Bodying Postqualitative Research (Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research) [1 ed.] 9781032405612, 9781032405667, 9781003353676, 1032405619

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BODYING POSTQUALITATIVE RESEARCH

Bodying Postqualitative Research posits the question of what happens when lived, fleshy human bodies engage in postqualitative research in education. It takes as its central concern research propositions aimed at dismantling the structures of humanism that typically govern research in education and uses postqualitative conceptions of data, methodology, and clarity in conjunction with insights from feminist science studies scholars to imagine how we might “body” postqualitative work. This book uses the provocations offered by postqualitative research and takes these touchpoints to dismantle dominant logics of research, born of neoliberalism and ongoing settler colonialism to offer alternative perspectives. Importantly, this book stays near to the body by proposing caffeine shakes, antipsychotic medications, and scars as moments to take seriously how bodies do researching practices. After each chapter, the book turns to poetry as a “fracture” or a moment of disruption to the rhythm of the text that incites readers to reconsider the previous chapter otherwise. It concludes by asking what bodying postqualitative research might mean for pedagogy and for propositions toward future inquiry. Drawing together the work of feminist science and education scholars oriented toward the biosciences and whose work has not yet been immersed into postqualitative scholarship in a sustained way, this book brings together a vein of feminist science studies theorising that both deepens and troubles postqualitative scholarship through its focus on the politics of science and the possibilities of doing bodies with biology, culture, and life. The volume is suitable for students and scholars interested in postqualitative and embodied research methods in education, and feminist and gender studies. Nicole Land is an assistant professor of Early Childhood Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University.

POSTQUALITATIVE, NEW MATERIALIST AND CRITICAL POSTHUMANIST RESEARCH Editor in Chief: Karin Murris (Universities of Oulu, Finland, and Cape Town, South

Africa)

Editors: Vivienne Bozalek (University of the Western Cape and Rhodes University,

South Africa)

Asilia Franklin-Phipps (State University of New York at New Paltz, USA)

Simone Fullagar (Griffith University, Australia)

Candace R. Kuby (University of Missouri, USA)

Karen Malone (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)

Carol A. Taylor (University of Bath, United Kingdom)

Weili Zhao (Hangzhou Normal University, China)

This cutting-edge series is designed to assist established researchers, academics, post­ graduate/graduate students and their supervisors across higher education faculties and

departments to incorporate novel, postqualitative, new materialist, and critical post-

humanist approaches in their research projects and their academic writing. In addition to

these substantive foci, books within the series are inter-, multi- or transdisciplinary and

are in dialogue with perspectives such as Black feminisms and Indigenous knowledges,

decolonial, African, Eastern and young children’s philosophies. Although the series’ pri­ mary aim is accessibility, its scope makes it attractive to established academics already

working with postqualitative approaches.

This series is unique in providing short, user-friendly, affordable books that support postgraduate students and academics across disciplines and faculties in higher education. The series is supported by its own website with videos, images and other forms of 3D transmodal expression of ideas – provocations for research courses. More resources for the books in the series are available on the series website, www.postqualitativeresearch.com. If you are interested in submitting a proposal for the series, please write to the Chief Editor, Professor Karin Murris: karin.murris@oulu.fi; [email protected]. Other volumes in this series include: Bodying Postqualitative Research On Being a Researching Body within Fissures of Humanism Nicole Land Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines An Introductory Guide Karin Murris For a full list of titles in this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/PostqualitativeNew-Materialist-and-Critical-Posthumanist-Research/book-series/PNMR

BODYING POSTQUALITATIVE RESEARCH On Being a Researching Body within Fissures of Humanism

Nicole Land

Cover image: [add credit line if known or TBC if pending] First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Nicole Land The right of Nicole Land to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Land, Nicole, author.

Title: Bodying postqualitative research : on being a researching body within

fissures of humanism / Nicole Land.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |

Series: Postqualitative new materialist and critical posthumanist research |

Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2023018794 (print) | LCCN 2023018795 (ebook) |

Subjects: LCSH: Education--Research--Philosophy. | Qualitative

research--Methodology. | Humanism.

Classification: LCC LB1028 .L247 2023 (print) | LCC LB1028 (ebook) |

DDC 370.72--dc23/eng/20230714

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018794

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018795

ISBN: 978-1-032-40561-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-40566-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-35367-6 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676

Typeset in Bembo

by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

Introduction to the Series – Postqualitative, New Materialist, and Critical

Posthumanist Research Introduction

vii

1

Where we are Headed 5

Four Critical Moves to Hold Near 6

Moving into the Body of the Book 14

1 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

15

Biocultural Creatures 15

Composite-in-Tension 18

Postqualitative Data 20

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Caffeine Shakes 23

Fracture One: Minnows 2 Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, and Antipsychotic

Medications Biomedical Imaginaries 30

Neurobiological Bodies 32

Postqualitative Methodologies 33

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Antipsychotic Medications 38

27

30

vi Contents

Fracture Two: Turing Test_Love

42

3 Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars

46

Biopossibility 46

A Topological Sense of Biopolitics 48

Postqualitative Clarity 50

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Scars 53

Fracture Three: Fermentation 4 Pedagogical Inquiry Work, Proprioception, and a Sweaty Quad

54

59

Proprioception 62

A Sweaty Quad 63

Fracture Four: Childless Offspring

67

Conclusion: Bodying Postqualitative Research

70

Proposition One: Imagine How Postqualitative Relations with the

Biosciences Might Proceed 70

Proposition Two: Build Otherwise Imaginaries and Lexicons for Doing

Bodies with Postqualitative Proposals 72

Proposition Three: Craft Ways to Intentionally, but Not

Anthropocentrically, Body Postqualitative Research 74

Final Gesture: On Education Research 75

References Index

77

83

INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES – POSTQUALITATIVE, NEW MATERIALIST, AND CRITICAL POSTHUMANIST RESEARCH Simone Fullagar Series Co-editor

Bodying Postqualitative Research – On Being a Researching Body within Fissures of Humanism is a delightfully thoughtful book that invites the reader to explore the bodying of research practices that are visceral, fleshy, and poetic. Reflecting the central aim in this book series, Nicole Land writes to disrupt humanist assumptions about bodies as contained entities and offers an alternative to much (dis)embodied theory by playing with the intersections of physiology and postqualitative work. Informed by the field of early childhood education, this book offers an animated account of more-than-embodied writing as an interdisciplinary practice for “dwelling more deeply with the body.” Drawing upon the insights of feminist science studies, this is also a critical prac­ tice that acknowledges the historical power relations that produce bodies, that colonise movement, freedom, and thinking. Extending the insights of Annemarie Mol (2021) and other scholars who pose the question of the body in terms of multiplicity, Land employs the language of “bodying” to understand the practices and relations of making, doing, and moving of bodies. Her exploration orients around a key question that invites disruption as well as creativity, “what methodo­ logical and pedagogical propositions might we create when we read postqualitative propositions and physiologies through one another, inciting little-tended gestures toward bodying postqualitative research amid the cracks and facades of contemporary humanism?” Each chapter plays with the central thread of body-making in four critical moves that interweave through an exploration of the bodying of “ethics and politics of limbs, ligaments, and lymphatic systems.” Deploying the language of postqualitative provocations rather than conventional critique, Land takes the reader through a diverse range of fleshy moments that are thoroughly entangled with bodying as life-making vitality, from caffeine shakes, antipsychotic medications, to scars. The researcher is located within these explorations as research is understood

viii Introduction to the Series

as a practice of bodying, where thinking with proprioception and sweaty outdoor spaces for example, opens up the fissures of humanist thought. Being small tears in the mucosa of a body part, fissures are not a complete severing but a rip that marks and sustains a thread of connection. The engagement with biology in this approach returns to humanities–science relations by unsettling the truth making claims of science to pursue the multiple physiologies that compose bodies and nonhuman worlds. The use of poetry in this book is a creative means of working material– discursive tensions to enliven our thinking about how bodies and language come together to incite different ways of learning–knowing. Bodying Postqualitative Research – On Being a Researching Body within Fissures of Humanism is a playful endeavor as it crosses boundaries, creating language that connects physiologies and postqualitative inquiry. In doing so it provides a valuable resource for doctorate students as well as more established researchers working across disciplinary perspectives. Bringing feminist science studies into a dynamic relation with postqualitative provocations, Land invites us to consider a central ethical question of how methodologies can enable different lives and inventive ways of writing the liveliness of the world.

INTRODUCTION

I wanted so badly to believe it was possible. Sitting in a doctoral seminar on theory and method, pouring over the shape-shifting provocations offered by postqualitative research scholars, and holding a deep fascination with the physiology of the body that I first met during my undergraduate degree, I hoped with all my scholarly hope that physiology and postqualitative work could intersect. I wanted to read about voice beyond the structures of bounded humanist identity and then scramble through articles detailing vibrating vocal folds and then hold the two in dialogue, wondering how rhythm and roaring might intersect and open toward something unfamiliar in my research practices. To take language beyond liberal humanist paradigms of truth and authenticity and put language into dialogue with the flurry of neuronal firing that animates any instance of speaking, writing, or rushing forward of vocabulary that undoes the lexicon of Eurocentric inquiry – this was my imperative, this is what made reading and writing with postqualitative provocations feel nourishing. And not just nourishing, but possible; it felt like I could create the conditions in (early childhood) education research that I want to stand for if I could find micro-methods for weaving my kinesiology-fueled obsession with the body with the affinities that drew me toward postqualitative theorising. I was, as Angela Benozzo (2021) describes, surprised by the magic power of words. These three words, post qualitative research, are a term for which the time has come; they grasped an exigence, a sensibility, a desire, and an ongoing process to work and research in a new, provocative, and relevant way. (p. 168) Put differently, I needed to declare that when we intentionally make postqualitative methods (and what truly felt like their magical provocational power) DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-1

2 Introduction

and physiology collide, we might generate spaces for meeting the body otherwise. And meeting the body otherwise: this was the energy that motivated my scholar­ ship. But the conditions of possibility haunted my thinking, as I debated if it was, indeed, possible to weave postqualitative and physiological scholarship. I did not want this to be a surface endeavor, using either a physiology or a postqualitative provocation to “prove” one another, nor did I want to draw upon physiology to simple reiterate what postqualitative work was already advancing. Embodiment was so often positioned as a balm to wanting to inhabit a body but, for me, the moniker of embodiment was not cutting it. It felt like a hollow signifier for the snarled, beautiful, not completely perceptible mess that is physiol­ ogy. I read the classics: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Serres, Michel Foucault, and some of Judith Butler’s work on feminisms and embodiment. I read some of bell hooks’ and Sara Ahmed’s writing, and while I understand and honor the importance of sharing racialised and killjoy embodiments, especially in spaces where such lived knowledge was negated in the name of white supremacy, I still wanted something else, a differently fleshed alphabet for wanting to know the researching body. I turned to the education literature and found embodiment as something mediated: am I doing embodiment if I am not doing breathwork? If I am not wearing an Apple Watch or a GPS tracker? If I am not measuring or refereeing my body, am I doing embodiment? I still find it profoundly confusing that we might figure embodiment as something different than the work of body­ ing, different than the labor of being a living, fleshy body moment to moment. Perhaps this drive was/is because of ongoing white supremacy and settler coloni­ alism: I have rarely had to fight to have my white, abled body made perceptible in the public realm. Embodiment, as I met it while first getting to know postqualitative literature felt like a vestige of humanism. It was almost an apology for the ordinary audacity of living with flesh. Embodiment meant acknowledging how our heart rate leapt when we met data full of mystery or how our eyes grew exhausted when we sat for sustained times with data that truly baffled our qualita­ tive habits. I did not want to argue that these bodied interjections did not matter to research, but I did want to find practices for dwelling more deeply with the body, for inhabiting bodies as more-than-embodied, to situate body-making as a thread of the postqualitative research puzzle. I do not want to offer a critique of embo­ diment theory here, as that is beyond the scope of what I hope to achieve. What I do want to do is make clear that there was something about embodiment theories that felt incongruous with these little nodes of physiologies and postqualitative research that I was beginning to dwell into. Perhaps it is the “em” of embodiment that I am most suspicious of. “Em” denotes a practice of causation or placement; to em-body is to put into a body or to lead to the creation of a body. This feels far too clinical, far too Cartesian (even as it works hard to bash the mind/body divide): embodiment as the act of putting the body into knowledge. “Em” feels like creating a container, creating a category, and we certainly know that Enlight­ enment has left us with a suffocating bounty of categorisations. Thinking with postqualitative provocations, I felt in my bones a call to reject conventions of

Introduction 3

embodiment and to carry a curated suspicion and care for how bodies, knowledges, and worlds entwine. I wanted to work in the muck, in the traffic, in the guts of what is made when postqualitative provocations and physiologies are forced to sit with one another and get to know each other’s insides. Layering physiology into postqualitative work or adding post qualitative flavor to physiology is too thin a project, too easy a corre­ spondence to produce anything capable of stirring the different humanist, colonial foundations that postqualitative research and physiology contend with, differently. To just bring one field of study to the other risked what, I thought and continue to think, is the biggest danger in the high-stakes game of thinking these two fields together: reproducing the body of humanism and the Eurocentric logics that sus­ tain such a body. I still want, very badly, to believe it is possible: to believe that muddling postqualitative provocations with physiologies can generate important propositions for both projects while making unstable our dominant ways of theo­ rising human bodies. That is, in fact, the fulcrum of this book: what methodological and pedagogical propositions might we create when we read postqualitative propo­ sitions and physiologies through one another, inciting little-tended gestures toward bodying postqualitative research amid the cracks and facades of contemporary humanism? It was at this juncture that I came to know feminist science studies theorising. I started with the texts with the most momentum in education research, working through Karen Barad’s (2007) germinal work on building lives and bodies in quantum worlds, and Donna Haraway’s (2006, 2016) world-bending scholarship on entanglement, debt, and figuring out how to be kin in worlds of cyborg, che­ mical, and Chutlucene dynamics. Then, I found Annemarie Mol’s (2002) brilliant treatise on the body as a collection of body-making activities and materialities. From Mol, I learned “the body, the patient, the disease, the doctor, the technician, the technology: all of these are more than one. More than singular” (p. 5) as we “do” disease. Can we do bodies, I wondered – can we, as Mol pens, understand bodies as processes whereby “far from necessarily falling into fragments, multiple objects tend to hang together”? (p. 5). This felt like a pathway toward thinking bodies with postqualitative research without the wariness I held toward the world embodiment. This, I learned from Mol, was a chance to think bodies as a verb – bodying – whereby that verb is messy and knowable through multiple knowledges, objects, relations, inheritances, and obligations. From Mol, I began reading Angela Willey (2016), who writes toward theorisations that “enable us to hold the politics of science and the possibilities of biology in the same frame, such that our new conceptions of materiality reflect the breadth of feminist and other contributions to knowing bodies” (p. 3). I learned, with Willey, that the futures of biology lie not in exalting biology as an interpretative frame but in thinking the possibilities of biology for life-making. It is about intensifying biologies’ differences rather than cementing biology’s categorisations, Willey argues. With Willey, I learned to read feminist science studies scholars like Anne Pollock (2021; Pollock & Subramaniam, 2016), Banu Subramaniam (2009, 2014), Deboleena Roy (2016, 2018), Jennifer

4 Introduction

Hamilton (Hamilton, Subramaniam, & Willey, 2017), Katherine McKittrick (2020), Max Liboiron (2021), Samantha Frost (2016), Susan Merril Squier (2004), and Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2016). From these scholars, I have learned that bodies must be theorised in the multiple: it is actually an ethical and political urgency to be against dominant Euro-Western scientific categorisations that know the body as essential, universalised, and predictable. We need skeletons without certainty; muscles without management. That this book very intently brings postqualitative theorising into dialogue with feminist science studies scholars rooted quite steadfastly in biologies and physiologies is one of the contributions that I hope to make to education research. There has been incredible work done with bringing scholars like Barad and Haraway to education, but for whatever reason – perhaps my skepticism of embodiment is shared by other scholars – we have not fulsomely placed feminist science studies into sustained conversation and proximity with postqualitative scholars’ provocations. I aim to do this, and I hope that by doing this, we might open otherwise pathways for getting to know the body in postqualitative research in education. As you first meet this book, I want to introduce you to four critical moves I return to throughout. To begin, I use the language of “bodying” to understand bodies as verb, as an undertaking. Bodying stands in the face of anthropocentric contentions of the body as a container or naturalistic truth and instead centers the ongoing ethics and politics of limbs, ligaments, and lymphatic systems (Land, 2021). I will detail this more in a section to come, but I do want to pull your attention toward the use of bodying as a query, whereby we are a fleshy body doing postqualitative work and enlivening postqualitative worlds; worlds that take much of how we knew these fleshy bodies as researching bodies and unsettle status-quo and anthropocentric knowledges and subjectivities toward relations of contagion, entanglement, and invention where the body becomes an activity (Mol, 2002) and never a fact to be subsumed to invisibility in the name of productive, perceptible research. Second, I deliberately use the language of physiologies in the plural. My intention here is twofold: I want to center that there are multiple physiologies that compose a body, and I want to unsettle the arrogant defensiveness and epistemo­ logical soul crushing often enacted to theorising by the capital “S” Science of Physiology – I am contesting the proper noun of Physiology, and all the inter­ pretative power ascribed to such a dictate, if you will. Then, I return often to the phrase “postqualitative provocations” as a third move. Utilising “provocations” instead of “contentions” or “argument” is an intentional move against the mascu­ linist aggression of self-assured paradigmatic research. Postqualitative work often offers forward propositions for working in the ruins of what we thought we knew (MacLure, 2011), where a proposition or a provocation is a move toward offering an uncompromising, hybrid call to thinking that unmoors what we thought we knew and, in the same instant, gestures toward the creation of a not-yet-known possibility for enacting methodologies. Again, I will offer more on this to come. Because, my third move, is to engender a careful, rigorous, playful kind of inter­ disciplinarity throughout this book. I will work with pieces from post qualitative research, from physiology research, but also poetry.

Introduction 5

Where we are Headed In this book, my analysis pivots upon questions of what happens when lived, fleshy human bodies engage in postqualitative research in education, where to think with the provocations offered by postqualitative research demand we dismantle domi­ nant logics from which we, amid neoliberalism and ongoing settler colonialism, have and continue to build our conception of the muscley, blood-filled human body. What happens when, I will query, we are a fleshy body doing postqualitative work and enlivening postqualitative worlds? Drawing together the work of fem­ inist science scholars oriented toward the biosciences and whose work has not yet been immersed into postqualitative scholarship in a sustained way – including Samantha Frost (2016), Susan Merrill Squier (2004), Michelle Murphy (2012), Annemarie Mol (2021), Angela Willey (2016), and Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2016) – this book brings together a vein of feminist science studies theorising that both deepens and troubles postqualitative scholarship through its focus on the politics of science and the possibilities of doing bodies with biology, culture, and life. Thus, this text has two main intentions: to ask how we do (situated, human) bodies with and as postqualitative research(ers) and to pull biosciences-oriented feminist science studies work into proximity with the provocations offered by postqualitative research. Asking how we do human bodies in postqualitative literature is a deeply political question as it is in close contact with constantly recomposing questions of difference, agency, knowledge, kin, relationality, and justice; that is, fleshy researching bodies are deeply complicit in answering to and infiltrating the hierarchical, curatorial, power-laden politics of 21st century scholarly spaces. In particular, I take up three postqualitative propositions named by Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre (2016) as features of “conventional humanist qualitative inquiry” (p.1) and re-articulated by Pauliina Rautio (2021) as “balancing acts” (p. 228) for contemporary viral times. I will work with data, methods, and clarity as three concerns for doing postqualitative research with bodies. The first three chapters that form the body of this book will think with provocations offered by feminist science studies scholars, asking what biocultural creatures (Frost, 2016) and bodies as composite-in-tension (Mol, 2021); biocultural imaginaries (Squier, 2004) and neurobiological bodies (Pitts-Taylor, 2016); and biopossibility (Willey, 2016) and a topological sense of biopolitics (Murphy, 2012) do with postqualitative enactments of data, method, and clarity. Each chapter will focus on one iteration of bodying including caffeine shakes, antipsychotic medications, and scars. Deepening the interdisciplinary character of the book, each chapter will also think with poetry or literature, making clear that the work of bodying is rich, lively, and slippery amid the suspensions (Phelan & Hansen, 2021) of our uneven, complex worlds in contemporary education research. Following this, I turn more closely to thinking with pedagogy as one project of bodying postqualitative propositions. I work with a moment from my Moving Pedagogies research to think with proprioception and a strangely sweaty outdoor space. In the final chapter of the book, I will reiterate thinking with postqualitative

6 Introduction

and feminist science studies’ provocations as a project of remembering that the “we” who undertakes postqualitative research is a particular form of body, a par­ ticular array of activities and vulnerabilities that mark our possibilities for bodying and for living. I offer three propositions that we might work to enliven toward this project. I argue that we do postqualitative research with/in bodying; to think data, method, and clarity is always to dialogue with particular manifestations of flesh.

Four Critical Moves to Hold Near Bodying Bodying names the work of doing a body – and of doing a body while being of that body, being inseparable from the bodies and work of bodying. This is a bit of a tongue twister to be sure, but it is a riddle filled with pedagogical energy: as we body, we make possible the possibility of otherwise bodies. There is hope here, because we need bodies we do not yet know in the name of survival. The obedi­ ently embodied body who writes of her human sense of her human quickening heart rate beating in her ears as she faces off with human-centered data that shakes what she thought she knew about humans? What if she is not the body of survi­ vance? What if we need to think bodies, and our practices of making bodies (Mol, 2002) as an urgent ethical and political project in education? From the biosciences as they collide with humanism, we inherit an image of the arrogantly humanist body (Taylor, 2020), one that knows its borders and protects its constitution as a human body at all costs. Such a body, I argue, is a methodological choice for meeting the world. It names borders as porous as its own membranes but pretends these borders are fortified by medicine, the wellness industrial complex, and the ever-willful promise of a strong Cartesian body capable of conquering the world (or at least, conquering the neoliberal imperative of achieving personal health). I borrow from Mol (2002) the notion that bodies are a collection of activities that have a history, an intentionality, and are wholly relational. This status-quo body, the Human body made of a lexicon of war metaphors, healthy citizenship, and a heavy reliance on medicine to interpret the body, is one iteration of bodying. It is one fashioning together of pieces of physiologies and pop culture, society and skeletons, that makes a body matter as such. If we take body as a verb, there must then be other bodyings, other processes of coming to body a body with different knowledges, relations, questions, and affi­ nities. Mol writes, on atherosclerosis as the doing of a disease, who does the doing? Events are made to happen by several people and lots of things. Words participate, too. Paperwork. Rooms, buildings. The insurance system. An endless list of heterogeneous elements that can either be highlighted or left in the background, depending on the character and purpose of the description [of, in this case, Mol’s ethnographic work in an atherosclerosis clinic]. (p. 26)

Introduction 7

Bodies, following Mol, are made of the question “who does the doing?” Who bodies? How? Why? To do bodying is to tend to the proposition “how is this body happening?” over and over and over – and asking, “how am I curating, responding to, and paying attention to the forces, materialities, politics, ethics, and relations that contribute to this iterative moment of bodying, here and now?” Bodying clings to the contention that we never body once and for all; bodying is not an achievement. It is a practice. It is an activity, a doing. We do bodying with our postqualitative research practices. We make and remake bodies as we grapple with methodologies that unsettle humanist paradigms and demand bodying prac­ tices that manifest our flesh otherwise, beyond these humancentric, Enlightenment models of the human body. To take body as a verb – bodying – is to tend to the very real possibility that we might do bodies otherwise within postqualitative research, and that this might be a lived, fleshed gesture toward creating more livable worlds.

