Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation: Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects 9780367612634, 9780367612627, 9781003104889

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FEMINIST SPECULATIONS AND THE PRACTICE OF RESEARCH-CREATION

Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique introduction to research-creation as a methodology, and a series of exemplifications of research-creation projects in practice with a range of participants including secondary school students, artists, and academics. In conversation with leading scholars in the field, the book outlines research-creation as transdisciplinary praxis embedded in queer-feminist anti-racist politics. It provides a methodological overview of how the author approaches research-creation projects at the intersection of literary arts, textuality, artistic practice, and pedagogies of writing, drawing on concepts related to the feminist materialisms, including speculative thought, affect theories, queer theory, and process philosophy. Further, it troubles representationalism in qualitative research in the arts. The book demonstrates how research-creation operates through the making of or curating of art or cultural productions as an integral part of the research process. The exemplification chapters engage with the author’s research-creation events with diverse participants all focused on text-based artistic projects, including narratives, inter-textual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts. The book is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers who mobilize the literary arts, theory, and research in transdisciplinary settings. Sarah E. Truman is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she researches English literary education and speculative fiction at the Literary Education Lab. Sarah is co-director of the international research-creation project WalkingLab, and one half of the electro-folk duo Oblique Curiosities. Her projects and publications are detailed at www.sarahetruman.com

FEMINIST SPECULATIONS AND THE PRACTICE OF RESEARCH-CREATION Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects

Sarah E. Truman

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 Sarah E. Truman The right of Sarah E. Truman to be identified as author 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 Cover image by Yam Lau and Daniel Barney as part of Intratextual Entanglements, a project curated by Sarah E. Truman (2014-2015). ISBN: 978-0-367-61263-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-61262-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-10488-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889 Typeset in Bembo by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For all the graduate students out there reading, thinking, and creating.

CONTENTS

List of figures viii Acknowledgementsx Interstice I: Andxiii Preface: ‘What do Books have to do with Education?’ xv

1 Theoretical precursors: Tracing my methodology for research-creation 2 Minor interferences: Marginalia as research-creation

1 31

Interstice II: Citations61

3 Affective public pedagogies: Youth writing the intersections of race-gender-power

65

4 More-than-linguistic rhetorics: Writing (speculative) mappings of place

92

5 Postcards from strangers: Queer-non-arrivals on a long-distance walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way

110

Interstice III: Oblique Curiosities139

Contents vii



6 Tweets & critiques from @postqual diffractor bot

141



7 Undisciplined: Reaffirming transdisciplinarity in social science and humanities research

151

Interstice IV: Hyphen158 Index161

FIGURES

The base text for marginalia project. Assembled by me from Nietzsche’s writings in The Gay Science and Ecce Homo33 Cartoon marginalia. By Joe Ollmann.41 Shattered mirror marginalia. By Rosina Kazi and William Goodall.42 A pencil drawing of a wheelchair in the margin of the base text. By Daniel Barney.44 Examples of recursion in marginalia. Top: Origami frogs made out of intertexts by Taien Ng-Chan and Kwoi Gin. Bottom: Nest and poem by Christine Brault and Kent den Heyer.49 Clock camera with intertexts. By Julian McCauley and Shannon Gerard.50 Nihilist Broth in a mason jar. By Stephanie Springgay and John Weaver.51 Diffracted, sprouted, living text. By Yam Lau and Daniel Barney.53 Blackboard repetition. Still from Kai Woolner-Pratt’s 22-minute performance where he writes the phrase, ‘all prejudice comes from the intestines’ on a blackboard in chalk.54 Threaded intertexts. Marginalia on the base-text in embroidery thread by Mary Tremonte and the phrase ‘To be born again’ embroidered as a response by Emilie O’Brien.57 Student poem. The photograph shows a hand-written poem that was ‘published’ by being pinned to a telephone pole. The writing in the photograph is too small to read. Graffiti and an urban street can be seen in the background.87

Figures ix

Student map of school (a) By Dylan and Dewy. The linguistic map, created in pencil shows a variety of school places and ideologies as experienced by the students.100 Student map of school (b) By Rhian and Sikeena. The linguistic map, created in pencil shows a variety of school places and ideologies as experienced by the students.101 Pinhole photograph in Lindisfarne. The pinhole photograph shows the shadowy image of me standing in front of a shadowy cross. Photo by Sarah E. Truman.110 Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot and Sarah E. Truman. Bot’s tweet reads: ‘Process: for a post-meaning-led conceptualization of ethico-politicality.’ Truman’s response reads: ‘Post-meaning indeed.’ Bot’s response reads ‘Onto-epistemological lines of f light into the actual: a postqualitative proposition.’142 Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. This list of eight assembled tweets by the bot read: ‘Floating data-assemblages in the Chthulucene: affirming minor politics,’ ‘Experimentwith attaching a Go-Pro to your grandparent: world the postqualitative turn,’ ‘Diffracting more-than-humanism in thick time: the ethico-political cleaving of the future of mobile architectures in kindergarden,’ ‘Rhizoming the future of rhizomatic research: Deleuze and the rhizome,’ ‘Mapping the conference presentation: why postqualitative research needs data haecceities,’ ‘Boil and drink your interview transcripts: queer the postqualitative turn,’ ‘Visceral methods: a landing site for affirming capitalism,’ ‘An affective sense of post-politics.’143 Tweets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. The list of three assembled tweets read: ‘Newness’ as method: postqualitative research for graduate students,’ ‘Endless propositions for data-assemblages: atmospheric data of data play through neo-liberalism,’ ‘Animacies of shredded data: against a postqualitative inquiry.’146 Tweet from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweet reads, ‘The onto-epistemological whiteness of postqualitative research.’.147 Tweets from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweets read: ‘Neoliberalist postqualitative research – a lure for feeling,’ ‘Anti-colonialist post-qualitative research – a lure for feeling.’149 Alphabet with ampersand (Moore, M., 1863, p. 5).151

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people have inspired and supported me through both enacting the research projects in this book and through the writing this book. Principally, I want to thank the inimitable Stephanie Springgay who introduced me to research-creation and the transdisciplinary potential of research in the academy during my graduate work at University of Toronto. Stephanie has been a feminist force through all my thinking-feeling-making these many years and continues to inspire me in our ongoing collaboration at WalkingLab. I worked with many excellent scholars and students as part of the collaborative program of Curriculum Studies (OISE) and Book History and Print Culture (Massey College) at Uof T. I want to specifically thank Peter Trifonas and Rob Simon for their generous work as part of my committee at OISE; and Thomas Keymer for his support at Massey College. I have had the opportunity to collaborate with and read alongside curriculum scholars, research-creation scholars and artists from around the world for many years, all of whom have helped shape my thinking. This has included my work with the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit which I co-founded with Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan; editorial collaborations on the book Pedagogical Matters with Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, and Zofia Zaliwska; SenseLab events organized by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi; affect symposia with Andrew Murphie and Lone Bertelsen; queer bush salons, reading groups, and other research collaborations globally with scholars Kim Powell, Linda Knight, Eve Mayes, Susan Nordstrom, Affrica Taylor, Mindy Blaise, Astrida Neimanis, Bek Conroy, Natalie Loveless, Natasha Myers, Aparna Mishra Tarc, Jayne Osgood, Victoria  de Rijke, Sid Mohandas, Vivienne Bozalek, Marek Tesar, Margaret Somerville, Karen Malone, Hugh Escott, Max Haiven and Sandra Phillips. Over the past several years I have been fortunate to have received invitations to present the research in this book and collaborate with scholars at universities

Acknowledgements xi

internationally. Thank you to Riikka Hohti (University of Helsinki), KatveKaisa Kontturi (New Materialist Network, University of Turku), Jonathan Wyatt (Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry, University of Edinburgh), the feminist research collective The Ediths (Edith Cowan University), and Claudia Matus and Macarena García González (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile), for your engagement and support. Since graduating from University of Toronto, I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside fabulous scholars in education and research methods in both the United Kingdom and Australia. In 2017 I was awarded a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Canadian government which I undertook at the Education and Social Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. I want to thank Harry Torrance and Maggie MacLure for their help in bringing me to ESRI, and all of the colleagues I worked with there. Particularly, the marvelous Liz de Freitas who has thought with me about science fiction, theory, and method the past few years; the generous and thoughtful Kate Pahl and Abigail Hackett for our ongoing work on affect and literacies; and my dear old friend David Ben Shannon (Shanny) who I have collaborated with for over a decade on many projects on many continents. In 2019, I landed at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. I didn’t know a soul before arriving but happily found myself in the midst of an excellent community of scholars who have become friends. I want to thank the ever-inspiring Larissa McLean Davies for her ongoing support and literary-linking collaborations, and the wry brilliance of Lucy Buzacott and our other Literary Education Lab members Jess Ganaway, and Troy Potter. A hearty thanks to ‘Lev7’s’ Licho López López, Sophie Rudolph, Jess Gerrard, Fazal Rizvi, Dianne Mulcahy, and Julie McLeod; ‘Lev2’s’ Mahtab Janfada, Julie Choi, Jo Lo Bianco and all my colleagues in LALE; and Sonja Arndt for all the impromptu chats and laughs at MGSE. I wrote this book living alone through Melbourne’s long hard lockdown during COVID-19. It was an insular time-space. I want to thank my long-time Melbournian friends Matt Radford, Steph Bohni, Will Bohni Radford, Jordan Wright and Annalise Drok for checking up on me from near-far. And my colleague and friend Peter Woelert for our walks and talks around ‘Peter’s Way’ when the lockdown rules permitted. A special shout-out to my pandemic pen pal Kathryn Yusoff, whose epistolary geo-pulls invariably lift my spirit. This book contains a series of research-creation projects that I enacted with more than 50 people: artists, scholars, students, teachers, and friends. I am indebted to all of them. These include the anonymous students and teachers at ‘Llyn High School’; all of the ‘entanglers’ as part of the Intratextual Entanglements project; and Shanny for joining me on the long walk along St. Cuthbert’s. I am grateful for the financial support I received to carry out the projects in this book which came from The University of Toronto Research Travel Grant, Ontario Graduate Scholarships, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and The University of Melbourne.

xii  Acknowledgements

Many colleagues have read, critiqued, and edited drafts of chapters of this book. Thank you to Ian Buchanan, Nathan Snaza, Eve Mayes, Stephanie Springgay, Lucy Buzacott, and David Ben Shannon for taking the time. Thank you to Hannah Shakespeare and Matt Bickerton at Routledge for their work through production. And thank you to Natalie Loveless, Aparna Mishra Tarc, and Greg Seigworth for reading the manuscript and writing such thoughtful and lively endorsements. Finally, I want to thank my ever-generous and hilarious family ‘The Trumans’ (and their menagerie) for always encouraging creative and critical thought in me, and always being open to me showing up at the cottage with a troupe of scholars/ artists/friends in tow (a tradition I hope to continue after this pandemic). x

INTERSTICE I ‘And’

“That was how we came to know each other,  and we’ve remained friends ever since, Sister Evonne and me. And,” my grandmother says. “And what?  You can’t finish a story and then say, ‘and,’ or it sounds like you’re not finished.” “Perhaps not.  That’s a good point. And,” she says. “You  just did it again!” “Mind your tone, Sarah and…” She pokes my rib. Her pooly old eyes shimmer. And. My late maternal grandmother used to end many of her sentences, and all of her lengthy stories with “and.” And oozed out the end of every statement. Nothing she said was complete. It used to infuriate me. Now I wonder whether she was casting a net with “and” to see what other idea came so she could continue on speaking. And. Alfred North Whitehead (1968) calls “the little word” and “a nest of ambiguity,” (p. 53). For Whitehead, conjunctions like and are “death traps for accuracy of reasoning” (p. 53). Ambiguity isn’t typically regarded as a happy occurrence in educational research, where we are encouraged to describe clear, consistent, generalizable (even marketable!) outcomes of research studies. But Whitehead doesn’t shy away from ambiguity and asserts that through “process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite” whereby all “inconsistencies are burst” (p. 45). And so how does and work? • • • •

And operates as a conjunction And a Boolean operator in library searches And implies causation (when someone says ‘and so’) And implies progression (she went on and on about and)

xiv  Interstice I

• •

•

And implies supplementation (this and this equals that) And joins varied things together but also makes them appear isolated (the phrase “Grandma and Whitehead both have a thing about and” both links and marks a difference between Grandma and Whitehead) And

And is a nest of ambiguity, and a link to what could be. And holds things together-apart and propels them forward. Many ands emerge in research-creation. &

References Whitehead, A. N. (1968). Modes of thought. New York, NY: Free Press.

PREFACE: ‘WHAT DO BOOKS HAVE TO DO WITH EDUCATION?’

This book is an overview of how I conceptualize research-creation, explicated through a series of research-creation projects I have conducted with different communities as an academic (both as a graduate student and as an early career researcher).1 Research-creation is growing in popularity in the humanities and social sciences. It has been mobilized in two ways: as a methodology and theoretical framework that informs qualitative research; and as a method or procedure for enacting empirical research (Chapman & Sawchuk, 2012; Loveless, 2019; Manning & Massumi, 2014; Springgay, 2020). As a concept, research-creation has a geographic affiliation with Canada, where it was made popular by provincial and federal funding agencies such as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as a way of acknowledging research projects at the intersection of arts practices, theory, and research (Truman & Springgay, 2015). Research-creation is transdisciplinary. The term ‘research-creation’ is used by: artists and designers who incorporate a hybrid form of artistic practice that draws from both the arts and science or social science research; scholars attuned to the role of the arts and creativity in their own areas of expertise; and educators interested in developing curriculum and pedagogy grounded in cultural productions, the arts, and attuned to process. SSHRC’s website outlines research-creation as “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression” (SSHRC 2016).

1 The funding for the research projects that feature in the book came from the Ontario government, the federal Canadian government (SSHRC), the University of Toronto, and the University of Melbourne.

xvi  Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

Research-creation as a term is not aligned with a particular theoretical framework. However, many scholars who use the term research-creation (Springgay, 2019; Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020) draw from the feminist materialisms to think-through how art, theory, and research emerge. Loveless (2019) points out that research-creation is not only a… logical extension of post-1968 interdisciplinary and theoretical interventions into the academy, but as specifically indebted to feminist, queer, decolonial, and other social justice movements, as they have worked to remake the academy from within (p. 57). This orientation to research understands the need for ethical, theoretical, and artistic rigor throughout a research project—from planning to dissemination— and charges those who take up the concept research-creation to “work in alliance with antiracist and feminist interventions” (Loveless, 2019, p. 57). How I built a theory to understand these processes is explored in Chapter 1 and exemplified through the different projects in the book. Of course, this is/was my way: you would likely have your own way.

Transdisciplining: situating myself I was introduced to research-creation as a concept at University of Toronto (Uof T) where I completed my PhD in a collaborative program in Critical Studies in Curriculum and Pedagogy (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education: OISE) and Book History and Print Culture (Massey College). As the distinction between the two programs suggests, I am both a social scientist and arts and humanities scholar. My undergraduate degree was in English and philosophy. I’m a qualified secondary English literature teacher. I worked as a secondary English literature teacher, and in the publishing industry as an editor and writer ten years before returning to graduate school. I’ve been awarded two Ontario Arts Council Grants for creative writing, a National Magazine Award for travel writing, and an Utne Independent Press Award for editorial excellence, as well as publishing numerous articles, editorials, and a creative non-fiction book. I mention these credentials to demonstrate that I have a background in creative modes of inquiry both through my own writing and through my editorial work with artists, authors, scholars, and students. Moving from publishing and creative work back into the academy shocked me: particularly the institutional proceduralism, silos between fields, and strictures regarding what counts as research. Research-creation as a concept helped me navigate my way through graduate school when I felt split between the social sciences and humanities, as I attempted to link disciplines that didn’t always (want to) understand or relate to each other. For example, I remember having to get some paperwork signed regarding my enrollment in the collaborative program of Book History and Print Culture. Because I was the first student from OISE who had been admitted into the collaborative program, OISE would have to become a collaborating department in

Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xvii

order for me participate in the program. There was a meeting. And there was a discussion about what OISE—a faculty of education—would gain from being involved in an interdisciplinary program with other faculties centered on Book History & Print Culture (e.g. English, Comparative Lit, Information, Religion etc.). During the meeting, an academic from OISE asked: ‘What do books have to do with education?’ I often reflect back on that question. Sometimes, I think of it rhetorically: of course books have something to do with education, at every level of schooling but particularly in higher education, so surely they were being rhetorical; or in terms of the material version or codex format of the book (PhD students are reading more digitally now, or they might read journal articles rather than books per se, so perhaps that’s what they meant). But over the years I’ve begun to see the question as a comment about two trends in the field of higher education: Firstly, ‘books’ and what they might stand for (the labour of reading and thinking and scholarship) are not valued in a field increasingly governed by business models that spin on the promises of multinational owned EdTech, micro-certifications, and quick-fix upskilling. Secondly, there’s a palpable distrust of the value of engaging in transdisciplinary research within the academy unless it can be commodified. Where does this leave me as a scholar? To be pedantic, I’d like to point out that even within the supposedly ‘social science’ oriented field of education, my subject specialization is English literary education. English literature is a humanities subject that pivots, for better or worse, on the concept of the novel and other forms of literary text such as the short story.2 Also, when studying a specific novel, teachers and students need to contextualize it, often using other books, often from other subject areas. To refuse the primacy of books and the interdisciplinarity required to engage with them is to refuse literary education itself (Truman, McLean Davies, Buzacott, 2021). Further, in case you’re not familiar with it, the term Curriculum Studies refers to a loose group of practices that critically examine the cultural and social effects of educative phenomena: it’s entirely interdisciplinary and rooted in cultural studies, philosophy, and the various subject specializations (like English literature) a scholar might bring to it. Curriculum scholars apply theoretical concepts to curricular documents, events, or practices as a form of empirical research: interdisciplinary reading is integral to this practice. Lastly, as a research-creation scholar, I understand that arts practices can instantiate theory; however, in order to further investigate an  issue,

2 I’d like to be extra pedantic about the idea of studying the history (and future!) of books and print culture as an English literary educator. For scholars interested in English literary education, it’s important to be aware of how specific socio-material publishing conditions allowed certain literary genres (the short story—and science fiction in the late 19th century for example) to proliferate. Yet concomitant with new formats and genres in the 19th century and intervening century came arguments about ‘literariness’ and the kinds of texts that should be allowed in schools. These debates continue to this day.

xviii  Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

I will be required to read across other fields. Transdisciplinary reading and collaboration are foundational to how I conduct research as a critical curriculum scholar, but also more importantly for the purposes of this book, to the practice of research-creation. During graduate school, I was fortunate to have collaborated with scholars who mobilized research-creation in their own research, many of whom were awarded funding by various granting bodies in the category of ‘ResearchCreation’ in Canada.3 Firstly, I worked as a research assistant on The Pedagogical Impulse, which is a research-creation project run by Stephanie Springgay that enacts socially engaged-art as research in K-12 schools in Toronto. The Pedagogical Impulse curated contemporary artists inside of schools: not to teach the existing curriculum or extract data to be analyzed, but as collaborative art projects unfolding in situ with the students and teachers and researchers. We also ran a theory reading group as an important part of the research-creation project to think through concepts while conducting the research and throughout the writing up of the research (see Springgay & Zaliwska, 2015; Truman & Springgay, 2015). Throughout graduate school, I also engaged with other research-creation collectives such as Concordia University’s SenseLab: these collaborations included symposia and retreats built around art and theory, in both Quebec, Canada and New South Wales, Australia. Similarly, WalkingLab, the research project I co-direct with Stephanie Springgay, has prioritized reading theory with scholars in the arts and humanities in Canada, the US, and Australia, as well as running ongoing research-creation projects with different publics internationally. The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, a socially engaged research-creation project I co-founded with artists Donna Akrey and Taien Ng-Chan runs itinerate reading walks as part of our public engagement. And my music-making and sound research-creation project Oblique Curiosities with David Ben Shannon is also embedded in theory (Shannon & Truman, 2020; Truman & Shannon, 2018). While an artistic practice is integral to research-creation, the need to read and engage with theory as part of conducting research-creation projects also cannot be overstated, particularly in our current climate of higher education. Our work as scholars is to read, think, and experiment (and of course to write and teach and do service). I will follow this with another statement: every student in graduate school should have funding and support that allows them time to read and think and experiment, and professors who value reading and thinking with theory in connection to research events. The practices of reading and thinking with theory are not inherently elitist, they are made elitist through not giving students the time and resources and support to read and think, and through creating a culture

3 The ‘What do books have to do with education?’ question was an anomaly (or so I thought at the time).

Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xix

that disavows the time it takes to read and think together (hooks, 1991).4 In their article ‘Ground Provisions,’ Thompson and Harney (2018) discuss the practice of reading together: to ameliorate how reading is ‘outsourced’ in universities (where students are expected to read and do ‘work’ outside of class), they organized a camp for students to read and study (Harney & Moten, 2013) together. This politics-of-reading aligns with many research-creation events I’ve been involved with over the years, where reading together, and thinking together, alongside conducting arts practices has been central to the success of the project. Me chiming in on the need to read theory and collaboratively engage with theoretical concepts throughout artistic projects will perhaps sound bizarre to colleagues in the arts and humanities (well, collaboration around reading might sound bizarre to some solitary readers). However, it’s a genuine concern in the field of education, where a culture of anti-intellectualism is growing. The global pandemic, increasing precarity, and overworked academics will, of course, exacerbate this trend. In light of this, I want to acknowledge my colleagues specifically in curriculum studies who are critical interdisciplinary scholars, who recognize the importance of reading theory, and who work hard to include graduate students in research projects, reading groups, and writing projects. I also want to acknowledge how, although it’s of course important for courses to teach theory and build a research community in graduate school, perhaps more important is that junior scholars gain experience running research projects, hopefully with scholars who are already enacting them.

