations or conduct interviews. In a post-Covid academy, how can we creatively go about facilitating ‘spoken words’ and sonic interactions in digital environments? This talk explores podcasting as a new action research method and sonic elicitation technique for interviews. In addition, in this talk Simone illustrates how spoken word performance and the production of ‘data music’ (data-driven song writing and music production) can be used to creatively communicate research outcomes for a wide audience.
*This event included poetry, music and performance.*

Biography

Simone Eringfeld is an educationist, artist-researcher, poet and musician whose work explores new ways to blend academia with art. She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Master’s degree in Education, in 2020. Her thesis on the future of the post-Covid University, which used podcasting as its principal research method, won the BERA Master’s Dissertation Award (1st Prize, 2021). In April 2021 she released her first spoken word music EP titled ‘Please Hold’, in which she presented data from her research at Cambridge. Her most recent work has focused on developing podcasting as an action research method and ‘data music’ as a new way of communicating research results. Follow Simone on X @SimoneEringfeld

Simon Webster talks about his doctoral work on sketchbooks
January
Making meaning of the sketchbook: an inquiry into the conceptualisation, content and form of sketchbooks, and associated pedagogical practices, in post-compulsory Art and Design education, with consideration of the effects of new technologies on practices.
This research project is an inquiry into, and exploration of, work carried out by students studying on formal Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) Art & Design courses in a specialist Art & Design college. The project focuses on the use of sketchbooks and the effects that new technologies are having on sketchbook practices. The sketchbook has played an important role in Art & Design practices, and education, for hundreds of years and in that time its usage had ‘remained virtually untouched by the march of fashions and theories throughout history (Clayton and Weisenthal, 1991:113). But, during the late 20thC and now, at the start of the 21stC, new technologies that utilise the microchip and the internet have had a significant effect on society and culture in general (Jordan, 1999; Slack and Macgregor Wise, 2015); this study offers research into more specific effects that the new technologies have had on Art & Design sketchbook concepts and practices. Sketchbooks are ‘poorly understood in terms of their meanings, having been rarely focused upon in research and yet widely used in practice’ (Ryan, 2009:121).
Meanings concerning the nature of sketchbooks will be uncovered, discovered and, or, co-created as the study progresses, especially when the practices being investigated are new or idiosyncratic (Heron, 1996; Teddlie & Yu, 2007). The aims of the project were to:
  1. Investigate the range of practices that constitute sketchbook work, and the discourses that surround it, enabling an original contribution to be made to the body of knowledge concerning the use of sketchbooks in FE and HE Art & Design education.
  2. Study the effects that new technologies are having on the range of practices that constitute sketchbook work in FE and HE Art & Design education. Key concepts derived from this project, relating to the effect of new technologies, are the dispersed sketchbook and the digitally impregnated sketchbook.

Biography

Simon Webster joined the Education team at the University of Plymouth in 2000, teaching on the PGCE for Post Compulsory Education and Training. He has also worked at Plymouth College of Art between 1998 and 2017 as a lecturer on Ceramics and Metalwork, Art History, and Graphic Design courses, as well as carrying out support work with students who struggle with their writing. He completed his Master’s degree in Education in 2008, which looked at ways of carrying out observations of online teaching. In 2021, he completed his PhD.

2021

Matters of Research and Response-ability – Dr Theresa Giorza
7 July 2021
Videography as Refrain: Diffracting with Forward, Backward and Stop in a Preschool Outing, presented by Dr Theresa Giorza, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
In my effort to enact an ‘ethics of worlding’ in my research with a group of children and a city park, improvisational and artful approaches to data creation (in this case videography) suggest ways of staying with emerging meanings and concepts that are constitutive of my becoming-researcher-writer-in-relation.