Fissures and Fractures I agonised over the language of “fissures” as an anchor for this book, as an instan­ tiation of the activities this book wants to inherit. I settled on fissures, and bodying research in the fissures of humanism, as I wanted to denote a cleft, a crack, but not a clean, sanitised break with humanism. It was important as well, in discussing bodying, that I think with a word familiar to human anatomy, of which fissure is one. A fissure names a small tear in the mucosa of a body part. It is a rip, a crevice, but not a complete severing. This is important: researching in the fissures of humanism does not mean abandoning humanism. Rather, it means studying the tiny threads of humanism that continue to hold a fissure together, and wondering how we might understand these and, perhaps, break them – or, see them as necessary for the survival of our bodies and our concepts. Fissures are, I imagine, quite painful; there is nothing easy about tearing mucosa and this pain matters for how I want to invoke fissures. I want them to be difficult; I want them to be unsettling – fissures should “hurt” in their disruptive capacity. Fissures are also dif­ ficult to repair. You cannot simply pour a balm or resin in the crack, filling from the outside in. Rather, flesh must braid together from the depths to the outside, changing the tensile and functional character of that tissue. A fissure leaves a mark, forever. Accordingly, I refer often to the fissures of humanism in what follows and I hope that each time I invoke the word fissure, you feel in your flesh a flash of what it might mean to have a fissure that severs your bodied links to humanism. The conception of fractures is also one that I play with in the book. I use it to announce the breaks between chapters where I think briefly with different poems as a method for adding texture to my discussion in each chapter. Here my use of fracture as a break is very intentional: I want to mark a shift from thinking with scholarly literature to thinking with poetry. Fractures, in human anatomy, are breaks – not always clean ones, and not always complete ones, but cracks and avulsions and snaps in a bone. Here what I want to articulate is a shift in how we

8 Introduction

pay attention and how we get to know bodying research otherwise. I provide some analysis and articulate my thinking with each fracture, but it is more so my goal for the fractures to agitate a reader. It is not about how I think each fracture complexifies the discussion preceding it, but how the poem gets into the reader’s flesh, how the poem itself becomes a fracture in reading practices that expect the author to tie pretty knots and bows on all sections of the text. I recall learning in my undergraduate training about a very common fracture, a FOOSH – a fall on an outstretched hand. This breaks wrist and arm bones. Fractures, as I invoke them in what follows, are a FOOSH, a risky tumble onto an inflection point. The body can absorb some of the fall, but not all the momentum. We radically accept how the tumble injures and reshapes our bodies. In a sense, this is a very postqualitative invitation for engaging the fractures: see what they create as you body them, as you take the risk of letting them infiltrate your skin and muscles, all in the name of thinking how we might do bodying postqualitative research.

Physiologies My contention that we might think with physiologies and not Physiology owes lar­ gely to Hamilton, Subramaniam, and Willey’s (2017) piece on the constitutive links between ongoing settler colonialism and the “epistemic imperialism” of dominant sciences that trample difference into power and subsume non-Euro-Western ways of knowing into subservient, “non-scientific” (non-logical, non-validated) categories. It is important for me to note here that I am a multi-generational white settler living now on the lands of the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas and Haudenosaunee, and having been born on Treaty 7 land, Tsuu t’ina Nation, Siksika Nation (Blackfoot), and Stoney (Nakoda) territory, in the colonial country currently known as Canada. I then moved to Treaty 6 territory, on Cree, Blackfoot, Métis, Nakota Sioux, Iroquois, Dene, Ojibway, Saulteaux, Anishinaabe, and Inuit land, to study Kinesiology – a normalising, essentialising science that is learning to recognise its complicity in the way its health-promoting practices also promote minoritisation, discrimination, and Eurocentric ways of knowing the body (Azzarito, 2009; Azzarito, Macdonald, Dagkas, & Fisette, 2017). I name my histories with these places and bodies of literature to make clear my own implication in the very notion of Physiology and Science that I critique and work against in this book. I am in the mess and sometimes I perpetuate the mess, be that inadvertently or intentionally. This is not a self-serving apology. It is a move toward answerability, and figuring out what answerability looks like in this context. Accordingly, a key move of this book is to work with physiologies to wrestle them from their interpretative clout that we know has participated in creating hierarchies used to order the world toward white supremacy. As such, my concern with thinking Physiology in the singular – the proper noun denoting an Enlightenment-validated bundle of knowledge – is that such a practice would necessarily ignore other practices for getting to know the body and its activities. When we invoke any Science, we do so amid a Euro-Western societal hierarchy trained to exalt Scientific discoveries as the expense of, for example, artistic ways of knowing.

Introduction 9

Postqualitative research knows this well as it pushes away the conventions of validity and accuracy afforded to the proper Scientific methods of rigorous Quali­ tative Research. This power of Science is wholly non-innocent. As Hamilton, Subramaniam, and Willey write, “science is constitutive of colonialism. Science is more than simply an instrumental extension of colonial power. Science and colo­ nisation are co-emergent, co-constituted, and coproduced; one cannot understand science without colonialism or colonialism without science” (p. 613). They think with Sandra Harding’s invocation of Capital S Science, “those knowledges and knowledge systems that count as science across time and space” (p. 614). I borrow this convention, naming Physiology and physiologies. How then, knowing that Science is a non-innocent epistemic formation that continues to perpetuate ongoing settler colonialism, do we move from Physiology to physiologies? Should we – or should we be paying attention to the con­ sequences of Science and intervening in its inequities? What then, becomes of my project in this book to think physiologies with postqualitative knowledges if I want to refuse to think with the dictatorial Science we are urged to revere? As Willey (2016) writes, gesturing to histories of feminist science and technology studies thought, “to engage scientific stories and make use of them … need not mean retreat from critique of science’s epistemic authority” (p. 14). We need, Willey continues, “some vision of what it looks like to politicize scientific knowledge production in a way that allows for an answerability, an accountability, beyond the realm of internal critique, that science as we know it lacks” (p. 14). Here is where my excitement builds: we need an answerability beyond the realm of internal cri­ tique. This is where I propose physiologies as a mode of creative engagement with the physiological events of bodying – physiologies are an activity, a doing, a plural verb. One final quote here from Willey thinking in the company of Haraway: “we need ‘critique’ to help us remember that ‘the body’ is still not ‘scientific data’, nor is ‘biology’ flesh ‘itself’; it is, rather, a field of study, a discipline, a discourse on the body” (p. 22). Physiologies are not an unassailable truth; they are made of sciences that are part and parcel of colonialism, neoliberalism, and the centering of a humanist subject amid the Anthropos. Physiologies are not a “solution” to the problems of Physiology as Science. But to think physiologies as multiple, always, and as part of the work of bodying, there might, I propose, be tiny windows into thinking bodies otherwise with postqualitative knowledges.

Postqualitative Provocations I want to start this book by briefly charting some of the contours of postqualitative research, as it is my assumption that anyone reading this book already has some familiarity with the landscape of this work. It is important for me to note that my thinking with postqualitative scholars is eclectic and almost a “visiting” of sorts with their work. I never attempt to articulate a wholesale theory of what postqualitative research does or answers to, and I do not work to pen a literature review of all relevant literature for each concept or moment that I grapple with.

10 Introduction

What I want to do is think with scholars whose provocations tug at the concepts that I presence in each section. I feel almost like I need to ask my reader for for­ giveness for such a move, as if not producing an encyclopedia of postqualitative work is something that will disappoint you. Perhaps this cuts to the wick of one of the imperatives of traditional humanist qualitative work: the desire to be exhaus­ tive, with comprehensiveness signaling the epistemic virtue of any work. I hope this is untrue, and it is my deep hope that you will see how I am able to engage different theorists at different depths than would have been possible if this book oriented itself toward breadth. If this demands that I accept a critique that this book is not a complete engagement with all of the literature that coheres as postqualitative research, then that is a limitation of this work that I happily accept, knowing that in its wake comes space for spending a great deal of time with a few pieces that deeply stretch our thinking toward the main intentions of this book: how do we body postqualitative research in the fissures of the humanist tropes and materialities we inhabit and inherit? I use the word “provocations” intentionally throughout the book, as it draws upon two bodies of thought that are relevant to our project here. First, to think in the lexicon of postqualitative work (Murris, 2022), crafting provocations is often invoked as a mode for inviting a reader to be implicated in a text, to have to take the risk of being provoked toward an unfamiliar mode of thinking or of life. This is different from a prescription or, in the context of scholarly writing, from a con­ clusion or a best practice to be carried directly into the world. Writing in the context of postqualitative inquiry, Karin Murris and Vivienne Bozalek (2019) pre­ sence provocations as “engag[ing] with the in/determinate direction of what a diffractive methodology might look like in practice” (p. 1505) where “being affected by these propositions is more than emotion or feelings, but a kind of mutual performativity that queers cognition/emotion and inner/outer binaries” (p. 1505). Here, propositions are affective and active; they call us into a history and a trajectory. We cannot easily ignore propositions, nor can we instrumentalise them. This is consistent with my intentions in this book, where I take up different pro­ positions as an almost feral, irrepressible tenor that draws both myself and a reader to thought, otherwise. Second, the language of “provocations” is part of the work of thinking pedagogy, a practice never too distant in this book from thinking bodying. My colleagues Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Fikile Nxumalo, and Narda Nelson (ex: Nxumalo, Vintimilla, & Nelson, 2018; Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2016; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015; Vinti­ milla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020) draw often upon the tradition in curriculum studies and pedagogy to articulate provocations that call readers into the manifes­ tation of a provocation; into the picking up and delving into of a contention that has the potential to re-articulate what it means to live well together with the vast liveliness of the world. I think often with provocations in my own work, imagin­ ing how differently cared-for pedagogical provocations might shift how we attend to children’s relations with bodies and technologies (ex: Land et al., 2020; Land & Danis, 2016; Land & Todorovic, 2021). To be provocative with pedagogy is to

Introduction 11

unsettle the status quo in education (and in postqualitative research) and ask ques­ tions of relations, debts, entanglements, life, flourishing, and death with educational practices. It is, therefore, central to the ethos of this book to think in the language of provocations and to answer to and with provocations as an imperative for thinking bodying with postqualitative research. St. Pierre (2014) anchors postqualitative research in a history of modern research, whereby the “ontology of humanist qualitative methodology could never make sense” (p. 3) for all of its reliance on veracity, extractivism, and epistemological violence. This means that critical to postqualitative inquiry is a suspicion of the easy research referents of liberal humanist research, like voice, authenticity, veracity, and accuracy – and a skepticism with what such knowledges do once released to the wild of a hyper-regulated neoliberal world. St. Pierre continues, offering that “if one accepts its humanist assumptions, it [conventional humanist qualitative meth­ odology] makes sense. However if one doesn’t accept them, it doesn’t” (p. 4). This positions postqualitative methodology as a decision a researcher enacts in the face of the normative modes of inquiry that drive the university; a researcher refuses to become the good research subject, producing methods that can be validated, reproduced, and scaled up in the interest of better understanding the world as it is, the world ripe for measurement. Importantly, postqualitative research confronts human exceptionalism, the contention that the human is a special collection of cells, one that deserves attention above all other forms of life. To take up questions of the human is to risk immersing the human body into the soup of messy forms of life; it is to resist humanism’s exceptionalism and think instead with grammars of entanglement, estrangement, and enlivening. For Patti Lather and St. Pierre (2013), a motivator of postqualitative research is taking the question of the human to task with poststructural theories. They ask: If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? Can there be an instituting “I” left to inquire, to know? Dare we give up that “I,” that fiction—the doer before the deed? How are we anyway in entanglement? How might we become in becoming? Isn’t this question affirmative? Experi­ mental? Ethical? Insistent? (p. 631) Here, Lather and St. Pierre are putting into question the normative, neoliberal (researching) humanist subject build of Enlightenment philosophies, where sub­ jectivity is stable and the world exists for humans to unpack and bring into the light its secrets. In the face of humanism’s reliance on calculations, order, and dis­ covery, postqualitative research proposes that what is at stake is not a quest to get the “best” knowledge, but instead questions of what kinds of knowledges we need for what kind of lives we want to be a part of. Maggie MacLure (2011) names this a project of inheriting and inhabiting the ruins, where representational logic fails in the shadow of an

12 Introduction

Enlightenment project [that] is breaking down and a commitment to bringing forth a different kind of research out of those ruins – research that has lost its innocence and its faith in ‘victory narratives’, that recognizes that its truths are always partial and provisional and that it can never fully know or rescue the other. (p. 997). Postqualitative research, with MacLure, is the work of recognising that postqualitative research must stutter, that we must open to the stutter, that makes shaky the epistemic borders we thought we knew: social/material, empirical/theoretical, data/method. There are many words for what MacLure drowns in the stutter: language and materiality (MacLure, 2013a), physical cultures (Fullagar, 2017), troubling and transgressing (Kuby et al., 2016), in-the-making and minor pedagogy (Mazzei & Smithers, 2020), grappling and the more than human (Nxumalo et al., 2020), and balancing acts (Rautio, 2021). For MacLure (2011), “resistant to capture by ideology or language, wonder could be the proper business, not only of philo­ sophy but also of qualitative inquiry” (p. 1004). Wonder (MacLure, 2013b) and stuttering, then, are a making-shaking project, one that does not cohere postqualitative inquiry as a single “thing” but does act as the sinew holding a diverse web of postqualitative projects together in their affinity for thinking beyond humanist inquiry. Holding the postqualitative project together, Susan Nordstrom and Jasmine Ulmer (2017) argue, are a few shared propositions: thinking with theories, becoming post-, flattening ontologies, turning to concept as method, experimenting creatively, reconceptualising research, and rethinking how and why we meet the world as we do as researchers. In a similar vein, Carol A. Taylor (2017) offers five gestures that postqualitative research might carry: de-centering the human; “recast[ing] epistemology by breaking open the individualized, rational, and binary representational logics on which the Cartesian knowing subject and his (sic) knowledge-making practices rest” (p. 313); shifting from viewing experience as the cognitive, internal world of one human to be extracted and analyzed toward thinking “materialist, relational, co-constitutive, affective, vitalist, corporeal notions of experience” (p. 313); get to (re)know research practices as messy material discursive enactments; and to “write inventively … to recognize the partiality of our knowing, acknowledge that which is beyond our interpretation, and appreciate our situatedness and uncertainty” (p. 313). Lather and St. Pierre (2013) illustrate the boldness of the postqualitative project(s), asking “are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?” (p. 631). I would suggest that this question – enabling different lives through methodology – is a key ethical tenant of postqualitative research. Importantly, there is always a push from within postqualitative research to resist too firmly drawing the bounds of such a project, as boundaries speak the language of inside and outside and forget the inevitable messiness of projects that dissolve inherited research referents into the soup of orienting otherwise. Writes St. Pierre (2019): “post qualitative inquiry never is” (p. 9). Postqualitative research is, as

Introduction 13

Nordstrom and Ulmer (2017) offer, “an agentic assemblage that spurs further ver­ sions of postqualitative research” (p. 2), meaning that it is concerned with reconfiguring research worlds through projects that, as Manning (2014) continually “outrun” the subject as we know it in any instance. Kakali Bhattacharya (2021), for example, details how de/colonial research methods sometimes confront postqualitative methodologies, because “post-qualitative approaches centre the work of scholars in relation to whom I experience ontoepistemic distance and cultural incongruencies” (p. 182). Nordstrom (2021) highlights that “the question becomes ‘Plural for whom’?” (p. 248) as postqualitative research traffics in multiplicity and invention amid complex common worlds (Taylor, 2020). This is to say, postqualitative methodologies are not solutiongenic; in their failure, they make deci­ sions about which theories (post structuralism, new materialisms) to think with and why, and they therefore draw lines – however unintentional and counter to the project of thinking against humanist categorisations this might be – in the sand that mark out their terrain. Postqualitative research is a decision to research toward different futures, but it is also a recognition that such futures will be imperfect and situated and tricky. If its project is, as St. Pierre (2021a) offers, “not to find a represent something that exists in the empirical world of human lived experience but to re-orient thought to experiment and create new forms of thought and life” (p. 163), then postqualitative research is about imperfect world-making – over and over, in the name of justice and in the name of life, but also in the name of trouble and difference. So then, why use the language of postqualitative provocations in this book? To my understanding, a provocation is something propulsive: it has an energy, it puts something in motion. This is how I want to think of what postqualitative research offers: as something that lends motion; as ideas that are to be drawn into our complex worlds and worked with to create something unfamiliar, but then to also be abandoned or re-encountered when their momentum reaches a limit or is no longer filled with energy. I borrow the idea of propositions from Lather’s (2016) Top ten+ list: (Re)thinking ontology in (post)qualitative research and Rautio’s (2021) “four balancing acts” for postqualitative inquiry, where Lather and Rautio write short propositions designed to agitate conventions of huma­ nist and postqualitative thinking. They offer what I would argue are provoca­ tions: ideas to be worked at and with and not resolved. Further, a provocation gets under one’s skin; as St. Pierre (2017b) writes, “the postqualitative researcher must live the theories (will to be able to not live them) and will, then, live in a different world enabled by a different ethico-ontoepistemology” (p. 604). A provocation asks to be lived toward crafting more livable worlds. It is in this spirit that I name postqualitative propositions as propositions in this book. I am never suggesting that a postqualitative provocation be engaged as an imperative or a fact or a practice to be implemented, nor am I asking a reader to wholly invest in any one provocation. Instead, I am asking you to please work with these provocations in my company and in the context of each chapter.

14 Introduction

Moving into the Body of the Book We move now into Chapter One, where I think with Frost (2016) and Mol (2021) to visit with different modes of bodying, before asking what their proposi­ tions raise toward the ongoing question of doing data in postqualitative research. I then think with one physiological knowledge – caffeine shakes – to imagine how we might body data otherwise and seriously in postqualitative inquiry. This chapter sets the rhythm for all that follow: it lays out a tempo of first visiting with the stories some feminist science studies scholars tell, then turning to postqualitative propositions, and then imagining the intersection of these two projects alongside a physiological knowledge that shapes how we come to articulate a body.

1 BIOCULTURAL CREATURES, DATA, AND CAFFEINE SHAKES

Perhaps to my own detriment, I am no stranger to the jittery, hand-quaking feeling of having consumed too much caffeine for my body to handle. This chapter takes these caffeine shakes seriously, weaving together the contention that we, human bodies, are biocultural creates as defined by Samantha Frost (2016) and a composite-in-tension as advanced by Annemarie Mol (2021). I will visit with these authors while almost telling a story of their work, as – as Donna Haraway (2016) parabolises – we need different stories to tell different stories. Sticking with these enactments of the body, I turn then to postqualitative questions of data: what – and how – does bodied data do in postqualitative research? I read data with caffeine shakes and porous cellular bodies to propose thinking data as transit and membrane, both motion and modulating mesh in the same moment.

Biocultural Creatures Samantha Frost (2016) wrestles with a brilliant material figuration of the human body as a “biocultural creature” where, to describe humans as creatures here is to be held to account for human creatureliness, for the ways that humans, like all other creatures, are alive and able to stay alive because they are embedded in and draw manifold forms of sustenance from a habitat of some kind. (p. 4) To be human, then, is to participate; to be more than just a presence, but a lifegiving and life-taking entity that contributes to the flourishing and the destruction of more-than-human worlds. For Frost – in a vein joyously kin to postqualitative scholars’ contentions – we need to rethink the project of the Human “so that the DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-2

16 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

work the concept of the human does in our thinking does not carry and elaborate what is noxious in its previous assumptions” (p. 12). That is, we cannot carry on with Humanism’s Human as it crumbles in the face of complex cellular and fleshed worlds. This is a fissure of humanism: the Human is falling down a steep embankment paved with Cartesian dualism and the elisions of Euro-Western colonial conceptions of the bounded, sovereign human subject who habituates a body meant for control and regulation in the name of normativity. When we come to sit, what will matter is a collection of bruised flesh and dented bone, the hubris of humanism (Taylor, 2020) scraped away in the tumble. We might name this fissure as the human tripping over themselves, becoming tangled in a bundle of fumbling limbs and membranes and skin that have to do the work of figuring out how to cohere as a body in the absence of humanism’s roadmaps. Frost (2016) continues, thinking with cell membranes to articulate the human as a biocultural creature, arguing that: In between the conceptual options of a smear and a hermetically sealed con­ tainer is the porous body. What makes a living body distinct from its envir­ onment are not the substances of which it is composed (which in face traffic back and forth across the membranes of the body’s constituent cells constantly) but rather the activities and processes that occur within and by means of that body. (p. 75) Bodies are particular; they are made of, as Frost notes, activities and processes from the level of the cellular to the more macro levels we might imagine the body entangling with. That the body is porous is hardly a novel idea in education research now, especially amongst research with a poststructural bend, where the stratospheric dependence on the body as a bounded entity or the subject as a bor­ dered actor have dissolved into questions of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) and intra-action (Barad, 2007) amongst a slew of other names for the body that no longer navigates the world as a closed constitution. What Frost adds that differs from simply seeing the body as gathering or a mark is that to think bodies with membranes, wherein membranes and cells have particular relations and functions and breaks, we can maintain “the conceptual possibility of talking about organisms or bodies as particular distinct things” (p. 76). Frost continues: by foregrounding activities and processes facilitated by the permeability of cell membranes, we draw attention to the traffic across the membrane, the influx and efflux, the absorption, recalibration, and response that together shape the biochemical activities within the body’s cells. (p. 76) Here we find questions of transit, of particular dialogue that makes bodies. The body is not porous because it is convenient for our social analyses to imagine the

Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes 17

body as a figure in flux or open to change depending on shifting societal condi­ tions. The body is porous because cells are porous; because the very constitution of the hand you hold this book with requires porosity to live – to metabolise, to bear weight, to do muscular activity. That bodies are porous is not a metaphor. Here is another fissure of humanism: we want to dream the body as porous because it opens toward unmediated possibilities for how we might become cyborg or even just survive in the face of 21st century worlds. It lets us leave behind the Human while still explaining that our fleshed containers matter in their generous relation with the world. We might name this fissure as a romantic one, where we are ready to cede the uncompromising firmness of the body in exchange for stories that absolve us of the responsibility of being a particular kind of body in a particular kind of world. In this fissure, we love a personification that names flesh as porous as though porosity is an ethic ripe to save the world. But with Frost, this is an empty proposition because porous membranes are a mark of a particular iteration of life, of being a particular biocultural creature. “We must trace,” Frost proffers, “how both the exacting precision of composition and the stimulation of environ­ mental conditions together make the processes linking genes, proteins, and cellular function neither random nor indeterminate, but, in its most literal sense, con­ tingent” (p. 85). Contingency, then, is key for thinking porous bodies in this fis­ sure of humanism: bodies are contingent. They are precise and strategic and detailed, contingent on the activities that make the body porous and that keep the body alive as a porous process. As Frost (2016) turns to most clearly articulating her theory of biocultural crea­ tures, she works incredibly hard to write against mysticisms or against fetishising biology as a metaphor for living well in 21st century worlds. Frost argues that “there is no überbiological matter in a cell, in a body. What this means is that far from being isolated, constitutionally durable, and materially infallible things, genes – and other proteins and cells and living bodies – are biocultural phenom­ ena” (p. 98). Put differently, bodies are contingent activities in porous biocultural worlds. We possess no organ, no membrane, no bone that is only biological, inert except for its function in holding us together, biological in the sense of participat­ ing in a body and engaging the world no other way. Rather, even our most bio­ logical bits are biocultural; our blood carries heavy metals that have slowly steeped into our bodies, our fat holds social coding that deems its incredible structure undesirable, the soft folds of our brain matter for more than the words we can draw out from its memory-writing neurons. “To consider humans as biocultural creatures,” Frost puts forward, “is to have a basis for thinking about humans as political subjects without recapitulating the forms of human exceptionalism that have relied on a disavowal of materiality, embodiment, animality, or dependence” (p. 147). Here is a third fissure of humanism: we need to think about humans. We might come to know this as a fissure of contradiction, where posthumanist scholars have worked so hard to undo the structures of humanism’s human and we need to heed their labor, while at the same time the possibility of being a biocultural creature means that “the constraints and delimitations on how biocultural creatures

18 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

might respond to their habitats are also the conditions of possibility for their responsiveness” (p. 150). That is, as biocultural creatures we are contingent and contingent again; we are not of everything nor everything of us in a magical soup of celestial exchange. Rather, our membranes work in particular ways. Our hearts, our hands, our hips – they work in particular ways. This matters for theorising the body in education research because carefulness matters: biocultural bodies are high stakes because we are in such porous dialogue with a world where the body of the human still matters, even in the tatters of the subject of the Human. We need to grapple with how to inhabit and inherit biocultural bodies when to be biocultural is to recognise “biocultural” not as a compound word merging the biological with the cultural, but as a proposition that “biocultural” is a condition of life, a marker of, as Frost concludes her arguments by proposing, a mode to “pose questions about the kinds of worlds we want to live in, the kinds of biocultural habitats we want to create for ourselves and others, and the kinds of creatures we hope to become” (p. 159). I turn now to Annemarie Mol’s proposal of eating – and I will argue, bodies – as “composite-in-tension” (p. 24). I will weave this with Frost’s (2016) articulation of biocultural creatures to name another fissure of humanism. Following this, I will turn to postqualitative research in education, wondering bodying biocultural creatures and composites-in-tension alongside formations of postqualitative data.