Research-creation in conversation with other qualitative research Because this book is part of Routledge’s Research Methods series, I want to note that how I formulate my approach to research-creation and method for conducting qualitative research is theoretically in conversation with many colleagues in the social sciences who draw on theories that align with the more-than-human turn.5 One component of these disparate new empiricisms in qualitative research is to acknowledge how thinking with theory is a form of empirical research (de Freitas & Truman, 2020; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). Of course, reading one theory through another—call it diffraction, call it friction, call it 4 I write this from Australia where the budget for 2021 will increase the cost of humanities courses at universities up to 100% of their previous costs in order to fund ‘ job ready’ courses. This will ensure that theory becomes more elitist and university becomes less accessible to poorer families and students. University students may undertake their studies part-time due to family obligations or work obligations or other reasons. As such they may only be taking one course at a time and read more slowly; that is fine. But reading theory and thinking must be valued and encouraged in graduate school and continue through a scholar’s career. 5 There are dozens of scholars who draw on these theories and other theories such as anti-colonial thought and feminism that seek to unsettle positivism in the social sciences, some of which are taken up in subsequent chapters where they relate to specific projects I’m conducting, particularly in educational settings.

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speculation, call it literary analysis—is pretty much what humanities scholars always do. As such, it is not a new approach to conducting qualitative research but essential to how I conceptualize research-creation. I understand research-creation as similar to the practice of cultural studies where a scholar might ‘empirically’ engage with a work of art or cultural production such as a film, art event, poem, or song and think about it theoretically. However, in the case of research-creation, I as the scholar am involved in the creation of the work of art or cultural production. I’m making or curating art as part of the research event rather than interrogating something that’s already been created. I then think further about the event and artistic production through scholarly writing. Further, research-creation as I theorize it in this book is not the creative presentation of, nor artistic experimentation with, pre-existing ‘data’ harvested through traditional qualitative research methods. As in, I’m not talking about conducting interviews and then composing a poem or drawing a picture ‘representing’ them, which is sometimes how Arts Based Education Research (ABER) functions: where the creative presentation of data arguably makes it available for different audiences on different registers. That said, the theorization of research-creation is aligned with qualitative researchers in the arts who have troubled positivism and method for decades (Irwin, 2003). And of course, artists themselves have troubled positivism for much longer through the radical arts practices which research-creation draws from (Loveless, 2019; Springgay, 2020; Springgay & Truman, 2018a). As the various exemplification chapters will illustrate, my approach to research-creation as (1) a methodology, and (2) the methods brought to bear on a project is interdisciplinary throughout the entire research process. This requires the theories, the arts practices, and the research to be attuned across disciplines. This requires a lot of reading and thinking about theories embedded in arts practices or cultural productions across different fields. That is the point of research-creation as a concept within the siloed academy: an interdisciplinarity orientation to research into theory and the arts (with a queer-feminist-anti-racist bent!). For me, this begins with the angle of approach I set out in Chapter 1, Theoretical Precursors: Tracing My Methodology for Research-Creation.6 This chapter introduces the theoretical framing for how I conceptualize my orientation to conducting research at the intersection of arts practices and interdisciplinary scholarship. I talk through what I call situated speculation, rigorous agitation, emergence, affirmation (refusal), and more-than-representation and a host of other attendant theories that inform these concepts. Writing that chapter was a significant part of thinking through how I approach research-creation and qualitative research in general, 6 Much of this thinking occurred during my PhD at University of Toronto as I developed own orientation to research-creation and was encouraged to run experimental arts projects by both my committee at OISE and practicum at Massey College (thanks to Stephanie Springgay, Peter Trifonas, Rob Simon, and Thomas Keymer).

Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’ xxi

and it’s always a work in progress: theory is also needed to make sense of the event of research afterwards, and this always means more reading and thinking in relation to what emerges. The chapters following Chapter 1 are all exemplifications of research-creation projects I have conducted. They are all theoretically and methodologically aligned in that they adhere to my orientation to research as described in Chapter 1. Some of the projects were completed with diverse groups of participants ranging from children to adults, and in different geographies including Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, while others were solo projects. While the majority of research-creation scholars come out of the visual and performing arts, the contributions I make to the field in this book focus broadly on ‘text-based’ research-creation projects including: narratives, intertextual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts. The projects in this book are in conversation with my other research-creation projects focused on literature and literacy education (Truman, 2016, 2019), walking studies (Springgay & Truman, 2018b), and sonic arts (Shannon & Truman, 2020; Truman & Shannon, 2018). The theories and scholars I think with to write about the research events and what emerged vary widely across the chapters and are embedded in different disciplines including literary studies, curriculum studies, public pedagogy, and cultural studies.

Text-based research-creation event chapters Chapter 2, Minor Interferences: Marginalia as research-creation, centers on a 34-participant intertextual marginalia project with adult members of the arts and scholastic community. I begin the chapter with an overview of some of the history of marginalia, theoretical approaches to texts, textuality, and intertextuality, and the pedagogical importance of annotation. I then think with some of the intertexts produced by participants in the project to consider the pedagogical outcomes of radical ‘reading-writing’ practices and annotation on meaning and the genealogy of a text. Chapter 3, Affective Public Pedagogies: Youth writing the intersections of race-genderpower, and Chapter 4, More-than-Linguistic Rhetorics: Writing (speculative) mappings of place, focus on a series of research-creation projects completed with secondary school English literature students. Chapter 3 is embedded in discussions of public pedagogy and curriculum studies. It exemplifies how I approached the overall project propositionally and let ‘ethico-political emergences’ guide the ongoing research and prompt further questions. The chapter goes on to focus on a social justice inspired creative writing and ‘publishing’ project in public space that considers the intersections of race-gender-power on student experience. Chapter 4 continues work with the same students and is theoretically informed by scholarship on transmateriality, place, and situated learning. The chapter then focuses on two writing and mapping projects: literary maps of the students’ secondary school, and speculative maps of the future.

xxii  Preface: ‘what do books have to do with education?’

Chapter 5, Postcards from Strangers: Queer-non-arrivals on a long-distance walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way, focuses on a long-distance walk and postcard project I conducted in the UK, inspired by the 19th-century practice of ‘letterboxing’. Letterboxing was a precursor to geocaching and originally took the form of people leaving writings addressed to themselves in hidden places on specific walks in Dartmoor for strangers to discover and post back to their own letter box (hence the name letterboxing). The project is theoretically informed by Derrida’s writings in The Post Card about non-arrival and hospitality, in conversation with queer theory. Chapter 6, Tweets & Critiques from the @postqual Diffractor Bot focuses on tweets generated by a Twitter bot I created with the handle @postqual. The bot’s ongoing tweets are a satirical intervention into the contemporary academic milieu. The chapter begins with a gloss of some of the theoretical orientations that inform what has been called postqualitative research. I then describe the mechanics of how the bot operates. The latter half of the chapter thinks with some of the PostQual Diffractor Bot’s generated tweets—or micro blogs—as critiques and provocations for the future of the field. Chapter 7, the final chapter, Undisciplined: reaffirming transdisciplinarity in social science and humanities research, is me thinking about where I am now. This includes my current research in English literary education and science fiction during a pandemic and climate crisis, and what might come next for interdisciplinary research-creation. In addition to these chapters, the book is punctuated by a number of Interstices. These occupy spaces between chapters and discuss different concepts or collaborations and their relationship to my understanding of research-creation and the writing of this book. The Interstices include: ‘And,’ ‘Citations,’ and ‘Oblique Curiosities.’ The final interstice, ‘Hyphens,’ is part of the concluding chapter. Finally, in addition to writing in 1st person (both I and inclusionary ‘we’s) I write in 2nd person at points in this book, directly apostrophizing a ‘you’ that I try to bring along with me in my thought processes. I had different ‘yous’ and ‘wes’ in mind as I wrote. As part of a research methodology series, I thought of graduate students a lot as I was writing, but also academics who might be interested in how research-creation connects different fields through transdisciplinary collaboration. I hope you find the book helpful to your own thinking.

References Chapman, O., & Sawchuk, K. (2012). Research-creation: Intervention, analysis and ‘Family resemblances.’ Canadian Journal of Communication, 37, 5–26. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020). New empiricisms in the anthropocene: Thinking with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420943643. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.

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hooks, b. (1991). Theory as liberatory practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4(1), 1–12. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlf/vol4/iss1/2. Irwin, R. L. (2003). Toward an aesthetic of unfolding In/Sights through curriculum. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(2), 63–78. Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Shannon, D. B., & Truman, S. E. (2020). Problematizing sound methods through music research-creation: Oblique curiosities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920903224. Springgay, S. (2019). Research-creation in practice. Public lecture. School of art, design and architecture. Melbourne, Australia: Monash University. Springgay, S. (2020). Feltness: On how to practice intimacy. Qualitative Inquiry, Online Fir, 1077800420932610. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420932610. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018a). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018b). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. London, UK: Routledge. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019). Walking in/as publics: Editors introduction. Journal of Public Pedagogies, 4, 1–12. Springgay, S., & Zaliwska, Z. (2015). Diagrams and cuts: A materialist approach to research-creation. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies, 15(2), 136–144. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1177/1532708614562881. St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: Conditions for new inquiry. Cultural Studies – Critical Methodologies. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616638694. Thompson, T. S., & Harney, S. (2018). Ground provisions. After All, 120–125. Truman, S. E. (2016). Becoming more than it never (actually) was: Expressive writing as research-creation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.108 0/15505170.2016.1150226. Truman, S. E. (2019). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465. Truman, S. E., McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Disrupting intertextual power networks: challenging literature in schools. Discourse, Online first: doi.org/10.1080/0 1596306.2021.1910929. Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The intimacies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19. Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2015). The primacy of movement in research-creation: New materialist approaches to art research and pedagogy. In M. Laverty, & T. Lewis (Eds.), Art’s teachings, teaching’s art: Philosophical, critical, and educational musings (pp. 151– 162). New York, NY: Springer.

1 THEORETICAL PRECURSORS Tracing my methodology for research-creation

As a transdisciplinary scholar, the concept ‘research-creation’ gave me the permission to draw on my background in English literature, cultural studies, and philosophy to inform how I conceptualize research in the social sciences. This chapter outlines my personal theoretical framework for how this process works methodologically, whereas the following several stand-alone chapters specifically focus on the enactment of research-creation projects using various methods. In this chapter, I set out how I think about research-creation methodologically.1 While there are likely as many ways of approaching research-creation as there are artist-researcher-scholars who might carry out a project, my own approach is aligned with many of my Canadian research-creation colleagues who think with the feminist materialisms (Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020).2 The feminist materialisms is an umbrella term that describes feminist scholarship that activates thought from diverse fields, including process philosophy, 1 By ‘methodology’ I mean the logic, ethics, theories, and angle of approach that guide how I approach research and inform the various methods that I might use. This is me talking through the theories that inform how I think research-creation operates. Also, amor fati: some of these theories might not seem like they go together to you, but they definitely influence me. I invoke Nietzsche’s (1960) amor fati to acknowledge that this is a situated historical and contemporary overview of scholars that have influenced how I think of research-creation. My background is English literature and philosophy, and some of these scholars, for better or worse, have been a part of my thinking since my undergraduate degree. In the following Interstice, I consider citational politics and whether it’s possible to omit scholars as a method of attuning to different modes of thought. Surely that is possible, with appropriate study, and this methodology will likely change in the future. But this is a snapshot of it right now. 2 This could also be written as feminist new materialisms, although I and plenty of people have pointed out that much of what is called ‘new’ materialisms is not new. That said, I believe the initial use of the word was to distinguish it from a Marxist mode and that has been forgotten in the critiques of the word ‘new.’ Also, the critique of the word ‘new’ in ‘new materialisms’ is itself not new (Ahmed, 2008; Snaza et al., 2016).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-1

2  Theoretical precursors

speculative pragmatism, the environmental humanities, queer and trans studies, vitalism, and affect theory. When activated in research practices, these theories disrupt common orientations to research methodology in a variety of ways, including: directly implicating researchers, artists, and theories in the event of research; prioritizing affect and relationality; re-thinking representationalism; and recognizing that thinking with theoretical concepts and making-doing art are also ‘empirical’ research. When I’m asked to articulate a common thread across all these disparate theories and how they play out in research, I say: they unsettle humanism. This is usually followed by the question: what do you mean by ‘humanism’? In the next section, I’m going to unpack what I mean by humanism, and my method for complicating humanism through invoking the inhuman and the narrative human. Once that’s established, I will discuss situated speculation, rigorous activation, emergence, affirmation (refusal), and more-than-representation as five movements for how I think about the process of research-creation.

What do I mean by ‘humanism?’ Literary theorist Sylvia Wynter has written extensively about how there are different genres of being human that are myriad and unfinished (Wynter, 1989; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). For this section, I am focusing on how Wynter has also theorized the production of a particular kind of human as a signifier for Eurowestern humanism. Wynter contends that who counts as this version of the human is tethered to white Eurowestern ideals: ideals that align with a particular set of aesthetics that are deemed desirable, and which operate through practices of exclusion or assimilation in a universalizing global order. Wynter calls this Eurowestern ideal of the human Man. Wynter’s theory of Man expands on the work of early anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon (1963) who explicates a similar Eurowestern ideal of the human as produced through a ‘bourgeois ideology’ that “manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie” (Fanon, 1963, p. 163). Wynter’s (Wynter, 2001, 2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) writings track the production of this version of the human—Man—through colonial capitalism, inextricably linked with transatlantic slavery, and back to the origins of the discipline of the humanities itself. This version of the human and humanism is implicated in the structure of the university, schooling, research methods, and aesthetic and literary traditions.3

3 Wynter tracks the production of Man through history: homo politicus (Man1) coincided with the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th  century as a break away from medieval theocracy. Homo oeconomicus  (Man2)  coincided with the Darwinian influence of natural selection and rise of capitalism in the 19th century. Both of these versions are tethered to what might be called Man—and are reinforced through stories and institutions that uphold their worldview. But Wynter’s genres of the human explain that there are myriad ways of being ‘human.’

Theoretical precursors 3

The production of this particular kind of human and order of knowledge—who stands in for and represents all humanity or what counts as a ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated’ subject—is not merely biological but rather is a combination of what Wynter calls bios and mythoi (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). However, Wynter emphasizes that this over-represented version of the human is only one genre, or way of being human: although, as the white, abled, cis-hetero, and male ideal, it’s the version of humanity that is most frequently centered in art, history, music, literature etc. in the west. As a result, our institutions, our research practices in the social sciences, and our dominant theoretical frameworks tend to calibrate everything to Man.4 In my scholarship, I think with theorists and pedagogues who challenge the humanism derived from European Humanist traditions that model Man as endowed with the sovereign rights to act on or against other people and inanimate matter. Mel Chen (2012) outlines how the concept of animacy in Eurowestern traditions has been constructed using the logic of the human. Linguistically, animacy refers to the “quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or a noun phrase” (p. 24, italics mine). The less agency a body possesses, the less animate it is considered to be, and the further from being ‘human.’ As such, this taxonomy, Chen (2012) argues, is a contributing factor in dehumanization, where qualities valued as ‘human’ are removed when discussing particular populations. The senses are similarly connected to this animacy taxonomy: perceived base senses like touch, taste, and smell have been historically understood as attached to certain bodies, particularly those which are deemed less-than-human (Springgay, 2008). The taxonomy of affect, or what Sara Ahmed (2004b) calls the “economies of affect,” also work to regulate and ‘dehumanize’ particular people. Dehumanization activates a logic where certain powers are granted the ability to assess and value life and include or exclude others from the realm of the human. This dehumanizing logic often follows racial hierarchies. For instance, Kalpana Seshadri (2012) argues that the line that divides those who are subject to the law from those who are protected by the law is a racializing line.5 Humanism in its ongoing proliferations functions through both erasing difference and enforcing difference. In order to be deemed ‘human,’ non-humans must be assimilated into the category of the human, a practice that Luciano and Chen (2015) argue operates through logics of inclusion and rehabilitation: to be included is to be rehabilitated enough to become legible within the very system that then continues to exclude others. Julietta Singh (2018) raises similar concerns through her analysis of Eurowestern notions of mastery, where to be

4 The proponents of whiteness may not question cis-white-able-Man’s certainty as the representation of humanity because they perhaps don’t want to know that it’s only a genre of being human. Those who have the most to gain from dominant ways of knowing, being, and storying within an inherited context are the least likely to question it. 5 Black scholars and activists have asserted this for a long time. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought this to the attention to even mainstream media.

