Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events [1 ed.] 0367464837, 9780367464837

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The task: to produce an account that is less an archive than a field of conditions, a set of practices. To anarchive: activate the surplus of experience in the event, make felt how what eludes capture nonetheless makes a difference. To turn without turning against: the AcademicConferenceMachine is not the enemy so much as the symptom (of frontality, of measurability, of discipline). To move beyond authority, allowing the words to tunnel their own uneasy resonances, turning the soil, creating new paths. To become-earthworm. — Erin Manning, Research Chair – Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Director, SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada. In this provocative and disruptive new book, Fairchild and colleagues offer a lively, creative, and necessary intervention into the academic-conference-industry landscape. Questions of ethics, environments, and politics abound, read through intra-actions between (conference) events, geographies, human and non-human actors, and more. What results is a post-qualitative, post-methodological tour de force: Knowledge Production in Material Spaces will disturb your taken-forgranted assumptions about and entanglements within the neoliberal academy. — Michael D. Giardina, Professor, Florida State University, and Director, International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). This exciting book mobilises posthuman and feminist materialist theory to agitate the ‘Academic Conference Machine’. Issuing from a series of experimental conference presentations by the authorial collective, it converts the exhilarations of those original events, with their speeding pulses, sweaty palms and disobedient formats, into energetic, event-ful writing that opens new spaces for knowledge and action inside the neoliberal machine. — Maggie MacLure, Professor, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K. This book is a playful intra-action with a geopolitical world, with multiverse connections, care and response-ability as vibrant nourishments. The six authors (CG Collective) and one more do not stand still; they do collective thinking and doings – IDEAS and materialities with ten events. Experimentations, speculations, process-orientations – push and risk the academic conferences continuously. — Ann Merete Otterstad, Professor, OsloMet University, Oslo, Norway.

After reading this book, attending or planning a conference will never be the same again. The authors put posthumanist feminist thinking, concepts and metaphors to work with great inventiveness and playfulness and they enable ways to know and learn otherwise within ‘the conference’ and beyond. — Malou Juelskjær, Associate Professor in Social Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark. A beautifully curated book? Yes, but more of an event to be curiously returned to time after time as readers become respons-able for disturbing the taken for granted, normative and dominant modes of knowledge production and the AcademicConferenceMachine. An assemblage of theory and creative practices for different embodied and ethical possibilities. — Alison Pullen, Professor of Management and Organization Studies, Macquarie University, Australia.

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN MATERIAL SPACES

Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events assembles and produces interventions that problematize disciplined practices and expectations governing academic conference spaces to generate new ways of thinking/doing conferences. The authors use posthuman, feminist materialist and post-qualitative theories to disrupt knowledge production in neoliberal, bureaucratic conferences spaces. The analysis they offer, and the rhizomatic writing and presentation styles they use, promote forms of educational activism through theory. They interrogate conference spaces as regulated, normalized, standardized modes of academic knowledge production – which they call ‘AcademicConferenceMachine’ – playfully subverting dominant operations and meanings of conferences and workshops to show how we can better interact and produce research, with and for each other. The authors indicate how creative conference practices produce playful possibilities to imagine and produce knowledge differently. Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on place-spaces in early childhood classrooms and gardens, this is activated using speculative methodologies and theoretically informed by feminist materialisms and posthumanisms. Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender, and Director of Research (Education), at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on entangled relations of knowledge-power-gender-space-ethics in higher education. She utilizes transdisciplinary, feminist materialist and posthumanist theories and methodologies and experimental academic writing practices to contest dominant knowledge formations.

Angelo Benozzo is an undisciplined researcher in work and organizational psychology at the University of Valle d’Aosta, Italy where he lectures on qualitative research methods. His research is located between organizational psychology, critical management studies, qualitative research, and cultural studies. Neil Carey’s Ph.D. explored creative fiction as queer disruptor for socio-cultural stories attaching to (homo)sexuality. As well as emerging work on internationalization of higher education, research interests focus on queer and discursive methodologies. He co-authored ‘Discourse: the basics’ for Routledge and publishes in a range of academic journals. Mirka Koro received her Ph.D. from University of Helsinki. She is Professor of qualitative research and Director of doctoral programs at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the intersection of methodology, philosophy, and socio-cultural critique. Constanse Elmenhorst is an Independent scholar and works as a kindergarten teacher. She has a Masters in Early Childhood Education and her research focus is on how materiality is present and revealed in everyday interactions both in early childhood and conference spaces.

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN MATERIAL SPACES Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events

Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor, Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Mirka Koro and Constanse Elmenhorst

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 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 © 2022 Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor, Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Mirka Koro, Constanse Elmenhorst The right of Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor, Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Mirka Koro Constanse Elmenhorst to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367464806 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367464837 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003029007 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

To all our curious souls. To all our curious kin. To those who enjoy disturbances.

CONTENTS

List of images Preface Acknowledgements Prelude

xi xiii xv 1

Entry

19

Bags

30

Thinking-with dirt: viral configurations of/for knowing

47

Autopsy

71

Tables, or not: multiple productions of tablediffractions through spacetimemattering

91

Playful cuts and cartographic mapping: gender-inthe-making - with Teija Rantala

107

String figuring sympoiesis: stringly matterings for doing knowledge-making differently

123

Subversion

141

x

Contents

Seductions

157

Sketching schizoid narratives - with Teija Rantala

172

Intermissions multiple

189

Index

209

IMAGES

Way In American Educational Research Association (AERA) Registration Hall, Metro Convention Centre, Toronto, 6 April 2019 The book CG Collective Pacifier-penis-straw-event-room Travelling Gorilla Bag-Angelo/Bag-Neil Bag-Autopsy Cut Hair Crumbs-dust Detritus Me and my shadow Rice-tray fusions Table x: Anatomy of invisible body-knowledge Autopsical practicings Roberto Cuoghi, ‘Imitatio Christi’, 2017; Padiglione Italia alla Biennale Arte, 2017 Memento-Mori St. John’s Cathedral, Malta, Valetta Tablediffractions Under-the-table Figure X Adapted from Foucault (1966/1992)… The order of things Table-shreds Tables-on-fire Table-matrix Mashing things up Aftermath

2 3 10 12 25 27 31 38 42 51 52 62 63 64 73 75 80 84 95 99 102 103 103 104 109 112

xii Images

Past/present/future connections to the Women’s March in Washington, DC Drawing surveillance Stringly things 1 Un-heard-of-songs Stringly things 2 Stringly things 3 Triptych Stringing bags choreographies Data trail 2 × 2 × 2 theoretical matrix Assemblage station at ECQI, Malta, 5 February 2020 ‘When I Crack I Expand’ (Kjellmark, T. 2021), Sculpture, 130 cm high, Bronze, Photo credit: Carl-Michael Herlöfsson AcademicConferenceMachine garden Cracks and ruptures CG collective AcademicConferenceMachine colony Earthworm Abstract 1 Abstract 2 Fill in the blanks…

114 116 126 129 130 131 133 138 142 143 150 163 177 190 193 196 197 200 200 205

PREFACE

We are an international group of six researchers who are working with posthumanist, material feminist, post-qualitative and un/indisciplined research practices oriented to doing qualitative research differently. Since 2016, we have been working together to find creative and experimental ways of disrupting normative, business-as-usual modes of knowledge production, in conferences practices and in article writing. We have conceptualized academic conferences as material-discursive spaces – as spaces of the AcademicConferenceMachine – which, as structured, neoliberal, organizational spaces, run the risk of becoming so regulating, normalizing and standardizing that they lose the possibility to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently. Our work goes beyond straightforward humanist critiques of these spaces to produce new forms of academic knowledge production about and with/in conferencing.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to the academics and scholars who have gone before us, and with whose work we continue our playful labours, to develop thinking and doing knowledge differently. This book draws on and builds on their work in enabling us to consider ways to do and write about conferences differently. We write as the CG Collective, a post-personal mode of authorship that does not privilege one voice over another. Thank you to Teija Rantala as a co-collaborator in two of the Events in this book (Playful Cuts and Cartographic Mapping: Genderin-the-making and Sketching Schizoid Narratives), your contribution is much appreciated and acknowledged. The cover image was created from photographs supplied by Claire Allain, an ethical jeweller (http://www.claireallainjewellery. com/) with a keen eye for capturing amazing images of her local environment. Permission was kindly granted by Roberto Cuoghi (https://www.robertocuoghi. com/) to include an image of ‘The Imitation of Christ’ in the Autopsy Event. Thanks also go to Tove Kjellmark (https://www.tovekjellmark.com/bio) for giving permission for the image of ‘When I Crack I Expand’ used in the Seduction Event. The Bags Event is based on our journal article: Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., &, Elmenhorst, C. (2019). Improvising bags choreographies: Disturbing normative ways of doing research. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418767210; permission has been granted by Sage Publications to reproduce this article. We also are indebted to Hannah Shakespeare, our editor at Routledge, for encouraging and supporting us to develop these Events into a book proposal and eventually this book. You provided guidance, answered our many questions and understood our vision and what we were trying to achieve – thank you Hannah!

PRELUDE

Hello, hi, good morning or afternoon or evening: welcome This prelude serves as an entry point to this book. It prefaces, introduces and frames the work the book aims to do to disturb academic conferences as a normative mode of knowledge production. A prelude has been defined as ‘an introductory performance, action, or event preceding and preparing for the principal or a more important matter’ (Merriam Webster, n.d.). This prelude is not a priori for the remainder of this book; it is immanently connected with the Events (which is what we call each ‘chapter’ or section which follows) and with the Earthworm’s ruminations which tunnel through each chapter and thread the book together. This book is written as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 8) in which each Event is connected to every other by principles of heterogeneity and relation. In a rhizome, there is ‘no unity to serve as a pivot, [there are] only determinations, magnitudes and dimensions’. Each Event, including this Prelude, contributes a ‘dimension’ and the book has ‘multiple entryways’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 12). There is no onus on you as a reader to begin at the beginning: begin where you wish, dip in and out, make your own connections, relations and detours as you travel nomadically through the book. Or you might prefer to read it from start to finish! Whichever way you choose to go, this Prelude offers an orientation to the work on contesting the normative framing of the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019a), which we have been engaged in since the summer of 2016. The Prelude provides an outline of what you can expect to find in the book as we come back and back again in different ways to this work. Each chapter is composed as an Event and each Event is a re-turn to the work of undoing the AcademicConferenceMachine and offers a new taking off point towards alternative provocations for knowledge-making. This prelude also situates our work in relation to scholarship on feminist materialisms, posthumanist, post-qualitative, DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-1

2 Prelude

Way In.

process philosophies and non-representational theories and methodologies with which our work is entangled, and we define some key theoretical and analytical terms to outline the book’s orbits. We hope you will connect with the book in many ways and that our thinkings and doings within it are a help to you in thinking about how knowledge is created, produced and disseminated (or not) at conferences – and how you might intervene to undo the hegemonies of the AcademicConferenceMachine.

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What is this book about? Contesting the AcademicConferenceMachine We are a group of six researchers (five university academics and one independent scholar) who are working with posthumanist, feminist materialist, and post-qualitative research practices. Our work is explicitly and consistently oriented towards disrupting normative, dominant, mainstream and bureaucratic modes of knowledge production through material interventions and creative, arts-based experiments in academic conference spaces. These ways of working together have found a place both in academic conference spaces and in three academic articles so far (Benozzo et al., 2019a; Taylor et al., 2019; Carey et al., 2021). Our work conceives academic conferences as neoliberal material-discursive space of (mis)recognition and discipline for scholars. In calling these spaces the ‘AcademicConferenceMachine’, we draw attention to them as ‘regulatory, structured organizational space, a space of (non)repetition – which runs the risk of becoming so regulating, normalizing and standardizing that it might be lose the possibility to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently’ (Benozzo et al., 2019a: 3).

WHAT IS AN ACADEMIC CONFERENCE?

American Educational Research Association (AERA) Registration Hall, Metro Convention Centre, Toronto, 6 April 2019. • • • •

A site to share educational research (Henderson, 2015); A meeting place, but also performative and losing sight of pedagogical potential (Skelton, 1997); Part of the events industry with a prestigious venue and a plethora of supporting staff (Mair, 2014); An expectation for academics to attend, has a set of (sometimes unknown) conventions and rules, part of the neoliberal market model for university esteem (Nicholson, 2017);

4 Prelude

• •

The potential for knowledge sharing, but exclusionary for many (Henderson & Burford, 2020); Open to new possibilities for conferencing otherwise (Osgood et  al., 2020).

Conference spaces materialize neoliberal academic life in many ways. Submit an abstract, paper accepted, register (must get an early bird discount – can I afford the conference dinner maybe/maybe not?), check the programme (where is my paper? who am I seeing? Aghh too many clashes for the papers I want to see – how can I choose!!!), flight (really – what about global climate change – OK feeling a little guilty now), get to hotel and check in, meet old friend and collaborators, go for dinner (chat about the academy, family, life, papers…), keynotes – who are they and when are they, which am I going to see, in/out of rooms, listen to papers, listen to question, sometimes ask questions but most often don’t, write notes. We often wonder about the unseen labour of academic conferences. It is not just about academic labour – what about the non-academic bodies that keep the machine working. Those bodies are not always visible – blending into the background, a supportive cast without which the machine would not function. The AcademicConferenceMachine rhizomatically and in many unseen ways connects administration staff, conference organizers, hotel staff, conference venue staff, bar staff, waiters, cleaners…the disparity between wages earned by academic/non-academic bodies an unseen viscous mattering where economic, gendered, classed and raced inequalities are revealed (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). … And what is being produced during these events? The Anthropocene is the term given to the epoch which signifies the influence of ‘Man’ on the environment and how ‘Man’ is having a significant effect/affect on the world (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). When thinking of our participation, the AcademicConferenceMachine can blind us to the impact of the conference on the wider environment. We need to consider more sustainable ways to conference. Posthumanist and feminist materialist ways to understand our relationship with the world enable us to interrogate how the geopolitics of conferences can be more ethical and response-able and move beyond nature/ culture divides (Alaimo, 2016; Cieleme˛cka & Daigle, 2019). And yet. When we attend conferences, we often quickly forgo these worldings that demand our environmental sensitivities. Why are we seduced by the AcademicConferenceMachine? The purpose of the conference materializes multiple becomings linked to prestige and promotion, academic/non-academic labour, the fun of connecting and collaborating with friends. As we have written this book, we have wondered many times about Haraway’s (2016: 55) words: ‘we are in a string figuring game of caring

Prelude  5

for and with precious worldings’. They provide a sharp reminder that the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, and the social, economic and educational inequalities it has brought to the fore and brought into being anew, might have produced lasting changes to academic conferencing. Sitting in our different countries (Norway, Italy, UK, USA), physically separated as we watch the conference year wheel round again with conferences cancelled and then moving online in different forms, we take time to reflect on the lives lost to the disease. Its effects will ripple through the world for years to come. As people die in multitudes across the globe and suffer long periods of illness and convalescence, the Western academic perspective, rooted in individualizing modes of competition, shifts to concern that cancelled conferences will impact on research dissemination opportunities and that this may have a knock-on effect on metrics that academics need to achieve promotion or pass annual reviews/appraisals. Uneven patterns of inequalities mean that certain scholars – emerging researchers, doctoral students, women, Black and those on precarious contracts – are most affected. The move towards online conferences and seminars as social distancing became the means to slow the virus spread (for example The Virtual Conference for Qualitative Inquiry https://vcqi.org/, Comparative & International Education Society 2020 https://cies2020.org/ and International Professional Development Association 2020 https://ipda.org.uk/ipda-international-conference/ conference2020/ ). Online conferences became tangled with national and international measures to control populations in new, invasive modes of state control and biopower. Such conference conditions serve to highlight the ongoing questions about the need for physical conference spaces (Manji et al., 2020), which have for long been exclusionary for scholars from the Global South, junior scholars and those with disabilities and specific needs. How can conference spaces of whatever kind be made less ableist, racist and exclusionary? Let’s not pretend that these exclusions and inequalities are somehow whistled away in the now ubiquitous online conferences, seminars and events we (and who is this ‘we’?) are now accustomed, in Covid-19 times, to attending. We sit, facing the screen, dis/embodied and strung out in spatial distances and differentiations. The question remains: what-wherehow is knowledge production?

Our work grows out of the small amount of literature (see references above in box ‘What is an academic conference?’) that has studied academic conferences, but is aligned most specifically with studies that have highlighted the limitations of academic conferences (for example, Bell & King, 2010; Ford & Harding, 2008), which critique conference spaces, and propose new forms of academic knowledge practices for ‘doing conferences differently’.

6 Prelude

Where do we situate our work? Transdisciplinary knowledge orientations The book is situated within posthumanist and feminist materialist thinking which seeks to develop both more affirmative engagements with human/ non-human/other-than-human relationalities and offer post-anthropocentric, critical, political and ethical accounts of pressing contemporary problems. We see the book as a commitment to ‘theoretical and practical effort[s] to displace the legacy of Humanism with its anthropocentric imperative to position “species man” (white, euro-american) as centre of the universe and top of a hierarchy in which “he” is the only one who matters’ (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020: 5). Posthumanism and feminist materialism’s displacement of humanist presumptions regarding humans as the location of agency in the world and of human exceptionalism has been critiqued on a number of grounds. In particular, some have argued that posthumanism’s ontological dispersal of agency across humans, non-humans and nature does not effectively address communities that have been marginalized (Braidotti, 2020). The concern is that structural issues and struggles facing individuals and communities are negated as a move beyond humanism is proposed ( Jackson, 2015). There have also been criticisms around the newness of posthuman theory: relationality has long been central to Indigenous ways of thinking and being (Kimmerer, 2020). Indigenous scholars have raised concerns that the lineage of posthuman – in particular, posthumanism’s ‘white episteme’ – erases Indigenous critical scholarship (Todd, 2016). Certainly, a critical posthuman and feminist materialist perspective needs to be aware of the lineages and inheritances it owes to scholars and communities that have gone before (King, 2017). This becomes materialized in the politics of location (Braidotti, 2013) and politics of citation (Ahmed, 2012) to ensure that research and researchers ‘are not simply [making] a gesture to move beyond the human and recognize agency in matter; rather, they charge qualitative research with particular ethical, aesthetic, and political tasks’ (Truman, 2019: 9). We have attempted to do this in this book. We hope that our posthumanist, materialist and post-qualitative take on academic conferences enables a richer understanding of human and non-human relations in accordance with ‘enmeshed historical lineages that emerge from co-compositions which are relational, sympoietic and affirmative’ (Taylor, 2021: 39). We have written the book to have wide appeal. It is intended as a form of trans-post-disciplinary scholarship with theoretical orientations that intersect with: •

•

Education, exploring pedagogies, classroom practices, gendered subjectivities, schooling policies, research and the ethics of slow scholarship (Fairchild, 2019; Hickey-Moody & Page, 2016; Kuby & Christ, 2020; Snaza & Weaver, 2015; Taylor & Hughes, 2016); Organizational studies, where the concept of socio-materiality has been applied to organizational leadership (Orlikowski, 2010);

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•

• • •

•

•

• • •

•

Environmental studies and feminist science studies where the intra-actions between humans/non-humans and the environment are articulated (Alaimo, 2008; Neimanis, 2017); Science and Technology Studies, which includes Actor Network Theory and Object-Oriented Ontologies (Bogost, 2012; Hayles, 1999; Latour, 2005); Studies in geography where material human and non-human processed have been explored (Anderson, 2014; Whatmore, 2006); Affect theory where the affective turn is implicated in human experiences (Blackman, 2012; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002, 2015; Stewart, 2007); Feminist and queer studies, with human/non-human entanglements surrounding sexuality, gender and subjectivity are explored (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Chen, 2012; Coole & Frost, 2010; Giffney & Hird, 2016; Halberstam, 2020; Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Rantala, 2019); Childhood and Early Childhood Studies (Fairchild, 2019; Holmes & Jones, 2016; Murris, 2016; Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Otterstad & Waterhouse, 2015; Somerville, 2019); Philosophical perspectives (Braidotti, 2019; Ferrando, 2019); Postcolonial theorising in Childhood Studies (Nxumalo, 2019; PaciniKetchabaw & Taylor, 2015). Methodological work on post-qualitative inquiry (Bhattacharya, 2021; St. Pierre, 2011, 2016, 2019), undisciplined qualitative research (KoroLjungberg, 2016), indigenous scholarship (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2012), process philosophy (Manning & Massumi, 2014) and non-representational methodologies (Vannini, 2015). Our work also resonates with theory-practice modes of research-creation, innovative writing practices and creative conferencing presentations such as production of SenseLab, the PhEmaterialisms range of events and Pluriversity endeavours.

The book’s Events re-turn to various conference practices and provocations we enacted, which were informed by post-qualitative post-methodologies (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011, 2019). The book’s Events reimagine the subject beyond bodily boundaries as a complex connection of intra-actions between human and other-than-human bodies (Barad, 2007). These connections have been theorized as assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and phenomena (Barad, 2007). Ontologically, these lines of thinking see life and agency as an otherthan-human concern which becomes actualized via material and discursive practices. Barad proposes that ‘discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; rather the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity’ (2007: 152 emphasis in original). A focus on how bodies are constituted within phenomena and which

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bodies come to matter (Barad, 2007) has meant that normative modes of research methodologies need to be challenged. Traditional methodology and methods are insufficient for conceptualizing work with the de-centred human subject ( Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; St. Pierre, 2016; Taylor & Hughes, 2016). Our work has engaged with post-qualitative research through modes of research-creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014), which refers to the fusion of academic research and creative practices that produce thinking-inaction (Manning, 2016). These creative practices activate immanent co-creation of knowledge through art-based expression and experimentation. Researchcreation is speculative theory-practice in motion; its occurrence cannot be limited by interpretation or categorization. It is affective and dynamic and productive in the moment. This is what our conference workshops aimed at and what this book re-turns to.

What is included in this book? Events Re-turns This book is an anarchive, not an archive (Murphie, 2016). An archive is a linear record of events, written or collected to document something; it is a ‘store’ of the past. But the archive’s past generates power in the present: it confirms a continuation with already known practices; it influences and produces a ‘more of the same’ way of thinking. Although there are more creative ways to archive information, the archive can be somewhat of an echo chamber, confirming and reinforcing what we know which thwarts the desire to know differently. The anarchive is a more speculative way of attending to past events that refuses traditional routes of documenting, collecting and collating. Massumi (2016: 6) posits that the anarchive is not a documentation of past activity, but a ‘feed-forward mechanism’ which generates and reveals new lines of potential. The anarchive becomes the concept-practice for thinking-in-movement for work which is ongoing, processual and diffractive, which is speculative, and reveals new propositions within/ between past-present-future events. This book works as anarchive, in that the re-turns to our conference events are a means to generate new potentialities, new thinkings and provocations for new practice-ings. In this, it undoes the work of ‘conference proceedings’ which are just so many descriptions of what happened in the past. The Events – the book’s ‘chapters’ – unfix our ‘original’ conference workshops and doings and put them in motion anew. In this, the Events work as disturbance and agitator to reveal new and different possibilities to think and enact conferences. Our book as anarchive sits in more or less dis/comfort with current critical discourses on conference spaces and places (Bell & King, 2010; Ford & Harding, 2008; Henderson, 2015; Henderson & Burford, 2020). The Events in this book are written as a series of re-turns. We take up the concept of Event from Gilles Deleuze and re-turn from Karen Barad. Our work at conferences takes the form of experimental workshops and creative happenings far removed from the traditional idea of ‘workshop’ or conference

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‘presentation’. While they retain aspects of the ‘hands-on’ nature of workshops and eliminate the passivity of ‘presentation’ (presenter talks/audience listens), they aim to enact and produce alternative, creative and performative understandings of what knowledge production in/through conferences might be and become. For Deleuze, events are transformative processes of becoming entailing degrees of intensity. According to Williams (2011: 84), Deleuze ‘defines the event as multiple events entering into harmonious resonance through vibrations between multiple series…each event is the whole of the world from a singular perspective’. The outcome of the event is never known in advance but is produced as bodies intra-act in assemblages of body, matter and discourse. Manning and Massumi (2014) consider events as immanent and always in motion. An event is an opportunity for ‘composing with creative practice, for composing emergent collectivities, for composing thought in the multiplicitous act’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: ix). These co-compositions are non-dualistic (they do not separate subject from object or researcher from researched, they entangle humans and other-than-humans), and they emerge from the connections and relationalities of the bodies which compose the event (Manning & Massumi, 2014). ‘Body’ here includes the physical corporeal form and draws on bodies of policy, educational matters and social, material and physical entities (Baugh, 2010). The conference Events we co-composed aimed to stretch what is possible in conference spaces. They emerge in the doing of the Event and are created in and by the relationalities of the multiplicities of the bodies present. In this, they question the form, function and experience of academic conferences spaces by turning the conference workshop itself into a speculative methodology of ‘research-creation’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014) which dis/orients traditional humanist research practicings. Recasting the ‘workshop’ as a series of performative material-discursive events creates new and different potentials for knowledge and knowledge creation. The Events you will encounter as you read this book emerged from our research-creation workshops at major international conferences, including American Educational Research Association (AERA), Gender, Work and Organization (GWO), European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI), International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) and Gender and Education Association (GEA). These workshops were provocative in their design, enactment and performance; they worked as serious fun in pursuit of doing knowledge otherwise. Even so, they were produced through a series of enabling constraints (Manning & Massumi, 2014): the abstract had to be written and submitted well in advance of the event’s materialization; we were allocated a room for a tables workshop that did not have any tables in it; we on occasions limited the number of participants because of room size constraints. These space-time-matterings as enabling constraints became part of the events on the day of the workshop and produced affective resonances after the event which continue.

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The book.

The book’s Events are composed as analytical ‘re-turnings’ that recasts and reworks them theoretically, conceptually and productively. This strategy of ‘returns’ is drawn from Barad (2007) who figures re-turning as: A multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or … turning the soil over and over – ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (Barad, 2014: 168) The re-turns we make in the Events featured in the book put the conference workshops in motion again. In enacting this strategy, we undo the assumption – common when thinking of what has happened in ‘the past’ – that the workshop happenings (and the ‘data’ they produced and created) are lying in limbo waiting ‘there’ for some human to come back to it/them to resuscitate and make meaning out of it/them. We trouble these linear meaning-making logics. Our returns produce the Events as new engagements, new provocations in producing knowledge differently, and new and ongoing matterings which are nomadic and non-linear. We’ve noted elsewhere (see Benozzo et al., 2019a: 89) that re-turning is not about providing a reflective or even reflexive review of past events, but is a ‘dynamic and generative [process of ] invigorating past/present/future connections and dissolving the Cartesian boundaries on nature/culture to generate new knowledge practices’ (Benozzo et al., 2019a: 89). Re-turning the Events is about entering into new analytic relations with the conference workshops and is enacted in the book as an analytical strategy for creating new openings for experimental thinking.

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We wonder if our re-turns can provoke you in your own re-turns. We wonder if they can inspire in you imaginative ways of disturbing conferences. We wonder what might grab you from this book and then how that might become woven into your speculative ponderings to make knowledge production in conference spaces matter differently. The title of this subsection refers to the ‘contents’ of the book. Should we tell you in advance what the contents are? We have suggested you dive in as you wish, immerse yourself, swim around a bit, see where you want to go. It would seem then out of keeping to give you a blow by blow account of the Events in the book as if they were reports on or repositories of ‘content’. But we do want to give you an inkling on what ensues in these pages. There are ten Events, including an Event on autopsy, another on dirt, one on bags, and Events on tables, string, subversion, seduction and schizoanalysis. The Earthworm threads its way into and through these Events – tunnelling, composing, commenting. The Earthworm becomes with us and the book: a disturber and co-composter of Events in the making of their re-turns. We’ll say a little bit about we who are writing this book next and then we will introduce the Earthworm properly.

Who is this book written by? The CG Collective Those of us who have written this book do ongoing work together – conference workshops, writing, thinking – as part of the CG Collective. The six of us who co-compose the CG Collective came into existence as a ‘we’ following the annual GWO conference at the University of Keele in 2016. We met at the conference stream on post-qualitative research, led by Mirka, Angelo and Neil. Nikki and Constanse had signed up in advance. Carol came along on the day, feeling like something of an interloper, and happily stayed. Many others joined the stream during the conference, participated in the stream plenary (sitting on comfy sofas) at the end and shared lunches and social events. But somehow … we six ‘clicked’, stayed together and in the ensuing years have continued to write, think, do, create and hold more conference workshops, events and papers together. We have regular skypes together, on one occasion masked (during the Covid-19 pandemic), as in this photo on 14 September 2020. Since the Keele conference, we have only managed to be together twice as a CG Collective of six in person at a conference; time, cost, distance and other life commitments have precluded that. Nevertheless, all the Events in this book have been planned by together – ideas fizzing, words tumbling, often quite raucous laughter ensuing and Angelo often saying ‘what, stop, you need to explain that properly’ as those of us whose first language is English speed off into gabble with a particular idea. The serious fun that informed the planning gave an impetus to the conference workshops themselves in the various spaces and places they occurred. The workshops were led in situ by those members of the group who were at that particular conference and others of us skyped in, whether in black bin bags or from under tables or as a disembodied head on an iPad hanging from a ceiling light.

12 Prelude

CG Collective.

The work we do remains resolutely and determinedly collective – it is our endeavour to hold and protect an ethical-ontological-epistemological space for academic work which is energizing, collaborative, important and playful. It speaks out from ‘us six’ into the performative, competitive and individualizing contexts of contemporary higher education, offering a collaborative space which is quite rare and precious. Based on our ongoing travels as a collective, we urge you reading this to form your own collectives in the particular space-time-matterings you find yourself in and make them into nourishing places for care, kindness and the relational work of accountability and responsibility. Such spaces matter. They are desiring spaces and enable us to carry on with the work we want to do amid the many institutional tasks we are compelled to do and which often freeze and fix our flows and bend our bodies into and out of shape. This book is an attempt to work against those academic ossifications. The preceding paragraph tells a ‘human’ story of those writing this book. There is also a whole host of non-human and other-than-humans who have accompanied our conference journeyings: string, spiders, earthworms, trees, benches, paper, cotton, bags, tables, light, air, glass, stone, carpets, lino, plastic, coffee, wine, bread, chocolate, suitcase, hairbrushes, perfume, ties, jackets and, and, and … This book’s title, Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events, is a reference to the human-non-human, material-virtual entanglements within which all knowledge-making happens. Conferences are humannon-human space-time-matterings and the Events which follow tangle with those. Space, time and matter are entwined in and as matters of knowing are central to who/what is and can become a body of knowledge and with questions of whose knowledge counts. Conferences also happen somewhere – a town, city, country, a university or hotel conference suite – but they are often spaces of dis/location, academic bubbles seemingly separated off from the somewheres they happen. We hope that the ‘we’ that we have summoned into existence does not sound too exclusive: we co-compose with multiple others, many non-humans as mentioned, and some humans (Teija Rantala has co-composed Events in this book

Prelude  13

‘Gender in the making’ and ‘Sketching schizoid narratives’ with us). Conference participants co-composed the Events in living choreographies with us on the day in the scheduled workshops sessions. We sought their permission to photograph and record aspects of the Events included in this book and have made sure not to breach any ethical protocols we established with our many participants. We also ensured they were aware we would at some future point be writing about the events taking place, although we did not know in advance what form that writing would take. The book has been written collectively and collaboratively. It is true that some of us led on some Events and did a first draft. That was a useful strategy to get going, keep going and write ‘something’. Those drafts were then written into by others of us and then tunnelled into by the Earthworm (more of which soon). These multiple rounds of composing and composting have meant this book has been written/produced by ‘us’ in multiple-author mode of composition. That is why no individual names are attached to any of the chapters (except for the one that includes and has been co-composed with/by Teija). However, as indicated, some of us were physically present at conferences and others of us weren’t. We mention this in some of the Events. This is not to give those ‘present’ any privilege as authors or generators or creators but to enable you as a reader to see how the Event’s happening took place. Each event (and indeed this book) is an example of post-authorship (Benozzo et al., 2016, 2019b), which questions ‘original’ intention and disperses the authority of authorship throughout the text. Post-authorship makes identity and positionality (sexuality, race/ethnicity, gender, dis/ability) questionable. We are drawn to post-authorship as our CG Collective-writer-bodies assemblage is relational and the writing is performed, produced and enacted collaboratively. The Author (capital T, capital A) is displaced and blurred so that it is impossible and, indeed, unnecessary to associate a particular part of the text to one of us. In normative conference mode, attendees are hailed with the Person at the Podium Presenting their Original Ideas. Our book undoes this ‘Me/Mine’ and ‘Look at Me’ ethic. It’s collaboratively written text fragments authorial authority: this is not a text which (re)presents, but one which aims to provoke, stimulate, question, destabilize, generate, create (Benozzo et al., 2016: 579). Post-authorship is a strategy of push back against the neoliberal marketization and competitive individualism of HE, which instantiates the need for ‘lead authors’ and puts a value on the position of the author in citations. The book includes creative and innovative modes of writing practices that challenge traditional modes of academic writing (journal articles and books) and the ‘conference proceedings’ which come out of conferences. Its format and layout are immanent and non-linear (Hein, 2019) as the Events could be read on their own but they are also in relational connection with each other, in ways similar to the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Posthumanist, feminist materialist and post-qualitative scholars have used non-linear writing (Gale, 2018; Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Kuby & Christ, 2020; Sellars, 2013) and feminists have long been interested in modes of ecriture feminine

14 Prelude

(Cixous, 1976; Zarabadi et al., 2019). Our writing and presentational choices in this book resonate with these innovative practices and with the experiments in form and presentation in our papers (Benozzo et al., 2019a; Carey et al., 2021; Taylor et al., 2019). The book includes images from our conference events, text boxes, poems and vignettes, which offer a different way to think about the Events – and about how the ‘data’ collected during the conferences is re-situated and put into motion again in new analytical and theoretical connections. The book’s composition works with a more expansive visions of what data is, and what academic writing might be, and how it might be ‘found’ (or even whether it even wants to be ‘found’) (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). The non-linear mode of writing we have produced does not presume what or how you as reader will experience the text; its aim is to disrupt the view that readers (and us as writers) ‘are subjects, stable narrators, which can articulate phenomena unambiguously’ (Hein, 2019: 88).

Introducing the Earthworm The Earthworm emerged as a Conceptual Personae (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991) during Skype conversations we had about how the reader might navigate the books and its non-linear complexities. We wondered if you would like or need a device throughout the text to provide a linkage between the Events. In our discussions and writing, the Earthworm grew and gathered to itself a number of roles: as textual collaborator, it emerged as a co-author writing the book in collaboration with us; as co-composter, the Earthworm tunnels through the Events, picking up an idea here and taking it along with it, re-situating that idea in a different Event; as agitator, it decomposes the familiar and inserts a provocation and a connection point for you to think about the Events and how they materialize some of the norms of the AcademicConferenceMachine. In doing these things, the Earthworm takes its place in the ongoingness of our conference disturbances as they appear in the Events. Earthworms aerate the soil by turning it over again and again and helping compost it into new formations that enable new problems and new flourishings to emerge from it. The Earthworm in our book helped us stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of the AcademicConferenceMachine and worked with us to ‘re-turn the neoliberal conference into a different sort of space  – a space of coalition, of composting and composing’ (Benozzo et al., 2019a: 100). As with the Earthworm, reader, we invite you to be a textual co-collaborator. We hope you will be engaged by the Events that follow and find in them encouragement to re-turn and aerate the soil of the AcademicConferenceMachine to produce new knowledge in different ways.

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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mair, J. (2014). Conferences and conventions: A research perspective. New York: Routledge. Manji, A., Coetzee, C., Uduku, O., & Green, T. (2020). The world cannot afford any more global academic jamborees. Time Higher Education. https://www. timeshighereducation.com/opinion/world-cannot-af ford-any-more-globalacademic-jamborees. Accessed 25 June 2020. Manning, E. (2016). 10 propositions for research-creation. The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 19(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.3998.3336451.0019.206 Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Massumi, B. (2016). Working principals. In SenseLab (Ed. A. Murphie), The go-to how-to book of anarchiving (pp. 6–7). Montreal: The SenseLab. Merriam Webster (n.d.). Prelude definition. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/prelude. Accessed 23 February 2020. Murphie, A. (2016). Where are the other places? (Archives and anarchives). In SenseLab (Ed. A. Murphie), The go-to how-to book of anarchiving (pp. 41–43). Montreal: The SenseLab. Murris, K. (2016). The posthuman child. Abingdon: Routledge. Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury. Nicholson, D. J. (2017). Academic conferences as neoliberal commodities. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. Abingdon: Routledge. Orlikowski, W. J. (2010). The sociomateriality of organizational life: Considering technology in management research. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 125–141. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep058 Osgood, J., & Robinson, K. H. (2019). Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Feminist thought in childhood research series. London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J., Taylor, C. A., Andersen, C. E., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Moxnes, A., Otterstad, A. M., Rantala, T., & Tobias-Green, K. (2020). Conferencing otherwise: A feminist new materialist writing experiment. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 20(6), 596–609. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F1532708620912801 Otterstad, A. M., & Waterhouse A.-H. L. (2015). Beyond regimes of signs: Making art/ istic portrayals of haptic moments/movements with child/ren/hood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 739–753. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306. 2015.1075727 Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (Eds.), (2015). Unsettling the colonial places and spaces of early childhood education. Abingdon: Routledge. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Rantala, T. (2019). Exploring data production in motion: Fluidity and feminist poststructuralism. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press, LLC. Sellars, M. (2013). Young children becoming curriculum. Deleuze, Te Whāriki and curricular understandings. Abingdon: Routledge. Skelton, A. (1997). Conferences, conferences, conferences? Teaching in Higher Education, 2(1), 69–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356251970020106

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ENTRY

Introduction This Event spins out from the diverse encounters that occurred in the conference strand Post-qualitative methodologies (of difference), convened by Mirka Koro, Angelo Benozzo and Neil Carey, at the 9th Biennial Conference on Gender, Work and Organization (GWO) at Keele University, UK, in June 2016. This Event also segues into and beyond the collaborative writing experiment that materialized in the article Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post-qualitative re-turning written by Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Michela Cozza, Constanse Elmenhorst, Nikki Fairchild, Mirka Koro and Carol A. Taylor and published, after two rounds of reviews and revisions, in the journal Gender, Work and Organization (Benozzo et al., 2019). As indicated in the Prelude, these ‘past’ occurrences are taken up in this Event in speculative ‘feed-forward’ mode to generate new lines of potential – to consider thinking and knowing beyond the immediately known and sensed. Here, we take up encounters and experimentations at the conference and in the article’s collaborative writing to speculate with/on data: data’s doings, data’s productivities and data’s happenings. We engage concepts from Karen Barad (2007), including diffraction, apparatus and spacetimemattering, in our re-turnings of the conference at Keele and the ensuing article. This speculative re-turn to and of data’s doings intra-act with our desire in this Event – and in this book – to undiscipline the disciplined and disciplinary spaces of the AcademicConferenceMachine with its ‘all too predictable organization of abstract after abstract, presentation after presentation, paper after paper, old/ known/familiar knowledge being replaced by another old/known/familiar’ (Benozzo et al., 2019: 88).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-2

20 Entry

Post‐qualitative methodologies (of difference): setting (data-objects-bags-writing) in motion The conference stream at Keele offered the audience, participants and panel presenters opportunities to be involved in a range of creative assemblages positioned throughout the Conference rooms and corridors and within the panel room. Three different experiment-events offered potential for differing and multiple experiences/entanglements: 1

2

3

Objects. Some objects were spread around the conference rooms (↔ some babies’ dummies/pacifiers ↔ a corkscrew (in the shape of a dildo) ↔ two plastic frogs ↔ a Billy doll ↔ a mask ↔ a furry tail ↔ a toy gorilla ↔ a lizard ↔ a kangaroo cock (or napkin) ring ↔ some cock-shaped straws ↔ fragments of male dolls ↔ and ↔ and ↔ and ↔. These objects took on a life of their own and enlivened the neoliberal conference space; some of them became ‘travelling objects’ and spread around the conference rooms, appearing in the dining hall, in the bathrooms, in the corridors and at the entrance. Data-bags. Bags (of different kinds) contained things becoming potential data-bags which participants were invited to intra-act with. Some copies of the book chapter ‘[Data within (data]-bag) diffracted’ (Benozzo & KoroLjungberg, 2017) were spread on the floor of the Terrace (the venue for our presentations). On the wall, pictures of bags were hanging. On the presentation table, a PC was showing Émily Muller, a short film by Yvon Marciano, which includes in-data-bag improvisations (here is the link if you’d like to watch it yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGAPpSjRehU). Artist Sophie Calle’s book L’Hôtel was put into circulation between participants. In this book, Sophie Calle describes a period of three weeks that she spent in a Venetian hotel as a chambermaid. She took photos of the rooms, inspected personal belongings, opened drawers and closets, used makeup from beauty cases, rummaged in suitcases, sprayed herself with fragrance, saved a pair of shoes left in the bin, read letters and so on. There is also a personal bag belonging to one of us that stream participants are invited to intra-act with. Writescapes. Participants were invited to explore different writing spaces and landscapes in relation to assumed dominant scholarly discourses and gendered writing practices. Writescapes (writing situated within different spaces and places) enabled participants to inquire (into oneself, others, gender, diverse forms of scholarship, materials, environments, landscapes, etc.). The participants experimented with writescapes in the bathrooms, on the stairs, in the Terrace rooms, in a car park, staring at a wall … wherever they wanted.

The objects, data-bags and writescape interventions at the conference proliferate and enfold our writing in the article (Benozzo et al., 2019), and now in this Event and now in your reading of this Event. These multiple nows reveal new

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propositions within/between past-present-future events. They undiscipline normalized modes of conferencing and qualitative research writing, which presumes that empirical research is DONE (and then that stage is over and finished), that DATA are OBTAINED (and then that stage is over and finished), that DATA are then ANALYSED (and then that stage is over and finished), and turned into FINDINGS (and then that stage is over and finished), which are then REPORTED and WRITTEN UP (and then that stage is over and finished), and finally that FINDINGS are PRESENTED at a CONFERENCE. At which the audience applauds, we sigh in relief and turn away to the NEXT project in which DATA are OBTAINED … and so the regular and routinized cycle of normative knowledge production proceeds. Our thinkings-doings with data disturb this presumed linearity of the AcademicConferenceMachine with its simplistic reductionist and representationalist assumptions. Instead, we focus on data’s proliferations and data’s ongoingness (as well as data’s lack of ‘origins’), on data’s movements and resonations. Important to note here that the post-qualitative methodologies (of difference) stream did not occupy a liminal or separate space on the edge of the conference; the experimental doings-with-data were layered into the conference space; our disturbances were tangled into its scheduled routines and regularities. We enjoy the fact that the AcademicConferenceMachine was/is entangled in its own undoings and unbecomings: non-human and human materiality, objects, bodies, spaces, stuff, inseparable and enmeshed, figurations of human and plastic, flesh and fur, paper, PowerPoint and, and, and … We revel in our undoings and unbecomings, we were (are) akin to earthworms engaged in making ‘compost [by] turning the soil over and over—ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing … aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it’ (Barad, 2014: 168). Just as earthworms perform vital activities of turning the soil to aerate and fertilize it with their organic mineralrich castings, our research experiments turn the conference space around and about in ways which open it up to multiplicities, to other ways of doing, knowing and being in research practices. The earthworm DECOMPOSES the AcademicConferenceMachine through aerating processes that make it permeable to water, air and life – breathing rhizomatic and generative vitality into the ordered and the routine, seeking to re-invigorate past/present/future connections and generate new knowledge practices. The earthworm DISTURBS the familiarity of the AcademicConferenceMachine to which we have been socialized since the beginning of our academic working life. The earthworm DISRUPTS the sanitized space of the AcademicConferenceMachine from which traces of ‘life’ – the messy life that happens outside the academy – are often removed. The earthworm DISORGANIZES the orders, procedures and rules of the AcademicConferenceMachine. The earthworm puts into DOUBT the respected and repeated conscious or unconscious reproduction of familiar norms. The earthworm’s turns and re-turnings produce DIFFERENTIATIONS which UNDISCIPLINE qualitative research,

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helping us in ‘staying with the trouble’ in our ‘situated work and play in the muddle of messy living’ (Haraway, 2016: 42). The earthworm decomposings in this Event are tunnelled with a number of Barad’s (2007, 2010, 2012, 2014) concepts: spacetimemattering as we re-turn again and again to revisit the GWO conference in Keele University in 2016 and the article (Benozzo et al., 2019). In spacetimemattering, subjects, objects, time and space are continuously unfolding in multiple iterations of possibility becoming phenomena of human and non-human discursive materiality diffraction

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in which data interrupts and opens other movements new ideas; in which questions and theories might appear; as a methodological practice of ‘reading insight through one another’ (Barad, 2007: 25). cutting together-apart to ‘discover’. ‘expose’ or ‘bring to the surface’ new potentialities; to open up new questions and wonderings. apparatus as conference and article, this Event, notes, bodily affects, thoughts, materials, objects and other texts become our data and again and again in an apparatus (Barad, 2007) of spacetimematterings that continue to proliferate and produce knowledge in relation to the human and the non-human.

When, what and how are data?

I produce data. You produce data. She produces data. We produce data. They produce data. Data is being produced. Data produces us. Data. Data. Data… But only illusions of “data”. Copies of “data” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2013: 274)

In this book and in our research, data is a phenomena of materiality produced from countless spacetimematterings. Data is as a ‘splinter of material or as waves, as flow, as liquid and then ever-changing, inconstant and noninterpretable’ (Benozzo et al., 2013: 309). Data is a production of illusions (Koro-Ljungberg, 2013). The question is not what data is but more about the becoming of data as materiality, as phenomena. Data are ‘phenomena’ in Barad’s (2007, 2014) sense, which/ that intra-acts between human and non-human materiality and cuts together apart. Phenomena ‘are differential patterns of mattering (diffraction patterns) produced through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices or apparatuses of bodily productions’ (Barad, 2007: 140). Thinking of data as phenomena-multiple in spacetimemattering means that data are no longer bounded; rather, they go on producing layerings of movements and moments as they become in new entanglements and materializations. If data are in constant mutation and movement, what is the task of the researcher? It might be to bring to attention and notice ‘something’ which has been hidden and overlooked, including sensations, feelings, affects and movements. It might be to tune into the ‘not yet’ because we cannot anticipate what will happen in the next moment. Data’s diffractions open an ontological and epistemological space of encounter: ‘the intra-actions of human and non-human bodies, together with the vagrancies of time and space, produce assemblages and events that prompt productive disconcertion’ (Taylor, 2016: 18). In this space of encounter, a researcher’s task is not to tell of something that exists independent of the encounter (producing

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the appearance of truth), but to open up an immanent subjective truth – that which becomes true, ontologically and epistemologically, in the moment of the encounter. Taking this line means that all data encounters are experimental: the researcher does not know in advance what onto-epistemological knowledge will emerge from the experimental mix of concepts, emotions, bodies, images and affects (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Data’s movements at the GWO conference generated some spacetimematterings that ‘glowed’ (MacLure, 2013). There were movements and moments that ‘did’ something and in which ‘something’ (but what?) was produced in and through the human and non-human entanglements: laughter, stress, irritation, text or, or, or. If, as Brinkmann (2014: 722) says, ‘data occurs in situations of breakdown, surprise, bewilderment, or wonder’, then where does that leave the researcher and her ‘analysis’? And if data’s movements are about what matters and what comes to matter, then who or what do those spacetimematterings matter to and why? The vigorous enzymes produced by our guts when talking and digesting the conference dinner at Keele mattered, and they too are enfolded within the collaborative energy with which the Post-qualitative methodologies (of difference) conference stream happened, but no traditional humanist qualitative researcher would be likely to take any account of them as ‘data’ producers – so, are they? Do our guts matter in who we are, in what our research ‘is’ and ‘becomes’? Perhaps. In the article we wrote together after the GWO conference at Keele – and in this Event we are writing together and in this book which you are now reading – data become a constructive force, working with and upon us. These differentiations in spacetimemattering are apparatuses for experiencing entanglement with the when, what and how of data. This is not about uncovering the essence or truth of data or its ensuing texts or an uncovering of a reality that exists among multiple realities, but a desire to try to open something else, of producing other possibilities in thinking in and around the conference and the article in space and time. Cutting together-apart … as one move in the (re)configuring of spacetimemattering (Barad, 2014) Cut, cut, cut and a quote glows. This particular quote glows: Two volunteers generate a penis straw installation using an existing colourful glass bowl inside the women’s bathroom during a conference at gender, work, and organization. After the installation, the ambiance of the bathroom space has been changed. Gender in the bathroom becomes more visible and touchable. (Benozzo et al., 2019: 96–97) And we speculate on this new data assemblage: What did the bathroom become?