Doctoral event presentations – Helen Bowstead and Lois Peach
7 June 2021
Helen Bowstead, University of Plymouth
Not-knowing-in-advance: trying to think and see as if not doing a PhD.
Working with the concept of the minor gesture, this paper offers an insight into the ways in which the doings and writings of a doctoral thesis can “articulate in language the agencements at the heart of the event’s dance of attention” (Manning, 2016: 120). For Manning, it is not new methods that research-creation needs, but “a reaccounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking-doing”. She argues that at its best, “writing is an act, alive with the rhythms of uncertainty and openings of a speculative pragmatism that engages with the forces of the milieu where transversality is most acute” (Manning, 2016:42). This approach to research-creation is not easy in the neoliberal university, for “[i]n the middling, everything is at stake” (Manning, 2016: 108). But risk is needed and risk is necessary if we are to find ways to matter and not just want to matter (Haraway, 2016:47).
Mapping a process that invokes image, voice and text, this ‘pop-up provocation’ will open up a space to explore how not-knowing-in-advance has the potential to generate a joyful-artful engagement with the PhD process and engender a more ethical relationship to being with the world.
Lois Peach, University of Bristol
Playing-with data, thinking-with playdoh: (Re)imagining possibilities for intergenerational research
‘Concepts are like clay or playdoh: they are malleable, and their form and substance are affected by the strength of hands, the warmth of the body and the intensity of the ideas explored and expressed collaboratively.’ (Murris, 2021:12).
Data, like concepts and playdoh, are malleable in our hands as researchers – and data about playdoh is no exception. This presentation shares findings from a re-analysis of ethnographic data, collected in 2019, of an intergenerational programme in the South-West of England. Through a detailed re-turning (Barad, 2014) of an episode involving preschool children, older adults living with dementia, practitioners and playdoh, the re-imagined possibilities for understanding intergenerational relations generated by a feminist new materialist analysis will be discussed. Concepts such as intra-action, diffraction and agential realism (Barad, 2007) entangle with those of child, older adult, practitioner, generation, dementia and difference. Drawing attention to the thinking/doing of my research practices in relation to this data poses questions about what thinking-with material-discursive entities such as playdoh may do in intergenerational research and how playing-with concepts and data may re-imagine (research) possibilities.

Doctoral event presentations – Mary Garland, Mandy Andrews and Toby Chanter
Mary Catherine Garland, University of Plymouth
Writing moving towards the not-yet-known
‘Practising the schizz,’ Erin Manning (2020: 188) says, ‘is about inventing new opportunities for modulating the shape of experimentation of an emergent collectivity’. Focusing on ‘shaping occurr[ing] in the real time of the event’ (ibid.), then, seems particularly pertinent to the landscaping of a doctoral thesis: a body of writing with, as Baruch Spinoza reminds us with his question of what a body can do, ‘the capacity to affect [and] be affected’ (Massumi in ‘notes on the translation’ in Deleuze and Guattari, 2015).
At our last doctoral event, paper planes (an idea inspired by a frustrated class of teenage students, in a UK Further Education college) flew extracts from various writings (potentially towards a doctoral thesis) around a room, rupturing the rigid Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘segmentary lines’ running through academic conferences. With the movement of those extracts animating the writings, subsequently crossing thresholds to the pages of a now emerging PhD thesis, this ‘main course’ will challenge those discursively constructed academic conventions: creating ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari) moving away from writing representing towards writing inquiring, perhaps offering a glimmer of something not-yet-known.
Mandy Andrews, University of Plymouth
Landscapes of Play
Drawing on understandings arising from my ongoing PhD work on ‘Landscapes of Play’ adopting a posthuman researcher perspective (as becoming posthuman), and participatory research with children into unsupervised play outdoors close to home; the intention of my input will be to prompt discussion around the opportunities offered by a consideration of post-human understandings of place engagement and play. I will be reading field research through current impacts of anthropocentric, powerful relationships on children’s lives and some written accepted conceptualisations of play. A post-human stance (Barad 2007, Braidotti 2013 & 2020, Haraway 2016,) intent on reducing the adult anthropocentric voice, may increase participatory understandings, reduce adult hubris in working and researching with children; and enhance sustainability through ‘topoludic’ intra-actions and multispecies awareness.
In this workshop/presentation I offer material which illuminates that “it matters which choices are made, it matters which stories are told” (Haraway, 2016), whilst seeking a reworlding, of current concepts of play and ‘use’ of the outdoors? Through a posthuman approach the predictive outdoor classroom agenda and ‘fix-it’ approach to play is reduced in favour of an experience of potentialities and being ‘of and with others of the world’, not ‘on our world’ (with resources for the taking) nor ‘going out to nature’ (as escapes from striated ‘work’ spaces or making traditional classrooms out of doors). Segmented directed outcomes could be removed in a conscious attempt to re-work and re-cognise the importance of playing, immanence and chance as ‘becoming engagements’ of curious encounters and agentic flows.
Toby Chanter, University of Plymouth
Simulated Environments, Immersive Cartography, and the (un)Making of Medical Worlds.
Medical simulation is one example of a well-established training methodology found across a range of technoscientific settings in the West. From surgical theatre to battlefield, from cockpit to nuclear power plant, the material, procedural, and social replication of the ‘real-world’ is enacted through simulation. These performative training environments and techniques are reasoned through the prism of technical skills, assessment, and the provision of sensory exposure in a safe context, prior to ‘real-world’ application.