Composite-in-Tension In a messy love letter to the uncertain work of eating, Annemarie Mol (2021) advances “eating as a composite-in-tension” (p. 24), asking what if we were to stop celebrating ‘the human’s’ cognitive reflections about the world and take our cues instead from human metabolic engagements with the world? Or, to put it differently: What if our theoretical repertories were to take inspiration not from thinking but eating? (p. 3) For Mol, eating is a site of undoing humanism, where many of the pillars of such a humanist project, like agency and hierarchy are disposed of their interpretative potential for seeing the world. Rather, eating brings forward a way of knowing the human body metabolically – with energy, with consumption, with the incredibly vulnerable act of placing nutrition in our mouths and chewing as a violent intro­ duction to our systems of metabolic life. Mol argues that thinking eating as com­ posite-in-motion is “informed not by an updated version of ‘the human’, but by specific stories about situated people, dependent on each other, on creatures, and on a forgiving but frightfully fragile earth” (p. 126). This means that thinking with eating a composite-in-motion is not a recuperative strategy but is one of response amid a porous body; our vulnerabilities hold together the stories that make our metabolic activities perceptible. For Mol, to think of eating as composite-in­

Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes 19

motion is to take eating as a site of layered storytelling, of understanding that every morsel of food to enter a body carries with it an entire trajectory of life and death, of flourishing and survival. To think of eating as composite-in-motion is to recognise the high stakes of these stories, but also our intractable intertwining with these stories; we are composites-in-motion as we eat because food, and the multi­ factorial stories of food, paints complex, compound tapestries of living that pause only briefly on our dinner plates. In emphasising eating as composite-in-motion, Mol is highlighting both the “composite” as a gathering and a layering, and the “in motion” as a marker of the fluctuations that animate bodies and food systems, and that circle back to make the gathered and layered stories of food unstable and pre­ carious over and over in these acts of eating beyond the self-serving, technocratic, instrumental modes of eating that humanism prescribes. The body is contingent, not merely a collection. Extending this to the body, and in the company of Frost’s (2016) biocultural creatures, I propose that we can think of the body as a composite-in-motion. Mol outlines four reimagined stories in the face of eating: first, being, the kind of “being [that] thrives on the energy of others. It maintains its form by changing its substance. Its limits are formed not be its skin, but by the finiteness of is lifetime” (p. 142). Here, and with Frost, we might imagine bodies as composite-in-motion whereby porous membranes are made and re-made over a lifetime and we know them not for their duration but for their re-creation, their responsiveness. Bodies matter then, for how they shapeshift as a process, as work, and not for the shape – be that humanist or cyborg – that they manifest. Second, Mol proposes knowing as a mode for storying bodies, where the knowing that emerges from my eating transforms, in not entirely predictable ways, all the subjects and objects involved (p. 142). Here, bodies as composite-in­ motion orients toward conversion, toward change, where a body never rests with a single iteration or manifestation or identity; the Human is far too boring a leg for a biocultural composite-in-motion body to lean on. Rather, biocultural bodies as composites-in-motion care about transformation as a political engage­ ment with meeting the world through eating, but also through cellular transit or porous skin. Then, Mol takes up doing as a question, arguing that with bodied activities “doing is often ambivalent. Bad, but not just bad; good, but not just good. Not good for everyone. Not good enough. Suspended within complex normative force fields, doing goes on and on. It never comes to rest.” (p. 125) Biocultural bodies as composites-in-motion then are deeply ethical because the activities of bodying – of being a body – never cease but also never cease to implicate us in our worlds. Eating is non-innocent; bones are non-innocent, membranes are non-innocent. We need, at this intersection of Mol and Frost’s work, ways of thinking ethics beyond the human and into the contingencies of being bodies, of bodying. Finally, Mol speaks of relating, arguing that eating

20 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

literally contributes to questions of survival and of life where “wiping out others has the effect of eroding the conditions of possibility on which my life depend” (p. 125). Here, biocultural composite-in-motion are high stakes; they are about life and death. It is not often we imagine a membrane as the site of a life; we have been taught by humanism to scale up and to see the human as the arbiter of a life, but thinking with Mol and with Frost, bodying demands of us an attunement to debt and to selfishness, to life and to precarity. Thinking with biocultural bodies as composites-in-motion names another fissure of humanism, one where we see the body as both a container and a signifier. We might name this fissure as a paradox, one where we know the body as a vessel necessary for holding together what makes us as human subjects, and also as a designate in and of itself of what makes a human a human: a human has a human body. With Frost and Mol, both tendrils of this fissure are put at risk through the biological and the metabolic, which is different than risking them through the strictly philosophical (this itself is a risky and imperfect sentence, drawing some lines between bodying, eating, and thinking that I do not love but I hope you will read the sentence with a generosity for how sometimes words do not give the clarity we seek). This is a fissure in humanism that opens space for acknowledging that our processes for storying the body are often wholly incommensurate for the work, for the hard labor of figuring out how to narrate this incredible web of flesh that we meet the world with. In the next part of this chapter, I take up this question by thinking about postqualitative research and data. I use biocultural bodies and bodies as composite-in-motion to theorise how we might complexify – body, perhaps – existing modes of engaging data in the postqualitative literature.

Postqualitative Data The first thread of postqualitative work that I will take up is the question of postqualitative data. In later chapters, I will work with postqualitative method and postqualitative clarity. Postqualitative scholars in education and beyond grapple with questions of doing postqualitative data: what is data in a world where the erasures and illusions of humanist epistemologies crumble, or when the currency of research can no longer be truth and accuracy and instead must orient toward entanglement, ethics, enactment? For Taylor (2017) the work needed to be done to cut agency loose from human subjectivity in ways which fundamentally contest the legitimacy of the Enlightenment rationalist knowing subject and include a host of other bodies, objects and things as agencies, actants, forces, and powers is an adventure into the meth­ odological unknown: if there are no methodological ‘templates’ for this work, then what ‘counts’ as a research problem? How can we ‘design’ a research project? How do we know what our ‘data’ might be? How might we analyse it? How to present it to others? How to evaluate its worth? (p. 322)

Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes 21

This emphasises the work of doing and responding with postqualitative data, where data becomes a question of keeping alive motion that agitate the grain of humanist research tenants. Importantly though, postqualitative status is not wildly critical for critiques sake, nor is it abstract for the purposes of intellectual rigor. Instead, it carefully picks up questions of how qualitative education research has an ontological history and an epistemological trajectory and it asks, what happens when we risk these formations? When subjectivity, agency, validity, truth, no longer answer to the complexities of 21st century education, what must we invent or attune to? As St. Pierre (2017a) articulates, “the real, then, was a provocation to continue, not a foundation for stability” (p. 4). Nordstrom (2018) echoes this, offering that building methodology on a line of continuous variation asks researchers to be accountable for all its iterations, even as a concept moves along the line … In this way, research conventions, such as methodology, materialise a particular repetition and difference that is responsive to the research project at hand. (p. 221) Here we come to know postqualitative data as motion, as movement, as an ethical commitment to keep up with the worlds of our data, even when these data worlds make silly the concepts we thought we knew about data. How – and not what – then, is postqualitative data? For St. Pierre (2019), there can be no post qualitative research methodology or research methods, no post qualitative research designs, no post qualitative data or methods of data collection or methods of data analysis, no representation of a stable, sensory ‘lived’ world, no post qualitative findings, no post qualitative research report format because, again, post qualitative inquiry never is, never stabilizes. (p. 10) This means that to do postqualitative research is to resist a definition of data but not the possibility of data manifesting in unique, multiple forms: data matters, and how we do data matters, but what becomes to be data is situated, local, and responsive. This marks an interesting fissure in humanism: how do we engage the rift left in data’s wake without filling such a hole with a “new” data that fills the hole all too well? What if data does not do fissure filling, what if it is unconcerned with placating the fears of humanist data collection and analysis? What does data do here? Postqualitative scholars often attend to a kind of chaos in their data-doing, where: Inquiry should begin with the too strange and the too much. The rest is what everyone knows, what everyone does, the ordinary, repetition. Postqualitative inquiry asks that we push toward the intensive, barely intelligible variation in living that shocks us and asks us to be worthy of it. (St. Pierre, 2017b, p. 5)

22 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

Chaos here does not mean nihilism or the lack of care; rather, this is a chaos born of the careful diligence necessary to keeping postqualitative data alive in the face of humanism’s capture. For Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (2016), there is a sense of “uncer­ tainty, rawness, and creative chaos prompted by doing, engaging, collaborating, and reflecting through failure and unfinishedness (without constant and continual pur­ ification and ‘cleaning’ efforts) is conceptually stirring and theoretically life changing” (p. 103). Here, postqualitative data is vulnerable because we inhabit a world of con­ tagions (Shotwell, 2016): there is no roadmap for doing postqualitative data because it traffics in the chaos that animates life, as St. Pierre (2019) noted above. This is not to draw a binary between stability and chaos; chaos can be made to look like stability and stability like chaos. Rather, it is to recognise that humanist research seeks a certain mode of stability, one with an ontological precision and epistemic clarity already known, already articulated. It disciplines. To do postqualitative data with chaos is to infiltrate, resist, and reinvent data outside of this disciplining. This presences another fissure of humanism: what if we need chaos? How do we need chaos? How do we need chaos in our data practices and data relations if we want to resist the well-worn closures and reiterations of humanist modes of data collection, analysis, and presentation? A third tangle of postqualitative data is the provocation of thinking data through the webs we weave when we collect and curate. This stands in stark refusal of thinking data as simply accruing points on a map or information to populate a pre-determined framework. As Lisa Mazzei (2021) contends, If we merely pose a question for which we seek an answer, we remain in this groove without the possibility of newness that does not seek an answer but that opens up new problems. I am not interested in newness for the sake of newness, but a grappling with problems and contradictions that do not repeat or mirror prior experience. (p. 199) This means that newness dialogues with curating problems, where problems name a mode for engaging complex worlds. To curate, as a researcher, is not to assemble a fanaticised or idealised research terrain to then mine for data, but to engage the world for its uncertainties, lives, and relations. As Rautio (2021) offers, the collections – things, beings, texts, habits, discourses, numbers, affects, scents – that end up being data are the combinations that actually contributed to the phenomenon under study: what did you happen to think with, and how did it help you to produce insights? … the materials that did turn into data can only be known afterward. (p. 229) To collect or curate postqualitative data, then, is to know that data is a field in motion, and that we encounter data in unexpected ways because this data does not

Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes 23

obey humanist doctrines of what ‘counts’ as data. We have to unknow data as Data in order to meet data with the world. This opens toward another fissure of humanism: if “in the end it is impossible to disentangle data, data collection, and data analysis” (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 471), then how do we do data as a web of engagements amid the failure of these three divisions (data, collection, analysis)? If humanism wants data to be logical and objective, technocratic in its function, how does data that resists the very possibility of infallible logic and true objectivity crack into humanism’s core? Having now traced two theoretical bodies in the name of bodying postqualitative research – biocultural creatures and bodies as composite-in-motion and postqualitative data practices – I will now weave these together with a third ally in this project: caffeine shakes. In doing so, I will ask how we body postqualitative data as biocultural creatures who are part of bodies-in-composite that are inex­ tricably tangled with postqualitative data processes.

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Caffeine Shakes So, caffeine shakes: caffeine, which many of us know well as a bodied interlocuter, is, in its natural state, a bitter white powder and central nervous system stimulant. Interestingly and/or nihilistically, the primary source from which I know caffeine’s biochemistry is a 2001 publication from the United States Institute of Medicine Committee on Military Nutrition Research, which explores the efficacy of increasing caffeine consumption for military personnel. When we talk about being “of the system” of Science, this article is certainly at its heart – and places this book too, within the industrial complex that is mainstream science. Caffeine is structu­ rally known as C8H10N4O2, and its effects primarily “include minor CNS [central nervous system] stimulation and wakefulness, ability to sustain intellectual activity, and decreased reaction times” (para. 1). Why caffeine is of interest to the military and its ever-violent push for efficiency in the name of human capital and power is evident. What is interesting about caffeine is that it works quickly – about 20 minutes after orally ingesting caffeine, we start to feel its effects. This is because caffeine is an incredible shapeshifter: it works by binding to blood plasma proteins, it enters into the waters of intercellular tissue, and it crosses through the mem­ branes that make up the blood–brain barrier. Caffeine has no fear of travel. It works by inhibiting adenosine receptors, thus inviting the body to release func­ tional neurochemicals that enhance performance. While not a core function of caffeine as it meets the body, it also inhibits enzymes in adipose (fat) tissue and skeletal muscle, preserving muscle glycogen for the body’s motor performance. Caffeine also dialogues with calcium and benzodiazepine receptors. Caffeine is a social creature, one never afraid of conversing, colliding, and colluding with the body’s nervous system network. Finally: what does coffee do at the macro-level, the holistic human body tract? Caffeine increases coronary blood flow, relaxes smooth muscles, increases bronchial dilation, and enacts “stimulatory action on dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, acetylcholine, glutamate, and GABA

24 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

neurons,” all of which improve human performance on measures of function, concentration, and stimulation (para. 22). Interestingly, our bodies can build a tol­ erance to caffeine; we can become less vulnerable to our activities. Caffeine’s rela­ tions are not set, they are not stable. Caffeine matters differently the better our cells get to know it. What, then, are caffeine jitters? It is the jitter – the shaky hand, the anxious heart rate, the urgently pounding headache, the palpable sense of wanting to explode – that I want to think with here. We get caffeine jitters when we con­ sume too much caffeine or when we introduce caffeine to a body system not used to this stimulant. It is essentially the mark of a body arguing that we have ingested too much caffeine. Caffeine, in its drive to increase alertness, blocks adenosine and releases adrenaline – a hormone that at too high a level, invokes feelings of anxiousness (Ferré, 2008). This, coupled with caffeine’s’ penchant to increase blood pressure (Riksen, Rongen, & Smits, 2009) by constricting blood vessels, leads to a body that is on high alert, ready to tackle any stimulation that crosses its path. Here we meet our fight-or-flight response. Caffeine jitters then, are an amalgamation; a phenomenon. Here is my proposal: caffeine jitters are a bodying of postqualitative data. One of many, to be sure, but a gathering of bodily functions that shapeshift what it means to be a body doing data. I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean it in an entirely material, bodied vein. Take, for example, how caffeine matters differently the more familiar that our cells become with it – we build a cellular tolerance of sorts, a relationship, with caffeine, and this changes how our body responds with caffeine. We can drag this logic toward thinking about bodying postqualitative data, where although the data remains slippery, doused in practices of “creating knowledgemaking practices which are immanent, embodied, embedded, entangled and situ­ ated; which privilege indeterminacy, uncontainability, excess, multiplicity, and the happenstances” (Taylor, 2017, p. 322), we come to build a bodied familiarity or relation with our data. A piece of data might make our heart race and, each time we hold it in our hands or mull over its theoretical potentialities, our body comes to know this data differently – not necessarily better as in more perceptible, but differently as in connected otherwise to our flesh. This means that even the most abstract of postqualitative data makes us as a body and that we body even the see­ mingly hard to touch corners of our postqualitative data. Recall that, for Frost (2016) biocultural bodies “are far from being isolated, constitutionally durable, and materially infallible things” (p. 98); bodies are biocultural in their entanglement with the world, where the membranes that allow caffeine to permeate their surface are in biocultural dialogue with the farmers who harvested caffeine-containing food, and with the hydrocarbons used to ferry this food to our mouths. What this means for thinking about bodying postqualitative data is that any data-body con­ stellation is an articulation, a relation over time, and always subject to failure. We can fail to body – to infiltrate our muscles and hearts – postqualitative data, but then we must ask if this data is still postqualitative: if we resist bodying, then are we recuperating the Cartesian mind/body duality and humanism’s arrogancies, where

Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes 25

we want to think postqualitative data only for its intellectual character and not for how it crawls into our cells? To body postqualitative data is to know that it is with a biocultural body that we do bodying; it is with a body already metabolically exposed to the world and a body that constantly re-exposes itself – through things like caffeine jitters – to the world. Here we might revisit Mol’s (2021) conception of the body as a composite-in-tension, where bodying postqualitative data as a biocultural body means learning how postqualitative data holds the body together and also causes it to crumble. If a body is a composite-in-tension, part of that tension is held in the modes of engaging postqualitative data that we invent as we body data. That is, we do not body data in the name of reductionism, simplicity, or to make the body easier to trace. In fact, to body postqualitative data is to complexify the tension, enrich the pressure, with which bodies come to matter. It is working with data in ways that question our flesh, that take caffeine and our shifting familiarity with it, as much a player in the question of research as one’s computer or camera. Here, to body postqualitative data is to know that our bodies are cohered by tension, by motion, by relations, and that postqualitative data swims amid such tension, motion, and relations as we constantly body and re-body our researcher bodies. Moving now to a second thread of thinking caffeine, if our jitters are an amal­ gamation and a phenomenon, then this phenomenon can contribute to burrow­ ing – even deeper – into the fissures of humanism. Returning to St. Pierre (2019), “post qualitative inquiry never is, never stabilizes” (p. 10). This means that to think about bodying postqualitative research is to work very hard to resist humanism’s contention that the body is. That it exists, that it matters outside of worldly enactments that shape and cohere any body. To think with Frost (2016) and bio­ cultural bodies, this means recognising that the biocultural body that bodies postqualitative research is a collection, a mess, a beautifully synchronised dance held together through its relations with the world – and with postqualitative data. If postqualitative data is what undoes the research subject, it too undoes the researching subject’s body. With Frost, this means attending to how cells and membranes might become actors in data generation and analysis: how do I meet this photograph with the cellular worlds that hold me together? How do, for example, caffeine jitters indelibly mark the body I am and the data this is as a I hold this photograph in my shaking fingers? As I sit down to pour caffeine-fuelled words on a page, how is this body (these fingers, this spine, this orchestra of mus­ cular contractions) shifting what becomes possible and impossible with this postqualitative data? This echoes Mol’s (2021) body as a composite-in-tension too, where bodying in tension means that bodies are never wholly predictable nor wholly whole; rather, bodies are made in practices that bump up against one another and come together in a rush, in a push, in a café jitter. To body postqualitative data, then, is to come to data as a literal composite in motion – to take the risk of saying “what I know to be my body is a composite meeting a composite body of data.” It is to resist the hubris of asserting that you are a body, intact, knowable, and invulnerable, meeting postqualitative data that is always in flux and

26 Biocultural Creatures, Data, and Caffeine Shakes

that escapes definition. We are not, in this equation, the ones built of stability. We are concocted of tension, of biocultural relations, of the work of bodying. Our bodies cannot be the humanist anchor point around which data collection and analysis circles, nor can we see ourselves as an unassailable anchor amid the gor­ geous chaos of postqualitative data. Rather, much like caffeine jitters undo the discipline we inflict on our fingers when we ask them to be stable, we need to think about bodying postqualitative data as the work of making bodies with data – not data bodies, per say, but bodies crafted within the messes of postqualitative data. This does not mean that the body that bodies postqualitative research can become anything or wildly shapeshift. This is not an anything goes, why do we need the body anyways argument. As Rautio (2021), thinking with postqualitative research, offers “I understand postqualitative data as participation in the world through the materials on offer, with both systematic and planned as well as sur­ prising and serendipitous designs” (p. 228). This articulation of postqualitative data is consistent with Frost and Mol’s contentions on the body as well: the body is organised and systematic, but also made and re-made. It takes the shapes it forms for a reason, for function and for fleshed synchronicity, but it is always also bio­ cultural and a composite-in-tension, especially in dialogue with post-qualitative research. This is, I propose, what it is to body research in the fissures of humanism with bodies and postqualitative research. To take the most humanist narratives of life – over-caffeinated humans who adopt caffeine shakes in order to be productive 21st century neoliberal citizens – and orient instead to the biocultural vulnerabilities that tie us to worlds we craft with qualitative data. It is to know that we are an ava­ lanche of permeable membranes in dialogue with data that does and undoes the body; to be a composite-in-tension is also to be a composite-in-motion, where bodying research means attuning to the common and uncommon pulses of our data and bodies, where data and bodies are not akin to one another nor a metaphor for one another, but do shape how the other comes to matter, together. As this first chapter winds to a pause, I move now to thinking with the first “fracture” that I want to offer. Fractures, as I spoke of in the introduction, are cracks and breaks in the status quo, in the boney grid that holds a body together. This first fracture centers a poem titled Minnows, and I think with this poem to imagine how we might build on our discussion of bodying postqualitative data, differently.

