Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship : Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education 9781787546363, 9781787546356, 9781787546370

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DECENTERING THE RESEARCHER IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP

ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ON TEACHING Series Editor: Volumes 1
11: Jere Brophy Volumes 12
29: Stefinee Pinnegar Recent Volumes: Volume 19:

From Teacher Thinking to Teachers and Teaching: The Evolution of a Research Community

Volume 20:

Innovations in Science Teacher Education in the Asia Pacific

Volume 21:

Research on Preparing Preservice Teachers to Work Effectively with Emergent Bilinguals

Volume 22A: International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A) Volume 22B: International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B) Volume 22C: International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C) Volume 23:

Narrative Conceptions of Knowledge: Towards Understanding Teacher Attrition

Volume 24:

Research on Preparing Inservice Teachers to Work Effectively with Emergent Bilinguals

Volume 25:

Exploring Pedagogies for Diverse Learners Online

Volume 26:

Knowing, Becoming, Doing as Teacher Educators: Identity, Intimate Scholarship, Inquiry

Volume 27:

Innovations in English Language Arts Teacher Education

Volume 28:

Crossroads of the Classroom: Narrative Intersections of Teacher Knowledge and Subject Matter

Volume 29:

Culturally Sustaining and Revitalizing Pedagogies

Volume 30:

Self-Study of Language and Literacy Teacher Education Practices

ADVANCES IN RESEARCH ON TEACHING VOLUME 31

DECENTERING THE RESEARCHER IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP: CRITICAL POSTHUMAN METHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES IN EDUCATION EDITED BY

KATHRYN STROM California State University, USA

TAMMY MILLS University of Maine, USA

ALAN OVENS University of Auckland, New Zealand

United Kingdom
North America
Japan India
Malaysia
China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2018 Copyright r 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78754-636-3 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78754-635-6 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78754-637-0 (Epub) ISSN: 1479-3687 (Series)

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

This book is dedicated to Peg Winkelman, an amazing mentor and educational leader who lives the ‘and.’

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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List of Figures

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List of Tables

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List of Contributors

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Introduction: Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship Kathryn Strom, Tammy Mills and Alan Ovens

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Affective Reverberations: The Methodological Excesses of a Research Assemblage Adrian D. Martin

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Teaching in, Relating in, and Researching in Online Teaching: The Desiring Cartographies of Two Second Language Teacher Educator Becomings Francis Bangou and Stephanie Arnott

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We, Monsters: An Autoethnographic Literature Review of Experiences in Doctoral Education Programs (Kind of) Jordan Corson and Tara Schwitzman

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Decentering the “Self” in Self-study of Professional Practices: A Working Research Assemblage Mats Hordvik, Ann MacPhail, Deborah Tannehill and Lars Tore Ronglan

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New Materialist Auto-Ethico-Ethnography: Agential-Realist Authenticity and Objectivity in Intimate Scholarship Chau Vu

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Narrative Mining: Story, Assemblage, and the Troubling of Identity Jay Wamsted

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CONTENTS

The Luxury of Vulnerability: Reflexive Inquiry as Privileged Praxis Tricia M. Kress and Kimberly J. Frazier-Booth

105

The Rhizomes of Academic Practice: Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students Negotiating Learning and Belonging Radha Iyer

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Pedagogy, Naked and Belated: Disappointment as Curriculum Inquiry Brandon L. Sams

137

Art as a “Thing That Does”: Creative Assemblages, Expressive Lines of Flight, and Becoming Cosmic-artisan in Teacher Education Kay Sidebottom and David Ball

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Becoming-with/in Educational Research: Minor Accounts as Care-full Inquiry Maria F. G. Wallace

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Affirmative Ethics, Posthuman Subjectivity, and Intimate Scholarship: A Conversation with Rosi Braidotti Rosi Braidotti

179

Decentering Subjectivity After Descartes: A Conversation with Michael Peters Michael A. Peters

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Encounters and Materiality in Intimate Scholarship: A Conversation with Maggie MacLure Maggie MacLure

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Deleuzo-Guattarian Decentering of the I/Eye: A Conversation with Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi

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About the Authors

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge the following: Stefinee Pinnegar, who originally recognized the value of a volume on posthuman intimate scholarship, and provided the space for this project as part of her book series with Emerald; Evelien Geertz, who coordinated efforts to conduct, draft, and edit our conversation with Rosi Braidotti; and Rosi Braidotti, Maggie MacLure, Michael Peters, Jessica Ringrose, and Shiva Zarabadi, for generously spending time lending their insights into the “conversation” chapters. Finally, we acknowledge and thank our families: Katie: Thank you to my husband, for both your support, both emotional (e.g., love and acceptance) and practical (e.g., remembering to pay our bills). Alan: I want to acknowledge the constant support of Dawn and my family, who are always the center of my world. Tammy: I wish to acknowledge Robbie Mills, my supportive son and thought partner in all things, but especially in all things philosophical, posthuman, and physics related. His knowledge, wisdom, and empathy exceed his years and I am forever grateful.

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LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 4 Fig. 1 The Empirical Work of Mats’ Self-study . . . . . . . . . . . . Fig. 2 Mats’ PhD Timeline
Central Moments, Connections, and Relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 10 Fig. 1 David Ball, “Collective,” 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Fig. 2 David Ball, “Self-Portrait,” 2016. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Fig. 3 David Ball, “Molly,” 2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Chapter 11 Fig. 1 Participant/Researcher Talking Triad . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Fig. 2 A Second Account of June by June (March 26, 2017) . . . . . 175 Fig. 3 On Research Participation by June (May 25, 2017). . . . . . . 176

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LIST OF TABLES Chapter 8 Table 1

Participant Information (2015
2017) . . . . . . . . .

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Gestures Toward a Minor Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 11 Table 1

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Kathryn Strom

California State University, USA

Tammy Mills

University of Maine, USA

Alan Ovens

University of Auckland, New Zealand

Stephanie Arnott

University of Ottawa, Canada

David Ball

Independent Researcher, Rotherham, UK

Francis Bangou

University of Ottawa, Canada

Rosi Braidotti

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Jordan Corson

Columbia University, USA

Kimberly J. FrazierBooth

Boston Public Schools, Boston, MA, USA

Shiva Hassan-Zarabadi

UCL Institute of Education, UK

Mats Hordvik

Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Norway

Radha Iyer

Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Tricia M. Kress

Molloy College, USA

Maggie MacLure

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Ann MacPhail

University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland

Adrian D. Martin

New Jersey City University, USA

Michael Peters

Beijing Normal University, China

Jessica Ringrose

UCL Institute of Education, UK

Lars Tore Ronglan

Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, Norway

Brandon L. Sams

Iowa State University, USA

Tara Schwitzman

Columbia University, USA

Kay Sidebottom

University of Leeds, UK

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Deborah Tannehill

University of Limerick, Republic of Ireland

Chau Vu

Louisiana State University, USA

Maria Wallace

Millsaps College, USA

Jay Wamsted

Benjamin E. Mays High School, USA

INTRODUCTION: DECENTERING THE RESEARCHER IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP Kathryn Strom, Tammy Mills and Alan Ovens

ABSTRACT In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered
no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry. In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research, we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the post-human subject and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as coproduced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. In the introduction, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the this book. Keywords: Intimate scholarship; post-human; materialism; self-study; autoethnography; subjectivity

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 1
8 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031002

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In the 1980s, responding to critiques of post-modernist-inspired qualitative research that produced a “crisis of confidence” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011), a number of scholars advocated for methodologies that positioned the “self” more centrally in their inquiry, as a way to practically connect the individual to broader societal and cultural transformation (Bullough & Pinnegar, 2001). This type of research, also known as “intimate scholarship” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015), focuses on the production and performance of knowledge/practice, forms of expression that give voice to situated ways of knowing, and the complex relation of the self to larger processes of change. As we use it here, “intimate scholarship” refers to qualitative methodology directly engaging the personal experience, knowledge, and/or practices of the researcher(s) as the focus of inquiry. Such methodological approaches include self-study of professional practices, autoethnography, life history, and narrative inquiry (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015). However, any such methodology risks the self becoming the sole focus of the research, conflating “self” with forms of psychological research on the individual/subjectivity, and/or privileging individual rationality over emergent activity within socio-material relations and collectives. In this volume, we ask what happens when the researcher in forms of intimate scholarship is decentered
no longer the focus, but merely one part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing the “results” of the inquiry (Barad, 2007). In the midst of the current ontological turn in qualitative research (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013), we argue that this form of scholarship offers the opportunity to address directly the question of the posthuman subject (Braidotti, 2013) and generate thinking for the field of qualitative research more broadly. In particular, chapters in this volume highlight ways that researchers of teaching and teacher education practices can advance conversations and knowledge in education while exploring theories with an ontological view of the world as fundamentally multiple, dynamic, fluid, and co-constituted by entangled material and discursive forces. Authors “put to work” post-human, nonlinear, and multiplistic theories and concepts (Strom & Martin, 2017) to disrupt and decenter the “I” or researcher-subject in self-focused methodologies, and/or to analyze knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/ material and incorporeal elements in which the self is but one temporally “individuated” or “subjectivized” component. Below, we provide brief discussions of intimate scholarship and post-human perspectives, followed by an orientation to the content of the balance of this book.

INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP Intimate scholarship is an orientation to inquiry that takes up Maxine Greene’s (1995) call for seeing the particularities and intricacies in the lives of those who are deeply entangled in educational settings, particularly in the sense that the interactions and activity at this fine-grained level is contingent to how education becomes enacted in those settings. Building on this, Hamilton, Pinnegar, and Davey (2016) define intimate scholarship as “work conducted from an ontological orientation developed in a coming-to-know process that emerges in and is

Introduction

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authorized through dialogue” (p. 183). A key point here is that intimate scholarship provides an alternative to large-scale, multisite studies that use standardised forms of measurement as a way of knowing and studying educational work. In contrast, intimate scholarship enables a sensitivity to the relational and temporal aspects of how meanings, practices and identities emerge in educational settings. As Hamilton and Pinnegar (2015) point out, by valuing the particular, acknowledging the relational, using dialogue as a means for coming-to-know, and respecting the embodied ways of enacting practice, intimate scholarship provides a way to plug into and engage with educational phenomena that often remain hidden or ignored in other forms of research. Such scholarship is intimate because it always involves the researcher’s own understandings of themselves and their experiences in relation to those they educate. It assumes a subjective, relational stance that foregrounds research findings as local knowledge emerging from, and unique to, the richness, dynamism and interactivity that is particular to the research setting. Such a stance becomes ontological, since it works to excavate the affects that networks of power relations have in forming the material, conceptual and social realities of educators’ lived experiences. Indeed, utilizing more intimate methodologies, such as S-STEP, memory work, narrative, action research, autoethnography, or reflective inquiry, allows researchers to engage with the messy, tacit, embodied, relational and contingent elements of educators work and workplace settings that are overlooked or ignored in other forms of research. Intimate scholarship is an excellent entrypoint for decentered thinking because it already blurs a very entrenched binary
that of researcher/researched
and troubles taken-for-granted ideas about objectivity and researcher distance. As the chapters in this book demonstrate, researchers can occupy a range of positions in respect to intimate scholarship. Some have constructed an element of intimate scholarship within a more traditional study (see Iyer, this volume), while others embraced methods like self-study (see Horvik, et al., this volume) and autoethnography (see Wamsted, this volume). Still others created their own assemblages with hybrid methodologies, such as Kress and Frazier’s use of co/autoethnography (Coia & Taylor, 2009) or Corson and Schwitzman’s mash-up of autoethnography and literature review. Collectively, such work provides examples of researchers engaged with decentering the self within the assemblages and relations that constitute their lives and work as educators.

POST-HUMAN MATERIALIST INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP The chapters in this book take up a range of perspectives that fall under an umbrella of post-human materialisms (e.g., Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Haraway, 2016). A transdisciplinary shift in thinking, post-human materialisms challenges both Eurocentric rational humanism, on the one hand, and social constructionism, on the other (Braidotti, 2013). Eurocentric rational humanism, or the notion that the world exists in static, separate, essentialist, neutral categories that can be studied objectively, represents outdated, simplistic thinking that has, through its cultural hegemony, served a

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White supremacist, heteropatriarchal status quo (Braidotti, 2013). In contrast, social constructionism understands everything as socially, culturally, and/or linguistically constructed. However, as Barad (2007) notes, there is a “there” there
it is just an entangled one. Post-human materialist perspectives explicitly bring back in the material (MacLure, 2017), but in a complex way that recognizes that we/our world are not transcendent and objective, nor completely constructed, but rather are a mixture of the two: material and discursive elements co-constitute us and our realities (Barad, 2007). This ontological shift also takes on human-centric, and human supremacist, ways of seeing the world (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016). Rather than viewing ourselves as autonomous actors with complete control over our environment and non-human others, we are in composition with them, just one element on a natureculture continuum, a part of a larger multiplicity of human-and. This shifts our understanding of reality away from a dualistic perspective and moves it toward a radically monistic, or immanent, one (Braidotti, 2013)
that is, everything is connected and all together, no above or below, nothing transcendent, just one plane of matter capable of transforming itself into endless collective arrangements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While “monism” might imply a return to the one, difference is actually the defining feature of these collective arrangements that make up the world. Describing the simultaneity of connectivity and difference, Braidotti (2017, p. 23) explains that it is a matter of, “Weare-all-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same!” Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship as a practice entails the explicit displacement of the humanist/anthropocentric “I,” as well as the shift described above that moves from “either/or” dualist paradigm to an immanent one of “and, and, and.” This is a move away from focusing on bounded individuals and toward connected, shifting multiplicities. In addition, the practice of decentering the researcher involves simultaneously providing an accounting of the researcher and connecting her up to multiple human and non-human others outside the embodied self. Within heterogeneous assemblages of human-and, an essential part of the work of educational researchers is practicing a politics of location (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 1988)
that is, explicitly situating oneself within specific earthly locations, historic and present moments in time, and systems of power. It is only by doing so that we can avoid a return to the transcendent by specifically honoring our material, temporal, and sociopolitical ties that form the position from which we speak/research. Intimate scholarship provides a methodology by which to pursue this politics of location, of situating and connecting oneself up. Importantly, however, when bringing a post-human perspective to intimate scholarship the emphasis must be on looking outward, not inward (Braidotti, this volume). In other words, we must not dwell on the individual teacher-researcher, but on her connections to alterity, the teacher-researcher-in-relation-to. The chapters in this book take up these ideas in educational research in varying ways. In the first chapter, Adrian examines how the self, whether positioned as researcher or participant, is always enmeshed as part of the research assemblage. Using research he conducted on mainstream teachers of English learners, he examines how the research process worked to position the researcher, participants, and

Introduction

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findings as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, social norms and practices. Adrian brings a sensitivity to how discourse, materiality, context, and positionality enable affective productions that shape the research assemblage itself, drawing attention to the self as affective, rather than agentic, and as affecting and being affected. Next, Francis Bangou and Stephanie Arnott open a space for thinking differently about the intricacy and changeability of becoming an online teacher educator for second language (L2) learners. Together they sought to illustrate what could happen when teacher educators and researchers become “intimate” with the various elements of a research and/or a teaching and learning agencement. The empirical material was collected as part of a study on a mentoring experience between the authors as one was preparing to teach an online graduate course in second language education to in-service teachers Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of agencements, rhizome, affect, becoming, desire, and experimentation, opportunities to disturb and transform online L2 teacher education emerged as they experiment with(in) the writing of the chapter. Indeed, as their writing demonstrates, both authors experience becoming teacher as an evolving process of transformations affecting and affected by various, unpredictable human, nonhuman, tangible, and not tangible elements. In the third chapter, Jordan Corson and Tara Schitzmann work at the juncture of autoethnography and the doctoral convention of the literature review, hybridizing these methods to theorize the monstrous figuration of the “good” doctoral student from a feminist post-human perspective. As they critically reflect on their experiences being made, while resisting being made, into this monster, they also push at the boundaries of acceptable scholarly practice. At moments in the text, Jordan and Tara make visible some of the rigid rules of academic writing and flout them, thereby fracturing the “good” doctoral student-subject. By doing so, they disrupt the normalized experience of reading a scholarly book chapter and invite the reader to critique and probematize these often-invisible rules that produce us and our work in particular ways. Fourth, Mats Hordvik and colleagues draw insights from rhizomatic philosophy, focusing on the concept of assemblage, to engage with a research collective to investigate its function and production. Mats, a doctoral candidate who was researching his practice of teaching pre-service teachers, engaged with his two supervisors and his critical friend to analyze data from meetings conducted throughout a four-year period. Presenting two vignettes, they highlight the nonlinear and fundamentally relational process of this research assemblage, arguing that Mats’ researcher-self was only one of multiple human and nonhuman components that together, jointly constructed knowledge for his thesis. The authors suggest that self-study researchers “make themselves into a rhizome,” embracing a research stance of “coming into composition” where the researcher engages with a research assemblage to construct joint understanding of teaching and learning. In Chapter 5, Chau Vu explores how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. She argues that, in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, and therefore, researchers must give up the authority of their narrative

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voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. Chau suggests instead adopting a performative voice, which constructs a narrator interested in how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies from this perspective, Chau notes, is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. The chapter also engages with an agential-realist account of objectivity, which diverges from the traditional notion of the removed observer and instead offers an understanding of embodiment through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. She argues that this shift means being accountable and responsible as researchers, an understanding of objectivity that engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what she calls an auto-ethico-ethnography. Invoking images of the Argo and the roiling waters of the Mississippi, in the sixth chapter Jay Wamsted troubles the notion that simple stories “privilege the humanistic notion of the autonomous ‘I’” by “mining narratives and discovering stereotypes lurking in entirely unknown spaces.” In mining two of their narratives, Jay interrogates stories of race and cross-racial relationships, disrupts his stated identity, and seeks to uncover hidden racism. By using this autoethnographic methodology, Jay proposes a perspective of fluidity of rhizomatic assemblage of identity that tests the threads of the stories that house researchers and teacher educators as autonomous beings. Further, he provides scholars with narrative mining as a methodological tool that enables them to navigate the (re)telling a series of their stories. Wamsted points out that because most educators will encounter significant racial difference throughout their career, there is potential for the use of narrative mining to be used to for self-reflective introspection with the aim of improving cross-racial relationships. In Chapter 7, Tricia Kress and Kimberly Frazier-Booth explore reflexivity as un/predictable to generate new possibilities and potential that are not bound by modernism’s penchant toward structure and humanism’s myopic self-awareness. Via co/autoethnography, Tricia and Kimberly present individual narratives illustrating their relationships with reflexivity in various spaces of their lives. By using various types of mirrors (e.g., classic mirror, interrogation mirror, window as mirror, water as mirror) as analytical devices, they illustrate reflexivity as embodied processes that emerge un/predictably as they traverse various geotemporal
political locations and engage with other human, nonhuman and material bodies. By recasting reflexivity as dynamic and fluid, the authors raise possibilities for spontaneously incorporating reflexivity into teaching
learning and research, thereby untethering critical reflection from modernist and humanist logics that attempt to corral reflection into discrete activities and truncate its potential for transforming praxis. In Chapter 8, Radha Iyer uses self-study methodology and rhizomatic processes to explore whether difference and diversity could be experienced positively for culturally and linguistically diverse students and the academic teaching them within a structured and restrictive university context. Together with her students, Radha engaged in an ongoing process of examining multiple interconnections, negotiating various perspectives and learning nodes, and identifying her own nomadic positioning that enabled assemblages that led to the deterritoritalization

Introduction

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of norms, allowing her to view her students as developing from novice learners to active participants in their program. Radha discusses how this rhizomatic process allowed her to assist students in positively rupturing points in molar lines of university’s structure. Her approach to decentering provides a point of entry for scholars interested in self-study to employ rhizomatic thinking to positively challenge binaries between teachers and students and disrupt restrictive forces of institutions. Next, Brandon Sams offers a Deleuzian re-reading of his initial inquiry of, “how do teachers read literary texts they plan to teach?” Using post-human perspectives, Brandon and his co-collaborator, Steven employ the concept of naked and belated pedagogy to understand their experiences as researchers, teachers, and writers. They provide a rhizomatic analysis of their pedagogical methods, viewed through “prism of failure and disappointment.” However, as they explain, this approach provides a more authentic view of education and becoming otherwise, resisting education discourses that favor certainty and linear narratives. Brandon and Steven discover that researching and writing disappointment may actually “begin a process of researching and teaching otherwise, where focusing on the can’t-bear-to-know leads to the not-yet-thought”. In “Art as a ‘Thing that Does’,” Kay Sidebottom and David Ball take on the reflective work in which developing teachers entering the profession are required to engage, which typically takes the form of a written journal. Authors instead focus on experiences using creative methods for reflection, which they argue can lead to greater ‘reflexivity’ and connection of theory to practice. The two authors collaboratively inquire into Kay’s teacher education practices and David’s processes of reflection using creative artistic expression, examining the impact it might have on the teachers themselves, their resilience, and their ability to subvert the oppressions of the current education system. The chapter recounts the story of a year of experimentation through the coming together of a student-teacher artistic assemblage which pushed the boundaries of the traditional teacher training curriculum as well as formal notions of “research.” Authors found that they moved in new configurations of “teacher-artist,” “student-curator,” and “audience-class” towards a notion of themselves as “cosmic artisans” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), eventually transporting their art from the private to public sphere to share with the world their painful, emergent and embodied experiences of “becoming teacher”. Maria Wallace offers a response to the first 10 chapters that also offers a becoming and writing-with them. Drawing on the intersections of feminist poststructuralism, posthumanism, and new material feminisms, Maria suggests that educational research can be seen as happening to worlds while also making worlds, which invites educational researchers to care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Bringing diverse mo(ve)ments into conversation, Maria presents a minor sequence for decentering the educational researcher, such as destabilizing conventional data triangulation through “Talking Triads.” This chapter begins to illuminate how textual presentations of becoming-minor inherently raise tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of being-educational researcher. The final four chapters in the book engage in dialogues with international post-human scholars who each offer their thoughts regarding the possibilities

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and challenges of decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship. Rosi Braidotti, a renowned figure in critical post-human and feminist studies, offers an affirmative, immanent perspective that requires the researcher to be both politically located, grounded, and accountable while also connecting oneself up outward, rather than inward. Michael Peters, one of the field’s preeminent educational philosophers, provides a discussion of the relational and evolving systems of thought that lead to the emergence of new movements, thinking and discourses, such as posthumanism. Maggie MacLure examines new materialist perspectives in relation to qualitative methodologies, providing insights regarding data analysis that attends to difference and imaging research as an encounter. Last, Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi explore decentering the eye/I through Deleuzoguattarian concepts, including schizoanalysis, and argue that we must put these ideas to work in ways that make a difference in the world.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman, all too human: The memoirs and aspirations of a posthumanist. Paper presented at the Tanner Lectures, Yale University, March 2017. Retrieved from https:// tannerlectures.utah.edu/Manuscript%20for%20Tanners%20Foundation%20Final%20Oct% 201.pdf Bullough, Jr., R. V., & Pinnegar, S. (2001). Guidelines for quality in autobiographical forms of selfstudy research. Educational Researcher, 30(3), 13
21. Coia, L., & Taylor, M. (2009). Co/autoethnography: Exploring our teaching selves collaboratively. In L. Fitzgerald, M. Heston, & D. Tidwell (Eds.), Research methods for the self-study of practice (pp. 3
16). Dordrecht: Springer. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). Capitalism and schizophrenia: A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: an overview. Historical Social Research, 12(1), 273
290. Greene, M. (1995). Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts, and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Hamilton, M. L., & Pinnegar, S. (2015). Knowing, becoming, doing as teacher educators: Identity, intimate scholarship, inquiry (Vol. 26). Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Hamilton, M. L., Pinnegar, S., & Davey, R. (2016). Intimate scholarship: An examination of identity and inquiry in the work of teacher educators. In J. Loughran & M. Hamilton (Eds.), International handbook of teacher education (pp. 181
237). Singapore: Springer. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist studies, 14(3), 575
599. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 629
633. MacLure, M. (2017). Qualitative inquiry and the new materialisms: “A little of Dionysus’s blood”? In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times (pp. 48
59). New York, NY: Routledge. Strom, K., & Martin, A. (2017). Thinking with theory in an era of Trump. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), 3
22.

AFFECTIVE REVERBERATIONS: THE METHODOLOGICAL EXCESSES OF A RESEARCH ASSEMBLAGE Adrian D. Martin

ABSTRACT This chapter decenters the methodological unfolding of a qualitative research study on mainstream teachers of English learners, shifting from a sociocultural emphasis on individuality and agency towards affect as a productive post-structural concept. The researcher, participants, and findings are positioned as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, and social norms and practices. The work employs concepts introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987): the rhizome, assemblage, and affect. The chapter discusses how the activity that constituted the research study was informed and influenced by affect that reverberated beyond the scope of the immediately observable. The multiple positionalities, past history, and values of the researcher and participant contributed to the methodological decision-making during data collection and analysis in conscious and unconscious ways. Affective distributions permeated throughout the study, contributing to the functioning of activity among and between the elements of the study. Ultimately, elements of the study contributed in ways that extended beyond the normative constructions of research, researcher, and participant. Elements affected and were affected, contributing to methodological excess, insights beyond the scope of normative systemic inquiry. This chapter demonstrates the productiveness of rhizomatic concepts to decenter the elements of a research study and affect as a productive construct to understand systematic inquiry. This move intentionally disrupts traditional conceptions of research and researcher objectivity, explicitly attending to the

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 9
23 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031003

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affective interplay among elements of the research assemblage and how this interplay functions as a primary means of scholarly engagement. Keywords: Affect; rhizomatics; Deleuze; posthuman; post-qualitative; English learners Among contemporary theorists, philosophers, and social scientists, the construct of I has emerged as a narrow, thorny, and limiting notion. Drawing from the work of the post-structuralists in the latter half of the twentieth century (e.g., Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari), intellectuals have leveled multiple critiques against prevalent constructs of I and the dominant connotations it assumes. Whether in written texts or oral speech, the third vowel of the alphabet references a presumed speaker. I is understood as a knowing subject, self-aware, and capable of truthfully relating thought and experience (Ellingson, 2009; Peters & Burbules, 2004; St Pierre, 2004). Thus, the I conveyed through language is a human I, and as such, is bound by commonsense understandings and discursive configurations regarding what being a human means (Kristeva, 1984; Weedon, 1987). From the perspective of humanism, this suggests a stable, rational, coherent subject who can engage with the world autonomously and with agency (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013; St Pierre, 2011). Yet, as a material or ontological reality, the postmodern world renders fallacious the I of humanism. Despite two world wars, nuclear proliferation, and the systematic exploitation and destruction of the natural environment, the human (I) continues to participate in (and perpetuate) oppressive systems of governance and rule detrimental not only to the human species, but to global ecology itself. Given this immanent reality, the humanist construct of I fails to encompass the contradictions, differences, irrationalities, and incoherencies maintained and enacted by the self (Braidotti, 2013; Cherryholmes, 1988). Ultimately, this highlights the I as a floating signifier that changes across space and time (Derrida, 1997; St Pierre, 2000). As this lens suggests, I is not anchored to the signified humanistic construction of self (Palmer, 1997; Powell, 2007). Such a critique of the I of humanism has contributed to the theorization of non-normative ontologies and subjectivities as nuanced, material, and multiple constructions of self (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Strom, 2015). Despite these emerging theorizations, qualitative inquiry in general has historically maintained the humanistic notion of self, even though qualitative research initially was considered a response to the crisis of representation in the positivistic underpinnings of quantitative research presupposing a stable, rational, and knowing subject (Bochner & Ellis, 2016). In quantitative inquiry, both researcher and researched are constructed as the I of humanism, quantifiable, fixed, and capable of analytic dissection (St Pierre, 2011). For many works of qualitative inquiry, emergent interpretations of self as mutable, performative constructions are glaringly absent from theoretical frameworks employed to study human phenomena and from the researcher’s understanding of self as a co-participant in the research process.

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The purpose of this chapter is to decenter the methodological unfolding of a qualitative research study I conducted on mainstream teachers of English learners (ELs) (Martin, 2016), employing an emergent construct of self that shifts from a sociocultural emphasis on individuality and agency toward affects as a productive, post-structural concept (Coleman, 2012). Like much qualitative research, self-study, autoethnography, narrative inquiry and other forms of intimate scholarship have historically positioned the researcher as agentic, and emergent themes or findings as central analytic foci (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2013). In contrast, the research discussed in this chapter positions researcher, participants, and findings as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, social norms, and practices. This move away from dominant conceptualizations of qualitative research deconstructs the positivistic, objective reporting of a temporally organized sequence of events, research findings, and researcher and participants as active, mutually discrete actors (the humanistic conception of I) who enact their parts in the methodological undertaking as free, individuated selves (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013). By drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic framework (1987), this chapter positions these identified (and unidentified) elements of a research study as a research assemblage (Fox & Alldred, 2014; Strom & Martin, 2017a), functioning via mutually affective processes that reverberate as synchronic and diachronic phenomena (Strom & Martin, 2013). Rather than focusing on what elements of the research assemblage are, attention is given to how discourse, materiality, context, and positionality enabled affective productions, shaping the research assemblage itself. In the following section, I describe the theoretical framework that informed this work. I then discuss the methodologies and analysis employed to construct the provided understandings. I conclude with a discussion on the methodological, theoretical, and practical significance of this work for qualitative researchers.

THEORETICAL APPROACH The non-normative ontologies and cartographic representations of experience and phenomena discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) are productive theoretical constructs to decenter I from humanistic denotations. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic framework constructs experience and self as enmeshed in a continuous, non-linear, morphic process of evo/devolutions intimately connected with materiality and discourse, entangled in spatial and temporal locations (Alvermann, 2000; Coleman & Ringrose, 2013). Rhizomatics disrupts humanism’s conception of the self as autonomous and discrete; instead, the construct of a recognizable self is not a defined identity, but an always emergent and connected subjectivity positioned in accord to what one does, not what one is (Semetsky, 2006; Strom & Martin, 2017a). Accordingly, rhizomatics provides a multitude of thought constructs researchers can strategically employ to “attend to the ways in which social realities are made through methods, and might be made in other ways” (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013, p. 11).

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This study employed the Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of the rhizome, assemblage, and affect to work with the data and recognize the connections among the elements that informed the functioning of the research study (Strom & Martin, 2017a). Decentering myself from the normative construction of researcher provided an opportunity to shed light on the interrelatedness, heterogeneity, and the mutual co-construction of elements in the study that contributed towards the functioning of something (Strom, 2015). As such, emphasis is placed on how elements work in composition (the assemblage), their connectedness (the rhizome), and the ongoing emergence of subjectivities within and among the processes of analytic inquiry. Rhizomatics suggests that such inter/ intra-action extends through processes of affective productions; affecting and being affected by others stimulates activity (Strom & Martin, 2017a), in contrast to dominant, sociocultural emphases on agency and autonomy (Fox & Alldred, 2014). For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), affect permeates immanently, within the realm of the material universe rather than as a transcendental, metaphysical “truth.” Putting rhizomatics to work forefronts affect as an integral element in the unfolding of this qualitative inquiry. In the following, I describe the employed rhizomatic concepts. Rhizomes The rhizome is a conceptual configuration proposed by Deleuze and Guattari that contrasts normative, reductive, and reproductive forms of thought (Strom & Martin, 2013). Literally, a plant tubular such as ginger or crabgrass, rhizomes unfurl as a-centered, non-hierarchical networks composed of multiple connections with multiple (and supple) points of entry and departure. The rhizome thus has neither a starting nor ending point (Martin & Strom, 2017). The nexus is always in the middle, ensconced by other, multiple rhizomatic connections. Conceiving of activity (such as research) as rhizomatic enables a recognition of connections among diverse elements at multiple junctures across diverse plateaus (e.g., material, psychological, cultural, discursive) (Colebrook, 2002; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While traditional models of phenomena articulate closed frameworks for discourse, observable behavior, or spatial relationships among individuals or communities (Merriam, 2009; Miles, Huberman, & Saldañia, 2014), a rhizomatic lens positions these as expansive, traversing multiple spheres of immanence. This orientation serves as a methodological affordance in qualitative research to describe the interconnectedness of a myriad of variables situated in the “blind spots” of traditional forms of analysis. Contemplating the research enterprise as rhizomatic can highlight how formal elements within the study (such as the participants, collected data, and other contextual elements) are intertwined with seemingly disparate elements or elements that extend beyond the scope of the immediately discernable (e.g., past history, dominant social norms or discourses, politics, anticipated futurities) and those seemingly absent. Educational researchers who methodologically employ and think with the rhizome can attend to how they themselves inform and are part and parcel of the confluence

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of elements that inform a research study. The rhizomatic amalgamation of these elements function as an assemblage, which I turn to next. Assemblage Deleuze and Guattari describe rhizomatic connections that function as an enabling or productive capability as an assemblage. Assemblages are non-linear renderings that articulate the connectedness of elements and how these function to do something (Strom, 2015). Less about what something is, assemblages foster insight on how phenomena emerge and the webs of composition that enable such capabilities. Individual elements in an assemblage are themselves composed of multiple assemblages. Thus, elements (themselves multiple assemblages) work or function collectively. As with the rhizome, the assemblage is unencumbered by the confines of space and time; elements beyond the scope of the immediately discernable or observable can contribute towards the functioning of something that is readily manifest. From a rhizomatic perspective, the multiple aspects and elements that inform a formal study or inquiry are a research assemblage (Fox & Alldred, 2014). Within research assemblages, the emphasis is on how multiple elements interact to enable the production of systemic inquiry rather than what each element is. Traditional perspectives on research construct the production of results or findings via a striated process of data collection and analysis that follows a narrow, linear course of investigation (Merriam, 2009). In contrast, the research assemblage attends to the multiple variables that contribute towards the functioning of the research process. Further, conceiving of the process as an assemblage decenters the normatively constructed prime actors. The researcher and participants (each psychological, physiological, sociocultural, and emotional assemblages) are elements among elements in the processes of systematic investigation. The rhizomatic lens de-emphasizes the historical narrative and discourse on agency and autonomy that individuals possess, and instead attends to how, as sentient beings, individuals are enveloped in fields of affect. Affect Affect refers to the non-conscious automaticity of feeling (interpreted as emotion) and sensory override that is translinguistic, beyond the domain of the rational, the immediately foreseen, and the logically understood (Braidotti, 2005/ 2006; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Martin & Strom, 2017). It suggests a change of state or capacity (Massumi, 1987) and can emerge at multiple locations, such as psychological, emotional, mental, physical, or social (Fox & Alldred, 2014). Given that there is no discrete subject (St Pierre, 2004), affective productions surface in composition with other elements of an assemblage, collectively feeling in contrast to agentic actions on the part of one individual or thing upon another. This epistemological shift contributes to the methodological decentering of both researcher and participants, holding each as elements that connect within the research assemblage (Fox & Alldred, 2014).

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Adopting such a perspective enables a complex, nuanced, and multifaceted consideration for the emergence of phenomena that extends beyond cause-andeffect models or linear casualty (Ellingson, 2009). Instead, the transparency of the openly partial, positioned, and positioning accounts of activity within a research assemblage that is afforded via a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens attends to the interplay among and between researcher, participant, context, data, and the host of other elements that coalesce to offer what traditional qualitative inquiry maintains as “research findings” (Merriam, 2009). As such, “findings” are an emergent construction of the rhizomatic network under investigation, operating and functioning as a collectivity of affects, or affective productions. Working through the research data with these rhizomatic concepts and constructing the multiplicity of elements that informed this study as a research assemblage demonstrated that the scope of activity that both I and the participant enacted was neither limited to the material context or discursive elements of engagement. The unconscious, ongoing, and spontaneously emerging series of affective productions amongst the elements of the research assemblage were integral to the production of the originally conceived findings. Indeed, rhizomatic concepts enabled me to decenter myself and attend to the affective interplay between myself and the elements of the research assemblage. In the next section, I discuss the processes of decentering my initial investigation and how analysis shed light on affect as a methodological excess.

METHODOLOGY This inquiry is consistent with methodological approaches wherein the researcher employs philosophy to inform the flow of research activity (KoroLjungberg, 2016; Strom & Martin, 2013; Strom & Martin, 2017b). As such, my exploration of the unfolding of the research process with the previously discussed rhizomatic concepts was an open, experiential process wherein diverse elements (normatively held as mutually exclusive) were constructed as enmeshed in a mangled web of activity. I engaged with the process of data-walking (Eakle, 2007), recursively examining the data sources, the findings and themes generated from the initial analysis (Martin, 2016) as well as the present experiential meaning-making of self in concert with the data (Strom & Martin, 2013). Although the processes of analysis described in the forthcoming section occurred through a chronological sequence, the analytic process failed to align with any of the dominant approaches to qualitative research (Creswell, 2012). The construction of emergent themes materialized through repeated flows of analysis, layering generated meaning upon generated meaning, attending to thematic points of fusion and rupture in the data, and the eventual judgement as to which were held as most salient. Context and Participants The processes of data collection took place in Springbrooke (a pseudonym), a suburb of a major metropolitan city in the Northeastern United States. The

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participant, Lucille, was a midcareer kindergarten teacher at a local elementary school. Although the Springbrooke school district was experiencing a rise in the number of students classified as ELs, at the time of the study it did not have a formal English as a Second Language (ESL) or bilingual education program. ELs were housed in mainstream, general education classrooms and taught alongside their English proficient peers. ESL instruction was provided to ELs in a separate classroom context on a weekly basis. As the teacher of record, Lucille had 20 students in her class, one of whom was an EL. Although she identified as a White monolingual speaker of English, throughout the study Lucille related her value for linguistic diversity, frequently commenting on her own early life experiences in a highly diverse urban community where the sounds of numerous languages being spoken featured prominently in her childhood memories. Lucille expressed great pride in her decision to become an educator. Teaching was a second career, having found her former profession in publishing as unfulfilling and devoid of meaning. Lucille expressed her desire for her students to succeed academically, and noted her efforts to promote a classroom environment that was welcoming to all students, including those for whom English was a second language. As an element of the research assemblage, I contributed to the analytic endeavor in multiple ways beyond the normative confines of the researcher. I acted as the researcher in the formal study from which this present work is discussed. I was responsible for the methodological design, analysis, and reporting of the findings (Martin, 2016). However, in working with the concept of assemblage, I recognized myself as an element that affects and was/is affected by the research process. Indeed, my positionality, personal, and professional history, the social categories I am ascribed and those I claim, and my values and beliefs inform the construction and interpretation of the meaning-making process. I am a first generation American, the son of Cuban immigrants. I have been involved in the field of education for almost 20 years; I was a classroom teacher for over a decade and served as a language arts supervisor. I am an advocate for culturally and linguistically diverse students, for LGBTQ members of the education community, and for equity and social justice in all aspects of schooling and the educative experience. Rather than denying these elements of who I am in the chimerical pursuit of objectivity, I disclose my subjectivity in the effort to convey the trustworthiness of this work. Data Collection and Analysis Data collection for this study occurred in two phases. The first was throughout the spring and summer of 2015. I conducted five interviews with Lucille and observed her teaching five times. Throughout this period, I kept a researcher journal, maintained field notes of my observations, and analytic memos on my meaning-making of the data. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed. The subsequent data analysis phase was during the 2016
2017 academic year when I resumed my researcher journal. Whereas the former researcher journal from the initial collection period documented the sequence of events as they

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unfolded, the journal in this secondary period chronicled my reflections and analysis of self as a member of the research assemblage in relation not only to Lucille, but to the other elements of the research assemblage as well. This researcher journal enabled me to make note of connections between the rhizomatic concepts in the unfolding of the study, my experiences pre- and post the initial inquiry, and the additional layers of insight emergent with the passage of time. In this inquiry, the researcher journal was the primary data source with the aforementioned sources serving to inform its contents. Reading and rereading the discursive/material elements (transcripts, analytic memos, researcher journal) of the study facilitated decentering myself as the researcher and acknowledging myself as part of the research assemblage. I focused on how these sources (and the processes through which they were collected) were understood with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts, keeping record of instances wherein elements of the research assemblage affected and were affected. The rhizomatic framework enabled a nuanced examination of how my engagement with Lucille facilitated enactments of particular subjectivities, and by attending to moments of visceral response or change, the affective productions that surfaced throughout this process. Thus, analysis of the activity in the research assemblage attended to the connections between and among the elements of the assemblage and what these connections enabled. An additional means of gaining insight occurred by constructing rhizomatic maps (Alvermann, 2000; Strom, 2015), suspended and momentary renderings of the elements in the research assemblage. In my researcher journal, I mapped not only material and contextual connections, but also affective connections as well. Mapping instances of affective connections highlighted the often unintentional and unconscious sensory productions that reverberated among elements in the research assemblage. Beyond the scope of the initial inquiry, these visceral impulses, productions, and co-productions echoed forth from the moment of their instantiations into the present. Ultimately, as Lather suggests (2007/2017), these unintended and frequently unexamined “excesses” of the research process (i.e., what was produced beyond the normatively identified research findings) both demonstrate the narrow scope through which traditional inquiry examines social phenomena while attending to the multiple (e.g., affective, material, discursive) plateaus through which phenomena occurs. As such, this takes up Braidotti’s (2013) charge to engage in an affirmative politics both through simultaneous critique and creativity, resisting the status quo (i.e., the limited nature of traditional inquiry) while creating alternatives (i.e., attending and reporting on the excesses of the research assemblage).

EMERGENT UNDERSTANDINGS This section sheds light on how affect permeated the processes of systemic inquiry. Lucille and I not only affected one another, but also the research process itself. The connections between her and I, including our histories, interactions, and perspectives, co-constructed the emergent understandings and themes generated by the study. Whereas in the reporting of the initial inquiry

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I partook as the researcher, here I decenter this role and position myself as participant among participants. To illustrate this shift, I present the findings as rhizomatic meanderings, analogous to an acentered and non-hierarchical navigation through the research assemblage. I report how affective productions reverberated through the research assemblage across diverse contexts, temporally unencumbered. Undoubtedly, affect was an unavoidable, essential, and integral component of the research assemblage. I commence by discussing Lucille’s affective response and pedagogical adjustments in response to my own affect. I then report how the research context enabled affective productions within myself and how this reverberated into the research process. I conclude with an account of how participation in the study enabled affective connections for Lucille (and myself) between our present subjectivities as education professionals and our previous experiences as students. Personal / Pedagogical Affective Distributions At the time of the study, Lucille was teaching one EL, Sharon, who had emigrated from Israel with her family and was in the US a few weeks. As the only speaker of Hebrew in the class, Sharon was linguistically isolated. Lucille indicated that she provided much individualized attention to Sharon, frequently monitoring her own rate of speech, modeling instructions with hand gestures, and employing visual images and illustrations as frequently as possible to support comprehension and language acquisition. Yet, Lucille’s prime emphasis was supporting Sharon’s sense of comfort and inclusiveness in the classroom. While she indicated that she did not possess formal training or professional development to teach ELs, Lucille was nonetheless cognizant of the need to attend to Sharon socioemotionally. I empathized with Lucille. Although my previous teaching experience was predominantly with Spanish-speaking ELs (and as a native speaker of Spanish, I possessed a shared linguistic background with most of my students), there were two EL students of another language background that I taught during my novice years. Like Lucille, I taught these children in an early childhood classroom, and like Sharon, they (a brother and sister) were the only speakers of their heritage language (Chinese) in the class. Like Lucille, I recalled the challenge to determine how to support these students academically and linguistically. While at the time I did not possess formal insight of pedagogical strategies to modify instruction for ELs, I did possess a first-hand understanding of the processes of learning a second language. I connected with these students (as I connected with Sharon) on a personal level, as a former student in the processes of learning academic content and English. But as a teacher, I connected with Lucille, recognizing the challenges (and opportunities) afforded by linguistic diversity in the classroom. These recollections of past professional (and personal) experiences mangled with affective productions contributed to the meaning-making of my observations of Lucille’s practice and the discourses from her interviews. As a former urban teacher myself, I was familiar with the structural and sociocontextual

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aspects of her school setting. I also connected with Lucille’s anecdotes on lesson planning, classroom management, and grappling with an imposed instructional model. Decentering my role of researcher, I was able to connect with the context of Lucille’s professional environment and her role as an early childhood educator and teacher of ELs. Nonetheless, moments of disconnect emerged, wherein I found myself unable to comprehend Lucille’s pedagogical decision-making making in lieu of her discourse aimed at enabling Sharon to feel comfortable and welcomed in the class. Having observed an instructional episode where Lucille randomly called on students by drawing popsicle sticks labeled with the students’ names from a cup, I experienced a sense of anxiety for the students, but especially for Sharon who, if called upon, would be expected to verbally participate in a public setting and in a language in which she was not yet fluent. I recognized that this affective response was potentially triggered by my own early schooling experiences as someone for whom English is a second language and as a former teacher of ELs. These affective productions in the well of my memory reverberated into that present moment. In an interview with Lucille subsequent to this observation, we discussed classroom management techniques and I inquired about the practice of randomly calling on students. The multiplicity that informed my positionalities shed light on how the very asking of this question was undergirded by my own affective production, and despite my defined role as a researcher who was supposed to engage in an objective protocol, the values I maintained as a teacher positioned the pedagogical practice I observed as undesirable and linguistically (as well as socioemotionally) inappropriate for Sharon. Lucille’s response to my inquiry suggested her own affective production; she appeared to have not expected my question on this instructional practice. She indicated that she would never embarrass a student or call on one who was not ready to respond. Her quick response, heightened pitch of voice, and eagerness to change the subject suggested that my own affective response at the formerly observed classroom practice reverberated with her own (at that present moment) in reply to my question. In subsequent classrooms observations, Lucille did not randomly call on any students through the use popsicles sticks or other means. Affective Contemplations/Convictions Prior to this study, my former experiences as a K12 student and my professional experiences as a teacher were exclusively in urban schools, and I approached the research from the dual lens of urban student and urban teacher. As a student, I was fortunate in that the schools I attended were well-funded, and I acknowledge the numerous teachers who promoted my learning and academic development. Yet, when I began my teaching career, I became familiar with a variety of school contexts that reflected the characteristics more frequently associated with urban education: a lack of basic materials, outdated instructional texts, rigid pacing guides that dictated the sequence of instruction, physical environments that (at times) were less than optimal as conducive to learning, and periodic lack of appropriate temperature control for the summer heat and

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the cold of winter (I recall instances when students and teachers would need to wear winter coats in the classroom). There was no recess, lunch periods were short, and should the lunch monitors be amenable to it, students were permitted to play for a few minutes on a playground that was in actuality a parking deck. My students (predominantly immigrants and children of color) would run on the concrete amidst the cacophony of cars and pedestrians on the streets beyond the school gate. Such observations, experiences, and my work with children and families at or below the poverty level, deeply informed my eventual scholarly focus on issues of educational equity. My work with Lucille was, thus, my experiential introduction to education in a suburban context. The aim of my research was not centered on similarities and differences between teachers and students in urban and suburban contexts. Yet, analysis of the entries in my researcher journal and my reflections on Lucille’s professional context in a suburban school district highlighted a variety of affective responses to that context that surfaced throughout the process, and how these served to inform my future research. Filtered through the lens of my background in urban education, I viewed the Springbrooke district as a privileged, even idyllic learning context. Recess took place on the expansive grounds filled with trees and green grass next to the school, devoid of the noise of traffic. The children played enthusiastically in a space unencumbered by fences or gates. The walls of the school were graced with student work in well-lit hallways; the staff was courteous and friendly, and the students learned in classrooms outfitted with the latest technological resources. My observations of Lucille highlighted a pleasure in regular classroom routines and in the teaching and learning process. But as encouraged (or even enthralled) as I was by this context, I experienced a visceral sting, a growing acknowledgement of how I, as a teacher, and my own prior students had not experienced schooling within such an environment, and an awareness that this was inextricably linked with socio-economic status and race. Below the surface level of my awareness and the formal processes of data analysis was an affective production surfacing from my experimental engagement with what teaching and learning are like for those in middle- and upper-class communities. Decentering myself as a researcher enabled recognition of how my analytic conclusions to better attend to the learning experiences of linguistically diverse children emerged not only from the intellectual endeavor of analyzing the discursive/material data sources (field notes of my observations of Lucille, her interview transcripts, and my researcher journal), but also from my affective response to what I had experienced as I engaged not solely within the research assemblage but also within the assemblage of Lucille’s school environment. I was affected by what I saw and what I experienced as much as I was affected by the inequitable learning conditions in my early career; my conviction to work for equity and social justice in my scholarship was reaffirmed not because of a conscious, deliberate act or consideration, but instead by the affective responses that reverberated from my early career through to the present, and in my contemplation for the future.

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Affective Resemblance Throughout the study, as I interviewed Lucille and inquired about her perspectives on ELs and what it was like to teach these students, she frequently reflected on aspects of her personal life and how the multiple roles or identities she possessed connected to her work as a teacher of ELs. Emergent commonalities between the two of us were undergirded by affective productions. Affect was not simply held as an element of memory; affect reverberated from our past history into the present. For Lucille, awareness of our commonalities and participation in the study reinforced her value for an inclusive and welcoming classroom for all her students. For myself, it surfaced as a lens through which I felt a kinship between our prior educative experiences. Lucille and I had each attended urban Catholic schools in our youth. While we both shared familiarity with being a student in a context that was deeply religious and faith driven, Lucille expressed that often, discipline techniques in the school were highly inappropriate, indicating that she would never discipline her students as she and her peers were decades earlier. Suggesting that it was perhaps because that was another time (“another era”, in her words), Lucille was critical of the methods and approaches that her teachers (some of whom were clergy) employed throughout her early schooling years. Evidently, these early schooling experiences affected the way she interacted with her students in the present, not in terms of what to do, but instead in relation on what not to do with them. In listening to her words, and in reading and rereading the transcripts of her accounts, I felt what she felt, and my memory was jogged to a teacher from my own educative experience whose disciplining techniques would be described as bullying today. Like Lucille, I too drew from the well of memory (affective and incidental) to know how not to affect my own students.

DISCUSSION The examples provided in the prior section suggest that changes, instances of emergence, and the reinforcement of perspectives did not surface from an independent exercise of agency. The unfolding of the activity in the research assemblage was prompted by multiple affective productions and responses (Fox & Alldred, 2014). Lucille’s change in instructional practice, although subtle, as an affective reverberation in response to my own affect having observed a practice of cold calling on students, including ELs. My commitment to issues of social justice and equity in education was not the result of an intellectual summation; instead, it surfaced as an affective response to my first-hand experience within Lucille’s school context. Our mutual experiences as former students in religious institutions was a source of affective influence, responding to practices that we deemed inappropriate by engaging in counter-practices in our own teaching. These points of analysis surfaced as methodological excess (Lather, 2007/ 2017), something not sought, considered, or examined under the tenets of the original research study, but an element of significance nonetheless. Further, a traditional qualitative model (with the historically constructed division between

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researcher and participant) and the humanistic definition of self (I) would have been unable to attend to the emergent understandings discussed in this chapter. As methodological excess, these understandings surfaced from the blind spots of normative qualitative inquiry. By thinking with theory and employment of the rhizomatic concepts, I was able to decenter my researcher self and examine my role as an element connected to other elements in the research assemblage. This conceptual and methodological shift (from agency to affect) is a significant departure from traditional considerations of agentic capacities among or between the researcher and the research. Employing affect and the other DeleuzoGuattarian notions as conceptual guides enabled the decentering of self/other towards a recognition of all as an entangled mesh of matter (Barad, 2007). Given the limitations of traditional methodologies to account for the complexity of social phenomena, engagement with such an approach to research and concepts of self and knowledge that break from humanistic assumptions are enabling and productive towards attending to the messiness, the irrationality, and the affective dimensions of experience that surface as visceral, autonomous responses as shaping forces in the processes of meaning making, prior to and in conjunction with conscious cognitive activity (Martin & Strom, 2017; St Pierre, 2011). Ultimately, this shift is necessary for researchers working with intimate methodologies who desire a fine-grained analysis of the activity in the research assemblage, but also in the effort to demonstrate trustworthiness in the work. Given the automaticity of affect, it is beyond the scope of being “controlled”. Maintaining affective productions and reverberations as methodological excesses in the blind spot of qualitative inquiry perpetuates status quo, reproductive means of understanding oneself and the world itself. For methodologists committed to constructing new bodies of knowledge with which to understand social phenomena and the processes through which such understandings are developed, it is vital to move away from normative constructions of qualitative researcher, research, and participants towards perspectives attentive to the inter/ interplay among diverse elements as diachronic and synchronic activity (Strom & Martin, 2013).

CONCLUSION The methodological approach employed in this chapter demonstrates the affordances of decentering the self by thinking with Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. It sheds light on how the self (whether researcher or participant) is always enmeshed as a member of the research assemblage. Even when feigning to assume objectivity, affect reverberates as a transconscious shaping force. Ultimately, for methodologists and researchers, attending to the self as affective rather than agentic and as affecting and being affected in the research endeavors holds much promise to provide nuanced and emergent insights. For research methodologists, and especially for researchers employing intimate approaches to inquiry, investigating instances of affective productions and reverberations draws attention to what has historically remained in the blind spots of research. As such, this chapter is a call

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for researchers to decenter the elements of the research process and re-examine the trajectory of their systematic inquiries.

REFERENCES Alvermann, D. (2000). Researching libraries, literacies, and lives: A rhizoanalysis. In E. S. Pierre & W. S. Pillow (Eds.), Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education (pp. 114
129). New York, NY: Routledge. Anderson, L., & Glass-Coffin, B. (2013). I learn by going: Autoethnographic modes of inquiry. In H. J. Linn, T. E. Adams, & C. Ellis (Eds.), Handbook of autoethnography (pp. 57
83). Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. New York, NY: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2005/2006). Affirming the affirmative: On nomadic affectivity. Rhizomes, (11/12). Retrieved from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/braidotti.html. Accessed on June 5, 2017. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Oxford, UK: Polity Press. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1988). Power and criticism: Poststructural investigations in education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. New York, NY: Routledge. Coleman, C. (2012). Affect. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 11
14). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Coleman, R., & Ringrose, J. (2013). Introduction: Deleuze and research methodologies. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 1
22). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Creswell, J. W. (2012). Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches (3rd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage Publications. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eakle, A. J. (2007). Literacy spaces of a Christian faith-based school. Reading Research Quarterly, 42(4), 472
510. Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An introduction. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Fox, N. J., & Alldred, P. (2014). New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and the researchassemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), 399
414. doi:10.1080/13645579.2014.921458 Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics, and affective pedagogy. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79
95). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language (M. Waller, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lather, P. (2017). (Post)Critical methodologies: The selected works of Patti Lather. New York, NY: Routledge. Martin, A. D. (2016). The professional identities of mainstream teachers of English learners: A discourse analysis (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Montclair State University. Martin, A. D., & Kamberelis, G. (2013). Mapping not tracing: Towards an interpretive inquiry with political teeth. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 668
679.

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Martin, A. D., & Strom, K. J. (2017). Using multiple technologies to put rhizomatics to work in selfstudy. In A. Ovens & D. Garbett (Eds.), Being self-study researchers in a digital world: future oriented research and pedagogy in teacher education (Vol. 16, Self-study of teaching and teacher education practices, pp. 151
163). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Massumi, B. (1987). Translator’s foreword and notes [Foreword]. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), Thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (pp. Ix
Xix). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Merriam, S. B. (2009). Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., &Saldañia, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Palmer, D. D. (1997). Structuralism and poststructuralism: For beginners. New York, NY: Writers and Readers. Peters, M., & Burbules, N. C. (2004). Poststructuralism and educational research. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Powell, J. (2007). Derrida for beginners. New York, NY: For Beginners. Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, education and becoming. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. St Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5), 477
515. doi:10.1080/09518390050156422 St Pierre, E. A. (2004). Deleuzian concepts for education: The subject undone. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 36(3), 283
296. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00068.x St Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitive research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (pp. 611
625). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Strom, K. J. (2015). Teaching as assemblage. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 321
333. doi:10.1177/0022487115589990 Strom, K. J., & Martin, A. D. (2013). Putting philosophy to work in the classroom: Using rhizomatics to deterritorialize neoliberal thought and practice. Studying Teacher Education, 9(3), 219
235. doi:10.1080/17425964.2013.830970 Strom, K. J., & Martin, A. D. (2017a). Becoming-teacher: A rhizomatic look at first-year teaching. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Strom, K. J., & Martin, A. D. (2017b). Thinking with theory in the era of Trump. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), 3
22. Weedon, C. (1987). Feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. Oxford: B. Blackwell.