Doctoral event presentations – Kate Viner-Bowen, Sara Stanley and Rachael Allain
Kate Viner-Bowen, University of Bristol
Challenging menstrual stigma through Relationships and Sex Education in England: troubling common conceptions of the actual and the virtual
This ‘snack’ presentation will question the common assumption that menstrual stigma can or should be solved by teaching biological facts in Relationships and Sex Education (RSE). In the presentation, I will argue that humanist assumptions about menstruation, that emphasise actual-virtual and nature-culture dualisms, can intensify menstrual stigma. I will suggest that posthumanist thinking can challenge problematic Cartesian dualisms and lead to a world where menstruation is not used to exclude individuals and groups from social acceptance.
I plan to start the presentation with a personal narrative about my experience of menstruation ‘myths’ and ask attendees to share menstruation-based folklore that they have come across. I will then set out the problem of menstrual stigma and outline the new RSE policy that applies to all schools in England. I will use Deleuze and Guattari’s work to critique the humanist stance RSE takes regarding menstruation education and trouble the assumption that biology can be defined as the ‘actual’ and fairy-tales, myths and other menstruation discourses as the ‘virtual’. I will finish the presentation by outlining the possibilities that posthumanist thinking, including Deleuze and Guattari’s work, opens up for menstruation education and RSE. I will also ask attendees to return to the menstruation ‘myths’ that they shared at the start of the session and to consider whether, and how, such context-specific discourses should or could be accounted for in formal menstruation education.
Sara Stanley, University of Oulu
Scurrying with a mouse: an ethnographic journey inside philosophical play
In this taster session I invite participants to walk (and scurry), with a small wooden mouse.
As I prepare to embark on my PhD research I re-turn to my Masters thesis and the philosophical narratives of symbiotic relationships between humans and non humans as they imagined and created storyworlds. I seek to listen with all senses to the affect of the wooden mouse as diffractive ethnographer (Smart Gullion, 2018) immersed in philosophical play and material intra-actions.
Philosophical play as a posthuman pedagogy creates a place to reconfigure the use of stories and who or what authors them. In order to re-view the practice of Philosophy for Children I propose that philosophical play happens as young children connect imaginary and physical encounters to the stories of their worlds. The relational encounters of shared imaginative play construct and reconstruct ‘child-story -artefact-movement-talk’ assemblages that take on lines of flight and create something new as the process goes along (Davies, 2011).
The morethan narratives of human-mouse-world-entanglements reawaken childhood memories and curiosity; what does it feel like to connect imaginary and real worlds and make physical places to play within picturebooks and children’s own stories? What do we hear, see and experience when we are mouse sized and everything is smaller than adult?
The possibilities of pedagogical shifts of power and meaningful educational knowledge require embodied and authentic understanding of the facilitation and ‘difficultation’ (Haynes and Kohan, 2018) of philosophical play through open-ended encounters. Care full listening offers opportunities to reconfigure the role of imaginative teacher connecting with the materiality of childhood engagement as a mode of philosophical enquiry in the early years.
Through conversations in time and space with myself, my readings, my engagements with children as co researchers, ethics and the mouse, I aim to untangle the threads of what it means to share research in the spaces of democratic enquiry.
Rachael Allain, University of Plymouth
Connecting through Bodies of Water
The film re-imagines the possibility of continuing practice -led research in the time of uncertainty, adapting to the changes, finding new ways of making and responding to the local environment when travel was prohibited. As the pace of my daily life slowed down, I started to swim in the River Dart, a five-minute walk from my home, and continued this practice through the seasons. Astonished that my body was able to acclimatise and endure the changing and often challenging meteorological conditions. Through this phenomenological encounter, I found new horizons on a more intimate scale, with regular and sustained immersion in the water, viewing the landscapes of the inner riverine horizon and its changing flora and fauna. Experiencing the freedom of the water which provided a space to escape the constraints of social distancing. I am perpetually drawn to the water, to its aqueous embrace, and the offer of some relief from the gravitational pull that weighs even heavier at this time of uncertainty.
Post human, feminist phenomenologist, Astrida Niemanis, in her pivotal book Bodies of Water (2017) explores the notion of watery embodiment by examining the way that all the waters of the world are entwined/interconnected, how our bodies have permeable skins (osmosis) that absorb as well as expel bodily fluids; describing our bodies as ‘wet and spongey’ (2017:30). Of particular relevance to me and my research is how phenomenology provides an integral part of understanding how I embody the life-giving element of water through a practice-led approach to swimming/immersion.