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Pacifier-penis-straw-event-room.

Did the human and the non-human materialities produce a change or a displacement? Did their intra-acting produce the bathroom as something else? Did the straws become something else? What did the movements, sounds, smells, light in/through/around the bathroom produce within or as other parts of the conference space? Our GWO disturbances within the conference spaces such as the bathroom, the rooms, the corridors can be conceived as agential cuts which do not produce separation – they do not cut time, space and matter into twos or into chunks – but rather are a process of cutting-together-apart, that is, material-discursive interventions that both create and delineate phenomena and enact boundaries, meanings, properties and categories. Barad (2007) notes that cuts are doings, practices and actions that intervene in reality by creating inclusions and exclusions. She says: ‘It’s all a matter of where we place the cut … what is at stake is accountability to marks on bodies in their specificity by attending to how different cuts produce differences that matter’ (Barad, 2007: 348). Other data glows, other cuts which cut-together-apart. Two of us spent three hours in a shopping centre in Manchester (UK) looking for objects to be taken at the GWO Conference. It was not an easy task. One of us looked for inspiration from the title of the journal Gender, Work and Organization; the other of us imagined the fun those objects we bought could produce in a university space. In the GWO conference, the objects started to move around; participants displaced them from their initial places and put them elsewhere to make new

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combinations. Some participants brought other objects and these new objects entered the assemblage and formed new connections. Some participants encountered these strange non-conference objects (pacifiers, monkey, dolls, straws) that seemed to be fragments of materialities from childhood play. The non-human-human intra-actions in the conference space produced possibilities of playfulness and joyfulness. It was fun; it was joy; it was an intensity. It aerated the conference space. Participants played, and through play became earthworms bringing new and differentiating life into a normative knowledge space, challenging discourses of what it is possible to in a conference space. Putting the objects in motion generated bodily movements and attractions. These mobile doings occurred alongside the usual sitting/listening/writing that was also going on in the conference. The playful doings and movings changed something, made something appear. They produced laughter, sparkling eyes, human and non-human bodies, intra-actions and intensities. Is this conference play kids play? Are these participants like kids-grownups …grownups-kids … grownkidsup … upgrownkids? These questions reveal and challenge the regulated divisions between work/play, the binaries of youth/adult and the histories of production of docile bodies in schools, higher education and academic conference spaces. These expectations about docile bodies, which must be still and stay sitting, which must face front, which must not move and whose mouths must stay closed and not speak, express what are considered to be widely accepted ‘correct’ behavioural standards – how they shape and deform educational possibilities! Our doings sought to enable the conference space to become something other: a daring space of data objects in motion and a place of playfulness for academic bodies, a daring challenge to discourses of what we can and ‘should’ be done in a public conference place and a daring doing of new possibilities of knowledge-making. These darings to do differently were/are spacetimematterings which enfolded participants in ‘matter’s iterative becoming’ (Barad, 2007: 181). Daring as differentiating. Daring as experimental practices which connect the conference to life itself in a diversity of ways. Bag-data-bag. An invitation. Going through the personal contents of a purse; a little bag. Pulling out a wallet and a driving licence. Who is wearing dotted red rubber boots? What do these rubber boots do? Born 21 December 1970. The citizens of the UK will not have driving licences like these much longer due to the UK’s departure from the EU. Uncertainty about entering into a purse. Guilt and many other feelings about peeking into somebody’s private objects and rifling through the contents of someone’s personal space. Private objects inside the purse bring back memories and also some painful events from the past. Are we allowed (to) have sex with her/him to investigate otherness in them and us through the objects? Where has this person been shopping? Oh, in the liquor store! Birthday card. What are these purchases? Somebody sees two driving licences. Why two? This cannot be you. Oh my God. Many women have very horrible driving licence pictures. But this one is not horrible. Smelling red berries in a lip balm. It smells so good and the colour is also very beautiful. Headphones, Internet access. A conference pass. A pen. Still no tampon. Can one look deeper? Can

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Travelling Gorilla

you dig deeper? Take all the objects out. This is too personal. Tiny things are so easily (and intentionally) missed. Do you remember going into Mama’s purse to get money for some candy. This investigation is too personal and the objects are too revealing. Still no tampon. Why is the tampon left in the bag? Who dares to touch a tampon? Gorilla dares you! After 20 minutes, there is silence in the room: no comments, no questions, no answers. Watch out for gorilla moving in/through/around the conference space. Look out for a pacifier hanging in a doorway as you enter the conference dining room. Gorilla may have produced affects and movements of fear and fun but interrupting/disturbing the conference space with a pacifier – with a material object ‘normally’ used to calm down or comfort a child, or cover the need for a baby to suck the breast or the bottle – was different. Pacifiers produced curiosity, small talk, irritation or surprise. Different bodies reacted differently to the hanging pacifiers/ installation. Some started laughing, some looked annoyed, others pretended to be interested, others did not see it. Some people looked at it but did not touch it. After a while, a waiter fetched a manager to decide what to do with the pacifier: they discussed it and decided to let it continue to hang in the doorway! The pacifier intervened in and created movements all around it, producing affects, thoughts, ideas and excitement in new and shifting material-discursive assemblages.

Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine What you have read above is not, you can see, a straightforward record of events that ‘took place’ at GWO in Keele, which were then ‘written about’ in the paper ‘about’ that conference (Benozzo et al., 2019). The data productions at the conference continue to resonate and generate power in the present and feed-forward

28

Entry

into new lines of potential. Data’s doings continue to do ongoing work in making new material connections within/between past-present-future events. Data’s troublings undo linear meaning-making logics. They open a space to provoke new material engagements with knowing (do you have a data bag you would like to invite conference attendees to peer into and play with their contents?) and encourage a different view of what is meant by knowledge (as nomadic and non-linear irruptions in time-space-mattering). Such irruptions could be seen as the ‘breaks’ that unsettle the norm, as disturbances that disrupt the regularity, the repetition, the normativity of the conference. From the position of those regularities, you might be tempted to dismiss our weird data doings as irrelevant to ‘what usually happens in an AcademicConferenceMachine’. After all, the AcademicConferenceMachine pretty much continues on its way whether we disturb it or not, doesn’t it? Well, yes and no. The presence of those pacifiers did disturb the script, did disrupt the regularity, did produce confusion and questioning and play. These possibilities for variance, for differences, for working outside the norm matter. The irruption of the experiments-events into a disciplined space like that of a conference was our attempt to generate a turning point, to break the repetitive banality and to surprise our academic colleagues. Some people were surprised while others were indifferent. Some people were hailed by the sense of unruly joy our doings set loose and were energized by provocative questions concerning ‘when, what and how are data’. Such agitations matter in helping us in the collaborative task of producing ‘research practice that troubles rather than tells’ (Benozzo et al., 2019: 96). In that troubling, new questions can emerge and different opportunities and possibilities to do a conference, and for conference doings, come to light. Our attempt to create a space for encounters – as in this Event between participants and objects and writescapes and bags and conference rooms and spaces – is about trying to resist the fixity of conferences. The disturbances could have started anywhere, anytime. Like the other events in this book, this event relates and re-turns conference disturbances and the purpose of each disturbance is to create a space for uncertainty to flourish. Disturbances help inject curiosity back into conferences. In undisciplining their normal unfolding, earthworm disturbances indicate why doing knowledge differently in the AcademicConferenceMachine matters.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetimeenfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240– 268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Barad, K. (2012). Nature’s queer performativity. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning, 1–2, 25–53. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067 Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction; cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623

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Benozzo, A., Bell, H., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2013). Moving between nuisance, secrets, and splinters as data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 309–315. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708613487878 Benozzo, A., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2017). [Data within (data]-bag) diffracted. In M. Koro-Ljungberg, T. Lo¨yto¨nen, & M. Tesar (Eds.), Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric (pp. 117–130). New York: Peter Lang. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Brinkmann, S. (2014). Doing without data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 720–725. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800414530254 Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal and Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 452–525. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09518398.2010.500628 Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2013). ‘Data’ as vital illusion. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 274–278. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708613487873 MacLure, M. (2013). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228–232. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708613487863 Taylor, C. A. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthuman research practices for education. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 5–24). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

BAGS

What is so important about a bag? Bags are such mundane objects. Bags are present in every aspect of life. Bags come in all shapes and sizes and can be made from a range of different materials – so why focus on such a common object? Bags come with a history/herstory, and this has been highlighted by Ursula Le Guin (2019) in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction which draws together a reframing of human evolution from hunter-gatherer societies. Here, she considers how the bag is just as useful to humans as weapons used in hunting, highlighting the importance of bags to release hands to perform other tasks. In the preface to The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Le Guin, 2019), Donna Haraway reminds readers of the mattering of stories by noting ‘it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what concepts we think to think other concepts’ (Haraway, 2016: 10). Le Guin’s (2019) speculative storytelling is well known, and in this small book she asks readers to consider how bags stories allow humans to discern what is happening (both in the past and present) and what potentials are available for life to be perceived differently. Both Haraway and Le Guin use the bag metaphor to move beyond the normalizing and regulatory nature of technoscience and its advancement narratives. They see the bag as an activator for thinking about more worldly and harmonious connections where new stories become possible. The possibility for new stories pushes against the gendered, classed, racialized, ableist and neoliberal framing which positions white Western men as the pinnacle of existence (Braidotti, 2013). Haraway proposed the bag as a storytelling vehicle and suggested new bag-stories where ‘wearing the bag means learning to listen and respond to the life stories’ (Haraway, 2019: 17). Such bag-storyings and hearing/listening practices can, we suggest, disrupt the AcademicConferenceMachine which is saturated with stories of ‘what works’ and ‘the right way to do things’ which frame a hierarchy of importance. DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-3

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Bag-Angelo/Bag-Neil

Taking a steer from Ursula La Guin, we explore the potentiality of bags which draws us to working in posthumanist, feminist materialist, post-qualitative, undisciplined and indisciplined ways with bags. Our conference event can be part of this baggy practice, where we challenge the norms of research expectations and become open to how post-qualitative methodologies offer us new ways to explore human and other-than-human relationality (Benozzo, 2020; Tesar, 2020). The humble bag allows us to think about the AcademicConferenceMachine differently in ways that ‘disrupt the striations of conventional research, quantitative and qualitative. It is out of this shadowy zone that new forms of vitality and interconnection emerge, positing a new form of posthuman inquiry’ (Fairchild, 2016: 18).

Gaining speed with/in/out/towards/to/for bags In this possibly post-qualitative, posthuman or more-than-human event, we experiment with what happens, what takes place and what is produced when bags and other human and non-human materialities connect, collide and intersect. By paying attention to bags as mundane objects of life, we illustrate the interrelatedness, connectivity and potential embedded in ‘thing power’ (Bennett, 2010) and matter that we (as scholars) generally bypass and potentially deem meaningless or lifeless. We outline how we deployed bags in four research-creation improvisations, which took heed of Manning’s (2016) invitation to combine and

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create novel approaches and connections as a means to study what objects do and what their performativity may enable in the context of scholarly research. The research-creation, thinking-doings enacted were partially inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) for whom creativity and experimenting is a mode of thinking. Our bags research-creations occurred at a workshop at the Gender and Education annual conference in June 2017 that we attended (three of us in person, three virtually), which enabled us to experiment with bags to explore the possibilities that bags might produce and offer. In this Event, we exemplify some of what our bags research-creation improvisations did – how they worked methodologically as improvisations, becomings and recreations; how they recalibrated what ‘counts as data’; how they materialized relationality, resistance, interactions and intraactions through the work they did as mundane objects in a conference space. We narrate how the possibilities opened up by bags choreographies improvisations helped destabilize normative ways of doing research – at conferences, in research practices and in ‘reporting’ research inquiries in academic articles. Our improvisations were oriented towards showing how bags prompt wonder and produce different spatial awareness; how bags solicit, assemble and combine things, objects and matter; how bags communicate, attract, desire and produce; and how they enfold odd, familiar, partial, broken, fixed, full, dreamed, seen, replaced bodies, all of which are coming together-with bags in unexpected ways and always more. In line with the innovative research-creation, post-qualitative approach to knowledge-making we took, the Event itself is shaped as a ‘baggy writing space’ which contains other-than-usual writing practices than those found in more ‘mainstream’ academic articles.

Bags/Wunderkammern/choreographies The activity of gathering together very different objects and materials and trying to classify them started in the sixteenth century with the phenomenon of Wunderkammern as places that brought together pieces of the world around us, a world deemed wonderful and full of amazing surprises. As Lugli (2006: 126) explains: The wondrous is a meta-historical category that has been defined all along the eighteenth century, didactically first and foremost, as a form of knowledge, that is, a very special half-way stage, a kind of mental suspension that lies between ignorance and knowledge, which marks the end of ignorance and the beginning of knowledge.1 Bags/Wunderkammern/choreographies forge an assemblage of fragments in an emergent temporary unity: • •

Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture, Testa + Casa + Luce or Fusione di una testa e di una finestra, in which objects literally enter the sculpture; Objects juxtaposed in a way that is surprising and thought-provoking;

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•

• • • • • •

Objects which make up, form (and perform) other objects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Combination follows combination and each one resonates differently. Different materials accumulate, align and compose in mobile juxtapositions which fire our imagination and populate our dreams; Fragments of the world enter the perimeter of the bag. Things pile up without any precise order; A dynamic, not static, mattering of objects ‘speaking’ to each other in ways we are unaware of; Objects producing wondrous relatings; Places full to bursting with natural (naturalia) and artificial (artificialia et mirabilia) things; Things making connections without necessity, logic or reason which obey their own laws and belong to the realm of dreams and wonderment; Bags improvising relations, soliciting new collections and intra-actions.

Bags/Wunderkammern generate potentialities of thinking-doing and possibilities for performing vital ecologies of spacetimematterings (Barad, 2007) instantiating bags’ capacities to disrupt normative research. This is what we experiment and wonder about in this Event.

Why bags? Bags have been our companions since earliest times when they freed women’s hands to forage, hunt and rear children. Bags in cave paintings date back thousands of years. Bags did work in military campaigns. Today, all around us, bags have adapted to changing needs: they establish wealth and status via designers such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Gucci (Russell & Tyler, 2005). Bags are political (Markstedt, 2007) and performative (Blaise, 2005), they are sites of racialization (Magnet & Mason, 2014) and encode and enact discourses of gender, materiality, power and knowledge. The bag is a prosthesis of the body and the body is equally a prosthesis of the bag, that is, bags are a kind of superposition in which body and bag mutually extend each other. The bag is the exteriority that extends the interiority, which in turn expands the exteriority in a continuous never-ending process (Massumi, 2002). Bags, bodies and environments together produce expected and, more importantly, unexpected affects and effects on us. In academia, bags activate us as (a)gendered, race(d), classed and particular bodied scholars. Bags are conferred on conference attendees – thick and durable, eco-friendly, bulky, too small or heavy. Such bags lend us an identity (now I am a gender scholar, now I am an international researcher!) and a belonging (I have a bag which displays and enacts my sense of being ‘at home’ here), and they travel home with us to find another use (or not) or are discarded in conference hotel rooms. Furthermore, as academic writers, thinkers and collaborative partners, we continually haul bags around with us – handbags, workbags, computer

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bags. Bags possess us as much as we possess them: bags take on relational force in engaging us as carriers, owners, explorers, shoppers, analysts of their contents and judges of other bags and bag carriers. It is apparent that bags are not only objects of human possession and utility. Bags are more-than-human mundane performative objects which, in personal, public, virtual and actual ways, have a capability to transform the subjects and objects associated with them. Bags enact

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improvisational choreographies of mattering. Bags orient bodies in spaces and, in entangling humans and more-than-humans together, constitute us as a form of bag-species: A new sort of ‘we’. Bags are lively matter (Bennett, 2010) with an ability to effect border crossings. In what follows, we re-orient bags, moving them from the sidelines and perimeters to the centre of our research and attention. We comment on how bags became entangled with those of us (Carol, Nikki and Constanse) who brought them to the conference, with those of us (Mirka, Angelo and Neil) who appeared inside the bags via iPads and Skype meetings and with those who participated in the bags workshop-creation event. To explore these entanglements, we have effected a number of agential cuts (Barad, 2007) to enable us to examine and create knowledge about bags and how they functioned in the context of the academic conference, as part of a research-creation apparatus and afterwards in the writing of this Event.

Improvising bag research-creations Improvisation has inspired many qualitative researchers in diverse and unexpected ways, as they seek to align the concept-practice of research-creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014) with arts-based research (Naughton et al., 2018), emergent and becoming research (Taylor & Hughes, 2016), performance studies (Massumi, 2011) and performance philosophy. The heterogeneity of improvisation has been instrumental in producing different forms and enactments of experimentation which have shaped recent shifts in qualitative and post-qualitative research. Manning and Massumi (2014) propose that rather than relying on free improvisation, highly ‘technical’ processes (such as research and scholarship) benefit from structured improvisations by building into them ‘enabling constraints’, suggesting that ‘like the dance practice, the philosophical exploration is a technicity in its own right, activated and activating across registers of content and processual invention’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: 94). They contend that the constraint of ‘activation’ can work against description or reportage which relies on describing the past, previous and before and propose, instead, the openness of activation, of improvisational research-creation which activates its own dynamic forces and new occurrences. In our case, the enabling constraint was bags (always a plural), and our task in the workshop at the conference and in the writing of this Event was to activate a space for ‘quasi-chaos’ to take hold, a quasi-chaos ‘pulsat[ing] with potential technicities’ and enabling ‘as-yet-unstructured improvisations’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: 114) to be activated. Thus, in the bags research-creation workshop, we, the participants and audience, were continuously entering, rotating and exiting the presentation space. We and the participants did not ‘sit still’ and observe, but moved through four different activity stations and intra-acted with bags with objects in them; a bags-autopsy table; a bags-image production; and virtual bags dialogues.

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Of these research-creation improvisations, one of us wrote: Bag entanglements, bag-bodies, diverse lines of flight. Mattering of bags happened. Leakiness of bag boundaries. What became a bag or of a bag was less certain. Some attended a conference in a bag or through a bag. Bags were blurring the lines between presence and absence. A single bag event was no longer one but became a multiple. Bags and people involved with bags multiplied. Unexpected appearance and meetings happened within and through bags. Some presentations took place in IKEA and garbage bags. Conference participants lived through difference with and in the bags. Bags held the session together. Others of us wrote: Bags multiple. Bags carry, contain, hide, transport, disappear, separate, travel, decompose, non-decompose, give, take, conceal, bring together, change, offer shelter, friend, sense, recognize, freeze and heat, store blood, generate ice and keep soup and soul warm and, and. Bags perform. Bags are always more than one. Bags become. Bags bag. Where can I find a garbage bag? In the library? In a conference space? Is somebody there? Is somebody in my garbage bag? An academic dialogue inside a dark garbage bag – how would that work? What would it produce? Bags activated in this way became mobile, vital and immanent, revealing potentials, relations, movements and flows as we explored: What is a bag? What do bags do? What do bags enact and enable?

Bags-improvisation 1: bags with objects in them And at this point, the possibilities are endless. Who knows what else there might be in this bag? Oh, there’re lots of interesting objects. Look at this! Oh, it’s a whip! And these are handcuffs and there are leather belts, some lubricant jelly, hair removing cream and vibrators, sexy underpants (see also Benozzo et al., 2016)… A space Full and/or empty

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Heavy and/or light Hard and/or soft Static and/or dynamic Continuous and/or discontinuous Public and/or personal A bag as something that contains a portion of (our) world A bag as an object with different uses: to carry other items and transport us. Who/what is transported by whom/what? A bag contains objects that can be wonderful (strange or extravagant, eccentric and unexpected, questioning, imagining, probing...) Travel bags, handbags, manbags, coolbags, beachbags, washbags… A bag has an aesthetic connotation: it can be ugly and/or beautiful; it can give pleasure, or it can disgust, it is seductive… An extra appendage – counting all my limbs and luggage – drag around. #BLM racialized – black boys – respectability politics. Baggy pants perhaps getting killed for baggy pants. ‘Too much baggage – emotionally incontinent too much history, too many children. This improvisation narrates how body bags co-compose relations which undo the ‘I’ and relocate it as multiple, in transpersonal and processual bag-species: multi-limbed, bag-human hybrids; the #BLM movement and the marginalization of African Americans in the US; and enduring gendered notions of women’s emotionality.

Bags-improvisation 2: bags-autopsy The bags-autopsy table – a gathering of bags, scissors, threads and fastenings – offered an invitation to encourage cutting-together-apart, a movement which is ‘not separate consecutive activities, but a single event that is not one’ (Barad, 2010: 244). People circle the tables wondering if they should … cut… rip … snip … sew … the workshop participants were initially reticent … who will make the first cut? … then one rips open a bag … others join in as bags entangle them and lines of flight take bags in new directions. Cuttingstogether-apart (Barad, 2014) are materialized as bags are re-worked, redesigned, re-made. Bags and humans as ‘data’ see bodies re-oriented and hybridized in the act of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), these vibrant bag-human hybrids brimming with (non)sense (Deleuze, 1990). New bags-human relations materialize as participants sit, cut, sew, chat, create, leave, re-turn, repeat. The bags-autopsy research-creation improvisation does not produce predetermined methodological outcomes, but engages new ways to think bags as connective, multiple, affirmative and generative (Van der Tuin, 2015) – bags as companion-species (Haraway, 2008). Bags mobilize regimented striated space (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) creating something fuzzier, not quite smooth but felted and textured, as both transversal and physical cuts diffract normalized bags meanings and allow us to think bags differently.

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Bag-Autopsy

Bags-improvisation 3: bags-image production 88 bags and counting Hessian bag Shiny bag Black bag Tea bag Sand bag Posh going-out bag Walking bags Flower bag Travel bag Handbag Shoulder bag Shopping bag Bag displays Plastic bags Brown in any shade bags Black bags Eye bags Football bag Tied up with string bags Valise that wants to be a bag bag Dog treat bag

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Bread bag Sweet bag Valise that’s given up on being a bag bag Bag collection Happy bag Swinging bag Jewellery bag Banana bag Paper bag Big bag and baby bag Wicker basket dreaming bag dreams Expanding bag Envelope bag Leather bag Hanging bag Bag couple Bag insides Golden shot bag Zipper bag Love bag Bottle bag Summer plant bag Blue bag Trolley bag Box of bags Earring bags You can’t see what’s in me bag Folded bags Torn bag I’m so pink and girly bags Carpet bags Bed bags Hanging on the door bags Bag in hand Bag on nail Bag on top Pooh bags Ready for your hand bag Disembowelled bag Dog treat bag A case becoming body bag Wine bucket bag My favourite work bag Bags in hallway

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How many bags do I need bag? Stripy bag Let’s go bags Low slung bag Hiding behind the door bags Garden bag Chair bag Waste bag Button bag Tic tac bag Lounging on the floor bag Swimming bag Reading bag Golfing bag Phone bag Human turtle bag Hairy bag Forgotten bag Wire bag Multi-coloured bags Conference bag Seated bags Trendy bag Us and Them bags This research-creation improvisation emerged with the collective assemblage of 84 bags images (personal photos, internet images, fine art images) into a Pecha kuccha slideshow. There was a little art in this assembling – attendance to contrast and colour and style. Workshop participants contributed four more images, which were added to the growing bag-image choreography. One bag image per slide. 88 bags images One image per 20 seconds 88 × 20 seconds image-production Each image changes automatically to the next image in a Pecha kuccha Repeated when ends A continuous moving-image slideshow In Cinema 1, Deleuze (1986: 2) contends that cinema ‘does not give us an image to which movement is added, instead it immediately gives us a movement-image’, because the movement-image extracts ‘from movements the mobility which is their common substance’ (Deleuze 1986: 24). This ‘extraction’ of ‘mobility’ occurs because of three things: one, shots are edited into sequences (montage); two, shots are taken from different angles and distances; and three, the viewer’s gaze is free to move over the image as they wish. These three characteristics free the image from space and connect it to time, constituting movement-images as ‘mobile sections of a duration’ (Deleuze 1986: 23). Here Deleuze brings in Bergson’s (2004) idea of duration to think about how the perpetual changes of cinema

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images (montage) works as a figuration of our consciousness which, according to Bergson, also continuously changes. Image and mind are connected by and in the activity of unceasing variation. Mobile sections, as sensory, material and temporal movement-images, include the viewer’s perception, sight and knowledge as well as the ‘force’ of the object. The image is not a representation of an ‘object’ and neither is the viewer separate or separable from the image: she/he is intrinsic to it through brain and consciousness in a material-psychical connection: ‘the thing and the perception of the thing are one and the same thing, one and the same image’ (Deleuze 1986: 65, 63). And so, bags-images are us. We are them. We move with them, become them, are entangled with/in them.

Bags-improvisation 4: virtual bags dialogues Improvisational dialogue. Unexpected activation. Without knowing and seeing anything from where I am inside this bag something is being produced and this something leaves a trace. A bag – filthy, dirty, stinky, plastic container of no-knowledge. Not. And yet. Place of unanticipated and surprising conversations. Space of relating; inside something unexpected and unexpected something inside. Smooth and calm, yet simultaneously harsh and violent movement between speakers and participants. Gentle entries and fast, rapid departures towards a dialogue. Not knowing who is who. Who cares? Productively failed improvisation. How are you doing? How do bags function? What can bags do? How do bags embody? How do bags body? What do they materialize? How to begin in relation to bag-events? How do you function in relation to bags? How do you relate? How do bags think-feel? How do bags affect and be affected? Where are you able to go and what might you be able to do? I am not sure. I have to go now. Cut. Movements in the room. Curiosity. Caution. Hands on the back. Looks. Breath. Quiet. Hot room. Sweat flows. More movements. Words flows through the room, around and through the human and non-human bodies. Hands writing. Hands cutting. Hands sewing. Hands pulls. Pulse. PC does not want to connect to Skype. Frustration. More sweat. Moments of excitements. Lots of energy and movements. Laughter. Cut. Two non-human phenomena. Two human phenomena. What’s up? Two apparently passive participants. Their crossed arms and legs produces affects in and around me. Cut. Materialization of bags and borders. Materialization hanging on materialization. Materialization moving with materialization. Materialization producing materialization. Materialization?

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Materialization produces phenomenon. Materialization is always becoming. In and through my body, I sense how my thoughts intra-acts with fragments of other spacetimematterings and the movements of my fingers on the keyboard. Pictures arise in my head and produce affects. Bags produce borders. Bags produce discourses and discourses produce bags. And …. Cut. Bodies are troubled by those who appeared virtually in bags. Bodiesin-bags (iPads, Skype, Neil, Mirka Angelo) as fleeting figures of the absent/ present, attendance as virtual and partial contained within bags. How might this text encompass these virtual engagements? How might these multiple I/i as thinking/writing/doing be remembered? Grosz’s (1995: 21) question about ‘the ways in which the author’s corporeality … intrudes into or is productive of the text’ helps us re-member (materially reassemble) the traces of the then-virtual, now non-existent, conference performances. Bags as unwavering and unwitting participants in their own representational capture of past, current and still-to-be events. Travelling onwards. Still sweaty in hearing those recordings, the virtualmaterial trace of bodies-in-bag-species. Cut. Skype rings. Mirka is there. Laughing: Mirka inside the black garbage bag. She is attending this conference from Finland, sitting in the public library wearing a garbage bag and Skyping us. Other library patrons stare. Cut. Connection with Neil, and then all together. Neil, Angelo, Mirka, Constance, Carol and Nikki. Cut. On the PC desktop appears the blue contour of an IKEA bag and the ceiling of a room. Introduction of the event. Carol’s voice in the distance. Cut. Some participants look inside the bag. Telling the story of the IKEA bag and of the IKEA ad. They are having difficulties in hearing the voice emanating from

Cut.

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the IKEA bag. It seems as the ‘performance’ does not work, perhaps too much prepared or am I too distant from the participants? Or is the difficulty with the audio? Cut. ‘To experiment is to try new actions, methods, techniques and combinations . . . we experiment when we do not know what the result will be and have no preconceptions concerning what it should be . . . Experimentation by its nature breaks free of the past and dismantles old assemblages’ (Baugh, cited in Torrance, 2017: 74). Cut. ‘Experimentation is about interrupting the taken-for-granted, doing something different, trying something out to see what happens, creating the new’ (Torrance, 2017: 71). Cut. A body bathed in the nervous sweat of the new. The anticipation of the virtual appearance at a conference workshop. A not-yet which has the explicit aim of disturbing the expected and accepted striations of the AcademicConferenceMachine space. This clammy body sits, alert, ready to engage and be engaged. The body’s virtual encounter planned as an unplannable ‘minor gesture’ (Manning, 2016). Technically transformed through an iPad like a 1990s MTV robotic talking head – sanitized, dry, pickable-uppable, droppable-downable, not quite reachable: a fascinated simulacrum. A body not quite encountering other(s’) bodies whilst encountering with (un)certainty the policed, disciplined and imagined – but real and contestable – contours of ‘that’ greater body: conference, academic etiquettes, fields and traditions of knowledge. Flashed recognitions. Planned. Let go. Wrong?! That didn’t work. Let go. Moved already. Other. Bother! Right?! Let go. It’s passed already. Invent. Remember plan. Off-centre. Try again. Try new. Let go. Catch up (?). Let go. Cut. A virtual participant in the bag. At the whim of others’ interest and curiosities, subject of and to the manipulations of those who decide to engage (Manning, 2013), inextricably a part of that wider choreography of bags experimentations. Bodies in flow: a bag holder for a body that is not present; a (non/ sense)body bag, leaking its virtual content; opened for display, for (non)identification, to be added to the unknown in the play of the academic workshop. And then, closed again – forgotten, dead, buried? Until the next wave of curiosity entices another (non-embodied) encounter with/in the workshop.

Bags choreographing research-creation: Bags-data and data-bags McCormack (2013: 171) describes choreography as ‘a process disclosing geometries of moving involvement – a choreography of worldly arrangements expressive of rather than reductive of difference’. In our research-creation experiments, bags choreographies put affects, bodies and materialities into co-motional relation which are productive of different spacetimematterings by, again and again, cutting-together-apart of/with human and non-human phenomena (Barad,

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2007). Bags-doings entangling ‘my/their/our/its’ body/ies and producing cuts and diffractions, affects, thoughts and movements in/through/around ‘my/their/ our/its’ body/ies. Bags, conceptualized as temporary structures, are regenerated, melt, transform, appear and disappear while opening up new directions/ movements/becomings. This posthuman experimental-theoretical-research-creation-improvisation produces and becomes in open processes where bags function as active agents and productive relational matter. Our experiments are not about determining what bags/borders are, but about the potentialities of bags-data-becomings which, in an agential realist understanding (Barad, 2007), appears as an assembly of materialities which incorporate us/them/it/other as researcher. Such becomings break the pattern of what may appear as bags as data (Augustine, 2014; Benozzo & Koro-Ljungberg, 2017; Brinkmann, 2014; Koro-Ljungberg, 2013; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014). Instead, bags-data and data-bags choreograph many types of (bags) materials. Data is not just about ‘things’ that you collect through, for example, interview, observation, statistic or video. Books and articles, conversations with others, diary notes, everyday experiences, hiking in the forest, Facebook, old memories, community discourses, political discussions and ~ and ~ and ~ are also part of/in this bags-(data)-choreography. Our experiments and this Event explore how bags-species have been produced via a range of bags-choreographies. The workshop and the textual re-turns serve as heterogeneous experiments in which bags feature and act as the constant relational connection. As our ‘enabling constrainers’, bags weave and flow along with the people present at the workshop who worked and chatted on the bags-autopsy table, moved around the room and talked into bags to distant collaborators, wandered down the side tables reading the bags texts and wrote into the texts with their bags definitions. Bags-people collectively producing and enabling, releasing flows, producing movement and creating space for stillness, sitting and contemplation. Bags-people creating openings for ‘participat[ion] in the direct experience of a world in-forming’, which recognizes that ‘the subject does not precede this experience, it is in-formed by it’ (Manning, 2014: 164). Bags and bags-people produce endless potentialities. For example, the Pecha kuccha slideshow at the front of the room, ongoing during all of this, created possibilities for spatial performance by dismantling the ‘front of the room’ because the bag stations have dismembered the four ‘normal’ quadrants of the room. Bags-related activity perfused the room until the room itself performed, its space transforming and its axis spinning widely away from its former function as a normative place for teaching. Bags as choreographic objects (Manning, 2013) – as catalyzers – rearrange the everyday classroom space by opening up new affiliations, affective relations, intimacies: a women’s sewing circle, a laughing interchange, a pass-by comment, a lingering look, an intensive deepening and slow diffusion. Bags co-compose fleeting actions which organize an ‘us’ in the here-and-now. Bags enable and constrain the way this text was written. Perhaps bags have always been concert/ed co-conductors in a human-nonhuman choreography; it’s just that ‘we’ haven’t yet noticed they’ve been doing it!

Bags

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Bags have potential to urge us as scholars to think about our work and our lives differently. What is or remains stable, what is enabled, what is constrained in the bags, in the beings, in the knowings, in the doings and more? We hope you, the reader, can also be drawn into our methodological bags choreographies which materialize past, present and future. The relational possibilities (with bags) are unlimited and always already here. What might thinking-with bags do for you?

Note 1 ‘La meraviglia è una categoria metastorica che si definisce fino a tutto il Settecento, didatticamente prima di tutto, come una forma di conoscenza, cioè uno stadio intermedio e particolarissimo, una specie di sospensione mentale che sta tra l’ignoranza e il sapere, che determina la fine dell’ignoranza e l’inizio del sapere’ (Lugli, 2006: 126)

References Augustine, S. M. (2014). Living in a post-coding world: Analysis as assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 747–753. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800414530258 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway – quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglement and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240– 268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168– 187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Benozzo, A. (2020). Post qualitative research: An idea for which the time has come. Qualitative Inquiry, online first, 1–4, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800420922251 Benozzo, A., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Carey, N. (2016). Post/Authorship: Five or more IKEA customers in search of an author. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(7), 568–580. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800415622490 Benozzo, A., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2017). [Data within (data]-bag) diffracted. In M. Koro-Ljungberg, T. Löytönen, & M. Tesar (Eds.), Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry. Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric (pp. 117–130). New York: Peter Lang. Bergson, H. (2004). Matter and memory. New York: Dover Publications Inc. Blaise, M. (2005). Performing femininities through gender discourses. In L. Diaz Soto & B. B. Swadener (Eds.), Power and voice in research with children (pp. 105–116). New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brinkmann, S. (2014). Doing without data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 720–725. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800414530254 Deleuze, G. (1986). Cinema 1. The movement-image. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. Trans. M. Lester. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Fairchild, N. (2016). Plugging into the Umbra: Creative experimentation (in)(on) the boundaries of knowledge production in ECEC research. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 7(1), 16–30. http://journals.hioa.no/index.php/rerm Grosz, E. (1995). Space, time and perversion: Essays on the politics of bodies. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2019). Introduction. In U. K. Le Guin (Ed.), The carrier bag theory of fiction. (pp. 9–22). London: Literary Trust. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2013). ‘Data’ As vital illusion. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 274–278. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708613487873 Le Guin, U. K. (2019). The carrier bag theory of fiction. London: Literary Trust. Lugli, A. (2006). Arte e meraviglia. Scritti sparsi 1974–1995. Torino: Umberto Allemandi and C. Magnet, S., & Mason, C. S. (2014). Of trojan horses and terrorist representations: Mom bombs, cross-dressing terrorists, and queer orientalisms. Canadian Journal of Communication, 39, 193–209. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2014v39n2a2712 Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2014). Wondering the world directly – or, how movement outruns the subject. Body and Society, 20(3/4), 162–188. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1357034X14546357 Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Markstedt, H. (2007). Political handbags. The representation of women politicians. A case study of the websites and newspaper coverage of the women candidates in the Labour Party Deputy Leadership election. MA Dissertation, London School of Economics, London. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2011). Semblance and event – activist philosophy and the occurrent arts. Cambridge: MIT Press. McCormack, D. (2013). Refrains for moving bodies. London: Duke University Press. Naughton, C., Biesta, G., & Cole, D. R. (2018). Art, artists and pedagogy: Philosophy and the arts in education. Abingdon: Routledge. Russell, R., & Tyler, M. (2005). Branding and bricolage: Gender, consumption and transition. Childhood, 12(2), 221–237. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 0907568205051905 St. Pierre, E. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2014). Qualitative data analysis after coding. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 715–719. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800414532435 Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (2016) (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tesar, M. (2020). Some thoughts concerning post-qualitative methodologies. Qualitative Inquiry, online first, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420931141. Torrance, H. (2017). Experimenting with qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(1), 69–76. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800416649201 Van der Tuin, I. (2015). Generational feminism: New materialist introduction to a generative approach. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

THINKING-WITH DIRT Viral configurations of/for knowing

Ingress This Event unfolds matterings of dirt. It proposes dirt as something useful for thinking-with. It uses dirt to speculate on knowledge and knowing, on producing data, on doing research and on academic writing. In focusing on material relationalities produced in, around, through and by dirt, the Event considers what dirt does in helping produce knowledge about bodies, objects and spaces in academic and non-academic, other, ordinary and everyday social spaces. It wonders about the ways in which dirt’s fusional potential brings spaces into relation, to bind them and others – and the humans and non-human who/which inhabit those spaces – together and into relation. The Event re-turns to, and takes flight from, a Gender and Education conference event held in June 2017, led by Carol and Nikki, described here:

AFFECTIVE ENCOUNTERS WITH SEEMINGLY DISGUSTING OBJECTS: THE MICROPOLITICS OF VISCOUS POROSITY This research-creation/workshop is an experiment with what bodies and affect produce in everyday encounters. Relational entanglements with a series of positioning papers, images, material objects and found items will encourage thinking gender-connections-between-bodies differently. Focusing on the micro-events of life and the reconfiguration of bodily connections as shadows, traces, viscous porosity and fusions will highlight a generative means to move past Other(ed) gendered notions of leaky, volatile and fluid bodies.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-4

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The Event’s beginning(s) work a re-turn to the conference event of the recent past via present circumstances of pandemic – past-present collisions which help illuminate dirt’s viral configurations and conceptualize the material matterings they install. The rest of the Event pursues what dirt’s viral configurations unleash for thinking through four dirt-ing entanglements. The first two speculate on dirt’s ability to generate knowledge which dispose of human and non-human bodies deemed unseemly, unsuitable, unworthy. These dirt-ings focus on dirt’s doings in dividing, separating and producing differentiated social positionings. The subsequent two focus on dirt’s potentialities and how thinking-with dirt can produce generative and different ways of producing data, doing research and engaging in conferences. The Event invokes dirt as an always-there/here entanglement with the ongoingness of life, academic and otherwise, and ends with some clues for you, reader, for addressing the question: how might dirt animate your own research and conference imaginaries?

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Beginning(s) one: cleaners clean, cacti are relocated, campuses close I (Carol) begin writing the first draft of this Event on Sunday, 29 March 2020, a date, like all dates, of significant and multiple particularities. It is the sixth day of the UK lockdown, a timespace of government economic and political interventions to control the population’s movements, doings and associations in order to combat the potentially rampaging spread of coronavirus. Lockdown officially began on Monday, 23 March, although like many academics across the UK, Nikki and I had already been working from home a number of weeks as universities moved teaching online, closed campuses and urged students to return home or sequester themselves in their student accommodations. My last day in work on campus was Tuesday, 17 March, when I delivered a lecture to undergraduate students. There were seven out of a class of 47 in the room, each student spaced out to observe what so quickly came to be known as ‘social distancing’, an apparently safe space of 6 feet (2 metres) away from other people. The rest of the students were watching (or not watching) on Panopto, a lecture capture system, from the safety of their own rooms. The sense of an ending materialized in the room: a giddy friendliness, an urge to be kind, a fear edging into panic. For the students (and for me too), the not-knowing-anything about this virus and its effects was suddenly so much more terrifying than the known knowns of seminars, lectures, assessments, assignments, exams. The ‘we’ who assembled temporarily in that room were affectively bound together for that short space of time by the impending sense that the virus was throwing/would throw the known lineaments of the academic future into doubt. As, indeed, it has done. Two days after this lecture, I went to my office on a now almost deserted campus to ‘rescue’ my plants. The university had given us a few days to get what we needed before buildings were locked, ID entry cards deactivated and the campus closed. A tentative knowing emerged: we were unlikely to be returning to campus until September. That long. Wow. Hard to comprehend. I boxed the hardy cacti reposing on my hot windowsill and carried them home to repose on other hot windowsills. The only people around were cleaners, whose job it was, as long as academics were still allowed to frequent their offices, to wash door frames, door handles and all other hard surfaces likely to be touched once every hour. I chatted with the cleaner from a safe distance, went home and washed my hands. In subsequent weeks, life was suddenly simplified into a few plain (clean, unadorned, stark) ‘save your life’ bullet points. This from the government: Coronavirus (COVID-19): what you need to do Stay at home • Only go outside for food, health reasons or work (but only if you cannot work from home)

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• If you go out, stay 2 metres (6 feet) away from other people at all times • Wash your hands as soon as you get home Do not meet others, even friends or family You can spread the virus even if you don’t have symptoms (www.gov.uk, 2020)

Beginning(s) two: viscous porosity, bodies and gendered micropolitics On Thursday, 22 June 2017, Carol-Nikki, two co-conspirators, set in motion an emergent event at the Gender and Education annual conference at Middlesex University, UK. Together, we present-lead-co-ordinate a Research- CreationWorkshop called Viscous Porosity and the Micropolitics of Bodily Fusions. The event abstract reads as follows: This workshop activates Tuana’s (2008) notion of ‘viscous porosity’ in an experimental-theoretical-research-creation which ponders the natureculture of bodily fusions. It includes two papers – one on the gendered politics of clean in university spaces, one considering bodily childhood fusions in school – and a research-creation-experiment in which participants engage with images/objects to explore the material, sensory and affective entanglements of viscous porosity. We consider how viscous porosity enables us to move past Other(ed) gendered notions of leaky bodies towards more diffractive conceptualizations of bodies as volatile and resistant, in which molecular interactions, traces and exchanges provoke new imaginaries in politically generative ways. The 90-minute session was arranged in the following sequence: • • •

Paper 1: The gendered politics of clean in university spaces – Carol; Paper 2: Cyborg fusions in a (class)room of goddesses – Nikki; Research-creation-workshop experiment – participants were provided with materials (images, artefacts and objects) associated with ‘dirt’ and invited to engage with them in any way they wished to explore dirt’s material, sensory and affective entanglements.

Event participants were informed at the beginning that the workshop discussion would be digitally recorded and that we would at some point be writing about the event but the form of that writing was not yet decided. There were eight participants. After the two paper presentations – done in ‘traditional’ spoken-from-the-front format – Carol-Nikki joined the participants sitting round a large table arrangement to engage with, feel, touch, smell the objects and discuss dirt’s material, sensory and affective entanglements and evocations.

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The materials included:

Hair

During the workshop, some comments from participants: R: Uhu, what do you think …. R: Oh nails! (laughter) Shall I describe for the— R: R: R: R:

(overtalking and laughter) Teeth! They’ve got teeth in here. Child teeth? They look quite small. I’d get out of here quickly. You don’t know what they’re up to. (laughter and overtalking)

… R: So what’s in there? Hair? *: What do you think it is? R: Yeah, but what is it? R: Does it matter. R: Who does it belong to?

(laughter) What do you think? Who do you think it belonged to? Maybe a cat? Oh is it dog hair. Is it your dog? I keep my dog teeth … These are human teeth, right? Are they children’s teeth? (overtalking and laughter) R: It’s cat. R: Oh is it cat? R: It’s definitely more like cat. R: R: R: R: R:

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After the workshop, in a blog written for the Gender and Education Association, reflecting on the event, Zoe Charalambous wrote: Generosity and Viscous Porosity = the workshop by Carol Taylor and Nikki Fairchild played with our limits with ‘DIRT’ – After the ‘theory’ – the presenters presented us with bags and boxes containing dirt (teeth, hair, nails, etc.) and we engaged in a free-associative discussion about our reactions to these. I absolutely was fed with thought (–as the conversation somehow spiralled into ‘breastfeeding’ and the role of the mother – whether it is natural or not – criticisms about discourses created –) by what was said by the presenters: ‘Dirt is always with us’ linked with what Marx has said (it was said) ‘the Poor are always with us’ and I must add ‘the Other is always with us.’ ‘Being Porous,’ it was added, ‘is a good thing, skin is the boundary.’ A final entertainment of boundaries was discussed using Haraway’s concept of the cyborg (1987) – a little girl from Fairchild’s research working with a rice-tray that was one with her – as she was moving and going away and being with it at kindergarten school. Playing. Punctuating, playing with punctuating. Playing with our bodies – with the bodies – with the body of this conference – in a manner that recognizes the validity of Other’s desires. This text. (Charalambous, 2017)

Crumbs-dust

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Beginning(s) three: re-turning dirt This Event shuttles between these two times. It re-turns the past Viscous Porosity conference event via the more recent past and present circumstances of pandemic, and re-turns the pandemic in the light of both our past workshop event and potential future conferences. These past-present-future collisions help us (Carol-Nikki) illuminate dirt’s viral configurations and ponder the material matterings they install. The re-turns discussed are nomadic and non-linear. We do not assume the Viscous Porosity conference event is lying and waiting ‘there’ (in ‘the past’) to have ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ wrung from it. Such are the linear and extractive logics of anthropocentric histories that trace a simple straight line between then and now. Rather, our re-turn is inspired by Karen Barad who figures re-turning as: A multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or... turning the soil over and over — ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (Barad, 2014: 168) Re‐turning is not about providing a reflective or even reflexive review of past events but, as Benozzo et al. (2019: 89) explain, is a ‘dynamic and generative [process of ] invigorating past/present/future connections and dissolving the Cartesian boundaries on nature/culture to generate new knowledge practices’. Re-turning the Viscous Porosity conference event moves in the direction of ‘not knowing so quickly’ (Holmes, 2020) so that we might ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) that dirt causes. Re-turning is, then, a particular analytical strategy for creating space to do some speculative and experimental thinking-with dirt: it enables some tentative responses to the devastations that dirt as material-conceptual assemblage has done to particular bodies, and helps us shape a more generative account of what becoming-dirty offers for rethinking knowledge in material spaces: A washing of hands across the nation and the world – at least for those with running water, a supply of soap and information about the virus. A surging, scattered sense of paralysis, fearfulness, slightly hyper-ness, slightly weepiness, inability to focus. A strong, galvanized need for being ‘there’ (wherever and whatever ‘there’ is) for students, colleagues, partner, parents, dog, self, friends, familiars, neighbours. A determination to ‘follow the rules’, to keep hands clean, to ‘get through this’. A rediscovery of the joy of walking – taking the ‘allowed’ does of daily exercise to the full – and smiling at others across the empty, quiet streets doing the same.

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Joggers seemingly multiplying. Birdsong louder than for years. Days disarranged by urgent Zooms and Skypes and Teams as life online displaced face-to-face. Panic buying first, then queueing in lines for fruit and vegetables as time slows down to the soles of your shoes at this point on the pavement. Clapping on Thursdays for NHS workers. Houses and closed schools have rainbows in their windows. Following arrows in shops, standing on spots in supermarkets and always keeping your distance. Different conspiracy theories and the ‘alternative knowledge’ they offer swirl and take hold. The devastating effects of austerity on public services become apparent. The ungraspable horror of the increasing multitude of deaths and infections – counted and uncounted – as the orbit of the virus steadily widens. A gradual adjustment to what we came easily (and euphemistically) to refer to as ‘unprecedented times’. Emailing to check in with academic friends and colleagues around the world to wish them well and urge them to ‘stay safe’. A catastrophic drop in food bank donations. Work-as-usual impossible. Writing almost impossible. Lack of old routines. New practices and patterns as emerging habits form. We stop clapping on Thursdays for NHS workers. What we know is what we’ve always known. The poor suffer most. Health workers do not have enough of the equipment they need. Capital is looking for another market. Face masks become mandatory. Protestors champion their anti-face mask freedoms. Loneliness and isolation. The merest coping. Im/mobilization from which some knowledge may (hopefully) seep.