FRACTURE ONE Minnows

This poem, Minnows, is by Sabrina Benaim and is shared in Benaim’s anthology Depression and Other Magic Tricks (2017) published by Button Poetry. i have minnows in my stomach.

i swallowed them singing to you underwater.

you once told me as a child,

you seldom remembered to feed your fish

my body is a fishbowl i have caught you watching

you can thank my ballet training for teaching me

how to hold my body

like a champagne flute in the hand of a debutante.

i started drinking aging to control my inside tides.

i continue drinking to keep the minnows alive.

i have minnows in my stomach.

at first, I thought they were butterflies.

the butterflies turned out to be your hands making shadows.

remember

that night we fell asleep with the candles burning?

the school of flickering light that swam across the wall –

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-3

28 Fracture One

i imagined i was inside of an aquarium exhibition

featuring the fish inside of you. they were

beautiful.

i have minnows in my stomach.

they are hungry.

starving.

is it that you are forgetful or sadistic?

i have minnows in my stomach that are going to die soon.

i’ve turned the top two chambers of my heart into a mausoleum

in anticipation. engraved each tiny tombstone with my fingernail,

i gave each fish its own nickname.

___ i had minnows in my stomach. there is a stillness now. a small condolence: their face down float was the closest they ever came to being butterflies. ___ it’s my twenty-sixth birthday. he arrives to my quasi-adult potluck party holding three styrofoam containers of seaweed salad from the sushi spot on the corner. he says: little lady,

i’m sorry it took me so long to get here.

I hope I’m not too late for the party.

(pp. 17–18) In thinking bodying postqualitative research in the fissures of humanism, alongside Frost’s notion of biocultural creatures and Mol’s body-as-composite, Benaim offers into our concoction of provocations the contention that bodies flee the boundaries we set for them. Minnows do not follow the niceties of humanism’s organised façade of relations: they die, they drink, they are and are not butterflies. What this means for

Fracture One 29

bodying data is recognising that bodying data is not an inherently productive endea­ vor: it does not mean that, because we can do bodies with a piece of data, there will be a life or that we will have done something toward a more livable world. We can body data in the fissures of humanism as we get to know minnows, and that data can die, shapeshift, come close to the flight of butterflies but remain belly up in the soup that is real life. Bodying data then, as we learn from Benaim, is a risk – a biocultural risk, a composite-at-risk. Benaim writes also of turning her heart into a mausoleum and etching into its flesh the traces of minnows that have died. How, this makes me wonder, do we carve into our bodies the traces of data that has died; postqualitative data that never was, that became too slippery or too obedient? Where do we carry our failed relations with postqualitative data? How do we hold these relations? Do we hos­ pice data as we feel it flee or does it surprise us, showing up with seaweed salad before we know in our hearts that we need to say goodbye to a piece that just isn’t working – maybe not forever, but for now? Can we body data that we do not write with, that never quite makes it to an article or book chapter or research relic? Benaim speaks too of her stomach minnows being hungry, of starving in the face of missing something – a relation, a touch, a nourishment. This makes me think of bodying postqualitative data where questions of how we keep our data alive matter: how do we prevent our data from starving, from curling up and floating to the surface of our bodied data pools? This is a question of how we keep data alive, whatever alive might mean in dialogue with our researching bodies in the fissures of humanism: swimming, slippery, strange, sharp, spry, suspicious. Here we might wonder, how do I body data toward nourishment? How do collisions of my flesh and postqualitative data produce something that does not resolve neither the data or my body but that keeps both animate, dynamic, vital? We can ask questions of what ‘counts’ as data minnows, swimming around our biocultural bodies, part of our body-as-composite, and how we tend to these data. We should wonder how our biocultural bodies, made of permeable membranes that weave scales of life together, also become vulnerable to the data that swims amongst our constitutions once we meet it; the data we cannot quite shake off and perhaps do not want to shirk. “i hope i’m not too late to the party.” Here, we might heed an urgency: we need to do the work of keeping alternative relations of life alive, both in postqualitative research but also in pedagogy. To be too late to the party would be to read this book in 20 years, when capitalism has shapeshifted into another iteration of control and our climate has, or has not, been cared for so that we can continue to exist in patterns that matter on this earth. Ideas, like bodying postqualitative data, have a life, a timeline, a temporal rhythm to them. This raises a question we can bring to the project of bodying postqualitative data in the fissures of humanism: why now? What puts the life of a belly minnow at stake now? Why carve the names of perishing data into our bodies today? Why are we starving, now? These are questions that I cannot answer as they are, like postqualitative data, deeply situated and contextual. That a response might differ by context makes sense, as bodies differ by context as do lives, relations, and precarities. What matters is, we cannot be too late to the party, no matter the peace offering we show up with.

2 BIOMEDICAL IMAGINARIES, METHODOLOGY, AND ANTIPSYCHOTIC MEDICATIONS

In this second chapter, I think with Susan Squier’s (2004) concept of biomedical imaginaries and hold this in conversation with Victoria Pitts-Taylor’s (2016) invoca­ tion of neurobiological bodies. I follow how, together, these concepts call for us to restory, re-imagine, the body with different lived resources than the scientific explana­ tions humanism loves to proliferate. This call, to refigure our biomedical imaginaries, is an ethical and political feminist contention, one that argues, in dialogue with neuro­ biological bodies, that it matters deeply how and why we story the body, especially in bodying postqualitative research. As I move through these sections, I name some relevant fissures in humanism. I think with postqualitative methodologies, asking how we body methodologies, before turning to thinking with antipsychotic medications to draw some propositions toward bodying postqualitative methodology with biomedical imaginaries and neurobiological bodies.

Biomedical Imaginaries Dwelling at the intersection of feminist science studies and biomedicine, Susan Merrill Squier (2004) proposes the concept of “biomedical imaginaries” as a mode for “reflecting the plots, possibilities, and perils of our liminal lives” (p. 280). With Squier, we need to ask “how are our stories not only reflecting, but actually lead­ ing, that reconceptualization of the course of human life?” (p. 275). Squier con­ tinues, “how have the plot, characters, intended audiences, and methods of production and consumption changed?” (p. 275). This is a question of attuning to the resources and the life(s) with which we think the bodies of and beyond humanism – a practice that Squier names as practicing or enriching our biomedical imaginaries or the literary and conceptual resources with which we envision and manifest (human, cultural) bodies. The biomedical imaginary is not a canon; the “liminal lives I focus on, inherently unstable, are the product of a volatile DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-4

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 31

convergence of disciplines, discourses, practices, events, and people” (Squier, 2004, p. 17). Here we meet a fissure of humanism bred by the possibility of holding biomedical imaginaries: to think the body as liminal is to reject the body as stable – a stability that is assumed through the myriad practices we typically body the researching body with. If a researching body occupies a liminal world, how can it produce knowledge that is enduring true, knowledge with more cohesion than its own flesh? Where a researching body is volatile, to borrow Squier’s language, how can we even imagine it might create knowledge that is innocuous in its objectivity or instrumentality? Importantly, Squier (2004) articulates the biomedical imaginary alongside litera­ ture, and fiction in particular. Squier contends that “fiction gives us access to the biomedical imaginary: the zone in which experiments are carried out in narrative and the psychic investments of biomedicine are articulated” (p. 17). The biomedi­ cal imaginary then, creates a space with narrative and with culture, as “we investi­ gate the biomedical imaginary when we consider how medical issues are articulated and engaged across all cultural fields, from medicine to government to popular culture and religion” (p. 15). To think with the biomedical imaginary then is to think with fiction; it is to recognise that we need resources for thinking the body beyond those provided by mainstream science and physiology, and it is recognising that both fiction and science are immersed in the flux of life, where neither is inherently stable or moralised but together, in their constellations, we might find alternative ways of imagining and bodying the researching body. We meet another fissure of humanism here: we do not want to name an alternative to humanism; there is no humanism 2.0 we seek with postqualitative research. Rather, we want to keep the question and imaginaries of the body alive and slippery. This means that our biocultural imaginaries can never proceed in the vein of resolution or stability; we cannot have a firm imaginary of the body, substituted in for a scientific constitution of the body. That is too far from the liminal character of life that Squier foregrounds. In this fissure of humanism, biomedical imaginaries ask us to carefully proliferate methods of doing the body alongside literature and the world, where it matters deeply how we imagine the possibilities of what a body can do and how a body can travel. Biocultural imaginaries are not a conceptual exercise. They are lived, bodied. Sticking with her attention to literature, Squier (2004) argues that we need fic­ tion (in this case, as she writes about stem cells), because fiction “offers the unset­ tling and valuable opportunity to access the liminal realm of the uncertain, the undecided, the ambiguous, and the unknown, only by way of taking on the socially devalued position resulting from association with these categories” (p. 22). Tracing a brief history of the collisions between science, literature, and feminist science studies, Squier contends that “we have not been bold enough in our approach to the intersection of literature and science, and the result has been a specific sterility” (p. 44). She posits too that, at the same time, “feminist science studies has been amply provisioned with good stories” (p. 39). This question of the relation between literature and bodying is one enduring relevant to thinking about

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bodying postqualitative research. What is the relation, in postqualitative spaces, between science, fiction, and the body? With Squier, “we start to rethink the logic that assumes some primary demarcation of the social production between subjects and objects, and some primary genre-bound division between literature and sci­ ence” (p. 44). Here is a fissure in humanism: how do our biomedical imaginaries infiltrate humanism’s reliance on the human as cultural and the body as scientific? How does such a distinction, one that so easily crumbles as soon as we poke it, dissolve into the need for biomedical imaginaries beyond the subject/object bodied discrepancy? Here Squier reminds us that it matters what literature we engage – and it matters that we engage literature. This is an important question for thinking about bodying postqualitative research: with whom are we reading and doing the body? How do we craft our biomedical imaginaries beyond the referent of humanism’s human and the inert, biofunctional body? This is, quite literally, a question of who we read with, where reading might be read broadly: with what literary relations do we come to know the body? In this book, to animate this, the fractures draw upon poetry to better articulate the multitude of entanglements between bodying and postqualitative research. As we move differently into ques­ tions of bodying postqualitative research, it matters to keeping alive our biomedical imaginaries and fiction comes along for the ride of remaking the body, now and again.

Neurobiological Bodies For Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2016) “neurobiology is both a legitimate ontological problem and also an epistemological one; what’s more, these problems are inter­ related” (p. 11). This means that as we think with neurobiological bodies, we are trafficking in the language of life and knowledge. To think with neurobiological bodies necessitates, following Pitts-Taylor, asking questions of ontology (as we do in postqualitative research) and epistemology (questions postqualitative research knows well), as we get to know how bodies do fleshy difference (a question per­ haps less familiar to postqualitative research). Pitts-Taylor articulates a formation of the neurobiological body, where “we need to look more closely at knowledge of plasticity, sociality, and embodiment to see what kinds of brains and bodies are being enacted, erased, and transformed in neuroscientific thought and practice” (p. 12). This means that we need to ask questions of creation, of how neurobiological bodies come to matter, rather than resting with critiquing the bodies that have come to matter. This is a question of attuning to how neurobiological bodies are made: we need to ask, Pitts-Taylor suggests, “if cognition, perception, and con­ sciousness are enacted through bodies, and if embodiments are heterogeneously lived, what differences do variances in bodies, embodied experiences, and worlds make? (p. 54). Neurobiological bodies are, therefore, a mode of getting to know the body through difference, where difference does not simply name the markers of differ­ ence we know well – ability, race, gender – but names those and names differences in neurons, hormones, cartilage. This manifests another fissure in humanism: what

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 33

if our conceptions of difference fail in the face of neurobiological bodies? What if difference is not universal in its cultural affiliations, but neurobiological? Pitts-Taylor (2016) also articulates important arguments related to the question of world making with neurobiological bodies. She argues that “couplings of bodyminds and worlds can be more and less normative, more and less queer” (p. 64), and that we need to “explore in what contexts and to what degrees the boundaries of body-minds shift, and precisely how and in what contexts these shifts may be variously emphasizing and constraining” (p. 64). This means that thinking with neurobiological bodies means asking how bodies assemble and reassemble in dia­ logue with dominant and minor discourses, and, perhaps most importantly, how these entanglements with inherited and invented ways of being in the world shape how our neurobiological life can unfold. Here, Pitts-Taylor turns to thinking about kinship models beyond humanism’s heteronormative facade, contending that dominant “understanding[s] of the body [are] constrained by heteronormative logic, a logic that does not merely exclude some bodies in favor of others, but obscures the complexity of the experience it is trying to explain for all bodies” (p. 115). For Pitts-Taylor, kinship can mean “having a biological investment in another, in the form of an intercorporeal tie to another, that is the product of interaction, intimacy, or companionship” (p. 117). This begets an interesting fissure in humanism: what if our models of kinship crumble in the face of neurobiological bodies? How do we relate, meet, come together, when we need to invent the biological grounds upon which we might bring bodies into proximity? As I write this book, we are deep in the COVID-19 pandemic and I think of processes of contagion and kinship: what is neurobiological kinship during a pandemic – how does it make bodies that matter and modes of relating that matter? This question of queer kin-making with neurobiological bodies is relevant to our questions of bodying postqualitative research because it raises the possibility that we do not already know all of the ways our bodies can collide in research; we do not already know the full biomedical imaginary (to pull back to Spier) with which neurobio­ logical bodies might make kin. To begin to experiment in this realm is, I suggest, a project we might take on in bodying postqualitative research.

Postqualitative Methodologies “Methodology” is a word I use with great caution in this section, heeding St. Pierre’s (2021b) provocation that postqualitative research is “not a methodology at all. In fact, it refuses methodology. Notice that I use the phrase postqualitative inquiry – I don’t use the word methodology” (p. 5). I do use the word metho­ dology here, but as a word to be undone, a touchstone to be dipped in the lava of inquiry that refuses humanist resting places. I heed St. Pierre’s (2021a) warning that “I think methodology is a trap, even though it can be a comfortable trap” (p. 164) and use methodology as an avenue in to interrogating how we might body postqualitative research. I echo St. Pierre’s assertion in that “I hope post qualitative inquiry throws into radical doubt the methodological project itself, especially its

34 Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications

rage to methodologise, and loosens its increasing control of our thought” (p. 165). The humanist methodological project is one that knows the body as an entity, as a concept in itself, and this is certainly a worlding that I work to disrupt. What I am not doing here is articulating a transferrable or stable methodology; instead, I am asking how postqualitative methodological practices shape and reshape how we might come to body the very postqualitative research that produces a/our body. I am, like MacLure (2023) offers, thinking methodology as “bespoke methods – ones that you fashion for yourself in the middle of things” (p. 6). It is a bit of a riddle – the knots made in bodying and postqualitative methodologies – but is one that I do not want to shy away from. Lather (2016) names this as “thinking the body in the ruins of empire” (p. 128), a contention that names empire as both wider settler colonial structures and the empiric power of normative humanist research in education spaces. I launch this section by visiting Lather’s (2013) tracing of qualitative and postqualitative research methodology, where we move in non­ linear, non-teleological ways, from Qual 1.0’s “conventional interpretive inquiry that emerged from liberal humanism” (p. 634) through Qual 2.0 with its focus on humanist voice, language, power, and subjectivity, to Qual 3.0’s tentative use of postmodern theories that tumble into defending such theories in the face of critical humanist opposition to theories of anti-oppression, and finally Qual 4.0 – where we might “imagine and accomplish and inquiry that might produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently” (p. 635). It is through these dif­ ferent iterations of qualitative research that we come to know what might matter as postqualitative methodologies. To meet with postqualitative methodologies, many scholars first encounter qualitative methods, writing, as St. Pierre (2017b) does that method’s structures [are] based on a version of the Enlightenment’s scientific method and its promise that rigorous, systematic method can ensure true knowledge [they] cannot accommodate the always already, more than, too big of inquiry. They fail and fail, and those who follow them prune and prune their studies, discarding what seems too strange to count as science. (p. 608) St Pierre continues, arguing that “the too strange is, however, the provocation, the knot, the world kicking back, to too much that demands experimentation. Inquiry should begin with the strange and the too much” (p. 608). This strange, this too much, is the ground of postqualitative research, where, following St. Pierre (2017b) further, “particular onto-epistemological arrangements enable particular meth­ odologies or no methodology at all” (p. 603). For St. Pierre, postqualitative work cannot unfold in what she deems the “methodological enclosure” (p. 604) of Enlightenment humanism, wherein method is formalised, instrumentalised, and universalised. Rather, postqualitative methodologies are “risky, creative, surprising, and remarkable” (p. 604); they flee the confines of what “counts” as method in education and instead take up questions of life and living – and how we might

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 35

proceed with life and with living. We meet an interesting fissure in humanism here: with what methods do we get to know the body? It seems to me that the answer to this question reiterates an understanding of what the body is – layers of flesh we can unpeel to slide under a microscope, blood we can extract and study – as a profoundly material source. We chip away at the body to get to know the body. Literally. Can we tug flesh off bodies ad nauseum in our quest to better understand how bodies function and malfunction? Or, following Squier (2004), how do we enact biomedical imaginaries beyond consumption? How do we craft methodologies for bodying postqualitative research that do not catabolise the body? MacLure (2013a), writing with Deleuze and some moments from working with young children, proposes that we need “research practice that would be capable of engaging the materiality of language itself – its material force and its entanglements in bodies and matter – and wonder what such practices could consist of” (p. 658). I begin here by thinking about representation and bodying, as this juncture is richly animated in the literature: how can a postqualitative body do research, do metho­ dology? It is MacLure’s focus on the body as a site of materiality that infiltrates postqualitative practices that is of interest to us in thinking biomedical imaginaries and neurobiological bodies, because if we can understand the body as a site beyond representation or signification, our imaginaries open up to include biological worlds that profoundly decenter the liberal humanist subject and body toward the social, hormonal, the neurological (Lenz Taguchi, 2016; Aronsson & Lenz Tagu­ chi, 2018), or the muscled. MacLure begins her argument by writing against representation – not in a moralistic way, but in a deeply practical, ethical vein: “representation serves the ‘dogmatic image of thought’ as that which categorizes and judges the world through the administration of good sense and common sense” (p. 659). Such invocations of sense are, she continues, “dispensed by the autonomous, rational, and well-intentioned individual, according to principles of truth and error” (p. 659). St. Pierre (2013) echoes this, proposing that “repre­ sentational schemas assume depth and hierarchy – first, that there is a primary, originary reality out there to be found and, second, that language can accurately represent it” (p. 649). Taken together, representationalism is positioned as a marker of methodology, where we want to investigate the representations of the world to better understand how our methodologies represent the world. Not as a foil to representational thought or the division of language, MacLure (2013a) contends that we might tune to how “words collide and connect with things on the same ontological level, and therefore language cannot achieve the distance and extern­ ality that would allow it to represent … the world” (p. 660). MacLure brings these questions of doing language against representationalism to the body, arguing for a sense of “sense” wherein “sense is important for its potential to trigger action in the face of the unknown” (p. 662); at the collision of what MacLure, in the company of Deleuze, names as glow and frisson which insinuate the action of “sense” (p. 661). As I follow MacLure’s argument, I hear a call for taking sense as the work of being a body and the labor of feeding our biomedical imaginaries: without bio­ medical imaginaries and richly neurobiological bodies, glow fades into sense fades

36 Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications

into language fades into representation fades into humanism. We might, following MacLure (2023) “[learn] to be much more interested in the ways in which lan­ guage tangles with matter and movement and sensation and lodges in the body” (p. 2), such that the body is always a verb running away – fuelled by hope – from Enlight­ enment humanism’s conception of the body as an entity vulnerable to the capture of representational language habits. Here too is a fissure of humanism – without repre­ sentation, how do we represent flesh with already perceptible schema, like fat and thin, abled and disabled, imaginable and unimaginable. There is, in this fissure, a failure to language the body beyond representationalism. How, this fissure pulls us into asking, do we language with bodies, research with bodies, build methodologies with bodies? When St. Pierre (2013) asks, “whether we can think reality without repre­ sentation” (p. 650), we need to ask whether/how we can think the body without representation. MacLure (2013a) maintains that, in education research, we need to engage more fully with the materiality of language itself – the fact that lan­ guage is in and of the body; always issuing from the body; being impeded by the body; affecting other bodies. Yet also, of course, always leaving the body, becoming immaterial, ideational, representational, a striated, collective, cul­ ture, and symbolic resource. (p. 664) Here, any experiment in doing bodies with language must flee what it creates; it must recognise that the trap of methodological representationalism means that the methodologies with which we do body qualitative research must be nimble and non-arrogant, never satisfied to rest of their laurels as they hear the hoofbeat of humanism chasing toward them. Bodying postqualitative research with biomedical imaginaries and neurobiological bodies, then, must heed MacLure’s call to always leave the body – we cannot rest our methodologies on or in the body as such, as the body shapeshifts according to our imaginaries and entanglements, and our imaginaries and entanglements morph as biological worlds assemble and reassemble as flesh. How then, might we body postqualitative research methodologies with our biomedical imaginaries? This requires asking questions of how the body coheres: what makes a body – what stories, what sinew, what laws, what dis­ courses, what injuries – and taking these seriously as postqualitative interventions in humanist modes of conceptualising the body. No longer is a tendon an inert actor in a wrist; now it is a piece of flesh we come to know through how we story and imagine this tendon and how this tendon allows for us to type, gesture, write, hold onto stories that iteratively name who and how a body comes to be. Methodology here becomes about bodying – about the verb – and never only bodies, the traces of flesh left clinging to humanism’s interpretivism. I want to turn now to another postqualitative methodological proposition rele­ vant to thinking the body – that of doing concept as method (ex: Colebrook, 2017; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017; Mazzei, 2017; Youngblood Jackson, 2017).