4  Theoretical precursors

masterful is to wield power within the system that may have excluded that same person or group in the past. This ‘becoming masterful’ could take the form of understanding a language or a theory or some other kind of mastery. However, Singh highlights that through becoming masterful, those previously deemed in-human or un-human might inadvertently begin to reinforce the very logics they might wish to overthrow. This understanding of how humanism operates has direct implications for what is valued, what is considered legible, and what counts as ways of knowing in research projects. Similarly, these systems of classification operate in educational settings and practices like literacy and literary education: where what counts as knowledge and who can possess knowledge is also governed by hegemonic values associated with a humanist logic and institutional legibility (Snaza & Weaver, 2014; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2019a) and where many of the world’s students continually “find themselves subjected to various tactics of dehumanization, objectification” (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016, p. xix). As an educational researcher in English literature and the arts, I constantly struggle with this: being aware that concepts like literariness, literacy, art, and aesthetics all hail from this Eurowestern-humanist tradition, desiring for my students and colleagues (and myself ) to refuse it, while recognizing that doing so may still mean being subject to the system through being excluded from it (and also believing that there is such a thing as ‘literariness’). Working to unsettle the humanist inheritance that haunts Western thought while not sidestepping very human concerns is an ongoing endeavor in both my social science and humanities research.6

Storying the inhuman We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one, eh? (The Doctor, Doctor Who) In this section, I will first discuss the notion of the inhuman, and then discuss the idea of storying the (in)human. In both my research-creation projects and my literary education research, I have thought with the notion of the inhuman as a way of troubling humanism from both within and without (Springgay & Truman, 2017; Truman, 2017, 2019b). This thinking has been informed by various queer scholars who challenge Eurowestern humanism but recognize the dangers of declaring a post-human position in a world that is very much still governed by

6 While post-humanism has been applauded for its attempts at de-centering the human, and acknowledging an emergent, relational subject, it has also been critiqued for dissolving race, gender, and sexual orientation markers among humans; erasing difference between humans and non-humans; and inadvertently re-inscribing anthropomorphism (King, 2017; Livingstone & Puar, 2011). See my SAGE encyclopedia entry on feminist new materialisms (Truman, 2019a); also, similar critiques have been made toward affect theory (Palmer, 2017).

Theoretical precursors 5

white-humanist power structures and ideals ( Jackson, 2015; Muñoz et al., 2015; Stryker, 2015; Yusoff, 2018, 2020). Jeffrey Cohen (2015) outlines how the inhuman as a concept describes an “estranged interiority” (p. 10). As a Janus word or auto-antonym, “in” in the inhuman can operate both as negative prefix (presuming difference from the human) while simultaneously also describe being within or of the human (as an intimacy). The paradoxical function of the term creates a frictional thinking space that keeps me and my methodology in tension. This aligns with Kathryn Yusoff’s (2021) assertion of why she continues to think with the concept of the inhuman in her research: because it is “counter intuitive, unsettles the normative paths of thought – queers your trails ” (personal communication). Similarly, José Esteban Muñoz (2015) proposes thinking with the inhuman as a “necessary queer labor of the incommensurate” (p. 209). This labor is queer in that it subverts the silos and stratification of kinds of being, and incommensurate because as humans we cannot know the inhuman (or human) due to the limits of our knowledge production. Thinking the inhuman does not mean flattening the boundaries between human and nonhuman, nor is it a practice that demands the inhuman’s inclusion into the category of the human. Instead, Luciano and Chen (2015) argue, the “inhuman points to the violence that the category of the human contains within itself ” (p. 196) and propose inhumanisms (note the plural, similar to Wynter’s genres of human) as a generative concept: an unfolding, rather than a spatial designator of a particular kind of entity. The queer imperative to think with the polysemous concept of the inhuman helps me continue to trouble humanism in research-creation projects and literary education precisely because the concept is unsettling and does not rest. Acknowledging that this is an ongoing practice where the friction between the inhuman, the inhuman, and human allows other mutual inclusions to occur, such as Jin Haritaworn’s (2015) necessity of injecting a “good dose of humanism” (p. 211) into thinking practices that seek to disrupt humanism. This is an important consideration for those of us who are drawn to the more-than-human turn which can theoretically slide into abstractions and elide the fact that there’s ‘humans involved’ in research (King, 2017). If the inhuman functions through both difference and intimacy, it’s a paradox that’s always in tension. This tension is helpful to my thinking as I attempt to unsettle humanism without ignoring the very real human concerns of research participants in my projects. Now that I’ve explained the paradox of the inhuman as a method for unsettling humanism, here comes the idea of storying the (in)human. As someone who conducts research based on texts, and literature, I’ve been influenced by what Sylvia Wynter (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) calls homo narrans: the narrated human who is a combination of both mythology and biology as a way of explaining how there are myriad genres of the human (even though Man might be the genre of the human who is vaunted in texts, theories, and literature). Wynter’s storying version of the human highlights how, as individuals, we are not merely produced through biology and social practices but also through creative

6  Theoretical precursors

practices: the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are becoming. For me, this emphasizes the materiality and power of language and storytelling in shaping—figuratively, speculatively, and literally—what’s possible. In that regard, what we foreground and center in narratives, texts, speculation, and art is both affirmed and reproduced through the telling: we’re materially shaping the world and ourselves through stories.7 The idea of re-configuring the human through story and language is significant to my research in that much of it, particularly the research projects highlighted in this book, focuses on ‘text’ based artistic projects, including literature and literary education, creative writing, marginalia, and hypertexts. In this section, I sought to articulate how I conceptualize humanism and seek to unsettle it through thinking with the paradox of the inhuman and storying potential of proliferating humanisms. The next section of this chapter will engage further with theories I use to think through my approach to the research-creation process.8 This methodological orientation is assembled from a variety of sources that I draw together under the terms situated speculation, rigorous activation, emergence, affirmation, and more-than-representation. I think with many philosophers and scholars in the next sections, some of whom write about how thought works, or how the physical world works. I appropriate some of these theories to explain how research-creation as a process works for me. It’s important to recognize a distinction between theories that seek to explain the world in an abstract or physical sense, and how I as a researcher might appropriate them to explain my own engagement with research in the arts and education: a process that Ian Buchanan (2020) calls a “subjectification of theory” (personal communication).

Techniques for thinking about the process of research-creation Situated speculation The structure of conventional qualitative research projects often requires researchers to presume to know in advance: this is demonstrated through an approach to research design that states what we’re looking for, what it might mean, what its outcomes might be, and who will benefit from it, all before embarking on a study. This process is normally built on some kind of knowledge of the field and, hopefully, a situated and ethical approach to speculating on what might occur or develop during the research. While I think all of these aspects of conventional

7 This also includes the constant re-affirmation of ‘Man’ as dominant through critiquing (and narrating) his dominance, so I don’t want to give him too much airtime. 8 I’ve belonged to several reading groups throughout the years and I am indebted to colleagues I’ve read and thought alongside for helping me frame my understanding of research-creation. I particularly want to thank Stephanie Springgay and David Ben Shannon who have conducted numerous research-creation projects with me.

Theoretical precursors 7

qualitative research can and should be speculated on before embarking on a study, students are rarely taught to think about this process as speculative. Following queer-feminist theorists, and informed by feminist materialist and process philosophers, in this section I think through situated-speculative thought as an integral part of research-creation. To do so, I unpack some theoretical influences that inform my understanding of speculation. Research-creation, like all research and creative practice, is in part a speculative process. As an artist and researcher embarks on a project, and throughout that project, they speculate about different times/spaces from a particular time/ space, and in so doing shape and co-compose what could be. Scholars in the fields of critical race, Black and Indigenous studies, queer and trans studies, critical disability studies, and feminist studies often mobilize this differential in their art and scholarship (Muñoz, 2009; Nyong’o, 2019; Wong, 2020) both to warn of futures that we might not want to eventuate and to take “seriously the generative proposition another world is possible …” (Keeling, 2019, p. ix). The differential link between a situated curiosity and speculative possibilities or potentialities9 fuels much feminist materialist thought. ‘Situatedness,’ as conceptualized by Haraway (1991), might mean the actual physical situation from where speculation occurs, but also refers to shifting, inherited, self-identified, and externally forced subject positionalities, including race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, as well as the theoretical positionality (concepts) a researcher speculates with. Åsberg, Thiele, and Van der Tuin (2015) outline how feminist thought has always been speculative, while remaining critically contextualized. Through speculative alter-worlding, materialist feminisms “envision a different difference from within” an inherited context (Åsberg et al., 2015, p. 160). A researcher’s positionality and intentionality have material effects on what the research-creation might produce. In order to keep being critical, a ‘critical positionality’10 cannot proceed from a fixed position: it is constantly being modified by what we read and encounter through the arts, or scientific research practices, or through discussions with participants, and in the event of research-creation. In this regard, the researchers themselves are also in process. The speculative process proposes what could be. It might usher in a different world while simultaneously changing us: this is the power and potential of speculative thought and storying practices. In continuing my discussion of situated speculation, I will now discuss some philosophers who have informed my thinking on how I’ve come to understand

9 Possibilities can be thought of as just that (logically possible). Whereas potentialities (Agamben & Heller-Roazen, 1999) have the capacity to both be and not be. 10 There’s also an important link between situated positionality and ‘objectivity’ in feminist science studies where a friction between subjectivity and objectivity has been debated by feminist scholars for decades. Haraway (1991) who complicates this at length in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. For Haraway, ‘feminist objectivity’ relies on the understanding that knowledge is partial and that ‘critical positioning’ is integral for any hope of ‘objectivity’ in science (1991, p. 193).

8  Theoretical precursors

the differential link between what is (in actuality) and what might be, and who have subsequently informed how I’ve conducted research-creation projects. I collect their ideas through discussions of: the actual and the virtual, propositions, situatedness, theories of affect, and queer time/spaces. Many of the theories I think with are aligned with what has been called the ontological turn (where ‘ontology’ studies what is) and process philosophy (which is a theory of how thought in general works). As you’ll see, many of the concepts I take up explain the world in an abstract sense yet have influenced how I think practically (albeit perhaps metaphorically) about running research-creation projects. This is an important distinction to understand. As these theories are appropriated or subjectivized (by me!) and engaged with in relation to queer positionality, antiracist praxis, and situated feminisms, they (perhaps aporetically) have much in common with phenomenological approaches to research.

Actual ⇔ virtual Gilles Deleuze’s (1994) writings on the virtual, actual, and difference inform this theoretical orientation and run as a current through much of the new materialist or ontological turn that influences research-creation scholarship in Canada, as well as other forms of qualitative research. To explain the relationship between actuality and virtuality, Deleuze (1994) engages the notion of difference as the force behind the creative becoming of the world through two processes: differenciation (with a ‘c’) and differentiation. Differenciation refers to the actualized expression of virtual intensities. What is actualized simultaneously affects virtual potentials through a process he calls differentiation. The differential movement between differenciation and differentiation operates in all events. Deleuze’s ontology is not only concerned with what is (with discrete forms of identity as being) but as an approach to experimentation—a way of probing what might be. This might be exists virtually in all actual instances but as a virtuality cannot be known until it actualizes. Simultaneously, what does actualize has the potential to affect the virtual. Deleuze (1994) fleetingly refers to the intensive movement that courses between actual and virtual potentialities and allows them to communicate as the ‘dark precursor’ (p. 119). To explain the dark precursor, he uses an atmospheric example of thunderbolts exploding in different intensities as being guided by an invisible and imperceptible precursor that determines a “path in advance but in reverse …” (p. 119). The idea of a dark precursor occupies an affective, queer time-and-space and has been utilized by many artists and scholars to think through speculative world-makings (Nyong’o, 2019). Similarly, feminist theoretical physicist Karen Barad (2015) describes lightning as having a queer temporal communication system that operates through non-local relating where there’s no ‘sender’ or ‘recipient’ until after the transmission has already occurred. Barad (2015) discusses all matter as operating agentially in “an ongoing reconfiguring of spacetimemattering” (p. 411) include ongoing ‘reconfigurations’ of the virtual

Theoretical precursors 9

as well as the actual. In the next section, I consider how this differential is activated in a research encounter through the ‘proposition.’

Propositions Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) explication of propositions has inspired many scholars who theorize research-creation (Manning, 2016; Shannon, 2021; Truman & Springgay, 2016). For Whitehead (1978) a proposition—whether uttered by a human in words or made through a material gesture—is a “… new kind of entity. Such entities are the tales that perhaps might be told about particular actualities” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 256). A proposition then functions as a differential lure for feeling that links virtuality and actuality (p. 25). I think of this kind of feeling as similar to Deleuze’s dark precursor, in that it is an invisible and imperceptible communication between potentialities; it is through ‘feeling’ that new potentialities actualize and make new propositions (and worlds) possible.11 As Whitehead (1978) states, “[e]vidently new propositions come into being with the creative advance of the world” (p. 259). Manning (2008) uses the idea of propositions to discuss newness or novelty not as “… something never before invented, but a set of conditions that tweak experience in the making” (p. 6). In this regard, propositions are activated throughout the research-creation event. Once these potentials are actualized (in an event), new propositions immediately emerge creating a new hybrid between actual and virtual. In Whitehead’s thought, this is not just happening in the human sphere, but obviously for the purposes of my research in education and the arts, humans are very much part of the mix and will ‘tweak’ the research in process as part of a situated response to what is unfolding. How a proposition might actualize will be radically different across different bodies, times/spaces, and circumstances. In that way, a proposition can function as an affective force in the Nietzschean sense—which would vary depending on circumstance and through its engagement with other forces. As such, Bennett (2010) after Latour explains that a proposition “has no decisionistic power but is a lending of weight, an incentive toward, a pressure toward the direction of one trajectory rather than another” (p. 103). Latour (1999) does not use the term proposition in an epistemological sense (as in deciding whether a statement is

11 I know all this might sound like a really complicated way of saying that things affect other things on every level. I do find Whitehead particularly interesting when he argues that even a non-conformal (untrue!) proposition’s “primary role” is to “pave the way along which the world advances into novelty” (1978, p. 187). In an era of post-truth politics, science denialism, and AI-driven media, I wonder what kind of ‘novelty’ world we’re going to find ourselves in next. As I say in the Affirmation section, sometimes the ‘affirmation’ that is required is ‘refusal’. In case you think I’m propositionally cheering for an anything-goes false world: I’m not. But sometimes what might be deemed ‘false’ in an existing order is that which is illegible or threatens it. We maybe need non-conformal propositions more than the conformal ones.

10  Theoretical precursors

true or false) but rather in an ontological sense that considers “what an actor offers other actors” during their interaction or event-making (p. 309).12 In all these relational exchanges among forces, feelings, and speculations as part of a research-creation event, there will be various humans. These humans will be replete with all kinds of human inheritances. As I mentioned at the beginning of this section, a feminist approach to speculation is situated, and considers the world-making that might occur through the act of speculation. As scholars (Nyong’o, 2019; Shaviro, 2015) have argued elsewhere, speculative thought is not neutral. In many instances (including in speculative fiction), the worlds created through speculation re-inscribe the logics of white supremacy, misogyny, and ableism, rather than creating a more just world.

Still situated I want to invoke one final process philosopher before I move on: William James, the speculative pragmatist. Dieter Debaise and Isabelle Stengers (2017) think with James and Whitehead to pose a pragmatic question concerning the process of speculative thought and the practice of feeling potentialities. They ask us to consider: “does the possible whose insistence I sense add or detract from the situation?” They then acknowledge that how we “answer is part of the situation,” and that we should then make ourselves “response-able, answerable for its consequences”(Debaise & Stengers, 2017, p. 13). I will return to this point later in the section on affirmation below, but just in case you think these speculative pragmatist/process philosophies are a-political: they are not. They’re radically political. But it’s up to those of us who mobilize these theories in research-creation practices to consider the forces, feelings, lures, and contexts that affect what actualizes, how it might be felt, and how what takes place in actuality might then affect what could be: this is where situated feminism is a necessary component in speculative thought. Feminism is the advocacy of equity and social justice across diverse sexes, genders, sexualities, classes, races, and abilities. While historical approaches to feminism were frequently based in practices that sought for equality between white (straight and abled) cis-women and white (straight and abled) cis-men, present-day feminism recognizes intersectional forms of oppression and efforts (speculation, writing, actions) to create a more just world. As I said in the Preface, many scholars who use the concept research-creation (Loveless, 2019; Truman et al., 2020) align it with a queer feminist, anti-colonial orientation to art and research. From the planning of a research-creation project, through 12 Composer and research-creation scholar, David Ben Shannon (2021) adds a good dose of Wittgenstein to his Whitehead to argue that there is a danger in completely abandoning the proposition’s True/False distinction. Rather, he suggests that in a post-truth era of white nationalist nostalgia, we should describe the proposition as speculating on a modality of Truth (on what is ‘possibly True’) in order to keep a firm grasp on what is distinctly False: “wrong notes, bad politics and crap art” (n.p.)

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the research-creation event, and through dissemination practices, the tension between what is being speculated, actualized, felt, and how we might respond, has material effects. In the next section, I think about this materiality through theories of affect.

Affect “Feeling” × 7 ~ Joy Division, Disorder This section still hovers in the realm of situated speculation but turns to theories of affect.13 In my understanding, affect functions in a similar way to the virtual and actual discussed above and is both situated and speculative.14 However, across academic disciplines, affect is understood in different ways. Affect is frequently theorized as the capacities of bodies to act or be acted upon by other bodies in an ever-shifting milieu. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) describe affects as the forces at work in an encounter.15 Such forces might capacitate or debilitate as part of relational exchanges circulating through (and transversal to) individual events and bodies. Affects can be intimate (Springgay, 2020) and sticky (Ahmed, 2004a) and cling to bodies (or events); affects can also be deflective and slip past particular bodies or situations (Truman & Shannon, 2018). Research-creation scholar Derek McCormack (2008) has argued that the practice of research-creation is tethered to an “ethical commitment to learning to become affected” (p. 9). In this regard, affect is a capacity that sounds like it is tethered to an individual who has become committed (or has the intention) to being affected. This capacity might vary wildly in different circumstances and situations. As a scholar, I might propose the question: how can I prime myself to become affected? But I also must consider how different affective intensities might circulate through, and land differently on, diverse research participants in my research-creation projects (Ahmed, 2004b), and consider how different affects make us feel differently (Probyn, 2010). Black affect scholars have argued that when an individuated subject is invoked in affect theory, they are frequently presented as transparent and “endowed with the capacity to affect and be affected” (Palmer, 2017, p. 37). Tyrone Palmer (2017) follows da Silva (2007) to argue that, while the transparent subject is endowed with a capacity to affect and be affected, Black subjects are often configured as “endlessly affectable but unable to ‘affect or have agentive power within an affective economy’” (p. 37). The removal of agency from already oppressed groups—through scholastic description, or 13 I would argue that affect functions in the differential of the actual and virtual. It’s speculative, pre-personal, and very personal. That’s why it’s still part of this section on situated speculation (and will be part of other sections below and throughout this book). Most of these different sections that I’ve made infiltrate each other. I’m just breaking them up because that’s how I thought through them to understand how research-creation functions. 14 And as you’ll see in the Emergence and Affirmation sections below, it fits there as well. Alas, linearity. 15 See above how I link propositions to forces/affect as well.