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TEACHING IN, RELATING IN, AND RESEARCHING IN ONLINE TEACHING: THE DESIRING CARTOGRAPHIES OF TWO SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHER EDUCATOR BECOMINGS Francis Bangou and Stephanie Arnott

ABSTRACT This chapter is the actualization of an experimentation of two second language (L2) teacher educators (the authors) with(in) Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology and the associated concepts of agencement, desire, rhizomes, becoming, and affect to contribute to the everchanging knowledge base associated with the work and experiences of teacher educators at a time when such contributions are urgently needed. More precisely, this chapter sought to illustrate what could happen when, as teacher educators and researchers, we become “intimate” with the various elements of a research
teaching
learning
writing agencement. To do so, the chapter presents research based on material collected as part of a study on a mentoring experience between the authors. The second author was preparing to teach an online graduate course in L2 education to in-service teachers for the first time, while the first author had more experience with online teaching. Through the rhizoanalysis of three vignettes, the authors engaged with(in) their experiences by considering how various elements of the research
teaching
learning
writing agencement
particularly the most intensively affective ones
impacted and were impacted by other

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 25
43 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031004

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elements. With(in) this process, desire emerged as a praxis and a force capable of generating new knowledge in part by encouraging teachers and teacher educators (1) to experiment with learning, teaching, and conducting research with(in) the productive energy of desire, and (2) to disrupt affective powers as well as the role played by the body in such a process. Keywords: Second language; teacher education; online education; desire; rhizoanalysis; Deleuze & Guattari

ENTERING IN THE MIDDLE At present, technology plays an influential part in our everyday lives (Contact North, 2012), continually transforming various aspects of human life, including the way that we learn (Prensky, 2010). In order to keep up with this trend, curriculum development across the world has seen a push to ensure that it reflects the twenty-first-century realities of society, culture, and technology (Karsenti, Raby, & Villeneuve, 2008). Of particular relevance to this chapter is the context of post-secondary education in Canada and abroad, where much investment has been made in the integration of technology into learning environments, not only in terms of its simple installation but also the provision of technological assistance to its users (Bangou & Fleming, 2010; Bischsel, 2013; Nadira Banu Kamal & Thahira Banu, 2010). Since the turn of the century, more and more post-secondary institutions from around the world have opted for online learning platforms to boost recruitment and to respond to expressed interest from students and employers alike for this type of learning experience (Bischsel, 2013; Contact North, 2012). However, as others have cautioned (e.g., Compton, 2009; Bailey & Card, 2009), such integration must be based on sound educational principles, while remaining cognizant of the principles of design inherent to the existing educational context. In the case of post-secondary learning, research has documented several failures in this respect, such as treating technology as an “add-on” to traditional instructional methods instead of a change requiring targeted professional development (PD) (Laferrière & Gervais, 2008; Ulrich & Karvonen, 2011). Consequently, calls have been made for further investigation into how technology is being implemented into the adult learning context (Coryell & Chlup, 2007). Second language (L2) learning environments are not immune to this trend
both Chapelle (2005) and Murphy (2010) have reported a noteworthy increase in the promotion of technology integration into L2 curricula. Still, calls for research are the same, with some arguing for studies dedicated exclusively to L2 teacher education, and how teachers and teacher educators are integrating technology into their practice (Guichon, 2012). Although the research dedicated to L2 teacher education and technology is still fairly new, there is a general consensus among scholars that the integration of technology into one’s teaching practice is a complex, multifactorial, and everchanging process that varies according to the contexts in which it is applied

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(Bangou, 2013; Guichon, 2012; Somekh, 2007). That is partly why some L2 teacher educators have called for a reconceptualization of the knowledge base that underpins L2 teacher education, and also for a change in the nature of what constitutes PD (Johnson, 2013). Thus, it is not surprising that, in recent years, a number of scholars in L2 acquisition and teacher education (LarsenFreeman, 2012; McKay, Carrington, & Iyer, 2014) have broken away from traditional ways of studying educational practices to find a more comprehensive way to study the complexity of the “emergence of meaning, knowledge, understanding, the world, and the self in and through education” (Osberg & Biesta, 2010, p. 2). Indeed, traditional (i.e., logical, linear, hierarchical, “scientific”) methods for understanding the world around us cannot arguably capture all of the intricate texture and changeability that make up reality (Strom, 2015). This limitation is, in part, why some scholars have questioned the validity of traditional conceptual and methodological resources that have been presented to understand such a reality (DeLanda, 2006; Fox & Alldred, 2015; Roy, 2003; Thrift, 2008; Vannini, 2015). Of noteworthy relevance to this chapter is the argument that Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology is particularly conducive to the study of complexity and change because it is a radical departure from the dogma of Western philosophy, which has guided modern science to date (Weinbaum, 2015). This chapter aligns with these trends in its actualization of an experimentation with this ontology to apprehend the intricate texture of the interrelationships between teacher education, technology, and research. It is intended to contribute to the ever-changing knowledge base associated with the work and experiences of teacher educators at a time when, according to Wright (2010), such contributions are needed urgently especially as L2 teacher educators face a new online pedagogical agenda. With this in mind, the goal of this chapter is twofold: (1) to generate ways of thinking differently (Sellers, 2015) about the intricacy and changeability of becoming an online L2 teacher educator and (2) to illustrate what (potentially) can be produced when we do so. This chapter begins with a brief overview of an immanent perspective on becoming an online L2 teacher educator. It then introduces the research project and discusses three vignettes that map our own immanent experiences as mentor/mentee and researchers during the processes of becoming an online L2 teacher educator and writing this chapter. An Immanent Perspective on Becoming an Online L2 Teacher Educator While Deleuze and Guattari did not address teacher education per se, they created concepts that can help us think about teacher education differently. Of most relevance to this chapter is Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy that advocates for the immanent1 origins of reality (Srnicek, 2007) and accentuates, difference, becoming, multiplicities, and rhizomes over identity, being, essences, and hierarchies. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), immanence is considered as a plane where life operates with(in) human and material experiences. Simply

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put
for Deleuze, reality consists of the virtual and the actual. The virtual is the plane of consistency where being is indivisible and where there are no hierarchies. It includes the elements, forces, flows, and movements with(in) which the virtual expresses itself in the actual. Indeed, the virtual is not accessible to human consciousness; rather, it is continually folding, unfolding, and refolding into different expressions that constitute observable reality (i.e., the actual dimension). According to Deleuze and Guattari, it is important to consider that the virtual is not transcendent to observable reality but is rather immanent to it. This means that being is weaved into the actual. As such, we can say that the virtual and the actual are all real and are constantly interacting with each other, but never in the same way. In this case, e.g., becoming an online L2 teacher educator could actualize in space and time as a scream recorded on a digital recorder, or a smile on a face, depending upon the connections that occurred in the virtual between such becoming AND feelings of joy AND a recorder, AND an empty space, AND a multitude of other perceptible and imperceptible elements. For these reasons, Deleuze and Guattari believe that life is foremost creative and cannot be separated from experience. Consequently, reality emerges from the unpredictable interconnections of elements of the world (human and nonhuman) that are in constant state of transformation (Bangou, 2014; Weinbaum, 2015). In this view, exploring the interrelationships between elements of the world (as opposed to merely representing or identifying them) and investigating the ways in which they contribute to the emergence of our realities are of the utmost importance (Bangou, 2014; Bangou & Fleming, 2014; Bangou, in press). Out of this emerged the concept of agencement2 (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)
an effort to theorize the ways that elements of the world come together and contribute to the emergence of an ever-changing reality. An agencement can be explained as the materialization of complex, interwoven relationships between heterogeneous human and non-human elements. In this view, reality can be understood as a collectivity of agencements of intermingling entities, actions, passions, acts, and statements reacting to and transforming each other through relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (see Bangou (2013) for more details). In order to illustrate the interconnectivity that occurs within and between agencements, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) referred to the naturally occurring rhizome. In the field of botany, a rhizome is a subterranean plant stem that sends out independent roots and shoots in all directions. Like rhizomes, agencements are believed to freely and continuously establish connections and interconnections between themselves that are both dynamic and flexible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Also like rhizomes, agencements may be broken or shattered at a particular connection but will re-establish themselves on either an old or a new line. Deleuze considers this productive effect of life as “becoming,” an act of transformation of elements of the world within and between agencements. In an agencement, becoming occurs through affects. While traditional notions of affect might equate it with emotions, Deleuze and Guattari contend that affect embodies the capacity of bodies to transform each other (Massumi, 2002). In a given encounter, the capacity of an element of the

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world’s external and internal parts to affect (i.e., to transform) or to be affected (i.e., to be transformed) will depend on the intensities (i.e., strength and duration) of the effects (i.e., augmentation or diminution of the power to act) of the various parts at work in this timely event. During these intensive events, multiple elements could potentially happen and this is why what is produced in an encounter can never be predicted (see Bangou (in press) for more details). Considering each of these concepts, what matters then is not so much to understand what an element of the world is but rather what it can do within and between agencements. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), a body (i.e., an element of the world) is not defined by its characteristics or the functions it fulfills but rather by “the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed, and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)” (p. 261). Focusing on its productive potential is key: “[…] we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are” (p. 257). In the context of this chapter, the notion of desire becomes both an experimental and creative force. Contrary to psychoanalytic perspectives, Deleuze and Guattari did not define desire as a drive or a lack but rather as an immanent principle of creativity that disturbs normality. In this way, we can say that the concept “desire” is largely sociopolitical (Zembylas, 2007)
we never desire something or someone but always an ensemble. For example, one’s desire for a piece of clothing is never just about the apparel alone, but is always associated with other elements such as his/her friends and the impact one thinks he/she will have when she/he will wear it. Therefore, desire is foremost a creation, that could potentially destabilize existing agencements and be affected by them (Ross, 2010). Ultimately, “becoming is the process of desire” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 272). Using this Deleuzo-Guattarian standpoint, becoming an online L2 teacher does not equal an act of imitation, regression, progression, or identification; rather, it is an act of creation that is affected by diverse forces such as desire, and numerous rhizomatic interconnections between heterogeneous human and non-human elements such as students, the online platform, higher education, language, and potentially anything else.

RELATING IN THE RESEARCH AGENCEMENT Overall, this study aligns with current changes in Social Sciences calling for more methodologies that account for the performativity of methods and that are capable of dealing with the changeability, messiness, versatility, and affectivity of the world (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Vannini, 2015). Research methodologies inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987, 1994) have also been referred to as non-representational (Dewsbury, 2010; Vannini, 2015), mostly because they do not attempt to re-produce the world, the eternal, or the universal, but rather aim to acquire a sense of how something novel emerges and to contribute to a world yet to come (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013). Thus,

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non-representational inquiry usually begins with a singular experience and maps the ways in which this experience emerged and could contribute to the emergence of novel elements depending in part on “the ways in which social realities are made through methods, and might be made in other ways” (Colebrook, 2002, p. 11). Importantly, as research methods themselves are productive, researchers need to consider the role we inevitably play in the research process (Bangou, 2013). Sandvik (2010) argues that we should relate in the material collected in the field (i.e., immanently) instead of simply relating to it (i.e., transcendently), and start engaging in the flows and intensities that emerge from different parts in the research machineries. In this way, a variety of unexpected elements might emerge to become forces in the analysis of the collected material. This chapter is an attempt to relate in this research agencement by experimenting with the ways in which the agencement of becoming an online L2 teacher educator functions and what it produces, and by considering the ways human (e.g., researchers, students, relatives, colleagues, etc.)
non-human (i.e., computers, online learning, research methods, etc.), virtual, and actual elements potentially affected and were affected by connections with(in) the agencement. We also considered additional agencements that were created through these new connections. Experimentation through Rhizoanalysis: The Use of Vignettes Masny (2013, 2015, 2016) presents the concept of rhizoanalysis as a way to open lines to think differently about qualitative research and data analysis
it is not a method, as there is no specific way to do it. Rather, it is an agencement that creates change and opens up potentialities for thinking differently (Masny, 2015). Contrary to discourse analysis, rhizoanalysis does not postulate a meaning awaiting interpretation, and disclosure as well as a rational human being who interprets the data, but rather sees the human subject and language as being decentered, for all entities (i.e., organic, material, expressive, political, ethical, technological, linguistic, etc.) can potentially contribute to multitude expressions of reality through their interactions with(in) a data analysis agencement (Masny, 2016). Therefore, rhizoanalysis is not about seeking meaning and interpreting data, but rather thinking about what could potentially become, by palpating the data (Masny, 2016) to map the ways elements of an agencement
be they human, material, digital, linguistic, perceivable, or unperceivable
contributed to any perceivable and conceivable actualizations in time and space of our experiences. Consequently, instead of talking about data, we talk about “vignettes” that are parts of a research agencement. Masny (2013, 2015) emphasizes the importance of understanding how vignettes are selected and actualized, stressing that they are selected through intense affective and disruptive passages as thoughts are produced in the mind of the researcher. Therefore, a vignette foregrounded for analysis is based on its capacity to affect the research agencement, and to be affected by this agencement (Masny, 2013, 2015, 2016). Furthermore, rhizoanalysis is “not a matter of going through the whole data set to identify

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excerpts according to themes or codings” but rather to wonder and ask questions; then, “the analysis ‘is reported’ in indirect discourse, that is, the subject is decentered and so interpretation by the subject is abandoned” (Masny, 2013, p. 343).

METHOD This chapter presents research based on data collected as part of a study on a mentoring experience between us (the authors). Stephanie (the second author) was preparing to teach an online graduate course in second language education (SLE) to in-service teachers for the first time while Francis (the first author) had more experience with online teaching. Collection of the Field Material The field material for this chapter was generated through continuous reflections and debriefing sessions with(in) the mentoring process and the writing of this chapter. First, to actualize the thoughts triggered by the research agencement, we began keeping reflective logs about our experiences as mentor (Francis), mentee (Stephanie), and researchers two months prior to the beginning of the online SLE course session and continued until the course was over. In line with the rhizome, our experiences were recorded in reflective logs, whenever the desire to do so emerged. Therefore, we tried our best to always keep a recording device by our side. This is why, throughout the project a variety of audio and video devices (e.g., cell phones, webcams, application JDVoiceMail) were used to record our thoughts. The logs were then uploaded to a shared Dropbox folder for ease of access. A total of 20 reflective logs (nine from Francis and 11 from Stephanie) were recorded by the time the course ended. The reflective logs addressed various issues such as concerns, frustrations, pains, joys, successes, a-ha moments, and failures we experienced throughout this process, depending on the unpredictable connections that occurred with various elements during our daily activities (e.g., an article, teaching, conversation with spouse, etc.). Seven reflective logs (four from Francis and three from Stephanie) were added as this chapter developed. In addition, we held eight debriefing sessions while Stephanie was developing and teaching the online SLE course in order to discuss her experiences in the moment and reflect back on her journey. Our discussions, which were largely nourished by our respective logs and the resulting questions we had for each other, were recorded on a digital voice recorder. All reflective logs and discussions were transcribed for rhizoanalysis. To keep thinking and relating in the research agencement, we continued to hold regular debriefing sessions (five in total) to aid in the analysis of the transcripts and the writing of this chapter; these sessions were also voice recorded and transcribed throughout the writing process.

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Becoming Vignettes It was during our debriefing sessions that we chose the first two vignettes underpinning this chapter. We agreed that each of us would identify two events during the mentoring process that had resonated the most with us (i.e., the moments with the outmost intensity of affect). In a subsequent discussion, thoughts associated with word limitations started to emerge, and the decision was made to limit these four selections down to two, with each of us choosing the most intense events to map out as a vignette. When the time came to start analyzing our experience, it was also during a debriefing session that desire became our point of entry into the rhizoanalysis of the material that we collected. Hence, the following questions guided our experimentation with(in) the field material: (1) How does desire function with(in) the agencement of becoming an online L2 teacher educator? (2) What does it produce? Interestingly, the third vignette emerged when writing this chapter, as disruptive, intensive and affective connections occurred with both of us when we considered including our names in the manuscript. For this vignette, we separately analyzed the same transcription of our discussion, mapped our connections, and finally “plugged in” individually at the end
that is, we individually worked in the elements that somehow connected with us and generated thoughts with(in) the agencements that each one of us formed with the vignette.

THE RHIZOANALYSES OF THREE VIGNETTES Vignette 1: When Desire and a Tumble Connect The first vignette is associated with an event that resonated with both of us. This event occurred a few days prior to the beginning of the online SLE course. On that day, Stephanie met with Francis to work on the course outline and to show her how to design a course on the online platform BlackBoard. With the first class only days away, no content had been uploaded onto the platform. Not surprisingly, as she realized how much work she still had to do, Stephanie’s stress level grew steadily over the course of the meeting
so much so that, toward the end of the session, she declared, “I might cry.” She did not cry, but her distress was palpable. When their session concluded, Stephanie began to exit the meeting room, which was on an upper floor. As she descended the staircase, she slipped and fell down the entire flight of stairs. Fortunately, she was not physically hurt, but at this stage tears of emotion and despair started to roll down her cheeks. In the following vignette, mapped by Francis, we are discussing that event after the fact. The intense affective passages are bolded to show when connections were made and when new thoughts were produced in the mind of Francis when reading the vignette. F: Because I remember when you fell, you didn’t just—I mean, that’s sort of kind of making sense of something, like you see something that happens to you—I mean, on that day—I mean, at least to me—I mean, that was not just like a simple fall on the stairs.

Teaching in, Relating in, and Researching in Online Teaching S: No. F: That was like a—I don’t want to use the term—it’s like a metaphor for so many things— S: Oh my God, are you kidding me? Yeah. [Both laugh] F: And I was just wondering about that, you know. I mean, like, of course I can make assumptions, but the only person who can really— S: No, you’re right. F: Think back about it. It’s you, you know? S: I don’t want to—Well, I’d be interested to listen to the recording that I made afterwards. I mean, in terms of feelings or words that would describe the feelings, I remember feeling really embarrassed, and I remember feeling just this wash of incapability come over me. Like, I can’t even—Really? I can’t even walk down the stairs? Like, because I was feeling very behind on a lot of things, including this course, and I thought, you know, I’m barely keeping up, but I’m keeping up. And then when that happened, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I’m not.’ F: Okay, okay. S: So it—it just sort of—Yeah, it was more just—it was more embarrassing on a lot of levels, but I mean, embarrassing just because I thought—I don’t—I never—I’ve never been the type of person to just give up, but I’ve never been faced with a situation where I, like, really, really— like, I’m really hard on myself, like I really failed or I haven’t—You know, it’s kind of finding that medium between putting pressure on myself and sort of allowing myself—if I need to sleep or I need to— F: Yeah. S: Generic things that you need. So I mean, that situation—I’d given myself a lot of latitude to sort of—With that faith that it will get done and I will get it done, I just have to be easy on myself, because if I’m hard on myself, it’s only going to create stress. So when that happened, I just felt like I— F: Like a—can I say the words—like a failure? Like a little bit? S: Yeah, well, yeah, but in a sense—Not like, “Oh, I’m not going to get it done” or “I haven”t got it done,” but “What piece of my life can I keep together at this point?” Like I just feel so all over the place. I felt really all over the place. ’Cause I was still getting my course outline done for this class and the other class—It was all getting done, but I just felt like a mess on the way. F: Mmm hmm. S: And I think I didn’t realize how much of a mess I was until that happened. F: Until that fall. S: Yeah. Because I thought I was doing okay—It’s like today. I mean, I thought I was doing—And then I asked the dumbest question to the friend I was working out with, and she just sort of looked at me and I thought, “Yeah, that’s the state of my brain right now.” I don’t know if I’m on autopilot, I don’t know if—Like, I’m just—Yeah, it’s like a weird consciousness, if you will. Like it kind of snaps you in and—I mean, what did I do as a result? It’s not like I took care of myself, but I just sort of calmed down, stepped away from the work for a

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FRANCIS BANGOU AND STEPHANIE ARNOTT second, and then, you know, gave myself some time to rest and reorient and then get back at it, ’cause […] F: Okay. S: It was kind of like a wake-up call, like I’m not doing—If I’m falling down stairs, then I gotta take a breather and then come back.

Thinking in desire as a productive force with(in) an agencement
one that is intensified by affect and is also able to generate connections and affect new agencements
we may wonder about the connections that were created during this event. Similarly, we may also consider how these connections affected our becoming through this mentoring process. At the time of the research, in addition to feeling like she was falling behind on her professional responsibilities, Stephanie was also going through some intensive changes in her personal life. How, then, might the tumble down the stairs have intensified the transformative capacity of desire with(in) the agencement? Thinking about flow, speed, and slowness, this tumble was unexpected. That, combined with the fact that it occurred in the blink of an eye, may have intensified its affects (i.e., diminution or augmentation of the power to act) on other human and non-human elements of the agencement (e.g., desire, Stephanie, etc.). Indeed, many connections to elements associated with Stephanie’s personal and professional lives were made after this fall, which may have contributed to the emergence of feelings of helplessness, vulnerability, and embarrassment
and ultimately tears. One of these associated elements was Stephanie’s unfamiliarity with teaching online. We may wonder, then, about the way technology affected and was affected by other elements of this agencement. We will never know if the tumble would have had such power otherwise, but after this incident, Stephanie was transformed in that she could no longer keep it “together” in front of Francis. Thus, we are left to wonder how such transformations may have affected our becoming with(in) this agencement. Indeed, at the moment of the tumble, connections emerged between Stephanie AND the desire to develop the online course AND feeling “like a mess” AND her overall life. Because of these connections, Stephanie’s becoming took an unanticipated direction as she realized at that point that something needed to be done and “stepped away from the work for a second,” to give herself “some time to rest and reorient, and then got back at it.” However, at that point multiple other things could have happened as well. Francis, too, was also a force in this agencement, as he was the one providing the mentoring (i.e., reminding Stephanie of all the things she had to get done) before the tumble. How might his role have affected, and have been affected by, desire to produce an online course? Indeed, Stephanie’s reflective log entry after the tumble recorded how she felt overwhelmed to be working with someone with so much online teaching experience, and how these feelings left her feeling excited and jealous at the same time. The log also recorded how she felt guilty to be taking up so much of Francis’ time. All of these feelings, then, were

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connections made between Francis’ role as mentor AND Stephanie’s various feelings. How might such connections have affected the capacity of the tumble to transform and be transformed by the research agencement at that particular moment in time? We will never know, but nevertheless, this tumble contributed to Stephanie’s becoming an online L2 teacher educator by transforming aspects of this agencement and taking this process in new and unpredictable directions. Vignette 2: The Desire to Become Technologically Present The second vignette is linked to an event that resonated with Stephanie in particular. It relates to her experience attending a PD seminar that focused on effective online teaching practices. During this event, various professors shared practices and organizational tips for teaching online courses at the graduate level. Stephanie, whose reflective journals had referred numerous times to the fact that collaboration was a central aspect of her teaching philosophy, had been anticipating this event as a welcome opportunity to work with colleagues and learn from experts. The following vignette, mapped by Stephanie, is extracted from a discussion that took place during the second debriefing session. In it, Stephanie highlights how the PD seminar made her realize the pressure she had been putting on herself to be a technological expert in delivering the online SLE course. Like the previous vignette, intense affective passages are bolded to show when connections were made and how new thoughts were produced in Stephanie’s mind when reading the vignette. S: I kind of—It was a nice feeling to have—And I keep coming back to [name of colleague] because he was the only one to respond to a question I asked to the group—Everybody was talking about these really interesting—you know, “I use these tools on BlackBoard” and I do this, that, and the other—and I could just feel my, you know, heart rate going up, and feeling like “Okay, this is going to be useful to me in two years.” So I sort of, you know, took the bull by the horns and asked the question of the group. I said, ‘This is all very useful, you know—I’m taking notes, it’s exciting—but I’m not only embarking on the online platform— F: Train, yeah. S: Right, from there, but it’s also a new course. So imagine—Like, I asked them, I said, “Imagine you’re teaching the course you’ve been talking about this whole time. Imagine—or go back to when you were doing it the first time. What did you focus on? What helped you, you know—And even the technological stuff that you’re doing now, what would you wish that you had done right off the bat, or like, one tool, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel— F: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm, mmm hmm. S: So, I mean, I got some feedback on that, really—That was where [name of colleague] talked about focus on the content first, then the technology piece. You know, he said one thing you need to do is [make] sure not only your expectations are clear, but the steps and how to do it, so sort of focusing on those kinds of administrative pieces, and if there’s stuff that other people have done that you can use, then by all means, ask some people, and so on related to that. But they didn’t really—It kind of gave me permission to sort of back off a little bit, and so it would then become my choice—I keep going to—I mean, Adobe Connect is the one that in my

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FRANCIS BANGOU AND STEPHANIE ARNOTT head feels like it’s simple and I’ve heard you say it’s simple and I’ve heard other people say it’s simple. I’m sure it is, but it stresses me out because I think—Three courses next term? I don’t want to be, you know, freaking, thinking, ‘Ahhh, I’ve got an Adobe Connect session, I hope all goes well, I don’t know,’ and then, like, I don’t—I kind of want that presence, that technological presence, to seem somewhat on an expert level. Like, I want—They’re going to know—I’m going to tell them straight up, this is my first online course, you know, so it’s going to be out in the open. But I also don’t want to pretend that—I don’t want to pretend I’m something I’m not. [Laughs] I don’t want to pretend I’m a technological guru— F: Oh, for sure, and you shouldn’t. And I think that it’s great that you are in this place right now. And it’s good because it seems that—Before it seems that, yeah, the technology was taking too much presence, to go back to this idea, in the sense that it was taking presence even in your own conceptualization of the entire process. And it’s true that what [name of colleague] said […] that basically what is more important is the content. You shouldn’t design a course around the technology, but around what you want to teach. And then see how you can enhance that with the technology. S: Exactly. Exactly. And I feel like, I mean, time-wise, I will hopefully have the time to do that, but, I mean, I’m going to focus on the content, make it priority number one, and then, you know, I have some kind of baseline goals I’ve sort of put in my brain, but I haven’t sat down to really, really think about it in terms of what—how technologically I would want to go beyond just the simple, you know, repository weekly sharing. And I’ve got some really good ideas related to that. So, you know, sort of putting a student in charge of facilitating an online discussion for a week, which doesn’t necessitate too much technological expertise, but does necessitate me being technologically present. F: Yeah, yeah.

In terms of how desire was a productive force with(in) this agencement, the above discussion reveals Stephanie’s desire to bridge the gap between her technological skill and the expertise she felt was required of an online instructor. Specifically, she sought guidance from her colleagues and various experts in terms of how and where to focus her energy while planning her online course. How did participating in the seminar in this way transform the elements of desire, technology, and Stephanie herself? The above vignette shows the many new connections that emerged between Stephanie’s desires related to technology, on the one hand, and the PD seminar, technology, and feelings of expertise and confidence (or lack thereof) on the other. We may wonder, then, how the desiring forces that generated (and were generated by) these connections were themselves affected, or affected by, other elements of the agencement. As Stephanie stated, the experience gave her the “permission” to characterize progress in terms of developing more concrete strategies and thereby becoming more technologically present (as opposed to simply coming clean about her lack of expertise and leaving it at that). The debriefing session enabled both of us to slow down and think with(in) this experience, which eventually contributed to the acknowledgement by Stephanie that “technology was taking too much presence” in the overall process of planning the online course. Indeed, instead of just seeing her technical abilities as lacking, this vignette suggests that Stephanie came to a different understanding of her capabilities as an online instructor. Specifically, what began as a perception of lacking expertise seemed to develop, with(in) the

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experience of the PD seminar, into an intense, productive desire AS technologically present. Had Stephanie not participated in this PD seminar, would she have come to that same place of comfort with her technological presence? As with the first vignette, we will never know what could have happened if Stephanie had not attended this PD seminar. We are left to wonder how these connections generated with(in) the PD experience affected the overall agencement
including the element of Francis as mentor
and how they might have transformed Stephanie’s desire into a productive force of its own. That said, it appears that this PD seminar transformed and was transformed by this agencement (and by the process of becoming an online L2 teacher educator in general), intensifying and transforming desire and technology, among other elements, in unpredictable ways. Vignette 3: No Hiding Anymore This vignette is connected to an event that resonated with both of us while writing this chapter. We started writing this chapter using more conventional means to refer to ourselves such as “the authors” or the “the researchers”. However, one day, while Francis was working on the methodology section, thoughts related to intimate scholarship and ourselves as writers
researchers started to emerge as well as the desire to use our names as opposed to more impersonal expressions of our presence with(in) this chapter agencement. He subsequently inserted our names in a draft for Stephanie to review. The following vignette, mapped by both of us, is extracted from a debriefing session that took place after Francis’ writing was shared with Stephanie. In it, we talk about what happened when Stephanie saw her name in the draft for the first time. In this vignette, intense affective passages are bolded to show when connections were made when reading the vignette and how new thoughts were produced in the mind of Stephanie, underlined when they were produced in the mind of Francis, and in both bolded and underlined when connections were made and new thoughts were produced in both of our minds. S: Well, I mean it didn’t necessarily, well it kind of did actually jump out of me in terms of I saw my name. F: Yeah, so what did that do? S: It just, I guess it provoked a couple of different reactions. I was, I was for lack of a better word, happy I guess to see my name there, hum. F: Really, in what sense? S: Well happy, maybe that wasn’t clear in my log because I guess I was more struck, what was more powerful, or more profound was the second guessing and that’s what I kind of do all the time, but I started to look at it and was like oh isn’t that nice! I think it would be nice for us to refer to ourselves in the first person or by our names. So it makes it really like you said intimate, personal. And then I was just shot back to that reviewer’s comment about not that there is no confidentiality but it’s very revealing and it put the second author, really me, in a vulnerable position. I can’t remember the exact wording. Maybe I’m totally making that up.

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FRANCIS BANGOU AND STEPHANIE ARNOTT F: No, no that’s what it was. S: Ok, and it’s funny how that keeps bouncing back into my thoughts. F: Yeah, because it’s not the first time that you’re mentioning it. S: Yeah, at that moment, and then I thought and that’s when I started thinking well no this is what I want but it was just this weird back and forth at second guessing, and so that’s kind of what you, I soon as I saw that I was like oh I have to press record, I have to do something in here, because I’m obviously having some sort of reaction, provoking something out of me. So that’s basically what you got was more or less the raw languaging of it all. F: So these comments from this reviewer obviously did something at that moment also in relationship to seeing your name, but at the end it seems that you are fine with it, right? S: I am but I think that it’s interesting to note that I have this suspicion that it’s gonna be a consistent sort of (m….) reaction for me, but now in the form of thinking of it in relation to the reviewer whereas before I may have been thinking of it in relation of me being vulnerable generally putting out there my experience whereas now the experience is linked to my name. I don’t know if it makes it clear. F: Yeah, so S: It was always linked to me, but for some reasons maybe when I looked at it before I didn’t see it as linked. We were just talking about first author ’cause I never really […] F: So it created some kind of a distance? S: Yeah, exactly, or maybe I thought in the back of my head, oh somebody will have to go back to the first page to see who the authors are, and like figure that out, and sort of like hah that’s it. Now that it’s like the names there like hah F: So, no hiding anymore.

Francis plugging in: As previously stated, contrary to psychoanalytic perspectives, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) did not define desire as a drive towards something or a lack of satisfaction, but rather as an immanent principle of production that potentially disturbs normality. Here, in this vignette Stephanie’s desire to record a reflective log emerged from the rhizomatic connections between multiple elements including our names, a reviewer’s comments, and feelings of vulnerability and happiness. We may then wonder about the potential of this desiring agencement to disturb this chapter and Stephanie’s becoming an online L2 teacher educator. A rupture in the rhizomatic flow of interconnections happened when Stephanie’s name “jump[ed] out” at her. At that moment, multiple elements could have emerged. For instance, the desire to erase her name could have emerged but somehow it did not happen. We may then wonder about how the affective capacity of her name could have transformed and been transformed by other elements of this vignette. For instance, we may want to think about the ways the previous comments from a reviewer may have increased or decreased such capacity. Indeed, as we were preparing to write this chapter we received feedback for an article we had submitted in a scholarly journal. In this feedback, a reviewer expressed her concerns about Stephanie’s confidentiality and vulnerability. Thoughts associated with these comments emerged

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when Stephanie saw her name, which may have increased the capacity of her name to create change with(in) this chapter. However, with(in) this desiring agencement there were other elements, including this chapter on intimate scholarship. We may then ask if writing about intimate scholarship could have affected the capacity of the reviewer’s comments to create change with(in) the desiring agencement of Stephanie AND name AND reviewer’s comments AND intimate scholarship. Apparently, at that moment the desire to contribute to this chapter was stronger, which was expressed by the urge to record a reflective log. We may never know what could have happened if this event had not occurred but with(in) the agencement of this chapter it contributed to an expression of both Stephanie and I becoming in online education. Stephanie plugging in: Considered collectively, this vignette and the others outlined in this chapter showcase the productive potential of vulnerability to further disrupt an already dynamic agencement. The reviewer’s comments were quite powerful in this regard, as seeing my name in the manuscript triggered another disruption in my comfort level with putting myself and my process of becoming out there for all to see/read, as demonstrated when I say “it’s funny how that keeps bouncing back into my thoughts”. While vulnerability is likely considered to be a central aspect of intimacy (and consequently, of intimate scholarship), the unpredictable nature of its emergence throughout this project shows its potential to disrupt and transform. What began as a process of collective second-guessing when considering the reviewer’s comments and including our names in the manuscript, was eventually transformed into a renewed, intense and collective desire on both our parts to persist with the inclusion of this vignette in this chapter
would this have happened if the reviewer had not included those comments? Would Francis have felt compelled to revise the text to include our names? The more I read it, the more Francis’ comment that there is “no hiding anymore” resonates with me, as it exemplifies the capacity of intimate scholarship to validate my process of becoming an online teacher educator
it is possible that none of these transformative experiences would have happened had we not had the courage to track and report on our experiences in the first place. In this regard, the desire to optimize my effectiveness as an online teacher educator by participating in this self-study has not only transformed my teaching but also my desire to explore its potential to transform my own research and the experiences of student participants in my future educational studies. Perhaps by reducing this “distance” that Francis refers to (and that many strive to maintain in traditional research paradigms), readers of this chapter may also feel compelled to explore the transformative potential of such vulnerability in their own online practice and research practice.

OPENING This chapter is the materialization of an attempt to map how the element of desire functioned (i.e., how it transformed and produced new connections) as part of this research-writing agencement. Through the rhizoanalysis of three

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vignettes, we engaged with(in) our experiences by considering how various elements of the agencement
particularly, the most intensively affective ones
impacted and were impacted by other constituent parts of the agencement. As part of this research agencement, we saw how desire affected and was affected by various other elements of an encounter (e.g., falling down the stairs, attending a PD session, reading a reviewer’s comments). It is through these intensive, affective moments that the process of becoming an online L2 teacher educator was transformed. With this in mind, we consider whether more thought should be given to how researchers and educators could experiment with the productive capacity of desire during the process of teacher education. An entry point into such experimentation could be Zembylas’s (2007) concept of the “pedagogy of desire”, which mobilizes and releases the “powerful flow” of desire “to subvert normalised representations and significations and find access to a radical self” (p. 331). Here, the term “pedagogy” does not refer to a set of teaching practices, but rather to “the relational encounter among individuals through which many possibilities for growth are created” (Zembylas, 2007, p. 333). Furthermore, as Zembylas explains, “A pedagogy of desire is […] not based on a notion of desire as being a state, position, or feeling towards teaching and learning practices, but it is a pedagogy of the subject and the relation between subjects and objects and artefacts” (2007, p. 339). A pedagogy of desire is particularly relevant to the agencement of becoming an online educator, as both desire and knowledge unite through encounters that can potentially disrupt normality and affective powers (like those seen in the dynamic agencement described above). Indeed, “when desires challenge or are challenged by events, the boundaries of what is sayable or visible are pushed because the fragility of these boundaries is exposed” (Zembylas, 2007, p. 333). For instance, when desire intersected with our names when writing this chapter, boundaries were pushed as Stephanie could not hide behind the text anymore and new connections emerged between Stephanie, Francis, the text, and her own becoming as an online L2 educator which materialized as this chapter. Following Zembylas’s (2007) line of thought, we could say that a teacher education curriculum based on such a pedagogy would consider desire to be praxis and a force capable of generating new knowledge. Such generation of new knowledge could be done by encouraging teachers and teacher educators (1) to experiment with learning, teaching, and conducting research with(in) the productive energy of desire, and (2) to disrupt affective capacities as well as the role played by the body in such a process.

EXITING IN THE MIDDLE This chapter did not seek to provide definitive answers to the question, how does one become an online L2 teacher educator? Rather, the goal of this chapter was to open a space for thinking differently about the intricacy and changeability of becoming an online L2 teacher educator by mapping our own immanent experiences as mentor/mentee and researchers during the processes of becoming an

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online L2 teacher educator and writing this chapter. Importantly, this chapter sought to illustrate what could happen when, as teacher educators and researchers, we become “intimate” with the various elements of a research and/or a teaching and learning agencement as we have seen, the possibilities are not only unpredictable but also endless. By relating in the agencement of this chapter, new knowledge about becoming an online L2 teacher educator emerged as well as the potential to enhance opportunities for more intimacy with our world, our teaching, and our scholarship. Thinking once again of the first vignette and third vignette, then, we may wonder about the role that Stephanie’s actual body played in these encounters, considering that her desire may have been intensified by the physical pain engendered by her fall or the emotions engendered by her name on the page. What also emerged with(in) this process are new discourses on teacher education which did not focus so much on what teacher education is or should be, but rather on what it had the potential to become. As previously argued (Bangou, in press), if we agree that most challenges faced by teachers are indeed complex, everchanging, and unpredictable, some thought associated with what teachers might have the potential to become might be necessary to be able to work with(in) the changeability and complexity of this phenomenon. As illustrated in this chapter Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology, and the associated concepts of agencements, rhizome, affect, becoming, desire, and experimentation are particularly propitious to the study of the intricacies and potential of teacher’s transformations. By experimenting with these conceptual tools with(in) this chapter, venues to disturb and transform online L2 teacher education emerged. Indeed, with(in) this chapter both Stephanie and Francis’ becomings actualized as an evolving process of transformations affecting and affected by various, unpredictable human, non-human, tangible, and not tangible elements. We believe such actualizations of teacherbecoming open up space to transform thoughts and practices associated with teaching and teacher education by destabilizing current neoliberal discourses on teaching and teacher education which seems to privilege individualism, linearity, human agency, evidences, and cause
effect relationships (Strom & Martin, 2017). With(in) the agencement of this chapter
mentoring
research agencement, a pedagogy of desire emerged not has a solution, but rather as space for further explorations with(in) the potential of online L2 teacher education by experimenting with the generative capacity of desire. At this point then, we invite readers to think in their potential by considering the ways desire functioned and what it produced with(in) the agencements that were created when they plugged in this chapter.

NOTES 1. Immanent life operates within (as opposed to beyond) the human and material experiences. Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, rejects the binary divide between subject and matter, and privileges the interconnections between human and non-human entities that produce reality. 2. The concept of agencement has usually been translated into English as “assemblage”. In this paper, the original term “agencement” will be used as the word “assemblage” does not fully translate the unpredictability and consistent reinvention of ‘agencement. See Bangou (2013) for more details.

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WE, MONSTERS: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC LITERATURE REVIEW OF EXPERIENCES IN DOCTORAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS (KIND OF) Jordan Corson and Tara Schwitzman*

ABSTRACT In this paper, we take up an autoethnographic review of literature on doctoral programs in order to engage notions of doctoral subjects. While the paper basically proceeds by taking up and entwining these methods, it is neither/ both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review. Rather, this work
like many spaces of a doctoral seminar
emerges as an uncontainable, unpredictable monster. We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading of what this “I” might be. We search for a preconfigured “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of doctoral experiences that never quite exists and yet moves and haunts us. We take up a tentative (post-)monstrous position that recognizes our cruel attachment to the “good” doctoral student, a subject that remains the inevitable (im)possibility of graduate school. Reviewing literature as an ethnographic practice and looking at ethnography as textual helps us smash these methods together. Yet, at any moment, we defy our methods
ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move

*

This chapter has been equally authored.

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 45
58 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031005

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intends to focus on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well defined “researchers.” We hope our project provides space to question the very categories and credentials built into doctoral studies by decentering the “doctoral student” subject. Keywords: Doctoral education; academia; autoethnography; literature review; monsters; getting lost

INTRODUCTION In our first year as doctoral students, we spent one day every week in a course we were told was both foundational and famous within our university. Through coursework, discussions, and everyday graduate student life we developed theoretical positions, elevator speeches about research, and territorial work spaces in the library. We learned how to be doctoral students, encountering names, theories, methodologies, politics, and other aspects of what it can signify to become (an) academic. In our experiences, the doctoral student life always returned to reading. Amidst mountains of texts that pushed us to (un)learn the very ways in which we think and experience the world, we encountered readings about ourselves. That is, wedged between Foucault and Apple, we read literature about the doctoral experience and the doctoral self. Some readings descriptively focused on the status of doctoral programs in education (e.g. Bargar & Mayo-Chamberlain, 1983; Weidman & Stein, 2003). Other readings presented prescriptive overviews of what should be happening in doctoral programs in education (Golde & Dore, 2001; Pallas, 2001). Qualifying and quantifying our experiences, these papers dynamically and flatly articulated grids of intelligibility for doctoral subjectivities. One paper, about our very own doctoral seminar, even considered doctoral education in general as the creation of (an) unpredictable and unknowable monster(s) (Lesko, Simmons, Quarshie, & Newton, 2008) and affectively stuck (Ahmed, 2006) with us enough to write this chapter. Lesko et al.’s (2008) idea of monsters as chaotic and puzzling appears throughout our writing as an emergent idea describing
to the extent that it is describable
our methodology, subjectivities, and experiences getting lost in our data. Emerging from our time in a graduate school of education, we have undertaken a project that engages the literature on doctoral programs in education and the “doctoral experience” itself and draws on our time in the seminar and other spaces of doctoral education. Framing this project as an autoethnographic review of literature, our goals are to: work among and play with existing narratives on doctoral education; explore doctoral student subjectivities; question the meaning and authority attached to this subjectivity; and tinker with/push against/embrace both the concept of doctoral student and the concepts of ethnography and literature review as academic genres. While we draw on both ethnographic methods and review a body of literature, this work is neither/both an autoethnography nor/and a literature review.

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We have also placed a kind of “I” at the center of this project, and yet use a posthuman reading (Braidotti, 2013; Snaza et al., 2014; also, trendy, oft-cited posthuman reference1)
something that both disrupts a stable “I” and gets us a place in this book.2 This “I” stands against itself and is decentered even in a reflexive examination of itself. The monstrous “I” of the doctoral student does not end with a doctoral degree, a tenure-track job, or vacation. It is always moving with and against us, haunting, becoming, and resisting. For instance, last year “I” participated in a walkout in support of protecting undocumented students […] until I had to go back to class. Even as “I” problematize the neoliberal politics embedded in higher education, the same “I” is haunted by the limits of what such problematizing can “accomplish.”

A (POST-)MONSTROUS POSITION To put our doctoral student selves to practice we write a positionality statement: “We undertake this work as two doctoral students in a PhD program in education at an urban research 1 (R1) university in the United States. We come from similar ethnic backgrounds, are close in age, and bring similar teaching experiences to our doctoral program. After the first year of our doctoral program, we were selected to be teaching assistants for the monstrous doctoral seminar.” We attempt to position our use of pronouns as (post)human, simultaneously engaging in our material experiences in graduate school as well as beyond what that materiality grants us. We do not differentiate between which author is which I, as we do not definitely know where one “I” begins and the other ends, nor do we feel it is particularly relevant to a posthuman project. Specifically, we recognize that individualism “is not an intrinsic part of ‘human nature’ […], but rather a historically and culturally specific discursive formation […]” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 24) and take up Braidotti’s provocation to renew and experiment with language and the way it constructs a self. We read every part of this work as monstrous and use this figuration to represent the unrepresentable
ourselves as doctoral students and our work in doctoral school. Not excluding other understandings of monstrosity, we use a radical, postmodern feminist understanding of the monster (Braidotti, 2011). We understand our subjectivity as students to be a “process without a stable object” (p. 243) that will never go away and is constantly “trespass[ing] and transgress[ing] barriers between recognizable norms or definitions” (p. 227). As monsters/scholars, we never settle into a particular discourse or way of being the (“good”) doctoral student. Thus, in this work, we both question entrenched academic conventions, such as coursework and certifying exams, that act as legitimizing barriers to academic work, but also subscribe to them. We are simultaneously the “Same” as other scholars, even as we become “Other” (p. 216). Through becoming-monsters, or becoming “figure[s] of simultaneous and contradictory signification” (p. 220), we attempt to touch upon the possibility of a posthuman doctoral student experience. Drawing on Lesko et al. (2008), we write of the persons and spaces within doctoral seminar as unexpected, unpredictable, and something like Frankenstein’s monster. We understand doctoral studies, then, as a monstrous constellation of

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spatial, temporal, physical, and mental territories that teach us how to subscribe to intelligible academic performances at the expense of problematizing our agency in becoming scholars. Though we use one conceptualization of “monster” to consider our studies and ourselves as students, we emphasize that there are no limits to where we use this word and understand the spaces in between and all around our experiences as monstrous, especially those ideas that remain unintelligible/unavailable to us. We (still) have a cruel, optimistic attachment (Berlant, 2011) to the performance of the “good” doctoral student
an “obstacle to [our] flourishing” (p. 2) and a “compromised condition of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic” (p. 24)
according to the regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980) the literature establishes. Importantly, this performance is inseparable from the broader context of the neoliberal capitalist machine in which we study; a private, R1 institution obsessed with producing cutting edge shit. The “good3” doctoral student might be found in the literature, but for us, it is a recognizable subject; it haunts us, remaining the only/(im)possible outcome of graduate school. The “good” doctoral student completes coursework, writes a dissertation, and subscribes to the rational, white, heteronormativity of academia. The “good” doctoral student is (supposedly) a temporary subjectivity, as he/she/they ultimately graduates and is no longer a student. The stance of the “good” doctoral student, however, is also supposed to be one that resists his/her/their subjectivity in an appropriate way, producing a new type of (stable) “resistant” doctoral student subject. For example, while we attempt to “resist” academia in this chapter
our hesitation to frame monsters or fill the paper with supportive citations
we still desire its publication and inclusion in our CV’s. If we resist too much, we cannot graduate and shed our doctoral student identities, assuming such a shedding is possible.

MONSTROUS METHODOLOGY Our methodology is a monstrous collision
a [insert academic word that matches CFP] call to work autoethnographically and a post-positivist review of literature. Unlike a mixed methods study, the collision of our two methods is not arithmetic but rather something complex, something beyond the sums of its combined genres that simultaneously destabilizes the finality of what was written in the literature and decenters ourselves in our autoethnographic accounts. If we were to take up a methodology, it would be that of the posthuman, pushing the subject away. We search for an “I” in the literature and create an “I/we” of autoethnography that can (never) quite exist (in our lived experiences). Becoming methodological traditionalists, we took a post-positivist approach to the literature review (e.g. Boote & Beile, 2005; Maxwell, 2006). We considered 15 (maybe 20?) articles about doctoral education. We entered the search criteria “doctoral programs þ education þ experiences” in our university library’s search engine. We supplemented these articles with assigned readings on doctoral education from our courses. We read and reviewed, pulling out major themes and gaps in the literature. Here, we found our first ethnographic

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moment: the act of reading can, in itself, be ethnographic
being inside your own body, but looking at this event from the outside, observing as you sit in the library and read. Reviewing literature becomes an ethnographic encounter. Still traditionalists, we undertook collaborative autoethnography (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2011) to describe doctoral experiences amidst the reviewing of literature. We did this in response to a perceived gap in the literature: there is not much student voice in writing about doctoral education. To conduct the autoethnography, we each wrote doctoral autobiographies and then compared them. Our process included jotting and narratively constructing memories, stories, events, etc. We then held a series of sessions to discuss convergences and divergences, exploring potential themes and chatting about how such autoethnography might work in or against “the literature.” We asked what was/would always be missing. Understanding reviewing literature as ethnographic and ethnography as textual helped us smash these method(ologie)s together. At any minute, though, we defied our methods
ignoring findings in the literature and possibly making up autoethnographic stories that never happened to us. Rather than sloppy academic work, this move focuses on thinkable and intelligible experiences as those belonging to doctoral students/studies/school instead of focusing on “authentic” experiences of well-defined “researchers.” As with our earlier footnote, we intend to be playful, rather than cynical. We view this process as a rupture, rather than an inversion, that challenges humanist principles of authentic experiences and progressively maximizing what happens in doctoral programs
particularly because we feel these methods often lead to an ideal doctoral subject that remains a cruel impossibility. We take up Snaza et al.’s (2014) perspective of a posthuman turn in educational research, creating a deep reckoning “with how resolutely humanist almost all educational philosophy and research is” (p. 40). We also welcome the decentering of humans in a posthuman examination of things. Yet, we focus our project on the contention that posthumanism creates a space for new directions in educational research. For us, this turn demands as a starting point a contemplation of “what” (rather than “who”) conducts research and the discourses (or literatures) that produce the thing (researcher) exploring these new research paths.

MONSTROUS “LOSTINGS” We understand the concept of findings as a monstrous (re)presentation of “data.” Here, then, we (re)present what we “found” in the literature and how that relates to our experiences as doctoral students. Yet, we question what constitutes findings and whether findings themselves depend on what is findable. Thus, we use “lostings” to touch not only what gets lost when (re)presenting data, but also on our goal to lose the individuality of the data. Surviving the Monster A scene from group office hours with new doctoral students: “How’s it going?” we asked. The group stared at us.

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JORDAN CORSON AND TARA SCHWITZMAN “Would it be helpful to talk about some theories from class? In seminar, I remember professors using words like poststructural or posthuman and feeling like I was supposed to know what they meant. In reality, I had no idea what was going on.” Still no response from the group. “Okay. Maybe just dive in? What’s poststructuralism?” The first-year students looked at each other nervously. One student raised a hand and read a definition off a laptop. After a few more “failed” attempts at discussing theory, one student finally asked, “How did you get the reading done during seminar?” Before we could answer, another student interrupted, “And how do they even decide what reading we are doing? Like what is the context for the feminist pieces we read?” A third student chimed in, “Speaking of context, who chose the book we read on qualitative methods?” I thought, “Why are you asking this? You are afraid to talk about theory, yet you want your professors to justify their theoretical stances?”

From here, we watched as an innocuous question marched toward something beyond what we ever considered possible. Students were now asking questions and making comments for what seemed to be the sole purpose of asking questions and making comments. The “good” doctoral student always participates and engages in group discussion. Yet, the new doctoral students during office hours seemed to be engaging in some type of paranoid reading (Sedgwick, 2003) of graduate school. The suspicion of some students became contagious to others. For this first time, and ever so slightly standing outside it (or so we thought at the time), we could see the emergence of something monstrous, something we had and continued to be a part of, something we had created and participated in, something we all were. They all desired to be right, to fit, and yet at every moment oozed from the box of doctoral student and the amoeba-shaped box of doctoral studies. Their questions allowed them to participate and perform into a closed category of the “good” doctoral student. Their silence and fear of being wrong exuded and yet reshaped this category. For/in what exactly did they, did we, participate? Using a strategy taught to us by our professors, we include this vignette to illustrate the theme of survival in doctoral school. We also recognize that a section on survival is what a reader may expect in work on doctoral studies, even as we intentionally cordon off the literature to only include academic articles
for survival guides and help books are an entirely different monster. In addition to this vignette and other parts of our autoethnographies, we read/ “found” multiple pieces of “data” in the literature (Kamler & Thomson, 2008; Lesko et al., 2008; Metz, 2001) that ascribed to this theme. Doctoral programs, and doctoral seminars specifically, are portrayed as an obstacle to overcome. Insert quote/evidence from literature.4 Yet, we question the taken-for-granted meaning/assumption of what it means to “survive” doctoral school. Specifically, survival has come to mean “finishing” doctoral school and graduating. Doctoral school, however, prescribes students

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an (im)possible temporal position: “Finish your degree too quickly and your CV will not be full enough to make you a strong job candidate. Finish your degree too slowly and your financial situation after graduation may grant less flexibility in choosing a job. Call your work ‘finished’ and you have committed some type of academic faux pas” (Specter of good doc student, in press). We can graduate, but we can never be “done.” Furthermore, we question the assumption that survival equals graduation. Is the doctoral drop out the “bad” student and/or the student who did not survive? Perhaps survival means dropping out and
with(out) recognition of the hegemonic discourses that still heavily influence academia
saying, “I am not playing this game anymore.” And what exactly is the opposite of survival? Not graduating becomes equated with some sort of death: Furthermore, the doctoral students who survive/graduate have learned to both manage and not threaten the “powerful pressures […] at work in an academic setting toward maintain[ing] an intellectual status quo” (Bargar & Mayo-Chamberlain, 1983, p. 418). Surviving and graduating, then, produces more of the same scholar. Bargar and Mayo-Chamberlain (1983) also note that “students constitute an essential barometer to which the program has to respond in order to remain relevant to its educational purpose” (p. 424). As students, however, we are often “positioned as ‘diminished scholar[s]’” (Kamler & Thomson, 2008, p. 507). A doctoral program may be fulfilling its purpose, then, if it produces similar scholars and positions the work of its students as less significant. (Authors, 2018, draft of post-positivist, non-posthuman, non-autoethnographic lit review)

Equating survival with graduation might also equate survival/graduation with mastery of some type of learning. Yet, we wonder exactly what we have mastered. The “good” doctoral student seems to suffer in part from school syndrome (Labaree, 2012), or the belief that a good grade or credential signifies learning. Still, we find it impossible to distance ourselves from our investments in these performatory acts. Survival, then, may have more to do with “(un)learning” (Metz, 2001, p. 15) or [insert additional trendy, posty academic concept]. Mastering the Monster If we wanted to do something beyond survive and actually use our (finished) doctoral degree to get a job, we needed things. We needed mechanisms to overcome the monster of graduate school and tame our emerging monstrous selves. We needed to learn and to do the grammar of (graduate) school (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). We needed to conquer certain schools of thought and acquire a methodology or two. We needed to hit each benchmark on the linear path to academia, even if this linearity created “the illusory notion […] that if stages are completed [in the right order], the task [of receiving a doctoral degree] will be fulfilled” (Kamler & Thomson, 2008, p. 510). We needed to present at reputable conferences, join research teams, publish at least two solo-authored articles in journals of a certain standing, network with the right people, and so on. We needed to become monsters and tame them simultaneously. While the only way to survive is to graduate, you can do more than just survive within doctoral school. The literature offers a few ways to master graduate

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school. Bargar and Mayo-Chamberlain (1983) from a developmentalist perspective and Weidman and Stein (2003) from a sociological perspective tell the importance of mentoring and shaping doctoral students found in advisement. Although Weidman and Stein (2003) describe mastery as the necessity of falling into place, we encountered the opposite. At no point did our advisors teach us how to do graduate school. Or, maybe they did. We had productive, intriguing, and often confusing mentoring relationships with our advisors. Meetings frequently concluded with stacks of reading recommendations, initial feelings of inspiration, and confusion rising the more steps we took away from our advisors’ doors. While they provide(d) practical advice on the “achievements” of the linear path
what courses to take, timeline to graduate, specific feedback on our work
our professors often seemed to intentionally feed the monster. They refused singular ways of being doctoral students, shrugging when we were desperate for definitive answers. Asking, for example, for us to take on low wage adjunct jobs teaching their courses, takes time from our own dissertation and slows us down on the path to graduation. But, it would be remiss of us to pretend we do not recognize the significance of such opportunities, both for our credentials and for feeling that our advisors thought highly of us. Proclaiming the importance of resisting exclusively outcome-based approaches, they suggested paths that ran specifically counter to “survival.” How can we resist outcomes when, as doctoral students, our entire life is shaped by the achievement of an outcome, or degree? Perhaps, taking other trajectories that tame/reject monsters, we might have benefited from becoming good positivists and trusting the authority of the literature and the advisor. After all, “most education doctoral programs […] see doctoral students as coming to learn appropriate skills and values as they move through a set of developmental stages” (Simpson, 1979, as cited in Pallas, 2001, p. 7). Even in our self-proclaimed non-developmentalist tracks, the advisor/doc student relationship certainly influences our becoming subjectivities. Ellsworth (1989), however, troubles the type of trust the literature calls for in relationships between faculty and students given the inherent power dynamic inscribed by the survival theme. While it might be easy for tenured faculty to prescribe a lack of prescription, this prescription places advisors in an impossible position: they can call attention to that power dynamic, but they cannot stand outside of it. The literature also tells us that academic mastery comes through socialization with peers (Weidman & Stein, 2003). The time we spent with peers
working in study groups, venting about professors, and generally figuring out how to doc student
took on comparative and therapeutic forms. Here, the literature tells us we should have been introduced to the “politics of academic work, including the difficulty of seeking feedback from colleagues with whom one is competing for reputation, promotion, and grants” (Kamler & Thomson, 2008, p. 512). For us, the feeling of competition was most pronounced during our first-year monstrous seminar when we spent the most time with each other. Social desires also pushed at desires to (un)fit. We could not help but want to become the student publishing what seemed like a new article each week. Even as we were drawn to certain authors, we wanted to remain monstrous, never

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fitting the mold of “that person.” We did not want to be the “post-structural person” to a peer’s “quant guy.” Doing so, we often moved between the joys of immersing ourselves in authors who unnerved and enamoured us and being told (mostly by the literature) that we needed to become master specialists. In the literature, “socialization is not regarded as linear but as seamless, fluid, dynamic, interactive, evolving, and permeable” (Kamler & Thomson, 2008, p. 643). Thus, the cognitive dimensions of graduate school can be stated evidentially in the form of certifications, grades, etc., while the affective and integrative aspects of the socialization process are less formally expressed and are “established by informal contact between faculty and students” (p. 643). Our experiences, however, seem to disrupt this binary between academic and social aspects of graduate school. Can socialization be divorced from the other things we are supposed to “master” in doctoral school? Is there not a social component to getting an article published or participating on a research team? Certainly, the social has played a significant role in our coming together to write this current chapter. We repeatedly found an implicit message to recognize the monster and make it fit somewhere as a determined, capable doctoral student self. Many times, this frame led to free drinking at conferences and/or building enough courage to share three sentence summaries with a professor you admire. “I am researching this. I hope to work in this field. I take up these authors and positions.” Our monstrous selves could slip from this frame, but only in those frequent selfconscious statements about how awkward academics are. But monsters always found/find a way to surface in forms of uncertainty. At times, we felt unsettled as we tried to figure out how to register for classes and meet all necessary requirements. Simultaneously, our uncertainty was also a form of subject-making about our identities, positions, and roles. How do we become professors? How do we become people who know theories? How do we fit into the program and academic spaces in general? The literature tells us this is a solvable problem, that doctoral programs are simply not fully preparing their students, perhaps due to the lack of agreement about the role of research and practice in each degree (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006). But, we came to see that uncertainty, that stuckness, as something productive, propelling us toward more unknown things. Put a good example here. We need more specific examples! Bargar and Mayo-Chamberlain (1983) write that it is “important for students to overcome the passive stance so characteristic of the student role” (p. 412). In the “constellation of local communities of practice” (Pallas, 2001, p. 9) that characterizes graduate school, we felt we could only overcome passivity to an extent
an extent that is mitigated for individual graduate students by their “learned and internalized oppressions” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 308) and perhaps an unwillingness to “overhaul the paternalistic project of education itself” (p. 306) that has, at the bare minimum, labeled us as smart and promises us our degrees.5 Built into this monstrosity was teaching and learning impractical knowledge (Popkewitz, 2013) and/or purposeless things before/after a pendulum would swing back to master and contain the monster. Uncertainty always took a

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backseat to the production of new experts in the field. Peeking behind the curtains of the first-year seminar, a professor told us that for all its supposed radicalness, even as it was home of the “pedagogy of monsters,” the course was essentially a test prep course. The point was to teach new doctoral students to be doctoral students on their way to being academics, regardless of whether they wanted to be academics after graduation. Furthermore, what our professors seemed to understand as being an academic was certainly influenced by their own contexts and experiences. Not only was the “non-academic” doctoral student lost in these monstrosities, so too was the doctoral student who wanted to work at a teaching university. This movement back and forth of mastering the monster, seeing it slip, and trying to contain it once more, suggests that doctoral school is a monster to which no person belongs. To master it creates a contradiction: those who do it right ignore the intention that doctoral studies can very much be about doing it wrong. Producing the Monster We presented some of our work as a paper at an academic conference, which came from a negative type of desire, a desire for something we lack, rather than desire as “positive and productive that supports the conception of life as material flows” (Ross, 2010, p. 65). The “good” doctoral student presents at conferences, but there is never a correct number
too few and you seem inexperienced, while too many may seem to point to valuing performance over publication. Haunted by the ghost of what he/she/they are supposed to later become, the “good” doctoral student gets stuck in negative desire, unable to flow through a multiplicity of doctoral student possibilities. In a manner that we have seemed to denounce in this chapter, we stood at a podium and talked structurally and rationally about the aims of our project. After all the papers on the panel presented, the discussant approached the podium to deliver their comments. Of the four papers, only two had submitted final work to them, and we
being “good”/bad doc students
were not one of them. After introducing themselves to the crowd of about 75 people, the discussant publicly announced our “failure.” They noted that while it is certainly interesting to push academic boundaries and question doctoral education, we still needed to write papers and publish articles if we wanted to further our careers. To the discussant, our work was nonexistent if it did not end with the final product of a paper or article (that they could critique). Like the resistant doctoral student subjectivity, our work itself was not granted subjectivity unless it was written according to certain prescribed norms. (Whether academic work itself wishes to be granted subjectivity is, unfortunately, a topic we will/might save for another paper. Or not.) They were not requesting a published version of our paper, but instead a version that is placed in the organization’s “paper repository,” or large storage unit in the internet cloud that very few people (we know have tried to) access. In other words, turning in a “finished” version of our paper would not have directly equaled a published article, nor would it have added anything to our presentation

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credential. Turning in this paper would not produce anything other than the “good” doctor(al) (student) who follows the rules. Our embarrassment did not last long as the discussant spoke tirelessly about every red mark they had given the other two papers. With a harsh and unforgiving affect, the discussant seemed to take a deficit lens to the work, commenting on everything it lacked. Like the first-year doctoral students, the discussant was making comments merely to make comments. The paper presentation became monstrous. We left feeling both uncomfortable, uncertain about what just happened, and unsure of ourselves and our work. Perhaps, this experience demonstrated for us that doctoral studies are not alone in their monstrosity. Even graduated, “good” (non-)students are/can become monstrous. Problematizing academic articles as capitalist objects of consumption is not new. (come back to this […] citations might make this point stronger??). Within this endeavor, we wonder why/whether the “good” doctoral student works to publish articles, as this is not a requirement for graduation. It does not result in course credit. Trying to publish work as graduate students may “slow” us down; yet, we are taught that the “good” doctoral student has a (insert arbitrary number) number of publications. We do not receive monetary compensation. What does publishing an article produce for us as “good”/“bad” doctoral students, for whom publishing is outside of explicitly prescribed roles and only worth something (in the monetary sense) for the student who lands a career in academia? Perhaps when Kamler and Thomson (2008) suggest that “too often doctoral writing is treated as separate from and ancillary to the real work of research” (p. 507) they are indirectly touching on the “institutional machinery of [graduate] schooling” (Mehan, 1993, as cited in Dudley-Marling & Burns, 2014, p. 23) that creates the conditions in which publications are not what graduate students are supposed to produce. Yet, they are the things we (negatively) desire because they supposedly distinguish us from our colleagues, becoming permanent fixtures on our CVs and finally outliving us. The mastery of doctoral student skills becomes almost irrelevant after graduation, as we are now supposed to be fullfledged, “independent” scholars. We are told, however, that we may encounter similar experiences in the first, pre-tenure years, even though I have never explicitly stated I wanted to be a professor.