AiPH doctoral event
2 June 2021
Ruler-Skirt Risings: Making da(r)ta and dartaphacts for ethico-political research assemblages. Keynote by Professor EJ Renold
“A choreographing of the political sees minor gestures everywhere at work, and it seizes them” (Manning 2016, p. 130).
In the spring of 2015, myself and a group of 15 year old teen girls made a graffitied ruler-skirt to lift the silence on routinsed sexual harassment and violence, in school, online and in their community – a post-industrial semi-rural Welsh valleys town in Merthyr Tydfil (UK). Unplanned, the idea to create a ruler-skirt arose from a throw-away comment by one of the girls; “boys lift up girls skirts with rulers”. It was one of those moments where an affective ‘snap’ (Ahmed 2016) meets creative ‘run(a)way methodologies’ (Renold, Ivinson and Angharad 2017) and “things in the making cut their transformational teeth” (Massumi 2015, ix). In a flash, the ruler seemed to become what Erin Manning (2016, p.1) calls a ‘minor gesture’ – an “always political (…) gestural force that opens up experience to its potential variation”. The ruler-skirt has been activating and making ripples and waves in and across policy, practice and activist spaces that none of us could have predicted three years on. In dialogue with a rich history of experimenting with what else post-qualitative research on gender, sexuality and schooling can do, and in dialogue with posthuman feminist-queer scholarship in educational studies (e.g. Taylor and Ivinson 2013; Taylor and Hughes 2016; Osgood and Robinson 2018; Ringrose, Warfield and Baradisi, 2019; Strom, Ringrose, Osgood and Renold 2020), this presentation offers a collective of ruler-skirt risings (attuning to the revolutionary forces of Merthyr Rising in 1831). Each rising provides a glimpse of an affirmative pARTicipatory embodied process and practice that remains ‘on the edge’ – a tentative cartography that makes itself felt across a range of fields, in micro-resonating moments (e.g. the up-skirting comment, a ruler-rattle) and macro force-fields of change (e.g. an activist tool-kit, a national curriculum, a law). Being ‘open to the insistence of the possibles, and of the pragmatic, as the art of response-ability’ (Debaise and Stengers 2017, p.19) is only sustainable, however, through collaboration and the regular nurturing of multiple ethico-political assemblages that have taken years to trust in and forge.