12  Theoretical precursors

framing, or through capitalism—is a problem of white supremacy that suffuses many of the theoretical frameworks and practices that circulate in the academy. Significantly, many critical race and Black studies scholars mobilize affect theory in nuanced and anti-colonial ways that don’t re-victimize Black people or people of color (Ahmed, 2004a; Chen, 2012; Harney & Moten, 2013; Puar, 2017). In The Undercommons, Stephano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) discuss this literally and speculatively through their description of the hold, below decks during the Middle Passage. They frame the hold as an undercommons and articulate how affect can circulate and land in different ways through the relations and forces at work in the hold. I include their discussion here because their thinking on affect does not reduce Black lives to being only ‘affectable’ yet never ‘affecting.’ In The Undercommons, what Harney and Moten refer to as the ‘common’ is developed through feeling. This feeling is more-than-individual (and felt throughout the common, not just by a single person). They call this “touch of the undercommons” hapticality (p. 98). Their description of hapticality is speculative in that it is to “feel that what is to come is here;” personal, in that it is the “capacity to feel though others, for others to feel through you;” and morethan-personal, in that people in the hold were “[t]hrown together touching each other [they] were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home” yet still “feel (for) each other” (p. 98). This understanding of hapticality and the feeling in the common shows the complexity of affect circulating in both the horror of—and through the Black resistance and resilience to—the transatlantic slave trade’s Middle Passage. Harney and Moten articulate how affective forces do not end in the hold but extend beyond it into different time/spaces including contemporary Black music, Black speculative thought, and study, demonstrating how hapticality can pull toward different potentials for the future.16 I now go on to think about how normative conceptualizations of time and space might be unsettled, or ‘queered.’

Queer time/spaces The situated-speculative differential and discussions of affect I’ve been unpacking throughout this section all occupy a queer time/space. And queer temporalities and topia are a part of how I understand the differential between situatedness and speculation. Queer is an umbrella term that is commonly used as a noun or adjective to describe LGBTQIA+ subject positions; and a mode of thought that scholars, activists, and researchers mobilize when attempting to unsettle normative approaches to method and methodology and the power structures that are 16 Further, Harney and Moten’s discussion of the undercommons is based in the literal undercommons of the hold but has also been taken up as a metaphor for affective spaces within and beyond the university inspired by Black fugitive thought. McKittrick’s (2021) Dear Science is full of examples of these arts in practice and is brilliant. Also, hapticality has been theorized by other scholars as a trans-sensory intimacy, including Laura Marks.

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reproduced through them. Similar to my caveats regarding affect, speculation, and the ‘human’ above, queer theory has been critiqued for centering a white, cis- and abled version of queerness at the erasure of Black, brown, Indigenous, disabled, and trans people. In mobilizing queerness, it’s important to work against it as merely a form scholarly or social transgression performed by people who often already inhabit a privileged position. If we consider how many people (racialized, disabled, trans) are already unsettling humanism’s ‘norms,’ then the notion of queering begins to reek of a kind of white enabled (often masculine) exceptionalism that ironically performs an exclusionary logic through asserting queerness as a drive to ‘do things differently,’ or ‘transgress’ these norms (and never more so than when ‘queering’ is enacted by white, cis-hetero, abled people: what exactly is being queered in that instance?). That said, and even though queerness has been co-opted (literally by banks and the police in Pride parades etc.), I think queerness still exceeds this kind of capture: particularly given how many radical thinkers still use and complicate the term (Keeling, 2019). Queer theorists help me think through my approach to research-creation projects and method as situated/speculation, imbued with affects that unsettle linearity and occupy queer times/spaces.17 Normative approaches to qualitative research tend to follow linear constructions of time. By way of a contrast, Muñoz (2009) contends that queerness might be understood as “structuring an educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). In Muñoz’s work, queerness itself is a horizon that has not yet arrived, and both the future and the past hold (virtual) potentials, or what he calls ‘affective surplus’ (p. 14), that may be accessed to feel toward different worlds. Thinking alongside Muñoz, the speculative planning that goes into a research-creation project is open to what could be, recognizing that what might actualize will create an affective surplus. Keeling (2019) outlines how queer is “palpable, felt as affect” (p. 18) and how queer temporalities outline a “dimension of time that produces risk” (p. 19). Queer temporally refers to the “dimension of the unpredictable and the unknowable in time that governs errant, eccentric, promiscuous, and unexpected organizations of social life” and, I would argue, methods (Keeling, 2019, p. 19). Research-creation is risky.18 And situated speculation, including propositions, affect, and queerness, are risky concepts: a researcher is never certain exactly

17 Colleagues who I have organized and written about research-creation projects with often think with queer theory (Springgay & Truman, 2019; Truman & Shannon, 2018; Truman & Springgay, 2019). 18 Risk is a high alert word in the academy, particularly when working with students, as I do in some research. When researchers write ethics protocols, we’re supposed to account for risk to participants which makes sense. However, the structure of capitalism also always seeks to minimize risk for some at the expense of others. Surely this happens with experimental methods and art as well. Perhaps Latour’s risky diplomacy is a way of thinking through this with regards to research projects.

14  Theoretical precursors

what is going to emerge in the event. But, in case this sounds like I’m beginning to say, ‘anything goes, weee!’ be assured that I am absolutely, most definitely, and forever not saying that. Yes, I wanted to hash out some of my favorite theoretical underpinnings for how I think about research both before and during the event of research. However (I reiterate), I don’t think research-creation should ever be conceived as an ‘anything goes’ process, just like the theories are not ‘anything goes’ theories. Like all research, there’s a planning stage. This is speculative, but it also requires me as a researcher-artist to set some limitations, or conditions, or constraints in advance and have some kind of ethico-political tendings that help frame and suffuse the project. As I mentioned in the introduction and will continue to affirm: my orientation to research is embedded in feminist, antiracist, queer politics. In my work with Stephanie Springgay at WalkingLab, we call this political orientation our (in)tensions to method (2018): meaning the politics that we aspire to keep us and our methods in tension throughout the research process, as we enact situated speculation. In the next section, I think about how these (in) tensions bring rigour to the research-creation practice.

Rigorous activation How do I get from speculating about what could be to enacting a project? If I’m talking about research-creation, which I am in this book, then I am proposing a way to artistically create an event (text, song, cultural production) of what it is that I am curious about. In other words, I figure out how to make an artistic event of what I want to research: that’s the creation part. I’m not talking about investigating something that’s already happened. It is fine to research something that has already happened, but that’s not what I’m talking about here: I’m talking about creating the thing/event that I want to investigate. Sometimes this occurs with other participants, such as in the example of my research in schools or with other publics. Sometimes this is a solo artistic project. Creating the thing that I want to investigate is not an ‘anything goes’ process. Creation requires curation: specifically, curation of how I will approach the research encounter, and how I will activate artistic practices and theoretical resources. It takes planning, including ethics protocols, co-ordination with participants, and curation of materials. In other words, I have to turn up with a plan of what I am going to do and with protocols in place, even though the event of what might emerge is speculative and unknown. In terms of working with students in schools, this process can take months of pre-planning and getting to know the students, parental consent, and giving students background knowledge on a topic or arts practice. When organizing public events with WalkingLab, it requires pre-walking routes, considering issues of access, and how the police (who could show up) might react to different bodies and groups in public spaces. Curating the artistic practices that will be activated requires artistic rigor, which usually comes from years of training or practice from myself or my collaborators. I don’t turn up to a research site and spontaneously decide I’m going

Theoretical precursors 15

to do a research-creation project using Ikebana or the Charleston with a group of students (when I’ve never done either before in my life). Just like I wouldn’t show up in a science laboratory one day, declare myself a scientist, and “do parameciums” (Shannon & Truman, 2020, p. 2). The arts are undermined considerably when they are leveraged in ‘anything goes’ ways in qualitative research. Curating the theory that is activated in a project is also embedded in the project from the beginning. For example, the project I discuss in Chapter 2 centered on a desire to understand how marginalia might pedagogically affect text reception. And the text I chose to investigate through artists’ marginalia was Nietzsche’s writings about the eternal return, which is a concept that has haunted me since I first encountered it during my undergraduate studies, and which first came to Nietzsche during a walk. The theory circulates through the base text, the artists’ engagement with it, and my discussions of it in the chapter. Similarly, theories of marginalia are foregrounded in the chapter and the project design. I take a similar approach but with different artistic practices and different theories in subsequent chapters. The arts practice, the theory, and the research methods are co-imbricated throughout the duration of the project (planning, background reading, arts practice, and theorization). As you’ll see in the various exemplification chapters that follow, I use a variety of different theoretical agitations, artistic activations, and methods to organize a research-creation project, depending on what it is I’m trying to think-through and who I’m working with. Once an event, or thought, or art piece, or cultural production actualizes, then new potentials emerge from that and may invite the necessity to read new theories. In this regard, situated speculation and its attendant concepts as well as rigorous activation prime an event, but also happen throughout the event (queer time/space). So, although the next section talks more specifically about the event of emergence, the attributes of situated speculation and rigor I addressed above are also part of emergence as well as precursors to emergence.

Emergence and events The term research-creation suggests a form of practice whose analytical framework does not simply study what already exists, but acts by bringing something new into the world. (Couillard, 2020, p. 55) In this book, the word emerge functions as a verb (these findings emerged), as an adverb (research-creation projects operate emergently), and as an adjective (an emergent concept). I like how flexible the term ‘emerge’ is, and how slippery. Events emerge. An emergence glides over a cusp between potentiality and an actuality. An emergent cannot be known in advance and so in that way is aligned with what has been called the ontological turn. Perhaps emergences are ontogenetic because whatever actualizes through emergence is ‘becoming’ as much as ‘being.’ Perhaps ontogenetic is the wrong word: perhaps I should say

16  Theoretical precursors

viral! Mostly, I like the term emerge because it reminds me of the word emergency and causes me to consider before, during, and after the event of research: ‘What is emerging—and what is the emergency?’ ‘How do I respond to what’s unfolding?’ ‘What do I affirm?’ In the coming sections, I think about emergence and the event of research-creation, and how bodies (or bodyminds), and ethico-political concerns emerge through those events.

!Emergence ⇔ emergency! Emergence as a term has cycled through much contemporary thought including the sciences, social sciences, and even new age writing. In many ways, I use the term as a metaphor because I like how it links up with the word emergency when I’m thinking about the event of research and I can’t think of another term that’s as good. In empirical science, emergence is often discussed as simple objects producing novel collective effects, where emergent properties are formed through a particular process or interaction and then acquire new characteristics that are substantively different from pre-existing conditions that gave rise to them (Chang, 2004). Cultural theorists have different uptakes of the term emergence, which include Raymond Williams’ (1977) description of an emergent culture as one where “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created” (p. 122) and interventions in a cultural realm arise from a dominant framework but operate autonomously from it. In this regard, the emergent only makes sense in relation to a dominant framework that it can be distinguished from. Bryan Reynolds (2009) hybridizes the scientific notion of emergent properties and Williams’ notion of emergent culture with what he calls ‘emergent activity.’ For Reynolds (2009) emergent activity draws from both fields to “… propose critical enterprises simultaneously stemming from a subject of inquiry and distinctly redefining it” (p. 276). Drawing from Haraway (2008), research-creation scholar Natalie Loveless (2019) writes that emergence “describes an aggregate property of elements, none of which demonstrate that property inherently within them” (p. 25): in so doing, she builds a case for the unknowability of what might emerge through research, as well as for the emergent trans-disciplinarity of research-creation as a growing field. The theoretical framework I attempt to build for myself to explain emergence happens on a whole host of levels including: relations between bodies; thoughts; social inheritances; genealogies of thought as part of materiality; and what emerges in the event of research (in the time/space that Stephanie Springgay and I call the speculative middle) (Springgay & Truman, 2018). I call my research-creation projects ‘events’ as a way of highlighting how research unfolds in practice. I conceptualize an event as a multitude of forces interacting and emerging as event—including the people involved. Following Whitehead, Steven Shaviro (2009) explains, “events do not ‘happen to’ things: rather, events themselves are the only things. An event is

Theoretical precursors 17

not ‘one of [the thing’s] predicates,’ but the very thing itself ” (Shaviro, 2009, p.  25). Similarly, Latour (1999) thinks with Whitehead’s understanding of an event to replace the notion of “discovery and its very implausible philosophy of history (in which the object remains immobile while the human historicity of the discoverers receives all the attention)” (p. 306). For Latour, defining an experiment as an event takes into account the historicity of more-than-human components and circumstances of the encounter. Whitehead expands on this notion at great length with his concept concrescence wherein an event’s concrescence does not occur through an outside human observer’s recognition and attribution of human categories to inanimate matter, but wherein all components at play in an event (including the humans) concretize and become recognizable as an event (Whitehead, 1978). I like to think of persons, relations, and the event of research as an ‘event’ because it helps to remind me that they are mutable, even though some may appear to endure for longer periods of time (and become what Whitehead calls a ‘society’) and be affected by other relations, texts, words, stories, events, and body(mind)s.19

Bodyminding The research-creation projects in this book (and all of my research) concern various kinds of bodies: specifically, people’s bodies and textual bodies. Many scholars of the more-than-human turn have thought through the body as emergent, co-imbricated, and co-produced in situ. I understand the body as a nexus of related forces that have different durations and rates of change that are constantly emerging and in relation to/with other bodies, inheritances, social situations, and larger geopolitical affects. Bodies are never static (even once they materialize), but rather are ontogenetic. This has ramifications for research-creation methods and school-based learning as it leads us to consider bodies (and the spaces they move in relation to) as always in excess of themselves and full of virtual potential, while still recognizing how race, gender, sexuality, and ability are also constantly co-produced and asserted in these relational exchanges. Feminist theoretical physicist Karen Barad’s work (2003, 2007) has specifically helped me think through how events and bodies emerge in research (and

19 Critical disability studies have long argued for the language of ‘bodymind’ rather than ‘body.’ While this may seem to imply a dualism between body and mind, it’s actually part of the politics of disability studies. Deliberately invoking the mind attends to the materiality of pain (Price, 2015), the ways in which racism and disability unfold mentally and physically on racialized people (Schalk, 2018), and prevents the elision of neurodivergence (Shannon, 2020). Shannon (2020) uses ‘body(mind)’ to make explicit that he is “not indicating the separation of body from mind, but rather explicitly invoking the minding aspects of embodiment” (p. 489) and that the phrase is a suitable catchall for a more-than-human definition of ‘body’ (Shannon, personal communication). I have begun to adopt this phrase and use both body and bodymind in parts of this book, although I still struggle with the term because it sounds like a throwback to the body/mind duality to me.

18  Theoretical precursors

how research emerges). For Barad (2007), the world’s basic ontological units are not bounded individual entities, but what she terms phenomena that are constituted through intra-acting agencies, or relata that do not precede their relations and therefore cannot be known before their intra-action. Barad’s approach moves away from a metaphysics of individualism that precedes encounters, deconstructs the reductionist ontology of classical physics, and describes instead how indeterminacy20 is entangled through all being (and all research events). Importantly, embedded in Barad’s thought is an ethical attunement to and responsibility for how this world emerges or unfolds and for what happens after it emerged and unfolded (discussed below).21 Barad’s descriptions of ontological indeterminacy are fashioned after the wave-particle performances in physics double-slit experiments. In the experiments, what come to be called waves or particles perform differently based on how they are measured or ‘cut’ into one state or the other: in other words, until that cut is made, they exist in a state of indeterminacy.22 Further to this, even the experiment’s measuring apparatus (including the test tubes, the centrifuges, and the hadron colliders, but also including the researchers, the concepts, the whiteness etc.) is part of the indeterminacy: it does not entirely pre-exist the event and is therefore “perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (p. 817).23 Barad’s notion of the agentic cut isn’t solely a cutting away from—as in making a part separate from a pre-existing whole—but also a cutting together: “Cuts cut ‘things’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted

20 de Freitas and Ferrara (2016) draw from Bergson’s radical conceptualization of a body (human or otherwise) as a ‘center of indeterminacy’ assembled through a tangle of perceptions and affections (affections being merely ‘perceptions caught in loops’) (p. 45). In this perspective, all bodies are materially linked to each other, although what eventually becomes individuated as a particular body occurs through the circulation of habit forming “affective states” (Bergson, 1988, p. 53, italics in original, as cited in de Freitas and Ferrara, 2016, p. 45). This conceptualization of the circulation of affect understands it as playing pre-personal role in the individuation of a body but not housed in a particular body. 21 Similar to critiques of flattening of all humans in post-humanism, or the neutral circulation of affect privileging whiteness, in some applications of Barad’s theories agency is depoliticized, a focus on matter omits intersectional discussions of race, gender, ability, and class (even though they are material facts), and a fetishization of relations risks swirling all encounters into a relational soup. While surface engagements with new materialisms are troubling, it’s clear that Barad, like other feminists, is attempting to link contemporary knowledges in the physical and life sciences with emancipatory politics and “making connections and commitments” (2015, p. 333). 22 In articulating how being, ethics, and knowledge (onto-ethico-epistemology) emerges in situ in a given encounter, Barad (2003), describes her concept of the agential cut: “A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘apparatus of observation’) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy” (p. 815). Barad draws on Foucault’s discursive practices and Butler’s performativity to theorize the agentic cut. 23 In this regard, apparatuses are the product of agential cuts themselves.

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from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all” (Barad, 2007, p.  179). Thinking with this ongoing agentic cutting and (in)separability—or what Barad (2003) calls the “the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena” (p. 815)—unsettles the classical position of exteriority between what is observed and the observer of a research event. This view queers traditional notions of research objectivity in that it conceptualizes the researcher as directly implicated (and co-produced!) in the research event.24 Although events, bodies, and subjectivities are emergent, that does not preclude the necessity to speculate on how things could become in the future. If I consider an emergence as not just the materialization of an object or subject, but as also accompanied by an ethico-political tending, each moment becomes charged with the potentiality and necessity to respond to what matters: where emergence meets emergency. In other words, to consider ‘What is the emergency here?’ This practical and speculative question keeps the event in tension. The actual/virtual differential that I discussed above plays out throughout the research event, and throughout the process of thinking with and writing up. What emerges and how we engage with it occurs within the research event but is also speculative, feeling toward the future. Thinking with the event: what is made possible? What is the potential: how do I “read for futurity?” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 99). (Re)presenting the event: what is made possible? What is the potential? These questions/propositions become precursors for the next event. Radically, these future-worlds are actually and virtually connected to this one. The next section I consider affirmation and affirmative refusal as modes of attending to what does emerge in a research event.

Affirmation (refusal) This section extends the previous three in thinking about speculation, activation, and emergence as well as modes of responding to research events: where ‘events’ include the reading of theories, planning, engagement with people, and writing up the research. It is concerned with the precursors to events, the cusp of what emerges, and how I might respond to what does emerge. Barad (2007) uses the phrase ethico-onto-epistemology to articulate how ethics-being-knowledge emerge through relation and affect each other and the surrounding material components

24 Because of this, you might wonder (I’m currently wondering) why I didn’t write this section before the ‘situated speculation’ section above? How could the ‘situated’ person speculate if they haven’t come into being just yet, or are constantly emerging? I didn’t write it above because I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive or linear but because of how research projects run (with enabling constraints and speculation ‘beforehand’ and throughout, it made sense to start with the situated speculation). That said, speculation is going throughout the research-creation process. And what we encounter while speculating, planning, thinking—throughout the research event—changes us and we change it. This includes the theories we might read and how they might affect thinking. Thinking and theorizing are material practices.

20  Theoretical precursors

of an event. In this view, an ethic isn’t an essential ideal that is applied from the outside to a situation, but an ongoing endeavor co-emerging among knowledge and being. And I think it’s more of an orientation than a destination. But this orientation continually situates us in an ethical realm that needs to be negotiated within each research event and each affective encounter. Bertelsen and Murphie (2010) state that affect re-configures ethics “as a creative responsibility for modes of living as they come into being” (p. 141, italics in original). As the researcher and member of an event (and its forces/agencies/processes/affects), I need to be attuned and accountable to what arises in the event of research. When considering what concept best encapsulates how I think about this process, I settled on affirmation. Similar to the inhuman discussed at the beginning of this chapter, my understanding of affirmation is paradoxical: recognizing that affirmation has the notion of negation inherent in its process (affirming something in research will likely mean not affirming something else, or sometimes deliberately refusing something). This section will give some background on affirmation as a concept and some intersecting concepts including affirming chance, weak theory, refusal as ways of thinking through, and responding to what emerges (or does not emerge) in the event of research.