MONSTERS IN THE FIELD Doctoral education is itself a reflexive field. In our program, we learn about learning. We do school about schooling. It would seem, then, that reviewing literature about education within schools of education through writing about personal experiences of education is self-indulgent. Additionally, we have already positioned ourselves in a shifting place that rejects the notion that we might talk for others. Considering these issues, who cares? Why might this work be useful? At its most ambitious, why might this work be impactful? In one way, this paper responds to a lack of personal doctoral student voice in the current literature; however, we do not claim autoethnography as agentive proclamation. It is not as though we wish to say, “The literature has ignored us,

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but here are our experiences to show what it is like for doctoral students!” Yet, we believe that by directly sharing some of the events, thoughts, and overall experiences from our time in a doctoral program, our writing entangles the literature with a different perspective, while not completely abandoning the literature review and autoethnography frameworks. This project does not aim to be some form of doctoral student blog or retelling of events in our program, but a contentious connection between experience and academic writing. We hope our project enlivens its object of study
doctoral studies. (Peering into) writing on the (good) “doc student” cries out for centering something. We resist that desire, pushing at an investigation that reaches toward posthumanism. It asks a question of what doctoral studies becomes without a predefined doctoral student and formed human(ist)s to train them at the center. As we reflect, this question may not have been answered (or even be answerable). Yet, it is a provocation that can stir considerations of doctoral education. Even though we cannot generalize our own experiences or those of others, all of this calls into question some of our personal experiences as doctoral students of education. We have noticed a strange contradiction within our program: it features a prominent post-structural voice and mentality. Foucault is both a common reference point in conversation as well as required reading in a range of courses. Yet, we follow the causal and linear trajectory of doctoral studies, mastering genres and academic worlds on our progressive path toward expertise in the field. The animals and things (mostly cats and computers) that contribute to our research appear nowhere in authorship. This notion is not to fault our department. It is not exempt from politics and dominant practices. We simply want to consider how dissonance exists within our experiences and suggest that maybe it has shaped our desire
in the productive, Deleuzian sense (not sure whether to put citation here/assume the intended audience of this book knows what we mean by Deleuzian)
to write posthumanly. What Comes Next? Our hope is to make possible new ways of thinking about education and academia. We suggest we open spaces to consider where the “I/we/things/any-all subjects” sits in becoming doctoral students and what “you” or “it” has been pre-determined before a new cohort of doctoral students arrives. Decentering a doctoral-self questions the very categories and credentials built into this field. At its loftiest, we hope that we challenge the foundations of how we make and value authority and how we approach and understand knowledge production. Or, this work could mean very little. Personally speaking, we entered graduate school with savior impulses. Our work would move mountains. Yet, now, we wonder if we want our work to do such things. This work has a right to fail, whatever that means. It can be not all that significant. When education scholars go to graduate school to tackle systemic and present issues like racism, it seems arrogant and dismissive to say that scholarly work has a right to fail. But, if we were to build our work on an outcome rather than partially veiled and unknown

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ends, we might end up reifying the very systems we oppose. If we do not risk the possibility of this work being insignificant, where does that leave us?

CONCLUSION Add something intriguing and/or “useful” about how our posthuman work is something other than “complete.” Make it sexy. And then queer it!

NOTES 1. Throughout, but mostly in the findings, we play with the tone, presentation, and process of academic writing. To indicate that we have not simply abandoned a rough draft, we italicize times where we do this. We are also not abandoning the potential of intellectual work, but critiquing our impulses to perform it. 2. We are sorry for the perceived necessity of the previous footnote explaining our “presentation” within the confines of academia. 3. Though, we should point out that the “good” doctoral student is dominantly seen as a figure of the Global North. 4. We play specifically here to show that the discourse of surviving doctoral school is intelligible even without our putting direct quotes from the literature. We do this to push on what constitutes as “evidence” in academic research. 5. Perhaps, in this very paragraph we feel intimidated by our writing, as possibly evidenced by our multiple sources (Kamler and Thomson, 2008) suggest that, “When students proliferate multiple quotations, this can often be traced to their difficulties in taking an authoritative yet critical stance in their field” (p. 511).

REFERENCES [THAT LEGITIMIZE OUR WRITING AND GET IT PUBLISHED] Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 543
574. Bargar, R. R., & Mayo-Chamberlain, J. (1983). Advisor and advisee issues in doctoral education. The Journal of Higher Education, 54(4), 407
432. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boote, D., & Beile, P. (2005). Scholars before researchers: On the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation. Educational Researcher, 34(3), 3
15. Braidotti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chang, H., Ngunjiri, F., & Hernandez, K. (2011). Collaborative autoethnography. New York, NY: Routledge. Dudley-Marling, C., & Burns, M. B. (2014). Two perspectives on inclusion in the United States. Global Education Review, 1(1), 14-3. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297
324. Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and power. In C. Gordon, (Ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews & other writings 1972
1977 (78
108) (C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage. Golde, C., & Dore, T. (2001). At cross purposes: What the experiences of today’s doctoral students reveal about doctoral education. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Charitable Trust. Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2008). The failure of dissertation advice books: Toward alternative pedagogies for doctoral writing. Educational Researcher, 37(8), 507
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Labaree, D. (2012). School syndrome: Understanding the USA’s magical belief that schooling can somehow improve society, promote access, and preserve advantage. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 44(2), 143
163. Lesko, N., Simmons, J., Quarshie, A., & Newton, N. (2008). The pedagogy of monsters: Scary disturbances in a doctoral research preparation course. Teachers College Record, 110(8), 1541
1573. Maxwell, J. (2006). Literature reviews of, and for, educational research: A commentary on Boote and Beile’s “Scholars before Researchers”. Educational Researcher, 35(9), 28
31. Metz, M. H. (2001). Intellectual border crossing in graduate education: A report from the field. Educational Researcher, 30(5), 12
18. Pallas, A. M. (2001). Preparing education doctoral students for epistemological diversity. Educational Researcher, 30(5), 6
11. Popkewitz, T. (2013). Styles of reason: Historicism, historicizing, and the history of education. In T. Popkewitz (Ed.), Rethinking the history of education: Transnational perspectives on its questions, methods, and knowledge (pp. 1
26). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Ross, A. (2010). Desire. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (Revised Edition). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Shulman, L. S., Golde, C. M., Bueschel, A. C., & Garabedian, K. J. (2006). Reclaiming education’s doctorates: A critique and a proposal. Educational Resarcher, 35(3), 25
32. Simpson, I. H. (1979). From student to nurse: A longitudinal study of socialization. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., Carlson, D., & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39
55. Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weidman, J. C., & Stein, E. L. (2003). Socialization of doctoral students to academic norms. Research in Higher Education, 44(6), 641
656.

DECENTERING THE “SELF” IN SELF-STUDY OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES: A WORKING RESEARCH ASSEMBLAGE Mats Hordvik, Ann MacPhail, Deborah Tannehill and Lars Tore Ronglan

ABSTRACT In this chapter, we deliberately attempt to reframe the “self” in self-study of professional practices by focus on how “self” can be conceptualized in ways that do not equate “self” with “I.” Drawing insights from Deleuze and Guattarian’s (1987) rhizomatic philosophy, and particular the concept of assemblage, the objective was to engage with a research assemblage to investigate its function and production. We
i.e., a doctoral candidate, who was researching his practice of teaching pre-service teachers, his two supervisors, and his critical friend
engaged with audio data from our meetings conducted throughout a four-year period. Zooming in on the research assemblage at times when we were provoked to reorganize, adapt, and enhance our systems of thinking (Ovens, Garbett, & Hutchinson, 2016), we highlight the nonlinear and fundamentally relational process of constructing knowledge in self-study of professional practices. We argue that the researcher-self became only one of multiple human and non-human components in a joint construction of knowledge. We suggest that self-study researchers can decenter the researcher-self by embracing a research stance of “coming into composition” (Strom & Martin, 2017) where the researcher engages with a research

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 59
73 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031006

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assemblage to construct joint understanding of teaching and learning. This stance to self-study requires researchers to make themselves into a rhizome. Keywords: Rhizomatics; Deleuze; teacher education; intimate scholarship; post-qualitative research; Sport Education; physical education

INTRODUCTION Self-study of professional practices is a methodology that would appear to explicitly center the self as a central tenet of doing this form of research. That is, it is a form of inquiry in which it is the self who is the researcher: “it is the self who is producing knowledge of practice while simultaneously enacting that practice” (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014, p. 8). While the explicit labeling of self in the methodology often distracts researchers, it is actually not the self that is the focus of inquiry. Rather, in self-study, it is “the self and the other in practice that is of most interest” (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009, p. 12). This encourages selfstudy researchers to enter into relationships and interact with other humans, both in practice and in the process of constructing knowledge of practice (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). Therefore, relationality is a central tenet of framing the self in self-study of professional practices. With this understanding, attention shifts away from the individual self towards the constitutive nature of the interdependent connections between self and other in the production of and knowledge about practice (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014, p. 8). Practice, then, is understood as inherently social and emerging “as ways of managing the diversely interconnected elements in each setting” (Ovens & Fletcher, 2014, p. 8) and refers to the activities in which a person engages in as part of a particular profession (e.g., teaching and researching) (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). In this chapter, we consider the relational nature of self in the self-study of professional practices. The aim is to deliberately reframe the self and the relationship between the self and the other in the self-study methodology. By drawing insights from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophy
which encourages a thinking of relationships among a multitude of interacting elements in a given social situation
we focus on how self can be conceptualized in ways that do not equate self with an essentialized or ego-centric “I”. In particular, we examine how the multiple selves in play within our research assemblage formed to produce Mats’ PhD study. That is, we draw attention to the ways multiple human and non-human elements functioned collectively to decenter the researcher-self within a self-study of the researcher’s practice. We hope that such an approach provokes the reader to reconceptualize their understanding of self in self-study of professional practices and the process of dialogue as the way of constructing knowledge in the methodology. Given that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) prompt us to ask questions about context, function, and production, the objective was to engage with the research assemblage to investigate its function and production. Contrary to searching for steps that can provide a description or manual to decenter the self in self-study,

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we seek to understand how the constellation of elements comprising the research assemblage combined and interacted in multiple processes of decentering the researcher-self. Thus, in developing our case, we first explore three aspects that mark the nature of self-study of professional practices. Second, we elaborate on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) philosophy with special attention to the concept of assemblage. Third, we provide the context of Mats’ PhD study, before describing the way we generated data and how we used the concept of assemblage to understand the data. We then show how the assemblage worked in producing the PhD study through two critical moments. Last, we discuss the practical and methodological implications of this study.

THE NATURE OF SELF-STUDY OF PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES Three aspects mark the work of self-study of professional practices (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015; Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). First, self-study researchers claim that trustworthiness is based in ontology rather than epistemology (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 201). That is, the aim of self-study is to understand and improve practice through careful articulation of what is in practice, rather than establishing foundational claims to know. Hence, self-study researchers do not strive for generalizability, but rather base their work in a relational ontological stance. Slife (2004) explains that in relational ontology, What is ontologically real and has being in practice cannot be understood apart from its relations to other aspects of the context. Indeed, practices do not exist, in an important ontological sense, except in relation to the concrete and particular situations and cultures that give rise to them. (p. 158)

While embracing a relational ontology, self-study research is also based in “awareness of the epistemology that underlies it (where knowledge has multiplicity and is socially constructed)
a space between ontology and epistemology” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 132). In this space, knowing is partial and emerges in the research process within which the task of the researcher is to consider the different perspectives and interpretations throughout the process (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 132). Second, coming-to-know in self-study is empirically grounded in a process of dialogue rather than the scientific method (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 201). Instead of following systematic and prescribed procedures that guide the research, self-study researchers engage in a process of dialogue that involve conversation with self, research, colleagues, and participants (Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009). Knowledge and understanding therefore emerge in the negotiation process between these actors. Third, the work of self-study researchers is grounded in a study of personal practice and experience within the space between self and other (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 201). Because self-study research focuses on the relational nature of practice, experience, contexts, and lives of the researcher, it involves others and our relationships and interactions with them. This relationship is

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always placed on a continuum between self and others, with the study becoming more viable with a substantial account of the other (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015). We favor a mutual relationship between these three dimensions of self-study research and also argue for the importance of “turning to the self” for readers to draw out significant meanings from self-study research. In “turn[ing] to the self”, researchers “make clear the meaning they are making and the understandings they develop as researchers and teacher educators based on the inquiry engaged in as supported by the data and their analysis” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 212). Through this process, researchers produces deeper and more nuanced answers to the “so-what” question of their inquiry by implicating personal understandings and insights that are useful for both themselves and other practitioners (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 294).

“THINKING WITH” DELEUZE AND GUATTARI’S PHILOSOPHY Deleuze and Guattari (1987) offer multiple concepts which can each be used to unsettle traditional thought and provoke alternative non-linear ways of thinking. Because we deliberately aim to reconceptualize the researcher-self in the self-study methodology, we engaged in a process of “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the concept of “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Our aim was to produce different understandings of knowledge construction in self-study, to turn the practice into something different, and use our practice to push the concept of assemblage to its limits. The concept of assemblage allowed us to create something out of the chaos of disrupting and decentering the researcher-self (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). In addition, to help readers follow and understand our thinking, we engaged with two inter-related schematic cues (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), “multiplicity” and “becoming” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). An assemblage is an aggregate of both human and non-human elements that combine and interact in a contextually unique manner to produce something (e.g., knowledge of teaching practice, a PhD thesis) (Strom & Martin, 2017, p. 7). To contextualize to this study, a supervisory meeting is an assemblage, a constellation of elements
the doctoral candidate, the supervisors, the physical space, the data set, the articles, the ideas, and the discourses
that come into composition in different ways at different times to co-produce different ideas and knowledge. As such, just as much as human actors, the material world and even the non-tangible are acknowledged as a capacity to influence and shape knowledge construction. Instead of viewing the self of the doctoral candidate or our different selves as the sole actors constructing knowledge, the concept of assemblage highlights how a constellation of active human and non-human elements work together in a joint production of knowledge. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), everything is a “multiplicity”
i.e., a collective of elements. A multiplicity should be considered in its substantive form, as a constellation of something (Parr, 2005). For example, doctoral candidate and supervisors are multiplicities composed of their own beliefs, backgrounds, experiences, languages, cultures, and investments. A supervisory multiplicity is a

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collection of the different doctoral candidate and supervisory multiplicities together with the multiplicities of non-human elements
such as chairs (composed of legs, backrest, expectations to sit on), journal articles (composed of words, ideas), the room environment (composed of expectations, power relations). The university, national, and international systems are also multiplicities composed of knowledge, practices, and policies. As such, the research-self is a multiplicity (own beliefs, backgrounds, education) within multiplicities (supervisory, larger university, national, and international systems) (Strom & Martin, 2017). From a rhizomatic lens, the different multiplicities work simultaneously to influence the construction of knowledge. In other words, it is the way the doctoral candidate’s multiplicity combines and interacts with the other multiplicities
together creating the assemblage in total
that determines the type of knowledge that is being constructed. A related concept, “becoming” expresses a happening rather than a thing (Strom & Martin, 2017) and concerns qualitatively different emergences that occur to, and within, a multiplicity, produced by the collective workings of the assemblage (Semetsky, 2006). That is, becoming is “created through alliances, as bodies, ideas, forces, and other elements come into composition in assemblages, and produce something new, different” (Strom & Martin, 2017, p. 8). A doctoral candidate’s evolving experiences as teacher educator together with the introduction of a different philosophy have the potential to create discussion that allows the research assemblage to produce different knowledge through such becomings. “Thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the concept of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), we aimed to look at the function and production of the research assemblage. These concepts allowed us to consider the multiple elements comprising the research assemblage, and the ways they collectively functioned to produce knowledge, while decentering the researcher-self. Working with these concepts, we viewed the knowledge construction in self-study as a continuous nonlinear process of different emergence co-produced by a collective working assemblage.

ASSEMBLING AND UNFOLDING A SELF-STUDY Because we focus on our research assemblage in this chapter and not on Mats’ particular self-study, in this section, we describe his PhD study. Mats was 26 years old when he enrolled as a full-time doctoral candidate in a four-year, fully funded doctoral program at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NSSS), a University located in Oslo, Norway. He resided within the Coaching and Psychology Department, one of five sport sciences fields at the NSSS. Mats decided that he wanted to do an article-based thesis, which required him to complete four publications. The PhD structure required Mats to both conduct research (75%) and teach (25%), and had to successfully complete 40 credits of coursework. The latter entailed a home examination in “subjects and methods” (30 credits), a course in “science theory and ethics” (5 credits), and an elective “methodology” course (5 credits). Mats’ self-study research involved four courses/modules: two practical based university content courses/modules and two phases of school placement

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(Fig. 1). He aimed to study the process of developing a pedagogy of teacher education, with a particular focus on teaching pre-service teachers about studentcentered models of instruction (for detailed description of the self-study context, see Hordvik, MacPhail, & Ronglan, 2017a). Fig. 1 shows the data collection procedures that were completed to explore Mats’ self-study and formed the empirical material influencing the research assemblage knowledge construction. Mats’ supervisory team included Lars Tore and Ann, two formally appointed supervisors, and Deborah, who functioned as a critical friend. Lars Tore was responsible for the PhD advertisement and served as Mats’ supervisor. His area of expertise is coaching, coach education, and sociology. He was located at the NSSS where he functioned as Deputy Rector. Ann served as the co-supervisor and was located at the University of Limerick in Ireland where she functioned as Chair of the Department for Physical Education and Sport Sciences. Her area of expertise is physical education and teacher education, self-study, curriculum development, and assessment. Deborah resided within the same department as Ann and completed the supervisory team as Mats’ “critical friend”. Deborah is internationally renowned for upskilling pre-service teachers, teachers, and teacher educators in the area of sport pedagogy and has contributed extensively to research in the field. “Plugging in” Assemblage and the Data “Plugging in” is a process of producing something new by making and unmaking, arranging, organizing, and fitting together (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). Given that we focus on the research assemblage, and not on Mats’ particular selfstudy, we “plugged in” the concept of assemblage into the data from our supervisory meetings. These meetings were carried out throughout the four-year doctoral period and included individual meetings between Mats and the other authors in different configurations. While not every single meeting was recorded, the data included 62 meetings with approximately 85 hours of audio. In addition, when connecting with other scholars, Mats wrote notes and reflections during and after meetings. “Thinking with” the thinking of Jackson and Mazzei (2012), we aimed to enter the research assemblage. We engaged in a process of reading the transcripts over and over while thinking with assemblage, aiming to show how the data and assemblage “make one another” (p. 5). What “emerged in the middle” (p. 5) of plugging the assemblage into the data and data into the assemblage was the analytic question: “How does a post-qualitative research assemblage work to decenter the ‘self’ in self-study of professional practices?” In the process of reading the data and plugging the analytic question into the data and the data into the question, we noticed how the research assemblage continuously evolved while particular situations provoked us to reorganize, adapt, and enhance our systems of thinking (Ovens, Garbett, & Hutchinson, 2016). Fig. 2 was created in this process. While we acknowledge the linearity of Fig. 2, it helped us engage with (and we think it can help readers engage with) particular connections and relationships throughout the four-year PhD. We worked repeatedly with the

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particular situations that provoked us to “‘deform [them], to make [them] groan and protest’9 with an overabundance of meaning” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 5). This facilitated the process of creating something new while showing the “suppleness of each [situation] when plugged in” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 5).

THE RESEARCH ASSEMBLAGE FUNCTION AND PRODUCTION In the following sections, we engage with two situations that provoked us to reorganize, adapt, and enhance our systems of thinking. We aim to engage with the research assemblage function and production as a way of showing how a working assemblage constructs knowledge while decentering the researcher-self. Process of Decentering the “Self” Looking at the data through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage, while bringing together past, present, and future (Hamilton, & Pinnegar, 2015), we sought to know how the research assemblage was working to disrupt and decenter the researcher-self. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblages consist of two axes. The horizontal axis comprises two parts: its content, or human and non-human elements (in our case, Mats, Ann, Lars Tore, and Deborah, desks, computer, journal articles, physical space, and the ways these connect) and its expressions (language and other discursive elements) that are both produced by, and are producing, the assemblage (Strom & Martin, 2017). On a vertical axis, the assemblage has both reterritorializing aspects, “which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 103). In this section, we discuss the different components of the research assemblage, its content and expression, and how they worked together to co-construct particular kinds of knowledge and processes of decentering the researcher-self (the deterritorializing and reterritorializing functioning of the assemblage). We argue that the content and expression of the research assemblage created a space for deterritorialized edges (Strom & Martin, 2017). That is, they created conditions where the research assemblage could enter into relationships with, and interact with multiple human and non-human elements. As elements shifted, or particular conditions changed, the function and production of the assemblage also became different. Hence, the ways the unique set of elements, both human and non-human, comprising the research assemblage combined and interacted determined the type of knowledge constructed. Becoming a Self-study Looking at the data through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage, what emerged was the way the research assemblage grew unpredictably in all directions, connecting and expanding with both human and non-human elements
always becoming different. Fig. 2 gives some justice to the

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nonlinearity of the assemblage function with different production seen as it connected and interacted with multiple human and non-human elements. In this section, acknowledging the scope of this chapter, we focus on the research assemblage in the space when it was becoming a self-study. While literature from journal articles and books influenced the assemblage’s thinking in this period, we focus on how the research assemblage changed its function and production as it entered into a relationship with Ann and Deborah. As we read the data, what emerged was how the research assemblage created spaces that allowed Mats to connect and interact with both human and non-human elements. Mats’ PhD position was connected to a project outline that Lars Tore had developed, an action research project looking at pre-service teachers’ and team players’ learning processes. However, instead of directing Mats towards the project outline, Lars Tore created a space for Mats to engage with the flexibility allowed at the institutional level and to follow his preferred area of interest. In the required research plan that was submitted after two months, the focus had shifted more towards physical education teacher education and pre-service teachers’ learning processes. When Mats noticed that Ann was providing the keynote lecture at a conference at the NSSS, he suggested that he could try to connect with her. Through a colleague at the NSSS who was already collaborating with Ann, Mats was able to arrange a meeting with her at the conference. Mats sent a copy of the research plan to Ann for her comments prior to their meeting each other which resulted in Mats asking Ann if she wanted to contribute as a co-supervisor. It was in this space the research assemblage entered into a relationship with Ann. She entered the assemblage after six months, expressing that “you don’t want a co-supervisor that is going to agree to everything. You want two supervisors that will actually push you”. Ann functioned as a catalyst for the research assemblage. Her knowledge and experience of physical education teacher education interacted with the research plan and started conversations in another way, introducing different ideas, concepts, and people to the assemblage. Combined with the flexibility of the PhD, and Lars Tore and Mats’ openness to change the focus of the thesis, the assemblage was able to produce different thinking. In the autumn of 2014, Mats traveled to Ireland and stayed for seven weeks with Ann at the University of Limerick. Because of the project focus on studentcentered models, Ann introduced Deborah, who had expertise in this area, to the assemblage. While the plan was to start the empirical work in August the next year, Deborah challenged Mats to start looking at his teaching of the model right away. It was in this space, where the focus was turning more towards Mats, that Ann introduced self-study to the research assemblage. This decision allowed Mats to enter into a critical friendship with Deborah. Plugging the horizontal and vertical axis of assemblage into the data, we see how the relationship with Ann and Deborah worked to increase the heterogeneity of the assemblage content and expression, and consequently what the assemblage was producing. The way Ann and Deborah’s multiplicities (their different experiences, knowledge), and the ideas they introduced to the research assemblage, combined and interacted with Mats, Lars Tore, and the research plan,

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producing different thinking and knowledge that both carried the assemblage away and stabilized it. The following dialogue between Mats, Ann, and Deborah took place in Ann’ chair of department office at the University of Limerick half way through Mats’ seven-week visit. It shows how the new content of the research assemblage challenged its expression and thinking, while working to stabilize it in the territory of self-study of professional practices. As we engaged in this conversation, we were sitting around Ann’s office table discussing a document with a figure similar to Fig. 1. Ann: I think this is great [looking at a figure similar to Fig. 1] but you have this as a guide and you will actually, after step one, you will review step two […] you can only take it in steps […] You also need to consider] what you want to contribute from this? We learn about your experiences and the challenges you face, well so what? Who do you want to inform? Mats: Make a guide for how to teach Sport Education [the student-centered model that they had decided to be the focus of Mats’ teaching]. Deborah: So you’d be speaking to research for teachers and teacher educators? Mats: Teacher educators would do it a bit different to teachers. Ann: So teach Sport Education from a teacher educator perspective […] If you’d set a guide to teach Sport Education without the qualification of this [teacher educators voice] I would have said that was nothing new, […] It’s everywhere. But a guide to teach Sport Education from a teacher educator perspective […] Deborah: I don’t think we really have anything that helps a teacher educator teach Sport Education to pre-service teachers. Ann: It actually talks more about the experience of pre-service teachers of learning about teaching Sport Education […] That’s why the self-study is really important […] What you can do in this study is share with people your story, as a teacher educator […] with implications for those of us in teacher education working with pre-service teachers. The next stage, another study altogether, is how to teach teacher educators to teach Sport Education.

What is key here is not what is said, but how the new human elements worked to influence the content and expression of that dialogue. The multiplicities of Ann and Deborah (i.e., their experience and knowledge of physical education and teacher education) connected with Mats and the research plan that allowed the idea of self-study and a teacher educator perspective to be introduced to the assemblage. This challenged the habitual content and expression of the assemblage (Mats, Lars Tore, action research, focus on pre-service teachers learning processes) and carried the assemblage away into becoming a self-study of professional practices. Because of Ann and Deborah’s continuous engagement in the research assemblage (i.e., formalized roles as supervisor and critical friend), the assemblage was stabilized in this other means of production, one that focused on a teacher educator’s self in enactment and production of practice. Furthermore, the way these new human actors, concepts and ideas combined and interacted with the other elements of the assemblage, worked to create differentiation in the assemblage roles. What emerged in our plugging of the concept of assemblage into the data was the way this different means of production

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reconfigured the function of the supervisory role. While having interacted with Lars Tore on every aspect of the PhD, Mats was now interacting with Lars Tore, Ann, and Deborah at different times and generally about different content. The increased assemblage heterogeneity produced a space where Mats interacted most frequently with Lars Tore about the data analysis, with Ann about study constructs and structure, and with Deborah about his practice. In this way, Mats engaged with each of them at particular times and with a particular purpose to produce particular knowledge. Importantly, however, the assemblage as a whole constructed the knowledge produced by the PhD thesis. That is, the way the knowledge and ideas from these meetings interacted with each other and combined with other elements (e.g., journal articles, data, reviews on articles) determined the type of knowledge constructed. Importance of Process Another example of the way our research assemblage worked
that is, the way the human and non-human elements combined and interacted
is in a meeting between Mats, Ann, and Lars Tore, the day after Mats and Ann attended a PhD seminar in Norway, Oslo. We arranged the meeting because Ann’s visit to Norway provided an opportunity to discuss the progression of the entire PhD and particularly the second study. We were placed around the table inside Lars Tore’s Deputy Rector office at the NSSS. The table contained a document including the main constructs, aims, and empirical work of each of the four PhD studies, and an article draft of the second study. The particular study used a case study design (suggested as a method within self-study
Pinnegar & Hamilton, 2009) to investigate three pre-service teachers experiences of teaching in school placement, and was the study Mats presented at the PhD seminar. We began the meeting by discussing the responses on Mats’ presentation the day before: Ann: So it seemed to be that peoples’ interest was more in the actual documentation of the pre-service teachers’ learning process from start to where they are now, then taking a snippet for each of the three [pre-service teachers’ experiences]. Remind me of the idea of your publications. Mats: [Explain the plan for each of the four articles] […] So maybe this article can look at the learning process, and the fourth article can concentrate more on the experience of teaching Sport Education in school placement. Ann: And how does what you have to say in this paper differ from what you have planned to say in the fourth paper? Mats: No, I think that’s a good point. Lars Tore: I think those two papers have to be distinguished, so it has to be different questions. This article could be more longitudinal. Mats: But if we look at the learning process, is it too much with three pre-service teachers? […] Ann: We need to find a way of addressing the comments made yesterday about taking the reader from start to where they are now […] Would you take one of the three [pre-service teachers] out?

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Mats: Maybe Calvin [anonymized] […] eh, it’s difficult to take one out. Lars Tore: But it’s the question of why more than one? Why more than two? Why these three? Ann: We have to compromise […] I think you need to come down to one [pre-service teacher] to show the process. Mats: I would have picked Michael [anonymized] because I think he is the most reflective one, reflected upon negative and challenging experiences […] If we pick Michael, should I approach him and ask for another interview? Ann: What would be the reason for another interview? Mats: To get the last part of the learning process.

This excerpt demonstrates how the assemblage works to ensure dialogue takes place as well as to influence the content of that dialogue. Our dialogue was not straightforward, where the idea that was introduced became the answer, but rather was a nonlinear dialogic process produced by and producing the research assemblage. That is, each of our multiplicities
as we were bringing together our past experiences, with our present understanding, and considering future enactments (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015)
combined and interacted with nonhuman elements (e.g., article draft, constructs, data set, and design) to coproduce new ideas. These ideas provoked the assemblage to think differently. In particular, the connections that Ann and Mats had made the day before sparked Ann to introduce the notion of the learning process to the research assemblage. This idea interacted with the article draft and the document with constructs, aims, and empirical work for the four PhD articles. Combined with Mats’ and Lars Tore’s experiences with, and knowledge of the data, the assemblage produced questions and new thinking about the study aim and design. Consequently, this discussion challenged the assemblage to reorganize its system of thinking, changing the article from one that provided a snapshot of three preservice teachers’ experiences of teaching in school placement to one that described a pre-service teachers’ longitudinal learning experience (Hordvik, MacPhail, & Ronglan, 2017b).

CONCEPTUALIZING “SELF” AS A PROCESS OF COMING INTO COMPOSITION Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concept of assemblage, the objective of this study was to focus attention on the way the self-study researcher is part of a research assemblage that works to produce the knowledge that emerges. We have highlighted the nonlinear and fundamentally relational process of constructing knowledge in self-study of professional practices and argue that Mats’ researcher-self was disrupted and decentered through multiple processes of “coming into composition”. That is, knowledge was co-constructed by the constellation of human and non-human elements comprising the research assemblage as well as “the processes resulting from the different ways those processes combine and interact” (Strom, 2015, p. 322). In this way, each element,

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whether human and non-human, functioned as active agents in joint production of the knowledge that was constructed. Further, instead of viewing self in self-study as an ego-centric self, in a Deluzian and Guattari lens self is understood as being co-produced through the constellation of elements functioning collectively to produce different becomings. Viewing self, practice, and knowledge production in self-study as coming into composition provides an alternative that decenters the conceptualization of self, and self and the other, in the methodology. We argue that the self of Mats became only one of multiple human and non-human elements in a joint construction of knowledge. This understanding highlights, together with the human actors, the nonhuman and material others in the process of dialogue as a way of coming to know in self-study. We suggest that self-study researchers can decenter the researcher-self by embracing a research stance of “coming into composition” where the researcher engages with a research assemblage to construct joint understanding of teaching and learning (Strom & Martin, 2017). This stance to self-study requires researchers to frame the research practice as an assemblage. Put another way, to avoid the possibility that the study becomes a study of the self, by the self, and for the self, researchers need to work to decenter themselves and see themselves as part of a larger collective. This process also entails entering into relationships, connecting to the current knowledge of the research community, and interacting with the relationships and connections that emerge throughout the study, as well as embracing difference both in data collection, and in the coming-to-know process. This stance allows self-study researchers to grapple with the tensions between relevance and rigor, and effectiveness and understanding, that is inherent in the self-study of professional practices (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2015). While the tensions can never fully be reconciled, the function and production of a research assemblage can help self-study researchers acknowledge the need to constantly position themselves between the two tensions.

REFERENCES Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hamilton, M. L., & Pinnegar, S. (2015). Knowing, becoming, doing as teacher educators: Identity, intimate scholarship, inquiry (Vol. 26). Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Hordvik, M., MacPhail, A., & Ronglan, L. T. (2017a). Teaching and learning sport education: A self-study exploring the experiences of a teacher educator and pre-service teachers. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 36(2), 232
243. Hordvik, M., MacPhail, A., & Ronglan, L. T. (2017b). Learning to teach Sport Education: Investigating a pre-service teacher’s knowledge development. Sport, Education and Society. doi:10.1080/13573322.2017.1322948 Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London: Routledge. Ovens, A., & Fletcher, T. (2014). Doing self-study: The art of turning inquiry on yourself. In A. Ovens & T. Fletcher (Eds.), Self-study in physical education teacher education: Exploring the interplay of practice and scholarship (e book) (Vol. 13, pp. 3
14). Dordrecht: Springer.

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Ovens, A., Garbett, D., & Hutchinson, D. (2016). Becoming teacher: Exploring the transition from student to teacher. In J. J. Loughran & M. L. Hamilton (Eds.), International handbook of teacher education (pp. 353
378). Singapore: Springer. Parr, A. (2005). The Deleuze dictionary. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pinnegar, S., & Hamilton, M. L. (2009). Self-study of practice as a genre of qualitative research: Theory, methodology, and practice (e book). London: Springer. Semetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, education and becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Slife, B. D. (2004). Taking practice seriously: Toward a relational ontology. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 24(2), 157. Strom, K. (2015). Teaching as assemblage: Negotiating learning and practice in the first year of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 321
333. Strom, K., & Martin, A. D. (2017). Becoming-teacher: A rhizomatic look at first-year teaching. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Vanassche, E., & Kelchtermans, G. (2015). The state of the art in self-study of teacher education practices: A systematic literature review. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 47(4), 508
528. doi:10.1080/00220272.2014.995712

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NEW MATERIALIST AUTO-ETHICO-ETHNOGRAPHY: AGENTIAL-REALIST AUTHENTICITY AND OBJECTIVITY IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP Chau Vu

ABSTRACT This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 75
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embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography. Keywords: New materialism; agential realism; authenticity; autoethnography; objectivity; auto-ethico-ethnography

NEW MATERIALIST AUTO-ETHICO-ETHNOGRAPHY: AGENTIAL-REALIST AUTHENTICITY AND OBJECTIVITY IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP Opening Thought “Intimate scholarship” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015) refers to the methodology directly engaging the personal experience, knowledge, and/or practices of the researcher(s) as the focus of the inquiry. Such approaches include self-study of professional practice, autoethnography, life history, and narrative inquiry. Intimate scholarship has been more and more welcomed as a transformative means of researching professional practices in the field of education research because with this method researchers are allowed to position their research in the “ontological space between self and other” (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 73), from which to examine what they know about teaching and being a teacher educator. Autoethnography, in particular, is gaining momentum in educational research as a method of inquiry into the cultural aspects of the self in relation with the society of which s/he is a part (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015; Morrissey, 2013). Theorists and practitioners in the field of autoethnography have established crucial features of this method of inquiry which differentiates it from other methods in intimate scholarship. As articulated by Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997), autoethnography stands at the intersection of three genres: (1) “native anthropology,” in which people who were formerly the subjects of ethnography become the authors of studies of their own group; (2) “ethnic autobiography,” personal narratives written by members of ethnic minority groups; and (3) “autobiographical ethnography,” in which anthropologists interject personal experience into ethnographic writing (p. 2). In accordance with these genres, ReedDanahay (1997) explained, autoethnographers may vary in their emphasis on graphy (i.e., the research process), ethnos (i.e., culture), or auto (i.e., self). Some scholars consider a personal narrative to be the same as an autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), while others use autoethnography as a means of explicitly linking concepts from the literature to the narrated personal experience (Holt, 2003; Sparkes, 2000). Autoethnography is considered by some as method (Belbase, Luitel, & Taylor, 2013; Chang, 2008; McIlveen, 2008), and by others as philosophy (Wall, 2008). For the purpose of this study, I adopted the view of

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autoethnography as referring to research focusing on autobiographical stories that feature the self or include the researcher as a theorizing character, a practice growing in popularity in recent years’ education research (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015, p. 92). Numerous studies have discussed autoethnography both as a qualitative research method and as a therapeutic practice for those engaged in social inquiry. Some studies tackled the critique that autoethnography is narcissistic, self-centered, self-indulgent, and too personal (Anderson, 2006; Coffey, 1999; Delamont, 2009; Madison, 2006) by claiming to be more truthful and evocative (Bochner & Ellis, 2016); more reflexive (Adams & Jones, 2011; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Humphreys, 2005); more performative and embodied (Sparkes, 2000; Spry, 2001); and more political (Jones, 2008). Other studies demonstrate a transition to a poststructuralist strand in autoethnography “after the crisis of representation” (Lather, 2001, p. 21) by questioning the linguistic frames within which the historical, philosophical, and cultural constructions of power are made possible (Gannon, 2006; Jackson & Mazzei, 2008; Moneypenny, 2013). However, not much has been done to address autoethnography from a posthumanist perspective. In other words, the role of non-human factors, the matters that are entangled in the autoethnographical accounts of social researchers, have not been tackled. There remains a gap to be filled by studies that provide both methodological and practical insights into how this lens could contribute to the field of research in teacher education. This study, therefore, aims to avoid the overly centric and rationalized accounts of individual agency and deconstruct the situational and complex nature of the auto, while also exploring the ethno, seen as the natureculture
a concept coined by Donna Haraway (2003), in the discussion of educational researchers’ autoethnographical practices. In paying special attention to autoethnography, this paper seeks to “think with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008) a posthumanist, new materialist philosophy in analyzing knowledge and practice as co-produced by multiplicities of human/material and incorporeal elements where the self of the researcher is entangled with other matters and is not a fixed, permanent and individualized component of that intra-activity. To respond to the overarching question of how autoethnography is conducted from a new materialist perspective, the paper focuses on two major issues of authenticity and objectivity, which caught my attention as highly complex problems across the literature on autoethnography. Taking account of Gayatri Spivak’s caution in her preface for Of Grammatology, “to make a new word is to run the risk of forgetting the problem or believing it solved” (1976, p. xv), I do not wish to suggest a concept in place of the self that is inherent in intimate scholarship so as to leave behind the problems of the researcher as subject who narrates. Instead, I argue that it is important to address the niches through which the self can be understood in alternative ways. In the same manner that Jackson and Mazzei (2012) wished to “displace the certainty with which the ‘I’ speaks of truth” (p. 308), I aim to retain the “I” in order to trouble the “I/eye” of the autoethnographer. In this paper, I immerse myself in various forms of textual evidences and “thought

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experiments” (Barad, 2007, p. 100) to explore the following question: How would a new materialist autoethnography decenter the self of the researcher and address issues of authenticity and objectivity in practice?

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK: NEW MATERIALIST ONTOLOGY This study uses a new materialist ontology as its conceptual framework. One of the pioneer scholars leading the turn from post-structuralism to new materialism, Barad (2007) called the former a “linguistic narcissism” (p. 42), suggesting that post-structuralists have granted language “too much power” (p. 132) by reducing every “turn”, or every “thing” into “a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation” (p. 132). New materialism is a response to such turns from Anglophone and continental approaches, which are associated with a cultural turn that privileges language, discourse, culture, and values, among other humanistic factors (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012; MacLure, 2013). For this reason, the study is framed through the lens of a new materialist ontology, and specifically, through the concept of agential realism. Agential realism, a concept most widely attributed to Karen Barad (2007), reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped. Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms
“agency” and “realism”
and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates. (Barad, 2007, p. 70)

For Barad, agential realism is not limited to the human realms, and so potentially includes nonhumans and cyborgs
an image first introduced by Donna Haraway in 1983 to indicate a third-type that crosses the rigid boundaries between human and animals, and human and machine. Additionally, Barad emphasized that matter is not just passive material that is shaped by agents; it undergoes a process as it “stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface” (p. 213). This is a breakthrough of new materialism compared to post-structuralist philosophies, because it decenters humans from the focus of mattering, and even insists on an alternative understanding of agency, a term closely tied to humanist/post-structuralist discussion of knowledge and power. Agency, according to Barad (2007), “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (p. 178). Lovin (2015) proposed a central tenet of new materialist theorization to be “[t]he erasure of the agency of matter within postmodern analytical frameworks that foregrounded language, signification, and discourse” (p. 65). At the same time, this author asserted that new materialism offers an alternative way to reconsider the “suppressed agencies” of “inhuman biological forces, non-living material entities, and more-than-human and nonhuman phenomena” to discover “new

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terrains for ethics” (p. 65) that address current issues taking place in the world. This understanding is core to the discussion of the role of me as the autoethnographer and researcher in this study. In short, new materialist ontology “breaks through the mind-matter and culture-nature divides of transcendental humanist thought” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 155), along with various other social theory dualisms, including human/machine, reason/emotion, male/female, physical/nonphysical. Most importantly, since new materialism defines agency as not necessarily tied to human action, a new materialist ontology shifts the focus for social inquiry from “an approach predicated upon humans and their bodies” into examining “how relational networks or assemblages of animate and inanimate affect and are affected” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 399). This new materialist lens is crucial in exploring the (re)configurings of concepts from traditional research paradigms, such as culture, (social) science and the self. This chapter addresses the ontoethicoepistemological concerns, or challenges, for those who wish to think with new materialist theory through their research projects in intimate scholarship, particularly through using autoethnography as social inquiry. Though there are many such challenges, the paper focuses on the reconceptualization of autoethnography as a method of knowing in being. Concepts of authenticity and objectivity will be discussed accordingly.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHICAL METHOD According to Pelias (2016), autoethnography “orchestrates the writing strategies of a number of other associated methods” (p. 384), namely personal narrative, autobiography, poetic inquiry, ethnodrama, and/or performative writing, to create its texts. The output of an autoethnographic study, therefore, may take the form of “an evocative narrative written in the first-person style” (Pace, 2012, p. 2) and may as well include graphic, audiovisual or performative components (Pink, 2013; Saldaña, 2008; Trinh, 2011). Some scholars emphasize the analytic (Anderson, 2006) over the evocative aspect, while others favor reflexive over reflective autoethnography (Adams & Jones, 2011). However, to some scholars, reflexive autoethnography is still overly focused on “a coherent, explanatory subject”, who “gathers up meaning” and exposes a “self-evident process of knowledge-production” with no confrontation of “the power plays in the noninnocent game of interpretation” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 303). In an exploration into how an autoethnography might find its form and meet its demands, this study employed the method of what I call diffractive autoethnography. Unlike reflexivity, which “only displaces the same elsewhere” (Haraway, 1997, p. 16) and “entails the same old geometrical optics of reflections” like “mirrors upon mirrors” (Barad, 2007, p. 88), diffraction does not produce faithful images of objects placed in a distance from the mirror. Instead, it produces “patterns that mark differences in the relative characters of individual waves” (Barad, 2007, p. 81). In other words, diffraction does not assume a state of being of a subject or an object; it explores how they are entangled in

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material connections in space
time and what differences make them different from one another. The turn from post-modern reflexivity to posthuman diffractivity, in short, is predicated on a premise that “knowing is as dependent on the coming together of things, places and feelings as it is on language” (Mellander & Wiszmeg, 2016, p. 99). Jackson and Mazzei (2012) advocated a diffractive reading of discourses, which emphasizes not how they function, but how they materialize. A diffractive reading, for them, “is not about what is told, or experienced
it is about the ways in which what is experienced is formed in the intra-action between the material and discursive” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 130). It follows that a diffractive autoethnography looks at the self in entanglement with the discourses and materiality around the self. Diffractive autoethnographic writing shifts its focus from “to tell” to “to know while being”, and accordingly, the autoethnographer is expected to part with what s/he think s/he knows, confront her/is privilege and authority in listening and telling, to fully come to her/is own presence. In this approach, neither the methodological steps nor the analytic process could be determined prior to the intra-actions of the autoethnographer with the particular discursive-material practices with which s/he is entangled. Throughout this autoethnography, I engaged in a diffractive reading of my research practice when I was a lecturer in English Teacher Education of a university in Vietnam, in order to reconfigure the auto, the ethno and the graphy agential-realistically, through the lens of new materialism. This is the first study I have ever conducted in the first person, and as such is very different for me. In all my previous experiences, I followed rigid scientific procedures in collecting and interpreting data to create new knowledge about the Other. Since I began to engage with new materialisms and challenged my own thinking about the boundaries that I made myself believe in or the binaries I reiterated through my practices, I have endured what St. Pierre (2014) called “a disconnect between conventional humanist qualitative methodology and the ‘posts’” (p. 3). I cannot deny that my conventional ways of doing research are disrupted by this thought experiment. However, it is the emerging, disruptive, and aporious new learnings that kept me going and growing into a becoming that I had not previously anticipated.

DIFFRACTIVE LEARNINGS Agential-realist Authenticity: Toward a Non-representationalist Voice Since autoethnography, like ethnography, has traditionally been associated with the (dis)placement of the self in a social or cultural context (Coffey, 1999), questions of authenticity, or the authentic voice, such as “who speaks and on behalf of whom”, or “who represents whose life, and how” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 3) have been introduced and addressed by various scholars of the genre. Autoethnography is assumed to be more authentic than straight ethnography in conventional anthropology because “the voice of the insider is assumed to be more true than that of the outsider” (Reed-Danahay, 1997, p. 4) and authors of

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autoethnographies are strictly “indigenous ethnographer[s], the native expert[s], whose authentic first-hand knowledge of the culture is sufficient to lend authority to the text” (Deck, 1990, p. 255). I took this assumption for granted when I was a bachelor student conducting a thesis on participants in a so-called gifted high-school, students who had high motivation for learning English but did not achieve the results desired by themselves and their teachers. When I turned in that neatly bound 80-page thesis written in English to a Vietnamese committee, affirming myself and my Vietnamese professors that I was speaking on behalf of the students whose voice needed to be heard, little did I question what made me a native expert
was it the three years I myself had spent as a high-schooler in an English-gifted classroom like my participants, or my instant rapport with the participants that consequentially led themselves to open up to me and gave me tons of data to mine? Or did I just benefit from the “essentialist assumption” that “one doesn’t really need to explain how one acquires authoritative knowledge of one’s own culture” (Buzard, 2003, p. 62)? The possibility of telling their stories in a foreign language to academic scholars who otherwise had no knowledge of the characters gave me a faux impression of being a native informant, “a subaltern that speaks” (Spivak, 1988, p. 67). In fact, I did not know the participants personally and had the privilege of diagnosing what they were experiencing as problems. There was nothing common-sense or natural about my desire to represent the Other and make their voice heard, but I had subscribed to the Western culture of representationalism for so long that it seemed “inescapable”, if not “downright natural,” that there is a “Cartesian division between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ that breaks along the line of the knowing subject” (Barad, 2007, p. 48). My positioning of the “researcher as subject”, according to Jackson and Mazzei (2008), assumes a self “who is able to recognize, know, and easily capture the ‘I’ that has had shared experiences with those whom s/he studies” (p. 300). The stories created from within that hierarchy, no matter how evocative, would serve to “further center the desire for empathy, authority, and authenticity of the researcher’s voice”, instead of troubling “the authority of the ethnographer as the one who knows and whose experience can provide such clarity and truth” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 301). In order to break this “Cartesian habit of mind” (Barad, 2007, p. 49), agential realism enables us to reimagine alternative conceptualizations of what constitutes an authentic narrative voice in new materialist autoethnography. Etymologically, the word authentic derives from the Greek version of “authentikos”, meaning “principal, genuine, original” (Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001). Within the agential-realist framework posited by Barad (2007), however, authentic and authenticity can hardly bear any of these meanings, because for her, there is no origin or reality. There are only phenomena in constant intraaction, or a “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (p. 33), to create new differences of their being. This notion of intra-action entails two important points. First, “distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intraaction.” Second, “the ‘distinct’ agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don’t exist as individual elements” (p. 33). “Reality is

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not a fixed essence,” then, but “an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity” (Barad, 2007, p. 206). Therefore, to represent reality, or to exactly mirror preexisting phenomena in some metaphysical world through language, is an impossible task. Barad (2007) proposed a “post-humanist performative” (p. 135) understanding of discursive practices as an alternative to representationalism. Unlike a representationalist account which entertains our illusion of being above or outside the world to reflect upon it, a performative account questions the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real, and “insists on understanding thinking, observing, and theorizing as practices of engagement with, and as part of, the world in which we have our being” (p. 133). As she explained further, “[p]ractices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world” (p. 185). So instead of asking if my descriptions have accurately portrayed the reality of participants’ life in the culture they belong to, I would need to question what different material-discursive practices produced the different material configurings that I observed from participants, and more importantly, what material-discursive practices enabled or inhibited me as the researcher from observing those different material configurings. What this means for autoethnography is that the researchers have to give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. Jackson and Mazzei (2008) critiqued some autoethnographers’ practice of “reaching out to the Other” through “transparent meaning that is easily understood and becomes shared” as an “intentionality that bears the burden of narrative unity and self-coherence”, arguing: For there to be evocative attachments with research participants and readers, autoethnographers seek dimensions of experience that will engender connection and recognition in the midst of complexity. […] This notion of transparent experience assumes both a reader and researcher whose positions are stabilized by invisible claims to a shared discourse. […] Sharing deeper hermeneutic understandings of experience through easy identification with the Other is, in our view, a practice that does not resist humanist principles of representing a unified “I” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 303).

Instead of yearning for the common experiences with the readers, these authors questioned: “What would happen if autoethnography were to disrupt identity, discourage identification, and refuse understanding?” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 303). Thinking in this direction, researchers could possibly shift the focus of their analysis from the ideas, actions and feelings of individualized subjects to the impersonal flows of performativity through the intra-actions of different discursive-material practices. To decenter the voice of the narrative “I”, Jackson and Mazzei (2008) suggested, autoethnographers need to move towards a performative “I”, “who uses experience not simply as a foundation for knowledge but as a concept ‘under erasure’ to expose the indecidability of meaning, of self, of narrative
without requiring self-identification or mastery” (p. 305). Simply put, this performative “I” is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Rather

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than predetermined, this performative “I” “is constructed in the process of attempts at truth-telling” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2008, p. 305). Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing
by writing certain stories, we simultaneously marginalize others, and are shaped differently according to what we write. Returning to my own practice, this materialist ontology enables me to question, for example, what makes it possible to talk about gifted students as opposed to non-gifted students. What privilege did I have that allowed me to see as problematic the fact that some students were not achieving the academic results desired by themselves or their teachers? The teacher introduced me in front of the class, looking at all of them from above. Maybe this was what gave me the look of the authority that was somehow reliable and had a solution to the problem. Perhaps, my own stress and disappointment stimulated me to talk about this problem through someone else. My own economic difficulties when I was a high school student might have made me choose a participant with the same economic situation as mine and not choose ones with seemingly more affluent conditions. A new materialist approach to autoethnography implies that “human accounts can no longer be accorded validity on the basis of their authenticity” (Fox & Alldred, 2015, p. 409), and that autoethnographical narratives need not be seen as subjective representations of the world, but as evidence of how researchers are situated within the discursive-material intra-actions of their becoming. Although she was not opposed to authenticity and voice, Lather (2001) argued that “all writers are cultural impersonators,” reasoning: “Whatever it means for a writer to speak as a this or a that, authenticity is much more complicated than singular, transparent, static identity categories assumed to give the writer a particular view” (Lather, 2001, p. 484). By saying this, she promoted a move toward “de-stabilizing practices of “telling the Other” in ways that displace the privileged fixed position from which the researcher interrogates and writes the researched” (Lather, 2001, p. 484). Agential-realist Objectivity: Writing Auto-Ethico-Ethnography Objectivity, along with validity and reliability, has long occupied scholars of social sciences as one of the crucial criteria for the legitimacy of their research
they twist and turn in trying to justify their scientific stance and prove that their contributions are of the same value as those of their counterparts in hard sciences, i.e. biology, physics, or astronomy and the struggle continues between qualitative researchers towards quantitative researchers, whatever these categories mean. Miller (2008) recognized a trend when some texts “passed themselves off as ‘factual’ and ‘objective’ by removing over traces of human authorship from their outward appearance and by providing data that appears untouched, authoritative, and telling” (p. 92). At the other end of the spectrum, Ellis and Bochner (2000) insisted that objectivity can be achieved through a sense of familiarity deprived from shared experiences with which readers could identify, since the goal of autoethnography is to produce vulnerable readers through

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evocative narratives
“to take the reader by the throat, break her heart, and heal it again” (p. 752). As a dutiful daughter of hierarchical, reductionist, and deterministic Western thoughts trying to apply what was taught in practice, I meticulously followed guidelines in qualitative handbooks about population sampling, retaining biases, data triangulation, data saturation, and data coding to ascertain the objectivity of my case study. I hid myself behind the veil of a third-person account, named my participants with numbers, presented dispassionate observations, and pretended with readers that “the data came to [me], not from [me], and was found, not made” (Miller, 2008, p. 93). I expected such practices to work the magic, without questioning the Newtonian assumptions that “objects and observers occupy physically and conceptually separable positions”, and “what has been obtained [through measurement] is a representation of intrinsic properties that characterize the objects of an observation-independent reality” (Barad, 2007, pp. 106
107). These had habitualized my mind and shaped my practices. An agential-realist account of objectivity, however, offers a different alternative. Barad (2007) contended that agential separability enacted through specific intra-actions is fundamentally important, because “in the absence of a classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed, it provides an alternative ontological condition for the possibility of objectivity” (p. 140). So, objectivity here does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing
in the words of Barad (2007), “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (p. 359). Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intraactions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography. Data as Diffractive Phenomena According to Barad’s agential realist ontology, the primary ontological unit of reality is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather […] phenomena” (Barad, 2007, p. 33). As she theorized, rather than marking the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, phenomena are “the ontological inseparability of agentially intraacting components” (p. 33). Seen this way, reality is constituted by phenomena. Barad wrote, “[r]eality is composed not of things-in-themselves or thingsbehind-phenomena but of things-in-phenomena” (p. 140). This new materialist (re)configuring of phenomena opens up an opportunity for autoethnographers to respond to St. Pierre and Jackson’s (2014) question regarding “what counts as data and how data are collected” (p. 715) in postqualitative research. While traditional sources of data in (auto)ethnography are widely accepted to include interviews, participant observation field notes, document and artifact analysis, and research diaries (Holt, 2003; Mayan, 2001;

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Morse & Richards, 2002), along with experience and memories of the researcher (Coffey, 1999; Ellis & Bochner, 2000), what gets taken for granted is the quality of the data collected through such methods. As a result, […] data collection is an “end in itself without sufficient theoretical analysis to determine appropriate criteria” (Young, 1969, p. 490) for which data to collect. Too often, we use the vacuum cleaner approach to data collection—sweeping up any and all data into our studies thereby ignoring the “quality of the data base”. In this approach, all data are equal and worthy of analysis. (St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014, p. 715)

To avoid the consequent “black hole of qualitative research” in data analysis (Lather, 1991, p. 149), I concur with St. Pierre and Jackson’s (2014) recommendation that we need to use theory to determine what counts as data as well as what counts as appropriate data, in order to “do more with less data”, and “focus on the difficult work of analysis rather than on conducting more and more interviews” (Lather, 1991, p. 149. In the case of autoethnography, I argue that we treat data as phenomena, those which cannot be engineered by human subjects but are “differential patterns of mattering” (Barad, 2007, p. 140), and are therefore produced by neither the material nor the cultural but the material
cultural. Since “phenomena are ontologically primitive relations
relations without preexisting relata”, Barad wrote, “it is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the ‘components’ of phenomena become determinate and that particular material articulations of the world become meaningful” (p. 333). Consequently, as posited by Jackson and Mazzei (2012), “drawing different boundaries has different ontological implications” (p. 114). This agential-realist ontology does not suggest that reality is a given, ready to be collected and dissected through data. On the opposite, it entails that knowing is not separated from being, and the world is always, already becoming through entanglements of subject and object, human and nonhuman. By getting entangled in data as phenomena, autoethnographers would be able to listen to the “silent dialogues not presented (or presentable) according to simplistic notions of what ‘counted’ as data” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 226). It is through this way that we could begin to tackle what and how different material
discursive practices of our worlds allow what we could and could not see through the “I”/ eye of an autoethnographer. Reliability as Axiological Intra-actions Another significant implication of agential realism for research is that our constructed knowledge has real, material consequences (Barad, 2007; Heckman, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), therefore, it is necessary to establish an ethics of knowing while in being. This meaning of ethics, per Barad, is different from the codes of conducts instituted by IRB or any other authority that has control over research practices: Ethics cannot be about responding to the other as if the other is the radical outside to the self. Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; “others” are never very far from “us”; “they” and

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179).

It is also important to note that since phenomena are inseparable ontological intra-actions that produce different material configurings in the world sometimes imperceptible to human cognition, our responsibility needs to expand over to the non-human territories: Responsibility
the ability to respond to the other
cannot be restricted to human-human encounters when the very boundaries and constitution of the “human” are continually being reconfigured and “our” role in these and other reconfigurings is precisely what “we” have to face. A humanist ethics won’t suffice when the “face” of the other that is “looking” back at me is all eyes, or has no eyes, or is otherwise unrecognizable in human terms. What is needed is a posthumanist ethics, an ethics of worlding. (Barad, 2007, p. 392)

Arguing that the separation of epistemology from ontology is a vestige of the Western thought, Barad proposed a concept of ontoepistemology as an intraaction of the two, and even beyond that, a concept of ethico-ontoepistemology as an entanglement of the three: Onto-epistemo-ology
the study of practices of knowing in being
is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that we need to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter. Or, for that matter, what we need is something like an ethico-ontoepistem-ology
an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being
since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter. (Barad, 2007, p. 185) Further, she emphasized: The attending ethico-onto-epistemological questions have to do with responsibility and accountability for the entanglements “we” help enact and what kinds of commitments “we” are willing to take on, including commitments to “ourselves” and who “we” may become. (Barad, 2007, p. 382)

Since every decision an autoethnographer makes about what stories to include in her telling has material consequences for the participants of her research and even her own becoming in the world, I suggest an advocacy of the practice of auto-ethico-ethnography as a constant reminder of our responsibility and accountability for the discursive-material entanglements that we help enact.

NON-CLUSION: AUTO-ETHICO-ETHNOGRAPHY AS A TURN TOWARDS POSTHUMAN SOCIAL INQUIRY I am still at a loss at this point after days of engaging with the concepts engendered through the new materialist agential materialism. And yet, “as we surrendered to the possibility of not knowing, we began to know and ask in ways that were previously unthought” (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012, p. 746). To think of an “I” that is becoming is also to reframe how those with whom we interact are also in this state of becoming, and what discursive-material practices allows or inhibits us from recognizing the differential patterns of matterings around us.

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The goal for new materialist autoethnographers is not more versions of “me”, or more versions of the story (Van Maanen, 1988), but more differences, contradictions, and folds. To encounter what is simultaneously materially and discursively produced requires “not just a reading with/ through a materialist lens”, but also “a reading that relies on a re-insertion of ontology into the task of knowing” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 121). Jackson and Mazzei (2008) suggested a deconstructive autoethnographic method so as to not use experience as the foundation of knowledge and the self as the reliable knowledge producer. However, I suggest that we take up auto-ethico-ethnography, where the self, the culture and the science of writing are all entangled into a space
time matter and decentered from the humanistic constraints of language. I argue that a more productive practice of autoethnography is an agential-realist auto-ethico-ethnography, which takes seriously the question of how the researchers’ experiences and ethical engagements constrain and limit what they can know and how they represent their participants or even their own social worlds. Linking the diffractive learnings explored above to my teaching and research practices, I feel the urge to reorient myself to a focus on performative understandings from within my situated discursive and material practices. In addition, autoethnography as a research genre offers me the possibility of putting other teachers/teacher educators “in motion,” of generating a space of dialogue, debate and change beyond the confines of my classroom. It also supports my ongoing engagement with writing that is, in St Pierre’s (1997, p. 408) words, “not only inscription but also discovery”. To begin again for the first time into the inquiry of what it means to do research in a post-humanist approach, I find myself turning back to Barad (2007)’s reminder to embrace a post-humanist ethics by “taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are a part” (Barad, 2007, p. 384). That is why I propose an alternative of auto-ethico-ethnography. Ethics needs to be the middle name of any social inquiry in intimate scholarship, and autoethnography is not excluded.

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NARRATIVE MINING: STORY, ASSEMBLAGE, AND THE TROUBLING OF IDENTITY Jay Wamsted

ABSTRACT Post-structural autoethnography is untidy. Our ability to write about our own experience is hindered both by the very idea of “the self” as well as by the hope that, even if such a thing exists, we could possibly know it. Rather than abnegate self-writing, however, in this chapter the author uses the construct of story-as-identity in order to create a kind of map of the self
a map that can be used to trouble tidy notions of the autonomous “I”. Specifically operating out of a context of racial identity, the author
a white man
(re)tells several stories from his experience, introducing three questions that are central to the idea he is calling narrative mining: a method to get behind the paradox of post-structural autoethnography (Gannon 2006) and the barriers to autoethnography (Wamsted 2012). In this act, he is accessing something close to an authentic self
not what we say we believe about who we are, but something approaching our actual operating systems. Two stories are (re)told
the story of his first racial memory and the story of his first black friend
and a demonstration of how autoethnographers could trouble tidy notions of the self is provided in the form of an exploration of the three questions. The chapter closes with a look at how narrative mining could be of benefit not only to autoethnographers but also to the education community writ large; operating in alterity is a fundamental skill for the public school

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 91
103 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031008

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teacher, and this method could be a powerful tool for both pre- and in-service teachers. Keywords: Autoethnography; post-structuralism; narrative mining; rhizome; race; implicit bias Writing about the self is tricky. Questions about veracity can tack into accusations of solipsism, difficult waters that just might lead an incipient autoethnographer away from self-examination altogether. At times post-structural thought purports to offer a way out of such inaction
note Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and their belief that the self “has a real future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled” (p. 171)
but just as often it whispers of what Gannon (2006) calls the paradox of post-structural autoethnography: “Although autoethnographic research seems to presume that the subjects can speak (for) themselves, poststructural theories disrupt this presumption and stress the (im)possibilities of writing the self from a fractured and fragmented subject position” (p. 475). In a detailed consideration of Gannon, I have written previously of specific difficulties that arise when the self is placed under examination, teasing out three formidable barriers to autoethnography: memory/knowledge, understanding/ interpretation, and communication (Wamsted, 2012). These barriers should give pause not only to autoethnographers; rather, any speaker or writer who places trust in a recollection of the past need be wary. Obviously, this is all of us
at least, all who rely on the foundational notions of self or relationship. The tripartite problem of autoethnography, in brief: (1) we might be wrong about what once occurred; (2) even if our memory is solid we cannot know if our present interpretation of an event has unduly affected its purported significance in our past; and, (3) even if our memory and understanding are properly in line we cannot be sure that our past self was operating in a theatre of truth or validity
if we dissembled then we inadvertently may be dissembling now (see Wamsted (2012) for more details). In other words, writing about the self is nothing so blithe as a mere recitation of “I am who I am because of what I once was.” Falsehoods may abound; here be dragons. In line with Butler (1999), however, who notes that she does “not believe that post-structuralism entails the death of autobiographical writing” (p. xxv), I wish to propose a way in which a writer of the self could push past these barriers and get around Gannon’s paradox
a method to dismantle the myth of the proximate self in an ultimate move toward autoethnography. I call this methodological tool narrative mining.