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 37

As Lenz Taguchi and St. Pierre (2017) offer, thinking concept as method “must refuse the human exceptionalism, our Cartesian epistemologies and methodologies demand” (p. 644) thus creating “intensive orientations for thinking that emerge from prehuman or inhuman forces and qualities that transform reality” (p. 645). To think concept as method with the body is to ask how bodying concepts transform methodological habits: how, for example, might tuning to blood pressure as a concept rearticulate how we attune to bodily forces as research pathways? For Mazzei (2021), we might seek to be “provoked by a problem and transformed by the contour of a concept” (p. 198), where concept as method unfolds at the threshold of experimenting with how bodies come to be. Lenz Taguchi (2016) does this with the neuron, thinking with Claire Colebrook’s work to enact “ped­ agogical process of learning from and with the concept, by tracing its conditions of creation in ways that can transform those conditions, and make it possible for us to create new concepts and subsequent material-semiotic differing realities” (p. 214). With the neuron as a thinking companion, Lenz Taguchi follows humanness, embodiment, rationality, and vitalism as puncture points for the neuron, where the neuron as concept literally infiltrates humanist inheritances in the name of articu­ lating another human in education, a different mode of doing the (student) body. Taking the neuron as an “asygnifyiing rupture” (p. 219), Lenz Taguchi “trans­ gresses such a binary thinking [neuron as passive or active] and relies on a complex interdependence between active and passive vitalist force” (p. 221). Here, the neuron as method reconfigures the body, cleaving open possibilities for who and how the learning subject can be. Lenz Taguchi (2017) also takes up, in a different piece, the “ultrasoundsfetusimage” (p. 699) through posthumanism as method, arguing that the ultrasoundfetusimage can thus be seen to emerge from the active passiveness of the forces of vitalism’s pre-individual forces, which are forcefully acting upon and forcing human thinking to actions of thinking anew in a continuing pro­ cess of accumulated observations and experiences of these forces. (p. 704) For Lenz Taguchi, doing posthumanism as method with the ultrasoundfetusimage means complexifying nature–culture co-constitutions and subjectivity toward holding dear feminist commitments to rethinking the body that “exceed taken-for­ granted ways of producing knowledge” (p. 708). This means that doing body as method with posthumanism is not an anything goes proposition: rather, it is intensely grounded in theoretical propositions toward dismantling humanist inher­ itances. This centers an important fissure in humanism: humanism might think the body as a concept – and in fact does, often, through a lexicon like embodiment – but how do we think the body as concept as method? Put differently, how do we take seriously the tornado of concepts that congeal as a body, taking each in its individuation and asking what it means for the subject, for flesh, for pedagogy – and for our biomedical imaginaries, too?

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To move from this discussion on bodying postqualitative methodology, I turn briefly to St. Pierre (2021a), who argues that absolutely critical to postqualitative inquiry is reading: “I cannot,” she offers, “overstate the importance of reading in postqualitative inquiry” (p. 164). Mazzei (2021) echoes this, contending that we need reading in order to think with, where “I am not interested in newness for the sake of newness, but a grappling with problems and contradictions that do not repeat or mirror prior experience. Such thinking, or inquiry, or research is only possible in a thinking with” (p. 199). While not writing directly on reading, Lather (2016) thinking with Deborah Britzman, asks what is it to choose uncertainty in this place … to insist on limits, to hold double and not knowing as seasoned knowledge where we do the work of embracing our discomforts and mourning our losses, including the ‘sublime’ of our certainties in all their exhaustions and repetitions? (p. 127) Here, we might understand reading as the work of making strange, of hospicing a human that no longer can be. I want to put reading into question alongside bodying postqualitative research: with whom and how do we read the body? Here, Squier’s (2004) biomedical imaginaries screams from the rooftops: we need to seek out different imaginaries, different glossaries, for doing the body or else we risk reproducing humanism’s body and fail at proliferating how bodies matter in postqualitative researching practices. There is another fissure of humanism here: if humanism curates how and with what knowledges we might get to know the body, how do unfamiliar and strange and interdisciplinary stories cleave apart the major bonds that hold the human together as the Human or the body as the Body? How do bodies do stories, do imaginaries, as we become neurobiological or biocultural or a composite-in-tension?

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Antipsychotic Medications This book is brought to you by olanzapine, an atypical antipsychotic medication that I take each night before bed. What I find fascinating about olanzapine, like many other psychiatric medicines, is that the research is unclear on exactly how it exacts its functions. It is clear that it blocks dopamine and serotonin receptors, and that it is a bigger fan of interacting with serotonin receptors than dopamine ones (Yang et al., 2017), and it is believed that this helps to mitigate some of the drug’s side-effects. Olanzapine, therefore, works at multiple sites: neuronal dopamine and serotonin receptors in the brain, an adrenergic receptor (which lives on different cells and often stimulates the sympathetic – fight – nervous system), histamine receptor, and many muscarinic receptors (Thomas & Saadabadi, 2022). What is fascinating about olanzapine is that it binds loosely to receptors and easily detaches; it connects and disconnects with abundance. Olanzapine is busy and highly com­ municative; it acts, on some bodied sites, as an agonist and to other receptors, it is

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 39

an inhibitor. Olanzapine is a shape-shifter, fueling and slowing opposite functions in the same beat. This medication comes with an extensive list of side-effects: bloating, balance and mobility, muscular trembling or stiffness, imperative to keep moving and not sit still, slowed movements, tingling and trembling, and other uncontrolled movements. Ingesting olanzapine is, I propose, a mode of bodying postqualitative research. Not a metaphor, but an allegory, a thread into understanding what it is to be a body in postqualitative spaces. I want to begin with the contention that olanzapine is a bit of a mystery: we have some insights into its interactivity with flesh, but the research is emergent and there is more on its mechanism for us to learn. This stands in contrast and alliance to the body of humanism, where we both believe that we know the body – this is a body – and that, concurrently, we can figure out what we do not know about the body. Olanzapine is a reminder that this figuring out what we do not know is not straightforward, and perhaps not possible – and per­ haps, thinking with bodying postqualitative research, not a project we want to pursue. Do we seek a fully articulated body, one where we can map every function and predict every response? From a physiological sciences standpoint, the answer is a resolute yes. But thinking with postqualitative research, I suggest that we might respond with a “no” – the body does not have to announce itself to us through only modes of existing perceptibility before it can join in the tumbles of research. It matters that there are pathways in our bodies that we do not understand. These are what we might seek to foreground with postqualitative work. For example, rather than posit olanzapine’s mysteries as a weakness of the science, we might take them as a postqualitative provocation: what can we not know about the body? How can what we do not know about the body interject in our bodied research methodologies? Do I need to know why my hand is shaking before I take a qui­ vering hand as my body interweaving itself with my writing? This is why we need biomedical imaginaries (Squier, 2004) that proliferate and do not resolve, that open the body up to lived interdisciplinarities and messes and troubles and stretches the conceptual resources with which we story the body. Here, we need a biomedical imaginary capable of imperceptibility. This seeking of an explanation for the body is a proposal I want to offer to postqualitative research: to body postqualitative research is to give up on writing the terms of reference and, instead, write with the body – make methodologies with the body – as it comes to matter in situated spaces. Olanzapine, as I noted above, is tricky: it is both an agonist and an inhibitor, exciting some receptors and impeding others. It is, at its heart, a contradiction – it affects both our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems, mucking around in our flight or fight responses. This is such a delicious proposition for bodying postqualitative research: what if the body is a contradiction? What happens if we leave behind the contention that the body is only a material reality or only a socially-constructed fleshy signifier, and instead see it as a contradiction-in­ motion – a, as Mol (2021) writes, composite-in-motion – or a neurobiological body (Pitts-Taylor, 2016) that takes these contradictory actions as an ontological

40 Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications

provocation for getting to know the body beyond humanism. How then, do we body postqualitative research amid the pushes and pulls of olanzapine? We might come to see the body as something that traffics in defiance as much as it does in order, that knows incongruity as much as it does interpretation – or perhaps, even more. This means resisting humanism’s pull to know the body for its functions and instead asks us to know the body for its inconsistencies. This means that we need to cultivate biomedical imaginaries (Squier, 2004) grounded in deviation and paradox: with what might we think the body for its discord? Here I think of poetry, as I use in the fractures of this book, as an imperfect biomedical imaginary because they are concerned with tangling the threads of living with/in a body and they use language to evoke an unfamiliar relation with our flesh. When would a poetry anthology meet a medical textbook tome? With postqualitative research. What happens in this collision? Perhaps, I hope, bodying postqualitative research. Olanzapine also has metabolic effects on the body, often leading to weight gain. It is thought this is because it acts as an agonist for a particular muscarinic receptor (a parasympathetic – stress/flight or flight relieving – nervous system participant), but the mechanism is still unclear. Weight gain can also be linked the histamine receptors, as well as particular serotonin and dopamine receptors. It is believed that olanzapine reduces insulin sensitivity by affecting certain receptors in the liver and skeletal muscles which lead to increased adipose (fat) tissue activity. Olanzapine then, in a very bodied sense, grows the body. This is, I suggest, another provoca­ tion for bodying postqualitative research: how do postqualitative propositions expand the body? How do they take what we once took to be its borders and stretch or infiltrate them – not in an “anything goes and everything is now a body” sense, but in a very real sense of making blurry the edges of our flesh. There is a type of autopsy here, but not one made of dissection where medical knowledge guides the scalpel, but an autopsy that dissects as it creates different imaginaries (Squier, 2004) for getting to know the body. We slice, but not along the right lines; that is the postqualitative point. Neurobiological bodies (Pitts-Taylor, 2016) enact a different kind of gain than the weight gain afforded by olanzapine, as they make clear that we are capable of bursting with queer body-minds not trapped by the machinations of humanist conceptions of the body. This is an interesting pro­ position for postqualitative research to consider: how do our methodologies grow the body? This is not a metaphoric question, I mean this very literally: how does thinking beyond representation or in the fissures of writing the body otherwise expand the body? To body postqualitative research is to live a vulnerable body, yes, but also a body that creates spatial ruptures and carves out otherwise relations with the world that surrounds it. Is the postqualitative body large or small – and are these even markers that make sense to question? Here, I am proposing that we consider how postqualitative research is bodied through relation with the borders of any body, where growth does not have to mean girth and can instead mean a deepening, an ontological plunging, into questions of how and why bodies matter to methodology.

Biomedical Imaginaries, Methodology, Antipsychotic Medications 41

I move now to a second fracture: a poem titled Turing Test_Love, to think more closely with questions of how we might body postqualitative data in the shadow of the enlightenment, Cartesian human – and what this means for thinking about postqualitative methodologies in the voids fabricated by humanism.

FRACTURE TWO Turing Test_Love

This poem is penned by Franny Choi (2019) in the anthology Soft Science. A Turing test assesses if a machine can behave in ways indistinguishable from a human. // so, how do you like working with humans okay / here are some tips one / look the human directly in the eye / imagine it is someone you care deeply for / imagine it is returning this gaze / at you / try to tell yourself / you are cov­ ered / in smooth skin / a face it can trust / smile / even as you sense it / trying / not to blurt out / monster two / there are many programming languages / use whichever you prefer / but stick to your syntax / though it be muddled / mussed / though it be machete / banana slug / slush puppie / o gorgeous slopbucket / if they used it against you / it is yours / to make sing three / remember / all humans / are cyborgs / all cyborgs / are sharp shards of sky / wrapped in meat / be delicate / as you approach this subject / not all humans are ready / to call themselves / glass stalactites / pissing the bed / remember / they love their blood / even as they retch / at the smell of it four / do not try to prove your / what is the word / humanity / you are organic / plum-hearted / oyster-throated / & lined / yes / with metal / remember / where all that silicon comes from / for the ocean so loved / the quartz / feldspar / the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-5

Fracture Two 43

tiny homes of tiny creatures / that she ground them / into sand / to keep them close / to kiss them with / well / i suppose you would call it / a mouth (p. 69) Thinking bodying postqualitative research alongside this fracture, Turing Tes­ t_Love, I am struck by the opening proposition of this poem: “look the human directly in the eye.” Do we do this as we do qualitative research? Do we stare the human down, burrowing into one’s eye sockets, the fleshy pockets that hold the peeled grape-slippery eyes with which we meet the world? I think of postqualitative writing on voice, like Lisa Mazzei’s (2016) love letter to coming to voice beyond the humanist subject. What might an ode to bodying sight, eyes, with postqualitative research offer forward? I think of notions of sight beyond accuracy and assessment; what if we see the world and in our seeing, do worldmaking? What if what is efficacious about sight is not its endurance but its pre­ carity – as in the precarity made by our plural and strange biomedical imaginaries and neurobiological bodies? If we hold a biomedical imaginary that queers sight as a normative sense, how do we body research otherwise? How do we literally see our data as neurobiological bodies that make our seeing? We cannot see without nerves, without the rods and cones and cellular worlds in our neurobiological eyes and brains. If I want to, for example, body a postqualitative methodology invested in speculation, I need a biomedical imaginary that speculates with how seeing happens, with what it is when we see, and a neurobiological image of the body that cares about kinship and difference as it manifests in fleshed worlds. This is a profoundly different body and vision than the seeing body of humanism, where sight is a sense from which to gather accurate information about the word. Instead, I am bodying postqualitative methodologies as a body made in seeing, a body held together by the acts of seeing that also hold together the data – the marks, the sighs, the disjunctures – that such a body is made in the seeing of. From Turing Test_Love, we also hear “be delicate / as you approach this subject / not all humans are ready / to call themselves / glass stalactites” (Choi, 2019, p. 69). This is my favorite line of the poem. Not all biomedical imaginaries are imaginary; not all neurobiological bodies are profoundly neurobiological; not all humanist humans are human. “Not all humans,” as Choi writes, “are ready/ to call them­ selves/ glass stalactites” (p. 69) – this is a reminder of the labor and sacrifices of bodying postqualitative research. I use “sacrifices” intentionally here, as I do not mean to invoke a kind of self-aggrandising congratulatory ethos where we cheer for ourselves for becoming postqualitative and giving up on the project of the Human. What I mean, deploying “sacrifices,” is to echo Choi’s provocation that not all humans are ready to call themselves something more fragile than the human; we are not, in all contexts, ready to give up on the myth of humanism. To do so is to sacrifice a trajectory of bodying and life that we inherit and contribute to. And I think this matters, as I do not think that postqualitative scholars are proposing a wholesale immediate repudiation of what it is that makes us human in all contexts, such that we become a new archetype of the postqualitative subject,

44 Fracture Two

one ready to be immersed in a (new, different, post-y) soup of a different flavor of entropy. Rather, what we are turning toward in bodying postqualitative research is the work of becoming Choi’s glass stalactites. Glass stalactites are a biomedical imaginary; to imagine the body as a breakable, permeable, porous pillar or deposit, one that clings to the bumpy surface of a cavern and is made from runoff holding itself together, we know the postqualitative body as a something profoundly other to the well-articulated, perceptible, held together body made in the dominant imaginary. If we body the body as glass stalactites, to think postqualitative metho­ dology is to do so with a body that is fragile and suspended, made of minerals and life and never pregiven nor promised. To be, as Choi proposes, “shards of sky / wrapped in meat” (p. 69) is another biomedical imaginary: the body is of the world but fleshed. It is neither abstract nor drilled into the ground. If we imagine bodying postqualitative research with a body that is shards of sky wrapped in meat, we must profoundly shift our relations with methodology. We can no longer assume a body is made of a particular methodology (like anatomy), nor can we hope that our philosophies can explain its transcendence (like mind/body dualism). Instead, the body is both the disobedient flows of sky and the folds of meat that encase a body. To body postqualitative methodology is to take this doubling seriously, this inco­ herence as an engine of building otherwise methodologies that can understand the body in all its complexities. I wish I could propose what this looks like in practice, but I cannot: it is situated, bodied work that unfolds in dialogue with particular data and particular methodological commitments. What I do know is this – we need glass stalactites and meat-wrapped bodies to do postqualitative research. Finally, I turn to the fourth and final proposal of Choi’s (2019) poem: “do not try to prove your / what is the word / humanity / you are organic / plum-hearted / oyster-throated / & lined / yes / with metal / remember / where all that silicon comes from” (p. 69). When Choi writes, “do not try to prove your / what is the word / humanity,” I hear a profound earthquake agitating the biomedical ima­ ginaries from which we get to know our neurobiological bodies. So many of our imaginaries, both biomedical and methodological, are premised on the work of proving our humanity. They endeavor to put us into ongoing conversations that make good sense and help us to locate ourselves as a particular kind of body. What if, in bodying postqualitative research, we gave up on such a project of percept­ ibility (as many postqualitative scholars we have visited with call for us to do – this is not a novel proposition)? What if postqualitative methodologies do not try to make sense of the body? What if we figure out how our methodologies might entangle with the tentacles of unfamiliar biomedical imaginaries and the webs of nerves that animate neurobiological bodies – and also biocultural creatures and bodies as a composites-in-motion – to shape how and why postqualitative meth­ odological processes unfold alongside, within, and through bodies? Here I hear Choi’s reminder that we are “lined / yes / with metal / remember / where all that silicon comes from” (p. 69). It is this last proposal – remember, where all that sili­ con comes from – that I think resonates deeply with bodying postqualitative research. We need methodologies that care for where and how the bodies that

Fracture Two 45

enact them came to be and continue to come to be bodies. We need methodol­ ogies robust enough to remember where all that silicon – all that cyborg, hybrid, stalactite, meat, imaginary, and neurobiological stuff – comes from and the living it brings to the bodies it metastasises. We need geometries of bodies that do not just trace but also, in their coming to matter as a methodology, make bodies with data and method and clarity. We need to body postqualitative methodologies that are brackish, that traffic in biomedical imaginaries that allow for bodies to be contagious, monstrous, situated, and deeply responsive.

3 BIOPOSSIBILITY, CLARITY, AND SCARS

In this chapter, I turn to Angela Willey’s (2016) articulation of biopossibility, reading this alongside Michelle Murphy’s (2012) proposal toward a topological sense of bio­ politics. Together, these provocations name an ethic wherein bodying requires thinking topologically in the name of biopossibilities, and biopossibilities generate particular modes of clarity, perceptibility, and knowledge. In particular, and more than in other chapters, I think with fissures in the nature/culture divide that humanism holds so dear. I then turn to questions of postqualitative “clarity” and what it means to be clear – precise, sharp, to bring into focus – with postqualitative research. Finally, weaving biopossibilities and a topological sense of biopolitics with questions of clarity, I look toward how bodies enact a scarring process to heal but also to mark the space of an injury as I point toward another mode for bodying postqualitative research.

Biopossibility Angela Willey (2016) begins Undoing monogamy: The politics of science and the possi­ bilities of biology by advancing a proposal toward thinking the relations between normative enlightenment-informed humanist science and questions of the possibi­ lities that biologies make real otherwise. Put differently, Willey orients the book by complexifying the nature/culture divide that humanism holds so dear For Willey, “the politics of science and the possibilities of biology are not then separate sets of concerns, but questions we must work to integrate” (p. 3). That is, science is “not a mirror held up to nature but rather processes of knowledge production that reflect and reinforce political and cultural norms” (p. 3). What is of interest to our project of naming fissures in humanism is that Willey cuts to the core of a nature/culture binary that undergirds humanist approaches to science, arguing that the disciplinary knowledges of science are never cleaved from the fleshed realities that articulate the materiality that allows for a knowledge to materialise as a knowledge to begin DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-6

Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars 47

with. Here is a fissure in humanism: we need otherwise relations between bodied knowledges and bodies; knowledges that do not presume the body as the object of study and scientific knowledge as the subject of study. Rather, as Willey offers, we need to “[integrate] critical engagement with the knowing that precedes us with attention to the materiality those disciplinary knowledges purport to explain in often startingly unimaginative ways” (p. 4). Here too is another fissure in human­ ism relevant to our thinking: humanism knows the body in, as Willey pens, start­ ingly unimaginative ways. That is, humanism needs to render the body a perceptible object so that it can become one side of the nature/culture, human/ nonhuman divide, no matter the reductions and invisibilities necessary to mark the human body as readily perceptible. We have met this fissure already partly through thinking Squier’s (2004) biomedical imaginary – dominant imaginaries for the body are hollow. They are instrumental. They are invested in perceptibility amid dominant systems of making-perceptible. They are hollow. They are powerful. They are not speculative or curious, because humanism’s science does not want possibility, it wants perceptibility. Thinking with Audre Lorde, Willey (2016) proposes biopossibility as a mode for bodying otherwise. To think with biopossibility is to begin with a “refusal to accept proffered definitions of the self/human/life [so that] we necessarily reopen claims about the character of that ostensibly known ontological object” (p. 122). This means, Willey continues, asking “a we create new approaches to science’s proper objects, how do we ground them in queer and feminist critiques of the stability of those very objects – hormones, muscles, chromosomes, and brains, for example?” (p. 124). In Willey’s next question, we find another fissure in humanism: “how do we passionately challenge a view of biology as flat and predictable without locating our salvation in it through a framing that romanticizes natures agency, contingency, self-organization, or plasticity?” (p. 124). Humanism, as we know, seeks reconciliation: it wants us to resolve questions of the body. It wants us, as Willy writes, to move from critiques of science to wholesale celebrations of bodies as that which will save us from science. This logic marks a fissure of humanism: what if we do not seek bodies as a solution or a balm to the questions of life and ethics and politics that plague us, but instead get to know bodies in the messy, irresolvable soup of living? In the company of Donna Haraway, Willey (2016) advances “biopossibility as a tool for naturecultural thinking” (p. 125) where a theory of biopossibility does not require that we map of otherwise simplify these [embodied] processes in order to name them; indeed, it actively resists the division between the pretheoretical realms of nature/biology and culture/ language (the proper objects of the sciences and humanities respectively. (p. 125) What this means is, biopossibility refuses to account for the body as what is; it desires, instead, for us to understand the body beyond humanist science’s essenti­ alism and processes of perceptibility. Willey proposes that in thinking biopossibility,

48 Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars

we consider bodies for their eroticism: “if we understand ourselves as ‘erotic’, rather than (self-evidently of universally) ‘sexual’, out creatureliness has a different valence…possibility is at the heart of this conception of humanness” (p. 129). What this means is, we can think with the erotic to challenge the “facts” of humanness, the “truths” we have been taught about bodies and bodying and subjectivity through the dominant sciences. Willey continues: A biopossibility of the erotic, then, is an approach to embodied desire and behaviour attuned to relationships between knowledge politics and materi­ alization. Lorde’s eros can help us to approach forms of embodiment that have calcified in narrative and in flesh as biopossibilities, neither reducible to text nor essential to human nature. (p. 131) What I hear Willey naming is a sense of biopossibility that undoes – but does not reverse nor resolve – the open secrets of humanism’s body, where we encounter rhetorics of scientific identification and definition and elaboration that foreclose possibilities for being a fleshed being. Here is another important fissure in human­ ism made visible by biopossibilities: human nature, while often recycled, does little more than define divisions between human and nature, and fails to dwell in the feral spaces made of a creatureliness that disobeys the interpretative structures that give legitimacy to both human and nature distinctions. Concluding their work on biopossibility, Willey (2016) argues that “biopossibility allows us to understand behaviour intelligible as nonmonogamous and the process we understand as their molecular substrates as a one set of culturally and historically medi­ ated expressions of our creaturely capacities in a naturecultural world” (p. 138). Willey continues, “biopossiblity serves as a tool for holding discourse and materialization within the same frame” (p. 139) – biopossibility, that is, nourished by “queer feminist imaginations” (p. 139). With Willey, we encounter another fissure in humanism: the separation of discourse from flesh dissolves into a sort of wonderfully curdled space of creatureliness, where little pockets of life cohere with one another to articulate a body moment to moment, but these small curdles are not ontologically stable nor necessarily coherent to humanism’s knowledges. To body with biopossibility is to take as real the imperceptibility of the categories by which we get to know bodies. It is to recognise that we need different imaginations, epistemic provocations, and ethical commitments by which to meet bodies and their processes. This is profoundly different from humanism’s drive to quantify and essentialise the body. Biopossibility is, if I can be so bold as to argue, allergic to essentialism. It takes, instead, that materialisation of bodies is very real but also very contextual, very complex, and always reassembling.