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Beginnings 4: re-turning thinking-with dirt In-amongst, Carol-Nikki write and meet (virtually) and think and talk about dirt. We approach, circle, back off from and look sideways at this question: How can thinking-with dirt help constitute knowledge in these changed, changing and unchanged times? We are ‘now’ more keenly aware of life’s fragility and time’s preciousness, of how spaces of privilege – and being a full-time academic and one able to go to international conferences is undoubtedly to occupy such a space – are so unevenly distributed. This knowledge tempers our joy in writing. Barad (2019: 528) speaks of how, during the development of Quantum Field Theory (QFT) in the twentieth century, ‘the nature of time and being were together remade’, a sentence which seems to sum up what the pandemic has done. Barad uses QFT to offer an alternative conceptualization of time and being. She opposes notions of time as ‘relentlessly marching forward’, or as succession of ‘discrete moments’ or as independent of space and matter. Rather, she asserts, ‘each moment is made up of a superimposition of all moments (differently weighted and combined in their specific material entanglement)’. This helps us navigate a path in these disjointed times when, at least to us ‘now’, talk of a ‘new normal’ by some self-aggrandising academics whose rushed-out, early calls for papers for special issues ‘the virus and … geography, urban studies, organizations etc. etc. etc.’ seems obscenely opportunistic amongst so much death and disturbance – an echo chamber to join those other historical echo chambers for important white men. Let’s not join that band. And yet. We must get on with some things and with something. Unfix and re/mobilize. We re-member and re-turn. Like KenJohnathan, our, that is, ‘our’ – Carol-Nikki-Mirka-Neil-Angelo-Constanse – writing is between, materialising on the page via multiplicity and connection, activating nomadic experimentation in its rhizomic wanderings (Gale & Wyatt, 2009). We re-member bodies’ intensities and limbs, their connectivities with others’ bodies in producing particular space-time-matterings; and we re-turn to these particularities diffractively via Barad’s reconceptualization of time-spacebeing in which all moments are material, dynamic and in/determinate iterations of time-being, and these material entanglements produce the need/requirement for ongoing responsibility (Barad, 2010). During the workshop, some comments from the participants: R: I was writing about pacifiers and how they maybe work, and then one grandma

told me, when she took a pacifier in her mouth, oh gosh now I remember how I used pacifiers to think. R: That’s an exchange of fluids, isn’t it, your spit in someone else’s mouth. R: And children share them as well, at the nursery they are always sharing them around.

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R: You exchange when you kiss. You connect in that way, so that’s kind of a

porous connection. R: And … the microbiome being pollinated by the kisses of the parents with

the babies … that creates the microbiome within the child’s intestinal tract.

Dirt-ing entanglements 1: Dirt’s duress Duress is defined as ‘compulsion by use of force or threat; constraint; coercion (often in the phrase under duress)’ (CED, 2018, n.p.). Duress is borne in and by the body; it is a psychic-physical materialization of pressure. Tobias-Green’s (2020) exploration of duress brings together Stoler’s (2016: 188) awareness that duress ‘does not call out its name’ but usually operates covertly, and Foucault’s (1977) account of the relationships between knowledge and power and how, together, they enact forms of social control. How is this useful for thinking-with dirt? In mainstream-malestream humanist thinking, dirt is to clean as woman is to man, as black is to white, as animal is to human, as nature is to technology. The first term in each of these pairs is seen as somehow lesser, negative, lacking, chaotic or undesirable in comparison with the second term which is somehow better, more complete, stable, if not perfect then certainly perfectible through the forces of progress of civilization. We could say that the first term (dirt, woman, black, animal, nature) is put under duress by the second term in a language system that operates on the basis of binary logics. But language does not simply describe a state of affairs that already and simply exists in the world. As post-structuralist scholars show, language ushers in and constitutes that state of affairs, and represents it as ‘reality’ so that it passes itself off as immutable, natural and acceptable. This act of ‘passing off’ helps to seal a set of deep injustices into the fabric of daily life under the guise of ‘normality’ – injustices based on concepts and presumptions of purity and danger (dirt/clean), on sex and gender (woman/man), on race and ethnicity (black/white), on biological taxonomy and species classification (animal/human) and categories for classifying the physical and non-physical world (nature/technology). But not only does binary logic produce privilege for one term in the couplet (in our list, clean, man, white, human), but that somehow the terms on either side of the deprivileged/privileged binary run together and slip-slide into each other, thereby compounding injustice: man is the rational, clean bodied norm; woman is the opposite – irrational, dirty, erratic. However, Barad (2003) famously said that language had been granted too much power and her work, along with others (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Bennett, 2010; Coole & Frost, 2010), helped bring about a paradigm shift in which matter, materiality and how matter comes to matter was given greater centrality. It is important to note that the shift towards feminist materialism, posthumanism and post-qualitative research ‘does not suggest that the discursive turn never acknowledged the material nor does it forgo discourse for analyses of materiality, rather the material gives increasing weight to material-semiotic-affective entanglements’ (Ringrose et  al., 2019: 6). In this Event, focusing on dirt and

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thinking-with dirt provides range and scope for considering dirt’s materialdiscursive matterings; considering dirt as matter enables a keener focus on the workings of inequalities, in/exclusions and injustices, and how their passings off as ‘normal’ are both constitutive of and further cemented into habits, behaviours, practices and social structures. Dirt as intra-active agency. Thinking-with dirt’s viscous porosity offers a mainline into the materialities and micropolitics of dirt’s operations – its affectivities and viral potential – and how these produce duress for different bodies. Carol’s paper for the workshop on ‘The gendered politics of clean in university spaces’ considered how dirt and disposability worked as material-discursive practices to reproduce the normative spatial order in university spaces. Through a focus on mundane encounters with non-human and human materialities – vacuum cleaners, a ball of dirt, rubbish bags, cleaning fluids, cleaning cloths, bins – the polluting qualities of dirt come to light. Covid-19 has brought the absolute requirement for ‘clean campus space’ to the fore – and my last memory of leaving campus early this year was as I said of a cleaner cleaning the corridor doors – but the ‘clean university’ imperative was already present in a range of insistent, highly regulated practices which separated dirt as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966) and continually (on a daily basis) produced the contemporary university as a ‘clean’ and putatively ‘safe’ space from which ‘dirt’ had to be expunged. Thinking-with dirt as duress indicates that dirt as matter ‘sticks’ to some bodies and not others in university spaces. Dirt as matter becomes-with some bodies so that those bodies come to matter less than others. The bodies in question here are cleaners’ bodies, and cleaners are overwhelmingly women and often people of colour. Dirt’s duress is tangible, material and spatial. Those who touch dirt, to whom dirt attaches itself on their shoes, hair, fingernails, are often spatially and temporally separated from those to whom the university, as an educational institution, more properly ‘belongs’. Cleaners come in early or late, but usually at the temporal edges of the students’ and academics’ temporal rhythms; cleaners do their work as unobtrusively as possible, putting matter back ‘in’ its place, that is, rendering it invisible, so that the university’s dedication to ‘mind and knowledge’ can be as uninterrupted as possible and those to whom the university more truly ‘belongs’ can lead cleaner and purer lives. Dirt’s duress also operates as a discursive-material political economy which enables and justifies low pay, poor conditions, insecure employment. Dirt’s efficacy in producing widespread gendered and racialized inequality can be seen in the common university practice of outsourcing cleaning, which has led to strikes and protests at some universities (IGWB, 2018). During the height of the pandemic in the UK, a cleaning company threatened to withhold PPE from cleaners unless they revoke their union membership (Smoke, 2020). Focusing on dirt in this way discloses how injustice materializes in institutional and economic arrangements that matter for some bodies (women, PoC) and not others. Stoler (2016: 6) notes that ‘duress … has temporal, spatial and affective coordinates’, that its impress may be ‘intangible’, but it is surely ‘indelible, if invisible’.

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Duress produces traces, marks, harms, pressures and injuries that endure and weigh on some bodies and not others. Thinking-with dirt as duress is to think ourselves into the material-discursive somatechnics of power and the insistent re-installation, through bodies, of where and how the boundaries between dirt/ clean is positioned and activated. During the workshop, some comments from the participants: In Sweden, and I am sure that it’s the same in Norway, is that you take your shoes off when you come into the house and my friends have explained that because when it’s ice and snow and the dirt from the gravel or snow, you’re tracking that in on your shoes and so if you don’t have – it happens in middle class and lower class houses, not in upper class houses where people have got cleaners to clean, but again you manage the dirt that way, but it’s all at the front, or it’s all in the boot room. You don’t bring it into the house.

Dirt-ing entanglements 2: Dirt’s debris The section above focuses on how dirt as duress brings to bear a bodily dividing line between clean and dirty. This section turns to dirt as debris in the production of the human/the production of the other. Considering dirt as a form of debris – waste, refuse, rubbish, trash, remains – means thinking about that which is left out or left over, both non-human and human.

WILL THERE BE MORE MASKS IN THE SEA THAN JELLYFISH? Already, some 8 million tonnes of plastics enter our ocean every year, adding to the estimated 150 million tonnes already circulating in marine environments. One study estimates that in the UK alone, if every person used a single-use face mask a day for a year, it would create an additional 66,000 tonnes of contaminated waste and 57,000 tonnes of plastic packaging. h t t p s : // w w w . w e f o r u m . o r g / a g e n d a / 2 0 2 0 / 0 6 / p p e - m a s k s gloves-coronavirus-ocean-pollution/ h t t p s : // w w w. n a t i o n a l g e o g r a p h i c . o r g /e n c y c l o p e d i a / great-pacific-garbage-patch/

Where are all the girls? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2252285-millions-of-missing-femalebirths-predicted-in-india-in-next-decade/

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The opposite of fun facts about animal discards and this is just in the UK In 2019, reports suggested that a pet was taken to a rescue shelter or discarded every six minutes as owners do not want to, or cannot afford to, pay for their care. The RSPCA were concerned that this was brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2018, the RSPCA investigated 130,000 complaints of alleged cruelty and secured 1,678 convictions In 2015, more than 47,500 dogs were abandoned by their owners in the UK. Animals given as Christmas gifts are more likely to be abandoned over the holiday period.

Border force Abdulfatah Hamdallah, Sudanese migrant drowned. United Nations figures show that more than 19,500 migrants have lost their lives attempting to reach Europe across the Mediterranean Sea since 2014, but the death toll for the English Channel is not formally recorded. https://w w w.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sudanesemigrant-channel-death-named-abdulfatah-hamdallah-france-a9680346.html

Dirt considered as the production of debris tells us something profound about modernity, progress and civilization: that they depend on and entail the production of discarded bodies, objects, things and with them discarded histories, futures, potentials and relations. Focusing on the horrifying levels of human and non-human debris and discards provides insights into the techno-necro forces that drive anthropocentric global capitalism and the practices of destruction they entail. Dirt was manifested in the classed and raced divides present following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was the inspiration for Nancy Tuana’s concept of viscous porosity (2008). The toxic outpourings of chemicals and microplastics was revealed in the human/non-human interaction of PVC (a component of plastic) and flesh, resulting in a plastic/flesh fusion provided lasting impact on the human population (Tuana, 2008). In the era of the Anthropocene, the Other is that which can be wasted/whose body can be wasted. In order for such waste to happen, first of all, the other has to be manufactured and rationalized. Braidotti (2020) offers a theoretical explanation which lays out the historical case as to why the production of debris – of the production of human and non-human as ‘Other’ and therefore as a category available ‘to be wasted’ – has become such a central effort of contemporary capitalist times:

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Humanity is rather a selective and exclusionary category that polices access to rights and entitlements. The “human” is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it includes in the golden circle of its privileges and in the structural distinctions that support them. The dominant idea of the human modelled on the European “Man of Reason” distributes differences according to a hierarchical scale centered on both humanistic and anthropocentric values … It assumes the superiority of humans that conform to the following format: masculine, white, Eurocentric, practicing compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction, able-bodied, urbanized, and speaking a standard language. This is the European Man of Reason that feminists, anti-racists, black, indigenous, postcolonial, environmental and ecological activists have been criticizing for decades (Braidotti, 2020: 28–29) Braidotti points out that this ‘vision’, lauded by the Man of Reason, as universal is, in truth, narrow, parochial and culturally specific. It inheres in the myopic vision of that Man of Reason (‘the eye that fucks the world’ as Haraway [1988] so memorably said) and has been held in place for centuries by violence, repression, duress. How does this help us think-with dirt to think about women-as-other? Above, we considered how dirt acts to separate the ‘clean’, visible, present and ‘correct’ bodies of academics and students – those who ‘properly belong here’ – from the bodies of those others (largely women and/or PoC) who engage in doing the ‘dirty work’ of cleaning in the university. We wonder: does dirt’s material-discursive productivity continue its stickiness in part because of the historical legacies and continuing social power of accounts of women’s bodies as sites of unruliness and lack of discipline. All the way back to the Bible and beyond, women’s bodies have been associated with dirt, blood, bestiality, their interiors feared as cavernous and engulfing, their genitals as possessing monstrous potential to harm men (‘vagina dentata’). Women’s bodies are considered abject, putrid, leaky, dark, disturbing (Grosz, 1994). A sexually active woman was for a long time (in many ways and cultures still is) referred to as ‘damaged goods’ and then, of course, how many pejoratives can you think of to describe women, their attributes, bodily functions and sexuality? There are many more ‘dirty words’ for women than for men. Feminists have pointed out how women’s biology and reproduction and bodily functions of menstruation, lactation and childbirth (Shildrick, 1997) have been used to position women as in need of regulation and control. Women’s bodies, as ‘dirty bodies’, continue to be subjected to vilification and unequal control in comparison with men’s. Dirt’s viscosity cannot be washed away easily. Look around. You will see everywhere hidden and not so hidden material-discursive practices in which surface equality and diversity legislative codes are entangled with ongoing and endemic material practices of institutional sexism, racism and ableism whose enduring effects are seemingly impossible to dislodge.

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The viscous porosity of women’s bodies continues both as a danger and a necessity to the maintenance of the ‘clean and efficient’ functioning of capitalist economic life. Ask the women in the maquiladoras of Mexico. According to Miriam Davidson (1992: 21): The U.S. – Mexico border, writes Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldua, is a ‘1,950-miIe-long open wound.’ The disparities that exist along this thin ribbon of barbed wire and muddy river are among the most extreme on earth. On one side, forty percent of the people are malnourished, while on the other, tons of food are thrown away. In Mexico, people get sick from drinking polluted water, while millions of gallons of clean, fresh water pour onto a golf course across the fence. Children die every day, within sight of a modern hospital, for lack of a 50-cent shot. The maquiladoras are a historical effect of colonialism, corrupt government and globalization. In Mexico, they are foreign-owned factories of huge multinational corporations who, because of trade agreements, pay minimal tax and employ a largely female, undereducated and poor Mexican workforce on below minimum wages, minimal benefits and long work shifts. As Davidson (1992: 10–11) notes, ‘Women in the maquiladoras must deal with sexual harassment, rape, torture, poor environmental conditions such as exposure to toxins, long shifts (sometimes lasting 22 hours), factory lock-ins, limited bathroom and other breaks, and strong discouragement from seeking medical attention’, thereby enabling the power of foreign capital to work hand-in-hand with Mexican patriarchy to exploit women. Dirty global capital requires dirty labour requires dirty bodies to do its dirty work. This is the knowledge that materialized when following another lead of dirt from the Viscous Porosity conference event. It is, of course, a knowledge ‘we’ (white, Western, privileged academics) are often quite insulated against. But this knowledge has already pressed and duressed the bodies of multitudes of women who have lived and died working in, and knowing the maquiladoras’ regimes. This knowledge of these material spaces is heart-breaking. It re-turns Mary Douglas’s (1966) notion of dirt as matter out of place into something else; these women’s bodies are, conversely, fixed firmly as matter in place. Dirt-as-matter enables their bodies to be positioned in a violent material-discursive assemblage of global economic practices that produce damagingly differential patterns of mattering which entangle the micro-, meso- and macro-levels. They have no economic choice other than to be materially mangled. Thinking-with dirt leads to a central aim of posthumanism and feminist materialism, which is to take forward the feminist challenge to the hegemony of nature/culture binaries regarding embodiment (Butler, 2004; Grosz, 1994; Haraway, 2004; Longhurst, 2001) and crucially to displace the inequalities produced by gendered binaries. Ferrando (2020: 75) notes the ‘exclusion of women from the anthropological machine’. Posthumanism and feminist materialism begin

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Detritus.

within a wider frame of methodology and research which requires the enactment of a political praxis of inclusion.

Me and my shadow In Murakami’s ([1991]/1993) dystopian speculative novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the narrator is a man who has been separated from his shadow: while the Man lives in the Town, the Shadow lives in the Shadow Ground. This im/possible separation of man/shadow provokes us to ponder another im/possible: eradicating dirt as ‘matter out of place’ is a pursuit which is always destined to fail. This is because: Dirt is always with us Dirt continually reappears in new guises and some non-human and human bodies get newly designated as ‘dirty’. For example, Brexit brings a new cultural imaginary with a reduction in current environmental legislation regarding the invasive threat of ‘outsiders’; ‘space junk’ now litters our immediate universe; dirty bombs are used which combine dynamite with radioactive material with the potential (if the wind were blowing in the right/wrong direction) to cause birth defects and heavy metal poisoning for years to come. What constitutes and comes to matter as ‘dirt’ – as that which needs to be separated from the ‘clean’ – is continually geopolitically reconstituted: Dirt moves, mutates, shifts; Dirt’s waste, leftovers and discards proliferate; Dirt’s contaminations accumulate. Dividing from Dirt = discarding relation The two dirt-ing entanglements above illuminate how designating something as ‘dirt’ is about effecting a fundamental negation of relation. Negating relations are a refusal to accept responsibility for humans’ entanglement in relations between matter, materiality and arrangements of power; and a denial of the response-ability – considered as the capacity to respond to – the entangled

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relations and concrete specificities of ongoing material enactments (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). The question then becomes a matter of Getting dirty = activating relation of shifting away from an idea of ‘Man’ as sole, sovereign and egoistic individual separated from others by ‘his’ boundaried body and cultured mind and towards apprehending humans as beings in-relation, connected to surroundings, nature and the world in more meaningful ways. Thinking-with dirt as viscous porosity – as the ongoing mattering of ‘sticky materialities’ – suggests the need for research and knowledge production practices which are relational, dynamic, intra-active processes which recognise that ‘agency is diffusely enacted in complex networks of relations’ (Tuana, 2008: 189). The two dirt-ing entanglements which follow pursue this line of flight for thinking-with dirt, to offer possibilities for provoking new politically generative imaginaries for knowledge production.

Dirt-ing entanglements 3: Dirt’s contagion During the workshop, some comments from the participants: R: When I was a child I saw one of those magnified photographs of the bugs that

are carpets, they’re in all carpets everywhere, so you’re walking around on the floor with your socks on, these bugs are getting in to the soles of your socks. R: Thank you! I don’t need- (laughter and overtalking) I’m going to take it home! Urghhh. R: There is a symbiotic relationship going on all the time. Bugs, bacteria and mould and things. And mouldy toast that we had for breakfast a couple of days ago. R: Think about all the people who will be walking on this carpet in this hotel room. I don’t want to think about this. Human and non-human, meeting under my feet.

Me and my shadow

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Nikki’s paper at the conference event was concerned with relationality and how viscous porosity might be thought in more affirmative ways. The focus was on cyborg fusions at the boundaries of bodies (corporeal and noncorporeal) and drew on Haraway’s (1991: 154) ‘potent fusions’ of the cyborg to consider what comes to matter if we think of how to collapse the boundaries between physical and non-physical bodies. This consideration was motivated by a micro-splinter of research data from the reception (class)room space in an all-girls private school, in which a young girl Stella plays at a red rice tub. A normative reading of the observed encounter might have seen Stella ‘baking cakes’ surrounded by gendered play in the classroom’s home corner. In this reading, Stella’s role in playing at housework and child-rearing presages and readies her for her later gendered identities. But there was more going on here – something alternative, contradictory, irreverent, which (dis) membered these normative readings. As Stella poured and scooped the rice, she hummed softly unaware of the bustle of the classroom around her. As she played, her seemingly trance-like state seemed to fuse the boundaries of human skin with the plastic rice tub. A cyborg moment occurs: a fusion, an electromagnetic attraction at the level of molecules and electrons sees both bodies (human and non-human rice tray) merge, fuse and connect. Stella-and-rice-tray-becoming-cyborgian-hybrid-body. The Stella-rice-tray-classroom-gendered play-encounter works along a different trajectory than those above in bringing to the fore the possibility of relation. The leakiness and volatility of Stella’s body is precisely what gives it potential to activate novel corporeographical experiences (Longhurst, 2001) which privilege connections, fusions and exchanges. Such fusions displace the binary separations between dirt/clean and may generate new ways to challenge the gender(ed) view of bodies and spaces through micro-political moments of viscous porosity (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020). Early Years and Primary Classrooms are distinctly material spaces where the material resources are co-implicated in knowledge production (Fairchild, 2017). These classroom choreographies

Rice-tray fusions

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highlight the material dances between children, teachers and non-human objects linking to the same kind of dirty matterings present in the knowledge production in conference spaces. Can thinking-with the potentially fusional effects of viscous porosity be of any help in the context of the pandemic and its aftermath? The Covid-19 virus cares nothing for human-instituted boundaries as long as it can travel, live and do its work of infection. As a virus, it treads ‘the fine line that separates living things from non-living things. Most scientists agree that viruses are alive because of what happens when they infect a host cell’ (Freudenrich & Kiger, n.d.). The virus isn’t bothered about which body it infects – yours, mine, his, hers, theirs. The virus’ only propulsion is to thrive and multiply, which it does through acts of contagion that pass through and connect bodies, irrespective of gender, class, status, culture, nation. In that sense, the virus is indiscriminately fusional; its reach international; its effects immense. On 24 August 2020, the BBC reported that the ‘Coronavirus is continuing its spread across the world, with more than 23 million confirmed cases in 188 countries. About 800,000 people have lost their lives’ (see this link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105). The virus cuts a relentless path. It is uninterested in clean or dirt. Not so us. For us (humans), the virus powerfully activates the most intimate and existential boundaries of clean-dirt and of life/death. Its mattering, in that sense, could not matter more to each and every one of us. It was striking that in the early days of the pandemic, toilet roll was the first item shoppers bought in bulk. The panic buying of toilet toll in the UK re-mobilizes knowledge around what a few years ago Lauren White and I called ‘the politics of shit and piss’ (Taylor & White, 2018). We wrote: Toilet roll takes its place as one of the most mundane objects you can imagine and yet it does vital social and cultural work. Toilet roll operates as a material-discursive practice of mattering, and paying attention to toilet roll tunes us into differences that matter. Toilet tissue gets us to the heart of some very social issues, such as: • It helps classify bodies by separating the acceptable clean bodies from the filthy unclean ones; • It provides a barrier between soft bums and hard porcelain, cold metal or splintery wood; • It negotiates between the contaminating fear of germs and the impossible dream of purity; • It blankets the noise of the plop, it absorbs the gush of the pee and covers, conceals and smothers the contents; • It pushes poo away, managing our disgust, and sometimes, it pulls it back to our attention when the flushing fails; • It might protect with its softness and ‘natural’ aloe vera, but it might also be abrasive, irritating and rub us up the wrong way;

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• It makes us connect with those orifices in ways we don’t normally talk about in ‘polite company’; • It highlights internal/external bodily boundaries – that moment when ‘inside’ stuff gets to the ‘outside’ world; • It circulates as a product of value: it is wrapped up and taken from home for use in public; it is kept in pockets and bags as a precious commodity; it is given to others in need; thrown over the cubicle stall it is a gift which is welcomed and appreciated: Toilet paper is political; it is also economic, social and cultural. Its materiality makes moral points. Indeed. And in pandemic times, the need to buy, have and hoard toilet roll materializes how, in the affluent West, the intimate relations of cleanliness and dirtiness stand as material proxy to ward off viral contamination and bodily invasion by an unseen but deathly threatening virus.

Since March 2020, the academic world has seen many calls for papers for virtual conferences and for funding bids relating to Covid-19. How might you, Reader, deploy mundane matterings – such as toilet paper or cyborgian gendered play – to pull a thread which entangles participants in disturbing knowledge production as business-as-usual? How can you/we use viral configurations to disturb conferences and compose events? How can you/we use posthumanist, feminist materialist conceptualizations to re-think the politics of clean?

Dancing-with Dirt: Conferences-events-knowledge During the workshop, some comments from the participants: R: I am really glad I’m not near the plates … because they’re a bit wet. R: That bothers me, and if it was spilled or wet, I think I might be more – R: See the picture that’s closest to you, that’s our shower, and I can’t actually R: R: R: R:

bring myself to touch that, I have to get – I would love cleaning that. I love it. I think that would be so satisfying. Me and my sister, when we were little, fought over who got that job.

On 15 July 2020, Carol had a supervision session with a doctoral student about to enter the second year of her research. She was looking at different theories and said her next job was to see how I can ‘make it clean’. I urged her to ‘keep it

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dirty’, to undo the masculinist myth that there can be ‘clean’ knowledge which is somehow more ‘objective’ and ‘true’, to work against the dominant idea of research as going into the research site, dirtying our hands, coming out, dusting ourselves down and then cleaning up our data for presentation to the world. Haraway’s (2016) incitement to work in the muddle and mess and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) notion that things pick up speed in the middle are energising encouragements for research and conference event-ings which aim to stay with the trouble and make further trouble. Refusing to clean up thinking-researchpractice means that we become composters – mulching, meddling, messing – and work with dirt’s productivity in un/re/doing boundaries in new ways. Löytönen et al.’s (2015: 31) collective study in pink abjures ‘mental hygiene. Clean thoughts, clean mind, clean bodies, clean brains’ and the ‘clean research’ it leads to. Such knowledge practices, they say, are for ‘mental hygienists [who] follow strict purification and sanitization processes in sterile environments’. Instead, to energize the mix, they call for scholarship that is ‘always material, sensed, and felt, in some ways, and connected to events and actualities of lives’. Like us, in this Event (and this book!), they ask: who needs purified social science research, theories or philosophies? Energising the mix in Covid-19 ‘conference cancelled’ times. Moving beyond nostalgia for: Not-being-in-the-room-together Ordinary talk Walking, sitting, plotting, planning Physical proximity Conviviality, buzz, sociable Finding, knowing, discovering otherwise: Stringing virtual figures diffractively Intra-active viral configurations This Event has deployed the concept of ‘viscous porosity’ to work with notions of dirt as ‘matter out of place’ to argue the need to replace humanist ontological, binary assumptions (clean/dirty), with notions which emphasize exchange, intraaction and emergence. Dirt continually becomes-with us in entangled, constitutive alliances however much we (humans) may (think we) want to avoid it. We have explored how thinking-with dirt does vital feminist posthumanist work in helping unsettle categorizations which continue to denigrate some women’s and othered bodies. We have also considered thinking-with dirt otherwise as a means for more generative imaginary as viscous porosity in knowledge-making practices. The Event re-turns to the conference event of the recent past via present circumstances of pandemic are past-present collisions which open up new possibilities for illuminating dirt’s viral configurations and the material matterings

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they install. The politics of dirt continue to matter. In our future conference doings, virtual-material-real, the question of how to produce knowledge from new dirt-ing alliances in new assemblages will continue to animate our inquiries. Creative experimentation within the conference workshops can allow a freedom to entangle knowledge practices and mattering. In these conferencing moments with dirt, ‘the agency of matter is positioned as both pedagogical and resistant. Matter teaches us through resisting dominant discourses and showing new ways of being’ (Hickey-Moody et al., 2016: 220).

Before we go: invitation to you, reader Barad (2019: 525) says: ‘Each moment is an infinite multiplicity where other moments are here-now in particular constellations. “Now” is not an infinitesimal slice, but an infinitely rich condensed node in a changing field diffracted across spacetime’. Look around you wherever you are right ‘now’. What do you see that is ‘dirty’? What is ‘clean’? How do you on a regular day-to-day basis separate your ‘dirty’ from ‘clean’? What judgements are you making in doing this? What/ whom are you excluding in doing this and why? Why does it matter that you do this and to whom? Watch tonight’s TV news: how is dirt being re-produced in what matters in current geopolitics? When you teach your next class, think about if and how that which might be ‘dirty’ appears and how it is dealt with. How might you use dirt as a disturbance of neoliberal business-as-usual in your next class, or presentation or conference? How might you activate dirt’s intra-activity as an affirmative challenge to hierarchical modes of anthropocentric speciesist exclusivism? Or as a move towards sustainability? Moving beyond dirt’s elicitation of disgust is a prerequisite, and invitation, for thinking-with dirt to produce new imaginaries for knowledge-making.

References Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. (Eds.), (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. https:// doi.org/10.1086/345321 Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/ continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1754850010000813 Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together‐apart. Parallax, 20, 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Barad, K. (2019). After the end of the world: Entangled nuclear colonialisms, matters of force, and the material force of justice. Theory & Event, 22(3), 524–550. https://www. muse.jhu.edu/article/729449

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Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. London: Duke University Press. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Braidotti, R. (2020). ‘We’ may be in this together, but we are not all human and we are not one and the same. Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, 1(1), 26–31. https://doi.org/10.46863/ecocene.2020.3 Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. Abingdon: Routledge. Charalambous, Z. (2017). Padam … Padam … GEA conference 2017. http://www. genderandeducation.com/conferences-and-events/past_events/padam-padam/. Accessed 31 March 2020. Collins English Dictionary (CED). (2018). Duress. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/ dictionary/english/duress. Accessed 20 August 2020. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (Eds.), (2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davidson, M. (1992). Women of the Maquiladoras. Agni, 36, 21–33. https://www.jstor. org/stable/23009463 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, London: Continuum. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge. Fairchild, N. (2017). Earthworm disturbances: The reimagining of relations in early childhood education and care. Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Southampton. Ferrando, F. (2020). Philosophical posthumanism. London: Bloomsbury. Foucault, F. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York: Pantheon. Freudenrich, C., & Kiger, P. (n.d.). How viruses work. https://science.howstuffworks. com/life/cellular-microscopic/virus-human1.htm. Accessed 20 August 2020. Gale, K., & Wyatt, J. (2009). Between the two: A nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing and subjectivity. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1987). A manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies, 2(4), 1–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08164649.1987.9961538 Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066 Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Abingdon: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2004). The Haraway reader. London and New York: Routledge Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hickey-Moody, A., Palmer, H., & Sayers, E. (2016). Diffractive pedagogies: Dancing across new materialist imaginaries. Gender and Education, 28(2), 213–229. https://doi. org/10.1080/09540253.2016.1140723 Holmes, R. (2020). Paroxysm: The problem of the fist. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, online first https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708620911402

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IGWB. (2018). University cleaners announce biggest ever outsourced workers strike in UK higher education. https://iwgb-universityoflondon.org/2018/03/15/universitycleaners-announce-biggest-ever-outsourced-workers-str ike-in-uk-highereducation/ Longhurst, R. (2001). Bodies. Exploring fluid boundaries. Abingdon: Routledge. Löytönen, T., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Carlson, D., Orange, A., & Cruz, J. (2015). A pink writing experiment. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 6(1), 23–42. https://journals.hioa.no/index.php/rerm/article/view/1489 Murakami, H. ([1991]/1993). Hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world (trans A. Birnbaum). New York: Penguin Random House. Ringrose, J., Warfield, K., & Zarabadi, S. (Eds.), (2019). Feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education. London: Routledge. Shildrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries: Feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics. London: Routledge. Smoke, B. (2020). Cleaning company suggests it may only provide PPE if workers ditch union. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/v7g3wj/cleaning-company-suggests-itmay-only-provide-ppe-if-workers-ditch-union. Accessed 20 August 2020. Stoler, A. L. (2016). Duress: Imperial durabilities in our times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, C. A., & White, L. (2018). Putting pen to (toilet) paper, in Lift the Lid – Around the Toilet Zine, published online 26 January 2018. https://issuu.com/aroundthetoilet/ docs/zine_finished_web_optimized Taylor, C. A., & Fairchild, N. (2020) Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: Viscous matterings and gendered bodies. Ethnography and Education, 15(4), 509–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1735469 Tobias-Green, K. (2020). Stories from an art institution: The writing lives of students with dyslexia. Unpublished PhD thesis. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University. Tuana, N. (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. www.gov.uk (2020). Coronavirus (COVID-19): What you need to do. https://www. gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-guidance-on-social-distancing-and-forvulnerable-people/guidance-on-social-distancing-for-everyone-in-the-uk-andprotecting-older-people-and-vulnerable-adults. Accessed 29 March 2020.

AUTOPSY

AUTOPSY REPORT NAME: Conference event AUTOPSY NO: SWE2018 AGE: Ageless DATE: Summer SEX: Poly TIME: in-and-out PHYSICIAN: Academic research body

Circumstantial summary This Event is centred on a series of autopsy-like experimentations that took place at an academic conference in Sweden in 2018 (Carey et al., 2021). The happening looked towards, and took licence with, autopsy as a key and privileged site/mode of inquiry. We were interested in autopsy because of its scientific and medical heritage in establishing bodies of knowledge that can then be used to make authoritative claims about how bodies are known and conceptualized. Our autopsy-like experimentations conjured a number of provocations that were part of our ongoing orientation, as a research collective, towards interrupting and disturbing the established ways of knowing produced in and by the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019). More than just as acts of disturbance, our experimentations with autopsy enacted a set of desires for dissecting the corpus of mainstream knowledge production practices more broadly, and opening up critical conversations that might loosen their hold on the morbidities that they nurture in their desire for form and sameness. We resist the urge to provide detailed descriptions of the body of the conference happening itself. What is included below is a sketch, an approximation, a more or less (or perhaps not) faithful account of what we did and of what those doings DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-5

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produced. This tack is part of our ongoing refusal to ‘fix’ the past as an object which can be known and as somehow ‘real’. In any case, our conference happening is no longer ‘alive’ in its original sense. The workshop experimentation and material happenings stretches as a corpse-like form on the dissection slab. There can be no clean and uncontaminated line of sight that points back to the conference happening. This Event is a re-turn (Barad, 2007) and reimagining of what autopsical happenings offer us for knowledge production. These re-turns are provisional as they both unsettle and resettle our re-membering of the workshop event and also the connections that we write about in this book. We make these returns by detailing some of the experimentations that were performed; thinking about how the privileging of sight and occularism impacts on the somatechnics of bodies; and incorporating a series of witness statements that consider the nature of the sighting and visibility of bodies which attests to the corporeality and the mattering of those bodies. The witness statements presented here are taken from co-participants who witnessed the autopsy-like happening at the conference and who continue to engage with its reverberations. We conclude with a mapping of the ways bodies are seen and produced in conference spaces and beyond.

Siting autopsy Subverting method requires us to unmake many of our methodological habits including: the desire for certainty; the expectation that we can usually arrive at more or less stable conclusions about the way things really are; the belief that as social scientists we have special insights that allow us to see further than others into certain parts of social reality; and the expectations of generality that are wrapped up in what is often called ‘universalism’. But most of all we need to unmake our desire and expectation for security. (Law, 2004: 9) Much of the normative conferencing we attend as academics is based on expected and ‘normal’ human functionality, including rapidly firing neurons, seeing eye, hearing ear and monitored, professionally clothed and docile body. From this perspective, any account of attendance at the conference autopsy ‘workshop’ would be presumed to form a set of reliable evidence which could be triangulated and verified. However, we are less interested in these normative, visible and easily recognizable accountings. Our witnessing documentations, instead, work otherwise. They come at bodies in their complexities and invisibilities – malfunctioning bodies, non-listening ears, closed eyes, uncontrollable muscles in academic spaces and within conferences that interest us. There is an anatomy of the body that is not available to sight; anatomy as invisible, unexpected and accidental? These things are rarely documented or reported.

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Table x: Anatomy of invisible body-knowledge

Autopsy: re-membering the workshop stations and experimentations The task is to imagine methods when they no longer seek the definite, the repeatable, the more or less stable. When they no longer assume that this is what they are after. … If new realities ‘out-there’ and new knowledge of those realities ‘in-here’ are to be created, then practices that can cope with a hinterland of pre-existing social and material realities also have to be built up and sustained. I call the enactment of this hinterland and its bundle of ramifying relations a ‘method assemblage’. (Law, 2004: 6 and 13 respectively) Our autopsy research-creation workshop experimentation pushed against the presumptions of normative knowledge-making practices in conference space (Brinkman, 2014). It included nine autopsy-like research practicings. Each of these practicings – referred to as stations – invited participants to engage in immersive, collaborative co-performances, in a range of groping ‘method assemblages’ positioned throughout the room. These practices and stations resonated with the theme of autopsy: 1

2

Naked live/dead body: a table, acting as a mortuarial plinth, bore a motionless dead-like male body which was naked but for some gossamer fabric worn from the waist down. Beside the body were a range of accoutrements, including medical instruments, measuring equipment, make-up and pens. Graffiti wall: a white wall lined with paper on which co-participants could write, draw, doodle. A range of writing implements was provided.

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3 4

5

6

7

8

9

Body part (re)assembly: various body-related toys, miniature body parts and partly formed male dolls were assembled with a range of other ‘craft’-related materials. Live body shadow theatre: a recurring theatre performance in which a supine body is eviscerated with a large knife and body parts extracted alongside blood-curdling screams. The performance took place behind a sheet with the body and body part silhouettes projected onto that sheet. Sewing bodies: complete and partly formed body outlines transferred onto translucent interlining fabric. A range of needles and thread of various size and quality were provided, as were a range of craft items. Unsight/ed/ly autopsy table: an upturned table on a plinth was covered in ‘operating scrubs’-type fabric and offered participants the opportunity to put gloved hands through a series of slits. Inside was a blank body outline with a range of body objects having various textures, smells, temperatures. Pecha Kucha: a rolling series of slides containing classic and grotesque body-related images. The images were interspersed with theoretical/methodological quotes. Contamination suits: those bodies (dis)organising the research-creation event were clothed in white, hooded contamination suits with operation theatre face masks, disposable plastic overshoes and latex gloves. Body outlines: a series of white, paper body outlines were randomly placed on the floor of the room in which the event took place.

The audience were requested to wait outside the room until being invited in en masse to the autopsy ‘theatre’. They were not given any theoretical or contextual explanation, were not provided with methodological directionality and were not served with any instructions as to the scope or nature of their participation. The room was arranged with the stations (as detailed above) and was deliberately darkened in line with the aim of occluding participants’ full sight: Walls papered white. Laboratory suits. Exposed bodies. Blood-curdling screams. Curtains round tables. Masks. Screens. Spotlights. A room once intended for classroom instruction and polite conversation was transformed into something monstrously unfamiliar. No longer were participants able to sit and listen, take notes, ask insightful questions from far. Participants were immersed and confronted with how to exist amidst the unfamiliar; how to act alongside the stations; how to engage, research, explain and be in a space that lacks recognition. In this way, we encouraged a reliance on the wider bodily sensorium: on touch, sound, smell, on affect.

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Autopsical practicings

The autopsy room space opened lines of flight to disorient visual optics. It was a speculative and immanent becoming, an agitator against linear and masculinist a priori academic knowledge. Participants found themselves experiencing the more-than of the event. This was conference space as an ongoing process

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where subjects and objects emerge, coalesce and momentarily actualize before subsequent disorientation (Bee, 2019). Reorientation gradually and inevitably occurred. Participants found their groundings, something to stitch, something to work with, a body to work with, a body to write on. Except, perhaps they no longer found the same self, the familiar self. In this fleeting moment, it is possible that the participants experienced a body without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), a moment of freedom, creation and experimentation. Perhaps they sensed the movement and process of a worlding, a self that was always more than one (Manning, 2013). Yet a self that was capable of return and refamiliarizing – the academic self to be decentred, deconstructed, dissected and held in suspicion.

An autopsy of a conference workshop This Event signals towards those technologies that make autopsies the gold standard site of rendering bodies known and knowable. However, autopsies are abstractions in which bodily death is faithlessly systematized, scrutinized, measured, compartmentalized, understood and mapped onto the scientific expectations of embodied life. An autopsy of a conference also illustrates the faithless systematization, scrutiny, measurement, compartmentalization and understanding different parts of a conference system; the (non)functionalities of conference organs. Fingernails connecting to auditorium chairs, eye lashes left on the empty hallways, whispers echoing in the lecture halls long after presentations are over. We wonder if conference autopsies may function as matter and material biopsies of knowledge laboratories. Donna Haraway (1988) speaks of situated knowledge practices which pay heed to witnessing, seeing and attesting. She attests to different modes of knowledge-making and problematizes the idea of the God Trick and it’s presumption of omniscience (Haraway, 1988). The autopsy has been considered as a mode of bodily omniscience. We asked for witness statements from our autopsy witnesses and included two provocations in Box X and Box Y.

Witness statements BOX X – A set of prompts in the hope of witnessing flesh. Or is it a coffin? In your witness statement, please REFRAIN from including any or some of the following: Your current professional position at the university of unknowns; Your professional position at the time you confronted the remains; Your qualifications; The full chronology of events of your encountering the deceased/remains; The details of any interventions, assessment and/or treatments you and/or your (non-existing) team provided to the deceased;

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However, you might think about including re-turnings to: – The non-place; – The un-date; – The irrelevant history at the point of assessment/treatment; – Condition on troubled assessment; – Outcome of unthinkable investigations; – The melting diagnosis (and the basis for it); – Treatment of discomfort given; – Any disruptive complications that arose; – Unresponse to treatment.

BOX Y – GUIDELINES FOR PROVIDING YOUR WITNESS STATEMENT. OR THE QUALITY OF A Y-INCISION. The statement could very well be fictional, and when you offer your opinion, this should be absolutely outside your regularized professional capacity. Personal and subjective opinions are the only kinds of opinions acceptable here. You should commit as many linguistic follies as you feel able to; be as visceral as you feel you must (after all, we have the remains of a conference event body to flesh out!): abbreviations, jargon, confusing metaphors, illogical connections, absurd comparisons, obtuse lines of flight are all possible and welcome. No terminology should be considered too bizarre, in need of explaining. No need to explain and describe your reasoning in any linear way. Be as critical as possible. Neither should you assume that your reader will be interested in or able to make sense of everything you conjecture. Never refer to formal records, protocols, policies or past practices. Remember, we have only the remains of an event-body with a need for fleshing out and a view of conferencing in the future! Try not to limit exhibits to key documents and annex volumes of research materials if you like. If you do need to use exhibits, be sure that you are not aware of all of the content and layers of inaccurate information they might contain or the exact lineage that makes them relevant. Please do not be overly concerned with, what might be termed in foundational ways, errors or omissions, and never offer accurate rationales.

Witness statement 1 Dear Messers I have no idea why you are accusing me of being in this autopsy place which is clearly a place I would not frequent. I resent the imputation that I would dirty my hand, or my mind, with such an event. I am, and always have been, a clean-living and a pure-minded person. Please note, I said pure not putrid,

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which is what the event you refer to clearly was. As deeply offended as I am, I remain Yours faithfully Anon

Witness statement 2 Ah, the male gaze is a wondrous thing. The eye that fucks, Donna Haraway called it a long time ago. It remains so and has caused me all sorts of squirms and annoyances and absolute outrages during my many years of watching TV, going to the cinema and reading newspapers. How many times has this happened? I am out or in enjoying myself and then there is a morgue and an autopsy scene and there it is – the always young, slim, trim, fit but always dead and naked body of a woman is displayed to the camera, to the viewer, for their gaze. She is DEAD and NAKED and HORIZONTAL. Supine, passive, inert. The camera pans caressingly, slowly, intimately over her breasts, thighs, legs, arms, pubic area. Yes, she is always that side up, situated such so as to be available for perusal, as the men in the room (proxy for the viewer in his room) move around her, the cutting tools visible at the side. The ultimate submissive woman: no need to ask this one’s permission for anything. She is fully DEAD BODY. Beyond human, beyond asking. There she is slayed and splayed out for his eye to see, to voyerise over, to slaver over, to feel mastery over, to feel contempt for. A DEAD woman – what a useless and hapless piece of nothing. For she is nothing other than DEAD and to-be-looked-at. Her DEADNESS is displayed. Her DEADNESS is desired. Indeed, her DEADNESS is what makes her desirable. It is her DEADNESS that makes the looking more delicious, delectable. Her DEADNESS adds taste and relish, sensation and satisfaction, allure and energy, to the eye-fucking viewer. She exists for the eye that fucks. There is nothing more to her. DEAD woman = frisson, fricassee, fun. All the thrill of the hunt and the bang of the kill without any effort. I have lost count of how many DEAD women I have seen on TV and film laid out in this way for the gratification of men. This is not pornography. It is popular culture. The people I watch with usually say nothing and continue looking as if what is on-screen is just another ordinary shot of a road, a room or an ice cream. I guess it is just another image of a DEAD woman to add to all the other DEAD women whose DEADNESS is a cultural thrill. The eye that fucks is a wondrous thing. Its necro-politics sanction the ongoing destruction of women, children, nature, the world, the planet. From A zoe-loving feminist

Witness statement 3 And how’s this for a lovely little Christmas stocking filler? Laura Palmer Dead Wrapped in Plastic, David Lynch, 2.25’ Pinback Button £2.49

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Low in stock VAT included (where applicable), plus postage ht t ps://w w w.et sy.com /u k / l ist i ng /241259220/ lau ra-pa l mer- deadwrapped-in-plastic

Witness statement 4 Since last May, Body5 has been imagining itself lying naked on a table in a university lecture hall. For months now, Body5 and others (Body1, Body2, Body3, Body4, Body6, Body7) have been anticipating/pre-living/rehearsing/imagining/ thinking/pre-tasting this experiment, this slight agitation: to be naked and ‘experience’ death in an academic space. What does a naked body do in such a place? Reviewer 1 – Please make explicit your theoretical perspective. Body5 is ready to get undressed, to be completely naked, with no clothes on, ‘covered’ from the belly-button to the feet with a transparent veil. Is it possible not just to represent death, but also to feel what it’s like to be dead? This experiment started centuries ago. For Body5 it is a slight agitation that evokes Mantegna’s The dead Christ as well as Rhythm0 (5974), the performance by Abramovich (https://vimeo.com/505920368), and in the Italian pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale 2017 (entitled ‘The magic world’). (https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=5yFo65IDDsY). In particular, for Body5, Cuoghi’s ‘The Imitation of Christ’ (Roberto Cuoghi, ‘Imitatio Christi’, 2017; Padiglione Italia alla Biennale Arte, 2017) in this pavilion (see video) (https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=I-HraCbmAfg) is a kind of earworm. Mantegna’s The dead Christ – The iconographic reference for Mantegna’s work is the mourning for the dead Christ, which required the presence of the ‘mourners’ gathered around the body being prepared for burial. Christ is lying on the stone of anointment, half-covered by a shroud, and the presence of the jar beside his head indicates that he has already been covered with perfumed oils. Reviewer 1 – Here there is a bit of blasphemy! Why are you using this image in this paper? Rhythm0 (5974), the performance by Abramovich – The subjects of the performance were 72 objects laid out on a table in a room in a Neapolitan art gallery. These objects were there to be used by the public to interact with the artist and in particular with her body. These objects included instruments of torture and deadly weapons, such as whips, chains, pieces of metal, pistols and razor blades. There were also bottles, shoes and feathers. Marina Abramovich stood for six hours at the disposal of the visiting public who were allowed to do anything they liked to her, from wounding her to stripping her. Roberto Cuoghi’s ‘The Imitation of Christ’ – For Roberto Cuoghi, everything is in various stages of decomposition. Everything is in a state of putrefaction because it is dead and lacking in any existential project. For him, bodies are not just dead: they experience the putrefaction of their present state as an essential part of

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Roberto Cuoghi, ‘Imitatio Christi’, 2017; Padiglione Italia alla Biennale Arte, 2017.

being in the world. In Cuoghi’s opinion, anyone who has read Da Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi knows very well how the presence of Christ reduces humankind to an existential nullity. The installation explores the fluid nature of identity and how matter is transformed. The bodies contained in the installation are at different stages of decomposition and deterioration. In Cuoghi’s work, a putrefaction of the human body emulates the putrefaction of Christ in which the nullification of humankind gives sustenance of the putrefaction of Christ. Reviewer 1 – Before that image, I read very complex sentences that make the purpose and the contribution of your paper very unclear. I am confused as to what the paper is trying to do. You need direction, you need a straight line…. By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of nonhuman in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us …. In so far as art stretches the boundaries of representation to the utmost, it reaches the limits of life itself and thus confronts the horizon of death. To this effect, art is linked to death as the experience of limits. (Braidotti, 2013: 107)

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Body5 is walking alone towards the university and is thinking/feeling/imagining the: Denudation Dissolution Liquefaction Exhaustion Putrefaction Decomposition (of Body5) Body2 thought that Body5 would have kept its trousers on. No. No trousers, no underwear, no shirt.... nothing. Just a transparent veil from the belly-button to the feet. Body2 is afraid of Body5’s denudation. Body2 fears the appearance of a naked body (Body5’s) in the academic space. At that moment, it would seem that the academic space is unable to contain Body5’s ‘madness’/thoughts/feelings and those of the other Bodies who are its friends. Body5 is disappointed and annoyed, having come to that academic space precisely because it wanted to take its clothes off. Because it wanted to lie down in an academic space inspired by Mantegna’s Christ, by Cuoghi’s work, by… by… by… It wanted other Bodies to be able to make use of its naked body. It wanted its body to be made use of. It wanted to be covered only with a transparent veil from the belly-button down. It wanted to experiment the decomposition/death of the human body. Silence. There is now a little tension between Body2 and Body5. Body2 suggests that they speak to Body10, which is the law’s official representative within the academic space. In the meantime, Body1, Body3, Body4, Body6 and Body7 arrive too. A table is covered with jackets, coats and sweaters, and over this, a blue sheet is laid: this will be Body5’s ‘bed’. Body5 can finally take off its clothes: a sweater, a shirt, a pair of trousers, shoes and socks and underpants. And that’s it, it’s done. Naked. Body5 hangs the clothes on the wall hook. Those clothes hanging on the wall conserve the shape of Body5, its smell and the cells of its skin. And there’s something attractive about this seemingly banal gesture of hanging them up: it opens up new vistas. A man – undressed – breaks up the pattern of a very specific context (the lecture hall). The clothes are not discarded or hidden – they are hanging on the wall and visible. They testify to the scandal of the fracturing of the normative space. When has that space ever been witness to underwear hanging on the wall? When has it ever seen a naked body? The gesture of hanging the clothes on the wall is a minor gesture: ‘the minor is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variations. It does this from within experience itself, activating a shift in tone, a difference in quality’ (Manning, 2016: 1).