Affirming chance In Chapter 5, I discuss the notion of chance in relation to Derrida’s (2000) theory of hospitality, which is an orientation toward the future that promises to “say yes to who or what turns up without any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification …” Derrida, 2000, p. 77). Derrida’s hospitality occupies a queer time/space and asks the reader to ponder being hospitable to anything/anyone who might arrive in our midst, be it demon, person, someone from a distant land etc. This mode of openness aligns with Nietzsche’s engagement with affirmation throughout his career (1960, 1995). Nietzsche foregrounds affirmation in much of his writing through the notion of the eternal return (which is the topic of Chapter 2) and amor fati (love of fate): both of which challenge him (and the reader) to accept, or embrace, or affirm life as it has been and will be (and are frequently read as deterministic or nihilistic as a result—although I don’t read them this way). In his long philosophical poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (1995) discusses a game of dice among the gods—a game of chance—as another analogy for the practice of affirmation. The idea being that dice are thrown and whatever the combination of the landing, we affirm what is actualized. To be clear, I do not think of affirmation as a cheering of whatever happens—like, ‘anything goes— weeee!’—nor an affirmation of ‘says yes because I can’t say no.’ Instead, this ethic of affirmation is a promise to respond to what happens: acknowledging that we can’t know before an event occurs. Braidotti (2014) outlines the desire to embrace an ethic of affirmation as borrowing energy from the future and using it to overturn present conditions. This aligns with how many queer-feminist speculative thinkers theorize both feminism and  speculative  thought. So,  although Nietzsche’s

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metaphor of the dice throw, affirming chance and Derrida’s proposal to be hospitable to anything that shows up can sound almost flippant, in my reading they both suggest a pre-emptive or anachronistic mode of openness and responsibility to affirm, or affirmatively refuse (see below) what does occur. In this context (i.e., this chapter and the projects discussed in this book), I am limiting my discussion of affirming, or affirmatively refusing, to what occurs in the event of research and its representation/dissemination.

Weak theory The notion of affirming chance and being in a state of not-knowing but responsive to what arrives in research is aligned with how I understand Eve Sedgwick’s (2003) proposition of weak theory (as opposed to strong theory which is valued in the hard sciences/social sciences). Sedgwick considers weak theory as a purely theoretical construct: here, I’m considering it in terms of research events. Sedgwick (2003) extends Paul Ricœur’s (1970) hermeneutics of suspicion, which she argues describes the methodological centrality of suspicion in philosophy and the humanities (and social sciences); the hermeneutics of suspicion highlight how the critical habits we have inherited often evolve from a suspicious view of theory, other theorists, and the “concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia” (p. 125).25 Sedgwick (2003) further describes how this paranoid critical stance has become synonymous with critical thought itself, in that it is anticipatory in a foreclosing way, already thinking of the worst that could happen; it is reflexive and mimetic: it does to itself what it suspects other may do to it, before it occurs. Sedgwick considers paranoid theory an example of what Silvan Tomkins called ‘strong affect theory.’ In strong theory, very little is left to “chance” (Tomkins, 1962, p. 433 as cited in Sedgwick, 2003, p. 135). A strong theory is tautological in that it “can’t do anything other than prove the very same assumptions with which it began … as a triumphant advance toward truth and vindication” (p.  135). Strong theory is paranoid, seeks to avoid surprise through aiming for consistency and knowability and occupying and organizing what can be. Tendings toward strong theory are prevalent in the social sciences where we are often asked to explain the outcomes and ‘benefits’ of a project before we even embark on it— which is a speculative mode of thought—but rarely understood that way institutionally. Such practices are normally framed in this paranoid mode through concepts such as minimizing ‘risk’ in the capitalist sense (although couched in the language of ethics or care). Strong theory also manifests in research that positions the arts as inherently transformative as a way of selling research in advance. To unsettle paranoid theory, Sedgwick (2003) proposes ‘reparative reading,’ which recognizes that we cannot know in advance and that we may in fact be ‘surprised’ during reading (and research). Like I said in the activation 25 Ricœur outlines three masters of the school of suspicion as Marx, Freud, and, ironically, Nietzsche considering how I’m engaging with affirmation and chance in this section.

22  Theoretical precursors

section, there is planning—on myriad levels including artistic rigor, ethics, and ­curation—when conducting a project. However, thinking with Sedgwick helps me consider the need to be open to what does occur, so I don’t foreclose new events before they even happen. Further, Kathleen Stewart (2008) describes this approach as becoming undone through an “attention to things that just don’t add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought” (p. 72). Thinking with these scholars as a researcher, I try to attune to stories, events that don’t add up, that make problems and that cause friction or defamiliarize my own thinking: indeed, this is the tradition of radical arts practice that research-creation draws inspiration from (Loveless, 2019). Sometimes this friction is created through the theories I think with, or through what happens during research events. Friction can be generative to thinking and propel new ideas, while at other times it might force the event to slow down. Or stop.

Refusal and responsibility To think through frictive situations, and what she terms a ‘politics of slowness,’ Stengers (2005) activates Herman Melville’s character Bartleby from Bartleby, the Scrivner: A Story of Wall Street. In Melville’s story, Bartleby is a law copyist who infuriates all the other characters in the story by stating, “I would prefer not to” when asked to complete any task, undermining the ways the other characters expect the world to function.26 For Stengers (2005), a politics of slowness “resist[s] the consensual way in which the situation is presented” (p. 994). Such a politics evokes Tuana’s (2008) viscous porosity, which does not allow us to easily glide away from “sites of resistance and opposition” (p. 194) but instead forces us to recognize the friction and perhaps a need to affirm a new direction. As scholars in Indigenous studies (Simpson, 2007; Tuck & Yang, 2014) have argued, sometimes research doesn’t just slow down, it stops, or is refused because all social science research is settler colonial. This is similar to Glissant’s (1990) conceptualization of opacity where Black people might refuse to render themselves legible or transparent to Eurowestern frameworks and affirm another world order. As such, while refusal can be configured as ‘jamming’ settler colonial research, this does not mean that Indigenous or Black thought and people are beholden to operating only in relation to settler spaces or logics. Importantly, Leanne Simpson’s (2017) engagement with Jarrett Martineau’s (2015) work on affirmative refusal describes not only how Indigenous artists might resist “forms of visibility within settler colonial realities that render the Indigenous vulnerable to commodification and control” (Simpson, 2017, p. 198) but how this refusal is affirmative in that it engages with the arts and modes of living as transformative resurgent constellations away from settler colonial capture. This is similar to 26 Bartleby has been theorized by scholars such as Deleuze, Agamben, and Stengers, as well as scholars such as Kara Keeling (2019) who describes Bartleby’s queer temporality in contrast to capitalistic time as a function that “upends Western humanism’s categories” (p. 51).

Theoretical precursors 23

Harney and Moten’s discussion of hapticality and affect which extends beyond the hold as a site of resistance and pulls toward new potentials for the future through the arts. And McKittrick’s (2021) articulations of ‘black livingness’ (passim) in Dear Science, which affirms the power of the arts as liberatory both through her scholarly engagement with various Black art forms and modes of knowledge production as well as through her own writing.27 As a scholar, to practice affirmation or ‘saying yes to what turns up’ may well mean that what ‘turns up’ is the recognition that there are entire constellations of relations and affirmations I might never be part of. Or that what ‘turns up’ is the need for me to affirm refusal. It also means taking responsibility for the material relations and worlds that I build through research-creation events and scholarship, recognizing who and what is being excluded or vaunted (Ahmed, 2008; Haraway, 2016) through my own affirmative practices, including through the act of representation, which I take up in the last section.

More-than-representation (in lieu of a conclusion) Affirmation means thinking critically about world-making practices I participate in, including research events but also the politics of how I distribute my speculative, affective, and scholarly attention. This includes who I cite, exclude, and think with when writing up an event. In this final section, in lieu of a conclusion, I outline a more-than-representational argument for how writing up research always produces something new (rather than merely representing something that has already occurred), followed by questions I ask myself about the process of re-presentation of events. Discussions of how to represent research events is an ongoing concern in the academy. Scholars have tried everything from verbatim representations of every guttural sound, including transcribing ‘uhms’ and ‘ahs’ and breaths from interview recordings in hopes of authentically capturing the true meaning of the speaker’s utterances; to refusing to discuss research unless the research participants are co-presenting (which can be important politically but can also add considerably to participants’ labor and may not ameliorate power relations); to other extremes of saying outright that it’s impossible to re-present something (like a dance or a gesture), and myriad other tactics in between. Performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider (2011) ponders whether the cultural and scholarly concern about the un-capturability of artistic events is predetermined by an ongoing (Eurowestern) “habituation to the logic of the archive?” (p. 98, italics mine). I would answer ‘yes’ to that question. So, what is the ‘logic of the archive’? In Archive Fever (1995), Derrida explicates how the term archive

27 It is important not to position refusal as merely a shutting down of colonial logics, which can re-center whiteness through forcing Indigenous or Black thought into only being in relation/ reaction to settler colonialism (and white narration, ah hem). What these scholars are affirming is that there’s a cosmos flourishing beyond white-Eurowestern reckoning.

24  Theoretical precursors

derives from arkheion: “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (p. 2). While an archive represents a physical (or virtual) space that houses ‘objective’ documentation of past ‘events,’ it also has inherent within its name a designation of authority regarding who can archive, who has access to the archive, and who can interpret the archive: it is a settler colonial (imperialist) project, which is mirrored in how science and humanities research treats data, interpretation, and representation. However, as Derrida shows, there are flaws in archival logic: Derrida argues that what is archived is always changed by the archiving process and as such, “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida, 1995, p. 17). To explain this aporia, Derrida describes the process of documentation (in an archive or other research): through archival procedures we seek to preserve an object or experience by removing it from circulation, seek to legitimize an event by naming and recording it, seek to forget an event through remembering it in another form, and seek to seal the meaning of something that can never be closed. Similar to his readings of texts, Derrida shows that although a version of archival logic is predominant in our culture, the logic of its practice undoes its own certainty: “… The archivist always produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out to the future …” (1995, p. 45). As such, instead of sealing or fixing meaning, archival procedures and other forms of recording always produce more meanings that might affirm or undo archival logics. As a way of deliberately intervening in and un-thinking the logic of the archive and its procedures of documentation and representation, research-creation scholar Andrew Murphie (2016) explicates a mode of practice that he calls anarchival. A current research-creation example of this practice is Stephanie Springgay’s The Instant Class Kit, which unsettles historical ‘Fluxkits’ with contemporary Black, Indigenous, people of color, and queer artistic interventions into the archive (Springgay, A. Truman, & MacLean, 2019). Artist, Black studies scholar, and participant in the Instant Class Kit, Syrus Marcus Ware (2017) has argued for the necessity of even ‘counter-archiving’ practices to challenge the inherent whiteness of archival procedures and logics even in the LGBTQIA+ community’s seemingly already-counter-cultural space. Even deliberate anarchiving or counter-archiving affirms something. Thinking alongside these scholars, my approach to research-creation is firstly concerned with the ways that I am generating (not collecting or representing) research ‘data;’ secondly, how what happens in the event might prompt further thought; and thirdly, how ‘re-producing’ those events and the theories I think with may engender further thought (Shannon & Truman, 2020; Truman, 2016; Truman & Shannon, 2018). In this way, writing about research projects is always more than (and less than) the events that occurred. But more importantly, writing is an event in itself: instead of this recognition causing a crisis of representation, or closing down of meaning, I view it as an opening. As such, in this book, I think with research-creation projects using various other theorists and theories that correspond to, agitate, and frictionally rub against the research events to

Theoretical precursors 25

consider how they engender further thought. This process is speculative, affective, and occupies a queer time/space, and might require me to re-think even the theories I use. In some of the research-creation projects that are discussed in this book, the art practice (for example, postcard inscriptions or song composition), is the research-creation project and the more-than-representation of it. But there’s also a layer of scholarly writing and engagement that’s happening in this particular ‘output’ that is interpretive (although, I always attempt to think with aspects of the events in relation to theory rather than close down meaning). After McCormack (2015), I view more-than-representational thought as a mode of “working (with) worldly relations – relations in which thinking is already entangled – in order to transform or recompose these relations anew” (McCormack, 2015, p. 92). More-than-representational theory has a different approach to the temporality of knowledge than most theories used in qualitative research; its theorists are less interested in representing empirical or essential realities that occur before the act of representation than in “… enacting multiple and diverse potentials of what knowledge can become afterwards” (Vannini, 2015, p. 12). Thus, a more-than-representational approach to research focuses on animation rather than representation, creation rather than reports, and fosters new constellations of meaning-making. Each re-presentation creates a new event. While research-creation (particularly when manifesting as arts forms) can instantiate more-than-representational theory, I think qualitative researchers or humanities scholars in general can take it on and realize that we’re all creating while we’re writing.28 While I believe all texts open up to interpretation because of the nature of them, as a researcher re-presenting events that have humans involved, I want to assert that it’s important to consider Stengers’ (2011) speculative question “Who is, or will be, affected, and how?” (p. 62), both throughout a research event and each time a new reading/writing is completed on ‘data.’ And although that question can likely never be answered, it is a guide for thinking about the material effects of the theories I draw on and how research is conducted and represented. To end on the queer-feminist politics that inform research-creation, some questions that help guide this process that I ask myself include: •

•

When working with diverse groups of participants, whose theorizing informs my research and dissemination practices? Who and what am I affirming through citational practices and research collaboration? In what ways is my thinking unsettling established assumptions and engaging with an anti-racist, de-colonial, and feminist politics? (Is my radical empiricism actually radical imperialism?)

28 A fabulous example of research-creation at the intersections of scholarly writing and the poetic is Katherine McKittrick’s (2021) Dear Science and Other Stories. That book is a must-read for anyone interested in method, the arts and representation, and what anti-racist worldbuilding could be.

26  Theoretical precursors

Research events—both empirical sites and the radically empirical sites of reading and thinking with theory—are material situations that create worlds. This comes back to some of the theorists that this chapter began with, specifically Sylvia Wynter who discusses how the stories we tell materially create worlds and shape us as (in)humans. Well, that’s a tour of the theoretical precursors and modes of thought I bring to thinking about research-creation projects at this juncture. The specific projects in this book have all sorts of other specific theories/scholars/modes of thought brought to bear on them because of the kinds of projects they were (marginalia, in school creative writing, post-carding, song-making, bots). Although I consider all of those projects ‘research-creation’ projects, I don’t particularly consider my ‘writing up’ of them in the following chapters of the book to be research-creation. The writing is mostly me trying to think further with emergences that I encountered during the events: thinking with problems as it were, which ends up informing further research-creation projects and produces new events in the form of scholarly writing. If you’re interested in my research as creation projects: some WalkingLab events, Oblique Curiosities’ sonic compositions, and my creative writing would be better examples.

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Shannon, D. B. (2021). (under review) What does the ‘proposition’ do for research-creation? Truth and modality in Whitehead and Wittgenstein. Matter. Shaviro, S. (2009). Without criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze and aesthetics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. London: Repeater. Simpson, A. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship. Junctures, 9(4), 67–80. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan Press. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822372363 Snaza, N. (2019). Animate literacies : Literature, affect, and the politics of humanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S. E., & Zaliwska, Z. (2016). Introduction: Re-attuning to the materiality of education. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. xv–xxxiii). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. A. (2014). Posthumanism and educational research. doi: https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315769165 Springgay, S. (2008). Body knowledge and curriculum: Pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Springgay, S. (2020). Feltness: On how to practice intimacy. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420932610 Springgay, S., Truman, A., & MacLean, S. (2019). Socially engaged art, experimental pedagogies, and anarchiving as research-creation. Qualitative Inquiry, doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800419884964 Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). Stone walks: Inhuman animacies and queer archives of feeling. Discourse. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2016.1226777 Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019). Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: walking research-creation in school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1597210 Stengers, I. (2005). The cosmopolitical proposal. In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Making things public: Atmospheres of democracy (pp. 994–1003). Stengers, I. (2011). Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds reimagined: (Dis)ability, race, and gender in Black women’s speculative fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stryker, S. (2015). Transing the queer (in)human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, 227. Truman, S. E. (2016). Becoming more than it never (actually) was: Expressive writing as research-creation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.10 80/15505170.2016.1150226 Truman, S. E. (2017). Speculative methodologies & emergent literacies: Walking & writing as research-creation. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Curriculum Studies & Teacher Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and Book History & Print Culture, Massey College. University of Toronto.