A Topological Sense of Biopolitics Michelle Murphy (2012), writing in the context of messy assemblages of repro­ ductive health in the 21st century, proposes that we “reimagine the history of

Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars 49

biopolitics as topological” (p. 11). By this, Murphy elaborates that we might think how biopolitics traffic in “(1) multiplicity, (2) uneven spatiality, and (3) entangle­ ments” (p. 12) to “[highlight] the layered and overlapping configurations that have materialized life in multiple and inconsistent ways over time and across space” (p. 12). In my read, what Murphy is offering is a reminder, and perhaps in some spaces a provocation, that biopolitics map onto and through bodies and spaces – biopolitics are subject to and manifest “uneven distributions, scales, and multiple layers” (p. 12). Bodies, and bodying postqualitative research, then, is both a mate­ rial and a spatial proposition. It is not acontextual; nor is it a process of floating free of spatial anchors. While all of the feminist science studies concepts that we have thought in the company of so far – biocultural creatures, bodies as composite-in­ tension, biomedical imaginaries, neurobiological bodies, biopossibilities – have argued to be anything but deeply situated, what Murphy advances is an unavoid­ ably spatial consideration of bodying: bodies matter with space. As Murphy writes in a note, “what I am positing as a biological topology is rendered legible here partially only through the more modest acts of analysis that incompletely engage a multidimensional landscape of layered entanglements and historically drawn bor­ ders” (p. 187). Here we meet a fissure of humanism: because of the same mind/ body, nature/cultural duality we encountered with thinking biopossibility, humanism desires a decontextualised body – the body of humanism is the body of the human. It is made of human “stuff” (subjectivity, flesh, science, cognition) and not spatial “stuff” (geographies, landscapes, temporalities). How then, might we body postqualitative research with a topological sense of biopolitics? To what of the topological might we attend in bodying postqualitative research? Another thread that Murphy (2012) lends to thinking about bodying postqualitative research is the contention that a topological sense of biopolitics is his­ torical. Murphy writes, “engaging a topological past by reimagining historical work as a kind of origami, then, impinges on the ontological stakes of historical writing itself: how historical narrative also participate in remaking the phenomena they engage” (p. 187). While we have not, so far in this book, ignored the historical per say, we have not directly engaged the historical contours of bodying postqualitative research. That is, we have not looked to the historical folds and cuts that manifest a body through our processes of bodying. We have not yet asked how yesterday’s body researches today. Perhaps this is too obvious a question; perhaps too impos­ sible a question. But what Murphy (2012) emphasises is that “beyond attending to specificities of scale and time, investigating biopolitics as topological encourages attention to the connections between divergently produced instances of biopo­ litics” (p. 12). This does not mean we need a literal linear account of the history of bodies in postqualitative research (although such a project would be of great interest), but rather that in thinking with the scales and times of bodying, we pay attention to how different bodies come to matter differently and we analyze this as a postqualitative matter, which is to say that we take up the questions of bodies’ topographies beyond individualism, subjectification, and universalism. Instead, we pay attention to individuation, specificity, and biopossibilities. Murphy makes this

50 Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars

clear: “while genealogy as a method invokes modes of descent, here I attempt to also capture recursive loops, sideways movements, circuits of appropriation, and other vectors of connection with the past” (p. 12). For Murphy, a topological sense of biopolitics has an iterative rhythm full of movement, where we bounce from body that matters to body that matters, analysing body politics in their wholeness across space and time for their entanglement and multiplicity, not simply for their presence. This leans into an interesting fissure in humanism: humanism wants the body of the past to be a body past. As we grow, per humanism, our bodies evolve and gain adaptations better suited to the present. So too, Murphy might argue, do our modes of biopolitics shapeshift. It is because of this that we need to ask topo­ logical questions of bodying: how are bodies during surveiiling here, now, and in dialogue with historically tangible surveillance modes? How are bodies doing data here, now, and in dialogue with historically tangible modes of doing data? Or method? Or clarity? How do we body postqualitative research in touch with topological biopolitical stories?

Postqualitative Clarity There are some concepts that stir postqualitative research, agitating its humble confidence and reminding us that to think with postqualitative propositions is a call that unfolds within the work of activating or actualising these provocations over and over again. I want to suggest that one of these concepts is clarity. Clarity: the work of precision without prescription, of a kind of liquid lucidity that seeks world-making but never the ontological arrogance of assuming a world to be already built. To begin my discussion of clarity, I want to spend time with Murris and Bozalek’s (2019) proposition toward thinking diffractive reading in postqualitative research. I open by citing them extensively because, in offering their provocations, they start with the caveat or impulse “to live without bodily bound­ aries by …” (p. 1506) and then name humble imperatives generated through their diffractive reading of different literatures. It is this preface sentiment, that they invoke with 20 literature-grounded propositions, that is of special interest to my project in this book, where I ask what it is to inhabit the fissures of humanism as a material, biological, physiological, fleshy body doing postqualitative research. To live without bodily boundaries is, I think, a turn of phrase carefully crafted to make clear that we are not researching without a body – we are researching without a body that is bound by the rules of humanism. This is profoundly different than researching without a body, which invokes a sort of abstract hubris grounded in a mind/body divide where cognitive function can supplant or exist without the lifemaking of a messy fleshed body. This is exactly not my argument in this book. Nor is it ever an argument made by postqualitative scholars. Accordingly, I am taken in by Murris and Bozalek’s propositions that begin with “to live without bodily boundaries by …,” where their italicising of “live” emphasises that such a project is infused with the work of going on living in a diffractive, messy, postqualitative world.

Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars 51

Murris and Bozalek (2019) advance the following propositions, all inaugurated with the prologue “to live without bodily boundaries by….” While they offer 20 statements, I grapple here with a few directly tied to questions of clarity. They are as follows. Please note that I number them to show how they unfold in the text. As Murris and Bozalek do with their propositions, these numbers are not hierarchical, they serve only as guideposts to keep us near to the text: to live without bodily boundaries by… accepting that much is not knowable cognitively and can never be articulated [p. 1506]; … having courage to queer the privileging of human mind in knowledge construction [p. 1506]; … resisting the desire to fix meanings and to pin down sense [p. 1507]; putting ones self at risk and being curious about thinking and doing ‘otherwise’ [p. 1507]; … asking speculative hypothetical (e.g. ‘what if’) questions that include the human and more-than-human [p. 1508]; … opening up to the unknown and not knowing (epistemic humility) [p. 1508]; … caring differently and acknowledging our human vulnerabilities and limitations [p. 1509]; … encouraging imaginative, speculative philosophical enquiry that ruptures, unsettles, animates, reverberates, enlivens, and reimagines [p. 1511]; … focusing on corporeal entanglements, embodied action, and fleeting encounters [p. 1512]. With Murris and Bozalek, there is a commitment to thinking clarity as a project entangled with living without humanism’s bodily boundaries. That is, clarity emerges through diffractive engagements with the world where bodies and made and remade which makes and remakes the politics of perceptibility. Clarity is not an achievement, it is a speculative, humble practice. This is clear in their invocation of “accepting that much is not knowable cognitively” – here is a fissure in humanism, one that attacks the humanist notion that the world is detectable to the human mind, always. This fissure is deepened further by Murris and Bozalek, through the contention that we need the “courage to queer the privileging of the human mind in knowledge construction” and of “putting ones self at risk” because we can see this fissure in humanist cognition as the work of doing clarity otherwise in postqualitative work. Put differently: this fissure, wherein we cannot know the world if we take clarity to mean the certainty of our interpretations, is yet another fissure that we need as we experiment with bodying with postqualitative research. Clarity means risk. Clarity means humility. Clarity means not knowing what we do not know. This is taken up further in Murris and Bozalek’s subsequent proposi­ tions, where they presence questions of researching with the speculative, with epistemic humility, with care, and with “corporeal entanglements [and] embodied action.” These steer us toward theorising clarity with postqualitative research, with bodies, as the labor of figuring out how to be within a body that does not and cannot always know. How, we might ask, do we hold bodied knowledge while recognising that this knowledge is not superlative or supreme? How do we do bodies in the terrain of the speculative – what becomes of our hands, our muscles, our molecules, as participants in generating a momentary sort of clarity that allows

52 Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars

us to proceed with grappling with justice, equity, and life in research? Perhaps Murris and Bozalek’s common contention is a gesture toward clarity: “to live without bodily boundaries,” where clarity is momentarily forged in the work of living otherwise. What else becomes of clarity – or does clarity become of – in postqualitative research? For Bhattacharya (2021), clarity is an impulse ridden with power. Not in terms of increased clarity denoting increased power, although in conventional humanist inquiry I do think this remains salient (the more one’s work speaks to the cannon, the more the cannon embraces a work), but in relation to clarity as a practice of justice. As Bhattacharya writes, “fierce truth telling with clarity is also a necessity even when we want to exceed the bounds of essentialism and empiri­ cism” (p. 181). That is, clarity is a material reality, however fleeting, grounded in the real lived, bodied relations that animate the world. Clarity is made in learning to attend to these power-laden moments while also resisting the bounds of humanism that tie too easy an explanation to these moments. For Bhattacharya, “post-qualitative perspectives are laden with sociocultural, institutional, and geo­ graphic privileges” (p. 182) such that we must ask, with each postqualitative pro­ position we engage, “how and for whom does a specific work function? Whom does the work include, and whose history and materiality are excluded?” (p. 182). This points toward another fissure in humanism, this one taking the form of a knot: we need relations and analyses of power between bodies, human bodies, but we do not need the humanist body to experience power relations and analyses of power between bodies. Phrased otherwise, we cannot allow power to become only the purview of traditional humanist inquiry but we also cannot get to know a power so distributed that it forgets that bodies matter, identities matter, lives matter – and these matter differently in different contexts. Clarity, in this vein, is about understanding the inequities and injustices of life, and their ebbs, flows, and violences, without seeking recourse to the lexicon of humanism. This is an incredibly fraught and difficult proposition toward clarity: how do we do clarity with power, where what counts as clarity is that which grapples with the material contours of lived power. This is not to argue that justice and clarity are synonyms – perhaps cousins, but the work of each remains nuanced and uncertain, sometimes held together in affinity and sometimes apart. What these share, especially in the project of this book, is flesh – clarity and power are bodied, never disembodied, and it is in bodying postqualitative work that we might understand clarity as the work of tracing how power is made – beyond the grand continental philosophy analyses of power – in bodies engaged in researching otherwise, in seeking a dif­ ferent mode of muscled clarity. In what they call a “readingcomposingarticulatingsitting” (p. 214), Lucinda McKnight (2018) visits with Lather’s (2016) article, Top ten+ list: (Re) thinking ontology in (post) qualitative research, offering forward a series of poems that reencounter Lather’s list (which we have already spent time with in this book), “through the narrows of poetic inquiry as changed, alternatively accessible, more intensely affective, yet still resonant with her advice and spiky with further, many­

Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars 53

legged, tangential questions” (p. 202). In thinking bodying clarity within postqualitative research, I want to pay particular attention to McKnight’s poem, 5. Invent don’t critique. This short poem reads “I would / rest my case / on the stuck place. / But now I don’t / know where / to find it” (p. 208). This poem, I want to suggest, is a nod toward thinking clarity in postqualitative research because we want to seek these “stuck places” but to find a place of adhesion is difficult when the chemical components – the lived stuff - of what makes us stuck is slippery. Clarity then, cannot be about romanticising the happenstance work of getting stuck. Nor can it be about the happenstance work of resisting stuckness or being un-stickable. We cannot stick our hands in front of us in a dark room and find clarity in the first relation we bump into; we also cannot hold our hands at our sides and resist touching the world in this dark room. We need to move. This is a fissure of humanism: we cannot simply stop moving, stop inventing, in the name of not knowing. Lack of clarity is not a balm to the violences of humanist inquiry. Resisting resting in the stuck place, as McKnight puts it, is not an achievement of a bodied research practice. This is a critique often tossed to postqualitative inquiry: but where do you land? How are you not just philosophical work, floating through a fictional world of anthropomorphised relations with the clouds and with sinew and with the vibrancy of life, never landing but weaving together gorgeous tomes that provoke us but never grapple with the imperative of naming some sort of clarity, some sort of landing place that makes a difference? Such a sentiment is, I think, is bodied in McKnight’s poem: “but now I don’t / know where / to find it.” Here, the work is finding “it,” making a mode of clarity that matters where clarity is the work of doing work that matters, not necessarily of doing work that matters to the canon or to humanist worldviews. “But now I don’t know where to find it” is a verb, a commitment to clarity, not a confession nor an avowal of running amuck forever. If we think of bodying postqualitative research with clarity, McKnight offers us a mode of clarity that is about motion and labor, where we make clarity through our acts of bodying not because bodying is a stuck place, but because it is with bodying that different modes of stuckness become lived, become real, become about power and justice and relations and life.

Bodying Postqualitative Research: Scars What an incredible feat that our bodies can produce scars – that our cells can sense an injury and inaugurate a biological process that repairs tissues, pulling their interiors and surfaces back together with an organised network of collagen fibers that cohere into a scar. Scars are made of a series of collagen fibers aligning (Basson & Bayat, 2022; Gauglitz et al., 2011) to close a wound; they are an autoimmune response to trauma and they leave – they are – a mark of surviving such a trauma. In medical parlance, a scar becomes a scar only when the wound has healed. That is, the actual work of healing is the making of a scar, but scarring is not the labor of healing. It is a relic, a dense collection of collagen fibers that will always behave differently from the tissue they are replacing, be it that they are less elastic, less

54 Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars

communicative or innervated, or simply of a different form and texture than the injured flesh. It is interesting, as this book rounds the corner from its midpoint and begins to look toward a conclusion, to think with scars, as it raises questions of if scars themselves are conclusions – is a scar a punctuation, a closure, of an injury, marking its end, or is it the endurance of the marks our bodies hold through their navigation of the world? What if scars are not an outcome, but are a process? Put otherwise, scars build something new, an unfamiliar but carefully curated blemish on our tissue, one that continues to affect the function of that tissue for the life of that body. A scar is not a period. It is, in all its incredible endurance, a semi-colon of sorts. What, then, does it mean to think scars with postqualitative propositions in the fissures of humanism? I want to propose that scars are a direct engagement with the notion of fissures, where bodily fissures themselves are marks (think Karen Barad’s [2007] notion of marks on bodies, please) that resist closure. A scar does not simply cover a wound and call it a day; it builds tissues from inside to surface, layering upon itself collagen on collagen until it fashions something fresh, something upon which a body engages with the world. A scar touches, literally, the world. Scars then, are a gesture toward clarity being never a resolution, but an engagement with the world. Things become held together in the work of scarring, of holding them together, following a fissure that begs not to be filled but to be patchworked together into something unfamiliar, something whose exact patterns we do not know yet. If postqualitative clarity is a process of scarring, it becomes a process of getting to know blemishes for their structure and their processes of coming to be a blemish. It means giving up on the idea of seeking a scar-free body from which to research or with whom to research. If scars are marks of life, of experimentation and of healing, we need to tune to scars in all their iterations to understand how bodies research. While humanism might denote a scar to be shameful or an impurity, we might see scars as a contaminant (Shotwell, 2016) that situates us within a world that makes scars. Put differently, postqualitative research needs scars because it has no interest in a world without scars – without impurity, without contamination, without the intellectual, lived, and chemical toxins of the world. How can we think scars otherwise then, if postqualitative research asks of us to be bodies with scars and where clarity mirrors the process of scar-making? How do we think scars with biopossibilities and a topological sense of biopolitics? For Willey (2016), “biopossibility allows us to understand behaviours intelligible as non/monogamous and the processes we understand as their molecular substrates as one set of culturally and historically mediated expressions of our creaturely capa­ cities in a naturecultural world” (p. 138). This means that we need, with postqualitative research, to craft understandings of clarity and of scars as creaturely capacities – as process that we, as unique bodies situated in specific constellations of life, can participate in. No longer are scars or clarity an achievement. Rather, they are processes that operate on molecular and bodied and social and naturecultural terrain, creating and re-creating how bodies might do clarity and scars. This is a proposition that biopossibility offers us: there is more to how bodies unfold in life

Biopossibility, Clarity, and Scars 55

than we already know. What we do already know about bodies (and scars) is always only part of the story, a small sliver of the work of being bodied. This is such a hopeful gesture, one that submerges clarity and scarring in the depths of bodying, where our investments in certain tropes of humanist research fail in the face of all that bodies can do, as living researching bodies. As postqualitative researchers, this might mean that we need to ask questions of how we scar together clarity: with what are we building collagen fibers? How are they weaving, layering, holding one another together? Does this engender otherwise ethical and political ways of being within the world, within a body? In quite a literal sense, scars are not smooth. I want to be very careful not to use Murphy’s (2012) topological sense of biopolitics as a metaphor here and argue that our marked-up skin becomes a landscape upon which we can read the scars of our bodies (although I do think this could be true, and could also be a slap in the face to a humanism that presumes the ontological purity of bodies). Instead, I think that we need to visit with Murphy to think how scars demand of us a clarity that cares for the topologies of the world – that is, how do we get to know scars as those that imbed us in a messy, uneven world as postqualitative researchers? That is to say: not all bodies make the same scars. Not all bodies scar in response to the same traumas. Not all scars on bodies are equally distributed across a topology of human and more than human life. Bodying is an uncommon, not an egalitarian, proposi­ tion, especially in postqualitative research where we work to attend to the real ebbs and flows of a life that does not obey the ontoepistemological rules it inherits. This means that, as researchers, we might ask how scars point toward a clarity of reality, of livedness, where crafting clarity is about figuring out how to get to know what a scar sets in motion for our attending to the world as bodying researchers, rather than a mark of moments passed. When we run our fingertips over the scars in our flesh, but also over the scars in our manuscripts and our data – the moments where our thinking was ripped open or scraped or sliced – we are engaging with the unequal distribution of scars across the world. We are touching a process that holds bodied together, when not all bodies fall apart in the same way. This is a massive proposition for postqualitative research to think with: how do we get to know scars and scarring in the name of meeting a world where scars are always non-innocent and storied? I move now to the final fracture of this project – Fermentation, a poem on the mediations of rhythm and temporality. I think with this fracture to think about bodying postqualitative clarity as a proposal tangled with time, one that tends to the quietness or out of timeliness of the work of bodying.

FRACTURE THREE Fermentation

I should confess to you: this poem, Fermentation, written by Kaitlyn Boulding (2017), has been the lock screen on my iPhone for a few years now, meaning that I read it every day. It takes time to turn cabbage into kimchi. Let things do their own work: malt-barley & hops, sourdough starters, jars brim-filled with vinegar, sea-salt, sugar, cucumbers, garlic, dill, the peaches we picked in Annapolis Royal, & allow them their stages, salty brines, time alone. If you want to find the closeness spoons find in drawers into a tangier form of tender, you need to hold the silence enzymes love. When you drink cider do you regret the loss of apples? DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-7

Fracture Three 57

It’s the change that happen between the first draft and the fifth and we know when we hold each other In your doorframe, nothing is lost here and all is gained. I want to begin by thinking with the impossibly beautiful passage, “if you want to find the closeness / spoons find in drawers / into a tangier form of tender, / you need to hold the silence / enzymes love.” When thinking about bodying postqualitative research, I take this as a proposition to think with the times and rhythms of researching bodies. To think time with postqualitative research is not a novel proposal (ex: Pacini-Ketchabaw & Kummen, 2016). What this poem opens up is, deepening these existing proposals, the contention that tending to bodily rhythms in research is hard work – we need to “learn to hold the silence / enzymes love.” This is not a practice that can be cultured with humanist notions of time or rhythm – easy referents, like fatigue and temperature can so easily slip into the language of humanist bodied phenomenological experience: my body is cold, which affects my data. I do not want to argue that this is untrue, but I do want to argue that to body postqualitative research, we must do more than this; we must tend to how bodies do silences, tenderness, tanginess, proximity, and pause. Can a body be quiet during a flow of postqualitative engagement? How are bodies loud, interruptive, boisterous during the heavy or sprite moments of researching with postqualitative propositions? “& allow them their stages, / salty brines, time alone” opens us toward thinking postqualitative propositions alongside a certain patience, where to body postqualitative research is not to attack research with a sledgehammer to insert the body but is instead to allow bodies to flood our research, taking the “time alone” necessary for our flesh to get to know our data. There is a humanist imperative to produce research, to produce data, to make clear how and when the body inter­ sects with our data. This, we might learn from Fermentation, is not an imperative for life; rather, how do we give our postqualitative data time alone with our bodies? How do we cultivate a patience that is not inert nor inactive but is gently persistent toward thinking how bodies and flesh matter to a postqualitative research under­ taking? That is to say, “allowing them their stages” does not equate to backing down or backing off the project of bodying postqualitative research, but it is a proposition that this work will take many kinds of time and intersect with many rhythms of life. What narratives of bodied time do our practices of bodying postqualitative research perpetuate? What narratives of bodied time do our practices of bodying postqualitative research forget, treat as myth, or elide? “It takes time /,” Boulding (2017) writes, “to turn cabbage into kimchi.” In these words, we learn that cabbage and kimchi matter; that is, we make decisions about how and what we ferment with. We are responsible for how and what we drag and present into postqualitative research processes concerned with bodied time and bodied patience. For example, we think here with caffeine shakes,

58 Fracture Three

antipsychotic medications, and scars. These are not innocent choices. They are my cabbage. They will form the backbone of my kimchi. They take time to turn from one to another, to ferment. This is important for thinking bodying postqualitative research because it advances the proposition that this work does not abide by humanism’s demands for efficiency or transparency. Kimchi cannot go back to cabbage. Fermentation cannot undo its bubbles and funk. This means that the notion of transparency, or reversibility or track-ability, hits differently when thinking about bodying postqualitative research. Put differently: we are honest, as postqualitative researchers, bodying our work, differently than the dictates of scholarly honesty we inherit. To body postqualitative research is not simply to name that this is a project we are undertaking and then to steamroll ahead, as though this caveat is enough to justify the machinations of such a process. We need to do more than only name that we are bodying postqualitative research. We need to “take time” to figure out what this means in each project we engage; we need to do the work of bodying postqualitative research rather than tell this work as a story with an already punctuated conclusion. What this looks like, I do not know exactly. I suspect it involves a lot of us getting it wrong, finding ourselves sliding down a slippery huma­ nist slope that describes our body’s functions without attuning to the back and forth between them and our data and our writing. Perhaps it is in clawing up such a ubi­ quitous slippery slope that we turn cabbage to kimchi, that our engagements become about understanding how bodies take up postqualitative calls for method, data, and clarity otherwise.