Webinar with Kerry Chappell and Katie Natanel
5 May 2021
Letting the ghosts in: Re-designing HE teaching and learning through Posthumanism is focused on a project, and ensuing paper, which sought to re-design an HE module through posthumanism. It began with our shared sense of unease as to the the neoliberalisation of UK Higher Education (HE); the way the values of speed, competition, marketisation and individualism increasingly shape teaching and learning globally. We aim to take seriously this feeling of unease and propose that posthumanism offers a theoretical, methodological and praxical means to challenge neoliberal logics and their effects. Through assemblages, diffractive analysis and an experimental film, we explore how module re-design and delivery around ‘posthumanist project-based learning’ (PBL) attends to materiality, embodiment, affect, ethicality, social justice and political transformation. We argue that by de-centring the human, posthumanist PBL alerts students, teachers and researchers to the ‘trouble’ that haunts educational experiences and centres an ethics of community that reshapes the boundaries of accountability. Our work indicates how posthumanism might offer new ways to engage in HE knowledge production – and re-position materiality, care and our common future as the drivers for teaching and learning.

Nothingness and the Unimaginability of Black Childhood
8 April 2021
Presentation given by Asilia Franklin-Phipps, SUNY New Paltz
References:
  • Colebrook, C. (2020). Fast violence, revolutionary violence : Black Lives Matter and the 2020 pandemic. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17(4), 495–499.
  • Dumas, M. J., & ross, k. m. (2016). Be real Black for me. Imagining BlackCrit in Education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415–442.
  • Michael J. Dumas (2014) ‘Losing an arm’: schooling as a site of black suffering, Race Ethnicity and Education, 17:1, 1-29, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2013.850412
  • Gilmore, R. (2007). Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
  • Hartman, S. (2007). Lose your mother : a journey along the Atlantic slave route. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor / Rob Nixon. Harvard University Press,. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061194
  • Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake : on Blackness and being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
  • Wilderson, F. B. (2010). Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thinking Writing Differently – Dr Ken Gale
11 March 2021
New inquiries, ontologies of immanence and the refusal of the humanist author
‘If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1000 Plateaus, p. 240).
In what St. Pierre has termed ‘post qualitative inquiry’, the necessity emerges that new forms of writing need to be offered which both address and perpetuate the ontologies of immanence that these new inquiries and research practices both use, entail and promote. This session will offer and encourage speculative and experimental explorations into writing in and as immanence as a means of moving toward ‘the not yet instead of the repetition of what is’ (St. Pierre, 2019: 3) in posthuman inquiry.

The Missing Peoples of Critical Posthumanism and New Materialism
3 February 2021
The Missing Peoples of Critical Posthumanism and New Materialism, presentation by Professor Karin Murris.

Book Launch – Lifelong Learning and Dementia
22 January 2021
This book explores the potential for lifelong learning in dementia. A growing social issue, dementia has previously been understood as a wasteland for learning: at best, those with dementia are helped to hold on to some pre-existing skills. This book draws on extensive qualitative data with people with dementia and their families to demonstrate that new forms of learning can happen in dementia, with positive outcomes for both the learner and those around them. In doing so, this book demonstrates that those with dementia help us to understand learning differently, thus providing a breakthrough in our understanding and theorising of lifelong learning. Using posthuman theory to scaffold and discuss the findings, this pioneering book will appeal to scholars of dementia, lifelong learning and the posthuman.

2020

Still Moving

5 August 2020
Still Moving present their artwork Speedwell, a large scale sculpture installed on mount batten breakwater in September 2020.
Speedwell, sister ship of the Mayflower, did not make the journey across the Atlantic, but instead returned home. The Mayflower left these shores 400 years ago. The voyage marks the dawn of our colonial exploits, an apparatus of attempted worldwide domination. In seeking a New World, we stole Old Worlds from Indigenous peoples, our kin. We silenced their languages, captured their stories, and buried their magic.
Still/Moving’s sculpture, Speedwell, relinquishes control to technology through its time-based, unknown sequence of iterations. Like an instinctive voice from elsewhere, it opens up the possibilities of perception and change. The sculpture uses modular, recyclable technology and has the capacity to be re-written. A site specific installation on Mount Batten Breakwater named after a Parliamentarian who defended Plymouth from the Royalists in the Civil War. The breakwater, a gateway to the Atlantic passage, layers over a prehistoric Roman trading port. This site of sea defence reminds us of our humility in the presence of nature and that we ourselves, through our ancestors, were, once upon a time, migrants. We too, through our history have been robbed of our magic, lands and resources by ourselves and through the conquests of our kin: Romans, Vikings etc.
Through action and reparations, we can intentionally forge re-patterning and re-worlding, creating systems and relations, that generate modes founded in equality, diversity and sustainability. We can step into our intended dignified role as stewards of this world and re-learn a reciprocal approach to each other, to our children and to all life in earth. We can conjure a new vision upon the horizon of this future. It is said that we become indigenous to place by caring for it; now is the exact time to illuminate and re-remember this symbiotic way of being. Speedwell is an invitation to return home.