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Truman, S. E. (2019a). Feminist new materialisms. In P. Atkinson, S. Delamont, A. Cernat, J. W. Sakshaug, & R. A. Williams (Eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of research methods. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd. Truman, S. E. (2019b). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465. Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The intimacies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19. Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2016). Propositions for walking research. In The Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research. doi: https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315693699 Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2019). Queer Walking Tours and the affective contours of place. Cultural Geographies. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019842888 Tuana, N. (2008). Viscus porosity. In S. Alaimo, & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 88–213). Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530265 Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational research methodologies: An introduction. In P. Vannini (Ed.), Non-representational methodologies: Re-envisioning research (pp. 1–18). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ware, S. M. (2017). all power to all people?: Black LGBTTI2QQ activism, remembrance, and archiving in Toronto. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 170–180. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality, corrected edition. New York, NY: Free Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wong, A. (2020). The Last Disabled Oracle. Retrieved August 15, 2020, from https:// bleedonline.net/program/assembly-for-the-future/the-last-disabled-oracle/ Wynter, S. (1989). Beyond the word of Man: Glissant and the new discourse of the Antilles. World Literature Today, 63(4), 637–648. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/40145557. Wynter, S. (2001). Towards the sociogenic principle: Fanon, identity, the puzzle of conscious experience, and what it is like to be “Black.” In M. F. Durán-Cogan & A. Gómez-Moriana (Eds.), National Identities and sociopolitical changes in Latin America (pp. 30–66). Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its Overrepresentation–An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalelled catastrophe for our species? Or, to Give humanness a different future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.), Sylvia Wynter on being human as praxis (pp. 9–87). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yusoff, K. (2020). The Inhumanities. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1814688

2 MINOR INTERFERENCES Marginalia as research-creation

This chapter is about marginalia and intertexts. The week I had blocked out to revisit, revise, and expand the chapter, I thought to myself: “Oh dear, how is Nietzsche relevant in the summer of BLM protests, COVID-19 pandemic, and collapsing higher education among other things like climate emergencies globally? Why did I use his texts to make this project?” Then I read Claudia Rankine’s poem Weather in the New York Times Book Review, 21 June 2020. Rankine states, “On a scrap of paper in the archives it is written/I have forgotten my umbrella” and my intertextual heart leapt. Rankine’s poem refers to an errant scribble of Friedrich Nietzsche’s in the archives, something almost forgotten about a forgotten object: his umbrella. Nietzsche’s scribble ‘I have forgotten my umbrella’ has been pondered by dozens of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and now the poet Rankine who builds a powerful poem around the images of the umbrella and weather. I decided that yes, I can still engage with Nietzsche’s writings and more to the point in this chapter use art to interfere with his writings and other scholarly inheritances.1 Intratextual Entanglements was a collaborative mail art and marginalia research-creation event between 34 adult participants that I curated during 2014–2015. The participants were colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine within the academy and arts community. All of the participants consented to have their names printed as part of the research-creation project. In the first phase of the research-creation project, I mailed each participant a copy of the same text to annotate in the margins or engage with using whatever media they chose. Participants then returned the texts to me by post, or in some cases

1 This chapter is extended on a previously published version (Truman, 2016).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-2

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email where the texts had become digital audio or visual files. I made copies of the first round of textual responses, and then sent those texts out again for a second round, wherein each participant received a text from someone else in the project to further engage with and then return to me. The organization of who received which text in the second phase was not a pre-planned arrangement. I sent the texts out for the second round based on when they first arrived to me (time-ordered) and based on the convenience of transport (large, heavy objects were easier to hand-deliver rather than post, and digital files were easier to email over the sea). At the time of writing, in 2020, I have 60 responses to the research-creation event with 8 outstanding: I think it’s fair to assume the last 8 will never arrive. Following an overview of the specifics of the research-creation project, this chapter highlights some of the long history of marginalia and theoretical approaches to texts and textuality, followed by a description of the methodology I used to frame the project. I discuss some of the pedagogical importance of traditional forms of annotation and consider how radical ‘reading-writing’ practices and annotation might affect engagement with texts and disrupt the genealogy and meaning of texts. Finally, I turn to different components of what emerged through the research-creation event and think further with them. The chapter also implicitly discusses the themes of walking and movement as they relate to ideation, because these themes are evident in the initiating text by Nietzsche. The beginning ‘text’ or ‘intertext’ or ‘base text’ for this research-creation was assembled from snippets pulled from two separate books by Nietzsche: The Gay Science or Joyful Wisdom (Nietzsche, 1960), translated by Thomas Common, 1910, and re-published in 1960; and Ecce Homo (Nietzche, 1989), translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1989.2 I cut out parts of Nietzsche’s work and made a new base intertext physically and conceptually. For the purposes of my project, what I’m referring to as the ‘text’ or ‘base text’ or ‘Nietzsche’s inter-text’ is the snippets of Nietzsche’s writing I pasted together, scanned, and then reproduced 33 copies of to circulate (the project ended up with 34 participants because my mother wanted to join: more on that later). The term ‘text’ has a whole host of meanings, sometimes referring to the ‘original’ piece of writing or the ‘original’ meaning, with scholars asserting phrases like ‘the text itself ’ as holding a particular authority. Scholars have been debating the authority of texts since they were first inscribed (and arguably oral ‘texts’ as well). The Ecce Homo portion of my assembled text discusses Nietzsche’s walking practice and how he believes walking aids creativity.3 In Ecco Homo (which was

2 The Gay Science was originally published in 1882, and Ecce Homo was written in the 1880s but not published until 1908, eight years after Nietzsche’s death. 3 The walk has been reported on by different scholars in different disciplines, acknowledging the relationship between walking and ideation (Gros, 2014; Solnit, 2002).

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 he base text for marginalia project. Assembled by me from Nietzsche’s writings in T The Gay Science and Ecce Homo.

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published posthumously), Nietzsche explains how, during a walk in Switzerland, an important affirmation came to him: The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me. (Nietzsche, 1989) Many years earlier, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche had introduced the eternal recurrence as the heaviest burden. It is framed as a proposition a demon poses to Zarathustra. This burden, or affirmation (two very ways of referring to it by Nietzsche himself ), is one of his most famous philosophical concepts that presents the reader with this scenario: The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: “This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence – and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!.” (Nietzsche, 1960) I view the Nietzschean intertexts as flickering between both minor and major concepts in the Deleuzoguattarian sense. In their book Kafka (1986), Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between major and minor literature wherein a minor literature is not beholden to genre, nor burdened with the weight of traditional meaning. Massumi (2015) suggests that major concepts “carry dead weight. They are laden with baggage that exerts an inertial resistance against effective variation. Minor concepts, once noticed, are self-levitating” (p. 63). The various concepts that emerge in the combined Nietzschean base-text could of course be either major or minor concepts, depending on the repertoire the reader brings to engaging with the exercise of reading. More important for me was my interest in the participants’ material engagement with the base-text, and each other’s interference with the text and what that generated. The eternal return is arguably a more major concept, in that participants in the research-creation event may have arrived at the text with a decided understanding of what eternal return meant to them: although each of the participants’ engagement with the text does something new with it, regardless of what pre-conceived major concepts

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or minor concept the participants may have brought to their own understanding of the text. Within both the Ecce Homo text and the Joyful Wisdom text and even my instructions to participants were various other themes or concepts participants took up and interfered with, including several focusing on Nietzsche’s statement: “All prejudices come from the intestine” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 240).

Reading and texts In the next section I discuss how I conceptualize the concepts of text, textuality, and intertextuality in relation to the Intratextual Entanglements project. A poststructuralist view of a text could be described as the meaning generated in the relation between the semiotic or material configurations of a piece of writing (or other kind of object) and the reader who activates it by viewing or reading it. What’s known as ‘intertextuality,’ as outlined by Kristeva (1986) is the acknowledgement that any text is constructed “… as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (p. 37). Hayles (2012) states that the traditional humanities approach to reading texts “… connotes sophisticated interpretations achieved through long years of scholarly study and immersion in primary texts” (p. 29). In this regard, reading well, or being well read in the humanities, requires engagement with primary texts and ongoing close4 intertextual reading practices. Intertextuality can work through the imagery, language use, or other overt or implied references to other texts (Truman, McLean Davies, Buzacott, 2021). Jameson (1975) describes textuality in methodological terms, where objects of investigation in the humanities or social sciences are understood as constituting “… texts that we decipher and interpret, as distinguished from older views of these objects as realities or existents or substances that we in one way or another attempt to know” (p. 205). Further, Spivak (2003) discusses how reading is an uncertain process that must be affirmed and that the act of reading is a “transgression of the text” (p. 55). Thinking with these scholars, the assembled intertext is perhaps writerly in Roland Barthes’ (1974) sense of the word. A writerly text destabilizes a reader’s expectations and requires them to ‘write’ the text while ‘reading’ it. According to Barthes, “… the writerly text is ourselves writing before the infinite game of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system” (Barthes, 1974, p. 5). Writerly texts’ narrative structures may be non-linear or disjointed and make the reader do some of the ‘writing’ as they read. This approach to textuality is in line with Derrida’s theories of the text, who describes the authority of a text itself as provisional and its origin a “trace” (Spivak, 1974, xviii). As such, a text could be described as occurring through meaning generated in the relation between the semiotic or material configurations of a piece of writing (or other kind of object) 4 Conversely, Morretti’s (2013) distant reading, or machine reading replaces the human as starting point with algorithms and depends on distance rather than closeness in scoping out genres or tropes.

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and the reader who activates it by viewing-reading it; texts function textually through the activation of reading. The notion of textuality and its many theorists has had significant influence in social science research by challenging the idea that data are separate from theory and interpretation, thereby requiring researchers to situate themselves before interpreting a text (be that ‘text’ a painting, gesture, word-based, or some other form of media). While discussions of textuality sound as though they might privilege—or depend on—humans as the main active agents and interpreters of the textual transformations, and perhaps privilege a representational approach to language, other material factors are also at play in textuality: for example, what Grigely (1995) calls discontinuous transience (a rupture or deliberate interference with the text); and continuous transience (material accretion, dissolution over time, or through context). Continuous transience operates similar to deconstruction: it happens within texts. It’s not something that’s done to a text from the outside. Derrida (1990) makes clear that calling deconstruction either an analysis or critique misses the point of deconstruction: Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality … (Derrida, 1990, p. 85) Poststructuralist thought has had genealogical influence on the more-than-human turn and remains a thread that influences how I think about research methods and representation, particularly the poststructuralist refusal to settle on fixed understandings of a text. This approach to textual meaning-making—where the texts, readers, and the meaning-making process are provisional—might start to sound like an ‘anything goes’ approach. However, poststructuralist thinkers have drawn attention to this themselves and argued for an ethico-political awareness within the deconstructive process along side intertextual meaning-making (Trifonas, 2000).

Intratext Drawing on the complex theorization of text and textuality that literary studies, and the more-than-human turn have inherited from some of these fields, I named this research-creation project Intratextual Entanglements. Barad’s (2007) neologism intra-action, “… signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (p. 33, italics in original). She explains that, while ‘interaction’ suggests ‘separate individual agencies that precede their interaction,’ intra-action indicates that distinct agencies (texts, humans etc.) emerge through their interaction or mutual entanglement rather than preceding that entanglement. Extending from the poststructuralist approaches to reading that trouble the assumption of latent

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meanings lying dormant in texts, waiting to be revealed by readers (or researchers), intra-textuality also acknowledges how the reader themselves as well as the text and meaning are entangled or co-created in situ. When conceiving of how the project might operate, I drew on Barad’s term apparatus, which is also from empirical science.5 Apparatuses are assemblages, rather than measuring devices, that according to Barad (2007) enact agential cuts (both ontic and semantic) and produce boundaries that give way to properties/objects/subjects. Barad’s discussion of apparatus comes from Haraway’s (1988) “apparatuses of bodily production” (p. 595), which Haraway developed from her readings of Katie King who coined the term “apparatus of literary production” in a working manuscript at the time (Haraway, 1988, p. 595). For King (1991), an apparatus of literary production emerges in the intersection of “art, business, and technology” (p. 92); ‘literature’ is produced from this matrix in the form of poems or other textual bodies. Haraway extends this thinking to include the production and reproduction of other bodies (acknowledging that biological ‘bodies’ may not be produced the same way texts are). Haraway introduces the term “material-semiotic actor” to conceptualize all objects of knowledge as active, ‘meaning-generating’ parts of the apparatus of bodily production. It should be understood that Haraway’s designation of texts or biological bodies (or research events) as objects of knowledge does not imply that they are static or pre-exist the research event; rather, “[t]heir boundaries materialize in social interaction” (p. 595, italics in original). As such, boundaries themselves and the objects they demarcate do not wholly pre-exist the event. Boundaries are provisional, generative, and happen in situ. In the case of the Nietzschean marginalia research-creation project, the apparatus would include: the base Nietzsche text and the situations from which it emerged (including Nietzsche’s famous walk in Switzerland when he came up with the idea of the eternal return); the materials of the first and second engagements by participants and theories they brought to bear on it; the social-material constraints mailing and organizing the research-creation project; and I theorizing it; as well as a host of social-historical-material engagements with the original ‘texts’ over time by philosophers. None of these aspects of the apparatus are entirely ontologically pre-existent but rather are produced through the intra-action. In a qualitative research setting or pedagogical event, this would mean that the ‘readers’ (including myself as researcher) who encounter a text do not entirely pre-exist that encounter, in the same way a text, or to use another Baradian (2007) term, the phenomena do not pre-exist its being ‘read,’ or ‘written’ in the writerly sense. For Barad, phenomena are “specific material performances of the world” (p. 335) that demonstrate the ontological inseparability (entanglements) of all intra-acting ‘agencies’ in a given situation. Further, I do not leave linguistic theorizing out of the materiality of research-creation by designating 5 As you can tell, I was reading a lot of Barad in 2012–2014 when I came up with this project. As I outline in Chapter 1, during research-creation projects I view the creation of art as a way of thinking through whatever I want to make sense of.

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language as a non-material entity. The apparatus in this instance necessarily includes language as a material element but does not give it more credence than other material components of the project. My survey of the history of marginal annotation (below) evidences that language is material and has material affects. Scribbles in the margins of pieces of paper have material affects (I have forgotten my umbrella). So, while I agree with many new materialists’ ongoing critiques of the linguistic turn, and believe it’s time language was relieved from what MacLure (2013) calls its “imperial position as mediator of the world” (p. 633), I do not exclude language or linguistic theorizing from the materiality of my research practice: I maintain that language is a material force and material event.

Some background on textual marginalia and group reading Reading the margin shows that the page can be seen as a territory of contestation upon which issues of political, religious, social and literary authority are fought (Tribble, 1993, p. 2) An overview of the history of marginalia shows that pedagogues during the Renaissance such as Erasmus and Mignault created annotated versions of textbooks to direct student learning (Grafton & Jardine, 1986). Teachers and students have annotated and written in the margins of texts since before the age of print. Heather Jackson (2001) glosses the centuries-old history of marginalia, its potential to influence readers’ responses to texts as well as ‘disturb’ authors—for example, Virginia Woolf who had an intense dislike of marginalia as an ‘assault’ on books. Jackson draws from her research into Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a prolific annotator. Coleridge coined the phrase marginalia and often wrote intentionally instructive marginalia in his friends’ books and annotated important sections of a book “…so that the friend would feel as though he or she were reading the book in his company” (Jackson, 2005, p. 135). Historically, marginalia were not the secret notes commonly used today but semi-public documents orientated toward other readers. Considering the persuasive potential of marginal comments, William Slights (1987) argues how marginal annotations and illuminations can “radically alter a reader’s interpretation of the centered text” or “… control the very genealogy of the text” (p. 201). As art book scholar Joanna Drucker (2004) argues, disruptions of a text are “interventions into the social order, and the text of the world as it is already written” (p. 109). Further, Jackson (2001) argues that while marginal notation can introduce contradictory opinions and facts, these in themselves may be less significant than demonstrating the “possibility of alternatives and opinions” (p. 241, italics in original). The awareness of the mutability of a text is an important component to reading and writing and education in general, as is the awareness of the capacity for readers-writers to exert the right to alter a text (social order). Such awareness highlights both the material differential inherent

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in an  existing text (and person interacting with a text) as well as the virtual potential of an existing text (and person interacting with a text). These viewpoints illustrate how reading and meaning-making are collaborative exercises: marks, ruptures, or comments on a text generate a new text. Several studies have attempted to evaluate how annotations enhance study skills and textual recall on multiple-choice tests as well as attempt to codify annotative practices (Feito & Donahue, 2008; Heath, 1983). Joanna Wolfe’s (2002) research with undergraduate English students demonstrates that marginal comments influence students’ perceptions of the source text; passages with evaluative annotations are more effective than underlining in boosting student recall, while, unsurprisingly, the perceived position of an annotator has the ability to shape readers’ responses to the text. For example, annotations by a professor, teacher, or person the student believes is an authority affect the way the text is received; accordingly, many students were “swayed in the direction of the gloss’s valence (i.e., positive evaluations uplifted students’ ratings of source arguments, and negative evaluations depressed their ratings)” (p. 319). Wolfe’s study confirms what many educators—from Erasmus to the current day—have known about the power of marginal commentaries to affect the reception and interpretation of a text. The ability of ‘negative’ comments to affect how a reader relates to a source has pedagogical implications for writing practices as well as reading practices. For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from reading the comments. In their development of a taxonomy of annotative reading practices, literary theorist Patricia Donahue and psychologist Jose Feito (2008) discuss Wolfgang Iser’s notion of repertoire as an element that develops through the reading process. According to Iser, the text, as well as the reader, has a repertoire of, first, “familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary themes, together with allusions to familiar social and historical contexts,” and, second, a repertoire that includes “techniques or strategies used to set the familiar against the unfamiliar” (Iser, 1972, p. 293). A reader will relate to the text and the text’s gaps differently, depending on the repertoire they possess before encountering the text. And the reader’s repertoire will be affected by the texts they read, causing them to change as a reader through experience (Iser, 1972, p. 285; Donahue & Feito 2008, p. 300). Brian Massumi (2015) discusses Andrew Murphie’s pedagogical technique of “conceptual speed dating” as a “collective encounter between a group of readers and a text” (p. 66) as another way of engaging with concepts and group reading practices. I had the opportunity to participate in a day-long conceptual speed-dating event at SenseLab in Quebec in 2013. For the ‘reading’ practice, a concept was presented to our large group of participants who, in turn, created artistic activations of the concept. After creating our artistic activation of the concept, we all later circulated the room in five-minute stints learning from each of the other groups’ activations as if ‘speed dating.’ In high school English classes, I’ve used a similar group reading activity with students called ‘The Market,’

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where small groups of students, each explore a different element of a text in detail and then circulate the room and pick up the ‘produce’ of the various ‘market stalls.’ In both conceptual speed-dating and the market stall scenarios (interesting metaphors!), participants’ understandings and the text are pushed out of their pre-established positions by thinking with each other. There is an assortment of reading traditions that I could continue to gloss in this section, including Hermeneutics with its interest in the meaning of a text and how to best obtain that meaning; Russian formalism with its emphasis on the nuts and bolts of the text, and how the structure of language can get in the way of finding meaning; psychoanalytic criticism with its focus on the unconscious desires of the author and what that means; and queer, feminist, postcolonial, sociological, and cultural studies readings and all of their attendant orientations that affect meaning: in other words, as Snaza (2019a) describes, an “infinite set of agencies appears around the edges of any scene of reading, and they are part of that scene” (p. 111). In truth, possibly all of these methods are at work in both the interactions with Nietzsche’s base text, and my reading-writing of those texts in this chapter. In this regard, all the readers are authors of sorts through their engagements that circulate new meanings. The following section will think further with some of the texts and show how, by viewing them with different apparatuses (which includes how I’ve organized them below), different ethico-political, artistic, and theoretical responses emerge. In writing up this chapter I am cognizant of not wanting to now pin the texts down and label them like specimens and state what they mean, as this would undermine the whole research-creation project—instead I think with the texts as provocations and highlight the cultural, linguistic, artistic, ethico-political concerns that arise from interacting with them. As such, rather than coding the intratexts by what they are/mean, my approach here requires a consideration of how they do/provoke. Thinking through, theorizing, and writing up this chapter is part of a process that will produce a new textual-event: the texts continue to proliferate. In some instances, as you’ll see below, the participants in the research-creation project wrote responses or spoke to me about what they were thinking when they engaged with the base-text, or intratext: however, others did not. I understand the participants’ discussions (or refusal to discuss) as another layer of the intertextual engagement.

‘Beyond man & time’ The first concept I want to consider is the overman, or the superman (Übermench), which appeared or was alluded to in different marginal engagements in the research-creation project. Comic book author6 Joe Ollmann’s cartoon marginalia critiques the Nazis for their uptake of the Übermench, while the 6 The participants are named in this project as per the ethics protocol. Because most are practicing artists or scholars, they all agreed to be identified (they could have opted to not be identified).