THEORETICAL APPROACH As an autoethnographer, I have taken encouragement from Deleuze and Guattari (1987) to “write, form a rhizome, increase [my] territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency” (p. 11). Similarly, I have followed Barthes (1975/2010), who in his autobiography considers “all this […] as if spoken by a character in a novel
or rather by several characters”

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(p. 119). In short, in my writing I have found myself considering the self as a kind of construction
in Deluzoguattarian terms, something of an assemblage. A caution, however, from Derrida, writing on the nature of structure and language: “destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a kind of circle […]. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics” (Derrida, 1966/1978, p. 280). Similarly, we as actants might be in some functional way unable to bring about an abrogation of the notion of self. There is some sort of “there” there, after all. Let me keep this warning in mind as I trouble the typically understood nature of identity. In this attempt to reconcile the rhizomatic, Deleuzoguattarian assemblage of a self with the autonomous “I” taken for granted in common parlance, the need arises for a map of sorts
a rubric by which an autoethnographer could both freely explore as well as expertly navigate the nature of identity. The danger of abnegating such a rubric is to reduce all research into ungeneralizable space, a “plane of consistency” wherein research remains inimitable and thus impracticable. In other words, without an ability to get at the margins of the self there is neither method nor motive to connect to the alterity of the other. This book chapter matters only if we acknowledge the existence of the “there” that must be there. Let us seek out such a map. Barthes (1975/2010), playing with the limits of self in his autobiography
and echoing Plutarch as he writes of a mythological ship
considers the manner in which Jason’s Argo is maintained from port to port: “each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replace, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form” (p. 46). Resonant with Heraclitus’ observation of our inability to step in the same river twice, at first Barthes’ thought seems destructive to the notion of a practical self; after all, might not I be similarly “an object […] with no other identity than its form” (p. 46)? A second look, however, betrays a point of entry for us on our journey towards identity. The boat itself may have been replaced a thousand times over; the river may constantly be in flux. Indeed, they each may have no core physicality. However, the stories of the Argo and its adventures live on still; the Mississippi river abounds with tales and lore. Herein might lie my map. Ships and rivers are not alone in their reliance on story to define them; Scott (1991), writing about experience and the self, argues that “subjects are constituted discursively” (p. 730). Expanding on this idea, Brown, Jones, and Bibby (2004), write that “identity is a form of argument […] [not] a stable entity
something that people have
but [rather] something that they use, to justify, explain and make sense of themselves” (p. 167, emphasis in original text). What we call the self, possibly, might be constituted through a sort of verbal storytelling. McAdams (1996, 2001) puts a more formal name on this concept in what he calls the life story model of identity: [Modern adults] provide the Me with an identity—by constructing more or less coherent, followable, and vivifying stories that integrate the person into society in a productive and generative way and provide the person with a purposeful self-history that explains how the Me of yesterday became the Me of today and will become the anticipated Me of tomorrow. [The deepest level] in personality, therefore, is the level of identity as a life story. (1996, p. 306)

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McAdams is writing primarily about a larger, overarching life story, of course
what he later calls “the life story” (1996, p. 309, emphasis added)
but he also notes that “no single story may encompass all of the many narratives that any given person can use to make sense of his or her life” (2001, p. 117). Building on this idea, Bamberg (2011) writes about small stories: narratives that “surface in everyday conversation […] as the locus where identities are continuously practiced and tested out” (p. 15). Stories, small and large, are what constituted the Argo; they are what make the Mississippi; they are what constitute me as an autonomous “I.” Let us push further into this idea.

SUMMARY OF STUDY METHODS In my doctoral dissertation (Wamsted, 2013)
a post-structural autoethnography centered on my experience as a classroom teacher
I used these ideas engendered by the Argo and the Mississippi to develop a research method of self-study I call narrative mining (see also Wamsted, 2012). I am a white high school teacher at a 98% black school; my primary areas of interest revolve around the backstage nature of racism (Hughey, 2011)
what is more commonly called implicit bias (Banaji & Greewald, 2013). Tatum (1997) provides a starting point for my work: in workshops intended to foster interracial conversation even through the scrim of unconscious prejudices, she encouraged participants to write and discuss their earliest memories of race. Unsurprisingly, Tatum finds that these stories run an attenuated emotional gamut
curiosity, fear, avoidance, terror, anger, confusion, surprise, sadness, embarrassment; in other words, “too often the stories are painful ones” (p. 32). It was in observing the anodyne nature of my own stories that I realized I would need a twist on Tatum’s tactic for my writing
autoethnography must cast suspicion upon simple stories. After all, Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1979/1984, p. xxiv); what else is a life-story but a metanarrative? Or, as St. Pierre writes, “For poststructuralists […] presence and other related concepts of qualitative inquiry
for example, voice, interview, narrative, experience
cannot secure validity, the truth” (2009, p. 223). My stories are not to be trusted. Gannon’s (2006) paradox and my barriers to autoethnography (2012) harmonize with Lyotard (1979/1984) and St. Pierre (2009): it is facile merely to tell myself early memories of race, blithely accepting what I say I remember from so long ago. Operating under the aegis of such incredulity, to continue my work I developed a method of placing my stories under a meta-analysis, a secondorder self-reflection that would enable a deprivileging of my words and the implicit trust placed in what I say I believe about myself. Narrative mining is a tool that enables me access to something more like my actual operating systems; it uses the Argo and the Mississippi and the life story model of identity to get behind Gannon’s paradox and the barriers to autoethnography. It is a map to a more authentic self. Let me undertake several examples in an effort to undergird this bold claim.

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FINDINGS AND UNDERSTANDINGS: PART ONE The initial step in narrative mining is for the autoethnographer to (re)tell a series of stories. “First” memories are a good place to start, tending to be either eidetic or, if less salient (as were my own), indicative through their very lack of dramatic content. However, first memories are by no means the only stories within which narrative mining can elucidate. Any story that has followed an individual through time could be ripe for the examination detailed here, insomuch as this story clearly plays a central part in the identity of the teller, else it would cease to be (re)told. In general, the older a story is the more potential it has for illumination; this rule, however, certainly could be belied by exceptions. My work revolves around race and racialization, but it must be pointed out that any area of difference or dialectic could be interrogated through narrative mining; similarly this work need not be done in isolation but could become a productive part of the traditional classroom environment. For my own part, in my dissertation I (re)told four stories: my first memory of race (per Tatum, 1997), my first black friend, my first physical attraction to a black person, and my first deep black relationship. These “firsts” might not make sense in a different arena of difference; even in the milieu of race I can envision a situation where these stories fail to enlighten the autoethnographer. However, given the long history of social mistrust between black and white Americans
and the manner in which this mistrust has played out in housing, educational, and vocational patterns
I believe these particular “firsts” will provide material for most people interested in the process of racial identity and narrative mining. This effect should obtain for a parallel area of difference. Here, at risk of adumbration, I will choose just two stories to (re)tell; I will begin with that of my earliest racial memory: an experience in elementary school, the first story housed within the narrative of my identity wherein a black “character” makes an appearance. Prior to this moment in fourth grade, every memory I have is of people that more or less look exactly like me. Let me note something subtle but important. I am not claiming that I did not interact with people of other races prior to the scene of this story, only that this is my first memory of any sort of difference. I grew up on Army bases prior to second grade and in Augusta, Georgia subsequently; it is difficult to imagine but that I had regular interaction with people of other races. A first racial memory, however, is not about researching the demographics of forgotten neighborhoods or scouring yearbooks in order to discover the skin tone of those with whom I went to kindergarten. The life-story model of identity presupposes that if no story exists around an event, then that event is more or less inconsequential to the self (this barring trauma and the repression of memories, an entirely different subject that I lack space here to consider). Meaning, if I do not have a story about a black child in my kindergarten class, it matters not to this current endeavor whether he or she was actually there. Prior to fourth grade, my stories, and thus my identity, are homogeneously white.

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Here I (re)tell the story. As always, all names are pseudonyms. One day at school when I was nine years old we were playing football at recess, fourth grade versus fifth grade, and I got into an argument with one of the older boys on the opposing team. I remember neither the verbal sparring nor the onset of the physical interaction; my story picks up with me on the ground as the larger boy held me down, digging his knees into my shoulders and hitting me with his fists. He was shouting and taunting, using his extra year of growth to humiliate me, when out of nowhere a black classmate, Kevin, barreled into him and cleanly knocked him off me. The bully hit the ground and was slow to react, but Kevin dexterously rolled straight from the tackle back to his feet and whipped around, square for a fight that never materialized. My bully was shocked and embarrassed—unwilling to fight someone able to fight back—and he slunk off amidst the taunts and cheers of a typical schoolyard. The bully and I didn’t speak again until high school; I literally remember nothing about Kevin after this moment.

McAdams (1996) writes, “what may be most important in a nuclear episode is not so much what actually happened in the past but what the memory of the key event symbolizes today in the context of the overall life narrative” (p. 309); it is in keeping with his life-story model of identity that I developed three turns to the next step of the narrative mining process. The following questions are designed to get at the clew of identity threaded through the skein of the story
remember that the point of narrative mining is to map a way past what I say I believe(d) and to discover something further from self-presentation and closer to the “true self.” These questions could be answered either in additional selfwriting or in conversation with a class or similar group: (1) Given that this is an “earliest memory” story, what might the lack of racial memory ahead of this story indicate about the storyteller’s racial upbringing? Or, if the “earliest memory” is coeval with the storyteller’s general host of early memories, what might that indicate? (2) Given the character(s) from the story, what can be said about them either before the action of the story or afterwards? In other words, do they “exist” outside of this story, and why or why not? (3) Are there stereotypes of difference and “othering”
tacit or implicit
embedded within the story itself? Let me briefly take each question in turn; first, however, a few procedural notes about the writing itself. The story could have been longer, of course, though as previously mentioned any shorter would have been noteworthy as well. There are no rules about how the story need be written
third-person narrative, poetry, or experimental writing would all be appropriate. I have (re)told this story several times throughout the years
childhood fights come up often in normative male conversation
and in some sense it gleams like a polished stone. An initial attempt by a novice at autoethnography or narrative mining, however, may in fact be far more shambolic; if so, a refining through (re)telling would not be inappropriate. In either case, when the story feels “finished” it is best to leave it alone for a short period of time
a matter of a few days
before returning with a critical eye to my questions. Heretofore, the writer has

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been undertaking more or less traditional autoethnography; the metaexamination of this critical eye is narrative mining. One last note. The process I detail here is entirely autoethnographic
meaning, able to be undertaken alone. Although I would hope to see narrative mining find a place in the traditional classroom
an environment in which the checks and balances of dialogue could smooth out the necessarily rough patches of monologue
I have attempted to recreate the conditions of isolation in which I first developed the methodology. In other words, though desirable and viable, no effort has been made to provide structure for group work. This decision elides, of course, the large contributions made by my professors and loved ones
additions to the writing that were essential, as very few projects truly take place in abject solitude. A novitiate at narrative mining is encouraged to share and discuss findings with others, to create a coterie of invisible partners, as it were. After all, as Ricoeur writes, of the dialectic nature of language, “the primary intention […] is to say something about something; speaker and hearer understand this intention immediately” (p. 84, 1974/1967). The same could be said of the stories that make up our identity: without a hearer the (re)telling is just whistling in the dark. My own story is a sterile one, certainly, especially when compared to many people’s first memories of race (or, for that matter, a first fight). But remember the Argo and the Mississippi: if our identities are housed primarily within the stories we tell, then any lacuna or logical inconsistency might indicate far more than a simple gap in memory; rather, it might be emblematic of an effort by the autonomous “I” to reconcile dissonance between identity and experience. In other words, this story is a thread that connects me through time to the person I was when I started telling it; in a nontrivial sense, this story is me. It is polished, and sterile, yes. The question is, why? What markers of identity are hidden in the gaps between the stated words? First, why do I have no racial memory before age nine? It would not be untoward here to speak to parents and siblings in an effort to answer this question
push into a collective memory about the history of home and neighborhood
but I chose a different tack for my own research. Instead, I wrote capsule biographies of each of my parents
short outlines of their histories, passions, and political persuasions
which directly led me to wonder if I was not an unwitting victim of what Bonilla-Silva (2006) calls color-blind racism. Meaning, I believe that in a liberal fashion typical for a child of the late twentieth century I had been raised not to talk about race, to attempt even not to notice it at all. Though well-meaning
an effort to tack away from the explicit racism of the Civil Rights Era in which they grew up
when my parents provided no outlet to discuss racial difference they left me free to be inculcated by the media and the surrounding social environs. Silence is no solution in a country hard-wired for white supremacy (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Delgado, 1995; Feagin, 2000; among countless others). To be clear, I do not believe that every story of difference that begins as late as mine is similarly subject to such a hypothesis; I only know that it makes perfect sense in the case of my own family. This realization is one to which I had not been able to come prior to my

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efforts at narrative mining. Though I would have said I come from a family comfortable with the concept of race, I believe a meta-analysis of my story belies this notion. Next, let us consider the characters of my story. It is of course to be expected that Kevin does not appear in my life prior to this story; else, that moment would have become my earliest memory of race. What is curious, however, is that Kevin completely disappears after the scene. That fact did not appear in my earliest draft of this story; rather, it is only in the troubling and subsequent (re)telling that I realized its saliency
I added it in the editing. It is curious because of what it says about my life at this time: though this story was reinforced diachronically throughout my life by episodic (re)tellings
these (re)tellings being the lines of identity drawn by the life story; in a very real sense, they “create” me
it appears quite likely that none of those episodes involved Kevin. If they had, it is probable that I would have added this to my story
that I would have remembered him in some other context, however far afield. In other words, what we might have here is a little white boy, saved from a bully by the heroic effort of a black classmate, who in all likelihood never spoke to him of the event again. This, even as I obviously spoke to multiple others about it over the years. Is it possible that I did not speak to Kevin about the fight solely because I did not speak to black people at all? I find this uncomfortable truth to be not merely possible, but probable. Though a tenuous conclusion, its consequences are powerful enough to warrant deep consideration: I never would have said that I was uncomfortable around black people as a child; I am not uncomfortable around black people as an adult, and our tendency is to map our experience backwards through time in the absence of any mitigating reason to act otherwise. And yet, here is some a posteriori evidence of racial discomfort. This powerful possibility has been unearthed through narrative mining. The last question is almost too obvious here. A black boy shows up literally out of nowhere in my earliest racial story, disappearing almost as quickly, and this boy is rife with racialized stereotypes. He is fast, athletic; he is powerfully in control of his body. He is aggressive, comfortable responding to violence in kind. It is dismaying to realize that I may never have spoken to Kevin, but that I remember him so vividly as a physical, violent being. In Whistling Vivaldi, Claude Steele (2010) writes of his experiments showing that white people will perform worse on physical tasks when they consider them to be things at which black people are stereotypically more talented, such as jumping. Consider that this result is obtained even from students in top-tier, liberal universities
young men and women who certainly should know better when it comes to stereotype and generalization. Most of us have been trained to say we repudiate these negative stereotypes, but then we see prejudices of the body embedded in the strangest places
our ability to jump in a lab or a story from our deep past. Again, narrative mining has enabled me to see something about myself I otherwise never would have known to name.

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FINDINGS AND UNDERSTANDINGS: PART TWO Perhaps all of this analysis feels puerile, dully obvious in an ex post facto observation. Another example, then, this one of “my first black friend”: Terrell and I had classes during all of high school, but I would say we were friends from 10th grade on. We had been in classes together in 6th grade, though my earliest memory of him is from a freshman-year football game. I had moved to a different state for the last two-thirds of middle school and had returned recently for the start of high school. Standing by the sidelines watching the game, a mutual friend re-acquainted us: “You remember each other, of course,” he said, “we were all in talented and gifted classes together.” We did not become close during that freshman year, despite being in at least one class together; rather our relationship began in earnest when we took the same gym section sophomore year, bringing us to a common lunch table. As we moved up through the years in our medium-sized high school the honors classes in which we were enrolled kept shrinking and combining; eventually we were taking most of our classes together. During 12th grade we again sat at the same lunch table—no mean signal of teenage friendship; we saw each other outside of school not infrequently. We subsequently drifted apart after high school when we attended different universities. As I am not on Facebook and rarely visit my hometown, I have not heard from him in many years.

At first glance we have another sterile, undramatic story, to be sure, but mark the components of this recitation of a “first friend” story: a timeline of the relationship, an earliest memory, a smattering of interstitial detail. Again, let me take my questions in turn. First, why do I not have any black friends ahead of ninth grade? Anecdotally, I will note that friends at early ages tend to come from two places: (1) our parents’ friends and (2) our neighborhoods. A brief interrogation of my memory fails to bring up any black people with whom my family was social; similarly, though several black students attended my elementary school, I cannot remember a single black family who lived in the orbit of my neighborhood wanderings. In a not uncommon American story, I inhabited an almost entirely monoracial world. Narrative mining provides no particular insight here, though it is certainly beneficial to remember periodically these realities of de facto segregation and the arenas in which they still persist. As to my second question, it is glaringly curious to note that though we were in classrooms together in sixth grade, my earliest memory of Terrell is from three years later, in high school. Why does he not “exist” in any of my stories from that earlier time? After locating such an oddity, the next step in the process of narrative mining is to push into more detail around it
in this case regarding the milieu in which we associated in middle school, the part of my memory in which he exists only as ideation, not actualization. The “talented and gifted classes” that Terrell and I had both been a part of in sixth grade took place in an all-day pull-out classroom, one where twenty or so of us took a bus to another site and spent the whole day together, separate from our regular schoolmates; Terrell had been the only black member of our cohort. Herein lies the power of narrative mining, as it cuts across the fait accompli of who we have become and pushes back into the past of who we once were
it takes a seemingly simple story and slices through layers. Though certainly, I would say I believe race and intelligence share zero correlation, if our identities

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indeed are housed in our stories it seems I may have unearthed a potentially dangerous stereotype lurking in my past. The story of Terrell woven through my identity betrays the possibility
behind the warp and woof of my stated self
of an implicit bias that has followed me from high school to college and into my teaching career without ever being addressed. To paraphrase a line from my dissertation: could I possibly have forgotten about Terrell in the gifted classroom because my identity carried disconcerting stereotypes about black people and intelligence, stereotypes that were both formed and reified by my education in overwhelmingly white honors classrooms hidden inside racially mixed schools? This question is not insignificant, and bears further introspection for which I lack space here. To our third question, and an observation about another facet of this stereotype of black people and intelligence. Terrell’s and my lunchroom, not unlike most such shared spaces in integrated schools, largely separated itself along racial lines. Meaning, Terrell was one of the few black people who sat at a table with all white people; the overwhelming majority of students sat at table comprised along racially homogenous lines. Given the importance of these shared public spaces to the act of racialization (Tatum, 1997), it is worth noting that by highlighting the lunch table in my story, I am in some sense remembering Terrell as being “not all that black”
that I remember him in a way as “acting white.” Here is a cruel obverse to my conclusion from question two: I do not remember him at all from my middle school gifted class, maybe because he was black; in high school, once I knew him to be smart and talented at school, I remember him as not being black enough, maybe because he was smart. Again, support in the narrative of my life-story that I once unconsciously trafficked in dangerous stereotypes pertaining to black people and intelligence, stereotypes that I never would have known I once believed
this absent the act of narrative mining. My method has enabled me to move past the barriers to autoethnography: I have not merely said what I think I believe about race; I may have discovered something heretofore unknown about myself. Behind this simple story lies something powerful; we have found here some dragons.

METHODOLOGICAL, THEORETICAL, AND PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE St. Pierre writes, “the narrative impulse cannot be privileged in post-structural research” (2009, p. 226), noting that in some sense our retroactive interpretations of events are no better than turtles all the way down. Simple stories privilege the humanistic notion of the autonomous “I”, yet I have troubled this tidy idea, discovering stereotype lurking in entirely unknown spaces. Once discovered, my bias is primed for interrogation and correction; this is the potential importance of my work, not just to me but also to the hundreds of black students I teach every year. In fact, narrative mining is an eminently imitable method, one that seems ripe for potential in the education system at large. Hillary Clinton once proposed that we retrain our nation’s police to correct implicit bias (Washington Post, 2016)
let us think big and wonder, why not

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also our nation’s teachers? Little imagination is required to picture the damage done by educators harboring racial stereotypes in front of the classroom
this whether these biases are conscious or not. Teachers do not carry weapons of iron and steel, but they are armed with the ability to impart miseducation by their pedagogy; vestigial stereotypes can contribute tacitly to an accretion of bias and racism. Keep in mind that as recently as the 2015
2016 school year 80% of public school teachers were white (U.S. Department of Education, 2017), while more than 50% of public school students have been nonwhite since the year before
a number that is predicted only to rise (Institute of Education Sciences, 2017). This gap guarantees that no matter how schools are demographically distributed, most teachers will encounter significant racial difference throughout their career; could not these delicate cross-racial relationships be bettered through the self-reflective introspection enabled by narrative mining? Let us interrogate our stories, disrupt the stability of our stated identities, and ferret out racism. A sort of aside to those who believe that an interrogation of his or her racial beliefs is unnecessary at best, insulting at worst. Critical legal studies scholar Richard Delgado writes of our society’s civil rights laws and policies as, “a sort of homeostat, assuring that the system has exactly the right amount of racism. Not too much, for that would be destabilizing, nor too little, for that would require that whites forfeit important psychic and pecuniary advantages” (1995, p. 48). According to this thinking, racism is an intentional effect of a byzantine array of structural forces; though no one individual can be blamed for such a system, we all have been inculcated into it, and thus even those of us who consider ourselves to be conscious cannot help but carry residual damage (see also Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Feagin, 2000). Narrative mining, however, has been designed to combat hidden racisms of teachers such as me, white men and women who choose to enter situations of racial difference carrying an unintentional vestige of this homeostatic institutional racism. Narrative mining provides a path for self-reflection that could prove powerful to any educator willing to delve into the unconscious forces that shape his or her pedagogy; it is a powerful tool which could enable any white teacher in a position of racial difference to self-examine and, subsequently, to enact change in his or her attitudes and actions
to militate against racial miseducation. Narrative mining matters to all white teachers of non-white students. Might we take the method one step further, take a parallel step in order to look beyond racial difference to all those in education who teach students “other” than themselves? Let us imagine what narrative mining might mean for all the students who have been othered by gender, sexuality, class, religion, or ability. In truth, all teachers operate in such a theatre, even if an individual situation is not as statistically extreme as my own
we all work with students who are different from us in some manner. I hope this will be the next step for narrative mining
to move beyond the paradigm I have set in the matter of race and push into all manner of alterity. I am calling our community both to self-reflect as well as to lead others in the practice of self-reflection; narrative mining is a

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method that can be implemented alone in a room as well as one that could prove powerful in the tight community of a pre-service program. Such examination, of course, need be done in light of the dangers inherent to autoethnography, and I will close by circling back to a further encouragement for us to interrupt the typical humanistic bent toward the stability of identity and the fidelity of self-storying. Deleuze and Guattari write that they are “opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 158); let us remember that our very identities might be nothing more than an assemblage of stories. There is some sort of “there” there, of course
we who oppose scientism are not opposed to organs
but the stable identity of the organization is problematic on many levels. Specifically, it leads us to backmap too much of who we think we should be onto who we once were; it leads us to deny any truck with stereotype and bias because “that is not who I am.” Ronai (1999) writes, “ethnography exists as a kind of hymen between fiction and truth” (p. 127), and that is where we writers of the self need locate ourselves: in the liminal space between the anthropocentric fiction of stable, autonomous identity and the truth of the organs that make up our “there.” Let us both acknowledge the fluidity of our rhizomatic assemblage of an identity as well as test the threads of the stories that house us as autonomous beings. I believe narrative mining is a tool that could enable us to navigate these difficult waters.

REFERENCES Bamberg, M. (2011). Who am I? Narration and its contribution to self and identity. Theory & Psychology, 21(1), 3
24. Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (2013). Blindspot: Hidden biases of good people. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Barthes, R. (2010). Roland Barthes (R. Howard, Trans.). New York, NY: Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1975). Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Brown, T., Jones, L., & Bibby, T. (2004). Identifying with mathematics in initial teacher training. In M. Walshaw (Ed.), Mathematics education within the postmodern (pp. 161
179). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing. Butler, J. (1999). Preface. In Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity (pp. vii
xxvi). New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Delgado, R. (1995). The Rodrigo chronicles: Conversations about America and race. New York, NY: New York University Press. Derrida, J. (1978). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences (A. Bass, Trans.). In Writing and difference (pp. 278
293). Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. (Lecture delivered 1966). Feagin, J. R. (2000). Racist America: Roots, current realities, and future reparations. New York, NY: Routledge. Gannon, S. (2006). The (im)possibilities of writing the self-writing: French poststructural theory and autoethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 6(4), 474
495. Hughey, M. W. (2011). Backstage discourse and the reproduction of white masculinities. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(1), 132
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Institute of Education Sciences. (2017, May). Racial/ethnic enrollment in public schools. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cge.asp Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge (G. Bennington, & Massumi, Brian, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979). McAdams, D. P. (1996). Personality, modernity, and the storied self: A contemporary framework for studying persons. Psychological Inquiry, 7, 295
321. McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100
122. Ricoeur, P. (1974). Structure, word, event (R. Sweeney, Trans.). In The conflict ofinterpretations: Essays in hermeneutics (pp. 79
95). Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press. (Original work published 1967). Ronai, C. R. (1999). The next night sous rature: Wrestling with Derrida’s mimesis. Qualitative Inquiry, 5, 114
129. Scott, J. W. (1991). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17(4), 773
797. Steele, C. Whistling Vivaldi: How stereotypes affect us and what we can do. New York, NY: Norton, 2010. St. Pierre, E. A. (2009). Afterword: Decentering voice in qualitative inquiry. In A. Y. Jackson & L. A. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 221
236). New York, NY: Routledge. Tatum, B. D. (1997). “Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?”: And other conversations about race. New York, NY: Basic Books. U.S. Department of Education. (2017, August). Characteristics of public elementary and secondary school teachers in the United States: Results from the 2015
16 national teacher and principal survey. Retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017072.pdf Wamsted, J. O. (2012). Borges & bike rides: Toward an understanding of autoethnography. Qualitative Research in Education, 1(2), 179
201. Wamsted, J. O. (2013). A high school mathematics teacher tacking through the middle way: Toward a critical postmodern autoethnography in mathematics education. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Washington Post. (2016, September). The first Trump-Clinton presidential debate transcript, annotated. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/26/the-firsttrump-clinton-presidential-debate-transcript-annotated/

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THE LUXURY OF VULNERABILITY: REFLEXIVE INQUIRY AS PRIVILEGED PRAXIS Tricia M. Kress and Kimberly J. Frazier-Booth

ABSTRACT Since the publication of Schon’s (1984) landmark text The Reflective Practitioner, there has been a surge in research literature demonstrating reflection as an essential “best practice” for teachers. However, it often feels as if reflection is forced into our lives or we happen upon it at inopportune times, creating a contradiction of un/predictability
it is touted as crucial but afforded only particular spaces or purposes, while it sneaks into our lives at inappropriate times. From our perspective, this indicates underlying flawed modernist and humanist logics at work in conceptualizations of teacher and teachers’ work
we cannot plan on bodies in motion being predictable, and just because reflection seems located in the mind, does not mean the human is solely involved in reflection. The purpose of this chapter is to explore reflexivity as un/predictable in order to generate new possibilities and potential that are not bound by modernism’s penchant toward structure and humanism’s myopic self-awareness. Via co/autoethnography, we present individual narratives illustrating our relationships with reflexivity in various spaces of our lives. By using various types of mirrors (e.g., classic mirror, interrogation mirror, window as mirror, water as mirror) as analytical devices, we illustrate reflexivity as embodied processes that emerge un/predictably as we traverse various geotemporal
political locations and engage with other human, non-human and material bodies. By recasting reflexivity as dynamic and fluid, we raise possibilities for spontaneously incorporating reflexivity into teaching
learning and research, thereby untethering critical reflection from

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 105
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modernist and humanist logics that attempt to corral reflection into discrete activities and truncate its potential for transforming praxis. Keywords: Reflection; reflexivity; co/autoethnography; post-formalism; narrative; mirrors We come to this work from different contexts and subjectivities
a white female associate professor in an urban university and an African American female National Board Certified English Language Arts teacher in an urban high school. We have been working together for four years as professor and student in an Urban Education doctoral program, and while our points of entry into our work are different, they are conditioned similarly in a number of ways. It seems our worlds are filled with a lot of talking, a lot of doing, and very little time to stop and think. Life is loud, fast, and busy. People tweet their thoughts to the world in 280 characters or less, generate status updates, vie for likes, virtually check-in as they move about through the physical world, and reminisce via application-generated time hops.1 All this rests on the backdrop of 24-hour news feed from countless media outlets around the world. Our work as educators and researchers of education is situated in an equally loquacious and productivity driven context of neoliberal policy and reform. Tricia works in a “striving” public university squeezed by state and federal budget reductions. Kimberly works in a public high school that is continuously under scrutiny via curriculum and testing mandates like the Common Core State Standards and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System and their co-ordinating evaluation and accountability mechanisms. We feel trapped in a constant cycle of working faster with few resources but an abundance of directives. In contrast, while exploring the “best practices” literature about education we see a pervasive call for reflexivity. Loughran (2002) points out the allure of reflection2 as “a notion that rings true for most people as something useful and informing in the development and understanding” of teaching (p. 33). According to Pitthouse, Mitchell, and Weber (2009), reflexivity enables teachers to shed light on social and cultural issues beyond the self that have bearing on the learning environment so that they can develop pedagogical strategies that respond directly to local challenges and students’ lived realities. Zembylas (2012) cites the potential of critical emotional reflexivity for engaging in personal, small-scale forms of activism through one’s teaching practice. For Kincheloe (2011), developing critical ontology through reflexive inquiry within one’s teaching practice is essential for embodying the dispositions of a social justice educator. And, according to Delpit (2012), critical self/other knowledge building in K-12 classrooms is particularly important for the empowerment of youth whose life experiences are marginalized or devalued in school settings and the larger society. Yet, as reflection has settled into the lexicon of common sense for improving teaching and educational research practice, researchers like Gemignani (2016) and Smyth (1992) also note its limitations, particularly when situated on the backdrop of an inequitable social and educational landscape. Reflection that simply seeks out technical fixes could perpetuate inequality by

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allowing researchers and educators to ignore systemic social inequities that perpetuate disadvantage in broader ways than can be addressed by tweaking classroom pedagogy and curriculum. As English teachers and writers of “intimate scholarship,” we find ourselves in a conundrum
intrinsically, we believe there is value in affording ourselves and our students opportunities for reflexivity. We have experienced moments of epiphany ourselves through reflection and reflexive writing. Yet, reflexivity often feels like it only happens when it is forced into our lives or we happen upon it accidentally at inopportune times when we are supposed to be doing something else. It is difficult to be reflexive in any systematic way. When we have a chance to reflect and be vulnerable to ourselves about our practice, like we are doing here, it feels like a luxury. To compound our unease, in our classrooms we require reflexive assignments from our students because supposedly reflexive writing is good for students’ learning, but students often submit what appear to be inauthentic writings in an effort to earn a grade. We suspect there is something ideological and structural in the contemporary moment that creates this contradiction
reflexivity is touted as ideal, but only afforded or sanctioned in particular spaces and for particular purposes, often with less than ideal results. Reflexivity is privileged as best practice but deprivileged when it is not performed for predetermined professional or academic ends. To us, this indicates the trappings of humanist logics that seek to contain and control complex and unpredictable human-world activity (Braidotti, 2013). It further reveals the ways in which humanist conceptualizations of reflective practice, including intimate scholarship about education, operate as technologies (Petitfils, 2015) that utilize reflexivity as yet another driver of “progress” in which the individual human is the center of the world. Paradoxically, while reflexivity is ostensibly useful for transforming teaching and learning in positive ways, it also reinscribes status quo conceptualizations of teaching and learning by operating like a mirror image against which the teacher or student can examine himself or herself to check for alignment with prescribed ideals of what it means to be a teacher or learner
indeed, even just a participant in the social and natural world. In this chapter, we take up this dilemma: reflexivity is commonly understood as a good thing, but it is often utilized in ways that limit rather than expand human potential. In the following sections, by utilizing the metaphor of reflection as mirror and unpacking the ways in which mirrors as objects of reflection are never neutral or static, we build a complex framework through which to examine our own autoethnographic reflections about reflexivity and teaching. In doing so, we problematize reflexivity in education and educational research as forging particular predetermined teacher
researcher identities and practices. We further argue that in order for reflexivity to become more than a tool that reinforces sameness by affording a human-centric view of the self in relation to social and professional norms, reflexivity can be recast as an event, a spontaneous coalescing of worldly entities that generate conditions that have reflective potential for people. In this way, the reflecting person is not the center of the world, but a co-participant with/in the material world. Reflection-as-event destabilizes commonsense notions of how reflection is included in teaching and

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learning spaces, and it implores educators to loosen their grip on the trajectory of learning activities to allow students and themselves to take advantage of reflective events as they arise.

EXHUMING THE GHOSTS OF HUMANISM IN THE MIRROR Tricia: I have found myself acutely aware of reflections these days. It happened by accident when I was rocking my son to sleep, gazing out at my garden daydreaming, and the light hit the window just right so I could see a ghost of our reflection transposed on the world outside. Some days, I reflect on my work while drying my hair in front of the mirror, seeing my physical features or the room behind me or maybe nothing at all but the thoughts in my head. Recently, I caught my 2-year old son playing pretend, zipping around the kitchen in a little yellow car with a bike helmet on. He kept ramming into my heels trying to get in front of the oven to see his reflection in the glass door. On another occasion, we saw our reflection on a sunny day out at a lake. We leaned over the edge of the dock looking for fish, and there we were, a rippling shadow in the water. Reflections, it turns out, are everywhere and seem to happen at any time, whether or not we seek them out. Perhaps, then, there is nothing particularly unique or important about reflecting aside from the meaning we assign to it. Kimberly: For nearly 15 years I worked at the local science museum as an exhibit instructor during youth sleepovers. Housed in the light exhibit is a twoway mirror. Museum patrons are invited to investigate the mirror with a friend seated on the opposite side. As the pair adjusts the lighting, the image of the individual is altered. If the lighting is just right, the facial features are blended so that neither face is distinct. If a kid is with an adult, sometimes a parent’s heavier brow may influence the composite. Other features, like eyes, may become indistinguishable. When this perfect balance is achieved, the observers become obsessed with trying to reclaim their individual characteristics. The experiment provides each participant with controls that allow for turning the lights so low that the glass becomes completely transparent, so high that only the controller is visible, or to any degree in between, so one or the other in the pair is more dominant. How observers approach the mirror is often a result of the visitors who explored the exhibit before them. On a crowded day the experiment might not be returned to a neutral setting, and the seated pair may approach the task after watching previous partners work through the task. If the exhibit is empty when the pair approaches, they may be more diligent, reading through the posted instructions. Control is therefore dictated in part by whomever has come before. As the task is dependent on pairs, explorers bereft of a partner have no way to access the experiment while trios must negotiate a turn-taking protocol. Authors like Fendler (2003) and Smyth (1992) have noted the proliferation of reflexivity in the literature about best practices in education. They also encourage caution because there are particular assumptions embedded in this literature.

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First, despite the vast body of literature that exists about reflective practice, there seems to be very little educational reform that actually stems from reflective practice (Fendler, 2003). Second, by continually highlighting reflection as something that practitioners and researchers should do, there is an embedded assumption that educators are not reflective about their work and must be shown how to be reflective (Kress, 2011). Third, there is a tendency in the research literature to limit what counts as reflective practice by generating hierarchical taxonomies of reflective activities, some of which are regarded as productive for improving practice and some that are not (Glasswell & Ryan, 2017). Fourth, if we position the rise of reflective practice as “best practice” within a timeline, we can see that there have been calls for reflective practice at least as far back as John Dewey at the turn of the twentieth century (Fendler, 2003), but the calls for reflexivity have hastened over the past 40 years alongside the proliferation of standardization, testing and accountability policies. While this may be coincidental, researchers like Smyth (1992) assert this is symptomatic of a larger trend of domesticating and deskilling educators under the guise of “empowerment” because reflexivity is used as a tool for accomplishing technocratic ends like increasing students’ test scores. Fendler (2003) further explains, […] the popularity of reflection in educational research and practice is supported by a variety of constituents including conservative, radical, feminist, and Deweyan. Supporting arguments for reflection are so widespread and divergent that they often contradict each other. (p. 17)

We believe this is because the various groups identified by Fendler espouse different reasons for why educators should be reflexive, but they are bound together by a common humanist epistemology and the presuppositions that come along with that. In all cases, reflexivity is like looking at yourself in the mirror and altering your appearance to accord with an ideal image that you wish to project and (ostensibly) embody. To disentangle reflexivity from humanist and modernist purposes to which it is often tied in education and educational research, we respond to postformalism’s urging to defamiliarize the commonsensical by examining it from different angles and in novel ways. One way to do this is by utilizing metaphors as analytic devices that are close enough to the original idea to be recognizable, but far enough away so as to blur the edges of the image and allow for new interpretations, similar to the act of gazing at an impressionist painting from different distances or looking into and turning a kaleidoscope (Thomas & Kincheloe, 2006). We have opted to use the metaphor of multiple mirrors to aid us in our analysis because the mirror is a commonly used image for thinking about reflection, but it can also be made strange by (1) deepening and broadening how we think about the history, role and function of mirrors in Western societies, and (2) diversifying the types of mirror-like surfaces that may be considered useful for analyzing reflection from anti-humanist and posthumanist perspectives. Our aim is not to define reflexivity by creating classifications of reflective mirrors or reflective practices, but rather to generate a robust and complex understanding that may afford unpredictable and transformative possibilities.

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As we think about mirrors and their uses, some of the same types of humanist patterns emerge. Mirrors are recursively connected to humans’ interactions and relationships with societal norms and structures. Mudde (2015), in her examination of the role of mirror as metaphor in Western philosophy, traces how mirrors emerged concurrently with Cartesianism in Western Europe. Despite common assumptions that mirrors reflect a direct, unaltered image of the self, the technology serves as a handy mechanism for perpetuating social norms and structures, including social inequalities. For one, household mirrors were initially accessible only to wealthy people, which automatically linked the technology to class stratification. Once they became more commonplace, they afforded many people, not just the wealthy, a means by which to self-examine their physical appearance and engage in self-comparisons such that they could determine whether and how their appearance reflected proper decorum and social location at the time. In this regard, a mirror is a normative device, and the act of looking in the mirror is never neutral. It is always already imbued with the meanings people assign to personhood in society. Mudde (2015) elaborates on this point as follows: [M]irrors do not do what we have learned to think they do, and rather than being tools of private, direct and clear self-access to a free and self-constituted self, they are better understood as complexly and socially mediated, their use of being social all the way down. The experience of being mirrored is a way of accessing indirect, highly mediated, and ambiguous selves, knowable only with others. (p. 540)

In Western philosophy, the act of reflecting has long been tied to the metaphor of the mirror, and is likewise weighted by the same Cartesian baggage. If we assume that reflection is a direct and objective link to self-knowledge and self-awareness and knowledge is a reflection of the world rather than an interpretation or construction of a particular situated experiencing of the world, we buy into Cartesian dualism that has shaped Western philosophy for centuries and likewise informs common conceptualizations of teaching and learning in U.S. public schooling. That is, from a Cartesian point of view, the mind is independent from the body, and knowledge and truth exist independently of humans’ experiences in and interpretations of the world. Therefore, the mirror affords the knower a certain distance that allows the knower to gaze at the self as an object even while still being a knowing subject. This is a very specific way of thinking about what a mirror is and does; there is a “confidence that knowers can ‘ground’ themselves and their knowledge, on their own, through a suitably refined and rigorous reflexive (self-reflective) method, producing the ‘complete freedom’ of being an unassuming reflector
an objective knower” (Mudde, 2015, p. 543). This notion of “freedom” is deeply ingrained in Western epistemology and affords humans the ability to think of themselves as independent from but central to the material world, while maintaining a sense of transcendence over all other earthly non-human things. Moreover, the closer one is to embodying the ideal image of “rational Man”, the more central and transcendent one becomes, thus maintaining a superior position within a stratified social and material world. This is an epistemology built on tenets of realism,

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universalism, and individualism (Braidotti, 2013), all concepts that support and feed into the contemporary neoliberal educational policy climate in the US. In other words, whether you are checking your make-up in a mirror or gazing reflectively into your soul, there is an assumption that you are gazing only at yourself independent of anything or anyone else and that what you see is an unmediated picture of the “real” you. Reflective practice that aligns with this type of mirror, therefore serves a humanist normative end and cannot become much more than a tool for furthering the status quo because it is assumed to be value-neutral and separate from human subjectivity. This is likely why there is a proliferation of literature about reflective practice but little movement toward transformative education reform because of it. The literature about reflexivity in education largely parallels the Western trend of drawing an analogy between the acts of reflecting and mirror-gazing, as much of it is informed by humanist epistemology that typifies Western ideology. It is common to see authors using mirrors as metaphors for making sense of reflexivity for gazing at the self in order to improve the self. For example, Lesham and Trafford (2006) refer to teachers’ stories as mirrors. Fendler (2003) describes the many different interpretations of (teacher) reflection as a “hall of mirrors” (p. 16). And Knowles (1993) refers to teachers’ life-histories as mirrors. However, the humanist rendering of reflections and mirrors, even those that come from oppositional worldviews (e.g., feminist theories; critical theories) constitutes a very intentional way of reflecting. In Mudde’s (2015) words, humanist mirror gazing involves: standing-before a large mirror, staring hard at oneself. This idea of reflection makes it easy to forget the ubiquity of mirrors or other reflective surfaces—such as wall-coverings, windows, computer screens, to name a few—which we do not engage as tools of self-appraisal or correction, in which we ‘catch’ ourselves in passing, and which constitute much of our daily access to universal-particular, embodied selves. (p. 552)

Typical conceptualizations of reflective practice, therefore, tend to overlook other possible ways of being reflective because of the epistemological blinders inherited from Enlightenment humanism. Furthermore, we would add, an additional assumption about mirrors truncates this metaphor’s power
that the mirror is for gazing only at a singular, unified self. As we discuss in the following sections, mirrors produce many selves and can be used to direct our gaze in many directions, toward different objects, sometimes with ourselves in view, but sometimes askew with ourselves as by standers in a larger landscape. As is apparent in our narrative reflections at the beginning of this section, mirrors need not be static and fixed. As Kimberly’s reflection shows, they may be worked on in partnership with or overlapping upon others, influenced by those who came before and influencing those who come after with the technology itself mediating everything via lighting and form. As Tricia’s reflection shows, reflections can be ubiquitous, unexpected, distorted, or secondary to the larger context in which they appear. Reflection then can be much more than a flat, glossy surface hanging on the wall waiting to feed humanistic self-indulgence and narcissism. If we decouple reflection from the humanistic image of the stationary

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looking glass, it has potential as a means of decentering ourselves and disallowing reflection from being yet another humanist technology used in the name of efficiency and progress.

MOVING THROUGH MIRRORS: REFLECTION AND MULTIPLICITOUS SELVES Kimberly: As a high school teacher I frequently task my students with writing texts that reflect the self. By virtue of being assigned, this becomes a display of thought. The most common task I assign my 11th graders is the college essay. Not only am I asking students to reveal themselves to me, their teacher, they are revealing themselves to a panel of strangers who will decide if they are worthy of acceptance into their university. The process is revelatory. Many students have never reviewed their lives in any formal way. With a modest awareness of audience, students look for stories to recount, but are influenced, I suspect, by hegemonic tropes of urban life on TV, in print, and elsewhere; students look for compelling stories to earn their admissions rather than compelling realizations. The latter is the luxury of self-writing. Students who keep diaries will be in the habit of looking inward. But in our overscheduled worlds where students go from class to homework to work to caring for siblings to […] well, there’s not a lot of time to sit and write diaries. So public writing becomes the sensational–who I saw, what I ate, my “status” at the moment. Like my students, I tend to log my look at self only when assigned. Not counting my numerous one-page diaries, started in a moment of literary flourish; as a teacher, mother, wife, student, community member, my best intentions fall to sleep in an exhausted heap, unveiling themselves at worst in tortured dreams, at best during my morning shower. Tricia: As a doctoral professor, I typically assign at least one or two reflective assignments in my classes, and sometimes I require students to reflect also within the parameters of mid-term and final papers, even as they are assigned other tasks like examining literature or theory in those assignments. Everything about “best practices” in my primary areas of expertise (autoethnography and teacher development) says that reflexivity is important, necessary in fact because if you aren’t engaging in reflexivity, you cannot possibly improve upon what you do. Sometimes I get pushback– many of my students haven’t had to reflect like this in years, and some don’t want to and don’t see value in it. Selfdisclosure can be challenge for some because they don’t want to be vulnerable in front of others in their writing. Academic discourse and practices can serve as armor for these students. Still, stripping away that armor is important for the authenticity of their research. Since all my students are practitioners, they all are deeply invested in the outcomes of their research. These possible conflicts of interest need to be unearthed to strengthen the quality of their research. As I reflect on an encounter of this type I experienced in my first year teaching doctoral students, I can still see a paper that my student wrote to fulfill a reflexive assignment. He turned my assignment against me by, in his words, refusing

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to “drink the Kool-Aid” and “sing Kumbaya”. In his flippant sarcasm, he dialed the light on my side of the mirror up high and his own down low. This forced me to be reflexive about my demand for reflexivity, and now, I reflect again […] To what extent was his refusal a way of maintaining sovereignty over his own reflexivity? By refusing to reflect upon himself, he forced the mirror back at me instead. In writing this chapter, we embarked on a co-autoethnographic exploration of reflexivity. As Taylor and Coia (2012) explain, co-autoethnography allows us to take seriously that as educators and educational researchers, we are people “in context and in relation” (p. 277), and it allows through individual and cowriting, dialogue and dialogic analysis, a way to examine self with and in relation to another in the world. It also allows for examining complexity as we think together about our histories, our presents, and our multiple selves as professionals, mothers, wives, siblings, friends, and community members. It is limited, however, because of the humanist epistemology underlying this tradition. Even with two selves present in the research process, there is always at least one self at the center, and the methodology tends toward reductionism in that it looks for sameness or a coming together of common understanding. To remedy this limitation, we were also inspired by Bozalek and Zembylas’s (2017) urging to decenter our selves by “highlighting the entanglement of material-discursive phenomena in the world […] [In order to draw forth] a relational ontology, an ongoing process in which matter and meaning are co-constituted” (p. 2). This implied reading our narratives through multiple lenses for multiple interpretations and being attuned to more than just the inner workings of the humanist gaze in order to open up creative possibilities for becoming. Over the span of six months, we generated approximately a dozen narratives in which we think about reflexivity in our lives. Specifically, we attended to the following questions: • When does reflexivity happen for us as teachers and learners inside and outside of our work lives? • Under what conditions do we reflect or ask our students to reflect? What happens in these moments? What does the experience look, feel, sound like? • What contextual, personal, interpersonal and emotional factors are at play? • What can this tell us about what reflexivity might become when thought of outside of the boundaries of humanist logics? • How do posthumanist possibilities for reflexivity inform our understanding of intimate scholarship? After writing our narratives and sharing them with each other, we engaged in several dialogues that triggered additional reflections in the context of our discussions. We began to notice that despite what we believed about reflective practice, reflection rarely took place as it was “supposed to.” Sometimes, reflection happened in ways that forced ruptures in our ways of thinking and being, and the most pervasive reflexive activities in both our lives were unscripted, undocumented and fleeting. We compared this to “model” examples of reflexivity in

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literary texts (e.g., The Diary of a Young Girl; Frank, 2015; Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass; Douglass, 2009; Live from Death Row; Abu-Jamal, 1996) and considered how published expressions of reflection contributed to our understandings of reflexivity as literary tradition, product and process. We then turned to our metaphor of multiple mirrors to consider reflexivity in relation to humanist, anti-humanist and posthumanist lenses; we examined reflexivity in process by positioning our lived realities within multiple lenses. We began to see that our personal and professional experiences with reflexivity varied widely for us as individuals and in comparison to each other. There seemed to be no predictable patterns in the reflections themselves, but we did share certain experiences while reflecting: (1) context was always significant to the act of reflecting, (2) reflexivity could be productive as well as disruptive, sometimes simultaneously, and (3) reflexivity is tied to complex emotions that emerge in response to the reflection itself, the context(s) of the reflection, and interpersonal relationships connected to the reflection. Considering reflexivity as contextual, productive/disruptive to human-centric ways of knowing and being in the world, and imbued with emotion illuminates how a relational ontology and affective dimensions of knowing (Braidotti, 2013) are fundamental to recasting reflexivity as an event. Moreover, reflection was not something we typically felt compelled to control as we moved through the world. Instead, reflective moments would arise, and we would engage in reflecting for as long as the world around us allowed without any specific purpose attached to how or why we were reflecting. In other words, there was no prescribed end to reflection. There was never a “to be done” in response to what we reflected about. Reflection just happened, and it ran as a train of thought through many topics as we moved in concert with the world around us. For instance, in one of Tricia’s narratives, reflexivity emerged as both an interruption and an inspiration. I have moments of reflexivity while I am commuting, trying to get “real” work done and suddenly I find myself jotting down ideas or sometimes just willing my mind to hold onto them and never forget while I redirect myself to the task at hand. Sometimes I catch myself scratching down a few thoughts in the middle of a faculty meeting or scribbling words on the inner cover of a text I am supposed to be reading. A few months ago I scratched out an entire poem on the inside cover of C.W. Mills’s (1967) Sociological Imagination.

In this example, material context is significant to the process of reflexivity in multiple ways. Reflexivity emerged not just in Tricia’s mind, but in particular locations (on a plane, in a conference room), and the reflections themselves were intimately tied to the activities and material conditions in those spaces. This aligns with Snaza and Weaver’s (2015) assertion that, “embodiment
material, affective, finite
proves to be of greater importance (ontologically) than consciousness” (p. 5). In this case, the subject of the poem was time and included an image of a handprint on a window (like the one on the plane).The material context paired with Tricia’s prior cultural knowledge allowed for a spontaneous moment of reflexivity that was not “on task” but was, ironically, related to the social constructions of being on task and timely with work, indeed, with time

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itself, but this moment of reflection would never have taken place under other material conditions. While the above example detailed a pleasant encounter with spontaneous reflexivity, often reflexivity was uncomfortable, laced with feelings of embarrassment, chagrin, shame, and even anger. For instance, Kimberly noted how sometimes the “stuff in our heads just comes out” verbally and in thoughtless ways that emotionally affects you and those around you. Tricia recounted her embarrassing history with “daydreaming” in classes or in meetings and getting caught by a teacher or authority figure. In one example, one of Tricia’s past professors shared with her his memory of her as “either dreaming in class or writing things down that had nothing to do with the contents of the class session.” As another example, one of Kimberly’s narratives details an encounter she had with a colleague at work when Kimberly made an offhanded but charged comment that forced a rupture in what she had previously assumed was a close friendly relationship. Following this incident, Kimberly was prompted to consider how her own culture and experiences with talking about race as a Black American in a highly race conscious city like Boston were not equivalent to the experiences of an African colleague from a largely Muslim country. Tricia recalled a time when she was a novice teacher and an African American student in her class gave her the book Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977). That gift triggered a moment of reflexivity when Tricia had the embarrassing realization that her course syllabus reflected a nearly all white literary canon. It included no texts by African American authors, despite there being a sizable number of African American students who attended the college where she worked. In both of these last two examples, the reflexivity triggered by the incidents has had a lasting effect that reverberates in our minds and bodies. Kimberly’s experience took place just this past year and is tender to her in part because it reveals how much fear and uncertainty about “others” can so easily surface when the lighting is “just right”, even when one has experienced marginalization herself. Tricia’s experience took place 17 years ago, but she still has that book on her bookshelf, and her reflections about race, invisible whiteness, and privilege, while no longer painful, still continue to emerge largely because of that event. As a final point of analysis, while our narratives were in general quite different, both of us when writing about the ways we include reflexivity as a pedagogy with our students wrote about a moment when reflexivity was “refused” or “resisted” by our students. Tricia’s reflection is included at the beginning of this chapter. For Kimberly, “refusal” would happen in various ways, like a student “forgetting” to complete an assignment, completing an assignment in a superficial way, or a flat out refusal by a student who either sees no value in the assignment or thinks the time is better spent on something else. To us, these incidents deftly illustrate the extent to which reflexivity, when brought into a structured learning space, can become highly artificial. Interestingly, when reflective activities were tied to assigned grades, students would be more compelled to complete them, even if superficially (in Kimberly’s case) or sarcastically (in Tricia’s case). Kimberly’s reflection also noted how students were less likely to complete these types of activities unless they were tied to a grade. Some savvy

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students even calculate how much influence each assignment has on their overall grade, choosing only to complete “high value” tasks. In this regard, reflection when tied to the structures of schooling could be understood as what Petitfils (2015) calls a “technology of production” (p. 39) that limits what students produce in the classroom. Anything that falls outside the confines of the prescribed curriculum and standards becomes off limits and anything that falls outside of graded assignments is devalued. The narratives also demonstrate students’ awareness of these structures and their expectations and rules, with a few students feeling empowered enough to transform this “technology of production” into a “technology of self” that can serve as an individual site of resistance (Petitfils, 2015, p. 39). This gives credence to our prior supposition that the breakdown in reflexivity for education and educational research lays in the inability to capture or contain reflexivity within humanist logics, and it points even more strongly to the need to recast the role of reflexivity in modernist schooling and research about education. If instead reflexivity is thought of as an event, a coalescing of entities in the world that gives rise to an opportunity to engage in a reflective moment that, under the right conditions, is potentially useful for accomplishing human goals, it is no longer a humanist technology of production and progress toward a preordained man-made future. This means that reflectivity becomes a disruptive and transformative force that has potential for bringing forth new ontologies and epistemologies that can destabilize oppressive humanist structures that place parameters around what constitutes “humanness” and therefore, what constitutes what it means to be a teacher, learner or researcher in a posthuman world.

THE LUXURY OF VULNERABILITY: REFLEXIVITY-ASEVENT WITHIN THE CRACKS OF HUMANISM Tricia: One day, I made a note for myself on my cellphone. It was one word, “taproot”, but as I think about it now, I know exactly what it meant to me in that moment. Even as I write this, I am for the first time a struggling autoethnographer who refuses to allow my whole self to be fully present in my work. Part of me doesn’t want to be vulnerable, because there are some things that are too deep and important for me to share. Just translating that embodied knowledge into words would alter what it is for me and how I experience it. Sharing it would be like severing a plant’s taproot from the earth. My mind wanders back to that idea every time I am faced with a choice to bring this part of my life into my work. Kimberly: In the college essay assignment, students must balance the expectations of the grading teacher, while simultaneously reflecting what they think the admissions counselors “want”. What students craft is an assignment, not really reflective, not truly revelatory, despite the degree of truth within. There is a little self, but the lighting is on the audience and rarely does the writing discern what the college can do for the student. This is not unusual for writing “on display”. A coffeeshop friend of mine asked me to review his college essay for Columbia University. The first draft was not unlike those of my students, and even the polished essay did

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little more than offer a cursory nod to why Columbia was his first choice. Yet in my own self- writing the lighting is on full blast–like the visitor at the two-way mirror/light exhibit who has no partner. There is no need to worry about the person on the other side of the mirror, save when that person is my future self, gazing back through the lighting of time. Even then, I may adjust the lighting so that I am only looking at my current self. Snaza and Weaver (2015) explain, “it is impossible to think, criticize, and write about a system except from inside it. One must always inhabit the discourse one wishes to throw into question” (p. 3). We have found this to be especially challenging when thinking about reflexivity, which is a self-centering activity, within typical structures of schooling that are underpinned by humanist logics and modernist conceptualizations of teaching and learning. Knowledge is presumed to be something that resides in the brain, and rational individual consciousness is sovereign and separate from the rest of the world and from the body itself. This is the legacy of Enlightenment humanism, which is woven into the very fabric of formal education in the USA, from the division of subjects to the hierarchical relationships between teacher and student to the designing of standardized curriculum and the execution of pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2012). Trapped within dualities
mind and body, knower and known
reflection becomes an instrumental practice aimed at “fixing” or “adapting” the teacher or student to external stimuli to achieve particular markers of progress. Reflection, like a glass mirror, is hence, a technology forged in the fires of humanism so that humans can manipulate themselves and the world, generating sameness, predictability, and knowability rather than privileging multiplicity, spontaneity, and unknowability (Braidotti, 2013). In the contemporary neoliberal policy climate, schooling can be deadening, if not necrophilic (Kress & Patrissy, 2014) as the machinery of progress becomes all consuming. To us, this speaks to the feeling of luxury we refer to at the beginning of this chapter, when reflexivity for reflexivity’s sake or for one’s own purposes not attached to prescribed norms of academic or professional labor, or even the structures of society itself, seems to be precious, rare, and indulgent. The context of school will only allow for a certain degree of genuine reflection that we as teachers will be able to access. The same can be said about reflexivity in research. As trained researchers, we are well aware of what sound research should look like. We also know that reflexivity should ensure that our research is sound because it makes us accountable for upholding the traditions of “high quality” research. However, we always make choices about what and how much to share of our inner thoughts because making ourselves vulnerable in forums where judgment is the norm (e.g., graded assignments, peer review processes, publication for an audience) can be dangerous. Self-censorship is also inevitable, though sometimes unintentional or unwitting, because at times the things we reflect upon and the ways we reflect don’t fit neatly into typical methods of ensuring research quality. In texts like Walden (Thoreau, 1910) and Self-reliance (Emerson, 2010), we have been exposed to the romantic humanist notion of the reflective independent

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man standing at the edge of a precipice looking at the world below. Conversely, we also know the trope of the prolific writer whose mind is free while his or her body is imprisoned or exiled, the one who looks at the world from inside-out or outside-in (Antonio Gramsci, Nawal El Saadawi, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Paulo Freire). In his autobiography, Malcolm X (Malcolm & Haley, 1964) talks of how his time of learning in prison was a time where he felt truly free. In the confines of prison he had time
took the time
to reflect. All of these reflections, however, delimit the parameters of what we recognize as self-knowledge that is worth knowing. In the first example, despite the ideal of transcending the world even as one stands within it, this is a highly artificial and unrealistic vision of personhood, like a carefully positioned looking glass. In the second instance, people have been violently extracted from context and cast out or detained in suspended animation. Here, we see ghostly reflections of the self, transposed on the world, like the ones we see on windowpanes separating us from the inside or outside of a building. All of these examples underscore the realization that our self is the only thing in the world that we cannot look at without the aid of reflective technology, which means there can never be a complete, unmediated rendering of the self. As Mudde (2015) so astutely explains, the inherent complexity of the relationship between selves and their mirror images, a complexity mediated by social location, historical situation, and particular projects—that is, being with other subjects and objects—points to significant spaces of unknowing, of indeterminacy, and of ontological ambiguity. (p. 542)

Upon reflecting intentionally and for an audience, we have already changed the reflection by filtering it through language, culture, positionality and medium of distribution. As we consider our interactions with our students and our own reflections in professional development spaces and research sites, the artificial types of reflection that “count” for reflexivity within these structures are perhaps the least important and least prevalent moments of reflexivity in our lives. At the same time, we do have students who find the reflective activities we assign to be luxurious. For Kimberly, even as there are students who resist, there are also students who are eager to connect with their teacher by sharing intimate stories because they have never or rarely before had an opportunity to do so. And for Tricia, even as some students refuse to “drink the Kool-Aid,” others choose to write autoethnographic dissertations. These students find connection with their research participants and empowerment as academics and professionals while conducting intimate scholarship in which their complex self-knowledge is valued while it is discounted within their workplaces. Finally, we cannot assume when students refuse to reflect for us or when reflection does not neatly fit into the parameters of “research quality controls” that reflexivity does not take place or should not count. Reflection can be unexpected, irregular, fleeting, or shattered into multiple contradictory ideas, but we can choose which reflections should count and be put on display and which we can tuck away or discard or stumble upon

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later. It is from within these unexpected, omnipresent places, the “cracks” within modern humanist logics, where sometimes the reflection is most incomprehensible but also most honest. Still, if we push further against the cracks in the humanist foundation, we can begin to recognize reflection-as-event and reconsider our classrooms and research endeavors as possible venues where worldly entities might converge to afford conditions ripe for reflexivity. Then, we can also think of reflection as a different sort of luxury, not something that can or should be hoarded or bartered but rather a momentary indulgence or stroke of good fortune. From this perspective, reflexivity becomes something akin to the warmth of the sun streaming through the window of an atrium, inviting you to sit, turn your face skyward and close your eyes while your body relaxes into the ground. Alternatively, it could be the cold breeze that gusts toward you, causing you to suck in your breath, startling you awake just when you were about to step into the path of another passer-by. Whether it is comforting or startling, a place we wish we could visit indefinitely or a time that we wish would never happen again, it is not an object for us to keep, control, or mass-produce. Therefore, it is always precious, rare, and valuable, in other words, a luxury. As we think, then, about the implications for our classrooms and our research, there is luxury, too, in feeling able to “let go” and not be compelled to participate in the machinations of humanist epistemology that assumes that everything, even our spontaneous, innermost thoughts, ought to be a commodity or a tool for “growth”. Reflection-as-event implores us and those we work with to remain open to partaking in reflection as worldly entities coalesce and invite us to participate. These invitations, especially if they do not match the pacing guide or the research goals for the day, are luxurious for the very fact that they can never be prescribed or duplicated. They are once, only now, never again, and the emotion or knowledge or growth that emerges from those moments is life beyond the imaginings of humanism.