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Reviewer 1 – The methodological focus needs unpacking. The paper reads like a series of observations and the ‘experiment’ needs developing through particular concepts and a clearer contribution to the development of one field. To which field are you referring to? Body5 is naked. It is lying down; it takes the transparent veil and covers its body from its feet to its waist. Body2 helps Body5 in this process, but the veil is too transparent: some folds need to be made, right there between the legs, so that Body5’s penis is invisible, illegible: Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Genesis, 3: 7. The famous gesture of Adam covering his genitals with a fig leaf is, according to Augustine, not due to the fact that Adam was ashamed of their presence, but to the fact that his sexual organs were moving by themselves without his consent. Sex in erection is the image of man revolted against God. The arrogance of sex is the punishment and consequences of the arrogance of man. His uncontrolled sex is exactly the same as what he himself has been towards God – a rebel. (Foucault & Sennett, 1981, n.p.) Body5 doesn’t feel cold; the ‘bed’ of clothes is protecting it. Other Bodies (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7….) draw near. Body4 attaches a tag to the right big toe with a name on it. Besides Body5, there are various objects: a gadget for measuring blood-pressure, some nail varnish, things for making up; two measuring tapes; two magnifying glasses. The light is turned off, and everyone goes out. There’s silence. Outside, Bodies are being warned that there is a naked body inside the room. These outside Bodies are not asked to look on passively; to watch a spectacle as spectators; to listen to a presentation-representation. There will be no PowerPoint presentation with accompanying voice. Vitality will express itself in unusual forms, unlike those we are used to in academic life. There will be no question time: the outside Bodies are entering a space where they will be invited to: Mix with… Try-ing Experience… Get involved in… Work on… Get dirty… Move around… Walk about… Do something… Bodies 1–7 want the outside Bodies to be affected.

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Body5 is alone in the academic space and waits for other bodies to come in. It closes its eyes and thinks contentedly that it is the main attraction in the room. It is the most important event within that academic space. Now Body5 is almost asleep. A few Bodies come near to Body5 and make up its eyes, paint the nails on its hands and feet. One Body takes its blood pressure. Another Body writes something on an arm: ‘Does my body end here? May be not - - - - - - - cut here’. A mask like those in an operating theatre is placed over Body5’s mouth. A tear is drawn below one of Body5’s eyes. Reviewer 1 – You should be clear about the aim of the paper.

Witness statement 5 Objectivity Bias Triangulation (the ‘Y’ incision) Science Truth Fact Purposeful Meaning making Validity Reliability All these words and their associated actions trouble me. They frame a particular way to do things ‘right’, a kind of research that leans towards positivism and structure which is so prevalent. They point to randomized controlled trials and the objective and hierarchical search for truth and knowledge. Although I do not align myself with this kind of research, I see its purpose. I am looking for more embedded and entangled ways for research practice with human and more/otherthan-human bodies. Deleuze (1990) sees the term sense (and sense-making) as a paradox – a thing that can be ‘sensed’ and contained within logical interpretations of ‘sense’. These cognitive dimensions link to the troubling words above – the ‘order words’ of research (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I consider how the order words, which direct and striate traditional research practices, become part of wider assemblages that situate ‘the legacy of Humanism with its anthropocentric imperative to position “species man” (white, euro-american) as centre of the universe and top of a hierarchy in which “he” is the only one who matters’ (Taylor & Fairchild, 2020: 5). As a way to decompose, disrupt and disturb these humanist legacies and to open research up wider and more ethical and response-able inclusive practice, we have to consider what matters in research and what stories are being told before, during and after the research process (Haraway, 2016). Memento-mori – a symbolic reminder of death (Latin: remember you must die). Is it now time for a methods death? The death of methods? Can such a death be released with the flow of the knife that makes agential cuts (Barad, 2007),

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Memento-Mori St. John’s Cathedral, Malta, Valetta

which determine what is included and excluded from research practicings? As Barad remind us: Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. (Barad, 2007: 185) Is it time to ‘flesh out’ other methodological possibilities? Must methods ‘as is’ die so that methods ‘as might be’ can emerge?

Autopsical seeing and knowing In this Event, we embrace and play with autopsy’s centring of the ocular. This is important because sight and vision has been the dominant mode, medium and metaphor for Western empirical traditions of knowledge production. In training our sights on autopsy, we take Berger’s (1973/7) ideas of ‘seeing’ (within European art traditions) as one point of departure in a wider constellation of theoretical (re)framings that locate sight and vision as part of the messy, embedded and embodied relationality of becoming of all forms of knowing. Seeing and being seen problematizes the fragilities and frailties of vision and its remembrance, given that sight-related concepts – sight-appear-sense-detect-vision – are

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fundamentals of Enlightenment knowledge production. The primacy of seeing and being seen traces accepted research practices that serve certain epistemological practices aiming at reporting truth and reality via methods centred on clarityreason-logic-method-evidence-standard-certainty-truth. It is in and from the dialectic of the seeing and seen bodies that our re-turns to this happening sits as an embodied somatechnics of thinking/writing in which we initially explore the primacy of autopsical sight and then consider which bodies are seen and which are invisible.

Autopsical sight ‘Autopsy’, most commonly associated with post-mortem examination, but also with the reassembly of bodies – or fragments of bodies – in forensic anthropological procedures, has an etymology in Greek as ‘seeing with one’s own eyes’ (Collins Online Dictionary). As a technology in which ‘systematic, direct visual and tactile investigation remains the ideal’ (Wolfe, 2010: 232), the autopsy is valorized as the technology by which: Western medicine was transformed from a loose collection of trusted remedies and superstitions to a discipline based in logic and observation, and another area of nature previously shrouded in mystery was liberated and assimilated into the collective library of human knowledge (Wolfe, 2010: 231) Klaver (2005: n.p.) highlights how the term ‘autopsy’ works across disciplinary boundaries: ‘autopsy’ ‘operates as a concept that can navigate various disciplines with ease’. The metaphorical deployment of autopsy in the social sciences and in the humanities more widely denotes the privileging of vision through dissection as the ultimate arbiter of knowledge production: ‘autopsy as a searching gaze deployed by the subject to ferret out meaning and significance essentially describes the position of the Western spectator, whether at a microscope, in the theatre, or reading a book’ (Klaver, 2005: n.p.). However, as a site and mode of inquiry, the practices associated with anato-medical autopsy – with bodily dissection, investigation, resection/display and reassembly (Klaver, 2005) – remain fairly resolutely within the realm of bio-medico-legal discourse and practice. Contemporary practices of forensic and medical autopsy are not solely confined to the lab or the pages of academic tomes. Representations of autopsy are myriad and pervasive in popular culture. This is especially so in forensic genre television programmes exemplified by CSI and others (Hausken, 2014; Tait, 2006). In this popular culture genre, bodies – or the remains thereof – are dissected and reassembled in order that the body pieces together its story and tells on the violent crime that saw its end. Like theatres of bodily dissection from the past, the autopsy is a theatre space in which the demise of the body, through its own decomposition, becomes a material case through which knowledge is (re)

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assembled and built into a coherent tale. As Palatinus argues, in these irreal autopsy spaces: The bodies, as objects of scientific speculation, are not only exposed to the scrutinizing gaze of the forensic experts, and, indirectly, to the gaze of the viewers of the show. The visualization of the bodies is contaminated by persistent verbalization as the scientists at all times interpret (that is to say describe, comment upon and narrate) whatever they perceive visually. In other words, the body as a mute image is consistently given voice (Palatinus, 2013: n.p.). The autopsy then – ‘a body space’ – as a technology of dissection and reassembly, in and through which knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge are created and crafted, is most often constructed as a ‘blatant idealization of the forensic profession as a positivist science capable of attaining objective truth’ (Palatinus, 2013: n.p.). Barbara Stafford’s (1991) project in tracing the lineages of 18th-century aesthetic and medical practice strategies to visibilize the invisible into contemporary culture is one that has resonance for encoding our autopsy-like experimentations here. She argues that the revolutionary turn towards a visually dependent culture is one that can be tracked from Enlightenment thinking/practices that ‘involve a practical, nonquantifiable and nondiscursive knowledge of nature and a skilled operation performed upon, and with, its materials’ (Stafford, 1991: xvii). This turn requires a contemporary focus on the importance of ‘the inescapable universalization of vision [which] suggests that visual aptitude and sophisticated visual learning should no longer be considered a mere aesthetic luxury’ (Stafford, 1991: xviii–xix). For Stafford, ‘Optical demonstrations and visualization were central to the processes of enlightening. … that focused on the puzzle of the feeling and thinking person’ (Stafford, 1991: xviii–xix). Come. Enter a version of an autopsy suite, one in which you occupy multiple locations of (in)sight. Be an academic, a producer of knowledge! Be an observer. Be a scanner. Be a ‘dead eye’. Be a pathologist in wait for a corpse. Be a forensic anthropologist. Be a corpse, recently dead. Be a technician, excising a ‘Y’ on this corpse. Be an autopsy table, drenched in bodily fluids. Be a collection of bones desperately wanting to become, again. Be a camera transmitting images to students. Be a camera on a forensic drama set. Make it a project. Project!

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Autopsy and the somatechnics of the AcademicConferenceMachine This Event has explored – and attempted to undo – how vision and occularism are reified in conference workshop spaces, and how this reification draws a line of sight back to positivist scientific methodology and research as that which can be known as truth and generalized as law. Our autopsical practices sought to question what counts as knowledge and how bodies are implicated in its production. The disruptions we pose provoke the following questions: • • • •

How is knowledge produced (or not) in conferences? Whose ‘seeing’ is given space in the AcademicConferenceMachine? In what ways can playing with ‘autopsy’ render the certainty of ‘vision’ in knowledge production less certain? In what ways do the provisional experimentations reveal cross-disciplinary and indisciplined pollutions via lines of flight/sight?

The witness statements illustrate the influence of sight on bodies. A wider focus on somatechnics highlights the relationality between bodies and the technologies through which bodies are formed (Sullivan and Murray, 2009). The Autopsy research-creation experimentation was an immanent and emergent collaboration of bodies, materialities and vitalities that pushed against the regulated optics and technicities of the AcademicConferenceMachine. Autopsical somatechnics query normative optics disrupt expected norms of knowledge production. The witness statements write about how bodies are produced. The objectifying gaze experienced by women is fetishized by the reproduction of dead women in popular culture. Women’s bodies have become sites of contestation. Feminist movements have challenged why women do not feel safe in public and private spaces. Femicide in the UK has remained an issue where on average one woman is killed every three days (Femicide Census, 2021). Sexual assault and unwanted harassment for women in the UK are a daily occurrence (Taylor & Shrive, 2021). Black women are more likely to die in childbirth or during pregnancy (Limb, 2021) and are routinely challenged by medical professionals who have gained their knowledge from textbooks designed for White patients ( Jackson, 2020). Such modes of bodily knowledge unmoor the certainties of autopsy. The somatechnics of academic spaces, including the spaces of the AcademicConferenceMachine, deserve closer scrutiny. How often do non-normative academic and student bodies experience death in an academic space? The Academy is an unforgiving place set up to reify White heteronormative male knowledge and scientific practices (Zarabadi et al., 2019). This results in bodily hurt for those who are positioned on the outside: lack of promotion opportunities; discrimination; more pastoral and teaching roles; lower pay and status for academics. Students face similar challenges where hierarchical lists of Universities favour those

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students who have the capital to pass the entrance requirements. These graduates are then able to access gold-plated networking opportunities only available to the favoured few.

Bodying forth beyond the event Our original autopsy research-creation event was envisioned as a productive disturbance of knowledge and methods that claim onto-epistemological authority. The unruly bodies of the autopsy conference happening, and the potentially unruly knowledge practices we promote in this Event and more widely in this book, try to work against and outside some of the foundational logics of modernist scientific knowledge creation. Our autopsy research-creation in Sweden offered rhizomatic and tentacular connections to knowledge in its partial situatedness. In a very key sense, the autopsy experimentation was unsightly – deliberately so, so that it could work against privileged lines of sight and against the ocularcentrism of mainstream knowledge formations. Our autopsy experimentation was also messy: there were no clean scalpels or scrubbed stainless steel work benches. We, and our co-participants, were in amongst a melee of bodies, sounds, spaces, sites and smells. This somatechnic immersion was also played through in terms of the post-disciplinary natures and knowledges that our autopsy practicings glanced at: film and cinema; histories of medicine; the juridical and surveillanced natures of academic spaces; gender and sexualities. These messy immersions sought to contest the constraints imposed on knowledge production and extend possibilities for corrupting these. The autopsy-like research-creations and the resultant written Event and witness statements acted as provocations to question: • • • •

Which bodies have the scopic authority to see? Which bodies get framed and seen? Whose and what bodies get to be the object of the gaze? What does this focus on seeing and sight occlude from the liveliness that constantly re-makes bodies in their daily intra-actions with the world?

Our autopsy-like research-creations pulled into view the human, discursive, and more-than-human somatechnologies that lend themselves to the matter of seeing. They reveal the ebb and flow of power and fragility within both the AcademicConferenceMachine and wider life. In Barad’s terms, our autopsy-like research-creations open questions about the provisional and intra-active ‘feel’ of matter: ‘matter refers to the materiality and materialization of phenomena, not to an assumed, inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects’ (Barad, 2007: 2010). We should continue to ask: what happens in/to the subject-object nexus when a viewing body becomes a (living) corpse?

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References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bee, J. (2019). “Pure experience” and true detective: Immediation, diagrams, Milieu. In E. Manning, A. Munster & B. M. Stavning Thomsen (Eds.), Immediation I (pp. 256–270). London: Open Humanities Press. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Berger, J. (1973/7). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brinkman, S. (2014). Doing without data. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 720–725. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F1077800414530254 Carey, N., Fairchild, N., Taylor, C. A., Koro, M., Elmenhorst, C., & Benozzo, A. (2021). Autopsy as a site and mode of inquiry: De/composing the ghoulish hu/man gaze. Qualitative Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999005 Collins Online Dictionary. (n.d.). https://www.collinsdictionary.com/. Accessed 25 March 2021. Deleuze, G. (1990). The logic of sense. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Femicide Census. (2021). Femicide census. https://www.femicidecensus.org/. Accessed 8 May 2021. Foucault, M., & Sennett, R. (1981). Sexuality and solitude. London Review of Books, 4(9). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n09/michel-foucault/sexuality-and-solitude. Accessed 27 February 2021. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066 Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hausken, L. (2014). Forensic fiction and the normalisation of surveillance. Nordicom Review 35(1), 3–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/nor-2014-0001 Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York: New York University Press. Klaver, E. (2005). Sites of autopsy in contemporary culture. Albany: State University of New York Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Abingdon: Routledge. Limb, M. (2021). Disparity in maternal deaths because of ethnicity is “unacceptable”. British Medical Journal, 372. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n152 Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Palatinus, D. L. (2013). Autopsy and/as ‘différance’ – CSI’s ekphrastic bodies. American E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, IX(2). https://americanaejournal.hu/vol9no2/ palatinus. Accessed 25 March 2021.

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Stafford, B. M. (1991). Body criticism: Imaging the unseen in enlightenment art and medicine. Cambridge: MIT Press. Sullivan, N., & Murray, S. (Eds.), (2009). Somatechnics: Queering the technologisation of bodies. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Tait, S. (2006). Autoptic vision and the necrophilic imaginary in CSI. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9(1), 45–62. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1367877906061164 Taylor, C. A., & Fairchild, N. (2020). Towards a posthumanist institutional ethnography: Viscous matterings and gendered bodies. Ethnography and Education, 15(4), 509–527. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1735469 Taylor, J., & Shrive, J. (2021). ‘I thought it was just a part of life’: Understanding the scale of violence. https://www.victimfocus.org.uk/womens_experiences_violence_abuse_ study. Accessed 8 May 2021. Wolfe, D. L. (2010). To see for one’s self: The art of autopsy has a long history and an uncertain future. American Scientist, 98(3), 228–235. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/27859511 Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C., Fairchild, N., & Moxnes, A. (2019). Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3671

TABLES, OR NOT Multiple productions of tablediffractions through spacetimemattering

Introducing table-body spacetimematterings In the Unmannered Tables event, which the CG collective curated at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in the Spring of 2018 in UrbanaChampaign, our impulse was to experiment with/in tables. In part, we were drawn to tables as mannered sites, sites around which bodies – as table-bodies – become mannerly. This draws us to the somatechnics of tables and the ways in which tables impact on and shape bodily techniques and technicities; table somatechnics were articulated in the production and curation of the ICQI workshop and also within the writing of this Event. We were particularly drawn to tables as apparatuses that materialize and regulate educational settings (Dytham, 2018; Taylor, 2017), and more specifically, with this book, to the mannering and mattering of tables in (academic) conferences. We often experience conferences as a sort of machine, where human and non-human phenomena are entangled in an AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019), a machine which produces more of the same by doing the same things over and over, again and again (check in at the conference, get a goodie bag, meet up with people, choose what to attend, prepare for your own paper presentation(s) and, and, and...). However, no space or time is the same, regardless of the machinic compulsions that aim for regularity (Benozzo et al., 2019). How, then, can tables help us undo our complicitous entanglements in an AcademicConferenceMachine? How can/might a table appear in a conference room otherwise? How might divergent (dis)orientations with/in tables produce movements, flows and forces differently? In what ways might tables de- and/or re-compose those objects, bodies and spaces with which they entangle at conferences? Our Unmannered Tables event at ICQI materialized as a set of experiments in meaning and method to address these questions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-6

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On 18 May 2018, we were all under tables; some of us physically in the conference venue in the American Midwest; some of us in our own homes, linked to Urbana-Champaign via video-conferencing technologies. Participants at the conference event were invited to a series of (under/in-) table encounters. Our table invitations to participants were somewhat unusual. Rather than inviting workshop participants to sit at or around tables, participants were, instead, invited to become entangled in intra-actions of co-production with virtual and/or (em)bodied table inhabitants. All such intra-actions happened in and from those underneath table spaces – spaces more usually considered beneath, void and/or inconsequential. In this research-creation event, table-body-time-zone choreographies and dispersals – Oslo-Sheffield-Chichester-Urbana-Champaign – occasioned a number of provocations: • • •

What might tables do when tables and bodies are assembled differently? What happens when space-time-matterings are put on the table by a series of differential tableings in different spaces and times? What comes to matter when tables are (dis)oriented otherwise; when tables become no longer sites of civilized academic talk, but are rather sites from which playful misrule might happen?

These questions and provocations arose in relation to our explorations of how the becoming of bodies-tables-bodies materialize in ways which are consequently marked as (un)mannered and (un)mannerly. Our experimentations played with ways that might undo the more usual taken-for-granted sense that a table is someTHING that is separate from and that separates BODIES; bodies that sit AT tables and (generally) behave themselves whilst there. Our under-table Event aimed to rethink-redo table-body meetings; to attune differently to the intra-actions of such table-body encounters and the affective matterings produced with/in the multiplicity of such entanglements. For example, table-body encounters produce a wide range of embodied affects as well as arranging and regulating bodies: tiredness, relaxation, stress, communion; they make and mark boundaries of becoming, demand transparencies, engender sites of battlefield or feast or … matterings-producing-affects-producing-matterings … in/through/around the spaces and times of table-body encountering’s. Our orientations towards such table-body encounters were compelled and propelled by the mannerliness of tables: the ways in which tables produce bodies that observe courtesies, etiquette, civilities; the ways in which tables orient, position and pose bodies; the ways in which tables produce habits of sitting still, of being (or at least seeming to be) polite; the ways that tables discipline voices, their volume and modulation. Of course, the mannerly table that troubled our envisaged play at the conference is an adult table (is it?), a table for adults (…or not?), a table that schools and habituates bodies so that they come to enact what is considered

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to be ‘reasonable’, ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ (or?). Children, the young, the infirm, dogs, cats, budgies and others have no such table orientations (or?). Nor do their bodies accept the duress that tables impress (or?). All such manner of table manners were, so to speak, ‘on the table’ in this (un)mannerly conference play. In this Event re-turn, we cohere a set of disruptive moves towards (conference) table manners as a means of considering how tables in their unmannerly becomings might become-with us in doing knowledge differently. Tables are a spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007) that connect and materialize new ways to think about the AcademicConferenceMachine and how knowledge is produced during and after conference events. These table-body somatechnics of thinkings and doings act as a provocation and we invite you, reader, to come play with us in ongoing experimentation. Come be with us as table-body encounters. Perhaps you could read this Event at or under a table of your own choosing? How hospitable is your table? How might you set and dress your table-body? Are those (table) legs immodestly bare? Are you making a den? Is your table-body a lookout from which to survey the world anew? Are you becoming-denizen with/in table-body? Are there other (non/human) bodies entangled with your table? In what ways does (the absence of ) table fold your reading-thinking-feeling body? Perhaps in adopting a playful orientation to your own table-body entanglement whilst reading, we will somehow be a part of different table phenomena in spacetimemattering as a part of an always-already, ongoing production of knowledge.

Table-body entanglements and accountabilities Following Barad’s agentic realist approach, we explore the discursive materiality (Barad, 2007; Lenz Taguchi, 2010) of the phenomena ‘tables’. We orient towards the ways in and through which tables and bodies, as table-body phenomena, might be more productively understood as material-discursive intra-active entanglements. The human/non-human materiality of the Unmannered Tables event at ICQI as well as the writing and reading of this text together produce new agential cuts. As entanglements of ‘cutting together apart’ (Barad, 2014: 176), we re-turn to moments and movements with tables and bodies that are not faithful replications or representations of that conference event. In writing this now – and in you reading this now – we open up the ICQI tables event to the various new (and unimaginable) agents who might be collaboratively enacting the phenomena ‘table’ in and beyond that ‘original’ conference event. To do this, we pose table-bodies as ‘lookouts’ from and with/in which we dis/re/orient table-bodies as sites of diffractive entanglement with/in and away from the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et  al., 2019). Thus, ‘in the process of changing concepts as lookouts for movements, [we are] trying to displace our thinking, as one molecule spins itself onto the next as part of ongoing entanglements’ (Andersen & Otterstad, 2014: 100) in spacetimemattering. In/through/around this Event, we question ways that the entanglements of non-human and human phenomena produce knowledge and operate to re/create

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tables in spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007, 2014). We hold open to question the intra-active production of table-bodies as phenomena of space and time. We wonder how the human-non-human table-body experimentations, materialized in ICQI and re-turned here, can remain open to yet further explorations in as yet unanticipated directions. Knowledge and knowing are relational and processual; conference-table-bodies emerge in processes of knowing that are always produced in their own becomings. Likewise, the ICQI table event proliferates in an ongoing process of iterative re(con)figuring of meaning making. In Barad’s (2007) shift from attending to epistemology towards a fuller appreciation of onto-epistemology, time, space and materiality become intra-active agents in their co-production of phenomena. Every space-time-mattering is an entanglement of materiality which co-produces material-discursive phenomena: Space, time and matter are mutually constituted through the dynamic of iterative intra-activity (…). The past matters and so does the future, but the past is never behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming (Barad, 2007: 181) So, tables and bodies do not exist as separate phenomena located along linear time; they ‘do not occur at some particular moment in time; phenomena are specific ongoing reconfigurations of spacetimemattering’ ( Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012: 12). Rather, tables emerge as phenomena only in/through/around their entanglements with other materialities in spacetimemattering. When bodies encounter tables in the moment but also as a part of past and future meetings in/around/through tables, such entanglements open up to thinkfeel (Massumi, 2015) or even thinkingfeelingdoing (Osgood, 2019). Thus, tables and bodies, as intra-active agents of the AcademicConferenceMachine, become producers of table-knowledge or…? The intra-active experimental process we invite you to participate in as you read this in your own here-and-now seeks something that is not clearly defined in advance, but embraces the uncertainty inherent in its own becoming (Waterhouse et  al., 2019), opening up potential and unimagined possibilities or ‘lines of flights’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), through rhizomatic ‘method assemblages’ (Law, 2004). How are you doing with your tables? Are your tables thinkingfeelingdoings offering you the potential to produce as yet unthought matterings: becoming-writer, becoming-reader, becoming-table-bodies? Barad places ethics at the forefront of meaning making and knowledge production. Ethics is an intrinsic part of how knowledge is produced through intraactive performativity. Therefore ethico-onto-epistemology becomes ‘an ethics of worlding’ (Barad, 2007: 392), where ethics cannot be separated from being and knowing, and is part of and produced by relational and situated intra-actions

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that are not a priori. For Barad, ‘ethics is about mattering, about taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’ (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012: 69). How can Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemological framing help us apprehend our/ your table-body experimentations? Barad (2007) avers that ‘ethics is therefore not about the right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’ (Barad, 2007: 393). How do table thinkingfeelingdoings produce responsibility and provoke questions of accountability, without pre-given answers, as in the usual institutional ethical protocols? One of the ways we thought about this was through the mattering of exclusions. Our table-body experiments were troubled by exclusions: of what might have been, of what comes to be. They cannot be separated from the intra-actions in/through/around the phenomena in the moment. But by interfering with/ through/around the material-discursive entanglements, the events and encounters can offer a (re)conceptualization of tables, of bodies; a (re)thinking with/in table-bodies. Who knows perhaps such interferences may also reconfigure the doing of ‘tableing’ and, indeed, of ‘conferencing’?

Tablediffractions-diffractionstables

Tablediffractions

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… or not. Surface, sanctuary, (un)suitable. Chat, chide, (in)hospitable. Falter, alter, (in)supportable. Tasty, testy, (un)palatable. Delectable, detestable, (un)stable. Wobbly, wonky, (un)predictable! Stable, (dis)able, (un)comfortable? Deal-able, trade-able, (un)accountable … some becomings with tables.

Data-tables The empirical material – the data – of/from this Event are ostensibly a series of notes that re-turn the table-body happening from 2018: notations, doodles, memos, images, jottings, observations, resonations; notes cut together apart; paper-table-notes flamed and turned to ash; Zoom and Skype meetings; and one film from the internet. However, and at the same time, the data is materialized in and through the conference table-body encounters diffracted through those mundane table-body entanglements of everyday living. The exponential multiplicity of such diffractions, like the spaces of misrule underneath the table, provokes rhizomatic lines of flight. This unruly data material takes off in different directions, produces other thoughts/words/actions that resist those (research) impulses to capture, to boundary, to bracket, so as to tell the ‘real’. Our tables-data materials are lively and mutinous phenomena that proliferate in their becomings in and through spacetimemattering. These data as phenomena produces affects/ thoughts/doings in movement and in the moment and in spacetimematterings since the data intra-acts with other human and non-human materialities that make different/further/other cuts.

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In all these table-body assemblages, some (data)materiality glows. We will now, together with the computer, music, sounds, smells and …, try to let us/text/readings/books/thoughts as spacetimemattering produce something. Let’s consider how tables’ spacetimemattering experiments data intra-actions worked on and with us – how table matterings articulate the forces and flows that disrupt the AcademicConferenceMachine. Tables are agential cuts (Barad, 2007) that reveal the impact of the AcademicConferenceMachine on conference bodies. These cuts illuminate some of the unseen movements of tables spacetimematterings that include or marginalize certain bodies. What have tables done for you in conference spaces?

SpaceTIMEmatterings Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Please feel free to explore the other side of the table and become entangled with happenings (from the Unmannered Tables event). Yes, let us, as an experiment, use a table as a diving board, to dive into an ocean of children’s books, and through fragments of childish text, play around with the production of meaning, with making knowledge. Let us start by diving into Lewis Carroll’s book Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late,” Alice heard a White Rabbit say (Carroll, 1988: 2) A conference has at least one white rabbit running around as a TimeConferenceMachine. It runs around and stresses me. And you? ‘Oh dear! You can’t speak for more than 20 minutes’; ‘Oh dear! It’s time for a break!’; ‘Oh dear! New session. Hurry up!’. The TimeConferenceMachineRabbit, as a timetable is, again and again, a regular interruption to the AcademicConferenceMachine. The timetablerabbit orders, demarks limits and borders, orchestrates and (at) tunes bodies to silence and talk. However, with all such order, there is also the possibility for leaky chaos: sneaky get-aways can also be tabled; there is always the possibility to escape from a boring paper presentation; or one can slope from the conferencing small talk that itself has the potential to render one’s presence even smaller. The timetablerabbit produces affects. The timetablerabbit-clock controls bodies in and around the conference. The rabbit, together with the clock, and other human and non-human bodies produces movements and affects in and around the conference. Together, they are producing doings. They intra-act and they ‘… do not necessarily precede the assemblage; they emerge through it’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012: 156); ‘...they don’t exist as individual elements’ (Barad 2007: 33). They produce feelings whereby time is ‘controlling’ the conference or maybe the conference is controlling time. The conference timetablerabbit, as an apparatus and as part of the AcademicConferenceMachine, shapes movements in spacetimemattering and guides the direction of where and what ‘you’ can/will do. Is human materiality becoming timetablerabbit-clocks?

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What if … somebody were to shoot the timetablerabbit? Or …what if … somebody just removed/took/destroyed/hid the clock? Clocking practices are constituted and reconstituted in intra-actions … The clock is never closed in on itself: it is always constituted in relation to human and non-human others … the clock might be made by us and for our purpose (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012: 157) but it ‘also performs a transformation on us’ by always increasing or decreasing ‘possibilities of acting’ (Grosz, 2009: 130). Tables, timetables and clocks are, as apparatuses, ‘perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings’ (Barad, 2007: 203). So, what would happen if we dared to remove/ restore the timetablerabbit from the conference 😉? In what ways does the timetablerabbit also inhabit the underneath of tables? “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Alice, “a great girl like you,” (she might well say this), “to go on crying in this way! Stop this moment, I tell you!” (Carroll, 1988: 17) Do you think Alice would have been crying for the timetablerabbit? Or maybe she would have been crying out of frustration, of not knowing where to go. The timetable, in a way, exercises a type of mastery over conference bodies: which paper presentation you can participate in, what panel you must commit to. Often, two interesting paper presentations or paper presenters are on at the same time. What if … you had a timeturner as Hermione has in Harry Potter (Rowling, 1999) and you could be a part of all the paper presentations. Seriously, this spacetimemattering interferes with body, bodies, bodying. The timetablerabbit and data-materiality produces a lot of thoughts about time, but what about the table? What is going on under the table?

Spacetimemattering under the table In the room under the table two people meet through a computer. Tick, tock! Tick, tock! Two spaces, two times are meeting under the table. US and England. Two non-human phenomena produce, together with two humans, a superposition-meeting, a moment of ‘effects of agential cuts, material enactments of differentiating/entangling’ (Barad, 2014: 176). … this is wonderful because I have been struggling to lipread people for the entire conference… … communicating over text is just... really... relaxing and liberating for me right now… … when you have deaf attendees in particular, there is a LOT of communication stuff going on under the table (so to speak) …

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Under-the-table

… instead of just bluntly performing … having a non-normative physical body that doesn’t work the way this conference assumes that bodies work … … under the table, for me, is whispering. If you think about it, how would you whisper to someone in sign language?... … you can’t just sign softer… … one thing you can do is physically block it with another thing… … if we are sitting next to each other at a table and I want to say something privately to you, I might move my hand under the table so only you can see it, and sign there (even if that is not the location on my body where the sign would conventionally be produced)… … but typically, ‘under the table’ is cut off from visual input and thus input about what is happening in the world, since I can’t for instance hear doors opening and footsteps of someone walking into the room… … I can hear you typing and it sounds very rhythmical… … ‘keyboard thunder’ is one of my nicknames :) … yeah, that notification of you typing… … it does create that affective experience… In some way it feels like they are in another space. Under a table-space A space under something. A space where earthworms can slide around and let the words, sounds, smells, lights, and the enclosing feelings make room for something else. The earthworm eating the words, sounds, smells, light and re-turning it as materiality which again and again make space for becomings. Becoming curious; how the AcademicConferenceMachine doings include or exclude human and non-human participants…

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Can sitting/being under a table produce other knowledge compared to that produced whilst sitting by/around a table? As Barad says ‘ each meeting matters, not just for what comes to matter but what is constitutively excluded from mattering in order for particular materializations to occur’ ( Juelskjær & Schwennesen, 2012: 21). Because of the Covid-19 situation around the world most conferences have moved from physical places to the virtual space of the internet. These virtual mo(ve)ments of the AcademicConferenceMachine becomings are different. Physical bodies do not intra-act – at least, not in the more usual ways of conferencing. The other-than-human intra-actions occur through a non-human materiality (computer screen) and produce other/different spacetimematterings. For many, the online conference produces a lot of frustration, not really knowing how to deal with the internet as a space. For others, online conferencing has given an opportunity to be a part of something they would normally not have had the time, nor the money, to participate in. And, there are others, other worlds, who/which are excluded through limited bandwidth. What does the AcademicConferenceMachine produce when you are sitting by your own table, in your own space, rather than in those spaces more usually deemed propitious for academic conferencing? Which table-becomings open when you sit with your computer on a ‘table’ that might be your knee, when your knee is also the site of caring for and about the materiality of heart and hearth? Which table-becomings open when you sit at a (private) table, which itself may host and haul a lot of intra-acting stories in and around you? How does the AcademicConferenceMachine intra-act with these stories as they play out, not in the conference hall, but in your bedroom, your living room, your home study? What is happening under the table when the online conferencing webinar plays out on the screen? What might get swept under the table so that your now, private, academic space becomes a spectacle for the AcademicConferenceMachine? Bookcases, tasteful decorations, classy art. In what ways might it make (any) more sense for you to be under the table when you participate thus?

Table-body academics – (in)visible and mundane practices Table-body-academics are not separate from the ecologies of picnic tables, coffee shop tables, outdoor dining tables, Parisian cafes and lonely single tables on otherwise empty patios. Table-body-academics mostly operate through their (in) visibilities. But tables might also enact the mundane work of getting on together, of coming to notice how ‘we require each other in unexpected collaboration and combination’ (Haraway, 2016: 4) in order that we may become-with each other. Tables perform ethico-onto-epistemological work of enacting relationality. This tables event brought into play – for ‘me here’ who could not be ‘there’ – a sense of frustration at methodological play of the ‘relational interval’ in which what matters in the ‘margin of indetermination’ which modulates the potential of the event (Manning, 2013: 141). I de/compose my table and head off to bed, tired and wondering what if …? they might cut together apart some of the discursive

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enmeshed and interwoven stories that can be a part of tableing. Or does the tabletext-phenomena change in some way if the text appears in another layout? Table-body-academics also operate through their invisibilities. But tables might also enact the mundane work of getting together, of coming to notice how ‘we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combination’ in order that we may become-with each other (Haraway, 2016: 4). Tables create academic bodies. Tables hinder, constrain, and problematize academic bodies. Tables also connect academic bodies to matter, thought, text, labour/work, time, and space and more. Sarah Ahmed, in her chapter ‘Orientations Matter’ (2010), used the table as an object for thinking about how bodies become orientated in space. Space time mattering

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Can text produce tables? If so, what story is the text-table telling? Or, in another textual table-turning mo(ve)ment: in what ways do tables produce text? In what ways do bodies get framed, calculated and rendered in tabulated form? What is the order of things when tabled through the fret of a grid? What apparatuses might be operating under this table-text? What sub-text-tables should we attend to in conferencing as part of the AcademicConferenceMachine? Belonging to the Emperor

Embalmed

Tame

Sucking pigs

Sirens

Fabulous

Stray dogs

Included in the present classification

Frenzied

Innumerable

Drawn with a very fine camelhair brush

Et cetera

Having just broken the water pitcher

That from a long way off look like flies

Figure X Adapted from Foucault (1966/1992)… The order of things.

Text-table experiments when table-data takes the initiative We consider what happens when we play and experiment with data. In this section, we explore and consider ‘how might data take initiative and create itself in connections with other data’ (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016: 49). Experimental practice offers researchers many possibilities to move beyond normative understandings about data and how to analyse it. In their book Disrupting Data in Qualitative Inquiry, Koro-Ljungberg et al. (2017: 2) encourage a move beyond anthropocentric thinking about data to pay attention to ‘different human and non-human forces creating, generating, and reproducing knowing, affect, and sensory experiences’. As part of our own post event creative experiments, members of the CG Collective met on Zoom for an immanent writing/thinking session. We talked about tables and then wrote table-words. These were then shared with one of us (Constanse) who played with a number of data-table-ideas. This was enacted whilst thinking about the question – ‘What happens with the table-text if we cut it together apart’? The text was cut apart and the pieces of paper were thrown into the air and landed on a carpet. Then the pieces were cut together apart in a new document. What happened? This new text became interesting in many ways. Some of the ‘new’ text produced laughter, whilst some of it also produced irritation/frustration. Most of the text, in a way, disappeared. However, in this act of disappearance, some sentences came alive: ...and the dark is suffocating. I lose the Skype connection altogether for 15 minutes and lean back and drift off (it is night and I am tired). I am dis/engaged from the workshop, I feel ‘out’... A place for whispering-imagining-making up and making do...

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Is it ok if I sit here? Of course. Is it ok if I sit here? No, that seat’s taken. What could happen if the text is made into a paper-table and paper-chairs? What if … a burning table – like Katniss, the girl on fire (Collins, 2008) – could start an uprising, stage an insurrection, against the AcademicConferenceMachine. Or maybe we could, instead, as many have done before, meet around a bonfire, to congress, to conference otherwise (Osgood et al., 2020)?

Tables-on-fire

Table-shreds.

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The always ongoing spacetimeMATTERING This Event neither builds towards nor terminates with answers. On the contrary, it opens up for yet more questions and/or re-turns those questions already posed and re-poses them. Moreover, in thinkingfeelingdoing (Osgood, 2019) tables differently, in invoking and provoking attunements to table-bodies, timetablerabbit, text-tables and other table intra-actions, our under/in-table experimentations will raise and legitimize another set of questions as we/you entangle otherwise with the AcademicConferenceMachine. Perhaps such questions will be provoked through further table experimentations at future conferences. Maybe the thinkingfeelingdoing that is available in this text-body-text will open up other intra-actions in/through/around the table and thereby produce ‘new’ knowledge with and beyond the AcademicConferenceMachine. Meeting each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and becoming. We need to meet the universe halfway, to take responsibility for the role that we play in the world’s differential becoming. (Barad, 2007: 396) Table spacetimematterings reveal how movements, forces and flows within, through and between tables, humans and other non-humans can help us consider

Table-matrix

Tables, or not

105

different ways to think about knowledge and conference spaces. The nature and regimentation of the AcademicConferenceMachine makes time an impractical notion. There is never enough time to see all you want to see, time flies and time drags. Spacetimemattering of conferences connects old and new friends, late nights, yawns in paper sessions, walking around wondering how to find the next set of presentations. There are also exclusions which we rarely consider – under-the-table provides opportunities for deaf conference attendees to experience participation on their terms, their familiar territory, writing-connectingthinking in virtual timespaces. This is where ethico-onto-epistemologies work as response-able moments to produce different ways to think about tables, conferences and their aftermath.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). Orientations matter. In D. H. Coole & S. Frost (Eds.), New materialisms. Ontology, agency and politics (pp. 234–257). Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Andersen, C. E., & Otterstad, A. M. (2014). Researching the assemblage of cultural diversity in Norway challenging simplistic research approaches. International Review of Qualitative Research, 7(1), 93–110. https://doi.org/10.1525%2Firqr.2014.7.1.93 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168– 187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the Academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Carroll, L. (1988). Alice’s adventures in Wonderland. Chicago, IL: Volume One Publishing. https://www.adobe.com/be_en/active-use/pdf/Alice_in_Wonderland.pdf Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York: Scholastic Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (trans. B. Massumi). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Dolphijn, R. & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Dytham, S. (2018). The construction and maintenance of exclusion, control and dominance through students’ social sitting practices. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 39(7), 1045–1059. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2018.1455494 Foucault, M. (1966/1992). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Routledge. Grosz, E. (2009). Chaos territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Juelskjær, M., & Schwennesen, N. (2012). Intra-active entanglements – An Interview with Karen Barad. Kvinder, Kjøn & Forskning, 1–2, 10–23. https://doi.org/10.7146/ kkf.v0i1-2.28068 Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. London: Sage.

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Koro-Ljungberg, M., Löytönen, T., & Tesar, M. (Eds.), (2017). Disrupting data in qualitative inquiry: Entanglements with the post-critical and post-anthropocentric. New York: Peter Lang. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Abingdon: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Bortenfor skillet mellom teori og praksis. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget Vigmostad & Bjørke AS. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). The politics of affect. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Osgood, J. (2019). Materialised reconfigurations of gender in early childhood: Playing seriously with Lego. In J. Osgood & K. H. Robinson (Eds.), Feminists researching gendered childhoods: Generative entanglements (pp. 85–108). London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J., Taylor, C. A., Andersen, C. E., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Moxnes, A., Otterstad, A. M., Rantala, T., & Tobias-Green, K. (2020). Conferencing otherwise: A feminist new materialist writing experiment. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 20(6), 596–609. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F1532708620912801 Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2012). Acting with the clock: Clocking practices in early childhood. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 13(2), 154–160. https://doi. org/10.2304%2Fciec.2012.13.2.154 Rowling, J. K. (1999). Harry Potter and the prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. Taylor, C. A. (2017). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(3), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1256984 Waterhouse, A.-H. L., Søyland, L., & Carlsen, K. (2019). Eksperimentelle utforskinger av materialer og materialitet i transmaterielle landskaper. FormAkademisk – Forskningstidsskrift for Design Og Designdidaktikk, 12(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.7577/ formakademisk.2648

PLAYFUL CUTS AND CARTOGRAPHIC MAPPING Gender-in-the-making with Teija Rantala

This Event entangles with indisciplined qualitative inquiry and critical feminist posthumanism to re-turn to two arts-based workshops which sought to disrupt thinking about gendered bodies in the AcademicConferenceMachine. It is inspired by two workshops run by Teija and Nikki in the UK (2018) and in Toronto (2019). As we write this Event, we re-engage with thinking about gender-in-the-making and how gendering practice and processes become materialized in everyday life. A re-turn to the workshops enables us to ponder the intersections of gender-in-the-making with/through our own affective cartographies as feminist researchers. By articulating the multiplicity of complex affective encounters between non-humans, materialities and humans that can be produced in workshops within both a feminist academic conference and a larger international education conference, our Event demonstrates the ethical complexity of feminist knowledge production. This helps us to work beyond the confines of the AcademicConferenceMachine which has a way of subduing certain voices (i.e. those that are non-White and non-male). The re-turn considers a number of entangled events. We explore the different articulations of feminist knowledgeformation and do this by highlighting the smoothness and striations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) of conference spaces where bodies/assemblages/events/sensory experiences/knotting’s collide – We question ‘what do they do’? and ‘how do enacted cartographies produce gender-in-the-making’? This Event is written in the spirit of feminist collaboration and as we write/wrote this flowed as an immanent process, we were not sure where it would end up. In this Event, we employ what Lenz Taguchi (2017) entitles cartographic mapping to consider how experimentation with concepts allows lines of articulation to consider how different philosophical problems emerge. In this way, multiple diffractive readings of the gender-in-the-making events are a cutting DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-7

108  Playful cuts and cartographic mapping

together-apart (Barad, 2014) as concepts flow within and between each other. Embracing philosophically and methodologically Karen Barad’s (2007) idea of agential cuts and cutting-together-apart (Barad, 2014), we see this Event as a series of ‘cuts’ which are non-linear and connect with each other in rhizomatic ways. Each cut details an aspect of the workshops and the productions that occurred both during and afterwards. We were particularly interested in the beginnings and endings of conference workshops, the need to introduce and conclude the sessions. Although we concede that beginnings and endings provide a pedagogical direction for workshop attendees, we wonder what might happen if people were able to play with the provocations during the workshop without any pre-briefing and/or plenary, play with the concepts, play with the materials – what might this offer? As Wolgemuth et al. (2018: 717) suggest, ‘play may pose an existential threat to (conventional) qualitative research. Perhaps this means the space to think and do research play is too narrow’. We need to expand the academic knowledge-making space to accommodate playful acts and creative enablements.

Cut: Re-turns The arts-based techniques of our workshop sought to disrupt thinking about gendered bodies as we and our participants rotated through a set of playful activities: data fragments, images, objects and dramatic interludes, where we created both individual and collective productions as a provocation to part of the wider gender-in-the-making materializations. These materials included: •

• • •

A number of contemporary and historical images of women reflecting the fight for women’s rights, the expectations (or not) for the ways women should look and be perceived and aspects of women’s bodies that remain silent (for example menstruation); Data from research projects conducted by Nikki and Teija where women spoke about their wider societal experiences; Selected quotations from feminist scholars (some of these are included later in this Event); Paper and a range of materials (pens, staples, tape, string, paperclips) to enable cartography to be produced.

This re-turn draws on two conference workshops. One of these was part of a conference organised by PhEmaterialisms in 2018 (Rantala & Fairchild, 2018). PhEmaterialisms (Feminist Posthuman and New Materialisms on Education) (PhEmaterialisms, 2018) is a globally dispersed working group formed in 2015 consisting of educators, researchers, students and artists seeking to create generative ways of researching, teaching and collaborating (see for example the work of Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Renold, 2018; Ringrose et al., 2018). The call for papers was a response to the rise in right-wing, post-truth politics and the theme

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was ‘matter-realising pedagogical/methodological interferences in terror and violence’. The other happening was at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meeting in Toronto, 2019 (Rantala & Fairchild, 2019). The conference theme was ‘Leveraging education research in a “post truth” era: multimodal narratives to democratize evidence’ to challenge and disrupt populist right-wing politics that had spawned the notion of a post-truth era where identity politics have been contested. There was an explicit aim to ‘make new connections across our often fragmented and disconnected findings, and we must learn from each other the possibilities of different epistemological and methodological approaches’ (AERA, 2019: 9).

Mashing things up

In the planning of these workshops, we wanted to think about how we might entangle with mappings of the different enunciations of gendered bodies and how this might cut-together apart (Barad, 2014) and articulate affective encounters. We wanted to consider how we/participants might read their own cartographies of feminist experience and how this might end up being mapped during the event. The workshop cartographies (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) chart the different ethical connections of non-humans and humans which, again, articulated new democratic possibilities.