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Cartoon marginalia. By Joe Ollmann.

next cartoon also states, “But the Superman posit is pretty ELITIST.” Nietzsche’s overman (whether or not Nietzsche meant he was literally male is irrelevant: he’s always referred to as a he) is a contested and divisive idea that has been taken up (perhaps unfairly) by some horrific regimes in history like the Third Reich. The overman is supposed to be beyond mankind—superior of mind and strength and not tethered to the same values or principals as ‘regular’ humans. And with most concepts that imply a superiority—when the notion of something being

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‘Man’ or beyond ‘Man’ is accepted, the polarized notion of sub-man or underman creeped in to conceptualize ‘non-Aryans,’ disabled people, queer and trans people. I don’t think this was necessarily Nietzsche’s intention with the invention of the overman. But words (and concepts) have a way of taking on new meaning when entangled-with by different readers/writers. I sent Ollmann’s comic to musician Julia Hambleton and she composed a song called I do like Strauss based on one of Ollmann’s marginal illustrations with the comment “I do like Strauss’ theme for Thus Spake Zarathustra …” William Goodall a tattoo artist with a background in Western philosophy and participant in the research-creation project completed a ‘pointillist drawing of a woman of color’ (as stated in his personal correspondence) on top of the ‘dead white male’ philosopher’s text and used red wine in a kind of Dionysian revelry to add color to the illumination. The marginally superimposed resulting image intertextually interferes with elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy for those familiar with the trajectory of the eternal return. Although the text is first mentioned in the Gay Science, it was made popular in Thus Spake Zarathustra. And it was Zarathustra (the character) who proposed the notion of the overman. In the intertextual reading/writing of this text that attends to what’s excluded from mattering, Goodall’s drawing while engaging with the idea of the ‘over’ as in literally being over the text, also reminds me of how women, people of color, and disabled persons rather than achieving the status of overmen, continue to be excluded from what Wynter (2003) calls ‘Man’ (p. 263). Wynter’s description of ‘Man’ refers to the oversubscribed white, able, wealthy, male European discussed in Chapter 1, who continues to reinstate coloniality through his ongoing appearance and reproduction, and who is violently and systematically upheld as the predominant form of the human (Snaza, 2019b). The marginalia provoked me to reconsider the eternal return, and Nietzsche’s philosophy in Zarathustra. If the ‘overman’ were a woman of color, would that ideal work toward ending the ongoing practices of dehumanization practiced by imperialist, colonial, and male supremacist societies?

Shattered mirror marginalia. By Rosina Kazi and William Goodall.

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For the next ‘entanglement’ with this text, I sent Goodall’s drawing to Rosina Kazi. Kazi is an electronic musician and activist in Toronto and member of the bad LAL. Kazi cut up and pasted Goodall’s pointillist drawing onto a broken mirror. When I gaze at the mirror, rather than reflecting ‘sameness’—it reflects fragmentary bits of me intersected with the woman of color and Nietzsche’s writing. When it arrived in the mail, I was reminded of Minh-ha’s “mirror-writing-box” (1989). Here Minh-ha notes that women of color can write as themselves without losing their subjectivity or being pigeonholed into a specific subjectivity in a “play of mirrors which defers to infinity the real subject and subverts the notion of an original ‘I’” (p. 22). In the physical performance of this particular text, we’re not dealing with a box of mirrors reflect back and forth until infinity and I as reader become entangled in the reflection: by ‘reading’ Kazi’s intertextual entanglement with Nietzsche and Goodall’s woman of color shattered across the mirror, and I too am reflected/shattered in the ‘text.’ This is perhaps an apt metaphor or performance of how reading operates. But that doesn’t preclude the content and the form of the text affecting how I perceive myself, nor how I perceive the text. This cutting continues to remind me how reading-writing can operate as a “multipolar reflecting reflection that remains free from the conditions of subjectivity and objectivity yet reveals them both” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 22). The description of diffraction put forth by Haraway and Barad was initiated as a way of complicating ‘reflective’ practices (where reflective approaches are representational and mirror sameness, diffraction attends to difference). Kazi’s mirror diffracts as much as it reflects through Nietzsche’s words, the image of the woman of color, and my broken reflection. In this way, it reminds me of Deleuze’s (1994) reading of Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return when he states, “[t]he eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different …” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 115). In the final paragraph of the intertext, the excerpt from The Joyful Wisdom introduces a kernel of Nietzsche’s thought that developed into the eternal return. The eternal return is sometimes conceptualized as sameness forever returning, or interpreted as a deterministic view of life as ongoing drudgery leading to nihilism. Conversely, Deleuze (1994, 2006) takes up Nietzsche’s eternal return, not as an endless repetition of sameness but as a “belief of the future, a belief in the future” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 90, italics mine). For Deleuze (2006) the eternal return operates as an autotelic, creative process of becoming: in this reading of Nietzsche, it is not sameness that returns, but difference, and it does so through affirmation. This affirmation includes the ethical imperative towards the future when it asks readers to consider ‘to will’ in such a way that you “will its eternal return” (p. 68). Deleuze (1994) explores these ideas further when he describes difference as the creative becoming of the world where difference does not arise from negation (as in different from) but from affirmation. What would it mean to affirm difference? The way forward is never clear, but the ethical task does not reside in evaluating a research-creationed scenario in advance, but in taking the risk that

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the processes will continue to affirm differences and maximize our diverse potentialities. (Shildrick, 2015, p. 115) Critical disability scholar Shildrick (2015) discusses the need to affirm difference as a way of thinking that ruptures the conventional logics of inclusion with regard to dis/abled people. One of the marginalia that returned to me during the project was a drawing by Daniel Barney, an academic and artist in Utah. Barney marginally disrupted Nietzsche’s statement “sit as little as possible” by drawing a wheelchair in the margins. I found this critical marginal image provocative, in that it troubled the ableist premise that bipedal ‘walking’ is causally linked to the generation of great ideas—a position there’s no shortage of anecdotes to support from theorists and philosophers across the ages (Solnit, 2002). And made me consider how normative and naturalized walking appears across cultural studies, education, and the arts (Springgay & Truman, 2017). For example, Gros (2014) extols the joy of walking where “pavements no longer guide your steps” and you discover the “vertiginous freedom” (p. 6). In these moments, according to Gros we lose ourselves and discover creativity (like the Beat Poets that he discusses in his book A Philosophy of Walking). In the history of linking walking and creativity tends to still centre white, able hetero men (and women). My initial impulse to this fact is to fight for inclusion—but as I explored in Chapter 1, I do not want to fight to ‘include’ people into a logic or system that makes them change into that logic in order to be included. Shildrick (2015)

A pencil drawing of a wheelchair in the margin of the base text. By Daniel Barney.

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outlines that, for many disabled people, “rehabilitation to normative practice or normative appearance is no longer the point” rather the lived experience of being dis/abled “with its embodied absences, displacements, and prosthetic additions – generates, at the very least, its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the self ” (Shildrick, 2015, p. 14). Rather than think of the disabled body as ‘less-than-perfect’ and in need revisions in order to perform within a particular logic—for example building machines that allow someone in a wheelchair to walk—what if we take seriously the call to affirm difference? I feel an aporia creeping in: I want to affirm difference but also make it so that people with differences can be included: not by changing them, but by building a world where they are no longer excluded. (Does this mean they’re no longer ‘different’ and difference is conflated into sameness? No. It affirms difference rather than excludes difference.) Taylor (2010) a disabled scholar who navigates the city in an automatic wheelchair, went on a walk with Judith Butler through San Francisco’s Mission District and had a conversation about accessibility. Taylor (2010) accentuates how, through practices of accessibility that are at work in San Francisco, more disabled people are visible on the street, and in her view because they’re more visible they’ve begun to be viewed as part of the social fabric. In her words, “physical access leads to social access” (2010, np). But that doesn’t mean everyone is the same: rather, when difference is affirmed—and as Mohanty (2003) describes, “diversity and difference are central values”—not only is walking reconceptualized, but we participate in the creative becoming of the world (p. 7). While the engagement with the wheelchair as a symbol highlighted physical disability (in reference to Nietzsche saying “sit as little as possible”) and its relationship to walking—the symbol of the wheelchair also denotes other kinds of dis/abilities. In recent years, there have been several instances of unarmed neurodivergent Black men being shot by police while out walking and being read as ‘dangerous’ for how they move through space. In this instance an ‘intermittently apparent’ disability coupled with systemic anti-Black racism becomes deadly.7 Movement in public space is always a political act.

Affirmation and movement The following engagements with the project took up Nietzsche’s call to movement, and the importance of going for walks while challenging representational approaches to language through poetic, propositional, and more-than-linguistic responses. Each of the ‘texts’ in this section reference the base text I circulated but do not engage with it as a piece of paper, but rather conceptually. Erin Manning (artist, academic and co-director at SenseLab in Montreal) included a series of propositions as her engagement with Intratextual Entanglements. Manning has written extensively on propositions and uses them in her research-creation

7 The systemic policing of particular people in public space is explored in the next chapter along with the in-school research-creation project.

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projects (as explored in Chapter 1). Manning writes in imperative voice, as Nietzsche did, and activates both movement and affirmation: Propositions for an Entanglement: 1. Believe not in thoughts that stem from the desk, but in thoughts born outdoors. 2. A thought always comes in from the outside. 3. Take the outside for what it is: don’t try to digest it. All prejudices come from the intestines. 4. Take the thought for a walk 6000 feet beyond man and time. 5. But don’t wear yourself out. I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me. 6. Let thought move you. 7. Live it, spirally. Interminably. Propositions are not tools or methods by which research is defined: they are processual, emergent, and immanent. Propositions “challenge the idea that what is not known as such is not knowable, emphasizing that knowability may take us off the path of the methodological disciplinary account of experience, propelling us into the midst” (Manning, 2013, p. 6). A proposition’s emphasis on unknowability means that conventional understandings of method need to be experimented with. To enact this undoing, Manning (2013) asks how techniques become propositional (as opposed to instructional). For example, a walk “becomes a proposition when it begins to exceed the technical, making operable a kind of bodying that is unforeseen (unpracticed) but available from within the register of the movement that will have preceded and followed it” (p. 78). A walk becomes a proposition when it proposes toward potentiality. The potentialities that are incarnated in the proposition are as Shaviro (2009) calls the ‘bait’ that lures us toward that potentiality—which might come to be felt.8

Dance The next entanglement also takes place in movement off the page. After marking marginalia on the base-text, and feeling limited by the confines of textual space, Blackbird—an Indigenous academic who has studied Japanese Butoh and other forms of dance—proposed to instead meet fellow participant Carl Leggo, a professor and poet in Vancouver, and ‘dance’ her marginalia. I put them in touch and was informed of the arrangement to meet when it occurred, but was not present, nor was the research-event video-recorded. Several weeks later I received the following ekphrastic poem in the mail from Leggo:

8 I also used Manning’s proposition “take thought for a walk” in my in-school study (as discussed in the following chapter).

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eternal return Sarah invited me to entangle with a few scraps of words by Nietzsche. I wrote a poem because a poem always seems an apt way to respond to any text. When Sarah asked Blackbird and me to entangle, we met in a grassy meadow behind the Museum of Anthropology. I invited Logan to join me as a witness because Logan lives with a wild spirit and I want to. Like a poem’s long breath I knew Logan could hold whatever happened in the meadow behind the Museum. Blackbird invited Celeste as her witness, and

we met in the meadow on a September day with the promise of rain. I have known Celeste a long time, and I love her for being a celestial spirit who celebrates the erotics of each day. After introductions, April invited us all to walk in the meadow, attend to breath, and return with a gift. I found a stone, like Mirabelle often stops amidst countless stones, and selects one she names special. Rain began and stopped, and Blackbird invited me to move in the meadow, to return, to know again the womb. As we moved with our eyes closed, Logan and Celeste made sure we didn’t

fall off the edge. While there is no record of what happened next except in memory I am still filled with angst anger hurt horror. While I twirled lurched hunched squat grew small in the meadow a wound ripped open in my memory. My body remembered what I didn’t know it knew (family stories secrets scandals), a hole, never whole. Logan, Celeste, Blackbird & I were the same, except I had died behind the Museum of stored memories. Each day is now a new birth where the past is the same but different, seen through dark holes

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It could be argued that Leggo, writing about his experience dancing with Blackbird has now jammed it into representational language. But I view his text as more-than-representational. According to Vannini (2015), the more-than-representational answer to the crisis of representation “… lies in a variety of research styles and techniques that do not concern themselves so much with representing life-worlds as with issuing forth novel reverberations” (p. 14). Leggo’s poem enlivens rather than reports; it leaves evocative gaps and brings up questions about the relationship between movement (dance), affect, and writing. Leggo has since passed away and I think this poem is an excellent testament to his work as a scholar, educator, and poet. Indeed, the success of these written entanglements that took up Nietzsche’s call to movement emboldened me to complete the in-school research-creation that makes up the next chapter.

Recursion Many participants in the project experimented with the materiality of both form and concepts of the text, which was pushed further by the next participant’s engagement with their text. Recursion is the act of turning a text’s logic back on itself. Recursion occurs on various material levels: linguistically, through illustration, and through multimedia arts. In the case of these entanglements the form is greatly affected by the content. You might even say that the form is the content. Taien Ng-Chan a scholar and multimedia artist covered the base-text in marginalia that I then sent to filmmaker Kwoi Gin. Gin photocopied the texts on different colored paper and then folded them into a series of origami frogs, upon which there was no ‘original’ text: only proliferating copies of the base-text. Christine Brault (discussed above) and Kent den Heyer, a scholar in Alberta, co-created what den Heyer refers to as a circular ‘nest’ of text and a haiku. Brault shredded and wove the base-text into nest-like shape, which den Heyer then penned stanzas onto. To read den Heyer’s writing you have to peel back layers of the bounded text and rotate it. In another play on recursion and temporality, Julian McCauley, an engineer, built a clock with a Polaroid camera embedded into it. He then cut up Nietzsche’s writings from the base-text and stuck them onto the dials and implements of the clock (which incidentally he got from my grandmother’s estate when she died). The camera would take a photo on the quarter of the hour—often of the viewer of the text who may be crouched in front of it trying to decipher its meaning. The clock-cameratext played both temporally (literally) and spatially with Nietzsche’s concepts and my conceptualization of the project. It ticked and clanged and measured time while the Polaroid photographs represented snapshots of the reading space. Unfortunately, the clock-camera-text got broken in transit and when it arrived

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 xamples of recursion in marginalia. Top: Origami frogs made out of intertexts by E Taien Ng-Chan and Kwoi Gin. Bottom: Nest and poem by Christine Brault and Kent den Heyer.

at Shannon Gerard’s house the Polaroids began to spit out blanks as seen in the photograph. Another example of recursion and intertextuality across media is a sonic composition by David Ben Shannon, a musician and academic, entangled with, by Yam Lau, an artist and scholar. The sonic composition that can be heard now is an intertextual layering of two songs that circle and cycle yet do not ‘end’ at the same time. The piece added by Shannon rolls repetition on top of repetition. The piece added by Yam Lau is reminiscent of Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie No. 1. As another layer of Intratextual Engagement, Satie is famous for his walking practice; he used to walk into Paris from the suburbs regularly to play music all evening and then walk back in the early hours of the following day.

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Clock camera with intertexts. By Julian McCauley and Shannon Gerard.

Discontinuous transience Unlike Virginia Woolf (discussed above), who thought even marginal inscription was a crime against books, book artists push the form and content of the book or text as an object. Drucker (2004) states that many book artists’ engagements with texts include “insertion or defacement, obliteration or erasure on the surface of a page which is already articulated or spoken for” (p. 109). Unlike a palimpsest (where some of the original bleeds through), some artist interventions with texts exhibit an ‘aggressiveness’ or ‘violation’ towards the original that becomes fragmented, modified, or lost like Frankenstein’s Monster. Svava Thordis Juliusson’s—an Icelandic-Canadian sculpture artist destroyed the base-text by setting fire to it deliberately. She wrote to me, “In its effacement, of which burning is merely the coarsest example, the Talmud acquires meaning” a quotation from Kanofsky’s (1997) review of Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud (1995) that discusses Jewish ways of reading as ‘atopic’—as in taking place nowhere—where meaning is never where it is given. Juliusson burned Nietzsche’s text, along with some bank statements and said, “It was consumed. The meaning was consumed,” and then alludes to Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a further intratext along with writing how therapeutic burning is. Like many of the Intratextual

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Entanglements in the research-creation project, Juliusson’s engagement with the text provokes further questions about the nature of texts: can they be consumed/ digested? Are they ever purely denotative? Are they ever present? Some of these questions are explored in Chapter 5 when I engage with Derrida’s post card ontology (1987). I fittingly no longer have Juliusson’s creation. I mailed it to VK Preston, a theatre scholar in Montreal and they have never returned it to me. It is presently absent. And consistently, Juliusson ripped up and collaged the text (created by illustrator Ian Sullivan Cant) that I sent her in the second round of the project. Curriculum scholar and academic John Weaver’s response to the project was an academic paper focused on the eternal return. I sent the paper to Stephanie Springgay—artist and academic—who then boiled the essay for two days into a broth. The Nihilist Broth hints at notions of digesting a text, and Nietzsche’s statement that “all prejudices begin in the intestine.” The act of combing ‘text’ with ‘food’ or ‘eating’ is found in many other art examples, including Dieter Roth’s Literature Sausage (wherein Roth made a series of sausages stuffed inside real animal intestines but used ground up texts as the ‘meat’). Springgay, in a later correspondence, stated that she was interested in bodily acts of engaging with the text. As opposed to a visual reading of the paper, Springgay’s intertextual entanglement pushed the materiality of pulp and ink further, as the broth was intended to be served to Weaver at the annual Bergamo conference, where an earlier version of this chapter was presented. In the act of boiling and making broth, the text is ‘reduced,’ or reshaped into another form, that can be consumed and read in a different corporeal manner.

Nihilist Broth in a mason jar. By Stephanie Springgay and John Weaver.

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An example of a different corporeality—or sensory—engagement with a physically destroyed and repurposed base-text was enacted by molecular biologist and musician Nirmal Vadgama. Vadgama made a video recording of himself holding Kwoi Gin’s (mentioned above) annotated text. However, the text has been rendered illegible through having guitar pick shaped holes punched out of it. Vadgama explains in the video that he punched the pick shapes out of the text and glued them together to create a homemade pick to play a song on his electric guitar. He then plays his guitar: Nietzsche’s text and Gin’s text are used to produce a screaming guitar riff. Narrative is often viewed in its role as being a primary mode of explication in English literature and philosophy. And through this mode narrative constructs causal tales. As evidenced above, many of the texts in this research-creation project disrupt how narrative operates. Other examples include Yam Lau & Daniel Barney’s (introduced above) diffracted sprouting ‘living’ text. Lau used an iPad and glass sphere to diffract the base-text I sent him. When I sent the diffracted version to Barney, he sprouted vegetation on it. The sprouted text always reminds me of the speculative fiction author Jeff VanderMeer’s living text produced by the alien Crawler in his book Annihilation. In the book, the text is written as spores that can be inhaled (consumed) by the reader, thereby infecting and changing them.9

New media and proliferating texts Participants in the research-creation project used a variety of ‘new’ media forms to entangle with the text including: GPS, hypertexts, animated gifs, and video recordings. While these forms may appear to be ‘less’ material than a piece of paper or a sculptural object, they still operate materially, albeit on different scales and in different modes. For Hayles (2012), materiality is not “a pre-given entity but rather a dynamic process that changes as the focus of attention shifts” (p. 14). Ian Cant’s & Carl Leggo’s (mentioned above) animated gif poem operates as a nod to computational poetics and continual return of the same. Similarly, Taien Ng-Chan (mentioned above) made a video collage of open-source animated gifs to illustrate an original song composed by academic and musician Peter Trifonas called Eternal Return.10 Trifonas’ song builds on imagery from Nietzsche’s writing including, ‘the heaviest burden is the one we make,’ references to angels and demons, as well as extended questions such as ‘why’s the rainbow so hard to take’ and a refrain that sounds something like ‘the sky is crying perfect tears … but it won’t wash … hope away.’ Ng-Chan’s open-source animated gifs engage with Trifonas’ imagery in the lyrics as well as the mood of the song. As listener, I hear

9 Liz deFreitas (2020) and I write about this book as a way to think through qualitative research and speculative fiction. 10 Please visit: https://vimeo.com/114177748.