NOTES 1. “Time hops” are Facebook users’ archived posts of photos or videos that the website presents back to the user as “memories” that can be reposted and shared with others on Facebook. 2. In this chapter we shuttle between the terms reflection and reflexivity because we see these as inter-related but distinguishable actions. Pillow (2015), drawing from ChiseriStrater (1996) explains that reflection only requires a self and not an Other. Reflexivity is more dynamic requiring a relationship between self, Other, and truth, leading to a form of transcendence. Pillow challenges this conceptualization by adding a critical lens, encouraging “reflexivities of discomfort” (Pillow, 2015, p. 421). Our notion of reflexivity is similar, but links the notions together. One can reflect without being reflexive, but one cannot be reflexive without reflecting. For us, this is akin to Freire’s (2000) notion of praxis; action informed by critical reflection of self, Other and world informs future action. Hence, reflexivity, like praxis can be thought of as a continuous spiraling forward while also looking backward. Reflection is more solitary and does not, on its own, require movement.

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14). New York, NY: Routledge. Taylor, L., & Coia, M. (2012). What do you mean you’re a feminist?: A co/autoethnographic selfstudy of feminist pedagogy. In J. R. Young, L. B. Erickson & S. Pinnegar (Eds.), Extending inquiry communities: Illuminating teacher education through self-study (pp. 276
279). Proceedings from the Ninth International Conference on Self Study of Teacher Education Practices. Provo, UT. Thomas, P. L., & Kincheloe, J. (2006). Reading, writing and thinking: The postformal basics. Rotterdam: Sense. Thoreau, H. D. (1910). Walden. Cambridge, MA: The University Press. Zembylas, M. (2012). Mobilizing ‘implicit activisms’ in schools through practices of critical emotional reflexivity. Teaching Education, 24(1): 84
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THE RHIZOMES OF ACADEMIC PRACTICE: CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE STUDENTS NEGOTIATING LEARNING AND BELONGING Radha Iyer

ABSTRACT Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students enrolled in a Masters program at an Australian university are often invisible or less visible in class; however, what is visible is their academic practice, which is often viewed as a deficit. Instead of comprehending how CALD students can become productive members of a community, research regularly examines ways to upgrade their academic literacy practices. This study contends that these students have much to offer, and if these students are to be considered valuable members of the higher education context, the learning community needs to perceive their difference as positive. This implies going beyond the institutional assessment of their academic practice as a deficit and examining spaces of learning as rhizomatic. Drawing on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari, this study highlights how the process of becoming for the students and the teacher teaching them is never static, but is one constituted of deterritorialization and subsequent reterritorialization, resulting in the rhizomatic principle of variegated subjectivity. A hybrid self-study and critical ethnography, the study entailed collecting and analysing data through a five-stage process of collection, observation, categorising, and analysis. Data collected over two years illustrated how, for the researcher/teacher, molecular level difference was possible within the molar level academic expectations. Themes of being and becoming and

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rhizomatic reimaginations demonstrated the desire of the students to achieve as a positive attempt to celebrate their difference and, for the researcher, her academic positionality as a fluid, ongoing process where the molar and the molecular interact to illustrate teaching as a productive venture. Keywords: Culturally and linguistically diverse students; critical ethnography; self-study of teacher education practices; Deleuze & Guattari; rhizome; deterritorialization To teach and learn in present times means being aware of the performative culture that pervades higher education. This performative, audit culture of the academia demands adaptable, autonomous, and self-managing learners (see Ball, 2003). However, we can move beyond such self-managerial discourses if we recognize that, although we “belong to these apparatuses,” what matters is both how we position ourselves and “what we are in the process of becoming” (Deleuze, 1992b, p. 164). This chapter applies Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizomatic processes of becoming to demonstrate how teaching and learning in diverse contexts are assemblages of practice, affect, and desire that produce agency endowed with multiplicity and heterogeneity. Drawing on a methodology of self-study of teacher education practice (S-STEP; Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2014), I conducted a Deleuzian analysis of data gathered over two years with culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) Masters in Education students in a unit I taught at a local Australian university. I adopted S-STEP as it allowed me, as a researcher, to engage in a constant reflexive process to examine the pedagogic subjectivities that my students and I were experiencing. Instead of an objective stance examining the learning of students, this study examines my practice and context to analyze the lived experiences of myself as an academic as well as the real-world experiences of my students from a rhizomatic perspective. In the predominantly Eurocentric settings of western academia, CALD, as well as pedagogically diverse, students are at the receiving end of the highly academic-oriented literacy and pay a high price both financially and subjectively just to get through their course. In the educational field, the unexpected is always on the horizon for these students as new causalities arise due to the unfamiliar and new ways of learning that they are expected to adopt. The students experience a struggle between institutional demands and individual knowledge as they attempt to excel academically. Within this context, my emergent self as a researcher/teacher demanded a decentering, a move away from the normative conception of the institutional voice, to instead become part of the diverse assemblage of my class and my students. Significantly, the study examines how the academic threshold became a site of fluid, rhizomatic transformations to identity and subjectivity, for me as a researcher, and for my students. The next section examines the process of rhizomatic becoming that was necessary for both my students and me so that we could understand our desires, needs, and goals of teaching and learning.

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BEING AND BECOMING Teaching and learning events with CALD students do not occur linearly but are interconnections of diversity and difference constituted by heterogeneity, fluidity and, importantly, malleability. To interpret diversity and difference as positive, I found I had to shed the deficit binary perception of the academic as an institutional representative and her students as the receivers of information. Further, with my diversity as a significant factor in my teaching, I had to perceive my subject positioning as rhizomatic, one that is nomadic, “intermezzo” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 380) that is, without roots in the normative. It also implied that I had to attend to interconnections or assemblages. An assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) consists of multiplicities, of often discrete singularities arranged together, or as Nail (2017, p. 23) notes, “a set of relations between self-subsisting fragments.” I found that in constituting my subjectivity as an assemblage, I needed to deterritorialize and destabilize the given institutional academic identity as was the case for my students whose discrete and diverse learning experiences led to an openness, to reformation, to destabilization from a fixed, rigid approach to learning. Such assemblages also contribute to heterogeneous forms of becoming, which Deleuze and Guattari (1987) describe as a fluid and constant state of being where there are processes of interactions and ongoing changes to self. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), becoming is “involutionary,” where to involve is to form a block that runs its own line “between” the terms in play and beneath assignable relations; becoming is “a verb that has a consistency of its own” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 239) that assists in moving from molar lines or molar identities that determine institutional operations to molecular lines and lines of flight. Molar lines are constituted of rigid segementarities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Examples of molar lines in this study include official mandates, as well as binary perceptions about teaching and learning, or about the good and not-so-good student. These are lines that organize to control, to administer organizational procedures, and are designed to restrict desire into manageable usages and practices (see also Windsor, 2015). Subsequently, my molar identity as an academic was maintained through institutional structures and was defined through the processes of governance. As the academic, I knew I held a dominant position, neatly positioning students through institutional norms and practices. However, as an academic from a non-western, nonwhite background, my diversity placed me on the threshold of becoming that Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 293) observe is “an in-between.” The “inbetween” occurred through the slippages from the dominant positioning ascribed to a western, white academic in a western institution. These slippages led to the conditions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization like that of the wasp and the orchid (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). My situation was like the wasp which, when it interacts with the orchid, has no clear delineation of being one or the other, or of territory (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 293). As Deleuze and Guattari observe, through this interaction, the wasp takes on the characteristics of the orchid, and a becoming-orchid occurs. Similarly, for me, it

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was an ongoing transformative unfolding of becoming-other from the given institutional identity to one of becoming nomadic that became significant. As Grosz (2005, p. 4) notes, “becoming is the operation of self-differentiation, the elaboration of a difference within a thing, a quality or a system that emerges or actualizes only in duration.” This demanded molecular lines, which Deleuze and Guattari state are the individualized processes of thinking and ways of enacting that interrupt and disrupt the normative processes of being. Therefore, my effort consisted of taking the lines of flight that could go beyond particular institutional ways of being an academic; the pedagogical attempt was to assist my students to engage in molecular becoming. In this process, my study became an examination of how I comprehended the status quo and disrupted it so that change could occur. I realized that to be a productive academic, I needed to think through BwO (Body without Organs) which, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is “not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body upon which that which serves as organs […] is distributed […] in the form of molecular multiplicities” (p. 30). Thinking through BwO meant comprehending the rigid organizational codes, rules, and procedures while, at the same time, considering alternative ways of being and doing (see also Reynolds, 1998). The structured and restrictive “centred system” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 17) that subjected “the unconscious to arborescent structures” was not suited to the learning that the CALD students wanted, and I had to explore the lines of flight that were evident in their engagement with the program. Notably, it became clear that if these students were to be valuable members of the higher education context, a productive learning community where there was an acknowledgement of their diversity was required. Having a productive learning community implied perceiving difference as rhizomatic and comprehending their learning processes through a rhizomatic lens. The rhizomatic analysis, as noted by scholars (Grellier, 2013; Honan, 2007; St. Pierre, 1997), is highly relevant to education research, with Gregoriou (2004) suggesting that it provides a “minor pedagogies in education” (p. 245). Rhizomatic Becoming The rhizome denotes a tubular plant that not only grows and expands in any number of directions, but also can bring about new shoots. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) observe, the rhizome is interconnected and radically invested in difference and diversity. Further, as Colman (2010) argues, the rhizome is constituted of networked processes that are neither tracings nor a map as a fixed entity. Academic diversity as a rhizome is full of positive and negative potentialities, and depends on individual comprehension of educational practice either as a political, institutional slogan or as a portrayal of difference as positive. Significantly, for myself as a researcher, comprehending diversity as rhizomatic led me to position myself in a nomadic manner within academia and the resulting rhizomatic plane of immanence that occurred through the lived research led to deterritorialization of norms. Further, for the CALD student, a rhizomatic

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process of engaging in learning assisted in an ongoing process of multiple interconnections, where they could continually negotiate their learning modes. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) outline six characteristics of the rhizome, which help to understand the diversity and difference in learning exemplified by CALD Masters students. These include connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, assigning rupture, cartography, and decalcomania. Through the principles of connection and heterogeneity, difference is comprehended as a rhizome, as it enables the connection of diverse ideas and skills. In this study, these principles provided a theoretical lens to understand how various participants formed a learning community that assisted in producing new knowledges, new understandings, and belonging. The learning situation, like the rhizome, was “perpetually in construction or collapsing […] breaking off and starting again” (Gregoriou, 2004, p. 244), thereby allowing for deterritorialization, or the lines of flight. Ruptures and new lines of flight could only be possible when the multitude of influences led to new knowledges, which subsequently led to new educational outcomes that were also lived experiences. Engaging in such ruptures denotes the principle of multiplicity, which has “neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without changing in nature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8). Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 9) state that every rhizome “contains lines of segementarity according to which it is stratified territorialized […] as well as the line of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.” The question that confronted my students and myself was whether, through a rhizomatic process, the university system could be diffused, ruptured, to allow for new growth. The principles of cartography and decalcomania explain how learning as rhizomatic becomes a map and not a tracing. Rhizomes are about growing, and, in this study, I perceived the students as growing from novice learners to active participants and skilled students who could engage in problem-solving at every instance of their candidature in the postgraduate program. The academic learning environment is a complex site that, like the tree, has structures that invite tracing, and its “overcoding structure or supporting axis [here, the academic program], is something that comes readymade” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). My mission was to develop an openness where student and researcher ideas could counter the tree-like, stagnant normative class and thereby map out new approaches that went beyond normative stance. Associated with the rhizome is the notion of desire. Instead of a negative energy denoting lack, desire is an active force within a person that can be utilized positively and is machinic in that it encapsulates the ongoing need for production and consumption (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). In my case, the desire was to produce the best learning environment for the students, where the stimuli
such as the challenges of academic literacy faced by students
could be addressed and the abstract or fantasy could be upheld (that they would be high achievers successful in learning). Desire is situated within the social and, as Smith (2007) argues, our investment in the social system is due to our sense of lack, which results in desire being constituted of the constraints of the system (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). However, for Deleuze and Guattari (1983), lack is

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only “a countereffect” of desire, and desire is a positive aspect of humans as social beings (p. 27; see also Gao, 2013; Smith, 2007). In this study, students experienced a sense of lack when they felt they had underachieved. I also experienced lack when I saw the results of my teaching. Nevertheless, drawing on Jackson (2009, p. 169), the “voicing subject is also a desiring subject” that implied how I, through reflexive thinking, could shift from my desire for the normative, academic standpoint, or to assist my students to rupture the silence they often desired in the face of institutional demands.

METHOD This study adopts S-STEP methodology (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2014) because it allows examination of the context and self-practice. As these authors observe, speaking about experiences that result from thoughtful engagement with issues provides deep understandings based on multiple truths and multiple ways of comprehending experience. I followed Hamilton and Pinnegar’s (2014) steps to ensure a systematic process of reflection. The provocation, which is the first step in this study, was the paradox of teaching the CALD students in an environment they were unfamiliar with and where institutional procedures catered to the normative. The provocation gave rise to the research question: how might difference and diversity be positive for CALD students and the academic teaching them? The question pushed the boundaries of the ontological stance and assisted in requestioning my ontological position regarding my practice. Next, my exploration led to investigating my prior knowledge of teaching CALD students, examining my previous ideas about teaching and resources in the light of research literature. Refinement took place when my background and experience guided me to select what was worthy of being examined. I received ethical clearance and, being mindful of ethical action as requiring trustworthiness and transparency, I present the data as reported by students, along with the reflections that I maintained. In presenting the data, an essential aspect of S-STEP methodology was to invite the students to enter a shared understanding of my experiences. Using the frameworks of inquiry and analysis as provided by Pinnegar and Hamilton (2015); see also (Hamilton, 2004), the study sets out questions, the context, the research literature, methods, and forms of analysis that highlight my practice. Data Collection and Analysis As noted previously, this study occurred at a local Australian university, and I chose my Masters of Education unit as the site for study. My students in these classes were all linguistically and culturally diverse, had previous degrees and work-experiences from their countries, and often identified as global citizens due to having traveled and worked extensively. Some, however, were very young and had finished their undergraduate degree a couple of months before enrolling for Masters. The two extremes of experience and exposure in students led to this research as well as the methodology that was adopted.

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The study began in July 2015 and is ongoing and undertook pre- and post-survey and focus group interviews with international and domestic CALD students who agreed to participate in the study. The following table depicts the participants’ background and educational qualifications (Table 1). In all, there were 34 participants, and the selective data reported here draws on the pre- and postsurveys as well as the focus group or individual interview responses. The online anonymous surveys invited Likert scale responses as well as comments. The focus groups were conducted with six students in each group and those not available for focus groups were individually interviewed. Along with my reflections, interview responses were selected based on the themes that emerged from the coding and categorizing of the data based on the theory. All student responses have been provided a pseudonym to preserve confidentiality. I also engaged in dialogue, another component of S-STEP, through the constant and ongoing interactions and conversations with students and a selfreflexive critique of practice. To disrupt good sense, which Deleuze states is “ascribed to one direction only” (Deleuze, 2004, p. 75), and go beyond diversity and difference as deficit, I had to investigate data non-linearly and perceive data as open-ended (Massumi, 2002), as comprising of infinite becomings and lines of flight. I examined the data through a theoretical lens because, as Mazzei (2013, p. 107) observes, it “opens up rather than forecloses meanings,” permits stuttering and rhizomatic interconnections. In fact, the process of becoming the researcher, of becoming data to study it from within, became crucial.

THE PROCESS OF BEING AND BECOMING The data overall illustrated that most students expected the arborescent academic structure and could not imagine they could be different and be appreciated for it. Data illustrated that the process of becoming was neither natural nor a seamless process, but was fraught with dilemmas and challenges. The institution is a molar machine dictating homogenous ways of academic operations, Table 1. Name Veta

Participant Information (2015
2017).

Prior Qualification/Work Experience

Country

Name

Prior Qualification/Work Experience

Graduate/teacher, early years

Vietnam

Hui

Graduate/engineer

Malaysia

Bina

Graduate/teacher primary

Malaysia

Chiu

Graduate/teacher primary

Hong Kong

Greta

Graduate/teacher secondary

India

Semi

Graduate/banker

Singapore

Rema

Post-graduate science/college India lecturer

Hridi

Early childhood teacher

Indonesia

Ahem

Graduate/teacher secondary

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia

Jess

Graduate/teacher primary

India

Nusur Graduate/teacher

Rasika Graduate engineer

Country India

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such as formal academic writing skills, a theoretical knowledge base, high-level abstract thinking for the student and an interactive, constructivist class for the academic who, however, insists on academic rigor. Homogenous grouping seemed to be expected by the students, for example, Bina’s sharing that “the best thing was meeting someone from my background”, or Rema’s response that there is a “significant divide between domestic and international students” were typical responses within the molar academic parameters. Even where CALD students wanted their diversity and difference to be noticed, often it was not. For instance, as Semi mentioned, although they each constructed knowledge differently and wanted to convey it, “we are expected to keep quiet.” Students desired greater rhizomatic principles in the way the institution operated
for example, preferring to see sample assignments and have their drafts read (which is frowned upon at the Masters level), or to be helped to use Blackboard (while the institution expected it to be a resource to be used independently). However, they were restricted by the institutional apparatus. There were significant moments where the students felt helpless as the institutional demands desired silence and in it reaffirmed the power of academic modes that were foreign to them. Their issue, as Hridi observed, was that “there are so many facets to academic learning that are suddenly confronted” or as Rasika stated, it was a “totally different experience, totally different style of studying”. For instance, there was the expectation that they would fully understand the online content without additional support, they would be satisfied learning in their group consisting only of CALD students, or they would enjoy engaging in the chat session when online. While some had the desire and expectation to share ideas and have fun in their studies, they were largely quiet, because, as Hridi mentioned, it was a silence expected by the normative demands. Further, Rema noted, “most of the time it is difficult to get from the boundaries to the centre of the discussion. Here there is a bigger divide between domestic and international students,” due to the mismatch between domestic priorities and international expectations in learning. Because of this mismatch Chiu mentioned
“I understand the topic and discussion but I was quiet because they did not notice me” and Veta agreed
the CALD students were perceived as having a deficit, as their previous educational experiences were perceived as lacking desired skills. The power of the norm sets up “degrees of normality,” thereby establishing “membership of a homogenous social body” (Foucault, 1991, p. 184) that distinguishes between who belongs and who gets excluded. The norm promotes the belief that not only suitably shaped docile bodies are required for learning, but also to “the shading of individual differences” (Foucault, 1991, p. 184) that, in this case, marked these students as noticeably different. Normalization processes have only intensified through surveillance such as IELTS (International English Language Testing System) and an expectation of high-level communication skills for entry into the postgraduate program in Australia. Normalization mechanisms such as these cannot be easily overlooked, especially, as Deleuze (1992a) observes, we live in a “control society”. It was, therefore, mandatory for me to realize that they were being constrained by institutional practices and that

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I needed to shift from my normative, arborescent position to recognize them within their space. I had to recognize that “educational life-forms” (Cole, 2011, p. 44) are questions about experience concerning education and a Deleuzian solution is “to look for ways out of these contexts” (Cole, 2011, p. 44). To shift from this molar process of being to becoming demanded a molecular response from me, the teacher, both so that deterritorialization of thought and action could occur and with the knowledge that, although future reterritorialization into the molar would continue to happen, these could be interrupted more easily. The molar academic machine was going to get frayed at the edges although continually reterritorializing to be normative. For example, Students’ attempts to adjust, acknowledged by Semi (“here the gap between teacher and student is lesser
it took me time to adjust”), or Nusur’s view that “the teacher does not encourage,” was a reminder that the molarity of the institution is an “apparatus of capture” (Massumi, 1992, p. 101) as it reproduces the same
in this case, it reproduced the international student as incapable of being a productive group member. Upon rereading the data closely, it became evident that while most students confronted the same normalizing processes, some understood they had to be proactive. Ahem, for instance, understood he “had to move from a traditional learning mode to a highly thinking and creative mode”; for Bina when “Pam shared resources, it was really nice”, it became easy to enter the new academic culture. Veta noted, “when I show my opinion they talk behind me; but I join up a different group, sit at different tables.” Their views indicated that the institutional homogeneity could be interrupted not by assimilation, but through “reciprocal presupposition” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 67), which is, by simultaneous importance, being given to their process of learning. Reciprocal presupposition occurred when academic learning had no hierarchy and students could go beyond tracings to map their territories. In my reflections, I found that while the overall program had a linear structure, the interactions that were necessary to the operations of the system needed to be non-linear, or “loop-like” (Smetsky, 2006, p. 10), given to extensions, modifications, and rearrangement. For example, I realized my attempts at reiterating the importance of assessment were not that successful, and, it “fell apart due to individual needs” (Reflection, 2015, Semester 2); that “they did not often complete the writing task and found the exercise a strain.” I realized I had to move from this standpoint, deterritorialize and “go beyond institutional expectations” (Reflection, 2016, Semester 1). Such a move required that my thoughts shift fluidly with the needs of the students. I had to engage in experimentation to reaffirm the plane of immanence that, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) claim, is constituted by a “differentiated threshold” (p. 281) through its capacity to produce multiple ways of doing that are not tied to transcendent institutional thought. To achieve the plane of immanence, I had to work through spaces that formed through interactive relationships and prevent the system from foreclosing on itself. It was to comprehend the limitations of my institutional judgment, “believing they had not read the set reading” (Reflection, 2015, Semester 2), to recognizing heterogeneity in that “they had different ways of learning”

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(Reflection, 2016, Semester 2). This was a process of mapping a new complex relationship, of changing my own identity through a subjective process of becoming by thinking through their problems as my concerns. I moved from, “‘Why do I feel a sense of loss when they are attempting to achieve?’ to ‘I should take the next step to get them to consciously comprehend that their voice is important’” (Reflection, 2017, Semester 1). Applying Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) view, it is on the pedagogical plane of immanence/consistency that the BwO can be realized through “assemblages […] plugging into desire” (p. 166), which, here, is the desire to ensure academic success for the CALD student. In believing that “showing a sample of academic writing is frowned upon at the Masters level,” I was experiencing the unique identity of the conformist academic who might overinterpret institutional dictates. However, any ontological becoming could only progress by perceiving myself as an interactive and dynamic component of the complex scholarly assemblage. In short, it was necessary to move from the arborescent role of the academic to a rhizomatic process of antidualistic thinking to engage in “transversal communications between different lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 11). In Deleuzian terms, it was to celebrate the becoming-wasp of the orchid and becoming-orchid of the wasp towards a new threshold that was always in the process of becoming-other.

RHIZOMATIC REIMAGINATIONS/DESIRING DIFFERENCE Understanding the academic environment in a relational manner as constituted of a micropolitics of difference was not without contention. It implied going beyond dualisms and binaries and perceiving the molar and molecular, homogeneity and difference as constituted on the same plane of consistency. As Blaise (2013, p. 189) notes, a “micropolitics considers the small everyday encounters.” The micropolitics of difference accounts for the molecular level lines of flights, and is composed of a diverse range of flow of ideas, values that are always susceptible to acceding to the molar machine (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 216; see also Krause & Rölli, 2008, p. 243). Subsequently, studying the micropolitical aspects of learner engagement became necessary to understand how these students took an agentive stance. The students, although aware of and operating to the norms prescribed by the institution, were often consciously and methodically rupturing the fabric of academia. For example, as an area of study within the Masters program, teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) is situated as a molarized wing of academia. However, for Hui, it implied being respected for having English as a second language as she imagined that TESOL positions itself as a deterritorialized space within academia. Deterritorialization became an essential focus for another student (Jess) where, faced with the lack of choice and knowing the conditions of learning, she had to “adjust,” or move between past experiences into present moments. Similarly, when a student in the survey mentioned that she liked to “share ideas and extend the point of views as well as having great fun,” it illustrated how she

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resisted the molar institutional forms that overcome, totalize, and attempt to unify. Semi mentioned interaction with the local mainstream students as very important, and stated that when “the local students show an interest in our experiences it helps with learning as the interaction leads us to comprehend institutional expectations.” Further, as demonstrated by Greta, rhizomatic lines of flight could only operate when CALD students fought against the normative tracings: “Whenever you give critical view to native speakers they will be negative towards you. I told him he could not take an Australian only perspective and that he had to take a global perspective.” When the CALD students adopted new ways of learning, they were approximating a rhizome, connecting, sharing through diverse modes, disrupting the perception of difference as irreconcilable. Veta realized that “even when the domestic students do not notice me, I show my opinion
then they have to notice me.” In reaching out, they employed the principle of connection in “making others notice,” and the process of becoming for these students was a move from “having samples would help” (Rema) to “we must think for ourselves,” as Greta mentioned. The students also shifted their perspectives, moving from Nusur’s experience
“knowing people is difficult. I found I had to go and join up
for me it did not work”
to Chiu’s opinion that “when the teacher puts you in groups then you have to provide your views.” Chiu’s response regarding the domestic students
“they were happy to learn by asking if it was the same back in your home country”
indicated a constant deterritorialization of the molar positionality towards a rhizomatic becoming, an assemblage of diversity and difference that could be used productively to interact with others. Such interaction ruptured the normalised perception of the international student who was expected to be docile due to institutional demands that positioned their difference as a deficit. As another example, many felt like Jess to begin with: “academic writing is totally new for me
a big challenge; subjects are not familiar to me.” However, they began to realize, “if I keep this attitude that there is language barrier then I will be stuck.” (Greta) The assemblages that formed with the students moving away from a linear conception of learning were a synthesis of heterogeneities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 330). Students realized that only by decentering themselves from a deficit discourse by mapping through cartographical becoming and by desiring to reposition themselves they could succeed. Decentered Researcher Becomings Constant reading and rereading of data from student interviews and survey responses against the theoretical framework illustrated the insecurity and struggle encountered by students as they attempted to become members of the institution. My experience of teaching them brought to the forefront my challenges and often the failures of my practice and my attempts to overcome those failures by making changes to my teaching and instructions. I felt I had not achieved the desired result of the program or the result desired by the students. In class, the students attempted to engage in the content, and in the hour reserved for them

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after class, recounted what and how they understood. However, I was doubtful whether they were adopting the system the way they desired. To find out, I decided to conduct focus group or individual interviews after they finished the unit. The interviews were conducted at the end of each semester. Initially, I was disheartened going through the data. However, when I reread the interview transcripts, I began seeing some students demonstrate a deeper process of reflection and ownership of ideas. The data suggested that they could build a rhizomatic assemblage that incorporated previous learning modes with new learning modes. Some did not “have a general idea of how to write critically”, yet, “they learnt to make the attempt” (Hui). Greta, who earlier was afraid to speak out, later managed to mix old and new ways of being a student through choosing instances to speak up in class and share her ideas. Rema noted, “it is difficult to get from boundaries to the center of the discussion,” but as Chiu stated, when the “teacher puts you in groups, and then you have to provide your views, it boosts you up,” thereby mapping and deterritorializing. As my reflections illustrated, when I noticed my assessment of these students as a deficit discourse, I realized I had to move from the molar institutional expectations I had towards a positioning that promoted their diversity and becoming different as positive. I had to go beyond the perception that students could not engage with the content to assisting them to be proactive in learning. I understood that the molecular lines intersecting the molar lines could encourage a change in thinking and learning if I could promote continuous deterritorialization. For such deterritorialization to occur, I had to shift my position constantly, comprehend the pull and push of the molar apparatus of the institution, an affirmation of the root-like, dominant forms of teaching which demanded sameness, and the contradictory forces of lines of flight. Becoming is a rhizome, “an alliance” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 238), which implies that it establishes numerous relationships. In this, I had to celebrate the molecular steps as there was an abiding correlation between each stage of deterritorialization with reterritorialization; however, it was one that was a creative attempt to enact difference, “an alliance”. Routines and traditional ways of achievement led to tracings being reaffirmed, and I comprehended that I was attempting to be the successful academic promoted by the institution when I attempted to get them into the mold of the ideal student. As an academic, I experienced a sense of loss when the students failed to achieve, but through a rhizomatic process of shifting my perspectives I recognized that they were establishing their voice and standpoint, and, in this process, there was a change in their approach to learning. In this regular site of tensions that occurred both for myself and my students, there was the desire to be different that could unravel a separate self. This process was not without contention, as the forces of desiring production and the desire for the plane of consistency collided. Subsequently, the students, bringing their expectations about the academic program and learning, were positive in their desire to achieve success. Their responses depicted their desires that often became visible as, beneath any “representative agency,” desire “continues to

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rumble, to throb [and] in return can […] resonate to breaking point” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 296). Desire, in turn, became a site to produce the new, a constant desire on our part to achieve, to dismantle the discourse of deficit. The methodology of S-STEP assisted in an intimate examination of my practice through the dual lens of the student and the teacher. It exposed how I needed to examine my practice over an extended period, make constant adjustments to my practice over each semester, and importantly, not consider all CALD students as having the same requirements. The study, though small, builds into the more substantial body of work on CALD students by highlighting the need for constant movement between thresholds, between positionality from being in a molar position to a molecular becoming. In this sense, it contributes to the more significant body of work that is occurring in making learning successful for these students. Importantly, this methodological approach assisted me in uncovering the finer aspects of each student’s approach to learning that, together, formed a rhizomatic assemblage. However, as Hamilton and Pinnegar (2014, p. 159) note, when focusing on “relational interaction,” the inquiry “remains inconclusive,” but is indicative of molecular openness instead of molar closures. Overall, the study illustrated the incompleteness that is recursively present in teaching, and of learning as an ongoing process of becoming. Performativity and its accompanying discourses of accountability and adaptable identities, as noted at the start of the chapter, are an integral aspect of present-day education systems. Therefore, there will always be territorialization and reterritorialization within institutional territories. However, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) noted, it is in the endless possibility for deterritorialization that molecular, nevertheless, significant points of achievement can be possible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT I acknowledge and thank the participants for the valuable contributions they made to this study. Reflections were noted after every class from Semester 2, 2015
2018.

REFERENCES Ball, S. (2003). The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity. Journal of Educational Policy, 18(2), 215
228. doi:10.1080/0268093022000043065. Blaise, M. (2013). Activating micropolitical practices in the early years: (Re)assembling bodies and participant observations. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 184
200). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cole, D. R. (2011). Education life-forms: Deleuzian teaching and learning practice. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Colman, R. (2010). Rhizome. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 232
235). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1992a). Postscript on the societies of control. October, 59(Winter), 3
7. Deleuze, G. (1992b). What is a dispositif? In T. J. Armstrong (Trans. & Ed.), Michel Foucault philosopher (pp.159
168). New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2004). The logic of sense (M. Lester with C. Stivale, trans.). London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. Lane trans.). New York, NY: Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1972).

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Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980). Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. London: Penguin Books. Gao, J. (2013). Deleuze’s conception of desire. Deleuze Studies, 7(3), 406
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251. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00065.x. Grellier, J. (2013). Rhizomatic mapping: Spaces for learning in higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(1), 83
95. doi:10.1080/07294360.2012.750280. Grosz, E. (2005). Bergson, Deleuze and the becoming of unbecoming. Parallax, 11(92), 4
13. Hamilton, M. L. (2004). Professional knowledge, self-study and teacher education. In J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. LaBoskey, & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 375
419). Dordrecht: Kulwer Press. Hamilton, M. L., & Pinnegar, S. (2014). Intimate scholarship in research: An example from self-study of teaching and teacher education practices methodology. Learning Landscapes, 8(1), 153
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546. doi:10.1080/09518390600923735 Jackson, A. (2009). What am I doing when I speak of this present: Voice power and desire in truth telling. In A. Y. Jackson & L. A. Mazzei (Eds.), Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research (pp. 165
174). London: Routledge. Krause, R., & Rölli, M. (2008). Micropolitical associations. In I. Buchanan & N. Thorburn (Eds.), Deleuze and politics (pp. 240
254). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables of the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2013). Desire undone: Productions of privilege, power and voice. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 96
110). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nail, T. (2017). What is an assemblage? SubStance, 46(1), 21
37. Pinnegar, S. E., & Hamilton, M. L. (2015). Knowing, becoming, doing as teacher educators: Identity, intimate scholarship, inquiry. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Reynolds, B. (1998). Becoming a body without organs: The masochistic quest of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In E. Kaufman & K. J. Heller (Eds.), Deleuze & Guattari: New mappings in politics, philosophy and culture (pp. 191
207). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Smetsky, I. (2006). Deleuze, education and becoming. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Smith, D. (2007). Deleuze and the question of desire: Toward an immanent theory of ethics. Parrhesia, 2, 66
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171.

PEDAGOGY, NAKED AND BELATED: DISAPPOINTMENT AS CURRICULUM INQUIRY Brandon L. Sams

ABSTRACT This writing is performed with and about disappointment in moments of failed research and teaching. The bulk of this chapter was written some years ago and describes, reflects on, and analyzes a self-study inquiry about the phenomenon of pedagogical reading. Having returned to and studied this earlier work, I offer a posthuman postscript that rereads the initial inquiry primarily through the work of Deleuze. Rereading intimate scholarship through a posthuman lens decenters the self as knower, writer, and teacher, making possible otherwise ways of imagining reading, writing, and studying together. In my case, posthumanism provides tools for rereading two concepts offered for understanding teaching literature, naked and belated pedagogy. While these concepts were somewhat productive in helping me understand what I was experiencing as a researcher and writer, they reproduce and justify traditional, text-centered teacher identities and practices. They are a product of and themselves reproduce what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) called “arborescent” thinking. Ultimately, naked and belated pedagogies reinforce traditional curriculum practices, sidestep students’ lives, and position the teacher as final authority in matters of curriculum control and interpretation. Disappointment includes those affections and emotions that arise through a posthuman rereading of the research scene
including what I, the researcher and teacher, failed to do, say, think, and teach. Keywords: Critical reflection; teacher identity; rhizomatic thinking; literature; posthuman research practices; curriculum

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 137
152 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031011

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You will find more questions than claims. I am revisiting and (still) trying to make sense of “research data” from some years ago. I write “research data” with
not quite an eye roll, but almost. A smirk maybe. Data sounds so other than me. Code-able and known. In the spirit of evocative writing that characterizes teacher-research (Fleischer, 1995), the “I” that appears here is aware of itself as textual construction, in process, and in-the-process of thinking. Hesse’s (2016) argument that the essay as genre embodies and performs reflection is relevant here. Temporal, evocative research writing represents reflection (of something) and is reflection in time (shows a writer thinking). This writing is performed with and about disappointment in moments of failed research and teaching. The bulk of this chapter was written some years ago and describes, reflects on, and analyzes a self-study inquiry about the phenomenon of pedagogical reading. Having returned to and studied this earlier work, I offer a posthuman postscript that rereads the initial inquiry primarily through the work of Deleuze. Rereading intimate scholarship through a posthuman lens decenters the self as knower, writer, and teacher, making possible otherwise ways of imagining reading, writing, and studying together. Strom and Martin (2017) argue a “post-human turn”
non-linear, embodied, materialist, multiplistic theories of difference
is needed in teacher education to disrupt hegemonic models and patterns of thought that organize educational policy, institutional education, and bodies of knowledge. Posthuman perspectives notice and critique hierarchical dichotomies that organize ways of knowing and being in education, including self/other, teacher/student, reader/text, reason/ emotion. In my case, posthumanism provides tools for rereading two concepts offered for understanding teaching literature, naked and belated pedagogy. While these concepts were somewhat productive in helping me understand what I was experiencing as a researcher and writer, they reproduce and justify traditional, text-centered teacher identities and practices. They are a product of and themselves reproduce what Deleuze and Guattari (2003) called “arborescent” thinking. Ultimately, naked and belated pedagogy reinforce traditional curriculum practices, sidestep students’ lives, and position the teacher as final authority in matters of curriculum control and interpretation. Disappointment includes those affections and emotions that arise through a posthuman rereading of the research scene
including what I, the researcher and teacher, failed to do, say, think, and teach. In Blush, Probyn (2005) argues that writing through and about shame is part of an ethical practice of paying attention to the uncomfortable, staying with it long enough to learn from it. We experience writing shame when the quality of our writing does not measure up to what we are trying to represent conceptually or empirically. This research essay (in Hesse’s sense) emerges from, reflects on, and works through teaching and writing disappointment and frames disappointment and being disappointed as an educative affective state. Because it presents thinking in process, it doubly invites the reader to engage as co-constructor of interpretation and to reimagine (trouble?) her research, writing, and teaching autobiography. As the reader is also in excess of me, the writer, you will likely suspect more than I can know or say, reading me and Steven, my co-researcher,

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in ways we cannot read ourselves. With time, reflection, and more writing, I hope to catch up with you.

THE RESEARCH SCENE I pose an ordinary question: how do teachers read literary texts they plan to teach? Scholarship in English, English education, and curriculum studies has amply explored aesthetic, efferent, and critical modes of reading (see, e.g., Appleman, 2009; Mission & Morgan, 2006; Purves, 1984; Rosenblatt, 1994). However, we have largely failed to inquire into the particular performances of reading that teachers do when reading texts for teaching. The seemingly ordinary question posed above led to more questions. What is the relationship between an event that is (by most accounts) solitary and private (i.e., a teacher reading alone) and the public, communal, and, in some cases, very regulated event of teaching? Are teachers aware of whether and how their reading acts are institutionally constrained? Or where and how constraints persist in teaching environments where teachers have choice and autonomy? Of particular interest was the relationship between a teacher’s private reading
potentially full of affective intensity
and how these intensities mediate (or not) curriculum design in schools. My research collaborator, Steven, teaches English at a fouryear university in the Northeastern United States. For this study, we read a text together, planned lessons, and taught the text to his students in an introductory literature course. I hoped our inquiry would help us better understand our reading processes and experiences and, in turn, how these experiences influence our preparation and teaching. As a trajectory of my own history, I hoped our inquiry would allow teachers (me) to understand with more clarity their (our) handing over to ways of things and the extensions and alternatives that are present with every reading and teaching moment. Steven and I read the memoir Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos, a coming-ofage tale wherein Jack finds his vocation as a writer. While reading, we recorded our experiences (of reading, of thinking) by annotating in our unique commonplace books (the text reprinted on larger paper accommodating annotation). Our multiple readings, spaced months apart, primed us to plan a 2- to 3-week unit on the memoir, which we eventually taught to Steven’s students. The methods of data gathering consist of four moments of reading outlined below. (1) Narratives of Reading and Teaching account for the histories and experiences of reading, of learning to teach, and of teaching that Steven and I bring to this project. In particular, these narratives represent our history of reading, within and without institutions of learning; we also, through writing and reflection, become aware of how our performances of reading have been shaped by individual desire, identity, culture, and sanctioned curricula, and, through this awareness, how we might disrupt or reproduce these scripts with intentionality. (2) Reading to Teach: The Anticipatory Moment. Steven and I read Gantos for the first time, preparing to teach the memoir by writing in our commonplace

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books and reflective journals and meeting to discuss our reading experience and teaching notes. From our engagement with the text and the imagined students, we made a tentative teaching unit plan. We had not, at this time, met the students. (3) Reading while Teaching: The Belated Performance. The third moment of reading is actually rereading. It occurred in medias res, as it were
as the students read, after the unit began, but before the end. This moment of reading was not exclusively a skimming of the text or of prior notes (although that was involved) but a close rereading of Gantos that tried to pay careful attention to the experience of reading within the conditions of teaching. During this moment, the teaching unit was adjusted to meet student needs and/or changing goals. (4) Reflective Reading: (Im)Possible & (Un)Timely. After the teaching unit, Steven and I reflected on what we learned about reading, teaching, and “reading to teach” from this project. We also considered implications for our future reading and teaching practice. This essay focuses on our reading, teaching, and reflection from the third moment (“Reading while Teaching”), particularly our return to Gantos and our unit plans after teaching was in progress. The Gantos unit occurred roughly half-way through the semester. In the transcripts directly referenced, “class session one” denotes the first class session devoted to Gantos. For this meeting, students read approximately half the memoir.

OPENINGS This chapter recounts and reflects on our pedagogical methods, largely written through the prism of failure and disappointment
at what we might have done, could have done better, or somehow failed to do. To my mind, this approach resists education discourses that favor certainty and variously profane forms of how to (Jardine, 1992; Wallin, 2007). Two related concepts ground the (un)method: naked pedagogy and belated pedagogy. Naked pedagogy is a threatening prospect for an English teacher: losing the text in class. How is it possible for a text to disappear in a unit ostensibly focused on its careful study? In short, naked pedagogy aims, to use Dewey’s (1902) language in The Child and the Curriculum, at the child and the child’s interests and, in the process, loses the text. In other words, our collective talk and engagement was not, in the main, about the memoir or our reading experience. The text disappeared from the first class session, leaving us vulnerable, confused, and desperate to connect with the students and Gantos and, importantly, to communicate what cannot be said. Belated pedagogy creates disappointment and confusion for teachers arriving late to the scene of reading and learning. The belated teacher struggles to come to terms with the possibility that what is most important about pedagogy is giving students an excuse to read
without you, in solitude
making the gathering and teaching secondary and possibly expendable. We wanted to occupy a redundant, useless, position. Like the author of the text, we wanted to

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be the storyteller
but the story had already been told by Gantos. The belated teacher, because he cannot utter the story and be the primary experience for the students, struggles with what to say, as the belated receiver, about his reading experience. And so he reaches hopefully but with disappointment to “side avenues”
our emerging shared language for topics related to the text that might support interpretation but are not themselves the text. “Side avenues” (you can read my disappointment even here) give us something to say and also spare us from our fears
of lacking speech when trying to communicate our affections and attachments to Gantos and of imagining that doing so may undermine our teacherly authority. The philosophical, more abstract discourses of side avenues allow the belated teacher to have something to say
sidestepping his inability to respond to aesthetic experience
yet, ultimately, leave him unfulfilled as a teacher and reader.

NAKED PEDAGOGY: WANTING AND MISSING THE STORY After the first class session, Steven and I both left disappointed at our lack of focus on the memoir. We did not know, e.g., how students felt about Jack, what parts resonated with or troubled them, how they identified or disidentified with him, how they understood his journey to become an artist, and if Jack’s journey was motivating or inspiring. We did not collectively graze over the text with the students. Part of the problem, we reasoned, was our need for more practice lingering with discussion questions. The students’ perspective was similar to ours, which contributed to a feeling that we had nothing to teach them, that students were essentially waiting for us to arrive at the place of learning. Referring to session one and our preparation for session two, I noted to Steven, The presence of the students was better than I thought. Before we taught the students, if there was a power relationship between me and them, I thought my knowledge was in excess of them. But then last week, my impression was […] it’s almost that poetic moment where you realize things are reversed. [yea, exactly] You realize in the middle of teaching that the students are in excess of you [right] and you have to do something about it but, in a way, it’s too late […] I mean they had the same knowledge that we had. It’s almost like [answer wise] they gave us the answers that we would have given. So I was thinking, “well, you’re right, I have nothing left to teach you.”

Not spending much time on the story was both a fact of time and a feeling of loss. We did not wander in the complexities of plot or share our journeys through the text. I felt that I had not communicated who I was through the text nor met the students through the text either. Our lesson missed the text because we privileged the students’ creative practices (e.g., through creative writing and “show and tell” activities). Focusing on the students was intentional as we did not want to “nit pick” and kill the text through over-reading (see Gallagher (2009) for a full treatment on killing the text through school(ed) reading). In the process of bringing their own creative lives to class, however, the connections to and talk about Gantos disappeared. A skeleton agenda, of class session one, illustrates how the memoir was decentered from our collective attention.

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• Show and Tell (sharing creative practices) • Memory Writing and Sharing • Approaching the question, “What is Memoir?” We began by sharing important books, music, art, or multimedia that inspired us. In the text, Jack takes great pains to inspire himself along his journey to authorhood, and we thought this would generate a productive discussion about how one relates to what one is inspired by. A week prior, we reminded students to bring in something
music, literature, poetry, images, games, videos
that served their artistic inspiration and interests. Before we began the activity, we made the mistake of revealing too much of the pedagogical architecture behind it. When announcing the connection between the students and Gantos, we taught our way out of a connective discussion. Brandon: one of the major ideas for Jack is that he takes great pains to be inspired by other artists. He goes on the road trip to visit Hemingway’s house and Stephen Crane’s house. So he’s always kind of looking to be inspired and looking to writers and what he loves to give him fuel to write. So, in his journey to become an artist, I guess one of the first steps is falling in love with an art form, whatever that may be. And being inspired by people who have come before you. So that’s kind of what inspired us to come up with the show and tell project. Um […] Steven: and we like the idea that it’s also a journey of an artist and you all are in art school, so there’s some kind of art form that you really want to produce and, you know, what does it take to become an artist? What do you have to do? What is that journey? That is something that is interesting to us. And we thought we’d start off, as we talked about last class, by bringing in something that maybe lead you to your art form. Maybe something that lead you to doing what you want to do. So, did anyone bring in anything?

Announcing one’s pedagogical intention can ruin the connections students might make between themselves and the text. We framed inspiration as one early step in the journey of the artist and announced how Gantos had intentionally taken steps to be inspired. We could have asked questions about the connection between the students’ inspiration and Gantos, an obvious way to hear from them how they were reading Gantos, how they felt about and related to his struggles. Our anxiety about silent students likely caused us to fill in gaps with commentary, leaving no holes for the text and the students to meet each other. Despite our intentions to do otherwise, we were teaching, to use Rosenblatt’s language, efferently, and not aesthetically. We announced facts about the text and thus closed-up the potential self to text connections students might make. While we imagined supporting students as they developed relationships with literary fiction, our classroom teaching was foreclosing this possibility. While the lesson was very “personal” both for us and the students, without a common text to connect us, we confronted each other on interesting but unfamiliar terms. The students participated beautifully in the lesson. Two students, Nate and Katelyn, read published poetry that inspired them to write their own. One student brought a violin that she played regularly and learned to play from her father, making connections between listening to music and her culinary craft as a chef. Another student brought a fashion magazine and pointed out styles

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she mimicked and adjusted in her creative work. Steven and I shared important novels that inspired us to read more and view literature a different way (Mary Oliver’s poetry and Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek, respectively). Class session one was memorable in terms of mutual sharing, but, as much as we were present to each other, we were not present to each other through the text
making for an awkward confrontation. Madeleine Grumet (1995) describes curriculum as a “mask of meaning”
the vehicle through which we play and trouble our identities even as we reveal ourselves to others. We play, reveal, choose, hide, protect. As the name implies
show and tell
there is a naked quality to this activity, even an absurd one. While we were getting to know each other, it seemed a little inappropriate, silly, because we had not yet shared anything (the text) together
Where is this going? Why am I sharing this? We were confronting each other without masks, without a curricular common place
a textual medium affording a playful yet guarded coming together. Unexpectedly, we re-enacted a twisted version of Jardine’s (1992) technical
scientific
curriculum tale. In his version, the curriculum object is exhausted to the point where nothing more needs to be said. In our version, the object was exhausted before it appeared in the space we shared together. We announced connections before students had a chance to connect, thus rendering them invisible through the text. Strange silence can be performed in pedagogical spaces, like ours, that valued creativity and students’ artistic lives outside the classroom. Connective tissue through the common text of Gantos was missing, thus rendering our space intimate, but on the wrong terms, and so connected only in passing. Sumara’s (1994) The Literary Imagination and the Curriculum, like Grumet’s work on masks, positions the common text as the object through which we come to read ourselves, others, and ourselves in relation to others. Without the common text, the possibilities of reading ourselves otherwise in relation to the text and to others is minimized, if not lost. Reading common texts offers learning and change. By contrast, we revealed ourselves only to stay the same. Even though, during class session one, we composed creative text, talked about our lives, discussed the genre of memoir, missing Gantos made us feel like frauds
what had we betrayed? Our preparation, certainly. The students who had diligently read the text. We also betrayed our own pedagogical identities to the point of not, anymore, feeling like teachers. In this particular pedagogical moment, I was a teacher because of and through Gantos. I was bound to the text, as a reader and teacher. Sumara (1994) speaks of the importance of the relationship between reader and text in terms of pleasure and giving the text away. He writes, it is clear that this experience of relationship with the literary text must be a pleasurable one, for it seems that the desire for one’s children, one’s friends, one’s students to form relationship with them goes beyond the belief that reading is good for them. Although the reading of literary texts is promoted by some as a way in which to improve reading skills, to experience a particular cultural heritage, or to learn particular facts, it seems that all of those could be just as effectively learned through other experiences. No, it seems that those of us who have experienced what it is like to be bound to the literary text have found this a pleasurable experience.

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We desire it ourselves, and because pleasure is meant to be shared, we wish others to participate in similar experiences. (p. 34)

This urge to share in part explains how we designed the final project to be a commonplace. It explains my desire to witness and learn from the reading experiences of the students. Desire, fulfillment, even frustration can be witnessed through the body, through speech, or through writing. Do you love what I love? Were you moved as I was moved? We wanted confirmation, through the text, that we had helped others be turned on to reading. Because we had learned so little about the students through the text and because I entered the lesson largely bound to the text, I felt lost. Not only had I failed to communicate about and share my love of the text, I had not been read by the students through the text. I was alone without recognition. Love of the object, the book, had been central to Jack’s journey and to ours as teachers and readers. Our commonplace books were central to our evolving identities as teachers and readers. We wanted to make them central as well for the students by creating the commonplace assessments. That it vanished is the inescapable irony. What, exactly, did we miss that I am mourning? I try to write about reading in ways that highlight the never exhaustible nature of text, that there is no final reading, only a timely reading by particular readers or communities of readers. In not meeting the students over the text, in losing the text, we missed the abundance of the text. Sharing common reading experiences with other readers makes possible the unthought-in-the-object and learning from other readers and readings (Sumara, 1996, 2002). While readings are shaped by interpretive communities and the larger discourses that shape who readers are (Benn Michaels, 1980; Fish, 1980)
there is no exhaustible text. In losing the text, we missed a chance to experience the abundance of the text through the students.

BELATED PEDAGOGY Steven and I struggled how to position ourselves as teachers related to the primary experience of reading Gantos. Reading seemed infinitely more important to us than being taught a text one just read. We were struggling with what and how to teach during the second class session; we wanted to bring the text back into play, to see the students desire the text, to be moved by it. But we were not sure how to make this happen, as Steven notes here in private conversation: To me, the hard part just keeps going back to literature. Every single time I teach literature, I think it’s important to read it. I just think the important part is experiencing it. The important part is not me teaching it to you, it’s your experience of reading. And teaching it is just to force you to read it. If you just read it, then that’s important. That’s what it’s about. It’s about you reading it, it’s about your experience. Like 10 or 5 percent is me talking about it, afterwards.

We (Steven? Me?) framed teaching as words emanating from our mouths. The teacher as central authority, speaking life into the pedagogical space, is a shared, historical discourse of teaching that we were never quite able to shake, get outside of, or counter with more student-centered approaches. We were embodying

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the wrong kind of history, the wrong kind of theory. We were also, to some degree, aware of how we might be reproducing teacher-centered pedagogy. The fear that we just might kill reading for the students perhaps explains why we disavowed pedagogy’s importance. Privileging the private reader lessens the threat of our pedagogical actions and also lessens the burden of not knowing how to improvise. Our pedagogical confusion about what to do with or say to the students was due, in part, to the tensions we articulated between an abundant reading experience that had to be shared and finding a way to share through pedagogy. In my reading journals, I wrote about this issue in the context of my concern about the lesson on ethics. If we began class session two by discussing the three schools of ethics, I worried about losing the story yet again. I noticed (or felt?) several times in this section the tension between my reading and teaching selves. As a reader, I frequently found myself caught up in the excitement of Gantos’s stories or struck nearly speechless at his prose. I wanted to respond to these passages not only as a reader, but as a teacher too
with ideas for pedagogy. I couldn’t say anything. The prison seal [on The Brother’s K] was stamped in blue in for both us to see. My heart was beating wildly. I had to keep that book. My entire identity as a writer was in that book. Everything I had written was squeezed between Dostoyevsky’s lines, as if my words were his discards. But they were all I had. And later, I did get the ship’s log back. Years later I had Newman request my court records, and the log and files were sent to me. But the Karamazov journal is gone. It was the biggest loss of writing I’ve ever suffered. Since then I’ve never lost a journal. I want to communicate something about these passages to the students, but I’m unsure how to do so. What do I tell them? That I sat in my reading chair speechless for a few minutes? Letting the feeling and impression of the words flow over me? That I almost cried at what I thought were beautiful words? I feel foolish. But I can’t let it go. I continue to think about how to communicate my feelings about beautiful writing to students and have them feel, think about and communicate their own. I could ask them if any passages were similarly moving to them. Maybe we give dramatic readings of our favorite parts? Or, and this is a stretch of the pedagogical imagination, we could find some way
maybe through gesture or body movement, to express or translate our readings to others. We could find another medium besides words to show how our readings felt, etc. […] [When I right ideas like this down, I feel insecure or unsure about it. Like Gantos, I cross it off the list.] These are the questions and obstacles I struggle with as a teacher. Because I have been so moved as a reader, surely something, something, something of this ecstasy should trickle into the lesson. I almost feel like a fraud to do otherwise. Part of me thinks I need more courage or imagination to do something radical with pedagogy. I want to do something pedagogically that gets at the nitty gritty stuff of the reading experience. Either I don’t know how or am afraid to venture into this territory of the unknown. Wow, I sound like Gantos here. I guess we all have our moments when we think a giant turtle makes for a good story.

I wanted to share but did not know what to say. Was this an instance of aesthetic modes baffling speech or explanation? Was this a moment when what I wanted most defied how I thought teachers should perform? Was Atwell-Vasey (1998) right? Had I been swept up in a way of being teacher that had no room for emotions, for the body, for the unpredictable? Partly so. But it was also a

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question of wanting “private” experience to translate to public teaching but being unsure how to proceed. I was stumbling onto a method
performing scenes of the tale, reciting responses to the tale
that could potentially get at “the private stuff” of reading experience in ways that provide structure. We did not pursue these avenues
mostly because we were late and out of time. Steven admitted that we
students and teachers
needed to talk about how we were moved. Like you said, it would feel weird or cheapened or false if you didn’t talk about it. You know being excited about it or if you didn’t talk about passages that you thought were really important and that resonated with you. I agree. I think we somehow have like a duty to talk about those. If literature is about some kind of effect […] that it can have on the reader on a personal level then that would be what we are doing. Trying to convey that.

He worried that our desires to share personal readings and reactions to Gantos would destroy them; that once announced, they would be cheapened and no longer have meaning. Pedagogical things are already dead, he claimed, whereas “aesthetic things” are still moving in the reader. For the stuff that we want to talk about pedagogically we can actually kill those things because in some aspects maybe they are already dead. Where the things that you think are living, talk about them, see how people felt. Keep them in some aspects alive by not talking about them for too long. We’re not forcing people to talk about them. It’s not that you can’t talk about them it’s just that we’re not forcing people to talk about them. Maybe. I don’t know. It’s tough for sure.

How do we share what moves us? And, once shared, is it dead? “Can you teach passion?” Steven asked. We were afraid that talking about the connection would kill the connection. We were also aware that sharing what moved us would make us appear foolish, out of control, even out of knowledge. Our plan was not really a plan at all. To the students, we would admit the limits of our methods by “going meta,” a phrase we used to describe when we, as teachers, would reveal our pedagogical desires
to connect with the students over the story. Lacking the time to create pedagogical structures
e.g., acting out a scene from the book or performing a reader’s theatre of their commonplace entries
through which the students could interpret, share, read and be read by others through the text, we would admit what we most wanted and maybe, just maybe, they would share. Steven: we should probably […] we could just be meta, man, we could just tell them about teaching, if you wanted to. We could just be like well, Brandon’s project is really about teaching, and we might as well tell you a little about teaching, some of the process. When we read this book, it wasn’t just for our personal enjoyment. I mean we might read something that we really love but it’s also about what can we convey to other people and how we can communicate to other people. How can we pass knowledge down, if there’s knowledge to be gained? And that’s something you have to take into account when you are teaching. You can’t just teach what you really like, sometimes, because sometimes you can’t really say things about what you really like. I mean so then we could talk about why we selected Gantos and we can ask them questions about what they’re thinking about it, how they feel about it. I mean we could just be meta, you know? There’s nothing wrong with it. I’ve never been meta teaching, so it would be interesting. I’ve already given up […] see it’s interesting, like in teaching, I think you can only

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give up the sense that you know what you are doing once. Once you do it’s just gone. I feel like I’ve already given up the sense that I know what I’m doing in that class.

Steven felt like a fraud. Only two reads in, he was faking his way through as an expert. While he understood, and even shared, my desire to know more about the students’ feelings and thoughts about Gantos
to graze with them over the text
this was like admitting pedagogical defeat. The only way we imagined understanding the contours of the students’ reading experience was by asking them directly. In class session two, both Steven and I attempted to ask but, not surprisingly, did not ourselves reveal what we were asking students to reveal. Steven: Another thing we wanted to ask, we just wanted to kind of open up, because last time we did not talk about the story. We talked a lot about different side avenues, so we wanted to open up this time just to talk about the story and see what people thought of the story. If you enjoyed it, if you, what your kind of reactions were to the memoir, as far as a piece of literature. Did you like it? Did you actually like it?

One brave student answered this impossible question. “I did like it […] because it was different. Different from the other stuff that we’ve read this semester.” We pressed for more details but not much else was forthcoming. We talked briefly about style, how we would measure Gantos on Steven’s prose axis (where Hemingway, at one extreme, is “spare” and Faulkner, at the other, is “ornate”)
the students agreed that Gantos was easier and more enjoyable to read than other texts read during the same quarter. A few others raised their hands. We then moved quickly to the next activity
the “side avenue” discussion of ethics
and away from the story. Our attempt to elicit the qualities of their reading experience failed, in part, because we were providing students with minimal structure. In “opening up” the lesson
these were the very words Steven used
we removed the textual threads for the students to hold onto. Had we asked students ahead of time to act out a scene or dramatically read an entry from their commonplace books, maybe then we would have “scene” the students interpreting and enjoying the text
inflecting Gantos through their own emotions, bodies, feelings (AtwellVasey, 1998). But, we could not structure our desires or the students’ and little was said or done, really, about the text. In the end, we remained strangers to each other, to each other through the text, and to the memoir. We were also unwilling to give an example to the students of the kind of intimate readings, and evidence of a literary relationship, that we wanted. Where was I? I could have told the students about my speechlessness at the end of the book, particularly that Gantos’ lost commonplace book triggered fears about losing my own. Would students feel similarly at the prospect of losing their own copies? Perhaps, like Steven, I would have felt foolish at losing pedagogical control by being vulnerable, even through the prism of the text. I said nothing. We had the ethics lesson and other side avenues to rescue us. And I write this with some disappointment
that we could talk about things that were “already dead.” In our preparation, Steven noted, When I looked at the ethics stuff, I was like okay, this is a path we could take. There’s knowledge or categories of knowledge here. I like philosophy but then at the same time this will give

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us something to talk about. But it is different from talking about the book though. I realize that. But I guess from a pedagogical standpoint, I’m glad we have the ethics part because that gave me something to latch onto, to teach because […] I do not know how to teach the memoir. I don’t know how to teach the second half of the memoir, with out doing side avenues.