Cut: Cartographic mapping Cartography is a means to map regions of intensive processes and explore the lines which cut and shape bodies. Cartography is an engagement with a theoretical and political reading of power relations, which can create new alternatives to explore the impact of material and discursive conditions on embodied subjects (Braidotti, 2011). This Event re-turns to aspects of the workshops in a different time and space and enables us to ponder the intersections with/through our affective cartographies as feminist researchers. By articulating the multiplicity of complex affective encounters between non-humans, materialities and humans

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that can be ‘hosted’ in workshops within academic conferences, we demonstrate the ethical complexity in how gender-on-the-making is an explicit part of feminist knowledge production. Critical feminist posthuman scholars have developed analytical frameworks and theoretical concepts to challenge established knowledge and question the notion of the role of the human in knowledge making (e.g. Braidotti, 2016; Braidotti & Dolphijn, 2015; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) and in pedagogical knowledge ‘mapping’ practices (Springgay, 2005; Strom et al., 2018). Both the workshops and the writing of this Event entangle with research-creation and thinking-in-movement (Manning, 2016). We also draw on Massumi’s (2015) notion of affect which is connective and ‘out of bodied’ in nature. Massumi (2015: 48) notes that affect is based on the Spinozan view of a body’s ‘ability to affect and to be affected’ and that affective capacities are ‘two facets of the same event’. These affective productions ‘give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies and emergences’ (Stewart, 2007: 2). The affective/affected body is more than the physical form on view – it is ‘always imbricated in a set of relations that extend beyond it and constitute it’ (Anderson, 2016: 9) and the body’s capacities are revealed as part of these relational connections. Affect becomes the invitation to create, enact, to change and experience politics-in-the-making for the researchers and also for the listeners/viewers/participants present in the event (Massumi, 2015).

Cut: Ethics Donna Haraway (2008) calls for a response-able view of both research and ethical practices. In When Species Meet (Haraway, 2008), she considers how research requires a more situated and relational vision of ethics that moves beyond Cartesian dualisms which results in separating the researcher from what they are researching. Haraway’s (2008) co-presencing calls for researchers to ‘cultivate sensitivity towards the other (through our bodies and the somatic expertise of others)’ (Greenhough & Roe, 2010: 44). Therefore, researchers must make a commitment to not just explore the entanglements by which the world is made, they must be responsible for research entanglements and how these are produced (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008). Karen Barad (2007) proposes agential cuts as the mechanism by which some realities, and not others, are materialized and enacted. This is an ethical movement as different agential cuts offer new potential realities that may gave rise to conditions of possibility for some bodies or that may produce exclusions of/for other bodies, and these are entangled ongoing materializations of the world where the focus is ‘on practices, doings, and happenings, on becomings not being(s), on immanence and emergence not essence’ (Fairchild & Taylor, 2019: 6). Across the globe, the recent rise in populist politics has impacted on social justice. To counter this, educational feminist theory and practice has engaged with critical qualitative methodologies as a means to attend to marginalized,

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indigenous and unrepresented participant voices and perspectives (e.g. Ahmed, 2017; Davies, 2014; hooks, 1994; Lather, 1991, 2007; Steinberg & Cannella, 2012; Tuhiwai Smith et  al., 2018). Similarly, critical feminist researchers have long promoted ‘highly diversified, contentious, dynamic, and challenging’ transformative and ethical politics through empirical inquiry (Olesen, 2005: 129). In addition, scholars such as Braidotti (2011) and Haraway (2016) have suggested that social justice approaches should attend with more than human perspectives. Braidotti (2013: 3) has argued that critical feminist posthumanism unsettles the category of the ‘human’ as the historical site of political privilege providing ‘the possibility of an ethical relation of opening out towards and empowering connection to others’. We suggest dynamic approaches to and vibrant and material thinking about gender-knowledge-making (post)qualitative and indisciplined research practices in education. In doing so, we seek to explore how non-human and human bodies and a host of materialities open up a more generative and democratic vision for gender politics in education. The workshop discussion in Toronto was focused on how female academics were positioned in their respective institutions. For some this was linked to recruitment policies where men were awarded higher salaries for the same role; for others, this centred on promotion opportunities where men were more assertive in their scholarship claims which resulted in their promotion; for others, it was the ways in which ideas were misappropriated in meetings and male voices dominated discussions and University Executive Committees and Boards.

CUTTING-TOGETHER-APART: ROUNDTABLE In Toronto, we were part of a roundtable where four papers were presented. As first presenters, we (Teija and Nikki) were keen for participants to talk and entangle with the materials on offer (see aftermath): •

• • • •

• •

So, we need to unite and I love that idea of whisper networks – as feminists we must support each other where we can and not allow ourselves to be overcome by neoliberalism or by our male colleagues. I am really mindful we have probably got about one minute left. I just want to hang something up. Thank you so much for participating; I know we did not have a lot of time but it was wonderful to hear your experiences, so thank you. So, I think our questions were – what was happening while you were engaging in the making and the doing? What was being produced for you? What sort of feelings and thoughts and affects were circulating through the room? Ah fabulous! When did you do that!

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• • • • •

•

• • •

Hahaha. Where can I tie this – maybe the handle of the jug. You have made a cat’s cradle. I wonder if there is a way to connect this all up and together. Oh my gosh – what – I thought this is so stupid, this little comic thing like ‘suffragettes on the warpath – jump on him he is only a mere man!’ like all these kind of fear tactics about women claiming their rights so I figured most like trivial thing that you do with it!! Turn it into what? I noticed the knitting and sewing going on and I wondered whether we talk better when we are doing something with our hands – I don’t know. It was good to have the plaiting as you can untangle it and some of the things that people were saying on the plait were tapping into what people were saying here as well. Should we name the things that are affecting us? Should they be named, recognized or should we let them work on us? We can leave that with you. Thank you – OK thanks great!

Aftermath …as we ended gender-in-the-making was left hanging. We hope it is still working on the participants of the workshop as it is with us. This gender-inthe-making re-turn reignites our experiences and adds to the production of our new cartographies that were temporarily punctuated by the end of the Toronto workshop.

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Cut: Perspectives Research has traditionally been seen as a knowledge-making practice reliant on extracting ‘information’ ‘about’ some ‘thing’ or person which is then represented in, usually written, language in order to reveal knowledge about social situations (Brinkman, 2015). However, a posthuman (post)qualitative and indisciplined commitment to research and a more ontological turn (for example Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2011; Taylor, 2016; Taylor & Hughes, 2016) prompts other modes of exploration. These new ways push back against more traditional research practices and require a rethinking of what is produced during these practices, where ‘disciplines still tend to order knowledge according to specific understandings of what constitute proper methods’ (Manning, 2016: 31). Manning (2016) and other (post)qualitative and indisciplined inquirers (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2011) urge the need to think the relations between subject/object, human/non-human within knowledge production as emergent which presume no pre-existing hierarchies and no pre-constituted subject position before an event. By endorsing these types of practices, more emergent and embodied ways of sensing, thinking and feeling the world can be enacted. Our critical feminist posthuman position encourages us to include nonhuman materialities in knowledge making practices, while at the same time it requires us to situate our own changing identifications and practices. This, in turn, questions more traditional methodological practices, as it requires us to adopt a more fluid and connected approach to method/ology (see KoroLjungberg, 2016; Rantala, 2019). We are drawn to research-creation, which, as Manning and Massumi (2014: 88) elaborate, ‘aims to create new potential for a thinking-with and across techniques for creative practice’. With their envisioning of the research-creation as a multimodal, radical and processual research technique, we approached our workshops as immanent, creative and experimental. In other words, we wanted to be able to rely on the flow of the moment and our intuition in how far, to what extent, to ‘plan and organize’ the workshop as we wished to give space for the unknown and unexpected in the event. Our workshops, as well as our written Event, aim to harness these ontological practices to engage with the doings of gender politics by encouraging women re-make their own cartographical interpretations of their positions and how these were materialized in their institutions and wider society (see Cutting-together-apart: Plenary and Cutting-together-apart: Playful genderin-the-making Events). Focusing on creativeness and experimenting with the open-ended research methodologies offers a possibility to encounter new ways of enacting critical social and educational (post)qualitative and indisciplined inquiry as an affective embodied research-creation with ethical and political consequences.

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Cutting-together-apart: Playful gender-in-the-making Events The UK workshop afforded time to explore the provocations Nikki and Teija offered. These included images which reinforced or challenged gendered normativity, quotes from feminist authors and academics and art materials. Participants moved around the space and worked with/on the materials with no direction from us. These unfoldings release some of the gender-on-the-making practices in play…: I (Teija) felt connected – I felt connected to Cixous, to women that are writing and trying to engage with change in terms of the academy but also in society. I felt a certain empowerment and a feeling of your own footprints being left here, right now being part of this community and that is a very powerful feeling because more often we work in silos and we are just sort of battling individual places to try and shift things. ‘Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it’. (Cixous, 1976: 876) I (workshop participant) experienced lots of different relational connections as well and I bought some technology into it because you know the thing I felt most connected to was the pussy hat pictures. And I pulled out a picture of my signs and the picture from my phone when I was in Washington DC on the Women’s March and just sharing that it was such as amazing thing and an act of solidarity and a coming together for this reason, you know this just mass of women and this way of speaking back and hopefully a new creation. And so, I started to create a collage here and I put my phone down and I thought ‘wow! I must take a picture of this’; so it is both the connections here being with everyone and with the materials but also bringing in that memory of that incredible collective moment.

Past/present/future connections to the Women’s March in Washington, DC

If we have to think that there is in our human capacity to transconnect to other psychic minds, to reattune to one and other … this capacity to transconnect affectively, through affects, through phantasmatic phases … is that human shape that we are from the beginning. (Ettinger, 2012)

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If we (Nikki and participants) think of Bergson or Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the eternal return or spacetimemattering (Barad, 2007) the past is not the past; it is coimplicated in what we are doing now it’s here and it’s there and it’s all over the place so it’s great to have that link within the assemblage to a past Event and a future Event and an Event that is yet to come. Are we (Teija and participants) able to, you were talking about the political powers that we have and these kinds of powers that limit our lines and mappings – are we able to recognize, and should we resist the prevailing power in our own cartographies? Are we able to name them? Are we/should we resist them? Or should we let them be part of the cartographies? Do you think that they can be in a way productive and part of the creations and mappings? I (workshop participant) was drawing the figures in the room and I started with you both as the researchers as I was trying to make myself aware that I think of myself as a researcher and that when I am having vulnerable participants engaging in these practices that there is a level of surveillance and power in the research process. The observers and the people that are active, although that gets blurred when we are researcher in the art practices, so I wanted to start by just mapping your figures, but then it evolved to mapping other figures in the room and I could sense people maybe feeling uncomfortable when they saw me observing them, so there is a lot of ethical considerations to think about when using these practices as researchers and participants. But I think it is very important to think that our practices are not just transformational in a positive sense, but they can elicit discomfort and surveillance even as we are trying to get out of them. Then as we are trying to re-territorialize dominant power structures, even as we think about drawing and experimenting, we are always getting caught up in those webs of power dynamics so that is what I was working to do and experimenting with. Cartographies are the post-structuralist collective practices to consciousness raising. (Braidotti, 2014) I (workshop participant) think it is part of the feminist politics really. The women who gave me advice, she was a second wave feminist, she was quite a bit older than me and she had been through those feminist battles in the 1970s, 80s and 90s so she could pass it on. Feminism can also be used as a word I do, not always see it in action, it can work against you sometimes. Women are competitive and we are all in these kinds of positions. And I think neoliberalism does that to you doesn’t it. It puts you in that level of competitiveness and does that to you – it puts you against each other. In a way, on a personal level we think we can’t go into that – we can blame the situation. It means we are like slaves of the situation in a way – we have to be able to somehow turn it for our benefit and try to work through it. Of course, we have to acknowledge that and we have to give it thought and work with that. Sex is not a posited truth “expressed” by gender but “is itself always already expression”. (Grosz, 1995: 212)

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Drawing surveillance.

I (participant) think there is a kind of impossibility to the work of radical justice because we are steeped in racism and we steeped in gendered patriarchy, and I think that does not mean to lie in defeat we need to mobilize and resource whisper networks and think about the ways in which knowledge is passed on tacitly and subversively for the survival of women in really abusive organizations and situations. So, we need to make use of those networks. But how do we do that, I wonder? Should there be different levels, the macro, micro, meso? That is the tension of networks and assemblages rather than a one-dimensional progress narrative, it is that when you have second wave feminists working, they might be pushing against what third wave feminists are doing, but also advancing the larger cause. So, there are tensions stretching in all different directions rather than one linear progressive. Mapping is not just an archive of projected points and lines onto a surface, often referred to as a trace; it is a dynamic and complex actualization of un/foldings. (Springgay, 2005: 107)

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Cut: Cartographic mapping Cartography is a means to map regions of intensive processes and the properties of a system (Bonta & Protevi, 2004). By mapping connections, it becomes possible to explore the lines which cut and shape bodies. Cartography is an engagement with a theoretical and political reading of power relations, which can create new alternatives to chart the impact of material and discursive conditions on embodied subjects (Braidotti, 2011). The cartography becomes a rhizome in as much as elements are drawn together in unintentional and heterogeneous ways. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) detailed that cartography was a means to map connections within a rhizome. The ‘map is open and connectible…has multiple entryways, as opposed to a tracing, which always comes back “to the same”’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 12). The map, therefore, is not concerned with representation and meaning making in a traditional sense. It is more concerned with connectivity and relationality and heterogeneity,

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mapping ‘lines of articulations and lines of flight’ (Martin & Kamberelis, 2013: 671) revealing new actualizations which decentre research and writing practices. Lenz Taguchi (2017) notes how attention to different ontologies moves us from normalized thinking to creative experimentation and that tracing and mapping concepts allow particular problems to be apprehended (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). Our workshop events were available to create a space for alternative and playful co-productions of bodies to explore our relational gendered becomings. We wondered what might happen to the mappings when objects and other human and non-human materialities connected and intersected. Mapping cartographies is one way to approach women’s own constructions and archives of past (bodies) which produces a consciousness raising (Braidotti, 2014). Braidotti (2014) proposes unbecoming – leaving the liberal ‘I’ behind. A collective practice is a question of being vulnerable and open to different and changing self-perceptions. Within these cartographies, bodies are porous and volatile and embedded in the nature-culture (Guattari, 1989). Gender-in-the-making can be seen as a becoming-woman, a situated minority becoming, which has a past/part in the bodies’ ongoing processes of negotiations on our subjectivity (Braidotti, 2011). These playful and eventful experiments pose a range of questions: • • •

How do our ‘cartographies’ ‘work’ on us? What is produced by using these method/ological mappings and with what kind of affects/effects? Who or what do these work for? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983)

Cut – Interventive Mappings (what gets produced? where do cuts take us?) In this written Event, we work with these co-productions in a non-linear way as we re-turn to the workshops and follow the affective flows to reconfigure the encounters, spaces and experiences produced. We sought to open alternative routes to entangle the politics of affect within gendered knowledge production and pedagogics. Since it would be impossible to unfold the intertwined collage of experiences and affects produced in the encounters of the workshops, we decided to concentrate on producing/creating a continuation of our shared feminist cartography as an (en)lived (enlivening) aftermath of the workshop. These connect the affective, lived and becoming mappings of our embodied lives as educators/ researchers/feminists/participants. The cartographies reveal multiple lines of articulation where intensive processes of gender-in-the-making are presented – the accumulation of various encounters, connections and events – in which our cartographical lines meet and co-mingle. Emerging with and alongside the workshop events, we ask ourselves, ‘What do we do with these productions? And how might these contribute to feminist posthuman methodology’? The potential

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result of this ongoing research-creation is in its ‘eventhood’, the movement it brings to the methodology of the research enabling it to evolve, expand, connect and generate with other research-creations (see Koro-Ljungberg, 2016). Our research-creations multiply and complicate the question of singular inquiry and its seemingly clear-cut results and effects. We look at the workshops as a space of intertwined pedagogical and affective encounters, in which the various desires, connections and powers are simultaneously at play. The aftermath of a workshop experiments here offer insights to the affective accounts and events of the co-creative practices among feminist educational researchers with non-human materialities and possibility to unfold through research-creation. This provokes new ways to generate further questions and research-creations rather than producing reflections on past happenings. The contribution of this feminist inquiry is in its creative and emergent way to enter the practice of feminist workshopping among feminist educators and academics in the field of educational and pedagogical research and (post)qualitative and indisciplined inquiry. This manages to open up a novel critical approach to feminist educational research practices and creates knowledge on the affective accounts of these practices. This approach emphasizes the affective elements of the inquiry focused on co-productive practice (of workshopping) in the field of critical feminist posthuman methodology. This Event brings forth the necessary discussion on how the human and non-human relations are materialized in affective spaces which are created within feminist educational and pedagogical encounters in academia. It explores how to make space for upcoming generations of researchers to participate and to form their own creative (post)qualitative and indisciplined feminist practices of inquiry. We also contribute to wider thinking as to what kind of knowledge might be produced and how this knowledge can be ethically and politically democratized in and through these encounters. We engage to promote more in-depth and critical visions and generous inclusive practices for gender politics in educational research in this era of post-truth within the frame of critical feminist posthumanism. As researchers, we call for insightful and experimental consideration of inquiry that troubles the affective practices of knowledge production. By pushing the boundaries of feminist (post)qualitative and indisciplined methodology and creative practices, we explore how research-creation contributes to gender politics (gender-in-the-making) within the changing landscape of academia. The non-linear nature of this Event is not an attempt to replay the events – the starting and ending points, the introduction and plenary are interwoven into the events assemblage, and as such are neither beginnings or endings they are movements through the cartographies with no fixed point in space. The Event reveals how gender-in-the-making and workshops are a middling (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) where past, present and future are interwoven. The intensive cartographical mappings of gender-in-the-making are never beginning or ending; they are part of the playfulness, part of the interwoven eventful assemblage.

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Steinberg, S. R., & Cannella, G. S. (2012). The critical qualitative research reader. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Strom, K., Mills, T., & Ovens, A. (Eds.), (2018). Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship: Critical posthuman methodological perspectives in education. Bingley: Emerald. Taylor, C. A. (2016). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(3), 311–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1256984 Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (Eds.), (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuhiwai Smith, L., Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2018). Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: Mapping the long view. Abingdon: Routledge. Wolgemuth, J. R., Rautio, P., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Marn, T. M., Nordstrom, S., & Clark, A. (2018). Work/think/play/birth/death/terror/qualitative/research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(9), 712–719. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800417735860

STRING FIGURING SYMPOIESIS stringly matterings for doing knowledgemaking differently

Introduction 1: how not to be Man How can string Help us not To be Man? String as wool weaves blends String as cotton threads histories String as hemp stokes up a fire that warms and burns String pulls tight String knots String thrown catches and connects String a bow – be an Amazon String an instrument – be a music-maker String theory – be a long-chain carbon bonder String figuring for worlding – a making-doing together Stringing tentacularities fibrous and sensible Stringly spidery weaving turns protein into the strongest silk Stringly encouragings Joinings and connections, knittings and knottings Stringly becomings Play and patterning with partners Stringly replenishings Unfoldings and co-living Stringing as art of minor flourishing Sympoiesis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-8

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Introduction 2: I would rather be Medusa than Logos In The Cyborg Manifesto, published in 1985, Donna Haraway (2016a: 52) says that ‘we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos’. The logos she refers to is the bloodless, disembodied abstraction of Godhead and its emanations in Science – a God and Science which, with their totalizing and imperialist dreams of the One Way and the Right Way to Truth, have bent power and knowledge to their ends in effectively trying to destroy other ways of thinking, being, doing and knowing. As counter to these destructive fantasies, Haraway (2016a: 22) urges us to weave ‘something other than a shroud for the day after the apocalypse that so prophetically ends salvation history’. She writes that ‘weaving is for oppositional cyborgs’ in the contradictory processes of learning new coalitions, dispersions and survival’ (Haraway, 2016a: 46). Almost 20 years later, Haraway’s cyborg has been displaced or rather is in a process of mutation. The cyborg’s techno-nature-culture has done its job, but as figuration it was of its time and is no longer adequate to the task. Now, we need a different figuration for ‘telling a story of cohabitation, coevolution, and embodied cross-species sociality’ (Haraway, 2016b: 96). In The Companion Species Manifesto, published in 2003, Haraway poses the herding dog whose smart, tenacious and daily work across species – human-animal – provides a better figuration for ‘gather[ing] up the threads needed for critical inquiry’. The herding dog has coevolved with humans over millennia. As companion species, human-dogs-dogshumans have mutually shaped each other through work and play, living and dying together. Their work together is grounded in a daily doing, a mundane ongoing, in which specifics matter – this person, this dog, this place, this task – and differences matter – dogs are not humans, ‘we’ (humans) are not dogs. Misunderstandings and mistakes arise, which is fine because such things are threaded in with the joys, achievements and ‘renewable hopes’ (97) of living together on earth. This figuration is most assuredly not about the objective and bloodless perfections sought by the Godhead and Science. It is also important to note that Haraway’s figuration is not of companion animals but is much wider than that – companion species. This figuration includes human-insect, human-bacteria, human-animal, human-AI as well as human-nature. Companion species are about recognizing and threading together old-and-new combinations of biopower, biosociality and technoscience. For Haraway, weaving with/as companion species is about paying attention to the fleshy fusions that materialize and come to matter in complexity and specificity and difference 13 years later. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway (2016b) continues with the weaving and threading trope in pursuit of tangles that turn out to be ‘essential to the fabric [of ] staying with the trouble of complex worlding … in the game of living and dying well together on terra’. Now she turns to string figuring as a practice – from the child’s game of cat’s cradle all the way through to the complexities of Indigenous strings figures – which demonstrates the means of ‘conjugating worlds with

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partial connections’ (Haraway, 2016b: 13). She says that ‘although they are among humanity’s oldest games, string figures are not everywhere the same game’ (Haraway, 2016b: 13). String figuring practices have travelled through time and space, knotting themselves into colonial histories, picking up with local variants and reconstituting them anew in comparative and different tensions as multiple and different hands took hold and made patterns together. Haraway invokes some ‘demon familiars’ in the string figuring task of making critical and joyful trouble for crafting new possible worlds. One of her demon familiars is the spider, Pimoa cthulhu, known both for inhabiting their own particular place and for making journeys. Like all spiders, this tentacular one makes attachments and detachments, connecting herself with the earth and earthly others through knots, nets and networks. Another of her demon familiars is ‘snaky Medusa’ (Haraway, 2016b: 52) and her antecedents, affiliates and descendants, whose ‘dreadful’ (‘gorgon’ translates as ‘dreadful’) powers are allied with ‘generation, destruction, and tenacious, ongoing terran finitude’. Medusa’s dreadfulness is ‘awe-ful’ and potentially inspiring. With Medusa – hybrid human-gorgon – Haraway bequeaths us another figuration. Medusa’s feet traverse mud; her doings cause earthy eruptions that unsettle the complacency of the sky gods; her becomings-with forge mongrel kind. Haraway (2016a: 68) concludes The Cyborg Manifesto with the line ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. 30 years later, snaky Medusa, monstrous, multiple Medusa, is a key creative figuration – along with spiders of all kinds – informing the string figurings this Event centres in and works out from. This is why we say: I would rather be Medusa than Logos.

Introduction 3: plyings and playings with/for string figuring sympoiesis

Threads – Tangles – String – Knots – Nets

Proceeding in a spiderly, spidery fashion, then and with Medusa as monstrous combinatrix to accompany us on our tentacular way … … this event re-turns to a selection of workshops Carol, Nikki and our various collaborators and co-conspirators have done over the past number of years. In different spaces and places, with different activators, prompts and themes, with similar and different materials, we have strung threads and pulled strings. As with the practice of string figuring – from the children’s simple game of cat’s cradle and the adult’s hundreds and thousands more complicated, local and culturally specific variants – each workshop has been different. Having said that, the threads that have animated our plyings and playings with string have circulate around a set of similar concerns regarding how string figuring can help us

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Stringly things 1

think differently about the researcher, researcher-collaborator relations, theory- practice relations, knowledge, knowing, body-world relations and experiences. Our stringly doings have deployed crafts/arts-based methods within conference workshop sessions to create spaces (ontological, epistemological and ethical) to explore these concerns through the materialization of stringly matterings. Sympoiesis as theory and practice has been central to these collaborative stringly matterings. Sympoiesis was both the process and the goal of our workshop string figurings – and is the process and goal of our writing in this re-turn and the connections it might make with you reading this now. Sympoiesis is a word Haraway uses (taken from M. Beth Dempster’s Master thesis and passed onto her from Katie King – this taking up of a concept and acknowledgement of its entangled lineages is important in itself being a mode of citational sympoiesis) to describe the collective making of systems and worlds ‘which do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries’ and in which ‘information and control are distributed among components’. Sympoiesis, in addition, is ‘evolutionary’ in having ‘the potential for surprising change’ (all quotes here are from Haraway, 2016b: 33). Haraway contrasts sympoiesis (collective making) with autopoiesis (self-making). Autopoiesis is what ‘I’ do, which presumes a bounded and separate intentional subject. Sympoiesis is what emerges from what ‘we’ do, which brings that ‘we’ into being in the very acts ‘we’ participate in when making and doing something together. Autopoiesis relies on separation and self-direction. Sympoiesis relies on tentacular connection and partnership. This is why stringing practices and string figuring are central to sympoiesis. String figures are ‘a theoretical trope, a way to think-with a host of companions in sympoietic threading, felting, tangling, tracking and sorting’ (Haraway, 2016b: 31). String figuring, Haraway (2016b: 10) says, is SF, ‘a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation’. The thing about string figuring is that it’s best played as an ongoing game of two, three, four and more with hands, feet, bodies, imagination, heart, stuff, things, spaces, air, light, wind, leaves and, and, and. Any and more partners can join as and when the string figuring unfolds because the partners do not precede the knotting.

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In the stringly matterings discussed below, and with many tentaculared Medusa as our guide, we re-turn to our workshops to consider how string figuring sympoiesis helps us become capable, to stay with the trouble, to become more response-able. The three sections which follow activate our SF stringings to consider stringing the I-in-relation (SF 1), stringing movement (SF 2) and stringing seeing (SF 3). We end with SF 4, stringing better nows, which pulls threads together into a new, temporary knotting that ends this Event but which are picked up elsewhere in this book (and in our ongoing work of collaboration).

SF 1: Stringing the I-in-relation: a sympoietic-ethnography This section addresses the question: •

How can string figuring help rethink autoethnography as a more posthuman, feminist materialist research and writing practice?

Autoethnography has been taken up widely as a mode of research and writing that helps navigate the relations between agency and structure, free will and constraint, experience and knowledge. It centres personal experience as the location from which research and academic writing emanates. Carolyn Ellis defines autoethnography as: ‘Writing [graphy] about the personal [auto] and its relationship to culture [ethno]. It is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness... Usually written in first-person voice, autoethnographic texts appear in a variety of forms …They showcase concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and selfconsciousness. These features appear as relational and institutional stories affected by history and social structure, which themselves are dialectically revealed through actions, feelings, thoughts, and language. (Ellis, 2004: 37–38) Autoethnography has been used by feminists to enable wider research audiences to hear the voices of women positioned as marginalized others (Asher, 2002: 86), and by educationalists emotionally bruised and battered by living and working in the competitive cultures of contemporary academic to explore the affective dimensions, the panic and anxiety this context produces and the toll it takes on body and mind (Strom, 2020). It has also been used as a hybrid experiment in writing differently – as transdisciplinary/interdisciplinary feminist auto/ethnographical journey, part memoir, part biotext – to span different cities, countries and continents to tell an I-migration story of a ‘here, a there, and an everywhere’ that can account for the complexities of un/belonging (Balsawer, 2020). Such research and writing accounts are radical, beautifully written and evocative; they do important work in centring vulnerability, struggle and emotions; and

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they use felt narratives of lived experience to challenge the academy’s adherence to knowledge produced at a distance that reproduces fallacious ideas of objectivity and separation. BUT. They continue to see the self as an entity with inherent agency able to reflect on the world around it, albeit that those self/world boundaries are much fuzzier than in traditional accounts. So, how can we do the ‘I’ differently in autoethnography? Wyatt et al. (2011) experiment with a four-voiced writing assemblage called JKSB – a combination of the initials of each of the authors names – in which writing becomes an ‘immanent plane of composition’, a notion taken from Deleuze (2004). As a series of plateaus ‘within life; not just human life, but all life, organic and inorganic (1)’, this beautifully written book has ‘I’s’ scattered on every page in amongst its ruminations and textural poetic play. BUT while the ‘I’ is entangled, it remains intimately present. Gale and Wyatt (2010) push at how the ‘I’ as separate self becomes ‘we’ through constitutive relations with (the) other(s). Their nomadic, rhizomic, non-linear engagements produce the ‘we’ as a ‘multiplicitous, layered story’ (Gale & Wyatt, 2010: 11) BUT one that remains recognizably human-centric. Let’s pick up the thread of these BUTS and in SF mode stitch them into Foucault’s (2000) question: is there any ‘getting free of one self ’? It seems from the evidence that the ‘collective ontology’ that Gale and Wyatt (2010) aspire to in their assemblage/ethnography can only shift the ‘I’ so far. Yet, the possibility they hail into view – of thinking the ‘I’ as a ‘current passing through you’ rather than as person, pronoun and noun – energizes us. We are also inspired by Badley’s (2019) thinking of autoethnography as bodies becoming within a choreographed dance of materiality and of Dickinson’s (2018) take on writing autoethnography through human/non-human relationships of thing power (Bennett, 2010). Let’s run with this current; think with it as it passes. Let’s re-turn to one of our string figuring workshop events to see where it takes us.

At the Gender and Education conference, we (Carol, Nikki, Shiva and Anna) explored how SF could ‘consider these tentacular troublings as relational entanglements which pose questions relating to (our) gender, positioning, recognition and respectability in Higher Education’ (Taylor et al., 2019). The event was concerned with how contemporary neoliberal academia ossifies, fixes and freezes feminist flows positioning us and marginalizing us in multiple ways. In the preparation for the workshop, we came up with the verb To Meduse, which (drawing on the work of Cixous) enables us to look, to laugh, to rope, to snake, to resist … Our resistance was articled in the SF connections with the material and our positionality: ‘How do you make change when your hands are TIED?’ ‘We are all fighting for the same jobs’. ‘You should be grateful ☹’.

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‘Tied up in unequal pay system and casualized contracts’. ‘Entangled in grievance shit! Entangled in University Politics’. ‘Only for women!’. To Meduse – she works in mysterious, snaky, un-heard-of songs and sympoietic ways….

Un-heard-of-songs.

What if … we recast the autoethnographer as a posthuman mutated modest witness (Haraway, 1997) who is part of a relational string figuring cat’s cradle. Modest witness Ontologically entangled researching and writing Situated relationality Partial knowledge Situated knowledges SF Materiality and metaphor collapse Form is always in-the-making Making connections is a methodology Articulating clusters Processes, subjects, objects Meanings as method as mattering Cats’ cradle commitments SF String figures (Adapted from Haraway, 1997: xv–xvi) Where then is the human? What happens to the bounded human body? What/ where is the ‘I’? Situating human bodies in relation with non-human and otherthan-human bodies makes it possible for autoethnography to shift towards posthuman entanglements. This work is akin to the postpersonal conceptualization

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of bodies and life explored by Taylor (2017) and Zarabadi et al. (2019), in which stringing the ‘I’-in-relation is about opening space-time-matterings which enable the body’s ‘boundaries [to] materialise in social interactions’ (Haraway, 1988: 595), and in which the body emerges as form in-the-making. Reconceptualizing autoethnography via the practices of a mutated modest witness, whose knowledge is partial and who may well be looking elsewhere, backwards or upwards rather than ‘at’ or ‘over’, shifts the gaze to entanglements, relations and spacetimemattering productions (Barad, 2007). What would a postpersonal, posthumanist, post-autoethnography look like? Would it look like this?

Stringly things 2

Or like this?

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How might the ‘I’ unfold and become connected and relational? We wrote this: ‘We consider our feminist commitment to SF and ecriture feminine as a post-personal mode of bodying – as a material connectivity and “movement by which corporeality surpasses itself ”’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: 30). This attention to the immanent nature of bodying allows us to ‘reshape that which constitutes the “auto” and the “ethno” and the “graphy” and to reconceptualize it as a post-personal eventful process. Our bodying connections usher in an event of Medusaen-kinship, a unique and everchanging practice’ (Zarabadi et al., 2019: 91).

Stringly things 3.

These SF string figurings can, we suggest, be a research doing that shifts the ‘I’ of the ‘auto’ in autoethnography. They unfold in and as a sympoiesis that situates the ‘I’ in relation with – in entanglement with – human-non-humans. These research doing are a movement from autoethnography towards a becoming sympoietic-ethnography, in which these relational doings attend in more nuanced ways to the constitution (rather than the assumption of ) a ‘we’. But, the question that then arises is: what does that ‘we’ make possible for a better and more affirmative future, both in research and in the world?

SF 2: Stringing movement: walking as sympoietic research practice This section addresses the question: •

How can string figuring help enact walking as a research practice which helps think and do research differently?

One of us runs a workshop called Walking with Theory at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, which has run for the past four years. This is the workshop description:

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Feminist materialist thinking presumes that matter and discourse are entangled and co-constitutive and that neither is foundational. Instead, matter is conceptualized as agentic and all sorts of bodies, not just human bodies, are recognized as having agency (Taylor and Ivinson, 2013). This radical move has profound ontological and epistemological consequences, and raises serious methodological questions about how we think about, do and value qualitative research. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad (2007), Jane Bennett (2010), Rosi Braidotti (2013), the workshop is designed around a participatory feminist materialist/posthumanist dérive – that is, a playful, political walk or stroll – which activates walking with theory as a means to unsettle anthropocentricity. The workshop opens a research space for experimental encounters with everyday things that we don’t normally notice or accord value to, and draws on the affective, sensory, embodied and relational research practices outlined in Posthuman Research Practices in Education (eds. Taylor & Hughes, 2016) and Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research (eds Taylor & Bayley, 2019). It works as a three-part research-creation process: an initial theoretical orientation; a participatory, experimental feminist materialist/posthumanist dérive; and a critical, collaborative appraisal of the matter and meanings which emerge.

Time. The workshop is scheduled for the afternoon of the ‘pre-conference’, a day for emerging researchers and doctoral students which takes place the day before the ‘real’ conference. People feel comfortably full: conference lunches are good! Space. Leuven (2017) cold, rainy, the building where the workshop was held was away from the main conference site, it was old and had scaffolding around it, the rooms were high, echoey, slightly dusty traditional classrooms. Leuven (2018) was held in the main site; the room was hot and packed with people sitting around the edges on desks and on the floor to fit in. It was cold, sunny and sharply bright outside. The Edinburgh (2019) workshop was in a conference suite, a huge room with moveable walls and conference chairs in rows with a raised dais and a lectern, cold and rainy outside. In Malta (2020), the workshop was in a hotel with a conference complex, a large room with chairs in a conversational round at one end, outside warm and sunny with a pool and the sparkling sea a five-minute walk away. Mattering. The workshop’s 2–4 pm scheduling is important: lunch together has helped initial morning nerves to shift into registers of conversation and research chat. Bodily relaxations animate the space. A happy anticipation to try something new, to get going, to move, to actually do some walking with theory infuses the atmosphere. As I/we talk and the first part of the workshop gets going, there is a tangible sense in feet, fingertips and flesh, in the air and light, in the shared laughter and comments and questions that bubble up, a ‘we’ is emerging – a ‘we’ that wants to have fun, to learn, to do something new.

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Triptych

Sympoietic Walking/Walking Sympoietically … … … Moves away from ‘dominant methodologies which privilege speech and human interaction’ (Taylor, 2020: 5). As an alternative methodology for ‘understanding, knowing and [producing] knowledge’ (Pink, 2009: 8), walking enables attention to research happenings as ‘unrepeatable and fleeing situation[s]’ (Springgay, 2011: 645). Aims to bring to the fore emergent, spontaneous and impermanent research practice-ings and how research activity – such as walking and placing string somewhere or thinking with theory animates walking and vice versa – situates the human body in existing, ongoing and new space-time-matterings. Shapes research as a practice of relationality and particularity in the mattering of this time, this location: placing string in relation with the iron, brick, cobbles and stone of Leuven, particularly a string which casts a wavy-line shadow in sunlight and which catches the breeze, opens a research space to the movement and melding of materiality with time and space. Try this: Walking as becoming in-tune-with. Slow walking. Walking with the body’s openness. Walking as affective immersion in place-scapes. Walking with mindbody. And this: Walk with/out rhythm. Move in-flow and out-of-flow. Keep pace and change pace. See how space alters. Feel how time shifts.

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Manning contends (2007: xiii) that ‘the body does not move into space and time, it creates space and time: there is no space and time before movement’. Walking’s movements are a here-ness and now-ness. Sympoietic walking as research practice puts the researcher into new relations with movement, space and time; it raises new questions about what research as a practice ‘is’ and how it might be done differently; and it focuses questions on how walking enables new modes of data production. Barad contends (2019: 525) that ‘time is out of joint. It is diffracted, broken apart, exploded, scattered in multiple directions. Each moment is an infinite multiplicity where other moments are here-now in particular constellations’. Sympoietic walking undoes time’s linearity, its presumed passage from ‘then’ (some time ago, in the past) to ‘now’ (in the present), as a means to attend to time’s differentiating rhythms, its slownesses and speeds and to how time comes to matter differently in and through the lived realities that inform, conform and deform us: sex/uality, gender, nation, class. Walking with string and walking with theory condenses time’s differentiations into a moment – here-and-gone but felt-known – that spins threads and, spider-like, throws those threads out to tangle with memory, history, bodies of all kinds and bodies of knowledge. Sympoietic walking is not about knowing ‘about’ something, but about how method might undiscipline knowing so that we come to know-feel otherwise in and through matterings diffracted across time-space. Our figuration of sympoietic walking as research practice prompts a ‘dialogue with methods’ (Fairchild, 2016), aims to put methods in movement and tries to work against methodological approaches which ‘draw a line between points [and which] fix, code and stratify encounters with participants’ (Fairchild, 2016: 25). Sympoietic walking presumes nothing in advance and invites participants of all kinds to meet and learn from each other in the smoother, less striated, methodological space of the webbed relationalities that ensue. Sympoietic walking is a doing that provokes further questions: • •

Can walking with theory help us in a Medusan task of refusing the linear temporality of research doing as a straight line from ‘here’ to ‘there’? Can walking with string deterritorialize normative research and work from the middle to better attend to the intensities and relationalities of material moments?

We and our multifarious conference participants indicate that it can. Stringing sympoiesis through our various walking experiments at conferences and in research can, we think, help attend to temporal and geographical histories which are multiplicitous, ephemeral and sensorially captivating. String-stone-theory-sensing-knowing-being-doing-together-difference.

SF 3: Stringing seeing differently: a slightly perverse shift of perspective This section addresses the question: •

How can a feminist materialist posthumanist optics be activated to make a difference in/as the politics of what counts in research?

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In The Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway (2016a: 15) talks of the need for ‘a slightly perverse shift of perspective’ to mount effective challenges to power with its dominating neoliberal logics and its hegemonic meanings that shape our lives, subjectivities and research practices. This section brings Haraway’s cyborg and its promotion of ‘transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities’ into coalition with a roaring Medusa, whose ‘snaky breath’ (Zarabadi et al., 2020) continues to kindle our knowledge, ideas and collaborations in and beyond conference spaces and inspires us to thinkings-doings which propel us in new directions. As posthumanist, feminist materialist and post-qualitative researchers, we spend a lot of time making trouble, particularly in relation to the humanist legacies of data as ‘object’. Our troublings question, unpick and contest the separation of subject and object, the hierarchy between researcher and researched and the presumption that meaning-making is an inherent attribute or intellectual quality of those who are alive (humans) whose job in research it is to extract ‘meaning’ from data which has, in being designated ‘data’, already been made inert (dead matter). In traditional research practices, once data is objectified – made inert – it can then be splayed, flayed and laid out. In our writing we have considered Humanist research practices as an orientation towards seeking to animate the dead corpse of decomposing data. Our autopsical practice-ings have interrogated this at conferences and in writing (see Event 4 and Carey et al., 2021) as a means to disclose the separations and hierarchies that ‘we’ (humans) impose on data (as object). Vision, optics and the researcher gaze are central to the Humanist technologies that have produced data as something to be rendered and that is required to be rendered up – suitably chewed, digested, spat out and then stroked and smoothed into an acceptable ‘product’ for knowledge dissemination. Scientific examination has relied on observation of surfaces (bodies, earth, atoms) to experiment on and deduce inner workings (minds, crust, mantle and core, protons, neutrons and electrons) in the task of separating and dividing ever finer parts of ‘things’. Observation technologies (human eye, microscope, telescope, solar viewers, ultrasound scanners and the Nion Hermes Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope which is capable of imaging objects a million times smaller than a human hair) have been the key devices, which have made it possible for us (humans, but actually and more specifically White Western Man) to ultimately grasp and know every single thing in its most detailed and private workings. This particular ‘epistemological occularism’ (Carey et al., 2021) re-inscribes a dualistic ontology at every level of matter and knowing. It positions sight, vision and the researcher gaze as that which is oriented to penetrate as a condition of knowing – penetrate: a word well chosen to designate the masculinist and sexualized thrust which the subject (Him/Self ) adopts as a positionality from which to orientate Him/Self to anything which is outside Him/Self. Thus, the gaze of the researcher pierces, punctures, stabs, pricks, makes a hole in this ‘other’ – whoever or whatever they are – as pre-requisite to possessing, taming, layout out and truly knowing. Donna Haraway (1988: 581) has referred to this mode of vision as the

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eye that ‘fucks the world’; it’s ‘cannibaleye’ gaze is one of ‘unregulated gluttony’. It has an affinity with the ‘god-trick’ – the eye that sees everything from nowhere and calls its position ‘objectivity’. The problem is the only stories this eye – this gaze, this optics, this mode of vision – can produce are visions of death and the materialization of dead things: land stolen from indigenous peoples in acts of colonialist appropriation, then parcelled out and farmed intensively until the soil is depleted of its millennial goodness; animal bodies (chickens, turkeys, puppy farms, fish) forced to early death through over-production and hyper-use to feed meat-eating humans, whose dietary choices are at the same time killing the planet (turning the Amazon into cattle farms, the seas into plastic dumping grounds), and human bodies worn out and worn down by hunger, homelessness, destitution. This eye and the research gaze it produces thrusts itself on in pursuit of more and better conquering violence, fragmenting bodies, rendering them, corpse-ifying all of life. Objectivity objectifying. Indifferently ma(r)king differences. How can our small, mundane research practice-ings shift this necrotechno-political gaze of disgusting domination? How can our playings and plying with knowledge make any sort of different at all? How can we string seeing differently so that we can do research, knowing and being in more affirmative and generative frame? It is tempting to say it is too hard a task … It is tempting to eat some chocolate and look the other way … It is more than tempting to lie down and refuse the confusion and the exhaustion … Instead Join us, we say Because we have an inkling that By a slightly perverse shift in perspective we can Share Make Do Craft Create We can story the world differently We can tell different tales We can envision new post-species imaginings For better Post-Him/Self Futures But how? Haraway’s (2016b) figuration of the Carrier Bag, an idea picked up from Ursula le Guin and carried onwards in an ethico-onto-epistemology that in cyborgian,

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multispecies fashion, hybridizes feminism, post-species, post-colonialism, antiracism and earthwide caring, offers us one possible way. How can a Carrier Bag help story the world differently? A Carrier Bag is soft, capacious and, if you get one of those tough ones, it lasts a long time. A Carrier Bag is enduring (fold it, carry it with you, keep it inside another bag). A Carrier Bag has handles so others can help you carry it. A Carrier Bag can also be biodegradable because all things end and return to earth. A Carrier Bag contains multitudes: more loaves, fishes, people, earthworms, dirt and water. A Carrier Bag is a Medusa Bag, too: it contains words which can be released as elemental forces to blow the master’s house down. Haraway (2016a: 99) says that ‘feminist inquiry is about understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less violently’. Extending this point to feminist materialism and posthumanist inquiry can be done by string figuring with Carrier Bags. We think that Carrier Bags thinking and doing can open new possibilities for stringing sympoiesis – for ethical practices of sharing the burden of whatever it is we’re carrying; for staying with the trouble; and for felting modest possibilities for new futures together through mutual encouragement. Carrier Bag string figuring can, though the skewed and slanted and perverse shift in vision it enables, work up, and with new and different ideas about research positionalities that refuse the appropriating Him/Self gaze of ownership and control. It offers a figuration for doing the ‘needed political work’ to get rid of the ‘unlamented -isms’ (Haraway, 2016: 20) and build better post-disciplinary affinities. Haraway asks: with whose blood were my eyes crafted? The answer to this question is fleshy, pulsing, alive, with material possibilities of coming to matter differently through string figuring sympoiesis. The perverse shift in vision, attendant on SF Carrier Bag seeing, knowings and doings, works with a critical movement towards contingency, partial connection and emergent knowing along with answerability and accountability. What goes into, comes out of and gets formed by Carrier Bag SF sympoiesis is likely to be erratic, errant, putatively monstrous, hybrid, specific, tentacular. It suggests the need for feminist materialist, posthuman research practices that generate connective threads that are spiderly and strong, and that are multidirectional to encompass non-human-human bodies and their differences in an ontological choreography that makes kinships and critiques power. Develop a perverse shift in perspective to turn the normative research gaze aside. Squint otherwise – it’s surprising what comes into view when you do.

Conclusion: pulling strings This Event’s re-turns to various string figuring, walking and other workshops we have done. It engages Haraways’ figuration of string figuring as material practice of hands and bodies working together and as imaginary thinking

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Carrier bag-of-bags-non-human-human choreography

Stringing bags choreographies

otherwise – thinking in SF mode – to explore how sympoiesis might emerge from research activities and events which engage participants in different kinds in doings which produce new matterings and new movements. The re-turns activated in this writing are a continuation of our SF-ings which continue to reverberate and thread their affective tentacularities in ways which bind anew and entangle us (and now you, our new reader) in new intensities, affects and flows. We who have written this don’t know what these new intensities are, but we hope that thinking with Medusa while doing the research work that SF sympoiesis demands generates that perverse shift in vision we need to banish fear (of being imposter, of not being good enough, of being the wrong body in the wrong space and at the wrong time). Instead, it is about how staying with the trouble can give us courage to think, prompt or create practical opportunities

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for those participating in its production – in knowledge-making in action – to become otherwise.

References Asher, N. (2002). (En)gendering a hybrid consciousness. JCT: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 18(4), 81–92. Badley, G. F. (2019). Human (and posthuman?) dancing: An assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(6), 697–702. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800419830125 Balsawer, V. (2020). Living in the hyphens: Between a here, a there, and an elsewhere. In C. A. Taylor, J. Ulmer, & C. Hughes (Eds.), Transdisciplinary feminist research: Innovations in theory, method and practice (pp. 103–115). London: Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2019). After the end of the world: Entangled nuclear colonialisms, matters of force, and the material force of justice. Theory & Event, 22(3), 524–550. https://muse. jhu.edu/article/729449 Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Carey, N., Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Benozzo, A., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Elmenhorst, C. (2021). Autopsy as a site and mode of inquiry: De/composing the ghoulish hu/man gaze. Qualitative Research. http://doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999005 Deleuze, G. (2004). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Dickinson S. (2018). Writing sensation: Critical autoethnography in posthumanism. In S. Holman Jones & M. Pruyn (Eds.), Creative selves / creative cultures. Creativity, education and the arts (pp. 79–92). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Fairchild, N. (2016). Plugging into the umbra: Creative experimentation (in)(on) the boundaries of knowledge production in ECEC research. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 7(1), 16–30. http://journals.hioa.no/index.php/rerm Foucault, M. (2000). Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, Paul Rabinow (Ed.), (Trans. Robert Hurley). London: Penguin. Gale, K., & Wyatt, J. (2010). Between the two: A nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing and subjectivity. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066 Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_witness@second_millennium. FemaleMan©_meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Abingdon: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haraway, D. (2016a). Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016b). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2007). Politics of touch: Sense, movement, sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

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Pink, S. (2009). Doing sensory ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Springgay, S. (2011). ‘The Chinatown foray’ as sensational pedagogy. Curriculum Inquiry, 41(5), 636–656. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-873X.2011.00565.x Strom, K. (2020). Learning from a ‘lost year’: An autotheoretical journey through anxiety and panic. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry. Online first https://doi. org/10.22387/CAP2020.47 Taylor, C. A. (2017). For Hermann: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Or, what my dog has taught me about a post-personal academic life. In S. Riddle, M. K. Harmes & P. A. Danaher (Eds.), Producing pleasure in the contemporary university: Bold visions in educational research (pp. 107–119). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Taylor, C. A. (2020). Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering: A speculative musing on acts of feminist indiscipline. In C. A. Taylor, J. Ulmer & C. Hughes (Eds.), Transdisciplinary feminist research: Innovations in theory, method and practice (pp. 4–15). London: Routledge. Taylor, C. A., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, 25(6), 665–670. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.834617 Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (Eds.), (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Zarabadi, S., & Moxnes, A. (2019). Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troublings of academic recognition and respectability – A string figure research-creation-experiment-event. Gender and Education Conference 2019, University of Portsmouth, 25th June 2019. Wyatt, J., Gale, K., Gannon, S., & Davies, B. (2011). Deleuze and collaborative writing: An immanent plane of composition. New York: Peter Lang. Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C., Fairchild, N., & Moxnes, A. (2019). Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), 97–111. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3671 Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., & Moxnes, A. (2020). PhEm special issue: Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability, published online 20 November 2020, https://feelucl.com/2020/11/20/phemspecial-issue-feeling-medusa-tentacular-troubling-of-academic-positionalityrecognition-and-respectability/

SUBVERSION

This Event is based on three data-trail happenings that took place over the last few years: 1

2

3

Neil Carey, Mirka Koro and Angelo Benozzo (2017) ‘Subverting the (Il) Logic of Knowledge Production’, ‘paper’ presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Congress (ICQI), University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, USA, 16–20 May 2017. Neil Carey and Angelo Benozzo (2018) Seminar during the Module ‘Qualitative research methodology’ for undergraduate students in Psychology held at the University of Valle d’Aosta, Italy, November 2018. Neil Carey and Angelo Benozzo (2020) ‘Data trail inventions: Sustain, sustainability, sustenance …’ Seminar held at the European Congress of Qualitative Congress (ECQI), University of Malta, Malta, 5–7 February 2020.