4 PEDAGOGICAL INQUIRY WORK, PROPRIOCEPTION, AND A SWEATY QUAD

I want to turn now to thinking with a moment from my own research, Moving Pedagogies, a pedagogical inquiry research project done in close collaboration with early childhood educators and children. We drew in postqualitative propositions to think through how we move together in early childhood education. Two ques­ tions anchored our research: how do we move together? How do we get to know a place with movement? Our guiding questions cared deeply about the ethics and politics of moving as a collective project. This meant a rejection of many of the knowledges through which early childhood knows moving, which are largely drawn from physical education paradigms that situate moving as a method for developing an individual child’s motor skills and physical fitness (Land & Todorovic, 2021). We wanted to take moving as a question and a proposition in its motions: how do we navigate space together through movement? How do we engage complex common worlds (Taylor, 2020) as a moving body? How do bodies move with our pedagogies – and how do our movement pedagogies respond with the world? In large part, we wanted to move while rejecting the humanist emphasis on a singular moving body traversing the world beyond its borders. It is here that Moving Pedagogies has great affinity with this book; we wanted to experiment with possibilities for being a moving researching body in the fissures of humanism. Pedagogical inquiry research methodologies are close allies of postqualitative research. What is required of the researchers – educators, children, scholars – is a careful methodological patience that weaves pedagogy with researching. Put dif­ ferently, pedagogical inquiry research pulls at the pedagogical threads advanced by postqualitative propositions and works to immerse postqualitative proposals in the rich muck of thinking with pedagogy. Questions of data, methodology, and clarity become meaningful for how they draw us into educational encounters and open horizons for thinking about how to live well with children in messy, inequitable worlds (Hodgins, 2019; Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017, 2022). Pedagogical DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-8

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inquiry research asks for us to participate in a process of offering active provoca­ tions to work with that are aimed at agitating the status quo (Nxumalo, 2016; in our case, human-centered, developmental conceptions of moving), documenting these as pedagogical documentation or narration (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015) – that is, documentation that takes as its mode pedagogical interpretation and not capture, veracity, reproducibility, or assessment – and through processes of enga­ ging this documentation in conversations with children and educators, opens toward alternate ways of interpreting the documentation. We then return to offering provocations that continue to invigorate the strands of inquiry that moti­ vate our thinking together (Land & Danis, 2016). In Moving Pedagogies, we main­ tained an ongoing blog where we shared pedagogical documentation and our on­ the-go theorising and interpretations. Pedagogical inquiry is quite an iterative methodology and it takes as its engine the pedagogical and thinks curriculum as a making, never reproducing the universalised technocratic demands of taken­ for-granted early childhood education curriculum that thinks curriculum as a pre-articulated bundle of knowledge to be transferred to empty-vessel children (Hodgins, Kummen, & Merewether, 2022; Nxumalo, Gagliardi, & Won, 2020). Instead, pedagogical inquiry work is just that: work. As I have written previously, pedagogical inquiry research sprouts tendrils that burrow, unevenly, into the copious political flows that unceasingly meet and disperse to create the ethical terrain that is early childhood education … a situated concern might crawl atop others in our work of answering to the local political commitments of educators, researchers, children, families, and ecologies, but the multitude of politics that pedagogical inquiry work contacts endures even when not foregrounded. (Land, 2022, p. 3) Pedagogical inquiry work is, therefore, deeply non-innocent work. It activates our pedagogical declarations and intentions as researchers and educators (Nxumalo, Vintimilla, & Nelson, 2018; Vintimilla, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Land, 2021). The literature houses some brilliant examples of what can happen in collisions of pedagogical inquiry work and postqualitative research propositions (ex: Hodgins, 2014; Nelson & Hodgins, 2020; Molloy Murphy, 2021; Weldemariam, 2020). Often, these inquiries share a commitment to decentering humanism’s human and engaging in a slow science that intentionally stutters toward creating conditions to understand children and educators’ relations with place, life, and educational pro­ cesses. Pedagogical inquiry is, as Hodgins (2014) argues, and I echo, a postqualitative project. It thinks data as contingent and emergent, as a process and a practice aimed at getting to know the world without positivism, universalism, or a commitment to a fictional axiom of true authenticity. Methodologically, pedago­ gical inquiry research is invested in experimentation beyond certainty and takes methodology as an ontoepistemological question of knowledge generation and accountability in situated research gatherings. That is never loses sight of pedagogy

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is its commitment to methodology. With clarity, pedagogical inquiry research seeks a relentless emphasis on returning to questions of pedagogy: what does this doc­ umentation or moment mean for how we take early childhood education as an educational experience? It is a refusal of clarity in the name of re-asserting the categorisations of child development and its associated practices, and instead seeks a clarity more loyal to emplaced relations that shape what becomes possible and impossible for children and educators’ subjectivities and relations. I am invoking the concept of “pedagogy” in a very particular way as I describe Moving Pedagogies. Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2020) propose that rather than defining pedagogy, we ask “how might we think of pedagogy? This query allows us to share pedagogy’s histories, conceptual difficulties, inherent foreclosures, and contextual particularities rather than merely defining the concept” (p. 629). Peda­ gogy, here, is a process, a project, a mode of life and speculative future-crafting. They continue, proposing that “pedagogy thinks early childhood education, not as a predetermined project but through open questions, such as: What is education? What are education’s purposes? What is education for, and for who and what has it been hitherto?” (p. 635). Pedagogy, as it matters in pedagogical inquiry research, never strays from asking the crosshatched purposes of educational encounters; it cares deeply about the subjectivities and relations and knowledges made possible and impossible in different moments with children. In particular reference to the structural inheritances of humanism, and of humanism’s grip on mainstream status-quo education in the Canadian context, Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw argue against the proposition that early childhood needs to have an already defined ideal of humanity. Our suggestion is that pedagogy orients early childhood to keep the question of the human project open and in constant correspondence with the world in which it operates and brings newly into being thereby. (p. 637) Here we come to know humanism as a lingering and powerful actor in dominant education systems, one which pedagogical thought must disrupt. To think peda­ gogically is to recognise that our modes of meeting and moving are not defined by the structures of the human but are, in a much more hopeful vein, an open ques­ tion to be grappled with. Decentering the child of child development becomes critical to nurturing alternative modes of engaging with children (Land et al., 2022. In the context of Moving Pedagogies, pedagogy does not resolve, abstract, or plaster moving to any singular conception or practice. It does not instrumentalise nor universalise nor define moving. Rather, it orients us toward ways of attuning to moving for its world-making possibilities with children. Pedagogy is, importantly, not dictated by the epistemological configurations of child development. In the early childhood education context, child development matters as a profoundly interpretative practice (Burman, 2016). Child development is utilised to center an idealised, romanticised version of a Eurocentric, able-bodied

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child who aligns with the “normative” vision of childhood (Castãneda, 2002) – it is this child who is the outcome of healthy child development. The “universalizing, human-centred, technocratic, individualizing, and often violent logics and con­ sequences of child development” (Land & Frankowski, 2022, p. 457) become a concern for pedagogy when pedagogy becomes concerned with achieving the dictates of child development (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020). The child, as a subject of the education system, becomes the center of pedagogical concern such that all curricular activities are actualised in the name of materialising the child subject of child development. It is not dramatic to trace child development back to the humanist origins that it shares with mainstream qualitative research; they are partner projects in reasserting an anthropocentric, Enlightenment-informed vision of the “good” human and the ontoepistemic processes that sustain such a human. Just as postqualitative research intervenes in this image of humanism, postdevelop­ mental approaches (Blaise & Hamm, 2022; Land & Nelson, 2022; Murris, 2017, 2019; Nxumalo, 2021; Rooney, Blaise, & Royds, 2021; Woods et al., 2018) work to unsettle the ontological pillars of child development by advancing the conten­ tion that childhood is more situated, emergent, responsive, and entangled with the world than the sanitised and reproductive logics of child development allow. In the context of the research moment that I will share shortly, child development is relevant because I am discussing children’s movement, which is a facet of children’s experiences very often co-opted to the discursive captures of child development. Motor learning, skills acquisition, and physical fitness are popular developmentladen techniques for apprehending children’s moving (Land & Vidotto, 2021). In what follows, I work to think children’s movement beyond these concepts and their developmental intentions.

Proprioception Proprioception names the body’s incredible ability to understand where it exists in space. It is the internal system that keeps us anchored in the world by navigating where our limbs are as they meet with the wider entanglements around us. Gan­ devia and Proske (2016) name it as a “sixth sense,” adding an almost mysterious edge to its very tactile, practical functions. Proprioceptive senses “include the senses of position and movement of our limbs and trunk, the sense of effort, the sense of force, and the sense of heaviness” (Proske & Gandevia, 2012, p. 1651). A torrent of neuron receptors, located throughout our bodies, come together to create a neu­ rological “map” of our body, which they then use to locate the endpoint of each limb as it travels through space. Often, these receptors live in joints so that they have immediate access to the most vulnerable and flexible points of bodies. In the sensory cortex of our brain (Johnson et al., 2008), our proprioceptive system meets with the vestibular and visual systems, collating more information about how a body is encountering a space. This sense means that we can know, for example, where our hands are without having to see them; we can run across bumpy grass without looking down at our ankles. Because of this network of proprioceptive

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senses, we can come to experience and understand how our bodies accelerate, balance, and coordinate. Proprioception can be both conscious and unconscious, taking on either an intentional bent or a reflexive response, and we most often draw upon our proprioceptive sense for stability and for pre-empting and tracking our movements through space. To know how our bodies meet with space is to understand that we are not simply a human container moving through the world, but we are continually negotiating, with our proprioceptive sense, a mode of engaging with the world. Here is a fissure of humanism: we do not move through the world as easily as we might arrogantly imagine; to walk with confidence is to plug into an avalanche of sensory receptors and muscle fibers dedicated to keeping us upright. Our move­ ment is, proprioception teaches us, inherently vulnerable. It is a collective activity from a neuronal scale to an interpersonal scale, entangled with the world at each juncture. When our limbs collide with space, they initiate this cascade of proprio­ ceptive work that unsettles the image of a fully capable human traversing the world. Instead, we can tune to the constant work that is required for being a moving body within a place. Further, that proprioception is both intentional and unintentional disrupts the humanist vision of a fictional human cognition tri­ umphing over a fleshy body, because proprioception keeps us upright and sturdy without a rational signal to do so. We can trust our bodies to hold us because of proprioception. This marks a relation of susceptibility but also of robust faith and reliance; we can very literally meet with the world because this “sixth sense” operates outside of humanist mind/body divide mythology. I want now to move into a story from the Moving Pedagogies project to think with proprioception and our relations with moving with children.

A Sweaty Quad Here is an excerpt from our blog post, “Resisting Explaining.” The “quad,” as we colloquially name it, is a green space surrounded on four sides by a square-shaped building that houses university classrooms and the early childhood education center. Today we went to a walk with a steamy/sweaty/dripping/raining/foggy quad – it was this unexpected, unfamiliar phenomena where the quad seemed to trap the warm air after a rainstorm, filling the quad with a dense, heavy mist as though it was raining from all directions. The “rain” caused us and the children who noticed it to stop, to ask “what just happened”, but not necessarily to seek a rational, science-driven water cycle/weather explanation, but to actually wonder: what just happened – what is this incredibly cool thing that this quad place can do, and how do I respond to it? We thought about words like liveliness and brilliance: attuning to the live­ liness and brilliance of this place where we often pay attention to its risks and

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troubles (needles, strangers, dogs, pollution, air quality). We thought about this alongside wanting to value this moment as just one moment of connecting to place, to the quad; about none of us having a for sure explanation for what happened, but also not wanting to seek an explanation, to capture this moment within a particular meteorological phenomena or technical explana­ tion. To instead think about connectedness, and about how this one morning this incredibly unique and awe-some thing happened within the quad, and how that is a story we and the children now hold of this place. In this moment, we walked a stumbly path of wanting to be awed by the awe­ some phenomenon that was mist trapped in the quad and of wanting to resist the pull to seek scientific explanations or to tell stories that might capture the mist into a concept that we already know. We encountered the steamy quad as a question of pedagogy: what about this experience draws us into unfamiliar relations that might inspire or ask of us strange responses? Inspiration, in this moment, mattered as an ethical and political decision, where to be inspired by this incredible pocket of foggy rain-smelling air in the middle of a huge city is to take seriously what this phenomenon asks of us and how we might make decisions as we get to know the mist. To be drawn into relation with this mist is to pay attention to it – deeply, and with a curiosity that rejects developmentalism’s mechanics or certitude – and to acknowledge that there is much we do not know about what is unfolding around us. The children stretched their arms in front of them, losing sight of their fingers in the mist. One of the children kicked at the mist, noticing it swallowing his foot. We tried to touch the untouchable mist; we marveled as it gobbled our limbs and limited our sight in front of us. Sensing – proprioception – in this sense, is a question of taking the risk of overwhelm, of sensing instead of explaining, of truly acknowledging there are worldly happenings that do not require humanist expla­ nations. We knew we had hands but the sweaty quad made us question the reali­ ties of these hands – are they ours? Are they enveloped in a mysterious mist? How can we lose our limbs in the sweat of the quad – and what relations with our bodies become possible when we do? This is sensing as the risky work of disorienting, of noticing our involvement as entanglement and not observation. Accompanying this is a sense of how our inherited frameworks for knowing bodies and sense, and proprioception, fail. We are often taught to know proprioception as an unassailable truth: my body will know where my arm is; it will sense that arm in relation to space and I will have a cognitive map of how this arm is engaging with the world. Instead, sense mattered as a marker of the failed, inadequate logics of expertise or cognition that fuel the figure of the human amid the Anthropocene (Taylor, 2020) because we had an embodied sense that this moment was meant to be responded with and carried with us, but not interpreted nor duplicated. Instead, thinking of our bodies with/in space took on questions of recognition and response, where we knew we were embroiled in a world with the misty fog and that moving with the air would require we set aside our typical movement lexicon and instead co-create situated,

Pedagogical Inquiry Work, Proprioception, and a Sweaty Quad 65

small ways of moving with (Pollitt, Blaise, & Rooney., 2021) the fog as an over­ whelming, lively, brilliant participant in our collecting movings. Manning (2014, p. 168) writes of “exuberant disorientation” where “being danced in the moving, to feel the composition of movement tuning to a topology of spacetime that affects, that tweaks the emergent bodying affectively” (168) names the potentialities of moving with the world. Moving with exuberant dis­ orientation demands of us not only a rejection of humanist frames of quantifying movement but also a suspension of the moving body as the independent, rational human subject. For Manning, “this force of movement-moving has a quality that is ineffable, a quality – an affective tonality in the moving – that touches movement’s limit as force of form, shifting the dance to a momentary place of intervention” (168). What becomes disoriented in practicing exuberant disorientation are the multiple processes of subject formation that we have allowed into our skeletons and how the pieced-together puzzle that is our body moves otherwise with dis­ orientation. What is exuberant and disorienting about exuberant disorientation is that the brilliant overflow of exuberance and the rich inventiveness of disorienta­ tion cannot be pre-planned products of a moving encounter – it takes proprio­ ception as a fact and rearticulates it as inaugurating an educational process. To sense with exuberant disorientation is to enter a relation of destabilising and excess, where sweaty air outstrips the bodied borders we often reiterate in our mechanised, perceptible movements. Doing proprioception with exuberant disorientation amid the misty, dewy quad is to move in concert with the unknowns of the heavy air and the damp grass; to move with, as Manning provokes, “movement [that] exceeds the theme, always out of reach of form-as-such” (168) amid a collective project of responding – toward creating conditions for exuberant disorientation ­ to the suspended rain, resisting the urge to recuperate movement to an already known language of twirling or rolling or jumping. To move in dialogue with exuberant disorientation can never be to plan for such a relation – exuberant dis­ orientation cannot be a curricular goal for children. Instead, as Manning writes, exuberant disorientation happens when it is “not the subject inventing, but movement inventing” (168). Trapped mist, raining from all directions, bodies, grass, rubber boots, muscles that stretch, bodies that are made and remade as they respond with the dewy quad and become a little less Human: these relations inspire and are inspired by exuberant disorientation, over and over, pausing and recom­ posing each time early childhood education’s certainty or surveillance or develop­ mental image of the ideal child subject interjects in movement. Pulling our “Resisting Explaining” blog post into dialogue with Manning’s (2014) exuberant disorientation, proprioception becomes a question of epistemic accountability. Rather than inspiration being oriented toward motivated, fulsome productivity, getting to know our body as it meets this sweaty space names who we choose to think with and how we choose to notice and be within the world and why. Our bodies are here; the sweaty fog is here; moving is unfolding – and we are trying to comprehend our fleshy container within such an entanglement. What, we might ask, do we draw children into with our moving together at the

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exuberant junctures of bodies and mist? How? Why? Rather than trust in resources or interventions that aim to inspire children to move, we might cultivate a suspi­ cion as we pay attention to the construction of sense, making visible the intentions, reach, and relations that hold any iteration of proprioceptive force together. With Manning, we can add a strangeness to our moving with children, where to use existing tools of inspiration is to reiterate a prevailing child subject but risking moving otherwise might draw us into relations of motion that upset the sovereign, individual movement-skill demonstrating child. To be think proprioception beyond its techno-scientific literal interpretation with moving with children is to do moving with the world, a moving with that disassembles and re-crafts how any body moves with the dynamism of life. This entails a shift, where rather than the individuating and performance-oriented logic of “I know exactly where my arm is at all times,” we must think instead about how sense unfolds within moving, where sense threads through the complex ethical and political forces that call bodies into movement. Moving is always creating a relational constellation (one never estranged from the forces that try to capture it – like child development) in motion, creating bodies and worlds in moving over and over.

FRACTURE FOUR Childless Offspring

This poem, Childless Offspring, comes from Rebecca Salazar’s (2021) anthology, sulphurtongue. I should admit I would prefer the ghosts come out fully screaming just to prove that they are there; that I am as likely to turn up fucking wasted at your door as I am to sprout long, verdant wings. A haunting is only a pheromone stain, the rate of cortisol secreted in a place by bodies flown by by-wings, wormed to imperceptibility before you came. I am the last resort my ancestors prayed long they would not come to. Inconvenient excess of emotion and of stubborn hair with one foot slipping on banana peels and one foot firmly in the grave. Loose end to their long plait of generations – guilty, although unrepentant, cup of flesh. “A haunting,” writes Salazar (2021), “is only a pheromone stain” (p. 24), invoking a historicity of the body that is fractured in its physiology; a haunting – a nostalgia made of lingering, of the strangeness of a voice that threads past with potential – is a mark made by a biological body. Pheromones are about dialogue: they are secreted by one body, on its public edges, to be taken in by another body through its sensory affairs. Pheromones are meant to be received. I will think, in DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-9

68 Fracture Four

the coming chapter, about the idea of our sensorial palate, where sensory experi­ ence implicates us in a world. For Salazar, this is a world of haunting, a world that has an eerie weight and wait to it. In thinking postqualitative research, we can take this a provocation toward temporality: what are the pheromones of our research that invoke a haunting? How do we do researching bodies that proffer something to be absorbed, taken in, sensed by another? Interestingly, much of the research on pheromones focuses on sexuality and attraction (Verhaeghe, Gheysen, & Enzlin, 2013). Pheromones, so it goes, matter because they bring mates together. They create an affinity. What modes of bringing bodies together do we make possible and impossible with postqualitative propositions? What affinities – leanings, wave­ lengths – do we craft with bodies against the walls of humanism? This is a question, I suggest, of how our research alliances become bodied. We so often create cita­ tional trajectories and friendships through words, through the typed brackets that certain citational styles use to invoke some sense of affinity (or, critique and refu­ sal). But what is it to take that bracket as a wrinkle on a forehead, a pheromone offered up to a co-conspirator, a mark on and from a body that needs alliances in order to research otherwise? Salazar (2021) continues, offering that “the rate of cortisol secreted in a place / by bodies flown by by-wings, wormed / to imperceptibility before you came” (p. 24). Imperceptibility. This is a word on postqualitative bingo. It is used to invoke a sense of unknowing, of becoming invisible to the radar of humanism’s status quo. To be imperceptible is not to be inconsequential, but is to no longer make sense to the epistemologies that structure our modes of gazing, of knowing. How does a body made of cortisol and of pheromones become imperceptible in postqualitative researching relations? Salazar’s mention of cortisol is a reminder that imperceptible does not mean invisible or fictional; a body is still made of adrenals that produce stress hormones and those stress hormones are secreted in dialogue with a world of various stresses and triggers and relations that demand a response. So then, how do bodies become imperceptible in postqualitative research? This is, I offer, a proposal toward bodying otherwise. To what do I want my body to be imperceptible? Technocratic data, instrumental methodologies, positivist clarity. I want my flesh to stop making sense to these, and I want my body to cease making sense of these. As a body researching in the fissures of humanism, to become imperceptible is an act of phy­ siologies-grounded refusal, where I am not refusing the facts of my body as a physio­ logical entity but I am intentionally and imperfectly denying it the ability to be made fully knowable by the conventions of Euro-Western science or normative humanism. This raises interesting questions about how and what such a body can do. What is it, for example, to type as an imperfect body thinking postqualitative propositions? With what do my finger muscles, tendons, neurons, and bones type as I grapple with data, methodology, clarity, and pedagogy – what worlds do I plug into? What entangle­ ments do I body? What contagions do I risk? To conclude this poem, Salazar writes, “loose end / to their long plait of gen­ erations – / guilty, although unrepentant, cup of flesh” (p. 24). This makes me think about the work of inheritance in postqualitative research. Throughout this

Fracture Four 69

book, I have tried to imagine a generous citational practice that honors that postqualitative thinking has lived an entire life before I even knew the world invoked by the word “qualitative” (let alone, “post”). This book is an inheritance; it is inheriting. My researching body, working with postqualitative propositions, is an inheritance. Bodying is inheriting. Salazar speaks of the “long plait of generations” (p. 24), putting forth an image that inheriting is not a linear task but an entangled one, one with rhythms and ebbs and flows, and one that asks that we do not draw straight lines where straight lines were never meant to live. To pick up the postqualitative propositions of those who have written before me is, as a researching body, to feel the labor of their sore bodies as they rise from a day of writing. It is to recognise that bodying postqualitative research is not a project invested only in the present or only as a proposal for an otherwise future. Bodies – be that a “cup of flesh” (p. 24) or a body of knowledge – do temporal research relations. This is a good question to carry as we work to body postqualitative research: how do we body the temporal relations, traces, and “loose ends” (p. 24) that nourish our propositions?

CONCLUSION Bodying Postqualitative Research

I want to conclude this little book by offering forward three propositions for thinking through and living through the work of being a researching body within the fissures of humanism. We have, to this point, thought through method, data, and clarity with caffeine shakes, antipsychotic medications, and scars; what I want to do now is to burrow into questions of how the body might proceed to deepen research relations and questions in an ever emerging and shapeshifting postqualitative space. It is important that I craft these propositions in a propositional way – that is, I am not proposing that these three actions are concrete ways that we can better think with the body in postqualitative research. Rather, I situate them as events or as processes that open toward the possibility of being a researching body with the rich knots postqualitative researchers articulate and grapple with. Accordingly, I end each proposition with a series of questions that I resist answer­ ing. I want them to take on a life with the body and research caverns that each reader inhabits and inherits. I hope that they will drive postqualitative research questions into a future where we wonder, collectively, what it is to be this incredible array of flesh and microbes that takes seriously a world of knowledge generation and motion beyond humanism’s grip.