As more solid knowledge, and not the messy, ambiguous stuff of reading experience, philosophy was easier to teach. We began to wonder about the difficulty of teaching literature compared to the ostensible ease of teaching philosophy or even history. What philosophy and history seemed to offer were events and facts that the teacher could animate through narrative structure. Steven and I were both frustrated teachers. Our pedagogy took us and the students far away from the text. We were caught between three nodes of literature pedagogy
being the text through reading to the students; ignoring the text through side avenues; or killing the text through over-reading. We simply did not know how to be with the text with others. Wanting to be the text opens larger conversations about creativity and teaching. Wanting to be the text, for instance, may relieve the burden of being creative. Reading to students grants the teacher a kind of omnipotence (listen to my voice, my rhythms, my language) without demanding that one say or create anything new. Being the text allows a teacher to honor the mystery of aesthetic experience, sharing text with the students without overburdening the moment with commentary. It also counters, temporarily at least, the notion that teaching is degrading work (Taubman, 2009). I am not a manager of data, of kids, or a belated deliverer of someone else ideas. Reading to students allows me to become what I might never create. All of these “benefits”, of course, were impossible to realize in our classroom. Our desires to be the text had already been usurped by, simply, the way school is practiced. The students had already read the text, experiencing what we wanted to provide them. In history or philosophy, teachers perhaps can be the storyteller. But, in literature, we cannot
the story has already been told and read. The pedagogical position of the storyteller, in the case of teaching literature, is redundant
and though it might hide my speechlessness about the text, my embarrassment of sharing private readings, the ineptitude at missing the text through side avenues, it is simply not needed. Our desire for authorship was frustrated because of the object of desire. We mourned the loss of the very thing we felt competent to do. We were teaching the wrong subject.

CLOSINGS In his reading journal, Steven asks, “Are stories enough? Or, in order to teach, do supplementary texts have to be used in order to give the book a pedagogical or practical edge?” Although reading might be framed as a thankful gathering of texts (Jardine, 1992), the “other texts” of pedagogy
creative practices and lessons on genre and ethics
distracted us from Gantos. While these texts may have enhanced meaning, they robbed us of connecting with the text via each other and connecting with each other via the text. The other texts, thus, cut the relational strings of pedagogy and cast a strangeness over our ritual gatherings.

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We were compelled to ask, why, again, are we here? While reading is intertextual and teaching might involve a poetic weaving of texts together, decentering pedagogical work from the text risks getting lost to the point of not knowing how to find your way back, of exposing yourself through “the personal” and losing the intertextual, hermeneutic possibility of gathering over a common object (Grumet, 1995; Sumara, 1996). Despite my misgivings, the ethics lesson was, in many ways, the “best” lesson of the quarter, an admission that disappoints me. The students were more engaged in our conversation about right and wrong, duty, pleasure, and happiness, than any other topic. We discussed Kantianism (duty ethics), Utilitarianism, and Virtue Ethics. We defined each school and gave a few examples of “ethical dilemmas” to test how the perspectives serve as an evaluative prism for action. The students seemed to enjoy these new ways of reading the world, of simplifying complicated moral situations from an outside system of thought. We then applied these theories to Gantos. How would you evaluate Jack from a duty ethics perspective? He lied, he treated others as a means and not an end, he’s wrong. Curriculum, as seen from a re-conceptualist perspective (Pinar, 2012; Pinar & Grumet, 1976) is a complicated conversation with oneself and with others about the world, including textual objects. Far from eliciting a complicated conversation about the text, these ethical theories, when applied to Gantos, made it so that nothing more need be said. The story, the word, was already spoken before we arrived on the scene.

A POST-SCRIPT: POSTHUMAN DISAPPOINTMENTS Rereading this chapter has refreshed my disappointment at what failed to happen in our teaching unit and in my failure to read the research scene in more capacious and interesting ways. Rereading has also provoked my resistance at needing to think otherwise and undo, in a sense, my research, writing, and education. In Deleuze’s terms, I am in the process of noticing and moving from “tree” thinking to rhizomatic conceptions of identity and curriculum-making. I am struck, foremost, by the text-centeredness of my teacherly identity
of course, I set-up the research project to intimately feature my textual engagement with Gantos’s memoir. The anxiety expressed at the prospect of “losing the next”
of the text somehow vanishing in class
points to how much of my identity, my sense of competence and belonging, was tied to Gantos’s memoir. This (over)investment in the text highlights a problem with text-centered teacherly identities more largely, especially in the context of contemporary literacy reforms that center close reading and discussion of canonical literature (Hinchman & Moore, 2013). A variety of scholars have noted the problems of the apprenticeship of observation (Lortie, 1975)
teachers learn how to teach by recalling how they were taught and by orienting to their early observational experiences in training as the model for how to teach. When these early learning experience feature text and canon-centered pedagogy, teachers create an emerging sense of identity that is intimately tied to the close and analytical reading of canonical texts. Thus, to use Deleuze’s terms, the arborescent structures of

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identity-making are built into how teachers learn their craft and “be” as a teacher. Given that we often teach as we were taught and that texts taught in English language arts (ELA) classrooms continue to largely be the same texts that have been taught for decades, one could argue that text-centered teacherly identities and the attendant practices of close reading and explication will continue if not interrupted in teacher education and research scholarship. I am not suggesting that teacher education programs (and practicing teachers) abandon the canon entirely or that traditional, text-centered literacy practices are not valuable. I am suggesting we educate ourselves and pre-service teachers in ways that decenter identities, texts, and literacy practices to be capacious enough, forgiving enough, to accommodate difference
the unpredictable capacities, possibilities, and intensities of rhizomatic practices. The sacrosanct canons and text-centered practices that have anchored our education and, thus, our identitymaking as teachers will not be enough to sustain ethical, culturally relevant pedagogies that our future requires. The center will hold unless we, as teacher educators and teachers, are prepared “to be” less attached to traditional, bookish identities and “become” otherwise. In my case, had I not been so attached to my teacherly identity as constituted through Gantos, I might have been more willing to experiment with methods that allowed students to share their readings of and through the text. Retreating to side avenues
like the ethics discussion
keeps the text and the students at arm’s length and our talk about texts at an abstract level. This kind of doubling down of teacher-centered, reason-centered instruction reinforces the hierarchical dichotomies of school and curricular organization that Deleuze-inspired theorizing wants to dissolve
teacher/student, self/other, reason/emotion, order/chaos. As teachers, Steven and I ostensibly wanted to approach the contours of reading experience; however, that our own readings were not used as models and that they seem to be “too precious” (in a sense) to share in public supports the conclusion that our preparation and identities were too invested in and around the common text that we shared together. Our reader-text relationships with Gantos ossified into a precious object that could not risk being shared or shattered. What if, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizing, we approach pedagogical reading as an ever-evolving assemblage, a rhizome of readers, texts, contexts, intensities, and interpretations? What would happen if there were no precious objects? What if texts, readings, and identities became possibilities of inter- and intra-action and less static objects to be guarded? How might approaching teaching as assemblage (Strom, 2015) change how we read to teach, how we imagine students, and how we plan our curricula? Yes, teachers need to be prepared to teach by, among other methods, employing close reading and analytical practices with the texts under study. But, we also need to be prepared to improvise and play with the rhizomatic happenings of every classroom and curricular encounter. This will likely involve many texts, activities, and intensities that take our collective attention away from the text and toward the intertextual, inter- and intrapersonal happenings of classroom life.

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DISAPPOINTMENT AND INQUIRY In the last chapter of Blush, Probyn (2005) writes about and through shame. “There is a shame,” she notes, “in being highly interested in something and unable to convey it to others” (p. 130). Probyn reframes writing shame as an “ethical practice” as it “forces us to continually reflect on the implications of our writing” (p. 132). Writing about and through disappointment may be, I hope, a similarly ethical practice, both for research and teaching. Our feelings of and writing about disappointment are linked in explicit ways to the structures of writing, research, reflection, and collaboration built into data collection. The kinds of failures that we noticed, experienced, and tried to maneuver around are, I would argue, fairly common for the teacher of literature. In other words, naked and belated pedagogy is not uniquely ours. The reflection and time required in order to notice these as phenomena (and to be disappointed by them) is more uncommon and needed in our professional teaching and research lives. Being disappointed and writing about disappointment suggests that reflection and the routines of thinking and writing that accompany are serving professional improvement. Improvement, not in the narrow sense of “what works,” but in a more capacious sense of being comfortable with unknowing and being willing to be uncomfortable long enough to learn from it. Embracing disappointment, noticing the contours of our failures, suspending our sense of identity and competence long enough to learn
these are rhizomatic practices that offer us, as teachers and students, better ways of reading, thinking, and becoming together. Berg and Seeber (2016), in their increasingly popular The Slow Professor, compare collaboration (particularly their collaborative relationship and work) to a “holding environment” that allows for speculation, creativity, failure, emotion; in short, for the inevitable mistakes and affective vicissitudes that characterize pedagogical and intellectual work. Teachers have reasons to be disappointed and to feel disappointment in their day-to-day work lives (the inevitable frustrations that arise with students, parents, administration, colleagues, workload, etc.). The present work suggests that disappointment, experienced because of and through reflection, may indicate that there are structures and patterns of action
collaboration, writing
in place that are helping us teach better by making visible what is not working. Experiencing and writing disappointment may begin a process of researching and teaching otherwise, where focusing on the can’t-bear-to-know leads to the not-yet-thought.

REFERENCES Appelman, D. (2009). Critical encounters in secondary English: Teaching literary theory to adolescents. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Atwell-Vasey, W. (1998). Nourishing words: Bridging private reading and public teaching. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Benn Michaels, W. (1980). The interpreter’s self: Peirce on the Cartesian “subject”. In J. P. Tompkins (Ed.), Reader response criticism: From formalism to post-structuralism (pp. 185
200). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Berg, M., & Seeber, B. K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2003). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York, NY: Continuum. Dewey, J. (1902). The child and the curriculum. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fish, S. (1980). Interpreting the Variorium. In J. P. Tompkins (Ed.), Reader response criticism: From formalism to post-structuralism (pp. 164
183). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fleischer, C. (1995). Composing teacher-research: A prosaic history. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gallagher, K. (2009). Readicide: How schools are killing reading and what you can do about it. Portland, ME: Stenhouse. Grumet, M. (1995). Scholae personae: Masks for meaning. In J. Gallop (Ed.), Pedagogy: The question of impersonation (pp. 36
45). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hesse, D. (2016). Reflection and the essay. In K. Yancey (Ed.), A Rhetoric of Reflection (pp. 288
299). Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. Hinchman, K. A., & Moore, D. W. (2013). Close reading: A cautionary interpretation. The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(6), 441
450. Jardine, D. (1992). Reflections on education, hermeneutics, and ambiguity: Hermeneutics as a restoring of life to its original difficulty. In W. F. Pinar & W. M. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding Curriculum and Phenomenological and Deconstructed Text (pp. 116
127). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Mission, R., & Morgan, W. (2006). Critical literacy and the aesthetic: Transforming the English classroom. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory [2nd edition]. New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W., & Grumet, M. (1976). Toward a poor curriculum. Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt. Probyn, E. (2005). Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Purves, A. (1984). The teacher as reader: An anatomy. College English, 46(3), 259
265. Rosenblatt, L. (1994). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Strom, K. (2015). Teaching as assemblage: Negotiating learning and practice in the first year of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 66(4), 321
333. Strom, K., & Martin, K. (2017). Thinking with theory in an era of Trump. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(3), 3
22. Sumara, D. (1994). The Literary Imagination and the Curriculum (Doctoral Dissertation). The University of Alberta. Sumara, D. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Sumara, D. (2002). Why reading literature in school still matters: Imagination, interpretation, insight. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Taubman, P. (2009). Teaching by numbers: Deconstructing the discourse of standards and accountability in education. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Wallin, J. J. (2007). The interpretive spirit of borderline figures. Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, 5(1), 1
20.

ART AS A “THING THAT DOES”: CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGES, EXPRESSIVE LINES OF FLIGHT, AND BECOMING COSMIC-ARTISAN IN TEACHER EDUCATION Kay Sidebottom and David Ball

ABSTRACT Further Education in England today is over-regulated, over-inspected, and has suffered from an increasingly interventionist government agenda. Trainee teachers entering the sector are required to undertake regular reflective work, traditionally in the form of a written journal. However, where trainees use creative methods for reflection, such as stories, films, drawings, photography, and models, greater “reflexivity” and connection of theory to practice become apparent. This led me, as a teacher-educator, to inquire further into our practice, examining the impact that creative reflective expression might have on the teachers themselves, their resilience, and their ability to subvert the oppressions of the current education system. Drawing on a collaborative inquiry between myself as teacher-educator, and student/colleague David Ball, this chapter recounts the story of a year of experimentation through the coming together of a student-teacher artistic assemblage which pushed the boundaries of our teacher training curriculum and formal notions of “research”. We found that we moved in new configurations of “teacher-artist”, “student-curator”, and “audience-class” towards a notion of ourselves of “cosmic artisans” (Delueuze and Guattari,

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 153
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1987) to share with the world our painful, emergent and embodied experiences of “becoming teacher”. Keywords: Art; assemblage; cosmic-artisan; reflective practice; teacher education; rhizomatic learning

INTRODUCTION In England, Education in the Further Education (FE) sector is in crisis. For a number of years, the pressures of increased managerialism, under-funding, and dependence on instrumental teaching methodologies and transactional pedagogical models (focused largely on tests) have combined to create a toxic environment where staff morale is low and mental health issues (for both tutors and students) are on the rise (Daley, Orr, & Petrie, 2015). Neither teachers in FE colleges, nor the wider community learning sector as a whole, are required by law to have a teaching qualification, yet most establishments continue to make this an essential requirement for employment. The Higher Education Institution with which this chapter is concerned prepares trainees for jobs through the provision of such teacher education qualifications. These jobs are not just in colleges, but also encompass other areas of the lifelong sector (prisons, hospitals, voluntary education, sport, and leisure and so on). Some trainee teachers learn on the job (in-service), while others are provided with a teaching placement in order to gain experience. Alongside the challenges outlined above, a range of other issues contribute to the call to do things differently. First, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the current teacher education curriculum is based on the thinking of predominantly white, male, European humanist thinkers. Despite movements to challenge such bias in the curriculum through campaigns such as “Why is my curriculum white?” (NUS Black Students, 2015), the doors of both syllabi and staffing remain resolutely closed to women and people of colour. As Bhopal (2016) reveals, “Of the 14,315 professors in the UK, only 70 are Black, and shockingly, only 17 of these are female.” Second, while rooted in educational practice and largely researchled, current approaches to pedagogical innovation are grounded in positivist assumptions which fetishize scientific methodologies. Thus, the idea that we can “know” or discover exactly what we need to create the “perfect” lesson drives much of our work. Social factors and anomalies that influence instruction are often overlooked, and so life for a trainee teacher is one of rationality, where lessons are still graded and improvement is expected to be predictable and incremental. To paraphrase Alfie Kohn (2000), this is a world where we only value what can be measured. My (Kay’s) personal approach to teacher education has been largely one of critical pedagogy and social justice. I have attempted to infuse the curriculum with the thinking of theorists such as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, and Gert Biesta. However, recently, I have felt tensions and limitations in my approach, as educators become increasingly “deadlocked in dualisms”

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(Jagodinski, 2018) and forced to identify as either “traditional” or “progressive”. The lines between labor and capital are increasingly blurred (particularly in a sector that uses precarious employment practices), and on a macrolevel, the wicked, complex problems of environmental degradation, Brexit, austerity, and the rise of the far right have required nuanced and uncertain approaches to debate and analyze. Using posthuman thinking as a navigational tool (Braidotti, 2013) has been a helpful means to steer my way through these complexities. Defining characteristics of Braidottian posthumanism include: a desire to challenge the anthropocentric nature of the world; rejection of the “human” (as defined in the Enlightenment, and embodied by Da Vinci’s idealised Vitruvian man) and promotion of the oppressed “other”; acceptance of our mediation by technology; affirmative politics; and the rejection of dualism (such as mind/body). Posthuman thinking is underpinned by nomadic theory, which “[…] stresses the idea of embodiment and the embodied and embedded material structure of what we commonly call thinking” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 2). This ontology emphasizes affirmation and praxis, as we are always in a process of growth and “detaching ourselves from the dominant systems of representation” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 7). Taking on board the notion of affirmative ethics and nomadic thinking, and grounding my beliefs in a process ontology, opened up new possibilities for taking “lines of flight” (Delueuze & Guattari, 1987), or pursuing antihegemonic actions grounded in hope and creativity. Along the way, I also hoped to challenge the racial and gendered bias of the curriculum, as my students and I reimagined what it meant to be “other” in a teacher education context and wrote the voices of the oppressed and overlooked into our curriculum. This chapter recounts the story of a subsequent year of experimentation through the coming together of a student-teacher artistic assemblage that pushed the boundaries of our institution’s teacher-training curriculum and challenged formal notions of “research”. Taking to heart the call of Maria Hlavajova (2015) to view art as a “thing that does,” we moved in new configurations of “teacher-artist,” “student-curator,” and “audience-class” towards a notion of ourselves of “cosmic artisans” (Delueuze and Guattari, 1987). We eventually transported our art from the private to public sphere to share with the world our painful, emergent and embodied experiences of “becoming teacher.” The experimentation I engaged in with David concerned the production of a body of “reflective work,” which is traditionally approached by students in the form of an individual written journal that captured the highs and lows of their teacher training journeys. Posthuman thinking had started to raise questions for me about the usefulness of written responses as the primary means of reflecting on affective experience, and class discussions with students indicated that many agents (human and non-human) were, in fact, impacting the manner in which they reflected and thus the means by which they expressed their thoughts and feelings. Through the introduction of creative methods of reflection, I sought to explore whether artistic approaches that took into account intra-actions with non-human others could lead to deeper, more reflexively engaged responses and understandings of emerging teacher identities. While this activity could have

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been defined as action research, I was keen to decenter myself from a researcher role, recognising my own entanglement in the process, and so resisting research as being an individual act. As Taylor (2016) suggests: “[…] post-human research is an enactment of knowing-in-being that emerges in the event of doing research itself. In opening new means to integrate thinking and doing, it offers an invitation to come as you are and to experiment, invent and create” (p. 18). Recognising the co-dependence of teachers and students, and in the spirit of joint creative endeavour, this evaluative chapter reflects on our experimental year, taking the form of a conversation between myself, Kay Sidebottom as tutor, and David Ball as student
artist
curator. The conversation emerged over a period of several weeks as we wrote together in a Google doc from a range of locations. At times we wrote synchronously, or at other times eagerly catching-up with what the other had written and separately responding to new thoughts and ideas. Although the initial question, “Let’s go back to the beginning,” was mine (Kay’s), the other questions were unplanned and unstructured. We chose images along the way to illuminate our points and experiences. As Isaacs (1999) states: “Dialogue […] is a conversation with a center, not sides. It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channelling it toward something that has never been created before.” In reflecting on, and mapping out our journey together, we hoped to gain further insights to energise new artistic projects and interventions.

FLOWS AND MULTIPLICITIES Kay: So, let’s go back to the beginning. Can you remember when we starting talking about using art in our teacher training sessions? David: Yes
it was in relation to reflective practice. Creating art has always had an element of reflection for me, be it a self-portrait or something more abstract; so reflection had always felt quite a natural way in which to develop artistic ideas. I remember visiting art exhibitions throughout my teacher training, first as subject-specific personal development for myself, but also as a way to start thinking more deeply about issues I may have had in my teaching. I had two very different placement experiences, one leading ‘taster’ sessions in a variety of art and craft situations, and the second, teaching a more traditional qualification within a local college art department. When I spent time looking at art, I found that pieces might ‘jump out’ at me, perhaps helping me to examine a relationship that was forming during my teaching placement, or to suggest a solution for an issue with a student’s work. Then I remember you leading a session where the class visited a local exhibition space where we chose artworks to describe an element of teaching we were struggling with, an aspect of our teacher identity, or another issue we needed to unpack further. I chose an image of a storm, a painting whose elements felt allegorical for my feelings at that particular time. I also transcribed this image as a sketch, which gave me further information to reflect upon. The transcription process highlighted to me the key elements of my feelings about why I had chosen the image. The mark making suggested conflict, and the line and movement described the state of flux I found myself in. The other trainees responded really well too. This was quite surprising for some individuals in the group for whom a gallery visit wasn’t an every-day experience. Offering up images, objects, and paintings as a springboard for reflection seemed natural, and the responses back from the group were deeply personal and pertinent.

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Kay: Yes, the responses were fantastic. We were lucky enough to have a Picasso exhibition visiting the local gallery that day, and so I think that lent an air of excitement and ceremony to the whole experience too. I was concerned at first that people would think that art ‘wasn’t for them’, and would resist the idea of using it as an approach to reflection. I guess what I was doing here, in true social constructivist style, was trying to scaffold the learning process. David: Where did the original idea for using art in this way come from? Kay: We’d been encouraged [by the University] to look at different approaches to assessment for a while, but I think (like some of my own students in fact), I didn’t consider myself artistic or creative in that sense, and so was fearful of facilitating something I felt I had no understanding of. The idea of art being critical, politically-informed work was also quite unfamiliar to me before that point. It was only after meeting the artist Maria Hlavajova (the Director of the Basis voor Actuele Kunst) at Utrecht University and learning more about posthuman approaches to art that I realised I was letting my own assumptions block what could be truly emancipatory pedagogical practice. We talked about being in a state of interregnum
that Gramscian concept of crisis where the ‘old [is] dying and the new cannot be born’ (Gramsci, 1971)
where concerns such as environmental degradation, climate change, migration, technological mediation, and the rise of fascism are threatening life as we currently know it. And I realised that working in education at that time felt very much like that for me; it felt like a period of stasis. While there was incredible creative and innovative thinking taking place, much of it was blocked at so many levels and for many different reasons. Friends in the sector were leaving, students were reporting increasing levels of stress and mental ill-health, many colleagues were on short-term or precarious contracts, and others were seeing the detrimental impact of the government’s austerity measures on their terms and conditions. It got me wondering about how we can help the new to be born, despite the blockages, if that makes sense. I wondered if using art to re-imagine how education could look and feel might do this, or be a way of at least making ourselves feel better in the meantime! I also began to appreciate that art has many forms, and began to explore the ways that we could also use mediums such as poetry, photography and performance, as well as making better connections with the traditional crafts that a number of my students were already involved in teaching. David: Before I studied for my degree in Fine Art, I was interested in how art has a power, and how that power might be harnessed to help others. I initially thought about a career in art therapy as a way to transcribe those ideas, and then made the connection that art could also be used to support trainee teachers in a pre-therapeutic space. Kaima, Ray, and Muniz (2016) talk about the stress-reducing properties of engaging in artistic processes, finding evidence of significant reductions in cortisol, the stress-related hormone, following time spent creating art. I think using art as a way of working through ideas, situations and problems really helped me over those teacher training years, offering a calming, creative and enlightening outlet for built up emotions and feelings. It was no surprise that using these processes for reflection also helped the other students to manage their own stress and anxiety a little better. Kay: Rosi Braidotti warns against ‘[…] promoting an ecology of belonging by upholding the collective memory of trauma or pain’ (2008, p. 8) and I think this shared creativity was really helping us to form a spirit of community which was affirmative and generative. It took away the temptation to rant or dwell in negativity in our reflective work. I love your idea of art as a form of power too. In his posthuman manifesto, Pepperell (2009, p. 186) suggests that creativity ‘[…] consists in combining things that already exist, but which had previously been held as separate’ and that the energy required to do this causes ‘a physical rush of excitement familiar to use who appreciate art.’ I felt that we could tap into this creative power, or ‘potentia,’ as Carol Taylor (2016, p. 20) defines it: ‘[...] energy, vitality, the constitutive desire to endure.’

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David: So would you say that the move to introduce art-based approaches was deliberate then, as a means to disrupt and destabilise things through the harnessing of this kind of power? Kay: Yes, although I’m not sure I was fully conscious of this at the time! I was very aware though that our entire Teacher Training programme was rooted in Eurocentric approaches, not only relating to the theory of education, but also in regards to the pedagogical methods we employed. I wasn’t convinced that writing a reflective journal was necessarily the best method for exploring the affective and physical responses to becoming a teacher, and I had a fear that assessment was driving the process. Our experiences were multi-dimensional and formed by intra-actions with not only our students but also other agents, be they human or non-human (Barad, 2007). Our reflections often took place in dialogue with family or friends, or even pets. I took heart from Rosi Braidotti’s idea that: ‘[...] the experimental approach is rather an integral part of the effort to produce adequate representations of our real-life conditions in fast-changing times’ (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018, p. 16). As a teacher I wanted to also model and engage with these experimental processes myself. It seemed strange that I should be advocating reflection as a vital learning mechanism, but not doing it myself or sharing my experiences.

COLLABORATION Kay: A few people (other teachers) have expressed surprise that I got involved in creating things with students
either in class with you, or at other times. You might remember the ‘Notes from a Lesson Observation’ poem I wrote, which was a reaction to the frustration I felt at the instrumental nature of teaching observations (also written in absolute frustration at the sheer quantity of them that I had to undertake). I did feel at times that I was being quite self-indulgent. After all, the course was about you! We also spent a lot of time discussing professional boundaries and this was a significant challenge in that respect. I’d be interested to know what you thought about this. David: I enjoyed the way in which you were unashamedly yourself as an individual and as a teacher. There was definitely something about Nancy Kline’s (1999) idea of being present as yourself in that. It was something that I took with me into my own teaching. It gave me the confidence to be open and honest with my students, and to kindle those shared experiences, after all I was also a student, with deadlines and assignments of my own. I think as I appreciated the honest approach you took, that my students respected me for my honesty and openness and willingness to learn alongside them as individuals. There is something about equality in those behaviours that can create fantastic rapport, without blurring professional boundaries. Kay: It’s interesting, because I’ve always had that ‘imposter’ thing about art, as I haven’t studied it, and was never identified as having any particular talent for it, but I suddenly found myself immersed in artistic things. I couldn’t have started this project without your involvement, as an artist. It was a necessary lending of legitimacy in a way. That brings me onto the concept of ‘assemblage.’ David: You should probably explain what you mean by the term. Kay: Yes, indeed. You’ve reminded me that much of the theory behind the posthuman thinking of Rosi Braidotti, in particular, is grounded in the concepts of Delueuze and Guattari (1972/1987), philosophers who are well-renowned for the impenetrable nature of their writing. One of my struggles as I’ve been wrestling with their ideas (over the past three years now!) is knowing how much to explain them to students, knowing that the relevance may not be immediately apparent, and conversely, being keen not to patronise you by over-simplifying things. Katie Strom (2018) suggests that we need to work with the exclusionary nature of

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‘high theory’ and I have found this sentence in particular very helpful ‘[…] Deleuzian concepts and their related language must be used purposefully and in ways that allow multiple entry points for readers to be able to plug into the ideas presented to create micro-transformations in thinking’ (p. 108). ‘Assemblage’, then, is the idea of a group (which may consist of people, things, ‘non-human’ others such as pets, and also more abstract components such happenings and language) that enters into relations; often for just a short period of time
but with the outcome of producing something (Strom & Martin, 2017). When I think of our time at the college, I’m reminded that a number of agents contributed to our artistic ‘assemblage’; not only the students creating the reflective work, but also the materials, the items and companions within our own homes, the artists like Picasso who influenced us, the music we listened to while we made the pieces, the educational theories that we read before reflecting, and so on. If you removed any of these elements, the end result would have been very different. The utterly co-dependent nature of our reflective practice was highlighted and made apparent through our creations, and this is one of the beautiful things about them, I think. Your piece, ‘Collective’, really sums up this idea of assemblage to me. Tell me more about how you created it? (Fig. 1) David: ‘Collective’ was a painting-based reflective project, influenced directly by those students with whom I had worked on their own Final Major Projects on the course I was teaching. The painting incorporates elements of a range of students’ work into one image that describes my last months on teaching placement. I was teaching a range of individuals who all had distinct artistic drives and practices. I found myself in a cycle of teaching and learning with each individual, researching alongside them and for them, experimenting with them, challenging their ideas and practices, and in turn my own artistic values. I made the painting over the course of a week, incorporating elements of collage, action painting, abstraction, as well as whole range of elements, styles and practices,

Fig. 1.

David Ball, “Collective,” 2017. r David Ball.

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into this one image that for me, became a celebration of the work we had done together. I wanted to reference those key individuals who I had challenged, and in turn, had challenged me, and show this as an almost joyful collaboration between us. Kay: So, in a way, you have created a concrete manifestation of your work together? David: I would agree with that. Looking back at ‘Collective’ now feels like more than one hand has produced it. I see the faces of those students when looking at the incorporated elements of the work. Kay: We often overlook the physical side of being an educator
although in reality much of our daily work is taken up with non-human ‘stuff’, be it paperwork, IT equipment, stationery, or in your case art materials. Mary Ann Hunter and Emery (2015) talk about the idea of bringing the ‘materiality of teacherly work’ back to the foreground (p. 170). ‘Collective’ really reminds me of how teaching is an act of creation (or co-creation), and it also brings me back to the idea of ‘assemblage’
how we are absolutely dependent on others, and not just the students who inspired the work, but the materials that created it. There was also a piece that you made purely by yourself. Can you tell me about how this one evolved? (Fig. 2) David: These sketches formed the basis of an evolving series about my teacher identity and culminated in a piece shown alongside ‘Collective’. I had particular ideas about how the first image should look, and made it at the end of my first year on placement. I wanted an obvious self-portrait originally, but this evolved into quite a dull image that expressed where I was in my training. I felt like I had achieved very little and that the lessons I had taught were uninspiring. Everything about that image for me is a little depressing, but making it provided me with a different lens through which to view my progress. I became more positive while making the image, as it helped me to work through some quite complicated feelings. For the second piece, I used the same image and remade it in an energetic way, using the same colour palette, attacking the page with my brush in frustration. On reflection, I could see that I needed to express some strong emotions, but unlike the sombre tone of the first, there

Fig. 2.

David Ball, “Self-Portrait,” 2016. r David Ball.

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was genuine passion for what I was doing as a teacher, and I realised that I could harness that energy to become better at the job. The shift in energy, in both my reaction to the role, and in the production of the reflective art-work, was very telling.

ANIMALS Kay: I found it interesting that lots of the reflective pieces featured animals. I don’t know why that was unexpected actually, when you think that pets form a major part of the lives of many mature students! Dogs, in particular, acted as a silent partner for reflections, and, in the words of Donna Haraway (2008, p. 8), they can be ‘[...] a provocation to curiosity’
they can make you look at the world in a different way. David: Animals have featured in artworks for centuries, from humble cave drawings to the most sophisticated of paintings, to contemporary sculpture. The fact they are non-verbal, I think, allows us to project ourselves, and our thoughts and feelings on to them. They can be powerful, serene, playful, and as such work as perfect vessels to carry those human emotions. Specifically in relation to reflection, I think animals have an amazing way of calming the mind and creating a perfect thinking space (Fig. 3). This image of my dog Molly expresses, for me, the calming and grounding nature of animals. I look at her here and think how she seems to be in a state of contemplation, relaxed and unworried about the world. I often go back to this image, her legacy as a calming influence allowing that important time to think, reflect and connect with the world around us. Kay: Yes, animals are so grounding, I think. In the course we talked a lot about ‘de-centering’ the human in our work and practice. This was really counter-cultural in a curriculum that relies heavily on Humanist theories and thinkers. Running through the heart of the syllabus are writers like Maslow, Carl Rogers, Malcolm Knowles
and Nancy Kline of course. The teaching focus was usually on ideas such as ‘self-actualisation’ and unconditional positive regard; in this system, learning is personalised and takes account of the affective domain. Relationships are essential to the education process and teachers act more as facilitators. I absolutely believe in the importance of these things, but I felt we were overlooking other key influences and agents, and that’s where posthuman thinking came in. Re-imagining the role of animals helped us to explore the way in which we ‘other’ or privilege different actors in our curriculum and in our classrooms. As Cary Wolfe (2017) suggests: ‘[…]

Fig. 3.

David Ball, “Molly,” 2015. r David Ball.

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racist and sexist hierarchies have always been tacitly grounded in the deepest
and often most invisible
hierarchy of all: the ontological divide between human and animal life, which in turn grounds a pernicious ethical hierarchy’ (para. 19). Taking account of our non-human reflective companions helped build empathy for and consider the roles of not only animals, but many overlooked ‘others’ in our everyday practice.

EXHIBITION Kay: So, as you know, we ended up moving much of the artwork created by students into a public space through our end of term exhibition, ‘Becoming Teacher.’ What do you remember about the experience? David: At first I was a little daunted by the prospect, as I hadn’t exhibited any of my own work for a number of years, and I felt those pangs of ‘imposter syndrome’ (Brookfield, 1995) when thinking about being part of an education conference. After all, I was a trainee, not a qualified teaching professional at that point. However, those feelings disappeared when I began collecting together the work produced by our cohort of educators, and began planning how the exhibition space would look. The fact that the work was so varied, and included painting, photography, poetry, models and video, meant that the exhibition would surprise as well as delight those who visited it. Kay: What were your favourite exhibits? David: I loved every submission. There were some amazing pieces, but there was a selection of photographs which were really beautiful: ‘Alongside’, by student Hannah Cambé. They were extremely professional compositions expressing feelings and thoughts that balanced being intensely personal, yet at the same time, wonderfully ambiguous. These photographs were very popular with visitors to the exhibition, as I think they cleverly allowed the viewer to see themselves in the images. Kay: I loved the photographs too. I was in a strange position as a teacher who had to also assess this work as part of your Reflective Practice module, and that felt quite bizarre. Firstly, I didn’t feel capable or qualified of making an aesthetic judgment (about what was ‘good’ in an artistic sense). And second, for me the goalposts had been moved because this was not the standard reflective journal with a particular word count; very often the works weren’t referenced or weren’t grounded in theory, either. I felt responsible at times for taking on this risk. This kind of pedagogy was disruptive (Reay, 2012) and by introducing an audience and a performative element, it was almost as if there was another layer of judgment. There is also choice in the putting on of an exhibition–you are making a conscious decision to place and select certain items and not others. I am interested in the notions of power here and how they played out. What do you think? David: Curating the exhibition put me in a strange position also. On one hand, I felt the need to be inclusive of all submissions, as they were all personal reflections with their own merit, but I was mindful that the resulting collection may not work as an effective exhibition, with flow and rhythm. I spent a large amount of time before setting up the exhibition considering the ways in which I would show various exhibits, and had a good idea of how certain pieces would work together. I luckily then had a good amount of time with the exhibition space to try out different ideas and placement of works. I had an element of power in curating the exhibition, which I was sensitive to, as artworks were produced by myself and my colleagues, and also by other students I didn’t know personally. I eventually decided to be wholly inclusive to all submitting artists, yet selective in the individual pieces, electing to show the strongest work, both artistically and reflectively. I think this choice meant the exhibition was the strongest it could be, with its roots in equality and inclusivity as well as in the strength of its artworks. There’s a quote by Marcel Proust (2016) that sums up for me the power of the

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individual contributions and the way in which they conjured up different re-imaginings of what it meant to be a trainee teacher: Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance. [III, p. 935)

COSMIC ARTISANS Kay: I’m going to talk about another Deleuzian idea now, that of the ‘cosmic artisan.’ An artisan, for Delueuze and Guattari (1987), is someone who is ‘determined to follow the flow of matter’ (p. 345) where the matter, or material itself intra-acts (Barad, 2007) with the creator too – very much in the way that our reflections were entwined with and informed by our creations. By harnessing and connecting with a range of forces
the energy of ‘potentia’ we talked about earlier
the artisan becomes ‘cosmic’. Part of me resists the notion of putting this label on ourselves, partly through fear of seeming pretentious, but also because it in some way suggests that I am empowered to do so on your behalf
and not all of us may buy into that concept! However, I do feel a lot of resonance with the Cosmic Artisan idea
as Sholtz (2015, p. 36) describes them, ‘Cosmic Artisans exist at the limit, are fabulators in the sense that they actualise lines of flight, potentials that exist immanently, virtually, intensively.’ I love the idea of us being ‘potentials’; it feels very counter-cultural in a system that is riskaverse, avoids complexity, and privileges the idea of replicable, positivist outcomes to reflective practice (e.g., “if I do x next time, y should happen”). David: In this analogy then, are the ‘lines of flight’ (Delueuze & Guattari, 1987) the movements away from the status quo that ‘cosmic artisans’ enact? I certainly see them as actions that disrupt and de-stabilise accepted teaching norms. Perhaps our ‘strongest’ line of flight (if that is a thing!) was to hold our exhibition off-site, at a completely different college. It was almost breaking apart the notion of the work being part of a formal assignment. By taking our work out of its normal location and displaying it in a different place for a different purpose, we were playing with the temporality of assessment and resisting the way that our teaching journeys were stratified and ‘territorialised’, as Delueuze and Guattari (1987) might say. Kay: Definitely. I’d also suggest that although we only disrupted things for a short time, these alterations in thinking, working together, perceiving reflection and so on will filter out into further changes and fractures in the system. I know that this project has given me the strength to continue working with creative methods and to keep using art to re-imagine education. Do you think it has changed things for you? David: It has definitely changed the way I approach my working environment, stretching myself to think creatively and break with established norms. I continue to maintain my artistic practice to explore difficult and challenging situations, and those resulting reflections continue to be insightful. I think it is also interesting that we have remained friends and colleagues, and continue to work together with quite radical artistic practices a year after the usual tutor/ student relationship would end. I have the sense that we will re-form and coalesce around other subjects and causes in the future; we just need to be alert to the power of forces of ‘potentia’ and ready to harness those energies again
whenever the time comes. Kay: Yes. I like the idea of activism associated with that. By taking on the idea of potentia as a form of creative and productive power, we can seek out informal, rhizomatic networks to further promote artistic practice in teacher education. It’s exciting to see other practitioners with whom we’ve connected taking up the mantle in their own teaching contexts, as a result of this project.

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CONCLUSION This dialogue, and giving names to the work we have done, has in itself been a process of ‘conscientization’ (Freire, 1970), which has felt empowering for me. Using a dialogic reflective conversation as an evaluative tool has helped me to decenter myself as researcher; the conversation and its direction and focus has not been (entirely) in my control, and its co-constructed nature has helped me to bring in the voices of other human and non-human agents. It has also helped me to reflect on how, at times, I have been very much in the centre, entangled both as a facilitator and participant in the artistic projects. St. Pierre (2016) encourages us to set aside the ordinary research methodology questions and realize that ‘[…] we are always tangled in enquiry’ (p. 29). This will be an important (and humbling) reminder for me as I move on to future research projects and re-imagine them as truly collective endeavors.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bhopal, K. (2016). White academia: Will the Race Equality Charter make a difference? London School of Economics and Political Science Blog. [Online]. Retrieved from http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ politicsandpolicy/tackling-race-inequality-in-higher-education/. Accessed 23 November 2017. Braidotti, R. (2008). Affirmation, pain and empowerment. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 14(3),7
36. Braidotti, R. (2012). Nomadic theory: The portable Rosi Braidotti. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R., & Hlavajova, M. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Brookfield, S. (1995). Becoming a critically reflective teacher. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Daley, Orr, & Petrie. (Eds.). (2015). Further education and the twelve dancing princesses. London, UK: Trentham Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-oedipus. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Trans. and ed.). New York, NY: International Publishers. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hlavajova, M. (2015). Critique-as-proposition: Thinking about, with, and through art in our time. 26 August 2015, University of Utrecht. Hunter, M., & Emery, S. (2015). The curious schools project: Capturing nomad creativity in teacher work. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 40(10), 167
179. Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue and the art of thinking together. New York, NY: Random House. Jagodinski, J. (2018). From the artist to the cosmic artisan. In C. Naughton, G. Biesta, & D. Cole (Eds.), (2018) Art, artists and pedagogy: Philosophy and the arts in education. London: Routledge. Kaimal, G., Ray, K., & Muniz, J. (2016). Reduction of cortisol levels and participants’ responses following art making. Art Therapy, 33(2), 74
80. Kline, N. (1999). Time to think. London: Cassell Illustrated. Kohn, A. (2000). The case against standardized testing: Raising the scores, ruining the schools. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. NUS Black Students. (2015). Why is my curriculum white?Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v¼Dscx4h2l-Pk. Accessed on 14 January 2018. Pepperell, R. (2009). The posthuman condition. London: Intellect Publishing.

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Proust, M. (2016). Remembrance of things past (Moncrieff, S. Trans. Volume 3) London: Penguin Classics. Reay, D. (2012). What would a socially just education system look like? Saving the minnows from the pike. Journal of Education Policy, 27(5), 587
599. Sholtz, J. (2015). The invention of a people: Heidegger and Deleuze on art and the political. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. St Pierre, E. A. (2016). Rethinking the empirical in the posthuman. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), (2016) Posthuman research practices in education. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Strom, K. (2017). “That’s Not Very Deleuzian”: Thoughts on interrupting the exclusionary nature of “High Theory”. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(1). Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00131857.2017.1339340?journalCode¼rept20. Accessed on 12 January 2018. Strom, K., & Martin, A. (2017). Becoming-teacher: A rhizomatic look at first-year teaching. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Taylor, C. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), (2016) Posthuman research practices in education. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolfe, C. (2017). Is humanism really humane? New York Times [Online]. Retrieved from https://evolutionnews.org/2017/01/now_its_posthum/. Accessed on 24 March 2018.

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BECOMING-WITH/IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: MINOR ACCOUNTS AS CARE-FULL INQUIRY Maria F. G. Wallace

ABSTRACT Care-fully attending to the ontologies embedded within educational research, this chapter provokes readers to consider the epistemic worlding of qualitative research. Drawing on the intersections of feminist poststructuralism, posthumanism, and new material feminisms, educational research can be seen as happening to worlds while also making worlds. As such, educational researchers are invited to care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Bringing diverse mo(ve)ments into conversation, a minor sequence for decentering the educational researcher is presented. One example is the destabilization of conventional data triangulation through “Talking Triads.” Thinking with/in a multimodal triad gestures toward the possibility of engaging all scholarship as an intimate endeavor. More specifically, this chapter begins to illuminate how textual re/presentations of becoming-minor inherently raise tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of being-educational researcher. From mirrors to monsters, the manifestation of “I” becomes-with/in that which is more than human. Keywords: Ontology; post-qualitative; subjectivity; posthumanism; new materialism; feminism

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 167
178 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031013

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INTUITIVE TROUBLE I use GPS navigational systems with the understanding they are not always trustworthy. Likewise, I also employ intuition when a device (e.g., GPS) or apparatus (e.g., research methodology) takes an entity (i.e., subject, object, ideology) elsewhere and/or elsewhen. Analogous with methodological traditions, “intuition […] is frowned upon within methodological approaches” (Manning, 2016, p. 42) and thus continues to trigger troubling circumstances for researchers conducting intimate scholarship. Decentering the Educational Researcher in Intimate Scholarship (Strom, Mills, & Ovens, this volume), illuminates instances where and when educational researchers stay with the trouble of conventional models of inquiry (Haraway, 2016). For the authors in this volume, intuitive connections among the position of researcher as also the researched are presented. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of involutionary
as opposed to evolutionary
becoming, intimate qualitative research, akin to the chapters presented in this volume, is inherently entangled with the production of something and somebody. That body, which is often signified as a singular and stable “I,” offers great possibilities and limitations for examining how “models model” the researched (Manning, 2016, p. 44). For example, statements such as “the ontological is [often] held hostage by the epistemological” (Taliferro Baszile, 2010, p. 491) and “[researchers] have literally been trained away from [themselves]” (Dillard, 2012, p. 18) offer a glimpse into the depths to which models work. In this response, I aim to attend to ways qualitative research, as a model (among many) is also inscribed (and inscribes) within an epistemic worlding. Inspired by Haraway’s (2015, 2016) account of diverse worldings (e.g., Capitolocene, Anthropocene, Platationocene, Chthulucene), I explore how epistemology might present another worlding directly entangled with the nature of qualitative research. Perhaps, the practice of decentering researchers attends to the ways in which human and non-human entities become-with/in an epistemological worlding? (this volume; Wallace, 2017a, 2017b) If so, then an epistemic worlding inherently functions as a “model that models” (Manning, 2016), or, as Barad (2007) might contend, an “apparatus,” where ontologies become configured. The accounts presented in this response begin to illuminate minor gestures (Manning, 2016) often deemed “too troubling” for educational research. Across each account, I aim to invite educational researchers to care-fully inquire with and in the search for something or somebody that is not yet.

MINORITY AMONG MAJORITY IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH Informed by “the posts” (e.g., poststructuralism and posthumanism) and feminist new materialist perspectives, “I” nor “my” is never static. As such, writing about decentering the researcher and writing writ large can often trigger writing paralysis (Bridges-Rhoads, 2015). Finding trouble in the writing is where inquiry unfolds, folds, and refolds (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Here, in this book, the authors (and those who linger in the margins and reference lists) remind

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I/we/us of the intimate exchange between ideas, spaces, artifacts, and humans. As Deleuze and Guattari state, “ideas do not die” (1987, p. 235). Ideas that linger cause trouble. Trouble, according to Haraway (2016), is inherent to our becoming-with various worldings. Trouble is a doubled event
it is both a noun and a verb. Trouble, therefore, is a thing that happens, but also an activity that consistently re/shapes worlds. For the purposes of this response, I/we stay with and in the trouble contextualized by an epistemic worlding. That is, my care-full thinking resides within gestures often identified as trouble within the realm of educational research. Such gestures inherently stir up possibilities for us to working within educational research. Herein marks the troubling relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion of major and minor movements. Neither the minor nor the major is fixed in advance. The major is a structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value. The minor is a force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards. (Manning, 2016, p. 1)

Both major and minor forces, or as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) state, “languages,” are always in flux; yet, they work within different planes. While the major territorializes, the minor deterritorializes. A practical example of a “major” entity, force, or movement is the figurative “man” or “box”. The man and the box structure. The man and the box maintain models. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987) major forces work to classify, categorize, sort, and overcode. Minor forces work to escape the major. Becoming-major is the model, the man, and/or the box that reduces possibility, while becoming-minor is to generate possibility through escape or opposition. Becoming-minor is a gesture, which “sticks it” to the man. Models that model (e.g., research methodology) function as a major language overcoding the possibility of minor movements. Alternatively, “the minor gesture creates sites of dissonance, staging disturbances that open experience to new modes of expression” (Manning, 2016, p. 2). Within an epistemic worlding, educational research that engages inquiry as a minor movement, as do the authors in this volume, often feels troublesome. There is little linearity and an abundance of getting lost (Lather, 2007). Tenuous and intimate, each engagement is likely a response to working within the major ruins of educational research (Lagemann, 2000; St. Pierre & Pillow, 2000). Influenced by feminist poststructural theory (St. Pierre, 2000), my reading of the chapters in this volume revealed many moments troubling what is and/or who is not yet qualitative research, thus inviting readers to make minor gestures through thought and (in)action (Manning, 2016). Minor movements engender potentiality.

CARE-FULL MOVEMENTS My reading of each chapter in this volume took me elsewhere and elsewhen. With each chapter, the authors challenged me to continuously reorient my engagement with a subject and/or object becoming-within the (re)search. Even

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so, I found moments embedded within each chapter worth reading side-by-side. As I assembled these specific mo(ve)ments into conversation with each other, a minor sequence decentering the educational researcher emerged (see Table 1). The contents and organization of Table 1 also illuminate an implicit desire to wrestle with pre-existing and forthcoming futurities in educational research. In sequencing minor moments, tensions between nonhuman structures (e.g., time, tradition, concepts, mirrors, literature) and the human experience of beingeducational researcher surface. Moreover, this volume reiterates the necessity for researchers to engage all scholarship as an intimate endeavor. Like Haraway’s (2016) notion of trouble, the chapters in this volume demonstrate that educational research also functions as both a verb and a noun. Educational research both happens to worlds while also making worlds. As such, educational researchers might look to this volume as an example for how one might care for the ethical entanglement among the research, researcher, researched, and reader. Minor movements, like those presented in Table 1, initiate potential practices of care-full hospitality in educational research. Likewise, and in solidarity with the Table 1. Gestures toward a Minor Inquiry. Assembling Movements I aim to retain the “I” in order to trouble the “I/eye […]a

A Minor Trajectory of Inquiry *If time is assumed to be linear.

Let us […] test the threads of the stories that house us as autonomous beings.b Here we found our first ethnographic moment: the act of reading can, in itself, be ethnographic
being inside your own body, but looking at this event from the outside, observing as you sit in the library and read. Reviewing literature becomes an ethnographic encounter.c What emerged in the research assemblage was the way it grew unpredictably in all directions, connecting and expanding with both human and nonhuman elements
always becoming different.d The debriefing session enabled both of us to slow down and think with(in) this experience […]e I write “research data” with
not quite an eye roll, but almost. A smirk maybe.f Reflections, it turns out, are everywhere and seem to happen at any time, whether or not we seek them out. Perhaps, then, there is nothing particularly unique or important about reflecting aside from the meaning we assign to it.g In working with the concept of assemblage, I recognize myself as an element that affects and was/is affected by the research process.h [It] feels like more than one hand has produced it.i a

Vu, this volume. Wamsted, this volume. c Corson, & Schwitzman, this volume. d Melvold Hordvik, Tore Ronglan, MacPhail, & Tannehill, in this volume. e Bangou, & Arnott, this volume. f Sams, this volume. g Kress, & Frazier-Booth, this volume. h Martin, this volume. i Sidebottom & Ball, this volume. b

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authors of this volume, I offer one of my own care-full endeavors to also decenter the educational researcher.

MINOR ACCOUNT(S) Amidst the writing paralysis that ensues when writing from feminist poststructural perspectives (Bridges-Rhoads, 2015), dilemmas of “giving voice” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2009), and conducting research that thinks with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), I (like the authors in this volume) sought to make minor gestures in my dissertation (Wallace, 2017a). For this reason, I share one more example of how I also care-fully enacted a minor gesture through what I refer to as a “talking triad.” The talking triad emerged as a strategic gesture that challenged the major language of formal “data triangulation” methods in qualitative research. Rather than using multiple “voices” to establish some sort of pure and rational truth, the talking triad presented here intends to highlight conflicting discourses of a singular self. Data never speaks for itself (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012). In the case of a “talking triad,” data speak across and in-between itself to trouble the “I/eye” (Vu, in this volume). More specifically, the talking triad presented here assembles accounts of one research participant (June) to reveal “new modes of existence” within educational research (Manning, 2016, p. 7). According to the institutional review board application, June was a participant in my research study. However, my relationship with June was very different than the formalities that appeared on paper due to our ongoing involvement in each other’s lives. While June completed official informed consent to participate in this dissertation, I did not view her as a research participant in the conventional sense. Instead, June represented a multifaceted relationship within a research study, navigating what it meant to “become an elementary science teacher,” and who she was (or might become) in the process of “growing up.” My work with June depicts our implicit and explicit engagement with educational research as intimate experience. As participant/researcher, we becomewith/in the (re)search. The following descriptions depict a divergent characterization of how one (or two?) participants explore a multiplicitous account of the subjects implicated in the (re)search. Simply put, the following accounts zoom in and out of a participant/researcher relationship. My position as both researcher/ participant, alongside June, revealed insights into troubling im/possibilities of becoming-within the epistemic regime of teacher induction. When co-constructing descriptions of June, I intentionally chose to supplement a more formal “profile” with excerpts from our informal exchanges. My intention in highlighting such informal moments is not to serve as an additional site necessitating “proper” analysis, but rather I/we share them as one attempt (among many) to destabilize the authority of a singular and stable written account. The following abbreviated accounts, or what I refer to as a talking triad, is one attempt (among many) to depict becoming-with/in a research assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Nordstrom, 2015). Fig. 1 depicts how I/we elucidate one account of three.

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One account of participant by primary researcher

A third account of being in a study with primary researcher by participant

Fig. 1.

A second account of participant by participant

Participant/Researcher Talking Triad.

When I proposed the opportunity for June to “speak for herself” about herself in any format she preferred (e.g., written narrative, story, picture, diagram, or audio recording), she responded to with, “Yes, of course! Hmm. I am going to have to think about how to approach it” (personal communication, June, February 27, 2017). While other participants preferred responding to specific prompts, June debated multiple formats and drafts of her account. Eventually, June decided to complete a self-recorded audio clip that best resonated with what she referred to as “her person.” The following sections reveal a unique account of one dynamic multiplicity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) concealed by the pseudonym, “June,” becoming-with/in the (re)search. I/we encourage readers to become-with/in this (re)search. Let June take you into a smooth space (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; St. Pierre, 1997). Let June show you a Slow and nomadic ontology (Braidotti, 1994; Ulmer, 2016, capitalization original). Let June teach you some thing and some body that is not yet. One Account of June by Maria At the time of the study, June was a 22-year-old White woman in the last semester of her undergraduate degree program where she would earn a Bachelors of Science in Elementary Education from the largest public university in the state in May 2017. June was in the midst of completing her student teaching placement as part of her degree and certification requirements, in a fourth grade math/science classroom. While June had pursued a degree and certification in elementary education, it was not until about one week before our first formal one-on-one meeting regarding this specific study in January 2017 that June had actually decided to begin a career as a full-time classroom teacher in August 2017 after graduation. However, June regularly re-evaluated her initial claim to pursue a traditional K-12 teaching position. June’s wavering decision provides a

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glimpse into the complexity of her inter-related and layered experiences with teacher education as also mode of induction, personal family background, and the passions that fuel her being. June grew up in New Orleans, LA and attended small private Catholic school from kindergarten through sixth grade. Then after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, June and her mother moved from the urban city center to a suburban community about 45 min away from her father. This relocation also consisted of a move from a small private school education to one of the highest performing public junior high and high schools in the state. While in high school, June was very involved in the school’s theater productions and completed different hospital and veterinary medicine internships. It was, and continues to be, common for June to be recognized by her peers, family, and teachers as the “artisticsinger student.” Unlike her parents and other siblings, June is the first member (and possibly the only one in the future) in her immediate family to complete college and earn a bachelor’s degree. June sings. JUNE: If you asked, “What is your ideal night out on the weekend? What is your ideal evening when you get home from school, what is your” […] Because I’ll tell you now, it is a struggle for me to sit down and [lesson] plan. It is a struggle for me to not, literally, not put the record player on and just dance and sing all night. I literally […] Actually, I’ve incorporated it into my evening, like, stuff. I have an hour-at the end of the evening that I shut down, I don’t do anything for that last hour before I go to bed. And for thirty minutes I literally just put my favorite music on and dance in front of the mirror. […] Sometimes I’ll put on my favorite outfit. And then the last thirty minutes I read my Bible and like say my prayers and stuff. […] My, um, my good friend from Florida, um, called me last night and she was like, “hey.” Like, [I’m] in the middle of my dance. She was like, “Hey what you doing?” I was like, “um, you want me to be honest?” She was like, “yeah.” And I had to tell her. I was like, “I’m wearing my favorite outfit and I’m dancing in front of the mirror.” Or I’m like picking out my outfit for the weekend, like what I’m wearing to work or whatever it is. But it’s just like the biggest stress reliever for me, like, I just put on music and I just like, “Oh, life is good.” […] And I don’t need anybody because I’m having so much fun with myself right now. (informal conversation, June, March 23, 2017) June is a “flawed” perfectionist. JUNE: Even like, I think you can be a lazy perfectionist, which is kind of weird like, because I think-like you still want to do it right but you are still going have those moments like, I don’t know, we are still all humans so it-it’s-to to be a, a human with flaws entering like a world where you’re supposed to create humans that are not flawed, it’s like — MARIA: That’s so, oh my gosh that’s a good point. JUNE: You know, like where I don’t know, I-I can think about this kind of stuff forever. […] It’s interesting for me now to look back because, so right now at this point in my life, I’m giving myself leeway to fail, because I never did before. MARIA: Yeah.

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MARIA F.G. WALLACE JUNE: Ever. MARIA: Yeah. That’s really fascinating. JUNE: And it’s interesting being so close to the point where I could be in a classroom helping students not fail. (informal conversation, June, January 8, 2017) June is ‘not easily definable’. JUNE: Like I can tell you things and […] I hate like I really don’t like [evaluating my mentor] […] That’s why this [research process] intrigues me, like meeting up, talking, like I’ve never […] I’ve always felt, too, like I’ve been the person that’s looked over very easily because, because I’m not well defined. You know what I mean? […] I just don’t want to be overlooked because I didn’t check these boxes. (informal conversation, June, March 9, 2017) June (re)searches. JUNE: So I typed up this like survey and so I had a little talk with [my fourth graders] before and I gave them the survey and I was like, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna put some music on for you guys, and I really want you all to think about just like yourselves, like how you’re personally like other people like, everything and had them take a survey and I’m gonna tally it up and bring the like the statistics back to them. MARIA: Oh. Okay. Okay. JUNE: So they can see their average of who is bullied and who feels like this. MARIA: Oh. Okay. JUNE: And who. Cause they’re all acting tough, you know what I mean? But only like two in each class, two or three, in each class said no, they were not bullied or. MARIA: Did you have them like pinpoint or like, what-what kind of questions I guess were in the survey? So did you make this up yourself? JUNE: I found it and then I added some questions. MARIA: Yeah and modified it. JUNE: Yeah. Like I added some [questions] throughout it […] I can show you the- I’m keeping this [notebook] because I’m kind of keeping it as a document of the times we [June and a student] have a [written] conversation. (Together June and I examine a series of several sticky-notes neatly taped inside a new composition notebook June brought to our meeting.) JUNE: And then look at what she writes at the bottom? She puts maybe. (informal conversation, June, February 2, 2017) […] JUNE: I’m I’m going to have to bring you examples of her different handwritings. I’ll show you her handwriting um like what it looks like when she’s fine and then when she’s like having a […]

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MARIA: So her handwriting changes based on her experience or mood or-or her emotional state. JUNE: Yeah. This is her handwriting like normally. MARIA: Okay. JUNE: And then I’m […] I’m gonna either take a picture and send it to you tomorrow or make you a copy. I’ll show you for sure. Um, so the first part of the data, like all the messy messy messy handwriting and um and she would not do anything else. (informal conversation, June, February 2, 2017)

A Second Account of June by June June self-selected to give an account of herself in the format of an audiorecorded response. June’s audio recording was conducted alone in her car as she drove to our frequent meeting spot. Before even discussing her age or how far along in the undergraduate program she was at the time of the study, June prefaced the complexity and hesitation embedded in her thoughts. June’s description explores her personal life and experiences of “becoming an elementary science teacher” in relation to navigating the “the box.” June discusses the ways her “job” and “life” run parallel, but was often unacknowledged or lacked understanding from her peers. In closing, June shares some insight into her motivation to participate in this study, but then also a brief description on what she felt transpired as the study progressed. To listen to June’s account of herself, scan the QR code in Fig. 2 or visit http://bit.ly/2rHjzCM.

Fig. 2.

A Second Account of June by June (March 26, 2017).

A Third Account of Becoming-with/in the (Re)search with Maria by June Again, June self-selected to give an account of her work with me in the format of an audio-recorded narrative. In the audio recording, June discusses how she never felt we were in a research study, but more similar to a casual process navigating a “vocal web of thoughts.” June explains how she did not view herself as a participant or even saw me as a researcher, because we were both participants in a discussion of questions and dreaming up new solutions. To listen to June’s third account, scan the QR code in Fig. 3 or visit http:// bit.ly/2qO9mB1.

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Fig. 3.

On Research Participation by June (May 25, 2017).

Minor and Major Shadows I use the phrase “talking triad” to emphasize the ways each of the June’s descriptions were always-already superimposed onto the others. In addition to all three aforementioned accounts, this research consistently worked at the threshold of three boxes: (1) “good” qualitative research; (2) a single dissertation study; and (3) perceptions of “good” elementary teacher. Again, each “box” illuminates the power of major forces, languages, and movements configuring the conditions of June’s emergence with/in educational research. Beyond June and my position in this study, several other people, institutions, and materials also infiltrated our accounts. A university campus, close friends, family members (canine and human), mentors, previous course instructors, science textbooks, cellular group text messages, and online teacher resources influenced the experiences explored in this study. Intentionally and unintentionally, our shared enrollment (i.e., as undergraduate and doctoral students) in the same university education program consistently percolated beneath the surface of our encounters throughout the study. June often referred to the university’s student teaching handbook as a source that provided multifaceted implications for decisions about her self and practice. Meanwhile, the weight of diverse norms of schooling and “good teacher” troubled our shared present and future imaginings of the educational encounter.