The reader will encounter the possibilities of subversions that happened during these three events organized in conferences (happenings 1 and 3 – ICQI2017 and ECQI2020) and during a seminar with some undergraduate students (happenings 2). Academic conference work is, more often than not, sedimented through the regimented cut of stream, session, slot; the score of paper, panel, presentation; between and across the blurring of serious discipline and the undisciplined play of the social. In taking such blurrings seriously, we think about indiscipline and undisciplined research. We suggest that undisciplined research has the potential to challenge the ontological and epistemological fixities of established forms of knowledge production and normative conferencing. Our project for subversion takes various forms. There are the subversions that we talk about in our re-turns (Barad, 2014) to the three experimentations that we enacted with/in the space-time-materiality of those three academic happenings. DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-9

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Data trail

Here, we perform a strategic relating of those experimentations in this text: after all, the only (data) trail of these happenings that we can share with you as readers is that inscribed in this text. A second form of subversion is the way this text is written – as a nonconventional writing experiment assembled through a congeries of unruly, undisciplined, imaginative, thoughtful and seriously playful gestures. Our subversion is an intervention to problematize the shape of mainstream academic writing. A third mode of subversion activates a number of theoretical provocations into which, through which, we fold our desire for doing and thinking knowledge and conferences differently. A fourth mode of subversion deploys mole-ish personae (more of this in a moment) and hails our mole-kin (we include you in this, reader) to collaborate with us in our subversions. These different modes of subversive thinking-doings, experimentations and re-turns are non-linear, unruly and undisciplined forms – not least because our ‘social imaginaries are just that: they cannot be contained’ (Thrift, 2008: 12). The first is these pages as we experiment with a text (perhaps a text) – this very text that you, the reader/the listener, are listening/living now. (Are we justifying our approach with a rigorously thought-through 2 × 2 × 2 theoretical matrix?) Our efforts at subversion embrace the undisciplined and undecidable nature of our social imaginaries and glory in the lexical slide available in the word ‘mole’.

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2 × 2 × 2 theoretical matrix

Mole (taken and adapted from a variety of sources, including Google define, wikipedia, Britannica): −

− −

− −

−

A spot/blemish/blot on the skin … a naturally occurring growth on skin. Historically, these skin moles have been seen in western culture as marks of beauty. However, more recently, such moles are identified as a site of cancer. In a significant twist of occularity, such moles should be kept under surveillance: the presumed ‘beauty’ of such ‘spots’ that marked rather than marred the beauty of a dermal landscape have become spots that mark the vulnerabilities of skin to sunlight and which have to be ‘looked at closely’ for changes in size and texture as an aid to diagnosing irregular cutaneous and subcutaneous cancerous growths. A small burrowing mammal with dark fur, a long muzzle, and very small eyes, feeding mainly on worms, grubs and other invertebrates. A spy who gradually achieves an important position within the security defences of a country; an agent of one organization sent to penetrate a specific intelligence agency by gaining employment – a term popularized by John Le Carré. A large solid structure on a shore serving as a pier, breakwater or causeway. In chemistry, a mole/mol is a standard scientific unit for measuring large quantities of very small entities such as atoms, molecules, ions, or electrons. A mole is defined as exactly 6.02214076 × 1023 particles. (Pronounced molee): the Mexican, highly spiced sauce served with chilli peppers and chocolate. Now there’s a confection to make you salivate!

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Across these pages, the subversive moles take the form of different/multiple minor gestures that attempt to re-assemble the forms of knowledge a conference produces, the forms that knowledge takes within the normativity of a conference space/place and the appearance of the forms of knowledge within an academic text. In this Event, using the metaphor of earthworm and mole, we re-turn some inventions/interventions with non-human objects in the three academic spaces discussed above, and wonder how those happenings can tax the accepted and expected limits of knowledge. This Event is organized into five (or six) subversive mo(ve)ments: • • • • • • • •

First mo(ve)ment – Mole slide; First mo(ve)ment 2 – Outside the room; Second mo(ve)ment – Within the room; Third mo(ve)ment – Moving (with) data trails; Fourth mo(ve)ment – Subverting framing; Fifth mo(ve)ment – Subversion as erosion; Sixth mo(ve)ment – Erosion within qualitative research; Eight mo(ve)ment – Fugato.

First mo(ve)ment – Mole slide Our first subversive slide into and onto ‘mole’ is to invoke that most perfidious and disruptive human kin: the mole/spy. In this lexical slide, we move towards that spooky double agency that this (other, human) mole – the spy – embodies. The spy/‘mole’ acts as a subversive operative; an undercover agent who is planted in and works from within the State to undermine and sabotage that state. Spy/ moles effect such subversive sabotage by leaking secrets to those who might be framed as ‘other’, as enemies of the state. This spy/mole is successful, not least because they appear and perform as if they are an integral part of the state of which they are now spookily extant. This particular human spy/mole form conjures enactments of subversion ‘from within’. These acts of resistance are usually barely visible: they sabotage at the same time as they perform compliance (from) with/in the state and status quo that has been infiltrated. These enactments of sabotage and infiltration emit the whiff of leak, the fecundity of pollutions; they perform sabotage as acceptance as they simultaneously loosen and dislodge the hold of the status quo. These spy/mole enactments resonate with our own desires of working subversively from within the realm of normative and established (qualitative) inquiry. We – the CG Collective – are mole/spies in effecting the types of undisciplined methods that we outline here (and across this book). We orient our subversive practices – posing and composing themselves in the stretch of acceptability – to weaken the hegemony of the mainstream qualitative research endeavour as the masquerade of the true and only ways to produce knowledge. Like our human spy/mole-kin, we enact visible compliance in our engagements with pedagogical and academic conference spaces. Prior to arrival

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in such spaces, we appear to conform to and confirm normative conferencing civilities: we align with conference themes; we write abstracts; we structure such abstracted offerings in particular ways that conform to disciplinary norms; we offer our academic labour for free. However, such dealings are, at the same time, somewhat under-handed. We are somewhat spy-fully and mole-fully subversive as we navigate the means of double dealing (from) with/in the borders of mainstream and normative (conferencing, pedagogic) architectures.

First mo(ve)ment 2 – Outside the room (Include Photo 1 – Urbana-Champaign empty corridor – Not able to find pictures within the iPhone – Shit! They have disappeared. Mirka perhaps you have some of them?) Before the panel session at happening 1, we organized a series of ‘objects and pictures of objects’ in a trail along the corridors external and internal to the room and we left the room door open. The aim was to get participants to ‘collect/ generate’ data from the trails whilst making their way to a predetermined spot where they would (interpret it) configure the data into an assemblage. Data trails included objects, images and words that played rhetorically with the taken-forgranted language associated with research practice. Here is how we conjured the ‘data’ that littered the trail: a

b

c

d

e

f.

Sample: for example, word cards with specimen, typical, representative, selection, random, blood sample, stool sample, urine sample (interestingly, all to do with being ill); Fieldwork: for example, agrarian paraphernalia, field boundaries (gate, fence, hedge), grass, (little plastic objects) animals, plough, tractor, spade or other tools to work in the field; Model: for example, picture of supermodel, a little model of a person, a map, a little vehicle (train, aeroplane, car etc.), a knitting pattern, a mannequin/ artists’ model/dummy, a frame of any kind (pictures provided of all of these); Design: for example, cards with words such as intention, plan, sketch, outline, blueprint, because, method, methodology, question, pilot, doubleblind; question-mark, inductive/deductive, pilot, setting, house plan, design sketching, classic research flow diagram (pictures provided of all of these; repeats of many of the above [for model] also appropriate); Plot: for example, anything to do with conspiracy and intrigue (mask, cloak, secret-coded notes, pictures of Mata Hari, a man in a trench-coat looking furtive), a novel (with a plot!), a graph of some sort showing plot lines through data, anything that represents an outlier of some sort (e.g. a photo of Fredrick Forsyth’s The Outsider), plot of land (several pictures provided of these); Report: for example, single papers, books, monographies, medical records, exam results, contents; everything for writing, pens and pencils and everything they can use to draw, to write (provided);

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g. h. i. j. k.

Inspiration: for example, pictures with clouds; thoughts; river, water, see, landscape, anything that can illuminate … (provided); Reflexivity: for example, picture with somebody who is thinking, sleeping … (provided); Blinding: for example, gimp masks, blindfolds, window dressings (images and objects provided); Polyvocality: for example, images of choirs, orchestra, little music instruments, something that makes noise (provided); Ambiguity: for example, images that are not so clear, images with shadows, blurred images (provided).

In Aosta and in Malta, we played with some variations. In Aosta, we asked students to take in the classroom pictures and newspaper articles connected with their ongoing research projects on migration. The data trail outside the classroom and in the university corridors included these materials. In Malta, in line with the conference theme on sustainability, we introduced ‘smells’ and objects not necessarily connected with research language: little plastic bags with potpourri, condoms, little bees … and … and … and.... These happenings came to be known as ‘data trail’ events and condense our thinking-doings around subversion of qualitative research and the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019). Each of these happenings was shaped with/in a sense of unease about the terrain of knowledge, the onto-ethicoepistemological certainties that are framed by and ‘naturalized’ in mainstream Western social science practices of knowledge production. Our re-turn in this Event and these happenings rests in the collective rhizomatic thinking/doings re-presented more widely across this book.

Second mo(ve)ment – within the room The room of a conference, a room of Congress, is a space where different forces intersect and produce entangled movements. A panel session-ness One hour and 20 minutes in May 2017 at Urbana-Champaign. A rectangular (sanitized) room: nothing is hanging on the walls and on the ceiling. Nothing lying on the floor. Imagine a room as a rectangular box with an entrance, some chairs and a table. No food is allowed in the room.

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Four presentations in 1 hour and 20 minutes: 15 minutes each and 20 minutes for questions and answers at the end of the four presentations. These presentations are singularities: fast, short, single events which can burn in a few minutes or play over a very long work of research. These presentations are made by a single presenter and exalt the work of the individual. A participant-ness Where is my pencil? I can’t present without my pencil. Perhaps it is in my conference bag. Noises Oh, it is not here. In the middle of the room: ‘Excuse me: Can somebody lend me a pencil’? Another participant: ‘I have a pen’. –‘Oh no. Sorry, I need a pencil, with pencil lead 2B 0,7mm’. ***** Where are the moles? Where is the Earthworm? Perhaps in another mo(ve)ment or Event?

Third mo(ve)ment – Moving (with) data trails Participants were academics (in happenings 1 and 3) and students (in happening 2). A prelude set the scene for each data trail. In Urbana-Champaign, the prelude focused on subversion. In Malta, it took the form of a short presentation on ontological turns and on undisciplined research. In Aosta, it was a brief for the happening. As described above, the series of ‘objects/picture/objects’ that made up the data trails were spread across the corridors external to the rooms as well as within the rooms in which the happenings took place. The materiality of these data trails produced litter; littering data in these (mis)placed data trails disturbed and caused disturbances. These data trail litterings subverted the Wizard of Oz-type magic of much knowledge production tropes. Unlike data in more conventional conferences and pedagogical spaces, these data materialized their presence into and through the conference spaces. There was no hiding this data in briefcases or in.pdf presentations whilst they waited for their big reveal as the punch of knowing, the apogee of knowledge! The data in these events cluttered in a hotchpotch mess and made themselves felt in dramatic ways. Data materialized as participants with others working in these sites of knowledge production. Data danced and hopped their way around the trails. Indeed, during the students’ seminar in Aosta, these activities (the data trail within the corridors) created

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dis-order and concern within the institution. One senior member of the administration staff was walking along the corridor before the students had started to collect the data (students were still in the classroom) and thought that someone had accidently lost some of their learning materials (data) and, as an act of order, she started to collect them up. We invited/encouraged the participants to move within and outside of the room and to collect data from and along the data trail. The aim was to invoke participants (as co-researchers? How do we refer to them? Actants, Participants, Audience, Students?) to collect/generate data from the trails as they made their way towards a predetermined spot. This spot became a site for participants to re-assemble (with) their (new-found) data (and their emergent interpretations of it). Participants’ movement with/in data trails produced thinking, sounds and affect in unruly and undisciplined ways. These movements were also tiring, just as thinking about and with something can be tiring. To think, in Italian is pensare, which derives from pesare, literally, to weigh (to carry a weight). The body bends to reach the floor and collect those objects/pictures/words that we had spread before the beginning of the session. After about 15 minutes, during which participants collected items from the data trail, they were asked to assemble the data they had chosen into a collage, a three-dimensional assemblage station, of some sort: Collage, a cut-and-paste genre … Collage precisely references the spaces in between and refuses to respect the boundaries that usually delineate self from other, art object from museum, and the copy from the original. In this respect, as well as in many others, collage (from the French coller, to paste or glue) seems feminist and queer. (Halberstam, 2011: 184) The assemblage stations were located in a space removed from where participants collected data from the trail. Assemblage stations were organized as a series of large format paper sheets and arranged in a circle, which positions assemblers ‘in the round’ so that they can compare, overlap and interpret collectively. The stations, obtained by juxtaposing pieces/objects/images, were oriented to putting something together with something else so as to form (and perform – and produce) other objects. Combination follows on from combination, and each one resonates differently and together. The participants spent time in preparing their assemblage, and then together we commented on each assembly station and the stations assembled en masse. At the end of the happening, one participant said: I didn’t understand what was happening; at the beginning I was dazed and very annoyed. But at the end of it all I said to myself ‘you are at ICQI, the most unconventional congress there could be, how can you be so annoyed/ bothered?!’ And I thought this was a great happening and I want to use the same experimentation in my teaching too.

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These data litterings, data trailings, collage-ings produce non-human-human data (re)assemblages that queer and query research inquiry by inviting re-visions of the putative rigours of more mainstream data analysis practices. They provoke us to think differently about the learned and ingrained practices (learned from methods courses, from doctoral training, from articles we read, from conferences we go to) to code, reduce and synthesize data so that it is made to reveal ‘one true story’ of our research. The doings, outlined above, refract such normatively hegemonic data analysis procedures and suggest how to do data/research/inquiry using more undisciplined, fluid and processual approaches. We hope our data trails might help us/you in (re)discovering different ‘findings’ for and with/ in your own conference participations and other pedagogical data productions.

Assemblage station at ECQI, Malta, 5 February 2020.

After the tiring effect/affect, there was also the glowing effect/affect. Data have an attractive power. Data glow (MacLure, 2013). Perhaps data also smell and vibrate with sound; they are soft and/or hard, they are rough and/or smooth, they conspire and transpire. Data haunt. Data intra-act. Data produce new assemblages. Data disappear (photos were taken of the assemblages but could not be found. Data dissipate (photos are also taken of what is left of the trail). Data exhaustion.

Fourth mo(ve)ment – Subverting framing Movements become an erosion … … of normative thinking … of normative representation … of normative method(olatry). Both the happenings and our practices of writing this Event are subversive experimentations, driven by a desire to create something different in and about conference/pedagogic spaces. This impulse was not fuelled by a faddish lure to thinking difference only for the sake of difference. We are/were animated by

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experimentation as a productive means to upend the repetitive routines of conference knowledge production and to weaken the normativities that inhere in conference/pedagogical spaces. In this, our efforts are: An engaged encounter with the very constitutive nature of knowledge – be it at the level of new forms of subjectivity, or in the reorientation of how thinking and doing coexist – is necessarily a disruptive operation that risks dismantling the strong frames drawn by disciplines and methodological modes of inquiry. (Manning, 2016: 18) How might this endeavour be framed? Like the happenings that this Event re-turns to, any framings we posed would have to be loose skeletal sketchings, not a set of fixed and immutable boundaries. We would want our framings to signal the tricky slides of signification, and like the unruly thinking-doings of our subversive happenings, they would need to be incomplete and imperfect. We would want to highlight that framings are entrapments; that framings lie in wait to fix knowledge tightly; that to use a frame is to fix the limits of knowing, and thus constrain (if not determine) what is known and what knowable (Law, 2004; Manning, 2016). We want to reframe the norm of ‘framing’! We try to do this by keeping alive the many lexical ambiguities that attach to ‘frame’, most obviously, the way ‘frame’ is used to de/note the ways in which objects and ideas are marked, structured and claimed. We also think here of the single image in a whole film reel – a glimpse – one frame that is intertextually

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related to and signals many others. However, we also highlight the sleight inherent in the juridical form of ‘frame’ – that dubious process of bringing false claims and evidence into court to establish the guilt of an innocent witness. These ambiguities both recognize the imperial power of traditional ‘frames’ for knowledge production and situate our own subversive framings alongside them.

Fifth mo(ve)ment – Subversion as erosion Together with Butler (1999) and Chambers and Carver (2008), we don’t see subversion as happening as an external event; subversion is an erosion that works on norms from within, from inside. As Chambers and Carver note: Subversion must be a political project of erosion, one that works on norms from the inside, breaking them down not through external challenge but through an internal repetition that weakens them. (Chambers & Carver, 2008: 142) Thinking and doing subversion as a ‘political project of erosion’ encourages us to embrace some of the many other phenomena of ‘erosion’ that come into view in our subversive moves. We think here, for example, about terrain and territoriality: about the tectonic shifts of the earth’s crust; the push and build of mountains; the ferocities of volcanoes and the catastrophic rift of earthquakes. These imperceptibly slow movements and staggeringly swift eruptions discompose the seeming solidities of earth/land/ground. So too do those geographical shifts of soil and landscape in the movements of ice, water and wind. Over vastly differential time-scales, landscapes accommodate the movements of rain, river, sea, ice and haboob (a type of intense dust storm or sandstorm that blows particularly in arid regions) in a constant ecology of change and modification, of erosion, erasure and (re)sedimentations. Alongside these ‘natural’ phenomena, we see the erosions wrought on such landscapes by ‘man’: the exploitative and excessive degradations of soil and wider ecologies as part of an intensified agro-industrial complex; the extractive industries that mine and drill to feed a seemingly limitless appetite for the earth’s limited resources; the catastrophic events by multinational pertro-chemical industries that have resulted in destructive depletions of flora and fauna (Chernobyl, nuclear testing, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, Union Carbide are just a few examples that indicate a much wider phenomenon). And the more mundane and daily polluting practices (use of plastic and low recycling rates) that mark the capitalist imperative for endless growth. These now irreversible man-made ecological disasters are a claiming of terrain and territory in which racist, colonial entitlements are entangled: the extractive brutalities and grab of bodies, land, resources and the cultural erasures and erosions that those processes entail (Yusoff, 2018). These post- and neo-colonial violences (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018) attend the erosions in knowledge production we seek. Our happenings are framed by these violences and we try to subvert and erode

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the methodological frames that frame those ‘master narratives’ from within that frame. We too are post-colonial entanglements. In this, our work of erosion as a mechanism, through which to activate subversive methodological practices of knowledge production, aligns with Law’s (2004) argument for erosion as a form of praxis against ‘the forbidding conventions of method’: I started with the desire to subvert – or at least to raise questions about – current social science methods. Current methods, I argued, have many strengths, but they are also blinkered. Along the way I have tried to show that they both presuppose and enact a specific set of metaphysical assumptions – assumptions that can and (or so I suggest) should be eroded. (Law, 2004: 151) The etymology of subversion suggests a ‘turn from below’. Subversion derives from the Latin subvertere: sub (below) + vertere (to turn), to turn back, to transform. The word has rhizomatic linkages to others that speak of destabilising, of unsettling, of undermining, of polluting and perverting established systems. Here, we fold the potential of working from below to queer and que(e)ry those onto-epistemological practices valorized as the dominant and ‘best’ ways of doing knowledge production. In this further movement to the underground, the kind of ‘in-act of intuition at the edge of the nonconscious’ (Manning, 2016: 19), we make another mole-ish shift. In this imaginative move – a move to the subversive underground – we become talpa/mole. Our becoming-mole embraces the multiple mammalian forms that coagulate under this sign ‘mole’ and relish the fact that this genus of mammal eludes strict classification (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(animal) for an extensive treatise on the (mis)classifications of moles and (some) other animals as ‘true moles’). In our subversive work of erosion from below, and in alliance with the mess of (mis)classification of mammalian moles, we are desirous of our star-nosed mole-kin’s characterization as social and as having a tendency to gather in colonies. We becoming-star-nosed moles are referred to collectively as ‘a labour’. As a labour of star-nosed moles, working in subversive underground form, we call our kin (hey you reading this, come join us!), we converge across the world, we tunnel and dig, we work in the dark, we breathe efficiently in the low-oxygen milieu that we favour. Despite our best work in eating other pests and in mixing and aerating soil, we are usually considered unruly pests. We are normatively framed as naughty and irreverent despoilers of the cultivated and well-manicured land. We are ‘dirt tossers’, who leave our trace in unsightly hills and collapsed runs. Becoming-star-nosed moles who practice and enact dirty, underground and subversive burrowings, who call to their other mole-kin to come and join them in these un/framing subversive activities, is, we think, a pretty good way of figuring another route to thinking/doing (subversive) knowledge production in

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conferences and in pedagogic knowledge spaces. As mole-kin, let’s make some unruly data litterings and data trails; let’s disrupt the turgidly manicured sites of normative knowledge production; let’s do some positively unsightly data un/ doings so that our knowledge becomes the equivalent of molehills – a fabulation of earthly aeration.

Sixth mo(ve)ment – Erosion within qualitative research During a Conference panel, when the panellists speak they are the authority and the audience is requested to listen (carefully) and to ask (clever) questions. The presentations are sometimes boring. Moreover, the audience sometimes has difficulties with staying in the room: the English of the speakers could be very poor or too sophisticated, too difficult or incomprehensible, and this can be very annoying. The room can be too small or too big and too cold (or hot); the chairs usually are uncomfortable; the body remains stuck on the chair for one hour. The earlier presenters sometimes do not respect the 15-minute time limit, so that other presenters do not have enough space to speak properly about their research. The end of the panel can be a liberation! Some participants stay there after the end and speak with the presenters. The neoliberal AcademicConferenceMachine is like ‘fairs’ where scholars display their wares and attendees are frantically searching for the most innovative product. They are also trying to suss out who is the new fashionable author? Who should they quote? Which is the right group to be part of? Who is the new right guru? A member of the audience Oh, thank you for your paper. It is quite difficult, but amazing. Please, can you send me the manuscript? You know my English is very poor, especially with prepositions (propositions). I need to better understand it. The happenings (dis)organized at Urbana-Champaign, in Aosta and in Malta were connected with a movement within the contemporary qualitative research field – we like to frame it as undisciplined inquiry – which tries to erode qualitative research from within. Undisciplined inquiry reconfigures the idea of ‘data’ (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013) to trouble the use of interviews and observations and field note collection which are still the most common forms of collecting qualitative data. Undisciplined inquiry puts data on the move to unsettle the still largely taken for granted relation between researcher and data. Undisciplined inquiry expands what can be viewed as qualitative data and takes into account its materiality, movement and its sensory qualities e.g. data as snow, water, dance, landscape, water, air, pollution, bags and … and… and… The materiality of data was particularly intriguing for the happenings and writing in this Event. We do not deny that data also have linguistic, symbolic, imaginary and narrative force. However, we try to subvert data and encounter them when they are not conceived only as what is transcribed from a recorded

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interview and operate as if separate from the researcher and researched. Moreover, we want to re-think data analysis in ways that disrupt the assumption that the data are subordinate to the rationality of the researcher. Like MacLure (2018), we problematize the fact that: •

• • •

Data have been considered to possess a kind of authenticity, uncontaminated by the interventions and the interest of human acts of selection and interpretation and analysis; Data are not ethically neutral, but can function as supporting dirty, powerful and dangerous practices; Data are recruited into neoliberal discourses as input for ‘evidence-based’ policy and practice; And importantly, data have turned research into a legitimized business, a rigorous enterprise.

The moments and movements and mole-ings of and with data we have considered above are encouragements to be subversive with data – to unmoor data from its usual framings. As a CGCollective, we have a shared commitment to (re)encounter data, to experiment with data, to open up new possibilities through data through a variety of seriously playful enactments with/in data. In our doings, we hail data as a resource for thought, for doing, for making, for dreaming, for laughing… for … for… The three happenings were a way to experiment with subversions; to experiment with what data do.

Eight mo(ve)ment – Fugato Our mole-work in subversion is not meant as a form of fatal corrosion. The movements of erosion were about hope: a hope for life, for movement, for dynamic assemblages and whether (and how) erosion could induce change. In our undisciplined inquiries, we hope that erosion is fecund in its potential for re-growth, regeneration and transformation. We hope our doings might open up an impulse towards subversion for you/us, our readers, so that you too may become-mole in your own contexts and happenings. We burrow out of this Event with some further mole-thoughts. Our shift to the underground through our mole-kin is a gesture towards Harney and Moten’s (2013) ideas of and for the undercommons, which emphasizes knowledge production as emergent, collective, inventive, experimental practice. Our imaginings of going underground with our mole-kin is a playful strategy of subversion in which we work our collective energies to mole-ing escapes from instrumentality through collaborative acts of learning-with. Our mole-becomings are, too, an entangled knowing that (under)mines and takes mind of the surface. What appears at the surface may remain silent about those forms of fugitivity that are propagating, unseen, right under the wellcontained and rigorously manicured ground – but the earth tremors made by

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moles are nevertheless felt and ultimately seen. The moles’ dirty little piles of earth may be ‘stepped around’ politely by those on the surface, but they are ‘there’ in full view. Likewise, our doings in conference spaces subvert the register of convention and aim to bring into view, albeit momentarily, the paucity of conformity. We desire that conferences as knowledge sites become more open to encounters with difference. Our subversive doing-writings look to the uncanny spaces that reside in the strangely familiar situations that conference spaces produce. These doings aim to produce uncertainty, surprise and fear to disturb what is supposed to be a ‘proper’ conference space and enable participants to question the violence of neoliberal conference organization.

References Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168– 187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Butler, J. (1999). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Abingdon: Routledge. Chambers, S., & Carver, T. (2008). Judith Butler and political theory: Troubling politics. Abingdon: Routledge. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer art of failure. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. New York: Minor Compositions. Koro-Ljungberg, M., & MacLure, M. (2013). Provocations, re-un-visions, death, and other possibilities of ‘data’. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 219–222. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708613487861 Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755 MacLure, M. (2018). Encounters and materiality in intimate scholarship: A conversation with maggie MacLure. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 31) (pp. 197–204). Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D. & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Oxon: Routledge. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

SEDUCTIONS

Invitation Our focus in this Event is on one of the contributions to a conference panel at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2018. This Event returns to and continues its liveliness with the aim of exploring seduction scholarship it speculates on ways to disturb the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019) in relation to researcher-seduction-body be(com)ings. In embracing the seductive whorl of recent ‘post’-scholarship that disturbs and disrupts normative formations of academic inquiry (Taylor, 2017), this Event is attuned to recent theoretical calls for thinking-doing research beyond the logics of representation (Law, 2004; MacLure, 2013; Vannini, 2015). The Event takes off from the video that was part of the conference panel. It is composed as a series of fragmented, montaged and inchoate scenes and sounds – a filmic surface of sliding signifiers – that traces our inquirings through seduction scholarship that we invent and imagine. The video is available to view at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= aulMQNEDhGo&feature=youtu.be. This video-techno-text emerges from an ecology of intra-active entanglements between a range of technologies, the invitation to the conference panel and some researcher-seduction-body becomings. We play with the idea that this video-techno-text is itself a posthuman researcher-seduction-body becoming. Although decidedly promiscuous in our theoretical penchants, we confess a flirty lean towards post-qualitative, posthumanist and feminist materialist theoretical frames (e.g. Braidotti, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016) that decentre and de-privilege the hierarchical species status of hu/man agency. We are enticed by Deluezian-inspired scholarship (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) that hails humanness in its relational unfolding and seduced also by scholarship on the ‘affective turn’ (Fairchild & Mikuska, 2021), which recognizes ‘[a]ffect, as a creative, DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-10

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unpredictable, and vital force, offers a means for interrupting and remodulating dominant modes of power and rigid normativities’ (Dernikos et al., 2020: 19). We embrace the capacious generosities that seduction-affect scholarship opens up in attending to those aspects of conferencing that are felt intensely but are often glossed over by and in the AcademicConferenceMachine. This Event positions researcher-body becomings as intra-active affective encounters with/in processes and practices of unruly inquiry. With Stewart, we hold that researcher bodies are subject to the pull and push of ordinary affects that: happen in impulses, sensations, expectations, daydream encounters, and habits of relating, in strategies and their failures, in forms of persuasion, contagion and compulsion, in modes of attention, attachment, and agency, and in public and social worlds of all kinds that catch people up in something that feels like something. (Stewart, 2007: 2) We re-turn some of the wonderfully messy, unruly and affective relations and encounters with academic thinking-writing-living as we prepared for, engaged with and returned from the AERA AcademicConferenceMachine.

Slide 1: startings and middles An email arrives from existing collaborators. We are invited to collude/collide in an adventure that seeks to puzzle at ‘seduction’ as a mode of disrupting mainstream forms of qualitative inquiry: Hi Neil-Angelo, Pauliina and I are thinking about putting together an AERA panel on seduction and qual inquiry. We wonder if you two could work on one proposal/paper together? Some preliminary thoughts and the first round of the title are below. Are you interested in joining us? Seduction, similar to attraction and affection, offers relatedness and intimacy for inquiry since seduction produces a particular kind of attachment to theories, inquiries, data, ‘methods’, text and writings and so on. We wonder how various forms of seduction – of being seduced and seducing – produce and shape inquiry processes, involves subject-objects, and inter-relationality of knowledge production. Additionally, we ask questions about the sense and non-sense-ical functions of seduction and how seduction’s different forces become possible. Although not the only possibility to work through the relationality and inter-relatedness embedded in many forms of (post) qualitative inquiry, seduction offers one site that is ripe for exploration. [Email – seduction invite!] Although a relatively standard and expected feature of the landscape of academic life, invitations to contribute to conferences activate a host of seductive forces

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as they jostle with and bump into the flow of ongoing academic work. This invitation, like all such invitations, provokes what Massumi (2015: 53) calls an interruption, a microshock, ‘the kind that populate every moment of our lives … a momentary cut in the onward deployment of life … a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress’. Invitations to academic conferencing, as microshocks, potentiate a different sort of attunement to the endless vortex of affects in which academic life and labour are fabricated. Such invitations demand reorientations, a slide into different grooves of academic thinking-doing. Flattery, prestige, success, annoyance, resistance, boredom, possibilities for escape, (re)scheduling, (re)arrangements, adapting current work, opportunities for further connection.

Aside from the mundane forces activated by such invitations generally, the lure of this particular invitation is one that doubly folds seduction into conferencing activity: ‘Seduction’!? What a capacious concept! And, ‘seduction’ is framed here as force, as beyond the rational intention of the human. In what ways can we seriously engage with ‘seduction’ in such terms? This invitation invites us into a realm of uncertainty, of (un)knowing. While habits of hesitation and doubt amass and make themselves available, there is simultaneously the thrum of excitement and adventure to shape formations of thinking-doing as this invitation settles into the realm of everyday academicresearcher becomings. The microshock that this invitation effects attunes us, as becoming researcher bodies, to affective forces that compel knowledge production into the safety of the known. However, we are simultaneously energized by the potential productivities of coming to new knowledge. Our researcherseduction-body becomings are lured by this invite which ‘leave[s] the door open

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for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where you yourself came from, and where you will go’ (Solnit, 2005: 4). We are seduced! This invitation pulses and vibrates with/in the unruly maelstrom of affective intensities in which we are embedded as academic researchers. This invitation insinuates itself into our becoming and ongoing academic seductions: the allure of disruption; the compulsion to fracture normativities; the desire to provoke changes that queer academic spaces so that they might better host those many other bodies who are ‘othered’ or rendered ‘missing’ (Braidotti, 2018: xx). We are beguiled by the opportunity of working collaboratively, of effecting some serious play in the academy. We are seduced by the allure of bending the straightened civilities of the AcademicConferenceMachine. We welcome the unruly, the chaos and the wild in the intensities of wildness that ‘function[s] as a form of disorder that will not submit to rule, a mode of unknowing, a resistant ontology, and a fantasy of life beyond the human’ (Halberstam, 2020: 25).

Slide 2: unsettling affects: joyfully unknowing seductive entanglements Accepting the invitation to contribute to seduction scholarship is filled with discussion, a to-and-fro of fraught attempts to know. Many cultural stories are replete with tales of seduction: stories of love and lovers; of women and men doing unto other men and women; of mean, malfeasant manipulators of emotions; of highly gendered (mis)deeds and doings in which violence appealingly appears in the guise of captivating surrender. Such stories frame seduction as agentic, as human and humanist in its form and formation. However, this invitation to seduction scholarship compels us to think otherwise, to think seduction differently. The invitation urges us to think seduction as a set of forces that (mis)shape, (mis)lead or derail the knowing of researchers. Our ponderings on seduction scholarship is a mix of solitary and collaborative efforts. Reading and ruminating, email trafficking, Skype openings, which keep open the potential inherent in the seductive invitation. There is the inevitable churn of affect that goes with the start of (m)any projects of inquiry. They register as the uncomfortable inhabitations of new and emerging habits, of the movement of activity in different directions: excitements, attractions, wonder, curiosities, frustrations. Together, joys spark and we follow the follies of playful lines of flight. We entangle with the delights of wild reckonings that precede the pulls and impulses to order, to make knowing accountable, to make knowing count as production, as conference presentation. The affective forces of seduction scholarship swirl with countervailing forces that repel: worry, hesitation, doubt, busyness, possibilities of failure. These are embodied and heady disorientations that come with falling out of and with the comfort zones of certitude and

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knowing. Seduction opens us up to processes of letting go as a means to attune to those affective forces that potentiate researcher becomings. The original invitation to participate was itself replete with such warnings: However, seduction also challenges researcher’s autonomy and independence. Seductive scholarship might also be blinding and during one’s intensive focus on the subject-object relation, otherness/difference might be difficult to recognize or acknowledge. At some point seduction might be replaced by cynicism and carelessness. A researcher no longer desires to be seduced but is afraid of the risk of getting lost, ridiculed, or rejected by others [Email – seduction invite] In our seduction enthrallment, there is the potential for overwhelm, for unproductive stasis.

Slide 3: still troubled and troubling: seductive thinking-doings We turn to the liveliness of a dead Baudrillard (1990) as he composes some provocations for thinking seduction:

Immediately obvious – seduction need not be demonstrated, nor justified – it is there all at once, in the reversal of all the alleged depth of the real, of all psychology, anatomy, truth or power. It knows (this is its secret) that there is no anatomy, nor psychology, that all signs are reversible. Nothing belongs to it, except appearances – all powers elude it, but it “reversibilizes” all their signs (Baudrillard, 1990: 10). To produce is to materialize by force what belongs to another order: that of the secret and of seduction. Seduction is, at all times and in all places, opposed to production. Seduction removes something from the order of the visible, while production constructs everything in full view, be it an object, a number or concept (Baudrillard, 1990: 34). Seduction cannot possibly be represented, because in seduction the distance between the real and its double and the distortion between the Same and the Other is abolished. Bending over a pool of water, Narcissus quenches his thirst. His image is no longer ‘other’; it is a surface that absorbs and seduces him, which he can approach but never pass beyond. For there is no beyond, just as there is no reflexive distance between him and his image. The mirror of water is not a surface of reflection, but of absorption (Baudrillard, 1990: 67).

Rather than helping to bring order to the misrule brought about as part of our seduction scholarship, Baudrillard’s writing provokes us even further. His musings about the incommensurability of seduction with/in architectures of

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production and representation are especially unsettling. Certainly, these provocative writings fail to translate our thinking-doing-seduction scholarship in any obvious way into a form of conference ‘paper’. We read further and make notes which we email to each other in embarrassed haste as deadlines loom. We Skype and muse further. Our virtual connections take a physical turn. As a form of provocation, in an act of further attunement to the seductive forces that move our inquiry, we travel from Manchester to Milan and then together to Rome. We walk, agog, amongst the feted wonders of the city. We venture to consume the marbled vitalities available in Bernini’s sculptures at the villa Borghese (https://galleriaborghese.beniculturali. it/en/exhibition/bernini/). We marvel at the voluptuous deadness of this Baroque statuary. The real-dead Bernini lives a particular form of liveliness in this palace of memory that refuses his death. There is vitality in the stone-cold stillness of this marble that silently roars the desire of its becoming sculpture: David, Hermaphrodite, Truth Unveiled by Time. The seductive press of finger and thumb carved into supple stone flesh belies the violence that transfixes in The abduction of Persephone by Pluto (https://mymodernmet.com/bernini-the-rapeof-proserpina/). Daphne’s attempts to repel the unwanted attentions of a lovesick Apollo by her transformation into a laurel tree thrums with the fantasy of woman-becoming-tree: leaves sprout from fingers, roots shoot from toes, bark encases body (https://www.artrenewal.org/artworks/apollo-and-daphne/ gian-lorenzo-bernini/1872). But whose fantasy is this we ask ourselves? Lured as we are by this statuary and the Villa Borghese itself, within those seductive intensities lurk the bursting male imaginaries of desire-domination: to have, to hold, to possess, to penetrate, even at the expense of the destruction of the desired one. Daphne and Apollo. Daphne’s desire for escape and her immurement in and as a tree can only be seen as affirmative metamorphosis through a perverse male gaze that denies the bodily autonomy of woman to say no to a male. ‘No’ – that fatal word! Daphne’s unhumanization turns flesh to wood, movement to stasis, woman into nature. Only in her becoming-deadness might his desire be thwarted. We note elsewhere that ‘sights of bodies function as evidence of larger grand narratives’ (Carey et  al., 2021). So, here, in this palazzo of seductive splendour, Bernini’s Daphne and Apollo marbleizes one of the foundational myths of Western culture –men desire and women refuse, men pursue and women flee, men capture and women are raped and/or die. Mulvey (1975) analysed the ‘male gaze’ as a scopophilic regime of power in which men look and woman are ‘looked-at’. The seductive power of the male gaze fuels pornography and the visual economies of fashion and popular consumer culture. Sculpture-sculptor-museum-curation move the bodies of its tourist-visitor-consumers around and through the marbled bodies of its art in flows of seductive intensities that are charged by money, misogyny and the artistic canon.

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When I Crack I Expand (Kjellmark, T. 2021), Sculpture, 130 cm high, Bronze. Photo credit: Carl-Michael Herlöfsson

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On our return from Rome, we sit in Angelo’s kitchen eating food, prepared in the generosities of connection, digested in the wanderings of wonder. We review the visual recordings of our privileged entanglements with the theatre of seductions that is Rome-Bernini-tourism. We add these to the ever- expanding anarchive of fragments that speak to our researcher becomings in seduction scholarship. We record our conversations, play them back and tease them more with further layers of talk. These moments of discussion multiply and fracture. They fold themselves into the warp of memory and story – trajectories of childhood, familial relations, adolescent awakenings, church and religion, moves towards metropoles, faltering and flattering academic work moves. These are stories of pasts shaped in the lures and repulsions of words and worlds for researcher body becomings. In such tellings, they cast their vitalities in the now. They tell the lie that such seductive entanglements might too easily be consigned to pasts and that they might be rendered dead. These inextricable entanglements resonate with Massumi’s conjecture that ‘affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. This gives the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions – accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency’ (Massumi, 2015: 4). There is no rational ‘outside’ from these inchoate past-present seductive forces and affects because, as Massumi (2015: 124) explains, ‘we’re in affect, affect is not in us’. How, then, can we conjure this wild and unruly concept within the striations of the AcademicConferenceMachine more specifically?

Slide 4: performative seduction-ing An act of imagination makes a bid for emergence! We want to work against the attempt at the ‘god’s eye’ view of seduction (Haraway, 1988). We are incited by scholarship that critiques the normative, rational, deductive logics of qualitative research (MacLure, 2013); by invocations to know ‘through techniques of deliberate imprecision’ (Law, 2004: 2); and by non-representational methodologies (Vannini, 2015). These theories provoke work which is ‘restless and wilfully immature’ (Vannini, 2015: 5) and methods committed to an ethos of: animating lifeworlds … [that] … aim to enliven rather than report, to render rather than to represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than to faithfully describe, to generate possibilities of encounter rather than construct representative ideal types (Vannini, 2015: 15). Our researcher-seduction-body were therefore ‘attuned to life as an unfinished process of growth and movement; to be attuned not to where life lies but rather to where it is going next’ (Vannini, 2015: 15).

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In collaboration with a videographer/film-maker (Dale Allen – https:// filmfreeway.com/dalejohnallen), we conjured a video project that in its assembly refused the coherencies that are usually demanded of academic conference texts. The video-techno-text musters some of the many fragments of our seduction inquiries for the AERA panel: notes and notings, photos and video clips, recorded discussions, scraps of text. The fragments track our journeys of inquiry through seduction. These fragments do not aim to capture, to represent, to make meaning of, particular researcher becomings. Rather, they act as slides of expression, as fleeting frames that explode any notion of coherency. Here’s another reminder that you can watch the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulMQNEDhGo&feature=youtu.be The video-techno-text that materialized hails and inflects the fragmented and experimental modes of filmic non-representational art produced by Fernand Léger with his collaborator Dudley Murphy in the film Ballet Mécanique (1924, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOvnQ9Vqptw). Léger suggests that his film: set out to prove that it was possible to find a new life on the screen without a scenario, through making use of simple objects, fragments of objects – of mechanical elements, of rhythmic repetitions copied from certain objects of commonplace nature and ‘artistic’ in the least possible degree (Léger, cited in Kuh, 1953: online). We were inspired! In its becomings, the video-techno-text signals our compulsions towards a different form of non-representation for academic conferencing. In its narrative incoherencies, our video-techno-text instantiates our researcher-seduction-body becomings and the extended labour that often precedes conference presentations. The video-techno-text assembled itself in and amongst the relentlessness of academic work. Phones, laptops, WhatsApp, Google docs, Dropbox and other technologies are summoned in a human/non-human ecology. Keyboards and screens host presences and present opportunities to work in diffuse and disparate modes of research activity loosely stitched together by the agency of our human researcher bodies claiming to make and know. Shared online spaces gather together and host the multiple auditory, visual and textual fragments produced during our forays with seduction. Documents with vague instructions direct a shape for the project, and are supplemented with virtual and face-to-face encounters: Angelo-Dale-Neil fragments distributed in shared online platforms; Dale-Neil fag-breaks; Neil-Angelo Skype calls; Neil-Dale edit-suite (re)viewings. The video-techno-text thus emerges amongst a congeries of intra-active, relational encounters between human and machine. It emerges in the void that is textured with the faith of collaborative co-production. Its emergence is a leap of imagination. It exceeds any logic that might have claimed to know

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it before its becoming. It is an emergence in and of itself. And in that emergence, in its unfolding as a video-techno-text, it expresses and folds some of the many incoherencies that played and plagued our own inquiries as becoming researcher-seduction-bodies. Of course, autobiographical traces haunt the video-techno-text. However, the video-techno-text shocks these autobiographical traces into a more autoethnographic mode (see also our meanderings in the String Event earlier on) – however, ours is a queered autoethnography that contests the singularity of the coherent self. Our video-techno-text ‘stages the self as a performance… the subject is fragmented as a consequence of the inherent quality of the medium’ (Purcill, 2006: 84–85). In its fragmentations, and by adopting an orientation towards supplication rather than mastery, our video-techno-text invokes the figuration of the ‘A-Grammatical child’, a persona not yet subject to the striations of ‘grammar that order and subjugate the world’ (MacLure, 2016: 173). As a mode of non-representation, the video-techno-text charges its own emergence with the challenge ‘what would it mean for qualitative methodology to engage its own “becoming-child”’? (MacLure, 2016: 173). What does this mean for acceptability in the AcademicConferenceMachine? And what does this mean for researcher bodies marked by striated expectations of what is legitimate and what counts as ‘proper’ research: rigor, depth, coherence, authentic, data, field, citations? The video-techno-text plays with a-grammaticality as it thinks/does its own becomings amongst multiple affective forces that shape it. The video-techno-text re/dis-embodies us as researchers, producing us instead as ‘a-grammatical artisans, capable of detaching words or phrases from their syntactic environment and the heavy freight of meaning and signification [in order] to play with them’ (MacLure, 2016: 176). The video-techno-text re-turns Baudrillard’s defiance of production and desire to elude representation. The video-techno-text emerges as a material-discursive melange of visual bodies attuned to the illogics of nonsense: ‘Nonsense works: it can wound and delight, soothe and excite. When it does so, not only are sensations and affects transmitted, but claims to corral them through proper use founder’ (Williams, 2008, cited in MacLure, 2016: 178).

Slide 5: seduction performances: AERA meets video screening The video-techno-text has its first outing as part of a panel on seduction scholarship at AERA’s annual conference in 2018. New York hosted that prestigious gathering of the great and good. The conference rumbled across a range of venues centred on Times Square. Conference attendees and researcher bodies scramble amongst the discombobulating clamour of other city-scape bodies. Tourist excitements bump against those city dwellers who service New York’s mundane spectacularities: the shrill shriek of neon billboards clash with the baying of shop displays; April downpours dampen the fetid smells of sidewalk waste; bloated food stalls dazzle their wares in despite of the desperate

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visibility of poverty. Berger noted the injustices of capitalism and the close juxtaposition of wealth and poverty many years ago: The great hoardings and the publicity neons of the cities of capitalism are the immediate visible sign of ‘The Free World’. Publicity … proposes to each of us that we transform our lives, by buying something more … Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (Berger, 1972: 131) Within this melee, conference attendees make their way to one of the hundreds of conferencing rooms in which the seduction scholarship panel is scheduled. Despite its having an early morning conference slot, this session is well-attended. What seductive forces pull these bodies to our event? These researcher bodies emerge as audience-speaker assemblage, and in doing so, merge with the human, non-human and more-than-human elements that compose those unsteady collectivities called conference event. Padded hospitality chairs, existing friendships, generically patterned curtains, expectations and excitements for knowing, computer and screen, drinking cups, trails of home-life trials, conference handbooks, chatter, whisper, (dis)orientations. Additional accessories find themselves unexpectedly in the room: balloons and diversely textured fabrics attach themselves to conference room chairs. The cacophonous glare of flashing neon publicity hoardings in Times Square intrudes upon the seductions gathering/happening. It requires a Herculean effort to cut this ‘inside’ from its embedded outsides. The fecundity of these bodies assembles in the intensity of their intra-active encounterings. The generically familiar sterility of conference space thrums with a liveliness that appears to denote ‘conference panel as usual’ but also attunes these waiting bodies to an expectation of something other. The video-techno-text makes its debut. It has no explanatory pre-amble. It blares its incoherencies in a cacophonous wail. It divests the architectures of the AcademicConferenceMachine of their usual mastery. Is this video not, itself, a becoming researcher-seduction-body? The presumed authoring body is displaced, revealed as superfluous to the life and liveliness that the video-techno-text announces for itself. There is no script. There is no presenter. In the absence of both, the video-techno-text finds itself marauding through the conference space, making eye-contact, playing with balloons and textiles, muttering and making nonsensical noises, whispering to the bodies assembled in this conference happening. There is an unhingement as chaotic potentialities are unleashed in this scene of unscripted movement. It is difficult, but not impossible, to think of these room-ramblings as enactments of a de-centred human agency in conference spaces. At the very least, these microshocks are minor gestures (Manning, 2016) that interrupt the settled realm of

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the AcademicConferenceMachine. They unsettle and provoke different affective attunements and intensities for academic knowledge production. Ha! We say that! But then! We cannot be certain.