About Still Moving

People and place are at the core of our individual and shared practices. Still Moving Projects is a platform for creative activities. We deliver exciting and ambitious collaborative artistic projects with a focus on engagement within targeted communities. Still Moving is co-directed by Devon based artists, Martin Hampton, Laura Hopes and Léonie Hampton. It began as a creative network providing international photographic workshops, screenings and residencies. Still Moving Projects was constituted in 2019 as a Community Interest Company (CIC) with the express purpose of making artwork through social practice. In September 2020 it will deliver a large-scale artwork Speedwell: NO NEW WORLDS commissioned by Plymouth Culture for the Mayflower 400 commemorations.
Laura Hopes is in the closing stages of an artistic Practice Research AHRC funded PhD with the University of Plymouth entitled Being Vulnerable: Distances of the Sublime Anthropocene. This project develops from a methodology built around the idea of the ‘vulnerable practitioner’, open to failure, seeking collaboration and acceptant of unknowns. Her practice has become, through extensive collaboration within the collective Still/Moving and with academics and experts in diverse fields, a much slower, lengthier process, where assumptions are constantly challenged – obstacles to be unpicked. Her expanded practice encompasses writing, conversations, film, performance, installation and multi-disciplinary exchange.

Biographies

Martin Hampton originally studied architecture before turning to Visual Anthropology and film. He now directs and shoots documentaries and is Co-Creative Director of Still/Moving Projects CIC. In 2003 he co-founded the production company Squint/Opera which specialises in films about architecture and urbanism. In 2008, he completed an MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths College London, his graduation film Possessed winning awards at several international film festivals. He has built a strong client base in the arts sector, directing and producing films about artists for the Tate, the Whitechapel Gallery, the V&A, Sky Arts, and Christies. Films include Gerhard Richter: Panorama, William Klein, and Nan Goldin. In tandem with his client-based work, Martin maintains an independent film practice. Projects include Gentle Oblivion, a long term investigation of his sister’s experience of Alzheimer’s Disease, and DreamWalking (work in progress) a film about the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi.
Léonie Hampton has exhibited in solo and group shows in the U.K. France, The Netherlands, Scandinavia, Vienna, Italy and Canada. Successive photo-based projects have been funded by Wellcome Trust and the British Council and her 16-part photo Installation was purchased for the permanent collection of the MEP (Maison Européenne de la Photographie – Ville de Paris) in 2008. In 2011 her award-winning 184-page book In the Shadow of Things was published by Contrasto (Italy). Léonie is a part-time teacher for MA Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. She is also currently working on an Arts Council England funded photography film project Islands of Women. She has recently been commissioned by RAMM in Exeter for an exhibition A language of Seeds due in February 2021.

Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering
18 November 2020
Posthumanist/feminist materialist encounters with objects, bodies and spaces.
Carol A Taylor, Professor of Higher Education and Gender, University of Bath, UK:
I’ve been interested in the crossing of disciplines for many years. I’ve always felt myself that I’ve been either positioned on the edge of things or in the middle of things, where boundaries cross in all sorts of really interesting ways. In the last few years, I’ve been thinking, working and writing about how walking helps me to do some of the transdisciplinarity work that I want to do, and how to connect that with posthumanist and feminist materialist ways of thinking and being and knowing. I’ve got an abiding fascination with the choreographies of objects, bodies and spaces and how they ‘fit’ or don’t ‘fit’ together.
I’ll begin with some orientations: to what is going on in higher education at the moment; to theory; and to theory, practice and praxis. I see walking as creating possibilities for change. I propose the idea of walking as trans(disciplinary) mattering, and will illustrate this with a few examples.
Orientations 1
I want to use walking as a research approach to contest the neoliberal context of higher education in which everything we do is economised, financialised and then monetised in terms of market principles. The questions here are: How can walking contest the idea of the accelerated academy, an academy which has seen even greater work intensification and speeding up during the pandemic? How can we use walking to help us think outside those kinds of all-pervasive ideas of competition, performativity and individualisation?
Orientations 2
Feminism and feminist theory, politics and praxis. I don’t see walking as one of the ‘master’s tools’ (Audre Lorde). As feminists our job, I think, is to create other kinds of methodological tools to fight back against patriarchy, colonialism, racism. Feminism has always been an embodied ethic. The personal is political.
Orientations 3
Like feminism, feminist materialism and post-humanism are founded in an ethic of the collective. Who are the ‘we’? What is a ‘collective’ and how is it constituted in different ways by those different ways of thinking? How can walking help us re-think this idea of the collective and who are the ‘we’ and then what that ‘we’ might be able to do and become? Alaimo and Hekman’s (2008) collection talks about the development of theories that bring the material back in to feminist theory and practice. Karen Barad (2007) is famous for saying we have to bring matter back in, that we have given too much credence to language and discourse and it’s time to think about the hyphenation of discursivity with materiality and that means to take matter seriously. That is, matter as the very stuff of bodies and nature.
I have found Karen Barad’s Agential Realism really generative in helping me to work this through in terms of educational research and practice. The things I see as important in Agential Realism are that it is:
  • A way of working beyond binaries and towards constitutive relations • A commitment to realism – to the ‘naturalcultural’ • Has a posthumanist allegiance to matter, objects, things, bodies, spaces
  • That it focuses on practices, doings and actions • That it attends to the practical, particular, and empirical • And that it offers new ontological, epistemological and ethical starting points.
‘Phenomena are the ontological inseparability/ entanglement of intra-acting agencies’ (Barad, 2007: 39)
In Agential Realism, relations come to matter when they come together in a particular moment. Barad’s idea is that things are not separate, and there is nothing in nature which is separate, and the things themselves don’t exist prior to their coming together. So it’s in that moment of constitutive relation that mattering and what comes to matter actually happens.
I have been working with this theory to think about: how do we decentre the Man, capital M, of humanism? That ‘Man’ is not an individual person but a conceptpractice-structure-idea which has been located within bodies, and has been incredibly powerful in shaping societies and social structures and ways of being and ways of thinking (see Braidotti, 2013). This Man of humanism, this white, western, patriarchal, colonial, meat-eating, capitalist, rational, science-obsessed kind of construction – how do we de-centre ‘him’ and his ‘doings’, particularly in terms of research approaches? How do we re-think knowledge? This is what I’m trying to work through in lots of different kinds of theory-practice ways, and these edited books are some of the collaborative endeavours that have come out of these processes.
So why walking?
Walking offers a way of being in the world – moving in the world – which is affective, embodied, sensory, visual and relational. The idea is that moving and sensing bodies can produce new and different forms of knowledge, which then raises the question of ‘What do we mean by knowledge anyway?’ Walking is about the intangible, the affective, atmospheric. But it’s also momentary. It’s not an ‘experience’ you can easily ‘capture’. What is ‘data’ when walking?
I have been inspired by Sarah Pink’s (2009) work which sees walking as a form of engagement, integral to our perception of an environment, although Sara Pink retains an anthropocentric view. I have also been inspired by Springgay and Truman’s (2019) work. They talk about walking as a transmaterial practice to displace humanist and human-centric histories of walking.