BECOMING-WITH/IN MODELS THAT MODEL Educational research is a model that models. Humans, ideas, experiences, artifacts are modeled as a result of methodological in/actions. Barad’s (2007) account of diffraction (for further discussion, see Vu, this volume) offers one image of how methodological decisions produce particular kinds of material outcomes. Another example of this can be extended to conceptions of “identity” offering particular images of legitimate (or illegitimate) identities (Wallace, 2018). Simply put, models that model inherently make and unmake lived realities. Like June, the authors of this volume become enveloped within the research. Yet, Britzman (1995) reminds us, “subjects may well be the tellers of experience; but every telling is constrained, partial, and determined by the discourses and histories that prefigure, even as they might promise, representation” (p. 232). Therefore, the tellings of research are always-already made and unmade in the relation to the model(s) enacted. From mirrors (Kress, & Frazier-Booth, this

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volume) to monsters (Corson, & Schwitzman, this volume) it is made apparent that the manifestation of “I” becomes-with/in that which is more than human. As such, this volume depicts care-full practices which invite educational researchers to become-minor (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Manning, 2016) within an epistemic worlding where ontology is often under erasure. Within educational research, care-full minor movements hold kinetic and capillary potential to escape models that model. As June and the authors of this volume share, minor gestures in educational research can co-create intimate exchanges between researchers, participants, but ultimately the search (Wallace, 2017b). Herein lies “a time to ask big questions” (Bazzul, 2017, p. 71): If researchers are becomingwith/in an epistemic worlding, what are the ethics of this entanglement?

REFERENCES Bangou, F., & Arnott, S. (this volume). Teaching in, relating in, and researching in online teaching: The desiring cartographies of two second language teacher educator becomings. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bazzul, J. (2017). From orthodoxy to plurality in the nature of science (NOS) and science education: A metacommentary. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technoglogy Education, 17(1), 66
71. doi:10.1080/14926156.2016.1271926. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic subjects. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Bridges-Rhoads, S. (2015). Writing paralysis in (post) qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(8), 704
710. doi:10.1177/1077800414566690. Britzman, D. P. (1995). “The question of belief”: Writing poststructural ethnography. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3), 229
238. Corson, J., & Schwitzman, T. (this volume). We, monsters: An autoethnographic literature review of experiences in doctoral education programs (kind of). In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dillard, C. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, & the sacred nature of research & teaching. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, platationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159
165. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2009). Voice in qualitative inquiry: Challenging conventional, interpretive, and critical conceptions in qualitative research. New York, NY: Routledge. Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge. Kress, T. M., & Frazier-Booth, K. J. (this volume). The luxury of vulnerability: Reflexive inquiry as privileged praxis. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Lagemann, E. C. (2000). An elusive science: The troubling history of education research. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. New York, NY: State University of New York. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Martin, A. (this volume). Affective reverberations: The methodological excess of a research assemblage. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Melvold Hordvik, M., Tore Ronglan, L., MacPhail, A., & Tannehill, D. (this volume). Decentering the “self” in self-study of professional practices: A working assemblage. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Nordstrom, S. N. (2015). Assembling data. International Review of Qualitative Research, 8(2), 166
193. Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research: Third edition (pp. 959
978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Sams, B. L. (this volume). Pedagogy, naked, and belated: Disappointment as curriculum inquiry. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Sidebottom, K., & Ball, D. (this volume). In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3), 365
383. St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. Qualitative studies in education, 13(5), 477
515. St. Pierre, E. A., & Pillow, W. (2000). Working the ruins: Feminist poststructural theory and methods in education (pp. 284
311). New York, NY: Routledge. Taliferro Baszile, D. (2010). In Ellisonian eyes, what is curriculum theory? In E. Malewski (Ed.), Curriculum studies handbook: The next moment. New York, NY: Routledge. Ulmer, J. (2016). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 1
11. Vu, C. (this volume). New materialist autoethicoethnography: Agential-realist authenticity and objectivity in intimate scholarship. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Wallace, M. F. G. (2017a). Deterritorializing dichotomies in teacher induction: A (post)ethnographic study of un/becoming an elementary science teacher. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University. Wallace, M. F. G. (2017b). Subjects in the threshold: Opening-up ethnographic moments that complicate the novice/veteran science teacher binary. Issues in Teacher Education, 26(6), 96
110. Wallace, M. F. G. (2018). The paradox of un/making science people: Practicing ethico-political hesitations in science education. Cultural Studies of Science Education, doi:10.1007/s11422-0179831-3 Wamsted, J. (this volume). Narrative mining: Story, assemblage, and the troubling of identity. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the educational research in intimate scholarship. Bingley: Emerald Publishing.

AFFIRMATIVE ETHICS, POSTHUMAN SUBJECTIVITY, AND INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP: A CONVERSATION WITH ROSI BRAIDOTTI Rosi Braidotti Interviewed by Kathryn Strom

ABSTRACT In this conversation, renowned critical posthuman scholar Rosi Braidotti offers insights regarding what the posthuman turn means for intimate scholarship and broader questions of subjectivity. She discusses the methodological challenge of post-anthropocentrism for the humanities and stresses the need to move to a process ontology, which entails a non-essentialistic understanding of subjects as in process and connected up to networks of human and nonhuman elements, yet simultaneously situated and accountable. While acknowledging the possibilities of “auto” forms of research for keeping subjects politically located, she emphasizes the importance of practicing an outward-facing intimate scholarship
one not focused on one’s own pain and ego, but rather, one connected up and out, an affirmative becoming-intimate with the world, with otherness and diversity. To do so, she suggests we must think differently by experimenting with non-linearity, associative thinking, and transdisciplinarity. We must nurture intergenerational connections both for continuity of important knowledge and to create alternatives, all while using theory as a tool for counter-knowledge production. Keywords: posthuman; subjectivity; intergenerational connection; feminism; Anthropocene; nature-culture continuum

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 179
188 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031014

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Katie: In your recent summer seminar in Utrecht, “Posthuman Ethics in the Anthropocene,” you discussed the turn to Spinoza as a qualitative shift involving new methodologies and new ways of thinking. Can you talk about what you mean by “new methodologies?” Is there any place in these new methodologies for research or forms of inquiry that still have some roots in a positivistic or scientific tradition? What is the role of the researcher-subject in those methodologies? Rosi: My generation was raised and trained coercively in the methodology of social constructivism. To even challenge that, and suggest instead a nature-culture continuum
let alone a nature-culture media, or media nature-culture continuum
was a methodological battle, although for your generation it may seem a banality. I think it is important for this volume that you historicize this shift, highlighting that the “turns”
the new materialist turn, the affective turn, the Deleuzian turn, the posthuman turn
are very, very recent. What they really tackle is the methodological groundings for the humanities, and this is why they are so contested, particularly the post-anthropocentric part. My definition of the posthuman is the convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism, and methodologically, the challenge for the humanities comes from postanthropocentrism. The exception are media scholars, who can say, “Ok, the network thinks,” like Artificial Intelligence and robotics, but that is very limiting. In other words, if I may simplify for a minute, you can do the non-human and the inhuman with networks and codes, or you can do it with animal studies and ecocriticism, but the cross-over between them is not widely practiced, it is as if you cannot work with both animals and algorithms. Meanwhile, the anthropomorphic “others,” the groups that criticized humanism
e.g., the gender, postcolonial, and indigenous studies scholars
are hardly engaging with the new media, though some have plenty to say on the Anthropocene and the relationship to the animal. This relative segregation of knowledge is the reason why I want to stress the importance of the convergence factor
we need to take into account both posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. As we noted in the Posthuman Glossary (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018), a project which is an attempt to show the enormous spectrum of positions posthumanism spans, there is a resegregation of the domains of knowledge happening right now, and it is happening along methodological lines. People do not want to let go of social constructivism. As a result, we have a return to humanism and to neo-humanist claims, because people want to hold on to something, some sort of human exceptionalism. And what they do with it, of course, is political: the conservatives reassert it as a natural law of domination, while the progressive thinkers generally identify the human with vulnerability and pain, which they see as the core of resistance. As you know, I on the other hand, stress the ethics of affirmation. The key idea for me is not only the methodology, which is the enlarged form of empiricism that we get from Deleuze and Spinoza; an enlarged methodology of the empirical transcendental. This is not a flat empirical, it is a creative understanding of matter, the intelligence of organizing matter, qualitative and dynamic. Nor is it a “flat” ontology, but rather a materially embedded, differential system of composing living matter. I think it is around the question of what counts as the empirical that the methodological shift occurs. Connected to that, I reject the notion that the human is defined by the pain of oppression only that is a kind of pseudohumanist exceptionalism in the mode of vulnerability, which is just contemporary identity politics. The ethical question for me is what we are capable of becoming. So, the “new methodologies” are a rejection or an expansion of social constructivism, an enlarged understanding of empiricism. The entire post-structuralist generation does that. We are really bringing empiricism back to include a grounding in lived experience. This empiricism includes process ontologies, non-essentialistic understanding of the subjects, non-unitary subjects as processes. I think that these are significant methodological shifts of which the disciplines do not always approve and with which they have great difficulties, because we are accustomed to social constructivism in the humanities. Naturalism scares them off.

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You also asked about big data. I think I would connect the issue of technological mediation to this enlarged understanding of empiricism. The empirical does not consist of flat, inert data just waiting to be collected. It is living matter, self-organizing, which can be partially recorded. Big data is the fetishization of a very narrow understanding of what counts as evidence. The difference between a Deleuzian, Spinozist, nomadic Braidottian approach and a flat empiricism would consist of qualitative analysis of the matter patterns that emerge in big data. We do get to advance some hypotheses about what kind of subjects we are in the process of becoming. This is why my philosophy is not Actor-Network Theory, nor object ontology, because the question is, through all of this constitution of knowledge production systems, what kind of subjects are we becoming? What is happening to us? What kind of subject are we being constructed as, being in the process of constructing ourselves, in a field of deterritorializing forces? Katie: This is one of the reasons I am drawn to forms of auto-research, because it forces us to bring back in the question of subjectivity. I straddle both worlds of qualitative research in education and teacher education, which do not overlap as much in the US, in the postqualitative field. However, with work of folks like St. Pierre
whose work I love and which has been hugely influential on me
they are moving away from subjectivity. They are experimenting with forms of research that they think are closer to what is truly posthuman, in that for them, it really centers on the non-human, inhuman, more-than-human ways of making meaning. But for me, we cannot move away from the subject, we have to be able to say, as you just mentioned, who we are becoming. The auto forms of research are really interesting to me in terms of how we can rethink that in terms of posthuman subjectivity. But I do agree that these are enormous shifts, and so for me, the really interesting piece comes around, where are the entry points that allow others to enter into and engage with these really different ideas? That is why I love self-study, because it already is blurring the binary between researcher and researched, that again takes that “God trick” head on, disrupting the idea we could ever be objective and separate from anything in our research. So, for me, that is a fruitful entry point to say, hey, we already are working at troubling this binary, what about pushing a little further? Rosi: I think this is one of the great intersections or dividing lines
the question of the subject. It is a heated discussion, and the resurrection of Latour is significant is this respect, because Latour was the anti-Foucault
he was the same generation as Foucault, he just lived longer. Latour has always opposed the idea of an epistemology of the a subject: he thought it was a left-wing obsession. That nowadays inhuman rationalism, speculative realism and object ontology should repeat this anti-subject position and be embraced enthusiastically is one of the worst trends in contemporary thought. A hardline posthumanist does not want a subject at all, in so far as they are not interested in the human factor as such. They are the rational inhumanists who are not remotely interested in social justice, in politics, in radical pedagogy. They are not interested in anything that could improve our collective existence
they are part of contemporary nihilism, as far as I am concerned. I pitch my affirmative ethics and my affirmative politics in firm opposition to this type of left-wing authoritarianism that really, really worries me. You cannot dismiss the state, the concerns and the aspirations of the world at this particular point in time, of all times, and if ever. You cannot say, “Oh, how old fashioned that the feminists, or critical posthumanists like myself, actually worry about what this posthuman predicament is doing to the human! Don’t you understand that this category has perished?” Excuse me? Where do you even stand to be able to make this statement? Are you doing the God-trick again, speaking from nowhere? The politics of location, which is radical immanence, which is situated and accountable, is non-negotiable. I do think that this type of inhumanism really plays a big role in the regression of our political scene, amid the absolutely devastating rise of populisms of all kinds. We cannot let go of the question of the subject, ever, even if that makes you look “uncool” and like you are not the latest thing in town, because the latest thing in town is quite clearly nihilism. It is Nick Land, it is the suicide of the West, that is the cool thing. That type of fascism
of the Left as of the Right
is something that I am deeply, deeply opposed to.

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Where the work that you do on pedagogies, and that of others working on education, is important, is that you cannot do it without the question of the subject. What is a teacher, what is the teacher relationship, what are the pupils, what is the position of the researcher? In the recent work that I have done, I have gone beyond just defending that I want to put the posthuman and the subject together, in spite of all the opposition. I also want the position of the figure of the researcher to be shifted
here I am inspired by Deleuze’s opposition between “nomad science/royal science,” which grants equal status to marginal and activist research, as to the state-funded one. I want to resist the image of the researcher as the legislator of knowledge and the owner of truth, in spite of the Western supremacist pontificators on the one hand and the charlatans of the right on the other. We are surrounded by all kind of populisms at the moment. Researchers are neither the legislators, nor the showmen of contemporary culture, but are people involved in the production of knowledge and power, knowledge as power, in a fast-changing world. We owe allegiance to the world, to the present. Thinking of ourselves as becoming-nomads of science and the becoming-nomads of research is absolutely crucial. Katie: I agree. I think it is extremely dangerous when people want to move away from the subject completely. I am engaged in work in schools that is really focused on students of color, students from historically marginalized groups, and from immigrant populations. Often teachers here are forced to be apolitical, or they are made to feel like they cannot bring their political location into the classroom. That is dangerous for our students, who are affected by political forces and power flows, whether teachers admit it or not, and they are part of those power flows. We are always embodied and embedded, as you say, and connected up and inextricable from our material and geo-political locations. So, teachers, in “not being political,” or believing that they can be apolitical, are actually pushing forward someone else’s agenda, that you are complicit in. We are both located and connected up, a part of a decentered web. Likewise, in this book, we ask chapter authors to consider what happens when we decenter the traditional humanist and anthropocentric researcher-subject of intimate scholarship (autoethnography, autobiography, self-study, etc.) in education. From your perspective, how would you describe who we are becoming as posthuman subjects (or who/what is the posthuman subject)? What implications or insights might we draw from that understanding of the posthuman subjectivity for forms of research that involve the researcher as subject? Rosi: The stresses on subjectivity pertain to the long philosophical tradition of thinking alongside, but also beyond identity. However, we do need to start from identity. Identities are indicators of where we are standing in the field of knowledge and power (potestas), but we need to understand that an identity formation is, per definition, reactive. As Deleuze puts it, identity is the effect of power (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Your identity pins you, nails you almost, to locations of power, which usually are binary machines. Gender is the perfect example of that. It is a mechanism of capture. It binarizes the complexity of our sexed existence, beyond, beneath, before, and below the gender system, which is just a binary mechanism of capture. You can take any mechanism of capture
whether it be race, ability, age, class
they are mechanisms that shape bodies and experiences and force them into identity categories. In that respect, although identity is a necessary grammar of social interaction, it is also something that we need to move beyond. So, when we say nomadic politics is postidentitarian, this is not a way of despising or dismissing identity, but of exposing the power mechanisms that structure it. It is just a way of moving beyond what is ultimately a reactive formation. What does it tell you about yourself that you are classified as female, white, middle-class, or LGBT? It is all very useful, and yet not, because what matters to nomadic and posthuman understanding is what kind of ethical subject you are. A subject is a matter of forces, of relations, of capacities, of inclinations. A subject is not a bound entity; it is a relational, transversal threshold of interconnections. How much can you take of the world, how much can you take in? How much beyond the narrow can you go? That is the road to take to be able to become-world, to become more than just an ego-infested, inward-looking entity. Opening

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outwards to the world is an affirmative gesture. This is a big shift, because your generation, the “Facebook generation,” is supposed to be saturated with identity. I think we need intergenerational compromise to accept and understand the importance of identity. Methodologies like self-study, autoethnography, and autobiography can help, as long as we really ask, “What is the self that is being studied here?” This, by the way, is Michel Foucault’s starting question on the technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988). What is the self that is being studied here? It is a relational entity
it is you, and me, a collectivity and a group. It is never just one. The other problem is not getting stuck in neoliberal individualism. On the one hand, the hardline, neo-rationalist, apolitical posthumanists dismiss the subject altogether; on the other, the liberal humanists, for whom the self is God, are drenched in identity. Somewhere in the middle, we need another way of approaching intimate scholarship, where the task is not to become intimate with an inward-looking definition of an egotistic self, but rather become intimate with the world, looking outwards, pouring out interrelations with the world
a world that is non-human, technological, non-Western, an infinity of diverse entities. Become intimate with the outside, with otherness, with diversity, and not with this obsession with the self, which is a form of socially-approved neurosis. If autobiography and self-study is to study a self that is not the black hole of the ego, then yes. I think it is very much part of a methodology, of a pedagogy, where you say you start from a politics of location, from your lived experience, which is socialized, mediated, and relational. You start by accounting for it and from there we move on to a number of directions. So, in this sense, I could see that there is no other way but autoethnography. But I have to say that what I see is a great deal of self-confession coming out in a lot of this scholarship, selfglorification, especially, with all the emphasis on me, my pain, my vulnerability
and capitalism loves vulnerability. Let us speak of the self as a transversal relational entity
as transselves. Katie: This relates one of the great critiques of auto-forms of research. During the last couple of decades during the struggle for legitimacy of especially the self-study of teacher education practices, we have heard things like, “Self-study is navel-gazing, it is narcissism of the worst sort.” It is always really important to move beyond that, to connect up to lessons learned and knowledge constructed beyond the self. Rosi: Feminism always did! Simone de Beauvoir looks at the woman, the woman is sitting in front of the man, the man is hitting on her, and she is pretending it is not happening. We all identify with that. It could be a textbook of the #MeToo movement. It is obviously a situation where a woman is experiencing this, but there is that sense that it could be any human, that you are phenomenologically generalizing from lived experience to something that happens the world over. It is always been there: you start with the self and the self becomes a relational threshold. It is the portal by which you move out to bigger patterns. And I think so, yes, in that sense, we cannot do without analyzing the self, but we cannot get stuck there, because then it becomes a pathology, not just narcissism. It does not give you the information that you need. What we need is
how widespread is this? How many are we? Are we in this together, and who are we? I think that is the only question that matters. Katie: This is one of the reasons that I am so drawn to studying instruction from a self-study perspective. Instruction is fundamentally relational, especially if we are talking about the type of instruction that, today, teacher education programs are trying to promote, in terms of much more collaborative forms of instruction. You could say, “I am studying my practice in relation to the other”
but that is the interesting piece, it is not just a human other. A lot of my research is around case studies of teachers looking at how instruction is not something the teacher does, but is produced by this entire assemblage of the teacher, in particular space at a particular time, working with particular students, who all bring histories, and it is all happening within a particular sociocultural and policy context. All of these things come together to produce teaching. I think studying those pedagogical relations can be an entry point into this very different way of thinking.

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Rosi: Dealing with post-anthropocentric pedagogical concepts and tools has its own challenges. I think that is why education and radical pedagogies, which have always been important to processes of social transformation, are especially significant at this moment. How do we do this? Who is the “we” involved in this process? Notice that posthuman academics are also experimenting with different publication formats
we are coming up with glossaries, and dictionaries, going beyond linearity. We cannot do this in a linear manner. Katie: What are your thoughts on the role of the nonhuman/material in intimate scholarship that employs a posthuman perspective, and how we can shift to more hybridized notions of subjectivity accounting for not just the human, but zoe-techno-geo, in research more generally? Rosi: In almost everything I have written, I always have a reflection on “How do we do this?” because it is absolutely crucial. The methodology for this comes straight out of feminism. Point number one: disidentification. Take critical distance. Challenge the authority of the past, which means challenging the authority of the older generation. This is a complicated issue. For the baby boomers to say that to our post-war and mostly conservative parents was one type of statement, but for the millennials to encourage the baby boomers to challenge authority is more complicated, because we did have done that extensively. We did bring into the institutions gender and postcoloniality and made a point of speaking truth to power. But it is also true that we are pre-Internet and pre-post-cold war. So, the cultural divides between these two generations are sizable. What disconnected us from our parents was that we loved pop music and they loved classical music. What separates us now is the entire digital divide, and it is gigantic. Although there is a wealth of knowledge from our generation that should be acknowledged, your generation also knows a lot of things that we do not. This is a complicated transferal-of-knowledge moment. So, disidentify, acknowledge the authority of the past, but question it. Of course, you know better, but there is so much that is not available on the Internet. For example, there was a recent article in the Guardian by Susan Brownmiller (Cooke, 2018) where she said, “I wrote a book on rape forty years ago. Now we have the #MeToo moment
do they even know that I have written a book on rape?” Against Our Will
it is a feminist classic. I thought, what a very good question. Where is the connection between the #MeToo movement and the second wave of feminism? What is happening in the transmission of the radical legacies? Here, we have both the need for identification and disidentification from patterns of thinking. Identify with the radical generations, and disidentify from the humanist and universalist. Do your own thing but do not kill or delete all that came before. Second is the importance of thinking differently, which means experimenting with nonlinearity, zig-zag thinking, more associative thinking, transdisciplinarity. If the world we are in is capitalism and schizophrenia, then we cannot think in a linear manner. In The Posthuman (Braidotti, 2013), I have an entire section where I lay out “the rules” of posthuman theory, and I think these are the ways to do this. We need to actualize the virtual, to realize that the present, the now, the empirical, is not flat and narrow. It contains the seed of its becoming. The present moment is both the record of what we are ceasing to be and the seeds of what we are in the process of becoming, at the same time. Actualize the virtual
that is the way to transform and modify. Also, while we experiment with that, we cannot let go of the social. The social is very high on the agenda, because we are human-rights people and we are campaigners for social justice, and that is where we differ from the inhuman rationalists who do not care about any of this. I think that those rules are a combination of radical pedagogy and the posthuman agenda with the added emphasis on mediation and the becoming-world
that we now have human and non-human interconnections that we need to take in. Katie: A central theme of your work is the importance of mapping your politics of location
that is, that we need to be specific about speaking and thinking from where we are standing, geo-politically and otherwise. What are your thoughts on the possibility of utilizing intimate or “auto” forms of research (e.g., autoethnography, self-study, autobiography) as tools to map our politics of location? What thoughts do you have on the usefulness of intimate

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scholarship, for becoming-political, becoming-radical, and transforming the structures of subjectivity? Rosi: The auto forms of research are absolutely tools to map the politics of location, critical tools. Nancy Miller coined the term “personal criticism” to indicate this aspect. However, they need to be deployed in a relational manner, not inward, not based on the black hole of ego-indexed identity. They need to be used as tools to pull you out, toward the multiple locations of the world, outward-bound and becoming. Become-world, become-animal, but do not collapse back into that pathological black hole of narcissism and paranoia that is identity in advanced capitalism. Move outward. I think that sense of exteriority, a relational, Spinozist becoming-world, is the autoethnography of a group, of a collectivity, of a transversal bond, of a pack of she-wolves. The autoethnography where the auto is a collectivity and mediated on top of it. This takes us to the composition of the “we.” Who are we? You need to find the missing people as part of your academic practice. For example, with this book, you are assembling a community of diverse, heterogeneous elements around the metastability of a project. You are not choosing the comfort of a homogenous, self-replicating, disciplinary, oedipalized entity where everything is, in some ways, a foregone conclusion. While this may be obvious to us, I think it is important to see how not-obvious it is in the world of today. Capitalism is a system where everything is always in movement. There are all kinds of deterriorializations, but they are mostly indexed on very short-term visions of profit. It is difficult to experiment with what we are capable of becoming in intensive, gratuitous manners, particularly in connection to the production of knowledge, in a system that tells us we must index our research on something quantifiable, profitable, that we must earn our own salaries. You have to contextualize this in the neoliberalization of the university, which I am very critical of, and choose the poverty road of becoming-nomad of science
to say, I actually want to think this through because I think it is important to find a vision of subjectivity that connects everybody to what is happening technologically, in the age of the Anthropocene. I do not want to become a specialist of only one fragment of this question. I want to be able to put everything together and to think, these are the conditions that I am living in, which combine the post-industrial revolution and the Sixth Extinction. I need to be able to think those things together, and do not tell me that I just have to focus on one, on a lovely piece of quantifiable research. It is the correlation between the two that is defining our existence. However, we academics are not encouraged to keep the broader picture in mind, only artists are. Marina Abramovi´c was saying this
“I do not like small questions, I like big questions.” In the university, you are not allowed to ask the big questions anymore
they are dismissed as “blue sky research.” But what we are in the process of becoming, in the post-industrial era, in the sixth major extinction, is a huge question, and it makes the single person in the street want to know the answer. It is something that affects everybody. We need to experiment with what we are capable of becoming in a variety of modes. What kinds of democracies? What kind of streets? What kind of neighborhoods? What kinds of high schools, possibly without shootings? What do we want to become? That is the fundamental question. That is intimate, in the sense of experiencebound, or related to experience, but transversal and collective; affecting your daily existence, but not in an inward manner that collapses you in the inner echoing chambers of identity. Katie: I am in a self-study group with four other women
a feminist self-study collective
and we all come from teacher education. As women and as teachers, we have had difficulty when it comes to engaging with heavy theory like Deleuze and Spinoza. As “just teachers” (a low status profession in the US), we do not feel “worthy” of working with these theories. We struggle with whether we are “allowed” to do this type of research in teacher education and how we might push at the boundaries to be overt and subversive at the same time, so that we can find entry points where people can enter into the work. However, we also find that some folks doing posthuman research in education can be territorial and judgmental
and say, “You are not doing this right.” So, the conversation among us, often, is how can we be courageous and experiment with theory and new methodologies, despite the fear of being told

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we are not doing it right. How can we be worthy of these theories and methodological experimentation? Rosi: This is the crucial question that brings everything together: we need to find the courage to experiment. To provide an institutional answer: we have the incredible growth of the digital humanities and the environmental humanities, which have little to do with the mainstream humanities
they are mostly corporate and engineering
but they call themselves the humanities. These disciplines do embrace the Anthropocene, robotics, and the technological revolution, but they do so by reterritorializing the humanities, while, at the same time, deleting the critical angle of it. They basically appropriate the question, so that only the specialized experts can give the answer. And we, the critical posthuman, need alliances
we need the engineers, we need those who study genomics, we need those who can do algorithms, to help us make sense of what is happening. But we also need the activist, the dispossessed, those who bear the brunt of contemporary injustice. Now, with the advent of the digital humanities and the disappearance of the subject and social justice, these alliances become much more difficult. This is also a reason why some postcolonial and queer theorists have rejected posthumanism and basically become born-again new humanists. So, I recognize the difficulty in wanting to experiment, but the people who are the “experts” refusing to talk to us, and the fact that these people call themselves the digital humanities is really a way of adding insult to injury. This is institutionally problematic for the critical practice of the humanities. The speculative posthumanists saying, “We do not need a subject at all,” and engineers saying, “We do not need humans because we can do the humanities better than the humanists, and you guys do not know anything,” have disastrous consequences. Just look at who gets the official funding to do the research
and, for example, who has the posthuman institute at Oxford and who does not. The response to that is the return to humanism, Martha Nussbaum saying, “Give human rights to algorithms, seeds, fungi, expand humanism to everything and we solve the problem.” It is completely unworkable and it begs the question of what is implied in the spurious humanization of the non-humans. The second part of the question has to do with the anxiety of influence
as teachers, what do we do? I do think that this reconnects to the intergenerational justice issue, and the complications of reconstructing that relationship. It is absolutely true that there were more baby boomers demographically in the Western world than millennials, and some of us were brave, we went to institutions, we changed them, we kicked ass, and we built great careers in the middle of it. All of that is true. However, it is not true that the millennials need to be forever oedipalized, caught in an unresolved conflict with the older generation. There is a very awkward relationship with the older generation, which you can see today in many social movements. The fact Gloria Steinem was still leading the Women’s March after Trump won
with Angela Davis
these were the leaders when I was a graduate student. They are pushing eightysomething, with all due respect. So, I think the oedipalization of millennials needs to be put on the agenda. I have written a lot about reading feminism as an anti-Oedipal tradition
e.g., in Undutiful Daughters (Gunkel, Nigianni, & Söderbäck, 2012), I wrote about the importance of being undutiful daughters, of not replicating, of having the courage to say, “Actually, no. I am not going to do it that way.” Unfortunately, because gender and post-colonial studies are so new in the institutions, we have not managed to reconstruct fully this intergenerational relationship as part of the pedagogical work. I made it quite clear when I left the Women’s Studies program that I created after 17 years. For me, it was an anti-Oedipal gesture, an application of nomadism to my institutional practice. At the time, I could feel that the program was becoming “my thing.” I remember the day someone from the Ukraine came up to me and said, “You have a star on your forehead. You are the Tsarina of Women’s Studies.” I thought, I am the Tsarina of Women’s Studies? I am out of here. That was a defining moment and I had to let it go, although it was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do. People may have misread it for a sort of fatigue with feminism. But it was exactly the opposite: I wanted my radicalism back, by becoming free of the institutional responsibility. For me, this was the gesture of

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absolutely honoring that feminist tradition by letting it go, by letting the younger generation of people do whatever they want to do with it. If I had not let it go, I feared I would become one of those paranoid maniacs that academia regularly produces, the possessive creatures who want their institutional practice to conform to their own expectations and desires. In this way, the anti-Oedipal also works as an antidote for the founding mothers
let the kids go. It hurts, but I have really used both Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Deleuze’s Spinoza book in my institutional practice to let go. For me, the itineraries of the critical thinkers are multiple. You have to move on, you have to keep going. You cannot get stuck in one role. Here, we have a particularly political moment where the change is so enormous and the transformations are happening so fast that the young ones need take the lead and they need tell us what needs to be done. The whole question of pedagogy needs to be brought back into the agenda. We did a lot of it because we had to deal with Simone de Beauvoir and then to deal with the trinity of Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, and then the whole second feminist wave
we had the real mothers of the women’s movement. Now they are like your grandmothers. And we, your mothers are already professors, people who are institutionally accountable. My mothers were unaccountable. Greer never had a job, Steinem never had a job, or not an academic job, anyway. They are megastars, self-funded brands. We are civil servants and professors and teachers, and we do our job. But I think we need to complete this arc of experience by probably talking about, for us, the aging process, and for you, the anxiety of influence. How do you both carry on the legacy and put it to rest? I believe that nomadic subjectivities and relational modes of transversal connections allow us to at last start this conversation. I can say, “There is so much that you know that I do not, and vice versa, let’s make this assemblage.” In full respect and mutual exchangeability
we need to make these connections, because if not, the younger generation is going to waste a lot of time remaking the wheel, and the older generation is going to feel totally disconnected from movements that we fought so hard to implement. I mentioned earlier the article by Susan Brownmiller
to see her in the Guardian, I cried. Susan Brownmiller was unmentionable
you did not even say her name in polite company, and now she is in the Guardian. What was once blasphemy is now banality, says Stimpson. That is the definition of progress
the transition from blasphemy to banality. But we can only make this mapping if we can have this conversation, recognizing our mutual positions and our common belonging to one particular political passion, of justice, in the classroom, in the world, and across space and time, for all the women and LGBT people that could never make it. So that is one level of this and I think a most important one
we need to put the generational issue back properly on the agenda. The other thing is, of course, another difference between my era and yours
we were allowed to do theory. This on the other hand is an anti-theory moment, or even post-theory. In the post-war years, after fascism and the Second World War, we had the dignity of theory. Now, that is completely gone, destroyed by populism. There is a homogenization of language
we are all supposed to be writing like bloggers. This is a generational issue as well. What does it mean to do theory in a non-theoretical era? Maybe we can help there by taking some of the burden. The older generation already has made our careers, so maybe we can risk some more, and protect the younger generation. Some of the new methodological people talk a very neutral social science, because they have to survive in the modern university. I fully understand and appreciate their work, but maybe for as long as we are around, because my generation is about to retire, we can go into overdoses of theory, so that you can then be free. We can share the roles here, because it can be very dangerous to do theory, which I think is part of your question. You can also go back to Foucault and Deleuze
theory is a toolbox, something that is full of transformative potential. Theory is a vector for intergenerational connection. Theory is a counter-memory so that you remember the radical voices
which run the risk of being completely drowned in the sea of platitudes that the system is throwing at us. Theory is a database of counter-knowledges, of oppositional voices
although we have a lot available online, much has been lost. I’m currently liquidating my own personal library to donate, and you would be surprised how much material from my radical feminist youth is not available

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online. This idea of using theory as an instigator of counter-knowledge production is core business. Katie: I completely agree. It makes me wonder, in thinking about the danger of doing theory and doing theory that pushes on the status quo in the neoliberal university, about the affordance of spaces that are like mine. At my university, the California State University, we are nicknamed “The People’s University,” and we are very social justice oriented. We are a teaching university—the University of California has the research university status. At our campus, 60% of our students are first generation college students, many speak different languages, and many undocumented—in this, we are really the university of the future. But because we are not a research university, we are not as regulated in terms of what we are producing regarding knowledge construction. So, I have, in Deleuzian terms, a “smooth space” to make connections and pursue my work on “putting theory to work.” Rosi: I recognize exactly what you are saying. Theory is being done today precisely in places like your college, but also in art schools, in the creative industries, design, media, fashion. The recent Gucci collection is about posthumanism and inspired by Donna Haraway (2016). Theory is being done in these places, but not as much in the research universities. Research universities are doing mostly commissioned research, paid for by some corporation or by government-implemented priority lists, indexed on the economy, of course. Royal science, state-approved. This is a huge discussion to have in terms of what is happening to us. A lot of people are going to different types of institutions where the process of thinking is not straitjacketed. With all the class warfare between institutions, with high fees and other issues with the neoliberal research university, we may see some surprising developments in the next decade. I see a lot of people who are choosing not to enter the big research universities, who do not want to be caught up in the machinery of a money-making research university. The path of nomad science looks more attractive by the minute.

REFERENCES Braidotti, R. (2012). The society of undutiful daughters. In H. Gunkel, C. Nigianni, & F. Söderbäck (Eds.), Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and practice (pp. ix
xx). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, R., & Hlavajova, M. (2018). Posthuman glossary. London: Bloomsbury. Cooke, R. (2018). US feminist Susan Brownmiller on why her groundbreaking book on rape is still relevant. The Guardian, February 18, 2018. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2018/feb/18/susan-brownmiller-against-our-will-interview-metoo Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self. In L. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16
49). Minneapolis, MN: University of Massachusets Press. Gunkel, H., Nigianni, C., & Söderbäck, F. (Eds.). (2012). Undutiful daughters: New directions in feminist thought and practice. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DECENTERING SUBJECTIVITY AFTER DESCARTES: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL PETERS Michael A. Peters Interviewed by Alan Ovens

ABSTRACT In this chapter, educational philosopher Michael Peters discusses the emergence of new movements in thought and educational research practice in an “epoch of digital reason” that encompass the posthuman and decentered intimate scholarship. Peters describes changes that have occurred at the juncture of philosophy, culture, and science, probing the notion of a “coming after” of postmodernism in a post-truth era that has seen a rise in reactionary, antiintellectual, anti-immigrant reaction across the Western world. Peters provides insight regarding this collection of changes in thinking, to which the decentering of subjectivity is critical, and even, as he suggests, one of the foundations of modern philosophy after Descartes. This shift in thinking across disciplines entails a turn to systems and ecological thinking; an understanding of consciousness as situated, distributed, and enacted; and a view of the world as constituted by productive difference. Other changes include connecting affect and cultural dimensions to research, which is expanding our view of science and what shapes science. Peters notes that these shifts turn us to new questions about rethinking concepts that are grounded in the liberal, intentional notion of the subject, such as agency and responsibility for one’s actions. As we engage in this rethinking, Peters suggests that we learn from

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 189
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indigenous studies, as indigenous peoples have been putting to work different forms of posthumanism for millennia. Keywords: Posthuman; subjectivity; philosophy of language; systems thinking; post-modernism; agency

Alan: I would like to begin by asking how you would locate your interest in and relationship to the current explosion of work within what is called “post-qualitative.” Perhaps, as a way of getting into this rather convoluted set of discourses, you could comment on how you would position yourself in the discussions around research after postmodernism. Michael: My training is in the philosophy of language and the two principal influences are Wittgenstein and Foucault, an unusual combination but alike in that they want to materialise and historicise discourse. They proposed a radical critique of the traditional liberal notion of sovereign subject that is transparent to itself and serves as the foundation of action, knowledge and ethics. In my interpretation both philosophers are anti-foundationalist in epistemology and propose accounts that lead into post-foundationalism (knowledge without foundations) and posthumanism (relational or ecological accounts of subjectivity that embrace nature and machines). I find that when I come to a question that I approach it from that position. What Foucault calls the “history of the systems of thought” (the title of his Chair) and, since he also uses Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy, he is talking about the genealogy of systems of thought. So, I guess I am interested in the question of the emergence of new movements, and therefore new thought and new discourses. At the same time, I am also interested in what happens to old discourses and the way they become rejuvenated or discarded. So, I think I talked to you previously about the generation of the new in relation to a kind of semiotic understanding of the way capitalism operates in relation to ideas and information. That’s one analysis which is a form of political economy. Another is a cultural analysis about apocalyptic cultures that are searching for that which follows the end of something (the end of the world, the end of history, the end of nature, and so on). So, that motivates me to look at what happens after post-modernism per se which itself is about endings (of modernization, modernism, etc.). Of course, when you phrase the question in terms of style it makes sense to ask, what new styles come into existence and how do they define new forms of thinking. I mean, you can name the collective activity of a group of artists, architects, and philosophers, etc. as people who write literature, who design buildings, and who talk about ideas philosophically, and all this is typified by some sort of style ultimately driven by its ultimate relation to the concept of truth. On the one hand, we have those people who say that post-modern is about relativism and that there is no truth, per se. That is, it’s all social construction all the way down. And then you have others, and I would be among them, that say if we are going to accept the label ‘post-modernism’, then we have to say that really it is systematically engaging with the notion of truth. I mean Foucault, on parrhesia, on practices of truth-telling, is providing a history on truth-telling in ancient Greece and how it changes with early Christian thought, and then how it changes again. So, he sees truth as a set of practice embodied in discourse embracing a materialist and historicist account of these different views of truth and of truth-telling practices. Foucault is very much interested in the history of truth-telling practices rather than the (analytic) theory of truth, which is what drives a lot of philosophy (see Peters, 2001). So, now what comes after it? I think we have all seen that the downside, or dark side, is an era of post-truth. This has to do with the rise of the “alt-right,” to quote Steve Bannon, and fake news, and the problem that new social media and opinion, when it gets enough “hits,” can create fake news and fake philosophy. And that is what I think we are dealing with now. It’s kind of like the rise of the reaction to a set of social events that began with the traditions of

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activism that took place in the 1960s. So, this is cultural kind of rippling that that follows on from the neo-conservatism construction that took place before Donald Trump and Theresa May came to power, if you want to see it in political terms. That is a very big issue. The rise of white supremacism, for instance. The solidification of politics within the oil and gas lobby. The repudiation of the Paris agreement. The celebration of white men in the southern states and all that that entails. The negative reaction to immigrants. So, it’s a pretty dangerous time. Alan: One of the issues for anyone trying to understand contemporary research practice is the plethora of labels associated with particular “posts and turns.” Do you think these represent any collective shift in philosophical thinking that researchers should be aware of? Michael: Absolutely. There are a whole collection of remarkable changes that have taken place, not only with academic discourses and disciplines, but also with institutions such as universities. The key words here, I think, are the neoliberal words ‘impact’ and ‘engagement’. Both of them point to a collapse in the distinction between academic discourse, on the one hand, and the reconstitution of new ways of thinking about the public and the private, on the other. So, let’s put it this way. The linguistic turn, which took place in different ways with Wittgenstein and Foucault are about a set of changes that took place in the early 20th century with the rise of formalist linguistics. Actually, you can say that in this period that five interrelated forms of thought (Russian formalism, Saussure’s structuralism, Pierce’s pragmatism, Russell’s logicism, Bakhtin’s dialogism) analysed linguistic systems as a way of being able to understand practice, understand culture, understand the mind (see Peters, 2012). And the poststructuralist was a refinement and critique of scientific pretentions of structuralism as a science, much more influenced by models from literature and art that enabled us to understand systems as less linear, static systems and much more as non-linear, dynamic, transformational systems. The critical question is how does a new system arise with different qualities from the old? So, I put it in terms of cosmological physics. I would say we are talking about the move from a system of one set of properties to another system with different set of properties. How do we get there? What does this sort of change mean? Well, we have it in the physical world, but we also have it in the philosophical and social worlds. And understanding the nature of that change is absolutely critical to what comes after. Posthumanism is an example of that kind of more expanded form of consciousness in relation to the environment but also in relation to those who are not part of the white, colonising model. At that point we redefine ourselves positively as part of the animal kingdom and emphasise a set of relations to animals more generally, species are being historically depleted and speciesism, like all forms of discrimination, still exist especially where there is easy money to be made. I think you can see that model of qualitative change taking place across the board actually. Alan: One of the very distinctive features of the so-called new forms of scholarship is their problematisation of issues of subjectivity, the self and individual meaning in forms of intimate scholarship (eg, autoethnography, self-study). How would you respond to this turn to decentering the self? Michael: I think it is absolutely critical to what I am saying because we are talking about that which comes after Cartesianism (And perhaps Kantianism) as the foundation of modern philosophy. You know, Descartes, the famous cogito ergo sum. The basis of modern philosophy with Kant, focussed on the lonely ego. And now we talk about post, to use that overused term, post-Cartesianism. Really, we are talking about a form of philosophy which is no longer anchored in cognitive foundations of the solipsistic ego. These questions drive us to critique subjectivity of the cogito
the so-called philosophy of the subject. Now we can entertain forms of post-foundationalism and non-foundationalism
the critique of foundationalism, the critique of Descartes, the critique of Descartes’s model of subjectivity as the individual knowing subject and the Kantian autonomous subject. We are now more sensitive to

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ecological forms of subjectivity that recognises relationality, that recognises our consciousness has a common element with the consciousness of other animals, probably with aliens (if you want to go that far). And we’ve come think of consciousness in terms of relational systems that are slowly emerging. So I am saying that post-Cartesian studies of subjectivity are really about the cultural affects of subjectivity. Spinoza is one philosopher who really understood this. And with the notion of subjectivity studies, which Foucault has encouraged, we have a better understanding how new political systems like neo-liberalism shape us as consumer citizens of a certain kind. In neoliberalism our subjectivity constrains us to make (individual) choices in the market place. So, the turn to systems is a recognition that consciousness is always situated, distributed, enacted, and ecological. We embrace environmental notions of subjectivity, which draw on the work of pragmatists like Pierce and Dewey, and on Darwinian evolutionary biology in suggesting that consciousness is an interaction with the environment. It is enacted and is part of a broader concept of consciousness that is not located in the head, but in the body which is also in a set of environmental interactions that take place. Alan: So, in there somewhere, and I am not sure if it is the structuralist or poststructuralist view, that would say that our subjectivity or sense of the world is constructed in and through language. What you just said would challenge that notion because the idea of an embodied consciousness as the location for making sense of the world is quite different from the idea that language is central. It is almost pre-linguistic to say that my body is creating meaning at a level of pain and pleasure and desire and fear. Michael: Absolutely, because you are talking about the affective, the importance of emotions, and the collapse of all these binary oppositions that set up the Cartesian model of subjectivity in the first place and locate it in the Pineal gland (Laughs). Now you are putting it into linguistic systems and also a certain kind of fluidity where the models are, let’s say, much more intercultural and intersubjective. So in education, the change is from modern subjectivity to postmodern intersubjectivity. Increasingly, in an globalised information society, I think that is the case. This occurs not always with sanguine consequences, of course, especially when one takes into account the system of algorithmic capitalism dominated by three trillion dollar companies that create, shape and control our desires. But coming back to your notion of decentering, part of that systems view here, let us say the genealogical view, moves us out of analysing practice, seeing the mind as embodiment, I think it is possible to deconstruct the researched but not the researcher. This is now an era when we have become much more sensitive to who we are, what our paradigm training is, what our emotions are, how that emotionality and cultural shaping as a human being, has an effect on the scientific enterprise. Alan: I suppose Merleau-Ponty should be considered there also, in as much as he argues that we are bodies that position us in the world and provides a particular subjectivity (see O’Loughlin, 1997). We look at things from a six-foot high position. Michael: Absolutely, as you say, the phenomenological turn that takes place with Heidegger. In actual fact, Heidegger is responsible for inventing (after Husserl) two or three different forms of phenomenology, one of which we may call hermeneutics, which is about the crisis of the western sciences really. And the way in which philosophy becomes interested in the priority of practice rather than theory per se, and the way we are some sort of bodies in a kind of lived experience with the world. Alan: And within that lived experience there is the embodied production of meaning, which has often been ignored.

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Michael: I think your project here is an endorsement of the concept of the book when you turn that critical gaze back on the researcher and you begin to talk about intimate research and you begin to look at new movements like new materialism, posthumanism, complexity, and systems thinking in general. This systems thinking takes different forms
cybernetics, the basis of digital reason, ‘cybernetic capitalism’ (informationalism, cognitive and affective capitalism). I am very interested in these systems and have published on the political economy of emergent knowledge capitalism. Alan: In your view, what new forms of researcher-subjectivity are, or might be, supported by new forms of scholarship such as posthumanism, new-materialism or theories of complexity? Michael: In one sense, when you begin that process of the investigation of the researcher in the same way in which we have been doing an investigation of the researched, we suddenly realised the question of gender, particularly after Simone Beauvoir in the 50s, and then with phenomenology we realised that there was an emerging group of ‘youth’ and they may see things differently, and we discovered an infinitely different number of constituencies, indigeneities, post-colonialities, that critiqued the way in which the researched were researched. So that same variegation and differentiation of understanding is, in part, part of understanding the deconstruction of the researcher in this intimate research. At the same time it is also about recognising new forms of research which are to do with multi-speciesism. For example, we passed some legislation here in New Zealand around giving rights to a river. So one can say that is part of the living biota, which in Lovelock’s terms, is part of the Gaia hypothesis. We want to say that here is this planet with some sort of life that has been around for 4.8 billion years and we are two-thirds through the cycle and this is where we are going. So multispeciesism is a clear ecological understanding of it. So when you say posthumanism you are talking about that relationship between humans and machines, where machines, for all intents and purposes, become conscious. When you talk about deep learning as a form of AI, and then you talk about something called augmented intelligence, and that is that which is between human beings and machines. And you move from carbon-based life forms to silicon-based forms then you are in the realm of Phillip K Dick (see Jackson & Letham, 2012) and electric dreams and I think that is why people are so interested. The brute fact that has to be addressed here is the Anthropocene, the concept that the Earth has moved into a new geological era characterized by human domination of the planetary system. Surely we must understand that this is an increasingly prevalent framework for debate both in academia and as a wider cultural and policy zeitgeist, as Yadvinder Malhi indicates (see Yadvinder & Phillips, 2005). Alan: I suppose that supports the decentering perspective. That everything serves the human. Michael: Except that I am going to say here that there are still a lot of philosophical problems to be resolved in this paradigm because the questions of agency and intentionality, you know, the old liberal, intentional subject who can exercise a kind of agency, is quite hard for ordinary people using ordinary discourse to dispense with. What better notions do we have of collective agency and intention? Alan: Yes, because you have been talking about relationality and recognising the citizenship of a river, draws on the notions of agency and intentionality in our humanised sense that it has a centralised intelligence. So it is highly problematic to rework those deep assumptions central to communication. Michael: The whole notion of law, which is based on liberal notions of the subject, of intentionality, of the Kantian responsibility for one’s own actions. So all of this has to be rethought. And that is a big change and it is not going to happen overnight. Alan: Related to the previous question, what do you think becomes of data when the self becomes decentered in forms of intimate scholarship?

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Michael: ‘Data’ has a particular lexical position and emerges as a part of scientific discourse at a certain time. One change through ‘data analytics’ is the machine reading of large sets of data with the detection of deep patterns or configurations. In the ‘ethnographic’, once stripped of its imperial ambitions, the situation becomes extremely complicated and often only resolvable through circles of reflection, reflexivity, and dialogue. I think of the absurdity of using Western scientific research ethics in relation to groups of nomadic herders who have only collective notions that include their animals; or indeed in investigating form of muilti-specism. It begins to look rather silly and precarious. What counts as ‘data’ is problematized. Alan: In your view, what new forms of researcher-subjectivity are, or might be, supported by new forms of scholarship such as posthumanism, new-materialsim or theories of complexity? Michael: Well, I invented a term, and I use it in a number of papers, called ‘the epoch of digital reason’. And what does that mean? Well, it means that there are different kinds of data and part of the paradigm of bio-informatics has been to discover that there is data in nature. I mean, the human body is a genomic map to be read, in the sense of its genetic code. And even the physicists want to talk about information physics where there is only ‘bits’ of information. But when you are talking about big data and big data analytics, basically you are also talking about a stage of catalysm where that data is generated and owned by large multinationals who put it to service in particular ways, some of which if we knew more about it we would find horrific and object to. But the epoch of digital reason changes the game about what it means to be an academic and what it is to be a university, what it is to do research. It changes the notion of researcher when a computer like IBMs Watson can do research. You can now have non-human algorithms that operate within autonomous learning systems where humans don’t figure. That is the case with a lot of cancer research on IBMs Watson computer. So, there are huge questions to be answered here. We are only at the beginning of this age. When you think that the internet was only invented in 1992, we are only in the first phase of the epoch of digital reason in my view. Alan: So in that sense is it wrong to speak of data because it is about flows of information that then have an effect? Michael: No, I don’t think it is wrong to talk about it. But I think there two major forces that define the current horizon. One is the forces of information-informatization, informational capitalism, information as data, information systems. The other is the new biology. And bringing those two together when we talk about bio-information is an extremely powerful paradigm that we have only just begun to see can change what it means to be human beings. I am beginning to use the compression ‘bioinfotech’. So we are into the era of openontologies. What will human beings become when their genetics can be changed, sometimes at will? In the genetic system stuff can be cut out, edited and added to. We can also create new life, different kinds of life. You know, Craig Venter, the businessman and biologist, does this. So I think there the two kinds of forces of data-ism in the world that currently exist. One is in the form of digital code that comes out of philosophy, comes out of Boolean algebra invented in the 1890s, and the other is the genetic code discovered by Watson & Crick and others in the 1970s, and the effects are magnified when those two come together. Alan: is there another aspect of that in terms of data and its relation to some concept of truth? I am thinking here of the paradigm shift from empiricism to post-empiricism and the old idea of searching through lots of data and trying to piece together something within the noise of information is somehow different from what is emerging now. Michael: We are talking here about a data-driven notion of truth and that is based on the ability of very sophisticated algorithms to pick out patterns and configurations in data. Let me give you an example. In the field of cancer studies there are eight thousand papers published

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weekly. No human being can read this number. Even the best speed reader in the world might manage 100 in a day. The database is 21 million papers. Watson can read eight thousand papers in a few of hours and read the entire database in under a week. It can then also make original contributions about pattern and configuration within that data, which has enabled cancer scientists to eradicate different forms. So, what is the notion of truth here? One notion of truth in a pragmatic sense is ‘that which works’ and surely enough, these big data systems and deep learning machines can reconfigure cancer knowledge. This is increasingly the case. The brave new world! Alan: One criticism levelled at posthuman scholarship is that it can be viewed as colonizing indigenous ways of knowing. In your view, does a shift to exploring decentered ways of knowing acknowledge and/or recolonise indigenous way of knowing? Michael: I think we have to talk about pre-posthumanism with indigeneity. Because ultimately when you look at the peoples of the Kalahari, for example, you find they have a much more kindly environmental view of the cosmos and of ways of knowing. So, in the post-human you are rediscovering an instance of a kind of indigeneity based on these kinds of values anyway. I think what is required now is we rediscover these sorts of things. We are now in a position where indigenous scholars are teaching us about the ways in which the old liberal way of understanding subjectivity has its limitations. If you go back to indigenous scholars and studies, they can then recover some of this traditional knowledge to show us these different versions of posthumanism that pre-dated us by sometimes thousands of years. Alan: To what extent can the inherent categories of modernism, such as critique, ideology, politics and power continue to have relevance to the emerging forms of scholarship that problematise such concepts? Michael: Actually I do not accept the binary opposition between modernism and that which comes after. In my book we simply add to the tools in the researcher’s tool kit. Add deconstruction, genealogy and power in Foucault’s sense to critique, ideology, and power in Marx’s sense. There is no inherent contradiction here. ‘Contradiction’ is a case in point, both a mathematical concept and a feature of Hegelian metaphysics. I do think we are moving away from a world shaped by contradictions to one more influenced by ‘difference’ and this is part of the hybrid process of globalisation as a form of interconnectedness. At each stage we need to ask where the concept came from and how it has been used or practised. Research practices are often hybridised compromises and experiments of what works forged in the activity of research. Alan: Finally, in your view, is there value in decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship? What are the possibilities of doing this type of inquiry for knowing the world differently, for living/teaching in it in different ways? Michael: Decentering the researcher is a process that has been a long time in the making and we are only part the way through it. It could be argued it began with the move away from the Geo-centric universe to the heliocentric; from the religious and metaphysics that supported a view of humankind at the center. The Ptolemaic universe gave way to the observations of Galileo and maths of Newton, and later to the calculations of Einstein and Minkowski. This is emblematic for us as an evolving species and the cultural ripples finds its place in disrupting the traditional researcher-researched binary. The ‘researched’ underwent huge scrutiny as we grew up, so to speak, and shook off the bonds of European positivism. Now we are at the stage where researchers are inquiring into the categories that have ruled the construction of the other side of the binary. This is a necessary approach and the results are impressive in understanding what you call ‘intimate research’. I think this is a great project and will lead to different ways of living and teaching but probably you are best to tell us what it may involve.