Slide 6: post-conference-ings: ungatherings, scatterings, extensions Our paper/presentation/production … we’re still not sure what to call it! The paucity of the lexicon for describing academic conferencing ‘doings’ that resist the usual looms large in our attempts to articulate here beyond the normative. The video-techno-text’s confoundings are diffused in the other panel presentations. These paper/performances also played with form and imaginative content, as our collaborators became entangled with/in seduction’s refusals to conform to the ordered and ordering hegemony of production and representation. These paper/performances also played with the wiles and wonders of ongoing research projects, the materialities of the conference space, as well as with the illegitimacies of re-presenting academic incoherencies at a mainstream academic conference. The video-techno-text resonated with the other (mal)formed irregularities of these other ‘papers’. Whatever they are/ were, whatever they did/do in their confused wanderings and wonderings with/in seduction scholarship, they have morphed into a Special Issue collection: ‘Mattering Seductions in undisciplined qualitative inquiry’ (Carey et al., forthcoming). We live in the hope that our interventions opened up other forms and forces of affective circulations in and beyond the conference happening itself. In retrospect, and with the experiences of other and further disruptive practicings with/in the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et  al., 2019), we sit and wonder about the nature and productivity of such disruptive tendencies. In our ponderings, we wonder how such minor gestures might configure relief and/ or how conference participants might delight in practices/performances that are dissonant, miscreant and rogue. Our invitation to that which is disruptive/transgressive is about how academic life ‘always exceeds our attempt to know and classify and escapes the order we attempt to impose on it’ (Halberstam, 2020: 30). Here we think of Koro-Ljungberg et al.’s (2015: 612) impulses towards ‘ecstatic thinking, and some other (unfinished) things’. We move with these compulsive refusals for ‘method’ as a form of capture, as a formula to garner insight, as a path to fix knowledge and knowledge-making praxes. Manning (2016: 31) argues that: whether we are talking about the making of an artwork or the setting into place, through a process artfully in-act, of activist practices of emergent collectivity, what matters is less how the work defines itself than how it is capable of creating new conduits for expression and experimentation.

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We wonder about what were the productivities that were made possible by this artfully produced video. We remain uncertain about our ability to map the realms of seduction scholarship. However, we remain hopeful for the productivity of this video intervention as an event which messes with the transmission of sameness, and that it proceeds as ‘contagion, affect, and epidemic rather than by meaning and signification’ (MacLure, 2016: 177). We still sit with the ethical response-abilities that attach to the unconventional form of our productions at this mainstream conference. What ethical risks and responsibilities inhere in such disruptions for our conference attendees? Although we made no attempt to capture reaction, to evaluate reception, we live in the haunt of the one audience member who, before making an early exit from the conference room, voiced their displeasure and wondered what was more repulsive: the video or the blare of the neon billboards visible from Times Square. This attendee’s dissatisfaction did not find balm in our disruptions of the stultifying sameness of the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019). What to do about them? What to do about this? What is our response-ability here? We have to ask ourselves in what ways can novelty, as disruption, be ethical academic praxis? We have to accept that there is not a binary between the AcademicConferenceMachine and the disturbances we offer in our conference workshops experiments. This calls us to be response-able to those responses where someone walks out, does not enter the room, questions our means and motives when we curate events. These experiments are not to everyone’s likings, sometimes the safety and regularity of the AcademicConferenceMachine is good, a comfort in the known. Every intra-action matters (Barad, 2007), whether this involves a pleasurable experience or not. Perhaps we might, instead, ask how any ethical (re)viewings that attach to the novel cast a different kind of gaze onto the safety of the repeatable, the expected. In whose service are the repetitions of AcademicConferenceMachine rigidly adhered? What is the merit, and who are the beneficiaries of such a meritocracy, in which expectation and acceptability reign? Beyond the life of the conference itself, we sit with the dis/comforts of collaboration and the relationalities of becoming-with others as academic researchers. Our hesitancies, worries and failures take on a different hue when working affirmatively and collaboratively with others. Here we lean on Braidotti’s seductive writings with what she calls her ‘favourite term: affirmative. Affirmative politics combines critique with creativity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects’ (Braidotti, 2013: 53). The video-techno-text emerged within a seductive invitation for connecting and collaborating with others: ‘we need an increased dose of collectively driven creativity’ (Braidotti, 2018: xvii). It continues its becomings in a wave of affirmative practices ‘infused with existential generosity, with care for what is and its promise of becoming otherwise’ (Pandian, 2019:118). In writing this Event, we extend our invitation to you, our reader, to wend your way through our nomadic journey towards our (un)knowings with

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seduction. We take seriously Braidotti’s (2018: xvi) invocation towards relationality as ‘the capacity and desire to move nomadically in the world, with and across a multitude of others’. We hope that this Event will tempt and provoke you to be seduced by the thinkings-doings in your own projects.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1990). Seduction. B. Singer (Trans.). New York: St. Martens Press. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post- qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work & Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. London: Penguin. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2018). Foreword. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, T. Shefer & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education (pp. xiii–xxvii). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Carey, N., Fairchild, N., Taylor, C. A., Koro, M., Elmenhorst, C., & Benozzo, A. (2021). Autopsy as a site and mode of inquiry: De/composing the ghoulish hu/man gaze. Qualitative Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999005 Carey, N., Koro, M., Benozzo, A., & Rantala, T. (forthcoming). Mattering seductions in undisciplined qualitative inquiry. Accepted for publication as a special issue in: Reconceptualising Educational Research Methods. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism & schizophrenia. London: Continuum. Dernikos, B. P., Lesko, N., McCall, S. D., & Niccolini, A. D. (2020). Introduction: Feeling Education. In B. P. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S. D. McCall, & A. D. Niccolini (Eds.), Mapping the affective turn in education (pp. 3–27). Oxon: Routledge. Fairchild, N., & Mikuska, E. (2021). Emotional labor, ordinary affects, and the early childhood education and care worker. Gender, Work & Organization. Online first: https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12663 Halberstam, J. (2020). Wild things: The disorder of desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066 Kjellmark, T. (2021). When I Crack I Expand. Sculpture, 130 cm high, Bronze. CarlMichael Herlöfsson. Koro-Ljungberg, M., Carlson, D., Tesar, M., & Anderson, K. (2015). Methodology brute: Philosophy, ecstatic thinking, and some other (unfinished) things. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(7), 612–619. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800414555070 Kuh, K. (1953). Léger. Catalogue of the exhibition organized by the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the San Francisco Museum of Art. https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_2833_300170782.pdf. Accessed 2 March 2019. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.

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MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755 MacLure, M. (2016). The refrain of the a-grammatical child: Finding another language in/for qualitative research. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 173–182. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1532708616639333 Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist film theory: A reader (pp. 14–26). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pandian, A. (2019). A possible anthropology: Methods for uneasy times. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Purcill, S. (2006). The autoethnographic in Chantal Akerman’s new from home, and an analysis of almost out and stages of mourning. In J. Hatfield & S. Littman (Eds.), Experimental film and video: An anthology (pp. 83–92). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Solnit, R. (2005). A field guide to getting lost. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, C. A. (2017). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(3), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1256984 Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (Eds.), (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research. Oxon: Routledge.

SKETCHING SCHIZOID NARRATIVES with Teija Rantala*

Schizoid whispers In this Event, we describe and illustrate academic disturbances at multiple levels. We do this by working with schizoid narratives to offer multivocal accounts and more complex and layered perspectives into, often strictly univocal and simplified, academic and conference contexts. Schizoid narratives in this Event as well as our actual conference experiment and presentation at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) disrupt(ed) the authority of the author voice (Benozzo et  al., 2016) by putting forward and articulating overlapping and potentially conflicting voices simultaneously with the author voice. Furthermore, schizoid narratives disrupt genres of assumed truth and knowledge. They introduce the multiplicity of ‘truth’, ‘perspectives’ and ‘voices’. They insert hesitation and uncertainty, enabling the possibility for ‘false’ knowledge to emerge into academic presentation space (we wondered how this distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘false’ might be measured or received). In this Event re-turn, we situate readers into a re-arranged conference space where narratives, power, knowledge, light, sound, touch and more do not flow from the presenter to the audience but via diverse assemblage of senses and knowing in simultaneously multiple directions. This multidirectionality reorients normative AcademicConferenceMachine spaces in creative and disturbing ways. Women’s whispered stories, rumours about who is moving around the conference space audience touching shoulders, hair, clothes, chairs and other objects. Looking for ears among the straight lines of chairs and desks. Audience members were disturbed by the movement of an actor (Angelo). These moments moved participants and possibly hindered some audience members from hearing the speaker and being able to follow her consistently. Laughter, wonder, sounds of moving chairs and desks added to the sound of the speaker delivering DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-11

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her presentation. Our disturbances introduced the non-sensical into an environment of sense and logic. Perhaps this confused conference participants, creating narratives which blended, mixed, started and re-started, never-ended and endlessly multiplied in schizomatic ways.

Schizoid narratives and conference flows Schizoid narratives offer opportunities to change the directionality of knowledge flows in AcademicConferenceMachine spaces. Knowledge no longer flows from the speaker and author to the audience and listener. Rather, the audience and listeners disturb the speaker and author, forcing her/him to modify their speed, tempo and possibly the content and form of knowledge being articulated. Conference rooms are framed/disciplined/regulated spaces: usually rooms are rectangular, square or semi-circular and there is a well-identified area for the speaker, which is generally near a blackboard/whiteboard. Sometimes the speaker has a lectern. From the front of a conference space one scholar reads, performs, shows off or speaks off the cuff to an audience. In the background there can be the projection of some pre-prepared slides. Summarized forms of knowledge to be delivered. Knowledge becomes reduced to taxonomy.

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Recently, we attended some conferences where the time available for each presentation was controlled: after 15 minutes the slides – which were uploaded the day before via a central system that controlled all the conference rooms – disappeared. This striated and controlled nature of paper presentations fits the standard model of the AcademicConferenceMachine. Knowledge becomes bracketed off and panels do not always encourage connected and relational thinking. In this case, the disappearance of slides after 15 minutes indicated redactions and reductions of knowledge (flow). This electronic shut off also signalled it was somebody else’s turn to guide the herd of knowledge-hungry bodies. In these same conferences knowledge patterns were created. While the scholar was speaking, the audience (apparently) needed to listen to her/him and respond and react. This was repeated in a specific rhythm: P = Presentation from one or more scholars; R = Reactions from other scholars (questions, comments, observations) – the audience; A = answers/reactions from the scholar. This rhythm produced vertical lines that framed knowledge and the room. Lines that delivered knowledge to receiving audiences. When a scholar presents her/ his paper, she/he is created as an authority and expert. After the presentation, the audience is created as a questioning subject whose task is to redirect this produced knowledge. This rhythm is repeated again and again and again across AcademicConferenceMachine spaces. Being part of the audience in a conference space can become a tiring, boring activity; jet-lagged or tired from the travel to the venue, trying to negotiate the spaces rooms and venue, sitting in a room for one and a half hours listening to presentations (after presentation), can be a challenging and exhausting affair. During the ICQI (2018) conference in UrbanaChampaign, we (Teija, Mirka and Angelo) tried to bring some playfulness into these striated and formulaic proceedings by interrupting and disrupting accepted norms of AcademicConferenceMachine paper presentations. The past disturbance and the present Event you are reading are entangled with/in a creation of schizoid narration. We feel this released the potential to disturb the act and practice of normative conference spaces by crafting and sketching alternative possibilities. We work with unfinished narratives and sketching which removes certainty and stability from knowledge production. It introduces unfinished and hesitant modes of thinking and doing that are rarely present in conference spaces. This includes improvisation and creativity as well as blurred boundaries of doing and not doing, knowing and not knowing, creating an unstable platform for sketching and sketches that we articulated. Instead of focusing on the outcome of the conference paper, sketching brings attention to the process of the disturbance itself. Sketching also introduces hesitant lines into fixed knowledge economies and it slows down the speed and logic of academic writing and inquiry. We invite you, as reader, to become part of these schizoid narratives

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as you read and entangle with what we are doing in this Event-ful re-turn. We encourage you to become part of the sketches, possibly this will trouble and disturb you, perhaps it will confuse and frustrate you…perhaps you will be a partner in past/present/future schizoid narrative.

Schizoid data The data that was used to disrupt the AcademicConferenceMachine included writing assignments, autobiographical and collaborative writings collected from a number of projects (Rantala, 2017, 2018, 2019). These excerpts should also be considered as sketches and unfinished narrations of young women’s lives or/and as momentary utterings and enunciations as they are partial and situated in these women’s experiences. These data were introduced into the ICQI conference presentation and by re-introducing them into this Event we revisit, re-turn and (re)voice the schizoid lines of the women’s cartographies (Rantala, 2017, 2018, 2019), and map what these did in the conference room space in the past, what do they in the present and what they might do in the future.

Where might we come from? Traditionally, narratives concentrate on the ‘past’ of the individual, they describe historical or memorable life events and speak to interpreted stories and lived experiences (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2018; St. Pierre, 1997). In this Event, we are interested in the making of future ‘narratives’ beyond individual storytelling and linear story structures. We draw on schizoid narratives which function as open-ended productions, always creating situated knowledge from and within the specific event-encounters that made them (Ettinger, 2006; Massumi, 2006). Our focus on schizoid narratives sees stories as rhizomatic arrangements, ongoing diverse and partial processes of creation that can show the potential ‘open-endedness of the future’ (Grosz, 1999: 18). Schizoid narratives are stimulated by entangled practices that enable formations of subjectivities as being situated within the events that produce their emergence. These subjectivities are in relation with the events but also are ‘travelling’ changing and nomadic creations within natural and social worlds (Guattari, 1989, 2013). Being entangled with natural and social practice, schizoid narratives overcome the binaries of human/nature and past/present. They produce knowledge through continuous and asymmetrical methodological posthuman processes (Ferrando, 2012). Exploring these schizoid narratives from a Guattarian perspective enables us to see them as unanticipated co-productions, which also stimulate emerging and alternative schizoid subjectivities (Guattari, 1989, 2013; Renold & Ringrose, 2011). These co-productions function as sketches, unfinished and ‘raw’ encounters that desire to embrace schizoid spaces that have been constituted by chaos and disorder. Schizoid narratives respond to the immanent nature of their production in the otherwise over-regulated AcademicConferenceMachine spaces.

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AcademicConferenceMachine garden

Sketching schizoid narratives We approach narratives as both unfinished eventful forms and as a type of sketch. Swedberg (2016) argued that sketches are quick and tentative drawings and descriptions. Paul Klee (1953) proposed in his Pedagogical Sketchbook that sketches reveal ‘An active line [is] on a walk, moving freely, without a goal’ (Klee, 1953: 16). Sketches have vagueness and playfulness in them. Sketches have been compared to a painting, in that they are made up of symbols that can easily take on different meanings through very small changes in the way that things are drawn (Goodman et al., 1972). A sketch ‘helps you experiment, and it minimizes the distance between an idea and its representation. It thrives and lives its life in the backstage area of the theorizing process’ (Swedberg, 2016: 268).

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Schizo/sketch – etymology Schizo – Word Origin 1

A combining form meaning ‘split’ used in the formation of compound words: schizogenetic (Dictionary.com)

Schizo – noun [C] (MENTALLY ILL) – informal usually offensive, a person with the medical condition of schizophrenia: The word ‘schizo’ crops up a few times and sounds like an out-of-date childhood taunt. In addition, these are associated and clearly offensive, and hence unacceptable, terms that are used such as loony, maniac, nutter, psycho and schizo, the terms to avoid include ‘victim of ’ and ‘suffering from’ (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ schizo).

In Italian sketch becomes schizo Schizzo fr. Esquisse; sp. esquicio; ted. Skizze: dal lat. SCHÈDIUM lavoro fatto in un subito e alla meglio (in Apuleio), e questo dal gr. SCHÈDION estemporaneo, fatto all’improvviso, onde SCHEDIÀZEIN fare all’improvviso, senz’apparecchio, scarabocchiare: da SCHÈDIUM si fece *SCHÈDJO, * SCHÈDZO, e poi SCHÍZZO.

Schizzo fr. Esquisse; sp. esquicio; ted. Skizze: from lat. SCHÈDIUM work done quickly and not accurately (by Apuleio), and this from the gr. SCHÈDION impromptu, done suddenly, then SCHEDIÀZEIN to improvise, without a devise, scribble all over: from SCHÈDIUM it became *SCHÈDJO, *SCHÈDZO, and then SCHÍZZO.

Abbozzo, Disegno senz’ombre non terminato; per similit. Piccolo saggio; e poi Minimissima particella di chicchessia.

Draft, drawing without shadows and unfinished; for similit. Little essay; and then Very little particle of something.

Vale inoltre spruzzo d’acqua o d’altra materia liquida e in questo senso è da schizzare = saltar fuori. https://www.etimo.it/?term=schizzo

It can also signify a spray of water or another liquid and in this case is Schizzare = to squirt.

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Schizo as a machine Schizo is considered a machine that operates with both symbolic and discursive meanings. It is also capable of changing and breaking meaning to reveal multiple possibilities that create further meanings through the multitude of machinic connections. Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 381) explain ‘schizo is a machine’ and Holland notes that the ‘schizoanalytic model of the psyche is that of a machine, or a set of machines: the desiring-machines’ (Holland, 2013: 25). Schizo, when envisioned as a desiring machine, connects forces and weaves together cartographies and modelisetions of subjectivity. Within the pages of this Event, we propose that the schizo desiring machines can produce knowledge and anti- productions of knowledge. In other words, the sketches of the young women’s schizonarratives can be fluid, active and relational on one hand, but also passive, malfunctioning and cracked on the other. Schizoid narrations are what Guattari (1995) calls ‘the modelisation of subjectivities’. They question subjectivity formation and foundation. The schizo desiring machines are conceived in opposition to normalized structures of subjectivity. There is no univocal ontological subjectivity; rather, there is a plane of machinic interface. Schizo desiring machines are precarious, uncertain, where creative aspects take precedence over the fixity of structures. They exist in flows of chaos animated by infinite velocities. It is out of this chaos that complex compositions constitute themselves (adapted from Guattari, 1995: 58–59). O’Sullivan notes Guattari’s argument on ‘narration’ operates as a refrain which ‘is stripped of its signifying and discursive function in favour of the “existential transference” of the non-discursive’ (O’Sullivan, 2013: 105). In our process of re-sketching the schizonarratives at ICQI, this ‘refrain’ is a ‘repeated tune’ which tends to fixate to the ‘(mal)functioning routes’ in the ear of the listener. These narratives appeared to be multiple ‘thingamabobs’ simultaneously; past and present cartographical lines to be mapped and future mappings to be created, lived and experienced. Working with schizoid narratives does not require choosing one mode of being or one process of subjectivity to the exclusion of another. Mapping schizoid narratives in action assists in moving toward more open, more processual, more deterritorialized processes of subjectivity. For Guattari (1989), schizo is concerned with moving beyond reductionist logics. Schizo is concerned with complexity and processes of bifurcation and differentiation which move away from sameness to ontological heterogeneity. Emphasis on schizoid narratives is not a practice of excavating the ‘truth’, but rather of fabulating the ‘false’. As Manning (2016:184) suggests, ‘schizo is allergic to all neurotypical commands’. Manning proposes that the task of schizo ‘is to tirelessly undo egos and their presuppositions, to liberate the prepersonal

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singularities they enclose and repress; to mobilize the flows they would be capable of transmitting, receiving or intercepting’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983: 434, translation modified by Manning). It is fabulated and mobile, mindful of the past but does not seek to return to it, mutating to provide a different mode of encounter (Manning, 2016).

Re-turning schizoid narratives In the following section, we combine the writings of both (i) young women at an upper secondary school and (ii) women belonging to the Conservative Laestadian religious revival movement in Finland with (iii) a conference presentation ‘replay’, in which these young women’s narratives became part of participatory experiment to include and disturb the ‘audience’ in narrative play. The data were produced with young women at a Finnish upper secondary school within a writing assignment on the women’s negotiations on their subjectivity, which formed part of a Master’s study (Rantala, 2012) and autobiographical writing on their desired subjectivity in the religious movement with Laestadian women as part of a doctoral study (Rantala, 2018). For the writing assignment and the autobiographical writing, women were encouraged to resist textual and narrated normativity that seemed to subjugate them. The term ‘woman’ was not taken ‘to refer to empirical females, but rather to socio-symbolic constructions, topological positions, degrees and levels of intensity, affective states’ (Braidotti, 2003: 48; Davies, 1993; Rantala, 2019). To bring forth the diversity and complexity of the negotiations of gender and subjectivity that unfolded in the schizoid narratives, in the re-turn to the ICQI event and the preparation for the ICQI event, we sketch the contours of the combined narrative below. This is presented as a multi-layered interruption of simultaneous voices that were fractured into storylines, tittle-tattles, narratives and theory. Here, the directionality of one-way presentation has been disturbed as we blend past and present narratives, blurring and spontaneously creating schizoid polyvocality.

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Becoming schizoid narratives Desire is strength, energy and control, to take in as much as you can handle, whatever helps one to sustain (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007). As the narratives were recited with desire, they showed the movement of the women’s lines and the processes in which they were formed. This allowed an understanding of the

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women’s aspirations to identify with and to make sense of womanhood as a part of continuously being formed through becoming. Becoming should not be considered as emerging as ‘new’ or as ‘different’, neither does it denote clear change. It always works towards the ‘other’ since becoming always needs its relations. This ‘other’ expresses the limits of subject, the movement within its durability and intensity. Therefore, becoming in these schizoid narratives is considered as multiple. The idea of multiple enables the deconstruction of the individual and subject-centred thinking, allowing us to create and to be created within connections to other possibilities. Since the women’s storylines are always situated in the event in which they were created, their narrative becomings are relational and make sense only in the event. They cannot be examined out of its milieu and contexts. This relationality rejects the idea of established singular entities as individual and subject; there is no individual becoming, since it is always a collective constellation (Rantala, 2018). As the extension of subjectification, becoming is the matter of taking chances, making new turns within the present situation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This is not about becoming a woman per se, but a chance to follow the changes one’s lines go through. It is adaptation as such, but it is also about being able to modify oneself, as much is needed to be able to function in the changing situation, in this case, as a young woman. All these becomings go through differentiation, in which continuous dissociation or separation emerges. This is illustrated in the way the women’s lines continuously shape the ‘landscapes’ their lines pass (Davies, 2014; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Jackson, 2010).

Re-turn to ICQI schizoid narratives At the end of the conference panel there was some time to listen to the audience. Somebody said that at the beginning when they saw Angelo (me) walking randomly and whispering in others’ ears, they did not understand what was happening. Somebody else said that they were really annoyed by those sensuous words that distracted them from the contents of the presentation. Somebody else claimed that they tried to let themself go to embrace the tone of the whispering voice …. pleasure, gratification, bother, concern, ailment … perhaps diffraction. Schizo interventions. An entanglement of the voice of the speaker, the audience – sat down silent and apparently listening to Mirka reading, whisperings near ears and random walking movements in the room. Schizo interventions.

What did we learn? What happens in the play with schizonarratives? Where does this take us? These co-productions with past data, the whispers in the conference event, the writing of this happening and now as you re-read the disturbances and productions, function as sketches of encounter. They embrace schizoid dis/

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order and anarchy as means of working with the immanent whispers and co-production in the event. To move academic knowledge production towards more response-able and responsive futures, we need to start working in opposition to structures that become controlling. We need to work with instability and multiplicity, distorting responses and distorting conditions that allow us to break free from the (un)ethics of the normative and expected. The AcademicConferenceMachine becomes a schizoid mode of production – disturbed and disturbing in the fusion of the women’s narratives with participants at an ICQI conference panel. For some this was disturbing, for others a welcome earworm which opened up different sensations and possibilities for conferencing.

Data Rantala, T. Writing assignment data, Upper Secondary schoolgirls, 2011, Helsinki, Finland. Rantala, T. Autobiographical writings data, Conservative Laestadian women, 2012–2013, Finland. Rantala, T. Collective writings data, Conservative Laestadian women, 2013–2016, Finland. Teija Rantala wishes to acknowledge all the women participating in her research for their generous contributions.

Note * Teija Rantala lectures and publishes on feminist research ethics, methods, and analysis. She is a Postdoctoral Researcher at TIAS Collegium, University of Turku, Finland, where her research takes a feminist posthuman framework to study bodily self-determination of young former religious women within wider focus upon reproductive justice and human-nature relations.

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Davies, B. (1993). Shards of glass: Children reading and writing beyond gendered identities. New York: Hampton Press. Davies, B. (2012). The ethic of truths: Badiou and Pierre Rivière. Emotion. Space and Society, 5(4), 226–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.08.001 Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children. Being and becoming. Abingdon: Routledge. Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2013). Collective biography and the entangled enlivening of being. International Review of Qualitative Research, 5(4), 357–376. https://doi. org/10.1525%2Firqr.2012.5.4.357 Deleuze, G. (1988). Bergsonism (Trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). New York: Zone books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem & H. R. Lane). London: Athlone. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans. B. Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II (Trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). New York: Columbia University Press. Ettinger, B. L. (2006). The matrixial borderspace (essays from 1994–1999). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferrando, F. (2012). Towards a posthumanist methodology. A Statement. http://www. tijdschriftframe.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Frame-25_01-Ferrando.pdf. Accessed 20 March 2020. Foucault, M. (2005). The Hermeneutics of the subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981– 1982 (Trans. G. Burchell). New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Goodman, N., Perkins, D., & Gardner, H. (1972). Basic abilities required for understanding and creation in the arts. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Grosz, E. (1999). Thinking the new: Of futures yet unthought. In E. Grosz (Ed.), Explorations in time, memory and futures (pp. 15–28). Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Guattari, F. (1989). The three ecologies (Trans. C. Turner (Material world)). Paris: Galilee. Guattari, F. (1995). Chaosmosis. An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Guattari, F. (2013). Schizoanalytic cartographies (Trans. A. Coffey). London: Bloomsbury. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holland, E. (2013). Deleuze and Guattari’s: A thousand plateaus. London: Bloomsbury. Jackson, A. Y. (2010). Deleuze and the girl. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 579–587. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500630 Klee, P. (1953). Pedagogical sketchbook. New York: Praeger. Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes. Movement, art, philosophy. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2006). Afterword. Painting: The voice of the grain. In B. Ettinger (Ed.), In The Matrixial Borderspace (pp. 200.1–212.3). Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. O’Sullivan, S. (2013). Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm: From the folding of the finite/infinite relation to schizoanalytic metamodelisation. Deleuze Studies, 4(2), 256–286. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1750224110000978 Rantala, T. (2012). Neuvotteluja naiseudesta –subjektiviteetin rakentuminen lukiolaistyttöjen kertomuksissa naiseksi kasvusta [Negotiations of Womanhood –Construction of Subjectivities in the Narratives of Upper Secondary Schoolgirls]. Käyttäytymistieteellinen tiedekunta, Helsingin yliopisto. Unpublished Master’s Thesis.

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Rantala, T. (2017). Maternal mo(ve)ments in memorywork. Post-qualitative mo(ve) ments I: Curations. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 8(3), 27–30. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.2554 Rantala, T. (2018). Beyond sisters and mothers –women’s aspirations within the conservative Laestadian movement. Helsinki: Unigrafia. https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/234040 Rantala, T. (2019). Exploring data production in motion: Fluidity and feminist poststructuralism. Maine: Myers Education Press. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2011). Schizoid subjectivities? Re-theorizing teen girls’ sexual cultures in an era of ‘sexualization’. The Australian Sociological Association, 47(4), 389–409. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1440783311420792 Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2018). Writing. A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. Fifth edition (pp. 818–838). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Sotirin, P. (2005). Becoming-woman. In C. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze. Key concepts (pp. 113–130). Durham, NC: Acumen. Stagoll, C. (2010). Becoming. In A. Parr (Ed.), The Deleuze dictionary (pp. 25–27). New York: Columbia University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Nomadic inquiry in the smooth spaces of the field: A preface. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(3), 365–383. https://doi. org/10.1080/095183997237179 Swedberg, R. (2016). Can you visualize theory? On the use of visual thinking in theory pictures, theorizing diagrams, and visual sketches. Sociological Theory, 34(3), 250–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275116664380

INTERMISSIONS MULTIPLE

Disturbing conferences We have entitled this Event ‘intermissions multiple’ for several reasons. Although this Event is placed as the last chapter in the book, it should not be seen as an end point. An intermission is a middle place, a break and a punctuation with/for other Events. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note that things pick up speed in the middle (intermezzo). This Event maps some of the wonderings and wanderings that working with/in the AcademicConferenceMachine has produced for the authors, the impact the AcademicConferenceMachine has on bodies and how undoing the AcademicConferenceMachine enables ways of doing knowledge differently in posthuman, feminist materialist, post-qualitative and indisciplined research. The earthworm makes another appearance and we invite you to be part of the ongoing and necessary disturbances to the AcademicConferenceMachine. In what follows, we re-turn to some of the concepts and practices that have animated this book as we have pondered how to disturb conferences and how conferences have disturbed us. We ruminate on conferences as material spaces of knowledge production; on conferences as generative and entangled matterings of human and non-human bodies; and on conferences as post-personal spaces of affective flows. In the Prelude, we characterized the book as an anarchive, that is, as a mode of intellectual assemblage that offers a more speculative way of attending to past events and that refuses traditional routes of documenting, collecting and collating (Massumi, 2016). Our intention in this book was to engage with conference-ing practices as a means to generate new lines of potential, to instantiate thinking-in-movement. These lines of thinking become ‘the little crack, the imperceptible ruptures’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987: 131), where the power of the material and the swarm of vitalities (Bennett, 2010) start to appear. This final Event continues this ongoing, processual and diffractive pattern; it produces DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007-12

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Cracks and ruptures

additional speculations and connections within/between past-present-future events with regard to the AcademicConferenceMachine.

First conference? I am new to all of this I don’t know anyone This is my first paper GULP It looks like I have 20 minutes to present Please don’t ask me a hard question

Give us a break! When I was a child and went to the cinema, we had an intermission. In those early childhood days, there would be ‘a short’, that is, a short film, often a funny film, sometimes not, but in any case something we sat through dutifully in anticipation of the ‘main feature’. At the end of the short, there was an intermission. Curtains would close ceremonially. Lights come back on. And young women in bright red or blue uniforms with ice cream and drinks trays would parade to the front of the cinema and stand as snaky lines formed to purchase interval goodies. Later, as an adult, theatre intermissions involved standing in a crush at the bar for a glass of wine to be hurriedly drunk before the next Act, standing around scoping out those who’d got really dressed up for a rather glamorous night out in a classed performative whose display I enjoyed and partially participated in, and standing in a queue for the ladies’ toilets hopping from foot to foot and raising eyebrows with the woman next to me: never enough women’s toilets: Intermission Interval Pause

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Break Gap Between a here, a there and an elsewhere Cinema and theatre intermissions are, in some respects, like the breaks between paper presentations in academic conference spaces: spaces of staging, performance and display layered into spaces of apparent rest, sociability and conviviality. The intermissions in conferences can be just as brutal in marking out who belongs and who doesn’t, in enabling those whose bodily ease can fill the space to take up that space, and to give those who have arrogated to themselves the right to speech to fill up yet more air with their ‘rightness’ expressed in loud ‘hello’s’, groupy joshings and sometimes raucous laughter. Conference intermissions can be lovely for those who belong ‘here’, for those who know many people ‘here’, for those whose adeptness in conference-ing has been well honed over many conference outings and paper ‘successes’ – these are the conference ‘stars’, the keynotes and ‘big names’ who are feted and who suck the air in the room towards themselves. But what if you are on the edge? What if you are positioned somewhat edgily in this conference? Perhaps you don’t know people ‘here’, perhaps this is your first time ‘here’, perhaps you are something of a transdisciplinary nomad. What if you are alone, struggling with imposter syndrome, a student or an early career academic? What if you have an excruciating moment of spilling coffee with clumsy awkwardness, of dropping your sandwich because your hands are overfull and all the tables are taken because everyone knows everyone else and they are all sitting together and having fun (it seems). Then, ‘here’ might be a space of painful dis-order as your body squirms with the excruciating and personal-public shame of its bigness, smallness, not-right-ness, in clothes which also bear the marks of not-rightness (it seemed like a good idea to wear jeans, but shit everyone is dressed up), everyone is so relaxed and expansive while you are tight and wound and wounded with exclusion.

Composing events: activate conferences differently! The conference co-composings we enact as a collective, including those in this book, focus on playful and relational connections and are generally informed by theory-practice-doings. We talk about our thinking and plan how this might lead to possible experiments. The documents from these ruminations, such as scribbled notes and emails, sometimes photos of material and collages we have made, become a relay, a contact point, for us to engage possibilities for the eventful doings that eventually cohere (or not) in and as our workshops. We aim for these workshops to be provocative in their design, enactment and performance; as serious fun (for us and our participants) in pursuit of doing knowledge otherwise. In doing so they take the form of research-creation enacted as an immanent becoming of bodies. Manning and Massumi (2015: n.p.) discuss how the fluid and open nature of research-creation might lead to ‘an institutional operator: a mechanism for existing practices to interface with the neoliberalization of art and academics’, which operationalizes the mode, modality and production of research. These

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comments chime with our own experiences of the AcademicConferenceMachine where we feel knowledge has been regulated, controlled and where we, as academics, become dividualized as part of these machinic interactions (Benozzo et al., 2019; Carey et al., 2021; Deleuze, 1992; Taylor et al., 2019). The Events that we composed and articulated at the conferences and the Event returns in this book are a (re)production of our initial ideas and playful experimentation as a way to do and think conferences and conferencing differently. They were produced through a series of enabling constraints (Manning & Massumi, 2014). An enabling constraint is ‘constraining to the extent that its focus is to structure the field of improvisation and enabling in the sense that the constraint is potentializing’ (Manning & Massumi, 2015: n.p.). Enabling constraints enable research-creation as an unfolding of positive and dynamic effects in conference spaces. Deleuze proposed events as transformative processes of becoming and intensities where the outcome is not known in advance but is produced via relational assemblages of bodies, matter and discourse. They are ‘multiple events entering into harmonious resonance through vibrations between multiple series… each event is the whole of the world from a singular perspective’ (Williams, 2011: 84). These becomings and intensities are immanent and always in motion, ‘composing with creative practice, for composing emergent collectivities, for composing thought in the multiplicitous act’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: ix). They are also non-dualistic and do not separate subject from object or researcher from researched, they entangle and emerge from the connections and relationalities of the bodies which compose the event (Manning & Massumi, 2014). For some, the nature and form or research-creation is too unpredictable, too ‘out there’, too indisciplined, moving too far away from some of the methodological conditions that make qualitative research comfortable, predictable, valid, rigorous. For others, immanent and relational methodologies offer new and different potentials for knowledge-making (Taylor et al., 2020; Wells et al., 2021). Eventful becomings and research-creation are intra-active and collective in nature (Barad, 2007), and this characterizes the work that we do in conference spaces. In the neoliberalization of the Academy and the constraints and expectations this brings, we are committed to holding and protecting an ethical-ontological-epistemological space for academic work, which is energizing, nourishing, collaborative, important and playful. The work of the CG Collective (and others who are doing similarly) is an entanglement of humans, non-humans and other-than-humans collecting. Our/your connections are assemblages of potential with the capacity to work against the performative, competitive and individualizing contexts of contemporary higher education.

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CG collective

The conference overlook The Look That Look The Look away from you The Look over your shoulder The ‘I’m done with you here’ moment The ‘your time with me is up’ moment The ‘what relief ’ moment The ‘I no longer need pretend your talk interests me’ moment Excuse me. Lovely to meet you. I need to catch up with X. You’re here for the whole conference, yes? Let’s talk again The Look That Look A look which tells you you are not worthy Not worth the effort a moment longer Nothing of importance for me here, that look tells you Nothing to gain for me here No connection, affiliation, relation for me to care about The academic clock ticks fast ‘Time to move on from this nobody and their nothing ideas’ that look tells you You shrivel inside as they gaily turn, shift and move away Move on to someone apparently better The Look That Look A look which stabs your heart

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Your body aflush with shame Did someone see you being overlooked? Did they look over at her looking over you and away from you? Did they too think minnow, sprat, chaffinch, lugworm, rugrat, mouse? Low-lying fruit? Low life? Low down? Low down and out? Out of the game because never in the game? Whose game? Not one of my making Overlooked Of no consequence Looked over She turns her back on you and hurries away You look down A smile plastered to your face, ‘see you again’ you say to her moving back You look down Your shoes look wrong now too Also too casual for this formal gathering You didn’t know what to wear You didn’t have anyone to ask You didn’t even know you could ask or should ask How stupid are you? You don’t know First time here Skirt feeling a mite too tight now Jacket heavy Nothing fits properly You don’t fit properly The Look, and the look away, told you so You are interloper here You are small You are unclean A body out of place Ms no-body Milly no mates You look around You feel shown up You feel like a ‘show’ You’ve never been a show-off though You bite your lip Grasp your wine glass tighter with sweaty hands

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The buzz around you gets louder Academic bees Busy, busy bees Where’s your place in this hive? People look around for friends Knots gathering, knots knitting together again, ties tightening You are alone on the edgelands of this room Tears are pricking behind your eyes Stupid you Close your eyes Breathe And again Shape yourself Put that wide and lovely smile on your face You can do it Stand up straight Shoulders back Move Move over there Look Another unbelonging one Standing awkwardly Body askew with the uncomfortable labour of trying to appear comfortable Another edgelander perhaps Hello. The conference overlook – have you had it? How did you feel? We turn again to the work of Karen Barad (2007) and her consideration of the ethics of response-ability. For Barad (2007), ethics are intimately intertwined with ontology and epistemology. Ethico-onto-epistemologies articulate the intra-active phenomena and co-constituted relations through which bodies are produced. Barad (2007) proposes that bodies only exist via intra-actions and becoming is ‘a logics of entanglement’ (Taylor, 2018: 87). Agential cuts constitute bodies and ‘boundaries to separate things off from each other … and brings new things into relation’ (Taylor, 2018: 87). The enactment of intra-acting agential cuts result in a doing rather than a being where certain entangled relations materialize and others do not …CUT – A look which tells you, you are not worthy; CUT – the look, and the look away, told you; CUT – a body out of place. Every intra-action matters. The edgelands, the overlook, the ways you feel when you are under scrutiny and ignored.

Knowledge production in the material turn What if we were to view the AcademicConferenceMachine as a colony of bees…

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AcademicConferenceMachine colony

…representing the governing of (human) bodies; their employment, their industriousness and their labour (Bloomberg, 2015). Members of the AcademicConferenceMachine hive gathering together for a specific purpose, the production of hive-body-honey-knowledge-(academic)-survival. The conference-hive is an exemplar of the ways in which bodies are controlled, governed and regulated (droning bodies perhaps?). Conferences can be big business replicating neoliberal notions of worth and production where knowledge is the commodity to be bought and sold. Anna Tsing calls this commodification salvage accumulation which she highlights as ‘Savage and salvage … salvage translates violence and pollution into profit’ (Tsing, 2015: 64). We ask you to consider what structures and bodies are made and unmade during conferences you go to and how might these impact on anthropocentric futures? How might these events be gendered, classed, racialized, heteronormative and focused on ableism? What sa(l)vage violences are produced via conferencing. Conferences take on a life of their own. Some have almost become corporate events and there is a hierarchy where academics are encouraged to be part of one of the ‘big’ conferences that confer prestige on those accepted to present their research. This can be daunting for scholars new to the AcademicConferenceMachine experience, where affective spaces leave marks on our own and influence other bodies. Conference spaces are striated and reify what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) called ‘Royal Science’ where learned gentlefolk presented the ‘truth’ of their research. BUT there is another partial situated, ethical and response-able way to live (Haraway, 1997) – one that accounts for those who ‘refuse distance and bring to the fore their (our) affective and embodied capacities for engagement’ (Taylor, 2021: 30). As Lorraine reminds us, ‘it is never a matter of simply opening oneself to all the forces of the universe, but always of creatively evolving one’s powers to affect and be affected by life in concert with surrounding forces’ (Lorraine, 2005: 163). Forces, flows and affects: there are other ways to conference differently!

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Earthworm Intermission Worms generate production-desire-machines. We, as authors, scholars, experimenters, endlessly diversified humans would love to be aerated, breathe fresh air and increase the level of oxygen in our bloodstreams. We need to do more and rethink. Too often our traditional conference space and its (epistemologically polluted) air generate a sense of suffocation in us and our conference attending bodies. We need to sense more and live. We cannot help this strong sensing. We need to escape. We need to breathe-together-apart. We desire the AGAIN (of the tomorrow).

Earthworm.

Time-space-affect-matter: activate conferences differently! Our personal and home life-movements get entangled with the intraactions in the AcademicConferenceMachine and through this book’s becomings. I was standing in our hall removing wallpaper and started thinking about how the becoming of research often is like tearing down old wallpaper and wondering what may occur

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or what will happen when you lay new wallpaper on the walls. Will the space (research/ experimentation) feel larger or smaller? Lighter or darker? Then I started thinking about how the pattern that occurred on the wall reminded me of the picture at the front of the Event ‘Sketching schizoid narratives’. I then went and looked at the Event and saw it was far from the same, but the thought had already produced something in and around me. Then I started thinking about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1892) book The Yellow Wallpaper. The becomings of the woman in the room and the becomings of the woman behind the wallpaper. Moving, shape-shifting, materialising different possibilities of female being and femininities in patriarchal times, which of course are our current times. How different materializations in spacetimemattering produces new and different human and non-human possibilities. How they somehow whisper in ‘new’ spactimematterings. «TIKK, TOCK? TIKK, TOCK! … you’re right …» the AcademicConferenceMachine is a clock with different sessions/numbers/felt of … What? The earthworm eats through thoughts, smells, sounds, affects, the book, the text and, and, and… The earthworm is in some way an academic-conference-earthworm-machine. When I am reading or writing, I often listen to music. Different music produces different affects in the meeting between the music, the text and body. Some music, for example, The Moonlight Sonata by van Beethoven (1801), often makes the writing just flow. Other times the music becomes so attached to an article, so even when I am not reading the article, it pops up in my body when I hear the music. When I am walking on a treadmill I often let Spotify select the music. While we were writing this book, I was once walking on the treadmill, thinking about the earthworm and this strange music hit my ear/body (DIV ART, Sidsel Endresen, 2008). It was not what I normally would call music. It was letters produced in a sort of rhythm/music. First, it made me upset and uncomfortable, then after some time it made me curious. What is this? I was walking and letting my body and the music entangle. My pulse and the pulse of the music produced pictures of earthworms eating through text. The earthworm was eating and eating and fragments of sounds/music was produced in/through/around my body and producing thoughts about earthworms in/around/through the text/book. Spacetimematterings, as a phenomena, can produce earthworm as a music-phenomena. An earthworm-musicphenomena, which entangle the matter in the moment and producing a type of musicspacetimematterings in/around/through body and text.

Abstracts: activate conferences differently! Abstracts. This is where conferences, plans for going to conferences and what we do and present at conferences begin. Of course, this is only true in one sense. What we present and do at conferences is already part of an ongoing intellectual project that we will have been engaged in for months or more likely years, either on our own or with a multitude of human and non-human others. In which case, many abstracts take their place and come to matter, that is, materialize within, many unfolding, ongoing and entangled material lines – past, present and future – of our academic lives. Abstracts are events in spacetimematterings. Condensed instances. Material moments.

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WRITE AN ABSTRACT The AcademicConferenceMachine often provides guidance on how to do this. For example, the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) has this advice on writing an abstract https://eera-ecer.de/ecer-2021-geneva/submissions/how-to-write-an-abstract/; the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) includes this advice on writing an abstract in their calls for proposals http://aareconference.com.au/call-for-abstracts/; and the International Conference on Academic Disciplines and Research Methodology (ICADRM) has this https://panel.waset.org/conference/2022/02/jeddah/ICADRM/abstracts. You will be familiar with prescriptions for abstracts from your own experiences.

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Abstract 1

Abstract 2 WAIT NERVOUSLY FOR ABSTRACT RESULT Abstracts are gatekeepers. They are the Cerberus at the gate: a large, fierce and excluding presence. They could be seen as the equivalent of border guards or bouncers outside night clubs. They permit those whose writing and ideas are deemed acceptable to pass into the AcademicConferenceMachine compound. In that sense, abstracts function as passes, as documents that enable you to pass. Abstract’s rules then are essential; abstract guidance needs to be complied with! In recognition of this, many international academic associations produce guidance for emerging and junior scholars to help them navigate their way into the compound. For example, the American Educational Research Association (AERA) has produced these abstract exemplars as it means to encourage graduate students to submit to AERA https://www.aera.net/About-AERA/ Member-Constituents/Graduate-Student-Council/Proposal-Examples-V2. WRITE AN ABSTRACT But let’s turn this around. Abstracts are reviewed by us! By you reading this and by each of us writing this! This does mean that even though abstract guidance may be something of a straitjacket, our task is to innovate within that – to make the abstract be a telling of what we want to do precisely in undoing the

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AcademicConferenceMachine. In a ghoulish perspective, we can see that the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed academic conferencing into new and uncharted waters of collaboration and innovative formats, in which technology becomes a potential enabler to create abstracts differently and to do conferencing differently too. These pandemic changes come on the back of a slow loosening up regarding the introduction of more flexible academic conference formats in mainstream conferences. At the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI), which has always embraced heterogeneity, dance, drama, painting, performance can be found in workshops alongside traditional paper formats. As post-qualitative, posthumanist and feminist materialist researchers invested in modes of thinkingdoing knowledge differently, invent your abstract in and against the normative. Make it work for you in what it is and what you need to do. That’s what we as a collective try to do.