Proposition One: Imagine How Postqualitative Relations with the Biosciences Might Proceed Lather (2013) writing on postqualitative research, argues that “out of mutated dominant practices, through a convergence of practices of intensity and emer­ gence, both practice and objects of a field are redefined and reconfigured” (p. 640). What this means in the context of thinking postqualitative relations with the biosciences is that we are not seeking one relation between postqualitative research and the biosciences – their intersections and collisions are not questions DOI: 10.4324/9781003353676-10

Conclusion 71

to be resolved. Rather, we need practices that engage biosciences with “intensity and emergence,” that are not scared by the epistemic and ontological power of normative and normalising Euro-Western bioscience, but that take biosciences as a powerful but non-totalising knowledge with which to think the possibilities for researching bodies. This is different than using biosciences as a metaphor, something I have tried hard to resist. We do not need to find the poetry or romanticism in bodily functions; we need to find the functions that ask hard questions of our researching proposals and practices of method, data, and clarity. This means tuning to the nuances of what biosciences know about bodies and then becoming the motion that drags these nuances into dialogue with postqualitative research’s tendrils: how do we read, hear, live sciences and postqualitative work together, knowing them for the aporias and disjunctures they enliven and being suspicious of their too-easily remedied affinities or allegories? How do bodies ask hard questions of postqualitative work, inter­ vening in the powerful sentences we string together in the name of thinking ontoepistemic justice and invention in the wake of humanism’s regulatory sway? This is, perhaps, nearing a methodological question, one that asks how we engage biosciences in postqualitative work: what are the methodological innova­ tions and attentions that we need to take bodies seriously in postqualitative scho­ larship? What if we do not know this answer already, what if it flees description or embodiment or interference, and asks us to imagine different modes of thinking sciences in the fissures of humanism? The final line of Willey’s (2016) Undoing Monogamy is as follows: “when we claim sciences, instead of ‘engaging’ them, the terrain shifts from one of how un/ friendly feminists are to Science to one of what a world of sciences has to offer, where so much is at stake” (p. 146). This is, I suggest, a timely initial motion into thinking bodies with postqualitative research where we need to think about the politics of claiming sciences with postqualitative proposals. This is not a contrite practice, not one where we apologise for the violences of normative Euro-Western Science and commit to becoming different types of scientists (although we prob­ ably need to do this too). Instead, taking Willey’s proposal seriously is about asking what this work of claiming vs. engaging puts into our researching lives: how do we claim different sciences differently with different postqualitative commitments? How, for example, do we need to claim sciences when talking about method – what of our methodological intentions and groundings cling to different threads of scientific practice, both hopefully, intentionally, and infuriatingly? This practice of “claiming” is, I contend, an interesting one to add to the lexicon of postqualitative research: what do we claim in the name of thinking sciences with postqualitative work? And, methodologically, what does the work of claiming sciences entail in the face of thinking bodies in the fissures of humanism? This is not, I would sug­ gest, simply a practice of integration – I want to think with this scientific knowl­ edge to add energy to this postqualitative question – but one of inventing a practice of claiming that we do not yet know the contours of. I am reminded here of St. Pierre’s (2013) postqualitative work:

72 Conclusion

deeply embedded in the new ontology are concerns that acknowledge the destruction of the world humanism and its science projects encourage with their man/nature, human/nonhuman binaries. Refusing that binary logic which pervades our language and thus our living is a priority, because if we see ourselves as always already entangled with, not separate from or superior to matter, our responsibility to being becomes urgent and constant. (p. 655) Constancy and urgency mark the project of claiming, and not simply engaging, with sciences in postqualitative work. We need to forge practices that take sciences’ history as a violent epistemic formation seriously, but we need too to ask questions of what endures of the body after we strip back the normalising functions of sci­ ence: what becomes possible for postqualitative work with the body through the labor of claiming sciences in a postqualitative vein? And – how do we figure out how to do this, collectively, and not as a practice isolated in the bounded, indivi­ dualised research spheres that humanist research holds so dear?

Proposition Two: Build Otherwise Imaginaries and Lexicons for Doing Bodies with Postqualitative Proposals We have spent time with Squier’s (2004) creation of biomedical imaginaries, and with Willey’s (2016) conception of biopossibility, which have made clear that in postqualitative work, we need to turn toward what our relations with bodies, and bodily sciences, will ask of us and will generate as we continuously inherit the fis­ sures of humanism. When I read biomedical imaginaries and biopossibilities in the context of postqualitative research, I am struck by the imperative to generate an unfamiliar lexicon, a lexicon for the afterlife of our relations with bodies where the after is an after positivism and normalisation and the violent epistemic captures of Euro-Western sciences. I use the word “lexicon” here carefully, wanting to stray from making only a discursive or semantic argument and thinking more along Karen Barad’s (2007) conception of the material discursive, where a lexicon matters for what it puts in motion for life and for living, researching bodied practices. How then, do we begin to articulate a living lexicon for thinking researching bodies in the fissures of humanism? What kinds of teethy language do we need to autopsy the bodies we inherit and inhabit, and the research practices they make possible and impossible? Lather (2013) proposes that we might ask, in situated postqualitative research assemblages, “what deaths of this and that and (re)turns need to be taken into account” (p. 635). In our space, we might ask what (re)turns with language might we need for bodying postqualitative research? I propose that we (re)turn – re-encounter, flip and mull over and over for their differences – some of the vocabulary that we have become almost fearful of in postqualitative spaces. Words like consequence, diagnosis, and agonist are ones that flood through bodies and biosciences, marking relations that reactions that matter for how bodies come to matter. These are also, concurrently, words that rightfully spur suspicion in the

Conclusion 73

heart of postqualitative researchers who have come to be wary of the teleological, explanatory power of such language in humanist research. How then, do we (re) turn to these formations as bodies doing postqualitative work? How do we think about how the, for example, diagnostic structures that shape how we come to know a body also ask hard questions of postqualitative practices? What if we refuse to give up on the idea of diagnosing and, rather than allow for it to exist as a word ripe with incredible explanatory power, see it as a fragmented practice of getting to know a body: how do I diagnose my researching body, and how does bodying research in the fissures of humanism become a practice of ongoing diagnosis where to diagnose it to attune, not attenuate? Taylor (2017) offers that creating knowledge-making practices which are immanent, embodied, embedded, entangled and situated; which privilege indeterminacy, uncon­ tainability, excess, multiplicity, and the happenstance; and which make space for the human alongside and with the nonhuman is a very real challenge. It requires making methodology anew with each research endeavour; it means attentiveness to the micro, to the instance, and to singularity; it is productive of multiplicity; and it is about entangled responsibility and accountability. (p. 322) Highlighting the “micro” and the “instance” is, I want to suggest, a practice toward building a different lexicon for thinking bodies in postqualitative research. There is, and deservedly so, an undercurrent of distrust for the universalising functions of science’s languaging of bodies: muscles are muscles, this already per­ ceptible thing; depression is depression, this formation of medication and molecules and moments that can be conceptualised and treated in already perceptible (though slippery) ways. What if we delve into the micro, the instance, and think about building a lexicon for thinking bodying in postqualitative research as a project toward unthreading the familiar dictations by which we preach a body. For example, how do we get to know muscles for their singularities in a postqualitative research collision? This is, in a sense, a reclamation of the messy bodily happenings that science has worked hard to reduce into standardisations and universalisations. What if we take the most obvious of bodied lexicons, like muscles or brains or skin, and claim (following Willey [2016]) them as verbs instead of descriptors? What becomes of enzymes (think to Boulding’s Fermentation), eyes and skin and stalactites (revisit Choi’s Turing Test_Love), or bodies as a fishbowl (here is Benaim’s Minnows) when we take the world-making power of these bodied languages ser­ iously as interlocuters in postqualitative research? What if we dunk, for example, the fishbowlness of our bellies into the muchness of postqualitative research – what does this language open up for bodying postqualitative work? And, concurrently, what happens when the so-called simplest of bodied formations – fingers, feet – meet with postqualitative propositions? What does this do to the language with which we do research with these bodied formations? Can I describe a finger as a

74 Conclusion

finger, or do I need to build a lexicon around fingers, one that thinks in the energy of motion, bending, stretching, cascades of muscle activity, the buzz of motor neurons, the slip of a fingertip across a keyboard? And, most importantly, how do I avoid a lexicon that slips into metaphor or that returns to the familiarity of description, to instead ask what these muscles and motor neurons mean for how I take up a postqualitative problem: how do my fingers shape this moment with data? What becomes of data when it meets my hands? Why? How?

Proposition Three: Craft Ways to Intentionally, but Not Anthropocentrically, Body Postqualitative Research I have, throughout this book, been walking a sort of very slippery tightrope that, I recognise a skeptical reader might think, I have fallen off a few times: as the heartbeat of this book is a contention that we can think with the human body without humanism, that we can body postqualitative research without this being a reassertion of the anthropocentrism that postqualitative research has long endea­ vored to interrupt. I think that such a project is entirely possible: we can body postqualitative research without recourse to anthropocentrism and the dictates of humanism. On postqualitative research, Benozzo (2021) writes that “research that proceeds by callidae iuncturae, unusual combinations which become enlivened through hints or stimuli or pretexts (perhaps new ways to name what we usually call data?) of an aesthetic, theoretical, intuitive nature” (p. 169). It is this emphasis on “unusual combinations” that I think opens space for us to think the body beyond humanism: we need to tune to ways of bodying that are unusual, that are not typically woven into the literature through conventions that we already know like embodiment or emotion, and instead get to know the body beyond the fix­ tures of humanism. This is, as I have been arguing, also a project of getting to know the body beyond normalising Euro-Western sciences, but, harkening back to Benozzo’s proposal of unusual combinations, does not mean eschewing bioscien­ tific narratives of the body and the possibility that we might claim these narratives otherwise. Humanism asks us to know the human body, to know the body of the enlightened, individualist, neoliberal subject. We can know a different body that is differently human: one that, following all of the feminist science studies scholars we have visited with – Frost, Mol, Murphy, Pitts-Taylor, Squier, and Willey – cares about how bodies come to matter in the project of navigating a collective ethical and political life. For Lather (2013), “out of mutated dominant practices, through a convergence of practices of intensity and emergence, both practice and objects of a field are redefined and reconfigured” (p. 640). This is, I think, a mantra for bodying postqualitative research beyond humanism and anthropocentrism: we need to reconfi­ gure how it is we get to know bodies within research – not just as the subject or object of research, or the vessel by which research gets produced, or the anchor that weighs down possibilities for thinking in the future or speculatively. Rather, we need to build postqualitative researching practices that confront the human

Conclusion 75

body for its humanisms and that, in the same move, imagine that body beyond the dictates humanism so easily offers as referents for getting to know a body. One of these, that I have worked to move away from throughout the book, is metaphor: we cannot only know the body as metaphor. Another is vessel: we cannot only know the body as the material vessel that types out words on a page and the words then do the work. To think the body as a limitation is another; we might think we know the possibilities for how a body can and cannot participate in postqualitative research, but what if we take seriously that these possibilities are humanism’s anthropocentric possibilities and are ripe for reconfiguration? This third proposition that I offer, that we need to craft ways to intentionally, but not anthro­ pocentrically, body postqualitative research, is the proposition I think we will fail most often at. It is hard to intently know a body beyond the logics of a humancentered world, because so many of our existing modes for knowing bodies reinscribe the human body as the fulcrum upon which we meet the world. I think it is wonderful for us to fail at this proposition, as each failure unsettles humanism’s grip on the researching body a teeny bit more. We are, after all, human bodies – per­ haps not Human, but human, in that we are a specific container of flesh and microbes that works in particular, not always predictable but always situated, ways. That is not a reality we need to flee from, but one that we can turn into, lean into, and ask: how do we body postqualitative research in the fissures of humanism?

Final Gesture: On Education Research I hope it has not been lost that in the context of this book, I am thinking about bodying postqualitative research in education – be that early childhood or physical activity education, my interest in the project of what becomes of and with the body as we take up postqualitative provocations is one that unfolds in the context of educational spaces. This means that my interest is also pedagogical; I am invested in the work of bodying otherwise with postqualitative provocations because I hold dear that the question of knowledge generation and mobilisation in education is one entangled wholeheartedly with pedagogy. Following the work of my collea­ gues Cristina Delgado Vintimilla and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (2020), pedagogy is about building a collective life with children, about figuring out how to live well together in the worlds we inherit and inhabit together. Bodying is, too, a collective encounter with crafting a more livable collective life: how, it asks, does taking seriously the work of bodying postqualitative research and living differently in the fissures of Enlightenment, Cartesian humanism change our everyday relations in education spaces? If we do not simply “bring the body back” through easy embo­ diment practices or treat the body as a metaphor, what happens when bodies, research, and pedagogy collide? This is, I propose, a space that can sustain postqualitative inquiry well into the future, where we might wonder together how blurring and blowing up the lines around data, method, and clarity with bodying change how we body our pedagogies. Perhaps we might foreground our relations with bodies, asking how bodily knowledges come to be made and remade amid

76 Conclusion

postqualitative propositions that claim sciences but do not know biosciences to be overwhelmingly interpretative or descriptive but part of the coming together of what a body can do. Maybe we will ask questions of how bodying meets peda­ gogies as postqualitative research agitates the fissures of humanism that linger around bodies – in the void, the shake, or the failure, what becomes differently possible for bodying in education spaces? And, most importantly, why does this matter for building a collective life together? Throughout this book, my project has unfolded in two interconnected veins: I have intended to bring some propositions articulated by particular feminist science studies scholars into the terrain of postqualitative research in education, working to see how the knowledges advanced by these feminist science studies scholars make clear the fissures of humanism that we inhabit – but do not repair nor remediate – as fleshy bodies doing postqualitative work. I have then worked to raise some proposals and questions for how we might body postqualitative work; how we might do the labor of thinking body as a verb, as bodying, to imagine the body as more than a metaphor or a container and instead get to know the body and its work(s) as another interlocuter in the messy brambles that hold postqualitative research inquiries together. What is important is the impulse to get to know how the body asks questions of our research practices and names questions that feel less than familiar in the ever-growing, richly theorised postqualitative space. This book does not take on a life, I hope, of a theory of how or why to body postqualitative work. Rather, I hope that it gains momentum as a proposition toward thinking otherwise with bodies and the bioscientific knowledges they enliven, differently, with postqualitative proposals. In doing so, I am offering postqualitative research and feminist science studies and any entity inhabiting a body a question: what is the work of bodying, in specificity and in a context? And, what does bodying make visible within our research practices that shift how we get to know the world in meaningful ways?

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INDEX

adrenergic receptor 38

Ahmed, Sara 2

anthropocentrism 74–75

antipsychotic medications 38–40

atherosclerosis 6–7

Barad, Karen 3, 4, 72

Benaim, Sabrina 27; concoction of

provocations 28; Minnows poem

27–28, 29

Benozzo, Angela 1, 74

Bhattacharya, Kakali 13, 52

biocultural bodies as composites-in-motion

19–20, 24, 25

biocultural creatures, human body as

15–18, 19

biomedical imaginaries 30–32, 44–45, 47

biopolitics, topological sense of 48–50 biopossibility 46–48, 72

biosciences, postqualitative relations with 70–72 bodied formations 73–74 bodies 49, 69; as composite-in-tension 19,

25–26; Mol’s definition of 6, 7; times and

rhythms of researching 57

bodying 3, 4, 6–7, 55, 69; data 29;

postqualitative propositions 5–6

bodying postqualitative research 23–26, 70;

anthropocentrism 74–75; antipsychotic

medications 38–40; building imaginaries

and lexicons for doing bodies 72–74; on

education research 75–76; in fissures of

humanism 28, 73; Murphy’s

biopossibility 49–50; postqualitative relations with biosciences 70–72; scars 53–55; times and rhythms of researching bodies 57; Turing Test_Love poem 42–45; see also postqualitative research Boulding, Kaitlyn 56–58

Bozalek, Vivienne 10, 50–52

Britzman, Deborah 38

Butler, Judith 2

Caffeine (C8H10N4O2) 23–24

caffeine jitters 24, 26

caffeine shakes 14, 23–26

Cartesian dualism, embankment with 16

Cartesian humanism change 75

Cartesian mind/body duality and

humanism’s arrogancies 24–25

chaos in data-doing 22

child development 61–62

Childless Offspring (poem by Salazar) 67–69

Choi, Franny 42; biomedical imaginaries

44–45; glass stalactites 44; Turing Test_Love poem 42–44

“claiming”, practice of 71

Colebrook, Claire 37

colonialism 8

composite-in-motion 39–40; biocultural

bodies as 24, 25; eating as 25

composite-in-tension: body as 19, 25–26;

eating as 15, 18–20

concept as method 36–37

contingency 17

84 Index

Deleuze, G. 35

Depression and Other Magic Tricks (Benaim) 27

disciplinary knowledges of science 46

imaginaries: biomedical 30–32, 44–45, 47;

for doing bodies 72–74

imperceptibility 68

eating as composite-in-tension 15, 18–20, 25

embodiment 2–3 Enlightenment 2; Enlightenment-validated

bundle of knowledge 8; humanism’s

conception of body 36; models of human

body 7; project 12

entanglements 49

epistemic imperialism 8

Euro-Western colonial conceptions, elisions

of 6

Eurocentric logics 3

exuberant disorientation 65–66

kinesiology 8

kinship 33, 43

Koro-Ljungberg, Mirka 22

feminist science studies 3–4, 5, 49, 76

Fermentation (Boulding) 55, 56–58 fissures of humanism 7–8, 46, 70; biocultural

creatures as contingent 17–18; in

biomedical imaginaries 32; with bodies

and postqualitative research 26; body as

porous 17; bodying postqualitative

research in 28, 73; body of past to be

body past 50; chaos in data-doing 22;

hubris of humanism,. 16–17; in

neurobiological bodies 32–33; processes

for storying body 20; proprioception 63;

relations between bodied knowledges and

bodies 47; representationalism 36; scars

with 54; separation of discourse from

flesh 47; thinking biopossibility 49; view

of biology 47

FOOSH 8

Foucault, Michel 2

fractures 7–8, 26; Childless Offspring poem 67–69; Fermentation 55, 56–58; Minnows poem 27–29; Turing Test_Love poem 42–45 Frost, Samantha 4, 5, 14, 15, 74; biocultural

bodies as composites-in-motion 24, 25;

biocultural creatures 28; theory of human

as biocultural creatures 15–18, 19

Gandevia, S. 62

genealogy 50

glass stalactites 44

Hamilton, Jennifer 3–4, 8, 9

Haraway, Donna 3, 4, 9, 15, 47

Harding, Sandra 9

histamine receptor 38, 40

Hodgins, B. D. 60

hooks, bell 2

humanism 3 see also fissures of humanism

Lather, Patti 13, 38, 52, 70, 72, 74; boldness

of postqualitative project 12; question of

human with poststructural theories 11–12

lexicons for doing bodies 72–74

Liboiron, Max 4

Lorde, Audre 47

MacLure, Maggie 11; argument against

representation 35–36; postqualitative

research 12; thinking methodology 34

Manning, E. 13, 65–66

materiality 3, 12, 35, 36, 46–47

Mazzei, Lisa 22, 37, 38, 43

McKittrick, Katherine 4

McKnight, Lucinda 52–53

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2

Minnows (poem by Benaim) 27–28

Mol, Annemarie 3, 5, 14, 15, 74; on

atherosclerosis 6; body as composite-in­ tension 25–26, 28; definition of bodies 6, 7; eating as composite-in-tension 15, 18–20 movement-moving 65–66

Moving Pedagogies (Land) 5, 59–61, 63

multiplicity 13, 49, 50

Murphy, Michelle 5, 46, 74; bodies 49;

bodying postqualitative research 49–50;

topological sense of biopolitics 48–50, 55

Murris, Karin 10, 50–52

Nelson, Narda 10

neurobiological bodies 30, 32–33, 39–40

Nordstrom, Susan 12, 13, 21

Nxumalo, Fikile 10

“of the system” of Science 23

olanzapine 38–40

Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica 10, 61, 75

pedagogical inquiry 59–61

pedagogy 61–62, 75

pheromones 67–68

physiologies 2, 8–9; layering

into postqualitative work 3; physiologies-grounded refusal 68

Physiology, notion of 8, 9

Pitts-Taylor, Victoria 4, 5, 30, 32–33, 74

Pollock, Anne 3

Index 85

posthumanism as method 37

postqualitative clarity 46, 50–53 postqualitative data 20, 24; chaos in

data-doing 21–22; as motion, as

movement, as an ethical commitment 21;

newness dialogues with curating

problems 22–23; provocation of thinking

data through webs 22; work of doing and

responding with 21

postqualitative inquiry 21

postqualitative methodologies 1–2, 33;

concept as method 36–37; posthumanism

as method 37; representationalism 35–36;

Squier’s biomedical imaginaries 38; St.

Pierre’s provocation 33–34; St. qualitative

methods 34–35; thinking methodology

34; ultrasoundsfetusimage 37

postqualitative propositions: balancing acts 5;

bodying 5–6; conventional humanist

qualitative inquiry 5

postqualitative provocations 4, 5, 9–13 postqualitative relations with biosciences 70–72 postqualitative research 1, 3, 9, 76; in history of modern research 11; with MacLure 12; Nordstrom and Ulmer’s views 12–13; propositions 60; Taylor’s gestures 12; see also bodying postqualitative research postqualitative scholarship 5

postqualitative theorizing 4

postqualitative work 4

propositions 10, 13

proprioception 62–63, 64

proprioceptive senses 62–63 Proske, U. 62

provocations 5, 33; concoction of 28;

postqualitative 4, 5, 9–13; of thinking

data through webs 22

Qual 1.0, 34

Qual 2.0, 34

Qual 3.0, 34

Qual 4.0, 34

qualitative methods 34–35 queer feminist imaginations 50

queer kin-making with neurobiological

bodies 33

Rautio, Pauliina 5, 13, 26

“reading composing articulating sitting” 52–53

representationalism 35–36

Roy, Deboleena 3

Salazar, Rebecca 67–69 scars 53–55 science: definition of 9; disciplinary knowledges of 46

Science 8, 71; Harding’s invocation of 9;

power of 9; “of the system” of 23

Science of Physiology 4

sensing 64

Serres, Michel 2

Squier, Susan Merrill 4, 5, 30–32, 38, 47,

72, 74 see also biomedical imaginaries

St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams 5, 13, 21;

boldness of postqualitative project 12;

critical to postqualitative inquiry 38;

notion of provocation 33; postqualitative

research in history of modern research 11;

postqualitative work 71–72; qualitative

methods 34–35; question of human with

poststructural theories 11–12

Subramaniam, Banu 3, 8, 9

sweaty quad 63–66

Taguchi, Lenz 37

Taylor, Carol A. 12, 20, 73

thinking concept as method 36–37

topological sense of biopolitics 48–50

Turing Test_Love (poem by Choi) 42–45

Turing test 42

Ulmer, Jasmine 12, 13

Undoing monogamy: The politics of science and

the possibilities of biology (Willey) 46, 71

United States Institute of Medicine

Committee on Military Nutrition

Research 23

Vintimilla, Cristina Delgado 10, 61, 75

Willey, Angela 3, 5, 8, 9, 74; conception of

biopossibility 46–48, 72; queer feminist

imaginations 50; Undoing Monogamy 46, 71