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REFERENCES Jackson, P., & Letham, J. (2012). The exegesis of Philip K Dick. London: Hachette. O’ Loughlin, M. (1997). Corporeal subjectivities: Merleau-Ponty, education and the postmodern subject. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 29(1), 20
31. Peters, M. (2001). Poststructuralism, Marxism, and neoliberalism: Between theory and politics. Lanham, ML: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Peters, M. (2012). Education, philosophy and politics: The selected works of Michael A. Peters. Abingdon: Routledge. Yadvinder, M., & Phillips, O. (2005). Tropical forests & global atmospheric change (pp. 563
566). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

ENCOUNTERS AND MATERIALITY IN INTIMATE SCHOLARSHIP: A CONVERSATION WITH MAGGIE MACLURE Maggie MacLure Interviewed by Tammy Mills and Kathryn Strom

ABSTRACT In this chapter, post-qualitative educational researcher Maggie MacLure discusses intimate scholarship and qualitative research within the new materialist turn, which has at its core a fundamental challenge to the humanist notion of the “self.” She suggests that, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities, which in turn requires us to continually push at the ways conventional research constructs researchers as sovereign subjects. At the same time, we must inquire into what these posthuman intimate connections might entail, reimagine the body outside the Cartesian mind/body dualism, and perhaps rethinking the notion of intimacy itself. She suggests that we might do so by explicitly attending to flesh and materiality in our research; focusing on affective intensities
the “hot spots” that continue to haunt us in our data; and aiming for difference, rather than sameness in our analyses, “dwelling with the data,” rather than trying to rise above it. Further, she contends that, rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter. Keywords: New materialism; encounter; materiality; entanglement; Deleuze

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 197
204 Copyright r 2018 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1479-3687/doi:10.1108/S1479-368720180000031016

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Tammy: We’d like to start by asking you about your general thoughts about some of the implications for new materialisms on qualitative intimate scholarship in self study. Maggie: Looking at as at it as an inexpert outsider to that field, I would think that the most obvious challenges would be the ones that you seem to be very aware of and tackling in the book
basically, whether you talk about new materialism or posthumanism or the ontological turn or whatever, they all have at their core a kind of challenge to humanist notion of the self. That’s the main “hot spot” around which all the discussion is concentrating. So it’s that need to rethink, or decenter – as your book itself is saying – that notion of what the self would mean. I was also trying to think again about this notion of intimacy. I was thinking that, in many versions of new materialisms, we are actually in some ways much more intimately connected than we are in a binary view where we are the human agents and we either are out to subdue the world, or are trapped in a world separate from ourselves. So, through new materialisms, we are much more intimately connected with human and non-human entities. That means that we need to keep trying to find ways to keep giving up our own privileges as sovereign interpreting subjects and realize that, whoever or whatever is in intimate relation, it’s presumably not going to be the same as it was in more conventional humanist research. In terms of how you would do that, I am not really sure. It is easy to have programmatic-type statements, like “we need find ways of immanently sensing our connections within encounters rather than standing outside trying to dominate them,” but you know, as you are all too aware
and as your questions to me have forced me to be aware as well
it is easier to say these things rather than do them. It seems to me that a new materialist perspective would require rethinking or remobilizing the concept of intimacy itself, to the extent that intimacy involves some notion that includes closeness or proximity. One of the ideas that ontologically oriented new materialist work offers is that we are connected and separated at very diverse scales, from the micro-organismic up to the geological. So what does intimacy become in that much more diverse way? What is your thought on that? Is intimacy working for you now that you are pressing the theory in new directions? Katie: I think of intimate scholarship as an entry point into new materialist or posthuman research. In thinking about how to communicate these concepts and work with them in my research and my practice and talking with other folks in the field, I recognize that it’s quite a shift in terms of commonsense and very internalized ways of thinking. The idea of intimacy, in terms of closeness, but also in terms of intimate scholarship as being forms of research where the researcher is, at least partially, if not the, focal of the research subject, I have thought of as an entry point, because this type of research already entails troubling the binary between researcher and the researched the person leading the research and person who is participating. And so, that is where I have been doing a lot of thinking in terms of making a larger ontological shift in the field, in terms of using the already accepted idea of types of intimate scholarship like autoethnography as a scaffold to troubling the idea of binary thinking in general. We are already there at the researcher-researched binary, so how can we push a little bit further and bring in ideas that move us into an immanent perpsective? So that is where my head’s been. Tammy: Me as well. Katie: The second question is a two-part question. One of the key shifts in new materialism is this return to thinking about materiality in our research. So, what is the role of the materiality and matter and the body and flesh in our research and how can we better attend to that? Maggie: One of the clearer things for me when talking about the role of the body and the flesh is that you have to start thinking now about how to rethink the body outside of that mind/ body dualism. On the one hand, you can’t really see the body as a substrate for whatever goes on in our minds. But neither is it necessarily already-formed bodies coming together in an

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encounter. Whether you go with Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action, or Deleuze’s notion of sense (2004), the mind and the body are always entangled, but in some sense, they also emerge out of a much prior entanglement. We have to think of ways of thinking about the body that doesn’t put it in opposition to the mind. For instance, Elizabeth A. Wilson’s (2015) book Gut Feminism is a very practical reinterrogation of the relationship between the mind and the body. She focuses her work on the gut, which was always assumed to be purely biological or simply dominated by the mind. She argues that the interrelations between mind, body, belly, and brain are much more complicated. So, methodologically, we need to think of ways in which bodies are taken seriously as phenomenological bodies, but not necessarily in opposition to the brain. Tammy: I also have a two-part question for you. In several of your works, you note that the purpose of several practices of more traditional qualitative research is to subdue difference through processes like coding and seeking patterns. What are your thoughts about embracing difference rather than trying to subdue or control difference in intimate scholarship practices, and what advice do you have for researchers who want to take a difference rich approach but battle their own internal micro-fascisms? We all come from qualitative backgrounds that tells us to seek sameness, so we can help them battle their internal contradictions? Maggie: For me the simplest way to think about embracing difference is a very practical one. I tend to focus on the data that really perplexes me, if I am doing an empirical study. I tend not to look for the stuff that is easily explicable. For me, that means treating the data as an encounter, trying to connect it to other things rather than solve it. I’m exercised by what Bettie St. Pierre always calls conventional qualitative method
where everything that methods tells us to do takes us away from difference and puts us right back into representation, so there’s this whole sense of moving away from the flux of experience. You either dig into the data, or rise above it, or you render it explicable. But what do we do if we don’t try to render it explicable? One of the things I like about Whitehead’s work – which I only dimly understand, and I am usually reading it through Isabelle Stengers to be honest
is that he was trying to get at a notion of abstraction that never moved away from the singularity of experience. He tried to get a way of sensing wider movements to connect to other stuff, but at the same time, not moving away from the data to do that. So embracing difference is that sort of thing. Another way of embracing difference comes back to attending to the body and materiality of our work. So, much of Western thought and qualitative method is about moving away from the body, so that we can think big thoughts. In fact, as I have written before, qualitative method is about getting rid of the stuff that is bothering us, and it’s often bodily felt. It’s about ambivalence, or it’s about sighs, or laughter, or affect of all sorts. So, I think tuning into affective intensities is key, and by affective intensities I’m not necessarily talking about emotions, because in some ways emotions are already captured. Instead, we need to focus on affect and the bits where the body breaks into that “hygienic” scene that we like, that is easy to understand because it has been cleansed of all the wet stuff and the discomfort and the uncertainty. Now, how to battle our own microfascisms, well, I think we are all microfascists. It is very difficult not to be because that kind of rage
to order, subdue, and fix the world
is baked right into the structure, and not just the structure of method or Enlightenment thinking, but the very structure of Western languages. We are always thinking, we cannot write or speak in causes and effects, and subjects and objects, and active and passive, and with the transitivity of verbs. All those dualities, they are built right into our language. So, to combat that, we might look for those things that catch you off balance, that press you into places you do not want to go. Tammy: I always liked the idea of the “haunting” data, the data I keep going back to. Maggie: Yes – that is a sign that the data has unfinished business with you. There is a great quote from Deleuze where says what forces us to think is always about difference. It’s never

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about sameness, because it’s easy to think with sameness. With sameness, you’re not really even thinking, you’re just trapped in that dogmatic image. The data that won’t go away, or that bit that is very resistant, that’s probably a sign that there is something that could be going on there. Katie: That is one of the things that drew me to self study in the first place. The self study of teacher educator practices is predicated on looking for those haunting spots on your practice
what are things that are bothering you? What are the contradictions between what you believe and what you are doing? Tammy: And for me, that also gets to how I think about intimacy. To be haunted by the data means that data lives with me. It is part of who I am, it is with my body all the time. Maggie: That is a really good way to think about because there is sense that the data that haunts you is within you. That is makes me think about Michel Serres (2007) and his notion of the parasite. Parasites are very intimate – a parasitic relationship is very intimate, and crosses those boundaries. I like that notion. Katie: What do you see as the difference between an immanent, hybrid, “and […] and” approach to qualitative research versus one that is a conventional approach that merely appropriates posthuman, new materialist concepts? And how do we do that without creating a binary- this is a “correct” use of new materialisms or posthumanism, or this “is” postqualitative or this “isn’t”? Maggie: I don’t think we necessarily know when we are doing it. We think we are being immanent and hybrid and connected and have done “something else.” There isn’t really a test for it. We can think we are making the language stutter and being immanent, but the question of whether we have managed to escape that dogmatic image of thought is a very difficult one. Maybe we shouldn’t be troubled by it too much. I think if there is a way to do it
to be immanent and hybrid and connected
it is to try to resist what Whitehead called “the bifurcation of nature”. It’s inherent in all of our research practices where we analyze, we explain, where we always try to rise above our subject, so dwelling with data that’s infected you is one way of doing it. As Tammy said, you being haunted or infected or productively poisoned by it, in a more Derridaean way, is a way of trying to avoid that kind of separating thing. But in terms of how you do it without creating bias, I try to avoid being dogmatic about it. I try to avoid saying whether something is the correct use of new materialisms and posthumanism. I get quite weary, because there are so many new fields of qualitative research, there is a proliferation of terms, such as posthumanism, ontological turn, post-representative, new materialism, Deleuzean, Baradian, and so on. I understand
it’s a turbulent field and things are still separating out, but I do think the sort of agonistic quibbles from people judging who are or who are not post-modern, or who are not properly posthuman, is very nonproductive and very binary in itself. So, anyone who says “this is the correct way to do it” is not being faithful to the spirit of the enterprise. Tammy: Part of our work is always trying to push up against binaries generally, to always be hybrid, which gets to our next question. In your 2017 chapter, you note: “It will be important […] to keep asking the question, in each and every specific case, whether we are caught up in a dance of difference, or just acting the drunkard and whistling the Dionysian tune. As long as we remain intelligible to ourselves as the orchestrators of data’s adventures, it will be difficult to escape the fetters of representation, humanism, and anthropocentrism” (p. 52). That quote really spoke to us in so many ways. We would like you to speak more about that if you could. So, in other words, does this mean that a way to avoid appropriation is to locate ourselves and be accountable to ourselves as orchestrators and agents in data’s adventures? Is that kind of what you were getting at when you were talking about Dionysus’ wine? (MacLure, 2017)

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Maggie: I think I am always influenced by something Deborah Britzman (2002) said years ago, long before the posthuman turn, that educational research, or ethnography, should become unintelligible to itself. So, if anything, it’s very difficult to locate ourselves within a kind of hybrid scene. It’s more a case of trying to unsettle our own analytical gaze, and maybe that is what you meant by being accountable to ourselves. I like Deleuze’s notion of becoming imperceptible (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), which is about that limit point at which the distinction between the self and other runs or leaks, and the boundaries become unthinkable. So maybe the way to become accountable to ourselves, in that more Dionysian way, is by trying to fence with what is forcing us to think – not with what is coming from within us, but with that we are not catching in the data. That’s a difficult one. What would it mean for you to try to be accountable to oneself? Katie: I was invoking Rosi Braidotti’s and Adrienne Rich’s politics of location. I have been thinking a lot about the politics of location as a teacher, as an educator, and as a researcher. Here in the US we have a huge issue with being political in schools, but we always are already political. So that gets us back to the myth of objectivity and neutrality
but there’s no such thing, you can’t be neutral, you can’t be apolitical. We as teachers are inextricable from our contexts. There is no “voice from everywhere and nowhere”
it always comes from somewhere, and we need to claim it. So I was thinking about locating ourselves and speaking from where we are. But then again, there is a tension there because that invokes the notion that we are conscious beings that can locate ourselves. Maggie: Maybe a way of working with that tension is to think of the research occasion as an encounter. So rather than thinking of the data as something one dominates, or subdues, we consider each instance with the data as alive, as an encounter. I think in that sense, you can say, “where am I in this encounter?” You can say, “this encounter has all of these participants or actants, some of which are human and some of which are not.” It is possible to ask the question even if you can’t properly answer it. In that sense, asking “where am I in this encounter” meets that demand from Rosi [Braidotti] and others to develop that politics of location, because it is when you dwell in specificity of the encounter that you simply are not allowed to move away into that kind of abstract “everybody knows” supposition. Tammy: I was thinking along the line of agential cuts, and those cuts I have to make as a researcher, what I pay attention to, what I don’t pay attention to, and just being really clear about that. Maggie: I think that’s right, yeah. And you can see the cut that is being produced. Tammy: You mention in your recent 2017 work that new materialism has “has come in for critique from scholars who object to announcing oneself as ‘new’ without due respect to other traditions, such as feminist theorizations of the body, and indigenous ontologies” (p. 50). Many writers, us included, tend to acknowledge this fact but don’t into depth about this dilemma, particulary with indigenous methodologies. We are wondering two things. What are your thoughts on how we resist perpetuating new materialisms and posthumanism as another colonizing force? And what are the relationships you see between new materialisms and posthumanism to indigenous ways of knowing? Maggie: I think that’s a really big and important question. I think that’s the problem, is we tend to “acknowledge the problem and then move on.” Wanda Pillow gave a really great presentation early this year at the first European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry. She had a really scathing critique and really tore into new materialists and feminist materialists writing for its “willed ignorance,” as she sees it, of the work and the contribution of the other scholars, particularly indigenous scholars, to their work. She had this great phrase, riffing off Karen Barad’s notion of the double slit experiment with diffraction as the figure for that unpredictable coming together of flows and movements. Wanda said (I’m paraphrasing), “In fact, it is not two-slit theorizing, it is one-slit theorizing because it always filtered through the figure of the –” I think she would have said White, feminist, materialist, figure. I think I am

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putting words in her mouth now, because it was a very complicated argument, but I think that was a very telling sort of critique for me. Partly, this question is about citational practice, and that’s a live issue
paying due respect to the work that’s gone before, but also realizing where the gaps are in the citational world, like, for example, around feminist citational practice. So, we need to be reading, and engaging, and citing that work. But I don’t think we can demand of Indigenous and other scholars that they should educate us. It’s not their job to tell us what we should be reading, so that demands a kind of active immersion in the citational trail in reading it. But more than that, it also involves taking very seriously the complaint and the demand. I do not mean merely tolerating what others say or the empty notion of inclusion, but we have to think of the extent in which the demand and the claims of indigenous scholars actually demand a different response on our part. One of the things I am certainly thinking a lot about is the notion of critique as this debunking thing that always, as Isabelle Stengers says, takes hostages of the thing we are supposed to be critiquing. I’m trying to think of ways of connecting with that work from outside the colonial relation. I do think we need to be willing always to be accused of having failed in that. I do not know if you have better ways of thinking about that. I am sure you do. Tammy: I don’t, other than engaging with the work and engaging with Indigenous scholars themselves. I live in an area of the United States that has a fairly large indigenous population, so I’m engaging with indigenous scholars, listening to them, working with them, and partnering with them. Maggie: Are you able to say how they have helped you to think differently about materiality? Tammy: No, I am not there yet. I’m being very careful. I’m carefully tiptoeing into that space and enter conversations carefully, but I’m still tentative about this topic right now. I’m trying to slowly enter these ideas and honor them and do a lot of reading. Katie: For me, I am conscious of my own positionality and that this is an area that I really know nothing about, I’m only really familiar with just the margins of indigenous scholarship and so I am hesitant to write indepth about something that I haven’t immersed myself in. This came up recently at a conference I was leading in Oakland, CA. One of the folks from a university in Oregon noted that they have a practice that they honor native people on whose stolen lands we are meeting, and requested that I go up and do that honoring during the conference. I recognized that this is something important that we should do, but I didn’t feel that I had the authority to do it. I had a colleague who was an Oakland native and he felt comfortable in doing that because it was part of his practice as well. I felt like I would have been a fraud getting up and saying that. I hadn’t made the observation first of all, and I didn’t have the local knowledge either. I felt like it wouldn’t have been authentic. I feel that way about writing about that too, other than having the requisite note that we understand that ideas have been around for a really long time and come from many different sources and this is my genealogy of where I am coming into it. Maggie: Yes, I know. It is fraught with all of those issues. Katie: This last question is very personal to us. We are coming from teacher education, which is a very feminized profession. It is also a profession where we are not looked as intellectuals and we really internalize that. So many of us have a block, we have a lot of difficulty when it comes to engaging with “heavy theory” or philosophy like Deleuze. We tend not to feel worthy of these theories. Like many of us [teacher educators], I have never taken a real philosophy class in my life. It’s difficult, first of all, but we also struggle from not having the confidence, and then, in connection to that, many of us are paralyzed when it comes to experimenting with methodology from a posthuman or postqualitative perspective because we have this internalized thought that we can’t get away from that we are not going to get it right. As you’ve mentioned, that does set up binary of right and wrong, but this has become an issue in the field, especially in postqualitative research, because there are folks who are saying, “you are doing it wrong.” What advice would you have for emerging scholars who do want to

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experiment with these ideas and methods, but they continually question themselves, are afraid of doing it wrong, and they don’t feel worthy? Maggie: Those are very good questions. I am always perplexed and unworthy. I am often paralyzed. It might not be obvious, but I find writing difficult because I am afraid to make a mark on the paper. That could be partly due to being a product of the Scottish education system in the 1960s, which was definitely against experimenting and instead was about accumulating facts. I think feeling perplexed and unworthy and often paralyzed is normal. I don’t know if people would find that helpful or not, but for me anyway, that is the normal. Even though, on the inside, I feel like I am much more unworthy than everybody else, and everybody gets it and I don’t, and I know that’s irrational. But especially in terms of the theory, to feel repelled
I think that is kind of a normal thing because theory is kind of repelling or repulsive, because it denies you access to common sense. Sometimes it’s helpful to me to remind myself that that’s ok. In terms of the advice, absolutely the important thing is to try and seek out the community of other people who are doing that stuff. Go to the conferences where people are practicing that and will take the leap, and learn from and acknowledge the work of other people who have gone before, and set up an arena where you can do it. Having said that, I do recognize, it is the case in the UK as well that the status quo is still a very convergent, conventional, and in some cases, quite positivist scene, so I think the risk of being told by people outside of what you are doing that you are getting it wrong is a real one. We try to fight against that in the UK on a smaller level. For instance, at my university we have created a kind of welcoming space for graduate scholars who want to do that kind of work and we more mature, senior gatekeepers, so to speak, will examine that work and know where it’s coming from. We would not criticize it because you have got the wrong sample size or they have not written about validity or significance. So the notion of community is absolutely key, and also building opportunities and spaces where ancient people like me can help bring in people for seminars. The Summer Institute in Qualitative Research that we host at Manchester Metropolitan University is a way to kind of do that.1 On the one hand, if you feel unworthy with respect to the people who have written in the field, rather than the people on the outside criticizing from the sidelines, it is helpful to think that is a normal way of feeling overawed by the ideas. I feel that quite a lot. People who want to experiment and are afraid, they need the support of community and they need to try to take the leap, you know, just do it and jump. But I also think there is something else
while you are doing that leaping or jumping or tentatively putting your toe in the water, I think it is about acknowledging difficulty. This stuff is hard to read. We often experience resistance to reading difficult text and we find it destabilizing, so I have tried to encourage people to not be deterred by difficulty and try to see that as a challenge, and enter at least some form of engagement.

NOTE 1. http://www.esri.mmu.ac.uk/siqr/

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Britzman, D. P. (2002). “The question of belief”: Writing poststructural ethnography. In E. A. St. Pierre & W. Pillow (Eds.), Working the ruins (pp. 33
46). New York, NY: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2004). The logic of sense. London: Bloomsbury. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). Capitalism and schizophrenia: A thousand plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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MacLure, M. (2017). Qualitative inquiry and the new materialisms: “A little of Dionysus’s blood”? In N. Denzin & M. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry in neoliberal times (pp. 48
59). New York, NY: Routledge. Serres, M. (2007). The parasite (Trans. Lawrence R. Sher). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wilson, E. A. (2015). Gut feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

DELEUZO-GUATTARIAN DECENTERING OF THE I/EYE: A CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA RINGROSE AND SHIVA ZARABADI Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi Interviewed by Kathryn Strom

ABSTRACT In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to moveaway from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist “I” in order to enable new and multiple forms of subjectivity that do not rely on otherization from an ideal norm of the humanist man. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of difference and becoming, the subject is fractured and becomes different in each encounter with time, space, others, feelings, memories, and self. Rather than clinging to the notion of a unified identity, Jessica and Shiva suggest adopting a “becoming-minoritarian” movement and attempting to exceed the trap of identity. The authors further discuss postqualitative research methods that help to decenter this “I/eye”, including those involving schizoanalysis, affective intensities, art-based inquiry, and walking methodologies. Moreover, Jessica and Shiva argue that these can, and indeed, must, be taken up alongside multiple more conventional methods and made accessible to a variety of audiences so to have the widest impact. In experimenting with posthuman and post-qualitative theories, researchers must ensure that they are putting these theories to work in ways that can combat the massive social justice issues we currently face. In times of precarity, they

Decentering the Researcher in Intimate Scholarship: Critical Posthuman Methodological Perspectives in Education Advances in Research on Teaching, Volume 31, 205
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contend, we must think differently while also using every theoretical and methodological tool at our disposal to make a difference in the world. Keywords: Feminism; schizoanalysis; gender and sexuality; Deleuze & Guattari; affect; walking methodology

Katie: Deleuze and Guattari and other posthuman thinkers have stressed a move away from the human(ist) “I”; this is really the crux of the book. Yet some of the critique of this is that many “others”
people of color, indigenous peoples, women
have never been able to be a subject or a fully human “I”. In your (Jessica’s) work, you focus simultaneously on a fractured “I” but also on gendered subjectivity. Can you discuss how you see these concepts working simultaneously so we ensure that we don’t lose the subject in posthuman research? Jessica: In my work, I move away from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist “I” in order to enable new and multiple forms of subjectivity that do not rely on “otherization” from an ideal norm of the humanist man. Deleuze and Guattari have challenged the idea of humanist man through lots of different concepts, but for me, one of their main contributions is looking at transversal power relations
not only to think them, but to enact them, as in Guattari’s La Borde Clinic experiments, to try to understand complexity and chaos. This is where their notion of schizoanalysis comes from. They were trying to understand very complicated force relations and power relations through scientific and materialist concepts, from physics, for example, to try to offer philosophers and social scientists different types of languages for tackling these issues. I think I find Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) writing together to be the most exciting
I see them as a queer duo who use theory and practice to rethink power away from the Oedipal power of the father figure and phallocentricism. For example, in their exposition of a “1000 tiny sexes,” they disrupt the gender binary. So, I actually claim them as a queer, feminist pairing, but it took me a long time to come to this awareness in my research. I always was like, “Oh, the man, the phallus, and they are men,” and experienced a lot of defensiveness with feminist scholars. I can see their point more from Deleuze, as the master and the single I, but when Deleuze and Guattari team up together, I think they did their most revolutionary, groundbreaking, incredible work. They paired the practitioner, Guattari, and his actual practice of antipsychoanalysis with the philosophy. Those experiments are so simple and easy to understand, even in terms of education and schooling. You take an institutional structure and you try to intervene into those striated and top-down power relations and create more transversal links. Take for example, the very simple phrase of “becoming a cook for a day”
the surgeon becomes the cook, or the patient becomes the doctor. These might seem radical in some contemporary contexts, but to me, they are really inspiring for education because the psychiatric clinic isn’t that different from a school
or a prison, for that matter. So, I think that Deleuze and Guattari have busted apart the singular “I” in so many ways
and most important for my work is their critique of dualistic gender and binary gender. “1000 tiny sexes”
that just put me on fire when I read about that. It really revolutionized how I think about the possibilities of being a sexed and gendered subject. Butler deconstructs the sexed body from the gendered self, but “1000 tiny sexes” privileges diversity. It has expanded my thinking so incredibly
for instance, I’m now working with an experimental psychologist who is interested in looking at power and sexual harassment. I’m like, if you want to test testosterone and power, let’s do it across both so-called genders, and we will flatten the gendersphere! Really, I think it’s going back to Deleuze and Guattari’s fundamental challenge to this monadic paradigm, singularity with multiplicity, which helps me become a better, more creative thinker. Shiva: I have problem with the former part of the question, because it still suggests a transcendental, higher position for the human, that many “others” as you said, have to get to this

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higher position or higher status of the “human”, to be able to move away from it, to becomeminoritarian. On the contrary to this and particularly, for instance, for the indigenous peoples, which were one of your examples, we are more-than-human or minoritarian from the beginning (if we believe in the beginning at all). So my counter-question would be: why do we need to become a fully human “I” to move away from it? Perhaps, from Deleuze and Guattari’s ontological understanding, we can say that we have never been, and can never become, fully human “I”. So I guess we start from the middle, in-between the life assemblage as more-thanhuman and more-than-one. The way I approach this question is through Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of difference and becoming: the humanist “I”, if we believe in such thing, becomes different in each encounter with time, space, others, feelings, memories, and self; in a sense, that supposedly humanist “I” is as much an act (Deleuze, 1998) than a human. Jessica’s fractured “I” is a gendered and more-than-gendered “I”. That’s why it is fractured. It is a subject in transposition, thinking with Braidotti (2006)
we can think about notions of middling and in-between-ness when we think about that fractured I. Katie: Yes, and that’s what I was trying to get at here, the middling
I like how you put that
but also to the multiplicity, moving away from the subject, as you say, from a transcendental or completely isolated human figure to the human and, always in composition with many more-than-human/non-human others and discursive structures. I think what I was going here was getting at the critiques from folks from different perspectives
decolonization, indigenous, critical perspectives
who have said, “Look, I’ve fought for a long time to have this identity, or be afforded ‘human’ rights.” How do we embrace more of a self-and
to acknowledge that, as Rosi Braidotti says, I am embedded and embodied in a particular location, with all the history and politics that entails, but at the same time, I am also connected up to many different multiplicities beyond my body? Jessica: I think it’s strategic. Identity politics would be useful for some types of struggles, but when we are dealing with the anthropocene and environmental disasters, or post-truth politics, we have to embrace a range of strategies. I actually think there’s been a misreading of Deleuze and Guattari
for example, the whole critique of “They say men should become women.” I understand the critique, but what they were trying to do was get outside phallocentric power relations and try to understand minoritarian positions of others. With “becomingwoman,” they were just providing one example of how you might do that
you could also become-mineral or become-earth. It’s a way to disrupt the humanist eye/I as the center of the universe. Shiva: My understanding of becoming-minoritarian or become with a minoritorized position is not about to fall into the other side of this binary and become majoritarian, but to become an “other” of the “other”, becoming the other of the other-self (yourself). This can be referred back again to Deleuze’s notions of becoming and difference, and I guess this is kind of the fractured “I”/self that Jessica is suggesting. Another point to understand regarding this minoritarian fractured “I”: I think is that there is no total escape from our embedded and embodied position that we are worlding with, and this is how this ontology, as far as I understand it, does not suggest moving away from human subject to deny it; it’ about starting from your position and making relations. So in a sense, it’s a kind of rooted uplift or forward movement as a territorialized deterritorialization. That’s why Braidotti or Haraway say that you are situated, and you have to think about your own positionality. This is our starting point. The idea is not to ignore the “otherness” of some people – for instance, the pain of being a Muslim in the age of terrorism, because the territory is here and is as real as “existential territories” (Guattari, 1995)
but also to think with “incorporeal universes” too, the lines of flight. Becoming-minoritarian is not necessarily defined as belonging to a particular minority group; rather it is an adoptive position – you are minoritarian and you have the ability to escape from what makes you the norm, to some extent. More than seeing this becoming-minoritarian state as an identity, I think we can engage with it as a movement and an enactment. Jessica: That’s why people are troubling basic intersectionality politics. We know the whole critique of fixed identity positions, structural identity politics, and intersectionality. I for one

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love intersectionality, and I think it’s very useful, but these can be much more fluid concepts. I just think, we need to do identity politics when they are useful, but right now we have some serious ecological crises and we need a range of tactics, and I think Deleuze and Guattari give us a lot of tools. Katie: In several of your (Jessica’s) works, you draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis. Can you explain how you see schizoanalysis as method? What are your thoughts regarding the possibilities of intimate scholarship in education that takes up the concept of schizoid (researcher) subjectivity? Jessica: This is a complicated question. I’m really attracted to schizoanalysis, which came out of a critique of Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, which understands everything through lack. Instead, schizoanalysis is about trying to understand and follow through pathways of positive desire, and most importantly, trying to grasp onto very complicated power and force relations. In extending schizoanalysis into my work, I’ve been influenced by Guattari’s schizoid cartographies. When he says “mapping,” as a social scientist, I take that literally, so in that way it isn’t all that different from loads of other methodologies. So for me, it’s not that different from normal ethnography or autoethnography. We need to work with a whole range of methodologies to try to grasp complexity. We need to be very attuned to their limitations, and consider whether certain methods work better together than others, but obviously we have to settle down on something in terms of methodology. Back to schizoanalysis: I was really influenced by Tasmin Lorraine, a feminist philosopher who works with Deleuze and Guattari and Irigaray. This quote was really influential for me: “Feminism could be seen as an untimely schizo practice designed to intervene with contemporary configurations of modern subjectivity that involve suppression and oppression of subjects that deviate from a majoritarian norm with the fault lines of sexed, gendered and sexual identity as its starting point” (Lorraine, 2011, p. 164). This ties exactly into what we just said: it’s those fault lines around that identity, and where lines of flight escape being captured by the disciplinary norm
and you can see that I’m totally influenced by Foucault. For me, it is a complete complex assemblage of all these tools. I don’t really like people that have this like exclusive attachment to something
I like the more diffractive method. Let us use all the resources we have available to us, and maybe something would not make sense, and we can work on that later. But I’m really not in for being puritanical about theory and method. The role of philosophy is to give us tools to try to see what’s happening to us. Maybe these tools will let us see the imperceptible, or the not-yet-understandable, of what’s happening slightly differently. That’s why these tools are exciting and useful to me, and also give me a moral compass for what I want to do with my empirical research. In terms of enacting schizoanalysis, we are challenged because we want to do empirical research, and we are saddled with all of these methodologies with positivist backdrops. Guattari (2013) actually suggests four dimensions of his methodology, which is really complicated, but I’ll try to paraphrase: (1) Mapping the phylum or knowledges or systems of thought that are constructing the situation. I see that as mapping out the discourses and representations
for instance, a policy is a technology or phylum-organising thought/action. (2) Mapping how value is accrued and attributable through aesthetical/image bound processes
so that would be systems of exchange and reward. For instance, fashion media could overcode wearable aesthetics. (3) Mapping the familiar territories and repetitions. This is really methodologically interesting, and there are loads of ways that we already do this in the social sciences
the phenomenological, embodied, everyday ground of existence and context in play. This brings in the autoethnography or intimate scholarship, which could be one dimension of that. (4) Mapping out the material, affective and semiotic flows of practices (the assembled relations in process). Guattari called these the four “functors of deterritorialisation”
in

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other words, the aspects that would help us to map “the configurations of subjectivity, desire, drive energy and the diverse modalities of discourses and consciousness relating to them” (1989, p. 26). With this methodology, Guattari is basically calling for a multidimensional mapping. It is complicated, but it is also common sense in a way. We can get very burdened down by, say, having to present empirical findings that a policy maker or stakeholder or different public audience member will take seriously
reporting, for example, the percentage of people who said this, or felt this way. The challenge here is to learn how to use conventional methodologies in the service of radical politics as well as adapt the conventional to find new ways of mapping that may democratically include the desires of populations who may not have representation and voice. Even more, we need to move beyond those concepts to a doing and a feeling type of methodology, what we could call “theorized action research”: where we are challenging the norms, and resisting the norms, all while we study the norms. But of course, the doing and mapping of this is highly challenging. Katie: I love this, and I think so much of this connects back to the piece of this book that’s focusing on methodologies that explicitly include the subject, and I think there are so many different connections there in terms of the political piece. Shiva: The part that caught my attention in the question was the part about the schizoid researcher. To me, a schizoid researcher is a researcher-in-becoming, a subject who becomes with its research, its participants and its data. Going back to the first question, the researcher itself is a fractured “I,” or “eye”, the organ, if you like, who becomes different in each encounter
to put it in Deleuzian terms
who becomes-different throughout this researchbecoming event. We can also think about Lenz-Taguchi’s (2013) understanding of the researcher and connect what Jessica said about schizoanalysis and think about the researcher’s schizoid subjectivity as its embodied and embedded engagement with the research. We want to think of the outcome of this schizoid research more than a written document and data, but as extended limbs of the researcher
as her arm, her leg, her desire, her thinking and feelings. For me, it’s an understanding of schizoid as more-than, as an extended self, as multi-sensory “eye” and the multiple and relational “I”. Here, I am really interested in ways in which our limbs and other people’s limbs and body parts as agentic are important in creating the schizoid research and researcher’s fractured “I”. Katie: In other research, you’ve discussed mapping affective intensities and posthuman assemblages across both digital and physical spaces. How might these methods help us think differently about/in intimate scholarship? Jessica: The way that I have approached affective intensities in the research encounter is critical to what you call intimate scholarship. I am interested in using Massumi’s (2015) definitions of affect as pre-personal intensities that may be impacting a research encounter in the form of affects that glow, for instance, in ways that cause heightened response such as disconcertation or confusion (as with MacLure’s research on wonder in research encounters in Deleuze and Research Methodologies). So I’ve tried to attend to
what does this really do when you are trying to focus on affectivity in your research? Is it the affectivity of the researcher, or are you trying to pay attention to something that has emerged in a research space? Is it something that you could identify as an emotion, or is it more like an atmosphere? There’s so many ways of approaching this idea of affective intensity. In working with Emma Renold, she’s really tried to teach me to slow down and appreciate that method is really everything. In our “Fuck Rape” article (Ringrose & Renold, 2014), we tried to make sense of different types of affective intensities, and one of the ways we did that was by taking an inspiration from Maggie MacLure’s (2013) piece on coding. The thing is, of course you have to do conventional coding. It would be ridiculous to say you do not. All my students code. You have to have a pattern, you have to have a finding, you have to have some kind of conventional orientation, a research question, a reason why you are looking for

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something. But then we want to go beyond that. We want to pay attention to the things that get cut out
if we use Barad (2007)
of the research account. So, in terms of going beyond the coding process, I was really attracted Maggie’s concepts of hot spots and glowing data, where she was trying to attend to the things that you would leave out of a traditional research account because you could not make sense of it and did not know what to do with it, which is disconcerting. Emma Renold and I borrowed MacLure’s concept of data hot spots to think beyond coding in our research, which was on a girls’ empowerment group within a school. They had gone on a “Slutwalk,” and it was the very first time they had ever taken part in feminist activism outside the classroom. They brought back the experience of the Slutwalk to the classroom, and discussed it in their group, and one student shouted out “Fuck Rape!” That was really an important critical moment, and it’s so simple, but has such significance. Being able to feel the hotness and glowing-ness of that moment, for everyone in the research encounter, and being able to explain that
we would not have been able to get that from conventional coding with our transcripts. So, affect really is a way of trying to make sense of the intangible, the unexplainable, and it is both outside and within us. In this way, we do not ignore subjectivity, but rather, we see it as more-than-human, and we attend to the relationality and the in-between of the research participants, the researchers, and also the more-than-human aspects of the research experiences. I think there is a lot of potential for this approach to be taken up in many different methodological directions. For example, in another project, Emma Renold and I used the idea of gender jars as a theoretically informed methodological practice to offer a different means for young people to respond to what jarred them about gender in their life and what they would like to change. The young people filled out notes, which they put in the jars, and then decorated them. The jars were meant to act as a conduit to the research funder (the government), but a conducive context is necessary, since that the funder was not genuinely interested in change or the voices of young people. So, these methodologies are important for enabling experiences that may remain imperceptible to come into becoming, but we also have to activate them in particular assemblages of educational policy and practice to have wider effects/ affects. (See Renold, 2018; Renold, Ringrose, & Bragg, 2017). Shiva: Jessica brings some good examples from her own research. My own methodology for my PhD research is a walking intra-view. It is a kind of movement, of those capacities, those affective intensities between two difference spaces or territories. Using digital technology is just one layer. I’m sitting in my own office, or somewhere else, with all the books and notes around me and all the layers inside me and then I call these girls. She’s in another world, she’s walking somewhere outside school. We are both in two different physical and virtual spaces, times, and mattering. This methodology helps me to become the partner of the affective intensities between these layers. I was thinking the ways in which our experience of the world is a schizoid experience that is always in “relay and return”, to use Haraway’s (2016) language. This back and forth, this relay and return, it’s a very core part of our subjectivity, which is never static. Also, like Jessica said, we can’t forget about all these resources we have available to us. So at the same time I’m doing the innovative walking methodology, I’m also doing conventional face-to-face interviews. So I have voices, narratives, stories and videos which with schizoid research experience we become entangled with more, new and other agentic layers. Jessica: This is a very good example of the digital as a tool. It completely goes through the virtual. There’s very little distinction between real life and virtual, between “IRL” and “URL.” I’m so used to dealing with the threshold that affectivity is traveling across, and which can even be more powerful sometimes, depending on the circumstance. I just don’t see much distinction between the two domains. They are entangled and collapsed. Katie: I really liked what you were saying about the hybridity, and the “both/and”-ness of doing traditional qualitative methodologies
or whatever methodologies they are
AND more creative and affective methodologies that can appreciate difference and those glowing hot spots. That’s something I have been struggling with myself. I’m still trying to find communities and find where I can plug myself in, and feel like I straddle the teacher education

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world, which tends to be pretty traditional, especially here in the US, and the posthuman qualitative or post-qualitative world. I’ve really struggled when there’s been articles, for example, that have come out about doing research without method. For me that again sets up that binary, that it’s either theory or methodology, and it’s got to be both/and. As you point out, on a very practical and logistical level, often if you want to get something published in a journal, or if you want to get a grant, you have to be able to make it intelligible to particular audiences. So how can we embrace the both/and hybrid space as researchers? Jessica: I would say that we need all the empirical research tools available to us. We are living in a post-truth era of Trump – as you have theorized so clearly yourself, Dr. Strom. Therefore, we need all type of research strategies from statistics, surveys, and creative arts-based methodologies that work to communicate messages through different means than science. Because we cannot break through the post-truth moment with harder science, we also need a variety of ways to communicate our results and findings to a wider audience, and this is where arts-based methods are critical. I think I’m becoming much more of a convert to arts-based methodologies because they provide different ways of telling a story, different ways of interacting with the students. For example, we do an affect workshop in my Gender, Sexuality, and Education course with Alyssa Nicollini where students bring in an object and tell a story about it. We use yarn to make connections across their stories, first in a small group, and then in the larger group, and soon we have this giant spiderweb going across the whole room! (See Nicollin, Zarabadi, & Ringrose, forthcoming) We need different modes of arts-based and affective types of communicating. Arts-based methods give us a different set of tools beyond just the research article, the report, or the statistics. The government does not care that there’s evidence for something
for example, there’s evidence in every corner of society about sexual harassment. Another report was released just yesterday
“there’s a crisis of sexual harassment in British schools. One third of students are sexually harassed.” We know this! We don’t need another report
we need to do something! We need to find a way, figure out how to communicate. What kind of radical politics do we need to make a difference, to be meaningful? What do we do with our scholarship? I would throw out that whole research without method, or whatever, it’s not getting us anywhere. I’m a bit frustrated with some of this qualitative research that just seem to be doing exercises for their own sake. I do not care if you came up with an innovative methodology unless it did something, like convinced someone to listen up about a social issue, or made a political difference. We do not have the luxury of sitting around and playing with theory. We are in a moment of crisis. We need to step up. I’m also tired of academic discussions that are exclusionary and inaccessible. I think the greatest talent we can bring is to our research is being able to put ideas into language that can be accessed by the most people. People who can do that are the most gifted
like Braidotti. Anyone can understand what she’s saying and connect with it, like the idea that the humanities need to step up. They have been called to justify themselves to the world in a way they never have before, and GOOD, because they should have to justify themselves. Katie: Yes, exactly! I just wrote a piece for the Educational Theory and Philosophy 50th anniversary issue
they are putting together a collage of different statements on what theory is becoming after postmodernism. Following Rosi Braidotti’s most current classes, I wrote about the need for anti-fascist theory. My last paragraph was about exactly what you just said- that we have to hold ourselves accountable in our work, not impose theoretical orthodoxy, but most importantly, we need to be really strategic with our language so it is accessible by the most people, and that all our work makes an explicit argument about how it matters and what it does, not just why it’s valuable, but how it makes a difference in material conditions and practices in education. We have to balance our experimentation with accessibility. And provide multiple entrypoints so people can access it.

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JESSICA RINGROSE AND SHIVA ZARABADI

Shiva: I think this is exactly what schizoanalysis and becoming the schizoid researcher is about, to move away from the oedipalized theories and practices towards the research methodologies in-movement. Jessica: You are transversal
you are moving across different spheres, different stakeholders. It’s very hard and it puts you out of your comfort zone. But you have to be, because that’s how you would make structural change, little ruptures. I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to do that. Intimate scholarship
we need to be thinking about taking care of ourselves too. We are in a moment where we are in schizoid capitalism, heightened competition, heightened hierarchy in academia. We have to negotiate that at the same time we are trying to make change. We are in a capitalist academic system, and at the end of the day, when we try to make our findings known in an article or whatever, that is also competitive. It all takes a toll. That’s part of the schizoid machine. So we need to find collaborations and have discussions
like this one! Shiva: I’m very much taken in by the idea of ‘‘the pull of the material” (Murris, 2016), because as soon as we are attached, or entangled, with these theories and concepts
there’s something there that takes us in. We go back to our own unique entrypoint to these theories and concepts and understanding of the world. For me, that’s very much going back to becoming and difference. Katie: In teacher education, our experience often as women and teachers is that many of us have a block when it comes to engaging with heavy theory like Deleuze-we don’t feel “worthy” of these theories and many of us are paralyzed when it comes to experimenting with methodology because we are worried we will not “get it right”. What would you say to emerging scholars who want to experiment with these ideas and methods but continually question themselves or are afraid of being told they are “wrong” by others in the field? Jessica: To answer this one I want to turn to something I wrote in schizo feminist research catrogrophies: From the first time I read Anti-Oedipus, I was enthralled. It was revolutionary poetry in motion! […] As a feminist the first task of schizoanalysis, the “negative” task of destroying the dominant social order or “insanity” of capitalism, was enormously appealing. I confess to seizing upon impassioned (and manic) passages like this one with glee: [S]chizoanalysis must devote itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions. Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes. And when engaged in this task no activity will be too malevolent. Causing Oedipus and castration to explode, brutally intervening each time the subject strikes up the song of myth or intones tragic lines, carrying him back to the factory […] Oedipus and castration are no more than reactional formations, resistances, blockages and armourings whose destruction can’t come fast enough […] the psychoanalyst reterritorializes on the couch, in the representation of Oedipus and castration. Schizoanalysis on the contrary must disengage the deteritorialised flows of desire, in the molecular elements of desiring-production. (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, pp. 345
346) How much this type of call fired up my radical feminist inclinations! I was pumping to crush all the vertical power relations that express themselves through phallogocentrism (Oedipal and phallic-oriented power relations) festering in the striated (stratified) intrapersonal spaces of “the factory” (the mind, school, workplace, family, peer group, social network […]). (Ringrose, 2015, pp. 395
396) So, you can see that see that revolutionary theory can be like kick-boxing for the mind! They ignite a spark or recognition about injustice and a desire to understand some sort of complex relations in order to intervene and change them. This to me is motivating rather than alienating.

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Experimenting with theory that moves us is difficult. It’s even harder to translate that out into new forms of doing our research in methodologies. However, we have to take a chance and a risk, including that we might be challenged as having the wrong interpretation. This is why scholarship should ideally develop in a supportive environment, and why it behoves feminist scholars to be supportive and nurturing to junior colleagues who wish to experiment and try out new formulations and theories and concepts. For me, if a research project is intending on making change, it’s through carefully thought-through processes that involve harnessing the power of concepts and theory to push beyond what we already know-like Shiva’s walking methodologies. Shiva: The ethico-political onto-epistemological turn in thinking, with Deleuze particularly, is to constantly question yourself, and with Braidotti and Haraway, to think about our embodied and embedded positionality, and think about different entrypoints. We start from the middle, moving beyond wrong and right binary oppositions, but instead employing different ways of approaches, ideas and methods. The point is not that we get it right or wrong; the point is that we get it perhaps differently or it gets us, it pulls us. This is an affective entanglement with these methods and theories
it is not just us taking these methods and ideas, but they are taking us as well. They glow for us, as soon as we think and FEEL there is something (indeterminate and unprecedented) in this heavy theory, like Deleuze, that probably can help me to experiment. That is the moment of entanglement, rather than the representational understating of worthiness; these are spacetimemattering events where this method, theory, or concepts make themselves intelligible to you.

REFERENCES Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2006). Transpositions: On nomadic ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays critical and clinical. New York, NY: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis. Sydney: Power Publication. Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic cartographies. London: Bloomsbury. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: Ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 706
716. Lorraine, T. (2011). Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent ethics: Theory, subjectivity, and duration. New York, NY: SUNY Press. MacLure, M. (2013). Classification or wonder? Coding as analytic practice in qualitative research. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 164
183). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. Malden, MA: Polity. Murris, K. (2016). # Rhodes must fall: A posthumanist orientation to decolonising higher education institutions. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30(3), 274
294. Nicollini, A., Zarabadi, S. & Ringrose, J. (under review). Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping in the gender & feminism classroom. Renold, E. (2018). ‘Feel what I feel’: Making da (r) ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), 37
55. Renold, E., Ringrose, J., & Bragg, S. (2017). Jarring methodologies, #GenderMatters and the morethan of research. Gender and Education Association Conference Middlesex University, June 17
19. Ringrose, J. (2015). Schizo-feminist educational research cartographies. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 393
409. doi:10.3366/dls.2015.0194

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Stephanie Arnott is an Assistant Professor in Second Language Education (French and English) at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. Her primary research focus is on methodological and curricular innovation in Canadian French as a second-language education, with a complementary emphasis on investigating the knowledge base of second-language teachers and the motivation of core French students. David Ball is a recent graduate of the University of Huddersfield teacher education programme. With a background in Fine Art, he teaches both art and functional skills in the Further Education sector and has a particular interest in interdisciplinary practice, utilizing art-based approaches across a variety of subjects. Francis Bangou is an Associate Professor in Second Language Education (French and English) at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. His research focuses on the adaptation of second language teachers and learners to unfamiliar teaching and learning environments, and the implementation of information and communication technologies in second language education. Rosi Braidotti is a Distinguished University Professor and the founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Rosi is a renowned scholar in the field of Continental philosophy and epistemology, feminist and gender theories, and post-structuralist thought. Her most recent books are The Posthuman Glossary (2018) and The Posthuman (2013). Jordan Corson is a Doctoral Candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University. Jordan’s research focuses on curriculum theory, education on the margins of school and state, and immigration and education. Kimberly J. Frazier-Booth is a National Board Certified English Language Arts teacher in the Boston Public Schools. She is also a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests involve student writing, currere, and autoethnography. Mats Hordvik is a Teacher Educator at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. His main research and teaching interests revolve around (physical education) teacher education, self-study of professional practices, models-based practice. Radha Iyer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. 215

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

She has post-graduate qualifications in English literature and language (India), PhD in Education (UQ) and has teaching experience in India and Australia. Her research interests include literacy/multiliteracies, gender/post-structural feminism, critical discourse analysis, critical pedagogy, and ESL. Tricia M. Kress is an Associate Professor in the Leadership for Diverse Learning Communities EdD program at Molloy College. Her research uses critical pedagogy, cultural sociology, and autoethnography to rethink teaching, learning, and research in urban schools. Maggie MacLure is a Professor of Education at the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI) at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research interests include theory and methodology in applied social research (especially post-structuralism and deconstruction); art-informed research; discourse analysis; childhoods; language and literacy; and affect. Maggie leads the Theory and Methodology Research Group in ESRI, and is the founder and director of the international Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. Ann MacPhail is a Teacher Educator at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her main research and teaching interests revolve around (physical education) teacher education, curriculum and instructional models, curriculum development, instructional alignment, and ethnography Adrian D. Martin is an Assistant Professor at New Jersey City University in New Jersey, USA. His scholarship attends to equity and social justice issues in education, teacher preparation and development for culturally and linguistically diverse students, teacher identity, discourse analysis, qualitative and postqualitative inquiry, and the self-study of teacher educator practices. Tammy Mills is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education at the University of Maine. Since joining the University of Maine, she has taught a variety of teacher education courses with an emphasis on access, equity, and assessment. Tammy focuses her research on pre-service teachers preparing to teach in rural settings, and their (and her own) experiences growing up and experiencing schooling in rural contexts, using non-linear perspectives to guide her thinking and methodologies. Alan Ovens is an Associate Professor in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Auckland. His research investigates the complex nature of educational practice with particular attention to critical pedagogy and social justice. His interests include embodied learning, democratic forms of teaching, and digital technologies in teacher education. Michael Peters is a Professor of Policy, Cultural and Social Studies in Education at the Wilf Malcolm Institute of Educational Research at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. His research interests are in educational philosophy, theory, and policy studies with a focus on the significance of both contemporary philosophers. He is the executive editor of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and is the author or coauthor over 80 books.

About the Authors

217

Jessica Ringrose is a Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education (London, UK), where she leads teaching in Social Justice and Education at BA, MA and PhD levels. Her research, which encompasses engaged, activist research in the community, includes transforming gendered and sexualized media cultures and working for gender and sexual equity in schools. Lars Tore Ronglan is a Professor in Sport Sociology and Sport Coaching at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences. His main research interests are leadership, coaching, social interaction, and learning processes in sport and physical education from a sociocultural perspective. Brandon L. Sams is an Assistant Professor of English education at Iowa State with research and teaching interests that include reading and writing pedagogy, critical reflection, and teacher identity development. Much of his current work focuses on the potential of aesthetic and contemplative reading practices to interrupt and renew “schooled” reading practices shaped by the epistemologies of auditculture. His work has appeared recently in The ALAN Review, English Teaching: Practice & Critique, and The Journal of Language & Literacy Education. Tara Schwitzman is a Doctoral Candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests include how teacher preparation programs at Minority Serving Institutions address “diversity,” as well as thinking more broadly about the discourses of neoliberalism, capitalism, and meritocracy that circulate in/through higher education. Kay Sidebottom manages the Education degree programmes within the Lifelong Learning Centre at the University of Leeds. Her doctoral research uses posthuman thinking as a navigational tool to reframe educational ethics and curriculum development for modern times. Her teaching incorporates art-based practice, rhizomatic working, and new approaches to identity work. Kathryn Strom is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay. Her research interests include preparing educators to work for social justice in classrooms and school systems, post-human/materialist theories, and post-qualitative methods of inquiry. Her recent work includes the book Becoming-Teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First-Year Teaching and the development of a complex framework for teacher learning
practice for the International Consortium of Multilingual Excellence in Education. Deborah Tannehill is an Emeritus Faculty Member at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Her research is focused on teaching and teacher education in physical education with a focus on professional learning communities, curriculum development, curriculum and instruction models, and the alignment of teaching for student learning. Chau Vu studied English Teacher Education at Vietnam National University and worked as a Lecturer at University of Languages and International Studies,

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Vietnam before gaining her Master’s in Curriculum & Instruction from Louisiana State University (LSU). She is now pursuing her doctoral degree in Curriculum & Instruction also at LSU. Maria F. G. Wallace is an Assistant Professor of Education at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. Her research and teaching intersects Science Education, Curriculum Theory, and Women and Gender Studies. Maria’s scholarship aims to deterritorialize teacher subjectivity and practice to re-imagine ways they become known, named, and produced. Jay Wamsted teaches Mathematics at Benjamin E. Mays High School in southwest Atlanta. He holds a PhD in Teaching and Learning from Georgia State University and has published in academic journals and literary magazines including Mathematics Teacher, The Southeast Review, Qualitative Inquiry, and Under the Sun. Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD Candidate and a Teaching Fellow on MA Sociology of Education and MA Gender, Sexuality and Education at UCL Institute of Education (London, UK). With her research approach, feminist new materialism and posthumanism, she is interested in the intra-action of matter, time, affect, space, human, and more-than-human becoming.

INDEX Abramovi´c, Marina, 185 Academia, 48, 51, 56, 57 Action research, 3 Actor-Network Theory, 181 Affect, 13
14, 28
29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 209, 210 Affective capitalism, 193 Affective contemplations/convictions, 18
19 Affective resemblance, 20 Affective reverberations, 9
22 Affirmative ethics, 155, 179, 181, 183 Agencement, 28
32, 34
42 Agency, 78, 79 Agential realism, 78 Agential-realist authenticity, 76
78, 80
83 Agential-realist objectivity, 83
84 Animals, 161
162 Anthropocene, 168, 180, 185, 186 Antioedipus, 187 Apocalyptic cultures, 190 “Arborescent” thinking, 138, 149
150 Art, 153
164 Assemblage, 5, 11, 13, 15
17, 19
21, 59
72, 155, 158
160 decentering the “self” as, 67 and self-study of professional practices, 63
70 Associative thinking, 184 Audience-class, 7, 155 Authenticity agential-realist, 76
78, 80
83 in autoethnography research, 5
6 Authentikos, 81 Autobiographical ethnography, 76 Autobiography, 183

Auto-ethico-ethnography, 6 new materialist, 75
87 Autoethnographic literature review, of doctoral education programs, 45
57 getting lost, 46, 49
55 monstrous methodology, 48
49 (post-)monstrous position, 47
48 Autoethnography, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 76
77, 79
80, 183, 191, 198 barriers to, 92, 94 diffractive, 79
86 narrative mining of, 93
97, 100102 post-structural, 92, 94 tripartite problem of, 92 Axiological intra-actions, reliability as, 85
86 Ball, David, 156, 159
161 Bannon, Steve, 190 Barad, Karen, 199, 201, 210 Barthes, Roland, 10, 93 Beauvoir, Simone, 193 Becoming, 125
128 becoming-nomads of research, 182 becoming-nomads of science, 182 becoming-with/in models that model, 176
177 and the decentered researcher, 133
135 and online education, 27
29, 32, 35
41 process of, 129
132 rhizomatic, 126
128 and self-study of professional practices, 62, 63, 67
70 219

220

INDEX

Being, 125
128 process of, 129
132 Belated pedagogy, 138, 140
141, 144
148, 151 Biesta, Gert, 154 Bilingual education program, 15 Braidotti, Rosi, 155, 157, 158, 179
188, 201, 207 Britzman, Deborah, 201 Brownmiller, Susan, 187 Burden of narrative unity, 82

Cultural hegemony, 3 Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students, 123
135 Curriculum inquiry, disappointment as, 137
151 belated pedagogy, 144
148 naked pedagogy, 141
144 posthuman disappointments, 149
151 Curriculum-making, 149 Cybernetic capitalism, 193

Capital, 155 Capitalism, 183, 185 affective, 193 cognitive, 193 cybernetic, 193 Capitolocene, 168 Care-full movements, 169
171 Cartesianism, 191 Cartography, 127 Cause-and-effect models, 14 Chthulucene, 168 Clinton, Hillary, 100 Co-autoethnography, 113 Cogito ergo sum, 191 Cognitive capitalism, 193 Collaboration, 151, 158
161 Color-blind racism, 97 “Coming into composition” process, self as, 71
72 Common Core State Standards, 106 Communication skills, 130 Conscientization, 164 Consciousness, 192 Conventional qualitative method, 199 Cosmic artisans, 7 Cosmological physics, 191 Creativity, and teaching, 148 Crisis, 157 Crisis of confidence, 2 Critical ethnography, 133 Critical reflection, 139 Critical theories, 111

Data analytics, 194 Data triangulation, 171 Data-walking, 14 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 155 Davis, Angela, 186 Decalcomania, 127 Decentered researcher becomings, 133
135 Decentering the “self”, 205
213 in self-study of professional practices, 59
72 Deleuze, Gilles, 10
13, 16, 25
42, 60
63, 123
135, 158, 163, 168, 169, 171, 172, 177, 199, 200, 201, 202, 205
213 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 93 Descartes, Rene, 191 Desire, 29, 31
41 Destabilization, 125 Deterritorialization, 125
127, 131
135, 181 Dewey, John, 109, 192 Dialogue, 156 Dick, Phillip, 193 Diffractive autoethnography, 79
86 Digital humanities, 186 Discrimination, 191 Doctoral education programs autoethnographic literature review of, 45
57 and getting lost, 46, 49
55 and monstrous methodology, 48
49 and (post-)monstrous position, 47
48

Index

Double slit experiment with diffraction, 201 Duty ethics, 149 Educational equity, 19 Egotistic self, 183 Embodied teacher education, 138 Embodiment, 155, 192 Emery, Sherridan, 160 Empowerment, 109 Empowerment group, 210 Encounter, 197
203 English as a Second Language (ESL), 15 English learners (ELs), 11, 17
18, 20 Entanglement, 199 Environmental humanities, 186 Epoch of digital reason, 194 Ethico-ontoepistemology, 86 Ethnic autobiography, 76 Ethnography, 46 Eurocentric rational humanism, 3 European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry, 201 Exhibition, 162
163 Experimentation, through rhizoanalysis, 30
31 Exploration, 128 Ex post facto observation, 98 Fascism, 181 Feminism, 183, 186, 208 Feminist poststructural theory, 169 Feminist theories, 111 Flows, 156
158 Foucault, Michel, 10, 46, 183, 187, 190, 192, 208 Freire, Paulo, 154 Further Education (FE) sector, 154 Gaia hypothesis, 193 Gender, 211 Genealogy, 190 Genre, 138 Gesture, 170

221

Getting lost, 46, 49
55 Giroux, Henry, 154 Guattari, Felix, 10
14, 16, 21, 25
42, 62
63, 123
135, 158, 163, 168, 169, 171, 172, 177, 205
213 Gut Feminism, 199 Haraway, Donna, 77, 161, 168, 169, 188, 207 Heidegger, Martin, 192 Higher Education Institution, 154 Hlavajova, Maria, 155 hooks, bell, 154 Humanistic conception of self (I), 10, 11, 46
47, 82, 83, 86 Hunter, Mary Ann, 160 Husserl, Edmund, 192 IBMs Watson, 194 Identity, 149 life story model of, 93
94 teacher’s, 138, 144, 149
150 IELTS (International English Language Testing System), 130 Immanence, 27
30, 38, 40, 42 Implicit bias, 94, 100 Imposter, 158 Indigeneity, 195 Individualism, 111 Informationalism, 193 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 85 Instrumental teaching, 154 Intergenerational connection, 187 Interregnum, 157 Intimate scholarship, 76
78, 107, 182
185, 197
203 definition of, 2
3 posthuman materialist, 3
8 Intra-action, 199 Intuitive trouble, 168 Involutionary, 168 Kantianism, 149, 191 Kline, Nancy, 158, 161

222

Knowability, 117 Knowledge, 21 Knowles, Malcolm, 161 Kohn, Alfie, 154 Kristeva, Julia, 10 Labor, 155 Latour, Bruno, 181 Life history, 2, 76 Life story model of identity, 93
94 Linear casualty, 14 Linguistic narcissism, 78 Literature, 138, 139, 143, 148, 149, 152 Literature review autoethnographic, of doctoral education programs, 45
57 Lorraine, Tasmin, 208 Lovelock, James, 193 MacLure, Maggie, 197
203, 209
210 Malhi, Yadvinder, 193 Managerialism, 154 Marx, Karl, 195 Maslow, Abraham, 161 Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, 106 Massumi, B., 209 Materialism, 5 posthuman, 3 Materialist teacher education, 138 Materiality, in intimate scholarship, 197
203 May, Theresa, 191 Meaning-making process, 15 Memory work, 3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 192 Metaphysics, 93 Miller, Nancy, 185 Minor account(s), 171
176 Minority among majority, in qualitative research, 168
169 Mirror, as metaphor, 108
116 Monism, 4

INDEX

Monsters, 45
57 in doctoral education field, 55
57 mastering, 51
54 producing, 54
55 surviving, 49
51 Multiplicities, 62, 117, 156
158 Multiplistic theories of difference, 138 Naked pedagogy, 138, 140, 141
144, 151 Narrative inquiry, 2, 3, 11, 76 Narrative mining, 91
102 Native anthropology, 76 Nature culture, 77 Nature
culture continuum, 180 Neo-conservatism, 191 Neoliberal individualism, 183 Neoliberalization, 185 New materialism, 198
201 New materialist auto-ethicoethnography, 75
87 and agential-realist authenticity, 76
78, 80
83 and agential-realist objectivity, 83
84 and the autoethnographical method, 79
80 new materialist ontology, 78
79 as posthuman social inquiry, 86
87 Nicollini, Alyssa, 211 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 190 Nihilism, 181 Nomadic thinking, 155 Nomad science, 182 Nonlinearity, 184 Non-linear teacher education, 138 Normalization, 130 Objectivity, 76
78 agential-realist, 83
84 in autoethnographic research, 6 Online education, 25
42 and field material collection, 31 and L2 teacher educators, 27
29 and rhizoanalysis, 30
39

Index

Ontoepistemology, 86 Ontological shift, 4 Ontology, 27, 41, 128, 168 new materialist, 78
79 Otherization, 206 Parrhesia, 190 Pedagogical innovation, 154 Pedagogical reading, 138, 150 Pedagogy belated, 138, 140
141, 144
148, 151 of desire, 40 of monsters, 54 naked, 138, 140, 141
144, 151 Pepperell, Robert, 157 Personal/pedagogical affective distributions, 17
18 Personal criticism, 185 Peters, Michael, 189
195 Philosophy of language, 190 Picasso, Pablo, 159 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 192 Pillow, Wanda, 201 Platationocene, 168 “Plugging in”, 38
39, 63
67 Post-anthropocentrism, 180 Post-foundationalism, 191 Posthuman disappointments, 149
151 Posthuman Glossary, 180 Posthumanism, 168, 190, 191 Posthumanist performative, 82 Posthuman materialist intimate scholarship, 3
8 Posthuman research, 138, 155 Posthuman social inquiry, 86
87 Posthuman subjectivity, 181
182 Post-positivist approach, 48 Post-qualitative research, 64, 190 Post-secondary education, 26 Poststructural autoethnography, 92, 94 Poststructuralism, 168 Potentia, 157, 163

223

Predictability, 117 Professional development (PD), 26, 27, 35
37, 40 Proust, Marcel, 162
163 Provocation, 128 Pseudohumanist exceptionalism, 180 Qualitative inquiry, 10, 12, 14, 21, 61 Qualitative research, 2, 10
12, 14, 20
21 minority among majority in, 168
169 Quantitative research, 10 Race, racism, 94, 95, 97
101 Rationality, 2 Reading narratives of, 139 pedagogical, 138, 150 reflective, 140 to teach, 139
140 while teaching, 140 Realism, 110 Refinement, 128 Reflection-as-event, 107 Reflective inquiry, 3 Reflective practice, 109, 111, 113, 156, 159, 162, 163 Reflective reading, 140 Reflective work, 155 Reflexive inquiry, as privileged praxis, 105
119 Reflexivity, 6, 7, 79, 80, 105
119 of discomfort, 119 reflexivity-as-event, 116
119 Relationality, 60 Renold, Emma, 209 Research assemblage. See Assemblage Research management of online education, 29
31 Research methodology, 169 Rhizome, rhizomatics, rhizoanalysis, 7, 11
14, 16, 17, 21, 63, 92, 93, 102, 123
135 characteristics of, 127

224

experimentation through rhizoanalysis, 30
31 rhizomatic becoming, 126
128 rhizomatic learning, 163 rhizomatic reimagination, 132
135 rhizomatic thinking, 149
151 Rich, Adrienne, 201 Ringrose, Jessica, 205
213 Rogers, Carl, 161 Rosmic artisans, 155, 163 Royal science, 182 Sameness, 117 Schizoanalysis, 206, 208
209, 212 Second language (L2) teacher education, 5, 10 online education and, 25
42 Second language (L2) teacher educator, 27
29 Self-awareness, 110 Self-coherence, 82 Self-glorification, 184 Self-indulgence, 55 Self-knowledge, 110 Self-study, 2, 3, 5
7, 11, 183, 191 assemblage and, 63
67 becoming and, 67
70 decentering the “self” in, 59
72 Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy and, 62
63 importance of, 70
71 nature of, 61
62 as process of coming into composition, 71
72 of professional practices, 76 Self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP), 124, 128, 129, 135 Sense, 199 Serres, Michel, 200 Sexuality, 2140 Shame, 138, 151 Sidebottom, Kay, 156 Social constructionism, 4 Social theory dualisms, 79

INDEX

Solidarity, 170 Spinoza, Baruch, 185 Spivak, Gayatri, 77 Spontaneity, 117 Sport education, 69 Steinem, Gloria, 186 Stengers, Isabelle, 202 St. Pierre, Elizabeth, 164, 181, 199 Strom, Kathryn (Katie), 158
159 Student-curator, 7, 155 Subjectivity, 2 Subjectivity, decentering, 189
195 Summer Institute in Qualitative Research, Manchester Metropolitan University, 203 Systems thinking, 193 Talking triad(s), 9, 171, 172, 176 Teacher(s) and identity, 138, 144, 149
150 Teacher-artist, 7, 155 Teacher education self-study of professional practices and, 64 Teaching creativity and, 148 narratives of, 139 reading while, 140 Technical
scientific
curriculum tale, 143 Technological assistance, 26 Technologies of the self, 116, 183 Technology of production, 116 TESOL, 132 Transdisciplinarity, 184 Trans-selves, 183 Trouble, 169, 170 Trump, Donald, 191 Truth-telling, 190 Undutiful Daughters, 186 Universalism, 110 Unknowability, 117 Utilitarianism, 149

Index

Venter, Craig, 194 Virtue Ethics, 149 Vulnerability, 105
119 Walking methodology, 213 “Why is my curriculum white?” campaign, 154

225

Wilson, Elizabeth, 199 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 190 Wolfe, Karl, 161
162 Zarabadi, Shiva, 205
213 Zig-zag thinking, 184