ABSTRACT ACCEPTED Against Methodolatry: A Materialist, Post-Qualitative Invocation of Speaking in Tongues The call for evidence-based practice by policymakers and research funders is driven by the underlying assumption that research ought to focus on ‘what works’ in education. These desires have resulted in research which privileges a certain kind of knowledge, resulting in a reliance on methods that are primarily focussed on ‘traditional’ and ‘go to’ nature of talk and text or on ‘measurement’. However, the over-emphasis of evidence-based policymaking and practice has been the subject of debate and critique, which has argued that this mode of research promotes hegemony and seeks to control curriculum, processes and practices of education. To counter these approaches, Snaza and Weaver suggest that ‘educational stories could benefit from more wonder’ (2015: 7), and it is this more ‘wondering’ approach that our workshop aims to enact. In counterpoint to the imputed selectionism and reductionism of evidence-based practice approaches, our research-creation-workshopexperiment-event activates post-qualitative methodological interventions to disrupt traditional conceptions of research methods. It does this through a range of theatrical and artistic techniques which aims to ‘to create new potential for a thinking-with-and-across techniques for creative practice’ (Manning & Massumi, 2014: 88). These disruptions draw on recent work in posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013), feminist materialisms (Taylor & Hughes, 2016) and post-qualitative research thinking (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016; St. Pierre, 2016) to decentre the coherence of the self-identity of Western, humanist ‘Man’. Experimental methods and inquiry practices also open

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alternative ethico-onto-epistemological spaces for more inclusive, diverse, relational and affirmative methodological approaches to ‘method’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘ways of knowing’. In this, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship concerned with different modes of knowledge production/creation at/ in conference workshop events (Benozzo et al., 2019; Osgood et al., in press; Taylor et al., 2019). Etymology method + -o- + -latry; Noun methodolatry (uncountable) – a slavish adherence to traditionally valorized research methods. Koro-Ljungberg (2016: 8) argues that creative and critical engagement with theory and methods is a political move; she states, ‘critical social science research and qualitative work in particular needs more rejoinders to scientific reductionism and the ever-increasing lack of onto-epistemological diversity and methodological creativity’. Care must be taken in order to actively work against the calcification and ossification of method which can reify and fix research as a series of ‘true’ and ‘right’ ways of performing method/ology. This workshop is designed to enable participants to engage with a series of activities/events/experiments which are a provocation for thinking with and about methods. These speculative activities/events challenge researchers to work against kneeling at the ‘altar’ of traditional methods and their religiosity. They will problematize: one, the unified and shared language of qualitative research; two, the subjectification of the researcher as the knowing speaker and creator of inquiry language; and three, the mode of dissemination which is rooted in masculinist lineages of knowledge production. Participants will be invited to engage in experimental methodological practices to provoke thinking about methodolatry. The workshop is inspired by glossolalia, that is, speaking in tongue, and aims to challenge traditional/ecclesiastical/religious view of speaking in a language (and not only) which is not our own. We invite multiple ‘languages’, personas, defaults and linguistic abnormalities, stuttering and slowness to meet and challenge the proficient speaker of the language of method. This includes the textures of texts less heard and mostly silenced in academic inquiry (folktales, folklore, old-wives tales, chant, prayer, song) and alternative modes of drama which offers presenters and participants the opportunity to refashion and challenge claims to ‘truth’. This workshop is creative, immanent and experimental. These activities/ events/experiments may appear anarchic and non-linear; however, we take a response-able view of ethics and participation for participants. During the activities/events/experiments, we enact and produce alternative and creative understandings of what knowledge production in/through conference workshops might be and become. We draw on an expanded vision of ethics which move beyond pre-set characterizations of good/bad to right/wrong judgements to an understanding of affective ethics as an ethics of productive

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relations which express different kinds of posthuman potential (Manning & Massumi, 2014). The ethics of research-creation and participation instantiates bodily capacities, which are not separated from the world but are ethicoonto-epistemological modes of mattering in/with the world (Barad, 2007). The conference events we compose are provocative in their design, ‘enactment’ and ‘performance’, in that they deliberately set out to challenge and disturb traditional, normative and routinized ideas of what education research might be for. This allows us to call for a challenge to evidence-based discourses and the knowledge they might produce.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., KoroLjungberg, M. and Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the AcademicConferenceMachine: Post-Qualitative Re-turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research. Methodologies without Methodology. London: Sage. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Osgood, J., Taylor, C. A., Andersen, C. E., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Moxnes, A., Otterstad, A.M. Rantala, T., & Tobias-Green, K. (in press). Conferencing Otherwise: A Feminist New Materialist Writing Experiment’. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 20(6), 596–609. Snaza, N. and Weaver, J. A. (2015). ‘Introduction – Education and the Posthumanist Turn’ in N. Snaza and J. A. Weaver (eds.) Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–14. St. Pierre, E. A. (2016) Rethinking the Empirical and the Posthuman. In Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C. (eds) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 25–36. Taylor, C. A. and Hughes, C. (eds) (2016) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., and Elmenhorst, C. (2019) ‘Improvising Bag Choreographies: Disturbing Normative Ways of Doing Research’. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 17–25.

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RE-TURN TO ABSTRACT AND PREPARE FOR CONFERENCE WORKSHOP/PAPER/PRESENTATION The abstract is a plan, a small story of intent, a condensation of how you are thinking about something in the here and now. Three months later, you’ve been accepted for the conference. You return to the abstract to see that your thinking has probably already shifted a bit due to the other things that you’ve been reading, the new empirical data that has arrived or the ruminating that you’ve been doing. Eight months later, and two or three weeks to go before the presentation, your abstract appears as the fictive construct it is. How do I make this work? What do my audience expect? What do I really want to do, given where my thinking is now? WRITE AN ABSTRACT Abstract. The word signifies thought, idea, general not particular, theory rather than practice, intellectual, formal, academic, speculative metaphysical, to separate something off from something else, a summary, a synopsis, a precis. To write an abstract, then, seems to be about separation and dividing and distance. It seems to instantiate the essence of mind-body split chat characterizing Cartesian humanism. It speaks into the division of theory and practice. It sits on the dividing line of intention and action. But Also The conference abstract, in speaking of a conference performance to come, poses a summoning of the not yet, and offers a speculative opening to multiple and unforeseen possibilities. It opens a potential space for ushering in the new that can jam the cogs of the usual gearings of the AcademicConferenceMachine. An abstract can be a gap, a crack, a fissure, a line of flight for making novel and affirmative connectivities. It possesses potential to disturb knowledge production as usual by creating openings in conference spaces for ways of doing knowledge otherwise – as posthuman knowing-doing-feeling-thinkings that are ‘co-composition[al], relational, sympoietic and affirmative’ (Taylor, 2021: 39). The challenge is to orientate our abstracts to knowledge productions that ‘disrupt, expand, experiment, extend, include more, and reclaim’ (Taylor, 2021: 39). Experiment with abstract writing to dis-organize the usual expectations and conventions? How can your abstract ‘capture’ the flows and forces of research-creation? Do the shapes below help as a provocation for your abstract writing? We wonder what you might put in each box.

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Fill in the blanks …

How do you choose key words for your eventful practices? Immanent, Schizo, autopsy, bags, research-creation, string, entry … what do they ‘mean’? Does ‘meaning’ bring fixity? Can we play with language and be more-than-representational?

Doing conference-ing differently: conferences on and on, and and and, and yet to come We wrote about the AcademicConferenceMachine (Benozzo et al., 2019) as a way to stir up the conference-hive. The concept of the drone is a multiplicity of paradoxical relations – drone as a subject of conservative political order, drone as a musical melody of harmony and dissonance, drone as a refrain (c.f. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), drone as a resonant collective body, drone as remote-controlled military surveillance-destruction machine (Bloomberg, 2015). Making connections (Oh Hi – good to see you how are you?) Another question that is not a question but a chance for the questioner to talk about their own research! Mansplained again, Trying to catch you out…or maybe not, Wow – someone else is interested in my research, Coffee breaks – try to relax. Lunch – who can I sit with? Hotel living – tired, uncomfortable, jet-lagged, flights, cost, climate change. Where is the FUN?

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One of the central elements to our work is the move away from representational thinking and an anthropocentric view of the world (Taylor, 2016). Deleuze and Guattari argue representation ‘fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994: 55). Working with representation and creating categories of existence leads to arborescent schema which promote binaries and hierarchies. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss tree logic, which in their view is a pseudo-multiplicity where hierarchies and power dominate representational thought. They consider the rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) as a mechanism to disrupt tree logic and a way of working in the middle (intermezzo) to promote difference and multiplicity. Furthermore, Massumi (2015: 170) suggests that ‘naming is a technique for fixing the procedures, in the sense that you fix a compound’ producing arborescent tree logic. This book and its Events are wilful, promiscuous and unruly. They faint and feint in their attempts to propose new ways of doing, making and becoming conference presentations and workshops as sites of contestation, our Events possess some potential to undo and push against all those other attempts at making claims to knowledge as a true, absolute and colonial mapping. The CG Collective and the work we do is an intermezzo, a middling (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). We do not reify the research-creation experimentations we perform, and the Events that are included in this book, as the right or proper way to do (un) conferencing. Doing so would render our work as striated as the AcademicConferenceMachine we seek to disturb. Donna Haraway notes: It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Haraway (2016: 12) The re-turns to the Events we curate is one reading of the happenings that were created. You may have another reading that tells a new story. We hope you might be inspired to create and compose your own experimental workshops and perhaps our paths will cross at future conferences. The beauty of these speculative stories is that they have no ending, they are processual, middling and immanent and that is why they are so exciting.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Taylor, C. A. (2019). Disturbing the academicconferencemachine: Post-qualitative re-turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), 87–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ gwao.12260 Bloomberg, R. (2015). Dancing to a tune: The drone as political and historical assemblage. Culture Machine, 16, 1–23. https://culturemachine.net/vol-16-drone-cultures/ dancing-to-a-tune/ Carey, N., Fairchild, N., Taylor, C. A., Koro, M., Elmenhorst, C., & Benozzo, A. (2021). Autopsy as a site and mode of inquiry: De/composing the ghoulish hu/man gaze. Qualitative Research. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794121999005. Deleuze, G. (1992). Postscripts on the society of control. October, 59: 3–7. https://www. jstor.org/stable/778828 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (Trans. B. Massumi). London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (Trans. G. Burchell & H. Tomlinson). London: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (1987). Dialogues (Trans. H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam). London: The Athlone Press. Endresen, S. (2008). DIV ART. https://open.spotify.com/album/6XMEz29VTHGVb fikc17ZoK?highlight=spotify:track:6u3FbW1tMiP7vlyGbWnzrj. Accessed 16 May 2021. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_ Meets_ Oncomousetm: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Lorraine, T. (2005). Ahab and becoming-whale: The nomadic subject in smooth space. In I. Buchanan & G. Lambert (Eds.), Deleuze and space (pp. 159–175). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2015). Toward a process seed bank: What research-creation can do. Media-N, 11(3). http://median.newmediacaucus.org/research-creationexplorations/toward-a-process-seed-bank-what-research-creation-can-do/. Accessed 15 May 2021. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Massumi, B. (2016). Working principals. In SenseLab (Ed. A. Murphie), The go-to how-to book of anarchiving (pp. 6–7). Montreal: The SenseLab. Perkins Gilman, C. (1892). The yellow wallpaper (2016 edition). Sweden: Wisehouse Classics. Taylor, C. A. (2016). Rethinking the empirical in higher education: Post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 40(3), 311–324. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2016.1256984 Taylor, C. A. (2018). Each intra-action matters: Towards a posthuman ethics for engaging response-ability in higher education pedagogic practice-ings. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, T. Shefer & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education (pp. 81–96). London: Bloomsbury. Taylor, C. A. (2021). Knowledge matters: Five propositions concerning the reconceptualisation of knowledge in feminist new materialist, posthuman and postqualitative

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approaches. In K. Murris (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist terrains across discipline (pp. 22–42). Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., & Elmenhorst, C. (2019). Improvising bag choreographies: Disturbing normative ways of doing research. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 17–25. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800418767210 Taylor, C. A., Hughes, C., & Ulmer, J. B. (2020). Transdisciplinary feminist research: Innovations in theory, method and practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. van Beethoven, L. (1801). Piano Sonata no. 14 in C-sharp minor ‘Moonlight Sonata’, Op. 27 no. 2. IMSLP. https://imslp.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No.14,_Op.27/2_(Beethoven, _Ludwig_van). Accessed 16 May 2021. Wells, T. C., Carlson, D. L., & Koro, M. (2021). Intra-public intellectualism: Critical qualitative inquiry in the Academy. Gorham, ME: Myers Education Press. Williams, J. (2011). Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time: A critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

INDEX

Abramovich, M. 79 abstracts 145, 198–205 academia 33, 119, 138 academic: academic bodies 4, 26, 101; academic writing 13–14, 47, 127, 142, 175 academic knowledge production: new forms/practices 5, 10, 21, 53, 68, 75–76, 88, 108, 168, 186 AcademicConferenceMachine 1–14, 19, 21, 27–28, 30–31, 43, 72, 87–88, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102–105, 107, 146, 154, 157–158, 160, 164, 166, 168–169, 172, 174–177, 168, 189–190, 192, 194, 196–204 affect(s) 4, 7, 23–24, 27, 33, 41–44, 47, 75, 92, 96–97, 102, 110–111, 114, 118, 149–150, 158–160, 164, 166, 169, 196 affected 5, 41, 83, 110, 164, 196–198 affective 8, 57, 110, 113, 119, 132–133, 138, 196; affective attunements 168; affective capacities 110; affective cartographies 107, 109; affective circulations 168; affective dimensions 127; affective encounters 47, 107, 109, 119, 158; affective entanglements 50, 56; affective ethics 202; affective experience 99; affective flows 118, 189; affective force(s) 159–161, 166; affective intensities 160; affective matterings 92; affective practices 119; affective productions 110; affective relations 44, 158; affective resonances 9;

affective spaces 196; affective states 180; affective turn 7, 157 affectivities 57 affirmative 6, 37, 64, 68, 131, 136, 162, 169, 202, 204 agency 6–7, 57, 63, 68, 127–128, 132, 143–144, 157–158, 165, 167; agency of matter 6 agential cuts 25, 35, 83, 93, 97–98, 108, 110, 195 American Educational Research Association (AERA) 3, 9, 109, 157–158, 165–166, 200 analysis 24, 150, 155 analytical 2, 10, 14, 53, 110 anarchive(s) 8, 164, 190 animal(s) 56, 59, 81, 124, 136, 145, 153 Anthropocene 4, 59; Anthropocentric 6, 53, 59–60, 68, 83, 102, 196, 206 anti-productions of knowledge 179 apparatus 19, 23, 35, 97; apparatuses 23–24, 91, 98, 102 archive(s) 8, 116, 118 artefacts 50 arts-based 3, 35, 108, 126 assemblage(s) 7, 9, 13, 20, 23–24, 26–27, 32, 40, 43, 53, 61, 68, 73, 83, 97, 107, 115–116, 119, 128, 145, 149–150, 155, 167, 172, 189, 192 atmosphere 132 audience(s) 9, 20–21, 35, 74, 127, 149, 154, 167, 169, 172, 174–175, 180, 184, 204 austerity 54

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autoethnography 127–131, 166; autoethnographic 127, 166; postautoethnography 130 autopsy(s) 11, 71–78, 84–88; autopsy-like 71–73, 86, 88 autopsical 84; autopsical happenings 72; autopsy/autopsical practices/practicings 75, 87–88, 135; autopsical sight 85; autopsical somatechnics 87 bags 11–12, 20, 28, 30–45, 52, 57, 66, 137–138, 146, 154, 205; bags-autopsy 35–38, 44 Barad, K. 7–8, 10, 19, 25, 53, 55, 56, 68, 84, 94–95, 97, 100, 132, 134, 196 Baudrillard, J. 161, 166 becoming(s) 3–4, 20, 22–23, 26, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42, 44, 53, 64, 75, 84, 92–96, 97, 99–100, 104, 110, 118, 123, 128, 131, 133, 153, 155, 157–160, 162, 164–167, 169, 183–184, 191–194, 197–198, 206; becoming otherwise 169; becoming(s)with 126, 169; becoming-woman 118 being 5–6, 21, 45, 54–55, 63, 68, 80, 85, 94, 110, 124, 126, 134, 136, 179, 195 Bennett, J. 7, 132 Bergson, H. 40–41, 115 Bernini, G. L. 162, 164 binary 56, 64, 67, 169 birdsong 54 Black 5, 37, 56, 60 black bin bags 11; black (garbage) bag 38, 42 Black women 87 body 9, 33, 37, 39, 41–44, 52, 56, 59, 63–65, 71–74, 76–83, 85–86, 88, 91–101, 104, 110, 114, 126–127, 129–130, 133–134, 138, 149, 154, 157–159, 162, 164–165, 167, 191, 194–196, 198, 202, 204–205; body/bodies of knowledge 12, 71, 86, 135; bodies 8–9, 12–13, 21, 23–27, 32–37, 41–43, 47–48, 50, 52–53, 55, 57–62, 64–68, 71–72, 74, 76, 79–88, 91–95, 97–102, 104, 108–111, 118, 126, 128–130, 132, 134–137, 152, 158–160, 162, 165–167, 175, 189, 191–192, 195– 197; bodily 7, 23, 26, 48, 50, 58, 60, 66, 74, 76, 85–86, 88, 92, 132, 162, 191, 203; bodily hurt 87; body without organs 76 boundary 52, 96; boundaried 63; boundaries 7, 10, 25, 36, 52–53, 58, 64–67, 80, 85, 92, 119, 126, 128, 130, 135, 145, 149, 151, 175, 195 Braidotti, R. 59–60, 111, 118, 132, 169–170 Butler, J. 152

cacti 49 campus 49, 57 capital 13, 54, 61, 62, 88; capitalism 59, 167; capitalist 59, 61, 152 carrier bag 30, 136–138 Cartesian 10, 53, 110, 204 cartography 108–109, 117–118; cartographic mapping 107, 117; cartographical 113, 118–119, 180; cartographies 108–109, 112, 115, 118–119, 176, 179 CG Collective 11–14, 92, 102, 144, 192–193, 206 childhood(s) 7, 26, 50, 164, 178 choreography 40, 43–44, 138; choreograph 44; choreographed 128; choreographies 13, 32, 35, 44–45, 64, 92, 138; choreographic 4 Christ 79–81 civilization 56, 59 Cixous, H. 114, 128 clapping 54 classify 32, 65, 168; classifying 56; classification(s) 56, 102, 153 clean 49–50, 53, 56–58, 60–62, 64–68, 72, 88; cleaner(s) 4, 49, 57–58; cleaning 57, 60, 66–67; cleanliness 66; clean-living 76; clean university 50, 57, 60 clock(s) 97–98, 193, 198; clocking 98 co-compose 11–12, 37, 44; co-composed 9, 12–13; co-composing 191 co-composter 11, 14 collaboration(s) 14, 87, 100–101, 107, 127, 135, 165, 169, 201 collage 114, 118, 149–150 collective 12, 40, 67, 71, 85, 108, 114–115, 119, 126, 128, 146, 155, 184, 191–192, 201, 205 companion species 37, 124 compose 9, 33, 66, 91, 100, 167, 192, 203, 206; composing 9, 11, 13, 14, 144, 191–192 compost 10, 14, 21, 53; composters 67; composting 13–14 concept(s) 6, 8, 13, 52, 59, 67, 85, 126, 159, 161, 164, 205; concept-practice 8, 25 Conservative Laestadian 180, 186 constellation(s) 68, 84, 134, 184 constitutive 57, 67, 128, 151; co-constitutive 132 conviviality 67, 191 co-production(s) 92, 94, 118, 165, 176, 184, 186 corporeal 9, 64; corporeality 42, 72, 131 corporate 196

Index  211

corporations 61 corpse 72, 86, 88, 135; corpse-ifying 136; corpse-like 72 courage 138 Covid-19 5, 11, 49, 57, 59, 65–67, 100, 201; Coronavirus 49, 65 craft(s) 74, 126, 136; crafting 125, 175 creative 3, 7–9, 13, 20, 68, 102, 108, 113, 118–119, 125, 157, 172, 179, 192, 201– 202; creative experimentation 68, 118; creative and innovative modes of writing practices 7, 13; non-linear writing 13–14 critical 6, 8, 71, 77, 107, 110–111, 113, 119, 124–125, 132, 137, 202 culture(s) 4, 10, 50, 53, 60–61, 65, 78, 85–87, 118, 124, 127, 143, 162 Cuoghi, R. 79–81 cut(s) 24–25, 37, 41–43, 65, 83, 96–100, 102, 107–110, 113, 117–119, 141, 149, 159, 167, 195; cutting 41, 78, 159 cutting(s)-together-apart 23–25, 37, 43, 93, 108–109, 111, 113–114 cyborg(s) 50, 52, 64, 124–125, 135; cyborgian 64, 66, 136 data 10, 14, 19–21, 23–28, 32, 37, 44, 47–48, 64, 67, 96–98, 102, 108, 134–135, 145, 148–150, 154–155, 158, 166, 176, 180, 184, 186, 204; data assemblage 24, 145, 150; data as phenomena 23; data-bag 20, 26, 43–44; data encounters 24; data litterings 150, 154; data material 96, 148; data-materiality 98; data- table(s) 96, 102; data-trail(s) 141–142, 144–146, 148–149, 150, 154; data-trailing 150 dead 43, 73, 78–79, 86–87, 135–136, 161–162, 164; deadlines 162; deadly 79; deadness 78, 162; dead wrapped 79 death(s) 54–55, 59, 65, 76, 79–81, 83, 87, 136, 162; deathly 66 debris 58–59 decompose(s) 14, 21, 36, 83; decomposing(s) 22, 135; decomposition 79–81, 85 Deleuze, G. 8–9, 32, 40, 67, 83, 115, 117, 128, 179, 189, 192, 196, 203 Deleuzo-Guattarian 13 desire 32, 142, 153, 162, 166, 170, 176, 183, 197; desiring machines 179; desiring spaces 12 difference(s) 19–21, 24, 28, 36, 43, 60, 81, 124, 136–137, 150, 156, 161, 206; differences that matter 25, 65, 124 diffract 37; diffracted 20, 68, 96, 134; diffractive 8, 50, 93, 107, 189;

diffraction(s) 19, 22–23, 44, 96, 184; diffractionstables 95 dirt 11, 47–48, 50, 52–53, 55–68, 137–138; dirt’s 47–48, 50, 53, 56–58, 60, 62–63, 67–68; dirty 41, 53, 56, 58, 61–63, 67–68, 77, 82, 153, 155, 156; dirty bodies 60–61; dirty bombs 62; dirtying 67; dirty labour 61; dirty matterings 65; dirtiness 66; dirty words 60; dirty work 60–61 displacement 6, 25 disrupt 14, 28, 30–31, 33, 83, 87, 97, 107– 109, 154–155, 172, 176, 201, 204, 206; disrupting 3, 102, 158, 175; disruption(s) 87, 160, 169, 201; disruptive 77, 93, 144, 151, 168 disturb 1, 21, 28, 66, 83, 156–157, 174–176, 180, 189, 203, 204, 206; disturbance(s) 8, 14, 21, 25, 28, 44, 55, 68, 71, 88, 164, 169, 172, 174–175, 184, 189; disturbed 148, 172, 180, 186, 189; disturbing 11–12, 19, 27, 43, 60, 66, 71, 172, 186, 189 dissected 76, 85; dissecting 71; dissection 85–86, 72 dog(s) 38–39, 51, 53, 59, 93, 102, 124 doing(s) 2, 5, 8–9, 14, 19, 21, 25–26, 28, 32, 41–45, 47–49, 53, 60, 67–68, 71, 91, 93, 95–97, 99, 110–111, 113, 123–126, 131, 134–135, 137–138, 142, 146, 150–157, 159–162, 168, 170, 175, 189, 191, 195, 201, 204–206 door(s) 39–40, 49, 57, 99, 145, 159–160; doorway 27 dualistic: ontology 135; non-dualistic 9, 192 duress 56–58, 60–61, 93 dying 124 ear(s) 72, 179, 184, 198 earthworm(s) 11, 14, 99, 144, 148, 197–198; commenting 11; composing 11; composting 11; Conceptual Personae 14; decomposes/ing 21–22; differentiations 21; disorganizes 21; disturbs 21; disturbances 28; disrupts 21; doubt 21; textual (co-)collaborator 14; tunnelling 13–14; undiscipline 21 earworm 79, 186 ecriture feminine 13, 131 education 6, 12, 26, 107, 109, 111, 192, 201 embodied 5, 43, 76, 84–85, 92, 109, 113, 117–118, 124, 132, 160, 196; embodiment 61, 124, 127; embodies 144, 166 embody 41

212 Index

emerge 6, 9, 14, 24, 28, 31, 76, 84, 94, 97, 107, 132, 138, 167, 172, 192; emerging 5, 54, 118, 132, 160, 176, 184, 200 emergence 67, 164–166, 176 emergent 9, 32, 35, 50, 87, 113, 119, 133, 137, 149, 155, 168, 192 empirical 21, 84, 96, 111, 180, 204 enabling constraints 9, 35, 44, 192; enabling constrainers 44 encounter(s) 9, 19, 23–24, 28, 43, 47, 57, 64, 92–96, 107, 109, 113, 118–119, 132, 134, 141, 151, 154–155, 158, 164–165, 176, 180, 184; encountered 26; encountering(s) 43, 76, 167 Enlightenment 85–86 entangle 9, 37, 61, 68, 91, 104, 109–111, 118, 138, 160, 176, 192, 198; entangled 2, 21, 35, 41, 60, 62, 67, 83, 91–93, 95, 97, 107, 126, 128–129, 132, 146, 152, 155, 168, 175–176, 189, 195, 197–198; entangled practices 176; entanglement(s) 12, 20, 23–24, 35–36, 47–48, 50, 55–56, 58, 62–63, 91–96, 110, 128–131, 153, 157, 160, 164, 184, 192, 195; entangling 35, 44, 98 epistemology 94, 195; epistemological(ly) 23–24, 85, 109, 126, 132, 135, 141, 197 erosion(s) 144, 150, 152–155 erratic 56, 137 ethico-onto-epistemology 94–95, 100, 105, 136, 146, 195, 202–203; ethicoonto-epistemologies 105, 195; ethicalontological-epistemological 12, 23–24, 85, 88, 95, 100, 146, 192, 202–203 ethic(s) 6, 13, 94–95, 110, 186, 195, 202–203; ethical 4, 6, 13, 83, 95, 104, 107, 109–111, 113, 115, 126, 137, 169, 196; ethically 119, 155 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (EQCI) 9, 131, 141 European Man of Reason 60 evaluate 169 Event(s) 1, 3–5, 7–14, 19–28, 28, 31–33, 35–37, 41–42, 44, 47–50, 52–53, 56, 61, 64, 66–67, 71–72, 74–78, 83–84, 87–88, 91–97, 100, 102, 104, 107–110, 113–115, 118–119, 125, 127–128, 131, 135, 137–138, 141, 144, 146, 148, 150–152, 154–155, 157–158, 166–167, 169–170, 172, 175–176, 179–180, 184, 186, 189, 190–192, 196, 198, 201–203, 206; eventful 118–119, 131, 177, 191–192, 205 evocations 50 evocative 127

evolution 30; evolutionary 126 evokes 79 experience 9, 14, 44, 79–88, 87, 91, 99, 105, 109–110, 127–128, 164, 169 experiment 19–20, 31–33, 43, 47, 50, 79, 81–82, 91, 97, 102, 127–128, 135, 142, 155, 172, 177, 180, 201, 204; experimental 8, 10, 19, 21, 24, 26, 43–44, 50, 53, 71–73, 86–87, 92, 94–95, 102, 104, 113, 119, 132, 141–142, 150, 155, 165, 201–202, 206; experimentation(s) 8, 35, 43, 55, 84, 72–73, 76, 87–88, 93, 107, 118, 149, 151, 168, 192, 198 extract 135; extractive brutalities 152; extractive industries 152; extractive logics 53 face-to-face 54, 165 Fairchild, N. 19, 52 feminism(s) 115, 126, 137; feminist 7, 61, 67, 78, 87, 107–111, 113–115, 118–119, 127–128, 131, 137, 149 feminist knowledge production 107, 109 feminist materialist 1, 3–6, 13, 31, 66, 127, 132, 134–137, 157, 189, 201; feminist materialism(s) 1, 6, 201 Ferrando, F. 7, 61 flesh(y) 21, 59, 76–77, 84, 124, 132, 137, 162 flourishing 14, 123 fluid(s) 47, 55, 57, 80, 86, 113, 150, 179, 191 forces 35, 56, 59, 80, 91, 97, 102, 104, 137, 146, 158–160, 161–162, 164, 166–168, 179, 196–197, 204 Foucault, M. 56, 102, 128 frame(s) 1, 30, 49, 62, 83, 88, 101, 109, 119, 136, 145–146, 151–154, 157, 156–160, 165, 174–175 fusion(s) 8, 47, 50, 59, 64, 124, 135, 186 fusional 47, 65 future(s) 8, 10, 13, 22, 29, 46, 50, 54, 60, 68, 77, 94, 104, 114–115, 119, 131, 137, 176, 179, 186, 190, 196, 199, 207 Gale, K. & Wyatt, J. 128 gaze 40, 78, 85–88, 130, 135–137, 162, 169 gender 7, 13, 20, 24, 33, 47, 56, 64–65, 88, 111, 113, 115, 119, 128, 143, 180; gendered 4, 6, 20, 30, 33, 37, 47, 50, 57–58, 61, 64–66, 107–109, 114, 116, 118, 160, 196 Gender and Education Association (GEA) 9, 32, 47, 50–52, 128 Gender Work and Organization (GWO) 9, 19, 25–27, 29

Index  213

gender-in-the-making 13, 107–108, 110–112, 114, 118–119 global 4, 59–62 Global South 5 God Trick 76, 136 God’s eye 164 Grosz, E. 42 Guattari, F. 32, 67, 115, 117, 128, 179, 189, 196, 206 Guattarian 13, 176 habits 54, 57, 72, 92, 158–160 hair 36, 52, 57, 135, 172 happening(s) 8, 10, 13, 19, 30, 71–72, 85, 88, 96–97, 99–100, 109–111, 119, 133, 141–142, 144–146, 148–149, 150–152, 154–155, 167–168, 184, 206 Haraway, D. 7, 30, 60, 76, 78, 110–111, 124–126, 135–138, 206 heterogeneity 1, 35, 117, 179 heteronormative 87, 196 Hickey-Moody, A. 6 higher education 12, 26, 128, 132, 192 hope 2, 6, 12–14, 45, 76, 112, 138, 150, 155, 168, 170, 206 human(s) 6–10, 12, 21–26, 30–31, 34–35, 37, 40–41, 43–44, 47–48, 51, 56–60, 62–65, 67, 72, 78, 80–81, 83, 85, 88, 91, 93–94, 96–100, 102, 104, 107, 109–111, 113–114, 118–119, 124–125, 128–129, 131–133, 135–138, 144, 150, 155, 159– 160, 165, 167, 176, 189, 192, 196–197, 198; human-animal 124 humanism 6, 83, 204 humanist 6, 9, 24, 56, 67, 83, 135, 160, 201 humanities 85 hybrid(s) 37, 64, 125, 127, 137 IKEA Bag 36, 42–43 images 14, 24, 40–41, 47, 50, 74, 86, 96, 108, 114, 146, 149 imaginary 62, 67, 137, 154 immanence 110 immanent 8–9, 13, 24, 36, 75, 87, 102, 107, 113, 128, 131, 176, 186, 191–192, 202, 205–206; immanent co-creation of knowledge 8 improvisation(s) 20, 31–32, 35–38, 40–41, 44, 175, 192 Indigenous 60, 111, 124, 136; Indigenous scholars 6–7; Indigenous critical scholarship 6; Indigenous ways of thinking 6

indisciplined 31, 192; indisciplined pollutions 87; indisciplined research/ inquiry 107, 111, 113, 119, 141, 189 inequalities 4–5, 57, 61 inquiry: undisciplined 7, 31, 141–142, 144, 148–150, 154–155, 168 intensity/intensities 9, 26, 55, 134, 138, 160, 162, 167–168, 180, 184, 192 interdisciplinary 127 intermezzo 189, 206 intermission(s) 189–191, 197 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) 9, 91, 141, 172, 201 intra-act 19–20, 24, 42, 96–97, 100, 150; intra-action(s) 7, 9, 50, 33, 35, 88, 92, 94–95, 97–98, 100, 104, 169, 192, 195, 197; intra-active 57, 63, 67–68, 88, 93–94, 157–158, 165, 167, 195 invent 43, 157, 201; invention(s) 35, 141, 144 iPad 11, 35, 42–43 jellyfish 58 joy/joyful 26, 28, 53–55, 78, 124–125, 160, 190 justice 110–111, 116 keynotes 4, 191 kin 142, 153, 155 kinship 131, 137 Klaver, E. 85 Klee, P. 177 knots: knotting 107, 123, 125–127, 195, 206 knowing 12, 20–21, 28, 41, 45, 47, 49, 53, 61, 67, 72, 84, 94, 98, 100, 102, 124, 127, 133–137, 148, 151, 155, 159, 160–161, 167, 169, 172, 175, 202, 204 knowledge Preface 1–6, 8–12, 14, 19, 21, 23–24, 26, 28, 32–33, 35, 41, 43, 47–48, 53–57, 61, 63–68, 71–73, 7–76, 83–88, 93–94, 97, 100, 104–105, 107–108, 110– 111, 113, 115–116, 118–119, 123–124, 126–130, 133–136, 139, 141–142, 144, 146, 148, 151–156, 158–159, 168, 172, 179, 186, 189, 191–192, 195–196, 201– 204, 206; knowledge flows 174–176, knowledge-making 1, 12, 26, 32, 67, 73, 76, 108, 110–111, 113, 139, 168, 192; false knowledge 152, 172, 197, 206 Koro, M. 19, 141 Koro-Ljungberg, M. 7–8, 13–14, 20, 23, 44, 102, 113, 119, 154, 168, 201–202 language 11, 56, 60, 99, 113, 127, 145–146, 202, 205

214 Index

Le Guin, U. 30, 136 leaky 50, 60, 97 Lenz Taguchi, H. 24, 93, 107, 118 light 11–12, 25, 37, 82, 99, 126, 132–133, 143, 172, 190, 198 lines 7, 8, 19, 28, 36–37, 54, 75, 77, 87–88, 94, 96, 107, 109, 115–118, 145, 160, 172, 175–176, 179, 180, 183–184, 189, 190, 198 living 13, 22, 65, 77, 79, 88, 96, 100, 123–124, 127, 143, 158, 205 lockdown 49 machine Preface 1–4, 14, 19, 21, 27–28, 30–31, 43, 61, 71, 87–88, 91, 93–94, 97, 99, 100, 102–105, 107, 124, 146, 154, 157–158, 160, 164–169, 172, 174–177, 179, 186, 189, 190, 192, 195–201, 204–206; machinic 91, 179, 192 male gaze 78, 162 man 56, 60, 62, 81–82, 123, 145, 157 Manchester 25, 162 Manning, E. 7–9, 31, 35, 43–44, 76, 81, 100, 110, 113, 131, 134, 151, 153, 167–168, 179, 180, 190, 192, 201, 203 Mantegna, A. 79, 81 masks 54, 58, 74, 146 Massumi, B. 7–9, 33, 35, 99, 110, 113, 131, 159, 164, 176, 189, 190, 192, 201, 203, 206 material preface 3, 7, 9, 12, 23, 27–28, 41–42, 47–48, 53, 55–57, 60–67, 72–73, 76, 85, 96, 98, 109, 111, 117, 128, 131, 134, 137, 189, 191, 195, 198 material moments 134, 198 material-discursive preface 3, 7, 9, 12, 23, 25, 27, 57–58, 60–61, 65, 93–95, 109, 117, 166; material and discursive 7, 109, 117; material-virtual 12 materialities 25–26, 31, 43–44, 57, 63, 87, 94, 96, 107, 109, 111, 113, 118–119, 168 matter 9–10, 12, 23–26, 31, 33, 35, 42–43, 47–48, 53, 55–57, 61–63, 65–68, 76, 80, 88, 91–92, 94, 96–97, 100, 104, 123–124, 126–127, 130, 132–134, 138, 189; mattering(s) 4, 23, 30, 33, 35–36, 61, 63, 65, 68, 72, 91, 95, 100, 129, 132–133, 168, 203 McCormack, D. 43 meaning 10, 25, 28, 37, 53, 83, 85, 91, 94, 97, 117, 129, 132, 135, 165–166, 169, 177–179, 205 Medusa 124–125, 131, 134–135, 137–138 memento-mori 83–84 memory 57, 114, 134, 162, 164

mess 21–22, 67, 77, 84, 88, 148, 153, 158, 169 measure 5, 172; measurement 76, 201 method(s) 72–73, 91, 129, 134, 202; method assemblage 73, 94; undisciplined 8, 73, 83–85, 88, 126, 134, 144, 150, 164, 201–202 methodology 8–9, 62, 87, 118–119, 129, 133, 141, 145, 166, 199 methodolatry 201–202 microshock(s) 159, 167 migrants 59 Milan 162 minor 43, 81, 123, 144, 167–168 minor gesture 43, 81, 144, 167–168 modernity 59 mole 143–144, 153, 155 molecular 50 moments 23–24, 41, 55, 64, 68, 93, 105, 134, 155, 164, 172, 198 more-than-human 31, 34–35, 88, 167 movement(s) 8, 21, 23–27, 36–37, 40–42, 44, 49, 76, 87, 91, 93, 96–97, 104, 110, 119, 127, 131, 133–134, 137–138, 146, 149, 150, 152–155, 160, 162, 164, 167, 172, 180, 183–184, 189, 197 multidirectionality 172 multivocal 172 multiple 1, 4, 12–13, 20–24, 30, 37, 42, 49, 86, 91, 117–118, 125, 127–128, 144, 153, 165–166, 179, 184, 189–208; multiplicities 9, 21; multiplicity 10, 53, 55, 68, 92, 96, 107, 109, 134, 172, 186, 205–206 Mulvey, L. 162 naked 73, 78–79, 81–82 narrative 13, 30, 109, 116, 128, 153–154, 162, 165, 172–188, 198 nature 4, 6, 10, 50, 53, 56, 61, 63, 78, 85–86, 88, 110, 118, 124, 162, 165, 168, 176, 201 necro-politics 78 New York 166 nomad 191; nomadic 1, 10, 28, 53, 55, 128, 169–170, 176 non-human 6–7, 12, 21–26, 31, 41, 43, 47–48, 57–59, 62–65, 91, 93–94, 96–100, 102, 104, 106, 109, 111, 113, 118–119, 128–129, 131, 137–138, 144, 150, 165, 167, 189, 192, 198 non-linear 10, 13–14, 28, 53, 108, 118–119, 128, 142, 202 non-representational theories 2, 7, 164–166; non-representational theories and methodologies 2, 164

Index  215

normativity 114, 180; of a conference space 144; of conference 28 objective 67, 83, 86, 124 objects 9, 20–22, 25–27, 28, 30, 32–34, 37, 41, 44, 47, 50, 59, 65, 72, 76, 79, 88, 101, 108, 113, 118, 135, 144, 145, 146, 149, 151, 158, 161, 165, 172 objectifying gaze 87, 136 observation 44, 85, 96, 135 ocular 84; occularism 72, 87, 135; ocularcentrism 88 online conference 5, 100, 165 ontological 6, 23, 67, 113, 126, 132, 137, 141, 179; ontological turn 113, 148 optics 75, 87, 134–136 order word 83 ordinary 47, 67, 78, 158 other 43, 52, 59, 98, 135–136, 144, 152, 161, 184 other-than-human 6–7, 9, 12, 31, 100, 192 pace 133 Palatinus, D. L. 86 pandemic 5, 11, 48, 53, 57, 59, 65–67, 201 participants 9, 20, 26, 28, 37, 41–43, 50, 51, 66, 72–76, 88, 92, 94, 108, 110–115, 134, 145, 148, 149, 156, 168, 172, 174, 186, 191, 202 participatory 132, 180 past-present 8, 21, 28, 48, 53, 67, 164, 190 Pecha Kucha 40, 44, 74 pedagogy 132; pedagogical 3, 68, 109, 110, 119, 144, 148, 150, 151, 177; pedagogical sketchbook 177 performance 9, 17, 35, 42–44, 73, 74, 79, 166, 168, 191, 203 performative objects 34 perverse 134–138, 162 PhEmaterialisms 7, 108 phenomena 7, 14, 22–23, 25, 41, 43, 88, 91, 93–96, 98, 101, 152, 195, 198 plastic 1, 20, 21, 38, 41, 58, 59, 64, 74, 136, 145, 152 play 22, 26, 28, 43, 64, 66, 84, 92–93, 97, 100, 102, 108, 119, 123–124, 141, 148, 157, 160, 164, 180, 184, 205; playful 12, 26, 92–93, 107–108, 113–114, 118, 132, 142, 155, 160, 191–192; playing 52, 64, 87, 167 Pluriversity 7 Polluted 61, 197; pollution 58, 154, 196 post-anthropocentric 6 post-authorship 13 post-autoethnography 130

post-disciplinary scholarship 6, 88, 137 posthumanism(s) 6, 56, 61, 107, 111, 119; posthumanist 1, 3–4, 6, 13, 31, 66–67, 130, 132, 134, 135–137, 157, 201 post-methodologies 7 postpersonal 129–130, 189 post-qualitative methodology 1, 3, 6–8, 11, 13, 19, 21, 24, 31, 32, 35, 56, 189, 201 potential 45, 47, 57, 60, 62, 64, 94, 100, 153, 155, 160, 161, 175, 189, 192, 203, 204; new line of potential 8, 19, 28, 189 power iii, 8, 33, 58, 60–61, 88, 115, 119, 121, 124–125, 128, 135, 137, 151–152, 161–162, 189, 206; power relations 109, 117 practice(s) 7–8, 13–14, 20–21, 23, 25–26, 30–32, 35, 53, 57, 59–61, 63, 65, 67–68, 71, 73, 76–77, 83, 85–88, 98, 100, 102, 107, 110–111, 113–115, 118–119, 124–127, 130–135, 137, 144, 146, 150, 152–153, 155, 158, 168–169, 176, 189, 191, 201–202, 205; practice-ings 8, 133, 135–137, 145, 153, 155, 175–176, 179, 192, 201, 204; practicings 9, 73, 75, 84, 88, 168 praxis 62, 153 process philosophies 2 processual 35, 94, 206 progress 56, 59, 159 provocations 7, 8, 10, 71, 76, 92, 108, 114 quantum Field theory (QTF) 55 Rantala, T. 12 refrain 179, 205 regulate 91, 174; regulated iii, 57, 87, 174, 176, 192 relation 1, 47, 62–64, 111, 113, 127, 130, 154; relations 10, 36, 37, 44, 59, 63, 110, 113, 119, 126–127, 134, 158, 184, 195, 203, 207; relationalities 6, 9, 47, 95, 100, 169; relationality 31, 64, 113, 117, 170 research xiii, 6, 8, 21, 32–33, 35, 47, 62, 67, 83, 96, 108, 110, 113, 118–119, 127, 131–135, 137, 144, 146, 150, 154–155, 164–165, 168, 196, 20–202; undisciplined research 141, 148, 189 research-creation 7, 8, 9, 31, 37, 40, 43, 50, 73, 74, 87, 92, 110, 119, 132, 192, 203, 206 researcher-body 158 researcher-seduction-body 157, 164–165, 167 resistance 32, 128, 144, 159

216 Index

response-able i, 4, 62, 83, 105, 110, 127, 169, 186, 195, 202; ethical responseabilities 196 re-turn 10, 11, 14, 22, 37, 44, 48, 53, 55, 67, 72, 77, 85, 93, 96, 104, 108, 109, 118, 125, 127, 139, 141–142, 144, 166, 172, 176; re-turning 10, 20, 21, 53, 55, 180 rhizomatic arrangements 176 rhizome 1, 117, 206; rhizomic 55, 128 rhythm(s) 57, 175, 134, 133, 198 Rome 162, 164 ruptures 164, 189, 190 safe 49, 57, 87 schizo 172–188 schizoid 13, 172, 174, 186, 198; schizoid data 176; schizoid lines 176; schizoid narratives 172–188; schizoid polyvocality 180; schizoid subjectivities 176 science 7, 86, 124, 126, 153 seduction(s) 157–171; seduction scholarship 157, 162, 167, 169 sensorium 74 sensory 41, 50, 107, 132, 154 shadow 47, 62, 133 shoes 20, 57, 58, 81 sight 3, 41, 72, 84–85, 87, 88, 135 situated 20, 76, 78, 94, 184 situated knowledge 129, 176 sketch 71, 145, 177, 178; sketches 176, 177, 179; sketching 179, 184 Skype 11, 14, 35, 41, 42, 96, 160, 165 slow 152; slowness 202, 134 somatechnics 58, 72, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93 sound 25, 74, 88, 97, 99, 149, 157, 172, 178, 198 space(s) xiii, 3–5, 8, 11–12, 19–23, 25, 28, 26, 35–37, 41, 44, 47, 50, 55, 57, 61–62, 64–65, 72–75, 83, 81, 87, 88, 92, 94, 97–101, 107–109, 118–119, 125–126, 132–135, 138, 144, 148, 150, 154, 156, 160, 167–168, 172, 174–176, 189, 191–192, 197–198, 202, 204 spacetimemattering: space-timemattering(s) 19, 22–24, 33, 42–43, 91, 93–94, 96–98, 100, 104–105, 115, 130, 198 species 35, 37, 44, 56, 124, 136 speculate 19, 24, 47–48, 157; speculation 86, 190; speculative 8–9, 11, 19, 30, 53, 62, 75, 126, 189, 202, 204, 206 spider 12, 123, 125, 134 Spinozan 110 spy 143–145; spy/mole 144–145 Stafford, B. 86

stations 35, 44, 73, 74, 149 stay with the trouble 14, 53, 124, 138 Stewart, K. 158 story 12, 42, 102, 124, 127, 164, 176, 204, 206; stories 30, 83, 100, 101, 136, 160, 164, 172, 201; storytelling 30, 176 striation 31, 43, 107, 164, 166 string 12, 108, 123–140, 166, 205; SF 126–129, 131, 134, 137–138; stringing 67, 123, 126–127, 130–131, 134, 138; string figuring 4, 123–140 student(s) 5, 49, 53, 57, 60, 66, 86, 87, 88, 108, 132, 148, 149, 191, 200 subject 7, 8, 22, 34, 43, 44, 79, 85, 109, 113, 117, 126, 135, 158, 161, 166, 175, 184, 192, 201, 205; subjectivities 95, 135, 176, 187; subjectivity 7, 118, 151, 179, 180; subjectification 184, 202 subversion 140–156 superposition 98 sustainability 68, 146 Sweden 58, 71, 88 sympoiesis 123–140 temporal 41, 57, 126; temporality 134 tentacular 88, 123–128, 137–138; tentacularities 123, 138 text 13–14, 23–24, 42, 44, 52, 93, 97, 101–104, 142–144, 157, 165–169, 198, 201–202 theory: theoretical 2, 6, 14, 44, 50, 59, 74, 84, 109, 110, 117, 126, 142, 157 thinking-doing(s) 32–33, 142, 146, 151, 157, 159, 161–164; thinking-in-action 8; thinking-in-movement 8, 110, 189; thinking-research-practice 67; thinkingwith 45, 47–68, 113, 201 thread(s) 1, 11, 37, 66, 74, 123–125, 127–128, 134, 137; threading 124, 126 time(s) 11–12, 22–25, 40, 49, 53–55, 59, 66, 91–98, 101, 105, 125, 132–134, 154, 175, 193, 198 TimeConferenceMachine 97; TimeConferenceMachineRabbit 97 Times Square 166–169 Timetable 97–98; timetablerabbit 97–98, 104; timetablerabbit-clock 97; timeturner 98 Tobias-Green, K. 56 toilet roll 65–66 transdisciplinary 6, 127, 191 trouble 10, 14, 22, 28, 42, 53, 67, 77, 83, 92, 95, 119, 124–127, 135, 137–138, 154, 161, 176

Index  217

truth 24, 83, 85–87, 108–109, 115, 119, 124, 161, 172, 179, 196, 202 Tsing, A. 196 Tuana, N. 50, 59 undisciplined 7, 31, 141–144, 148–150, 154–155, 168 university 3, 12, 25, 49, 50, 57, 60, 79, 111, 129, 146 unruly 28, 88, 96, 142, 149, 151, 154, 158, 160, 164, 206; unruly bodies 88 vacuum cleaners 57 video-techno-text 157, 165–169 Villa Borghese 162 virus 5, 49–55, 58, 65–66; viral 47–48, 53, 58, 66–67; viral configurations 47–48, 53, 66–67 viscous porosity 47, 50–53, 57, 59, 61, 63–65, 67 vision 60, 84–87, 110–111, 119, 135–138, 150, 169 vital 21, 33, 36, 65, 67, 158; vitality/vitalities 21, 31, 33, 36, 65, 67, 82, 87, 158, 162, 164, 189 volatile 47, 50, 118 walking 38, 53, 63, 67, 131–134, 137, 185, 198 wallpaper 197–198 wash 49–50, 53, 60, 114 waste 58–59, 62, 166

we 5, 11–12, 35, 41, 44, 49, 55, 61, 67, 100, 114–116, 118, 126, 128–132, 174, 197 western 5, 30, 61, 84–5, 124, 129–130, 135, 143, 146, 162, 201 whisper 76, 99, 111, 116, 167, 172, 184–186; whispered stories 172; whispering 99, 102, 167, 184–186 white 6, 30, 55–56, 60–61, 85–86, 107, 135 witness 81, 152; modest witness 129–130; witness statement(s) 76–88; witnessing 72, 76 woman 56, 60, 78, 87, 118, 162, 180–184, 190, 198 womens’ bodies 60–61, 87, 108 wonderings and wanderings 23, 168, 189, 201 work 1–8, 12, 21, 33, 45, 55, 57, 60–61, 67, 99–101, 114, 116, 124, 127, 137, 141, 153, 159, 164, 186, 193 workshop: creative happenings 8–10, 45, 68, 106, 108, 113, 118–119, 126, 191, 201–202; experimental 8–10, 47, 50, 72–74, 113, 118–119, 132, 169, 201–202, 206 writescapes 20, 28 writing: autobiographical 127, 166, 176, 180; collective 13, 191; assignment 49, 176, 180 Wunderkammern 32–33 Y incision 77, 83 Zarabadi, S. et al. 130