So, taking forward some of these ideas, I theorise walking as transdisciplinary mattering and use transdisciplinary in Stella Sandford’s (2015) sense of theory and concepts that are not necessarily identifiable with any specific disciplinary fields, either in their origin or their application. I’m also interested in theorising walking as a kind of feminist indiscipline, going back to the earlier feminists, which situates us within a feminist politics which contests the disciplinary requirement for boundaries, cuts and exclusions in the first place. Pulling through posthumanist and agential realist thinking helps me consider walking as assemblage, movement, intensity, and immanence.
The walking practices I now talk through put these theories to work in various different ways to understand different aspects of complex problems and to consider what walking as research practice enables.
Example 1: Mundane matterings in Covid-19 times
Most of my working life these days is spent doing what I’m doing now, which is sitting at my computer, on the chair, looking at the screen. Often talking to people in all sorts of different but highly mediated ways. Lockdown. Physically separate from everybody, but looking at people. Intimacy of connection – of being in the room with people – has completely disappeared and there is a tremendous sense of loss and sadness and separateness and isolation in our lives at the moment.
Example 2: Rethinking the university – city relation
Taylor, C. A. and Ulmer, J. (2020). Post-industrial methodologies for post-industrial cities. Somatechnics. 10 (1): 7–34.
Example 3: Whiteness, history, memory
How can walking unsettle racism, colonialism and disciplinary thinking? How can walking move philosophical critique into politically inflected praxis?
C. A. Taylor Walking as Trans(disciplinary)mattering: A Speculative Musing on Acts of Feminist Indiscipline.
Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., and Hughes, C. (Eds.) (2020) Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. London: Routledge.
Walking: What matters?
Barad says ‘every intra-action matters’ which means you’ve got to attend to every single thing because every single thing is an ethical intra-action. Ethically, that is really useful. Epistemologically, it is also useful, because it helps me contest macro-sociological accounts of the world (generalities) by privileging the micro, the details, and the specificities.
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (2016) talks about experimentation in research as a willingness or a desire to become comfortable with uncertainty, and partly unfinished thought and practice. This approach resonates with my notion of ‘edu-crafting’ as a sort of research DIY, a practice of the plunge in which everything is always in process, emergent, happening (Taylor, 2016). Working in these posthumanist, feminist materialist, post-qualitative ways means that walking as experimental practice is challenging but also creative and exciting. It has helped me to think with Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the ‘and and and’ and the middle, and with Isabelle Stengers (2018) and slow science. If we do, then walking as a research methodology can be about making us capable of resisting what is destroying us, of recuperating, and unlearning.
References/ Reading
Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (Eds.) (2008). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury.
Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies without Methodology. London: Sage.
Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Sandford, S. (2015). Contradiction of terms: Feminist theory, philosophy and transdisciplinarity. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5–6), 159–182.
Springgay. S. and Truman, S. (2019). Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World. London: Routledge.
Stengers, I. (2018). Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity.
Taylor, C. A. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthuman research practices for education. In C. A. Taylor and C. Hughes (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 7–36.
Taylor, C. A. (2020). Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering: A speculative musing on acts of feminist indiscipline. In Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., and Hughes, C. (Eds.) (2020) Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. London: Routledge. pp. 4–15.
Taylor, C. A. and Ulmer, J. (2020). Post-industrial methodologies for post-industrial cities. Somatechnics. 10 (1): 7–34.
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Regular contributors

Kerry Chappell, University of Exeter
Asilia Franklin Phipps, SUNY New Paltz
Erin Manning, Concordia University Montreal
Jo Albin-Clark, Edge Hill University
Hannah Gardiner, University of Plymouth
Dani Landau, University of Plymouth
Colette Campbell-Jones, University of Plymouth
Viv Bozalek, University of the Western Cape.
Winne Wong, University of Plymouth
Claire Walsh, University of Plymouth
Natalie Pollard, University of Exeter
Theresa Giorza, University of the Witwatersrand
Léonie Hampton, Co-Founder of Still Moving
Christine Smith, University of Hull
Liz Latto, University of Edinburgh
Jenny MacKay, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh
Charlotte Hankin, University of Bath
Johara Bellali, part of Transtechnology Research
Ruth Churchill Dower, Manchester Metropolitan University