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Diffracted, sprouted, living text. By Yam Lau and Daniel Barney.

intratextual audio references to Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing, as well as David Bowie, and Brian Eno. These entanglements demonstrate on a different register how texts are changing assemblages rather than static entities. The next entanglement I will discuss engages with the material text as well as GPS. The participant, Kai WoolnerPratt, an academic wrote to me: I have been visiting a friend in Paris for the past week. After I asked about a plaque in the entrance of the building, he conceded that Baudelaire had inhabited his apartment for 4 years at the turn of the century. After dining at a restaurant that he described as being a vestige of literary SaintGermain, I pasted the extracts of Nietzsche’s writings on 3 buildings in the neighbourhood. I hope that the ideas in them – along with the wheatpaste used to affix them – will provide some sustenance for the ghosts. (Personal correspondence, 2015) Additionally, Woolner-Pratt sent me a GPS map with specific locations pinned to it with date-stamped notes. His GPS intervention distributes attention differently but no less ‘materially’ than other forms of text. According to de Souza e Silva (2013), location aware mobile technologies and GPS “… enable users to inscribe locations with digital information, such as texts, images, and videos,

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 lackboard repetition. Still from Kai Woolner-Pratt’s 22-minute performance B where he writes the phrase, ‘all prejudice comes from the intestines’ on a blackboard in chalk.

and find other people in their vicinity … they play an important role in helping people imbue locations with new dynamic meanings and construct new types of urban mobilities and narratives” (Silva, 2013, p. 33). For Silva, these new technologies create a palimpsest where intertextual digital narratives combine to make new meaning. Woolner-Pratt mapped four days of his eating and walking as a ‘Flâneur’ in Paris, using Google Maps’ GPS in reference to Baudelaire. The Flâneur has been portrayed as a disinterested, leisurely loafer or observer of daily life who takes pleasure in being lost in crowds. Woolner-Pratt’s GPS map troubles the notion of the Flâneur through not only making him visible (GPS is after all a technology developed for military purposes of making the geolocation of anything on earth visible and trackable from space) but also through the narrative map of what’s in Woolner-Pratt’s intestines. In this regard, Woolner-Pratt is not detached observer lost in the crowd; in using Google Maps, he is surveilled by a global network. On another level Woolner-Pratt’s maps call attention to how common Google Maps have become; we live in an era where a Google map is often construed as ‘the’ map of a place. To add to Google Map’s surveillance database, it now has a time-space recording of everything Woolner-Pratt ate, drank, or smoked (‘consumed’) during a day. Later in the project, I sent Woolner-Pratt artist Hazel Meyer’s blackout (well, pinkout because the paint is milky-pink in color) version of Nietzsche’s text with only the phrase, All prejudices come from the intestine visible on it. Much of Meyer’s artistic work has to do with the intestines and guts, so this is a particularly apt phrase that she also investigated in her engagement with artist Donna Akrey’s engagement with the base-text. Woolner-Pratt took the phrase, lifted it off the page and inscribed it for 22 minutes on a blackboard. When I saw the performance,

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I immediately thought of Bart Simpson in the opening credits of The Simpsons where he writes different lines on a blackboard of his classroom. I asked WoolnerPratt who he was referencing, and he said he was ‘very into Joseph Beuys’ and the feeling of the schoolroom had the quality of an image from Beuys’ performance of I like America, and America likes Me, but that he was mostly concerned with being in a classroom and performing the repetition. In the background, while Woolner-Pratt performs the writing, Erik Satie’s Gymnopodie No. 1 lilts away: another reference to Satie, and in resonance with Shannon and Lau’s entanglement discussed above. The reference to the intestine also resonates with Stephanie Springgay’s and John Weaver’s ‘Nihilist Broth’ discussed above—and the notion of how the act of reading might materially affect the reader through ingestion, and how thinking (and prejudice) may be embodied and emanate from the gut.

Threads This chapter could continue indefinitely by engaging and re-engaging with the different conceptual, material, or political vectors that emerged from the project.11 For this last section I’m going to focus on both conceptual and material references to texts as textus: as in textiles woven threads or textures that emerged in the project. For her first engagement with the base-text, artist and activist Mary Tremonte annotated it using different colored threads. A pink intestinal annotation from the word ‘intestines,’ a zig zag annotation beside the words ‘walking through,’ and series of sand glassed shaped annotations alongside underlined words like ‘again’ and ‘series’ and ‘times.’ I sent Tremonte’s text to artist and curator Emilie O’Brien in Montreal, and she embroidered a response: “To Be Born Again.” in black thread on a white sheet. Dan Barney (discussed above) also used textiles to engage with the text: he crocheted the edge of the text, he initially sent me with a map of Utah on the other side. My mother found his response so compelling that she wanted to join the project—my mother has knit her whole life and she liked the idea of a textured response to the text.12 She then engaged with Barney’s text by knitting a blue cord off the end of his crocheted binding and affixing a miniature Book of Mormon to it with the inscription “No Smoking” on the inside. The physical textures the participants engaged with and the texts they refer to—Nietzsche’s text, a map, other religious texts, religious

11 In fact, there’s a number of sonic compositions that I have not engaged with in here which makes me despondent about how the sonic, digital, and gestural that might not lend themselves to linguistic discussion or visual representation are at risk of being sidelined in academic discourse—even by me and I make sonic compositions in collaboration with David Ben Shannon (more on that in Interstice ‘Oblique Curiosities’). 12 Adding my mother as participant bumped the number of texts to 34, which was fine as there was no pre-arranged order of sending them to varying participants, although I had liked the idea of an odd number of participants to begin with. Enabling constraints perhaps should always allow for the opportunity to add one’s parents to a project if they’re interested (my father was not interested in participating).

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imperatives—as well as the traditionally ‘feminine’ acts of stitching, crocheting, embroidering, and knitting each engaged with and queered the textures and threads of the base-text. Stephanie Springgay’s engagement with the first text I sent her also engaged with textiles. Springgay hand felted six red wool casings of rocks and mailed them to me on top of Nietzsche’s unmarked text. In her paper, How to Write as Felt (2019) Springgay discusses her arts practice of felting; unlike weaving, knitting, or crocheting, Springgay draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) description of felt as an ‘anti-fabric’ that is created by agitation. Springgay (2019) writes of felt that it has no warp and weft: it “spreads out infinitely. Felt, unlike weaving is irreversible. Once wool is felted it cannot be undone and the fibers returned to their original state” (p. 58). Springgay’s felted textiles in their woolly softness instantiate the repetition, movement, and productive agitation that both Nietzsche’s text and other entanglements with it provoked. This project was the first research-creation project I conducted with other human participants. The interdisciplinarity of it is evident in the various modes of engagement with the text, as is the scholastic and artistic rigor the participants brought to their marginalia. The research-creation event shows the mutability and materiality of texts, the ongoing productive potential of texts and group reading-writing practices, as well as the emergent quality of pedagogy: how both the ‘how’ of pedagogy and what might be generated and learned varies in different material encounters with interacting elements and situations. This does not mean that pedagogy lacks an ethical imperative, but rather the ethics of what becomes pedagogical is emergent in each encounter (with the texts). During the research-creation project, a series of publics (material, semiotic, human publics) did emerge. And within those emergences different pedagogical imperatives arose. The texts circulated both in small publics (between participants), and in larger publics (such as when I presented them at conferences or on my website) or in publications.13 Amor Fati. As researcher and reader, I am very much fabricated and stretched in this process: specifically, the various intra-actions with the text have made me reconsider my own usual reading of the eternal return, a version of it I’d asserted since my undergraduate degree and recognize that reading is not the act of a ‘subject’ but something that emerges from within a complex entanglement. Texts are material; in their linguistic expression, written or oral form, texts can mutate and form publics with and through humans. In this view, texts are more like “technical individuals enmeshed in networks of social, economic, and technological relations, some of which are human, some nonhuman” (Hayles, 2012, p. 13). These individuals, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) might call haecceities, pose new problems or propositions through their emergence. Texts matter and how we engage with them matter. What’s written in the margins matters. Minor interferences matter.

13 All of these publics disrupt the false public/private binary.

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 hreaded intertexts. Marginalia on the base-text in embroidery thread by Mary T Tremonte and the phrase ‘To be born again’ embroidered as a response by Emilie O’Brien.

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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. Barthes, R., & Balzac, H. (1974). S/Z. New York, NY: Hill and Wang. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020). New empiricisms in the Anthropocene: Thinking with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420943643. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2006). Nietzsche and philosophy. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated by B. Massumi, 1987, reprinted 2013. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Derrida, J. (1987). The post card : From Socrates to Freud and beyond. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1990). Some statements and truisms about neologisms, newisms, postisms, parasitisms, and other small seismisms. In D. Carroll (Ed.), The states of ‘theory’: History, art, and critical discourse (pp. 63–94). New York: Columbia University Press. Drucker, J. (2004). The century of artists’ books. (2nd ed.). Minneapolis, MI: Granary Books. Feito, J. A., & Donahue, P. (2008). Minding the gap: Annotation as preparation for discussion. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 7(3), 295–307. doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/1474022208094413. Grafton, A., & Jardine, L. (1986). From humanism to the humanities : Education and the liberal arts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe. London, UK: Duckworth. Grigely, J. (1995). Textualterity. In textualterity: Art, theory and textual criticism (pp. 51–88). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gros, F. (2014). A philosophy of walking. London, UK: Verso. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. doi: https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066. Hayles, N. K. (2012). Digital Media and contemporary technogenesis. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Heath, S. B. (1983). Ways with words : Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Iser, W. (1972). The reading process: A phenomenological approach. New Literary History. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/468316 Jackson, H. J. (2001). Marginalia : Readers writing in books. Yale University Press. Jackson, H. J. (2005). Marginal frivolities: Readers’ notes as evidence for the history of Reading. In R. Myers, M. Harris, & G. Mandelbrote (Eds.), Owners, annotators and the signs of reading (pp. 137–151). New Castle, DE; London, England: Oak Knoll Press; British Library; St. Paul’s Bibliographies. Jameson, F. (1975). The Ideology of the Text. Salmagundi, (31/32), 204–246. Kanofsky, J. (1997). Review of Ouaknin, Marc-Alain, The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud Translated by Llewellyn Brown. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. URL: http:// www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=1081 King, K. (1991). Bibliography and a Feminist Apparatus of Literary Production. In D. C. Greetham and W. Speed Hill (Eds.) TEXT 5: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (pp. 91–103). New York, NY: AMS Press.

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Kristeva, J. (1986). Word, dialogue, and the novel. In T. Moi (Ed.), The Kristeva reader (pp. 34–61). New York: Columbia University Press. MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Minh-Ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Indiana University Press. Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders : Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moretti, F. (2013). Distance reading. London, UK: Verso. Nietzche, F. (1989). On the geneology of morals and ecce homo. New York, NY: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. (1960). The joyful wisdom. New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing. Ouaknin, M. A. (1995). The burnt book : Reading the talmud. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shaviro, S. (2009). Without criteria: Kant, whitehead, deleuze and aesthetics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Shildrick, M. (2015). ‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’: Embodiment, boundaries, and somatechnics. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 30(1), 13–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12114. Silva, A., & de, S. (2013). Mobile narratives: Reading and writing urban space with location-based technologies. In N. K. Hayles, & J. Pressman (Eds.), Comparative textual media: Transforming the humanities in the postprint era (pp. 33–52). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Slights, W. (1987). The cosmopolitics of Reading: Navigating the margins of John Dee’s general and rare memorials. In D. C. Greetham (Ed.), The margins of the text (pp. 199–228). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Snaza, N. (2019a). Animate literacies : Literature, affect, and the politics of humanism. Duke University Press. Snaza, N. (2019b). Curriculum against the state: Sylvia Wynter, the human, and futures of curriculum studies. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/036267 84.2018.1546540. Solnit, R. (2002). Wanderlust : A history of walking. (New ed.). Verso. Spivak, G. C. (1974). Translator’s preface. In of grammatology (pp. ix–xc). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Spivak, G. C. (2003). Death of a discipline. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Springgay, S. (2019). ‘How to write as felt’ touching transmaterialities and more-thanhuman intimacies. Studies in Philosophy and Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-018-9624-5. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2017). A transmaterial approach to walking methodologies: Embodiment, affect, and a sonic art performance. Body & Society. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1177/1357034X17732626. Taylor, S. (2010). No Title. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=k0HZaPkF6qE. Tribble, E. B. (1993). Margins and marginality : The printed page in early modern England. University Press of Virginia. Trifonas, P. (2000). Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 32(3), 271–281.

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Truman, S. E., McLean Davies, L., & Buzacott, L. (2021). Disrupting intertextual power networks: challenging literature in schools. Discourse, Online first: doi.org/10.1080/0 1596306.2021.1910929. Truman, S. E. (2016). Intratextual entanglements: Emergent pedagogies and the productive potential of texts. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 91–107). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational research methodologies: An introduction. In P. Vannini (Ed.) Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. (pp. 1–18). doi: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315883540-5. Wolfe, J. (2002). Marginal pedagogy: How annotated texts affect a writing-from-sources task. Written Communication VO, 19(2), 297. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Permissions Parts of Chapter 2 were previously published as Truman, S. E. (2016). Intratextual entanglements: Emergent pedagogies and the productive potential of texts. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (pp. 91–107). New York: Peter Lang. Reprinted with permission by Peter Lang.

INTERSTICE II Citations

I think about citations and referencing styles a lot. All texts are intertexts so it’s important to cite your sources, particularly when drawing from the work of traditionally oppressed groups of scholars (who are consistently un-cited and overlooked). And it’s important to read across fields and know them as best I can. Sara Ahmed (Making Feminist Points) discusses citation as a reproductive technology, generating the world around particular bodies that form disciplines. These disciplines are then enforced through referral back to the governing bodies (citations) that make up the field in both writing and in academic conference settings. Citations are an economy. Citation ‘count’ is a good word for the accrual of citations attached to a piece of writing and the person who authored it (likely with the help of a whole bunch of other people’s citations). In the academy (particularly here in Australia) citation count and h-index plays an increasingly pivotal role in grant submissions and promotion. It’s a hustle where even being cited in order to be critiqued might be good. But there are different citation indexes, including those that only index citations from papers that are indexable within the same index. Which means the publication that’s citing your publication must be a particular kind of publication (or it does not ‘count’). Scopus works like this: you can have a paper that’s indexed by Scopus, but unless the paper that cites your paper is also indexed by Scopus, it doesn’t count as a citation. This is framed as being objective and upholding scholarly rigour, which I partially agree with: but it also generates a culture where particular forms of knowledge will always be excluded and particular journals will flourish, while new journals, or other kinds of outputs will not ‘count.’ Research-creation scholars have sought to offer different methods of rendering research public beyond academic writing and advocated for arts creations to be a valid form of knowledge mobilization. And I hope they are successful. In the meantime, I’ve been making a record of all the different metaphors I think about DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-3

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when thinking of citations to help me complicate and remain accountable to the politics of citation, and also to remember who brought the thought to mind. Citation is a Fortean object: hovering anomalously in a text it might not belong. Citation as agentic cut (Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway): collapsing indeterminate states into ontological determinations. Citation as speculative worlding (Åsberg, Thiele, & Van der Tuin, Speculative before the Turn: Reintroducing feminist materialist performativity): create the academy you want by citing who you want to be made up of! Citation as mastery (Singh, Unthinking Mastery): demonstrating what and who the author knows as a way of becoming legible or masterful in a field. Citation as a spell, a conjuring, a summoning: the word ‘cite’ comes from the Latin citare “to summon, urge, call; put in sudden motion, call forward; rouse, excite” (Online Etymology Dictionary) But what if those summoned don’t want to be called? Could a textual reference resist the summoning? What if the citation is a ‘diversity and inclusion’ citation? What if the author is tired, dead, or asleep? What if they don’t want their work stuffed into a book chapter? What if they don’t want to be mis-cited and used? Citation as resource extraction (Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes): we do call citations ‘resources’ and they are extracted from other texts, often violently. Citation as a wormhole: connecting different space-times and worlds. Citation as performance: appropriating Black thought. Or disabled people’s thought. Or Indigenous thought. Or queer thought. Or maybe that should be called citation as theft. Or citation as violence.1 Or citation as resource extraction. Not citing: deliberate? Or misinformed? As refusal? (Simpson, ‘On ethnographic refusal’). Citation as false equivalent: conflating theories. Although I do think it’s possible to rub theories together frictionally (Puar, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’). This friction should not be an ‘anything goes’ friction, but stem from a mutual resonance or attraction. Citation as sharing (McKittrick, Dear Science): Katherine McKittrick enacts a thorough think-through and critique of the politics of citation and complicates it from various angles.2 Similar to bell hooks (Theory as Liberatory Practice) she demonstrates the citational necessity for Black feminist thinkers to be theoretically well read across fields. She then demonstrates how the citational method of sharing ideas among Black scholars operates as a practice for undermining oppressive structures, and in the service of liberation. Citation as poltergeist: haunting the paper and haunting the citer. An absent presence. A promise. A debt. 1 How do we not do this? As my friend David Ben Shannon says, ‘well, we don’t use fugitivity to talk about masturbatory white nonsense.’ 2 You should definitely read this book if you want to think about citational practices, anti-racism, and art.

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What metaphor and/or praxis informs your approach to citations in writing and research?

Post-script Against APA: what does it say about the field of education that we use the American Psychological Association’s citation format? Why would education be tethered to psychology in this way? APA gives the page number but not the name of the text as an in-text citation. I’d much rather know what text 3 is being inserted intertextually than the page number as I’m reading. I’d rather know the topic of the text than the date as well. And if it’s an author I don’t already know, I’d like to know their preferred given name4 in the reference list.

References Ahmed, Sara. (2013). Making feminist points. Retrieved September 12, 2014, from https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/ Åsberg, Cecilia, Thiele, Kathryn, & Van der Tuin, Iris. (2015). Speculative before the turn: Reintroducing feminist materialist performativity. Cultural Studies Review, 21(2), 145–172. Barad, Karen. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cite (v.). (n.d.). In online etymology dictionary. Retrieved from https://www.etymonline.com/word/cite?ref=etymonline_crossreference. hooks, bell (1991). Theory as liberatory practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4(1), 1–12. McKittrick, Katherine. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Puar, Jasbir. K. (2012). ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becomingintersectional in assemblage theory. Philosophia, 2(1), 49–66. Simpson, Audra. (2007). On ethnographic refusal: Indigeneity. ‘“Voice” and Colonial Citizenship.’ Junctures, 9(4), 67–80. Singh, Julietta. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Yusoff, Kathryn. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes, or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

3 I have inserted the texts into this chapter. 4 I’ve inserted the preferred first names of authors to the best of my knowledge.

3 AFFECTIVE PUBLIC PEDAGOGIES Youth writing the intersections of race-gender-power

Inspired by the pedagogical turn in walking research and my interest in the relationship between movement and creative writing, this chapter (and the following chapter) focuses on a research-creation project I conducted with youth. The proposition for the project was to explore the relationship between thinking-in-movement, writing, and youth cultural/artistic productions as situated literary and literacy practices. The participants in the project were grade 9 English literature and language arts1 students in Cardiff Wales, UK at Llyn High School 2 where I served as both the facilitator/teacher and researcher on the project. The students joined the project from five different English classes during class time and we gathered to create a walking and writing class twice a week. Using various pedagogical propositions to de-familiarize walking, reading, and writing practices, the students and I explored ‘emergent-emergencies’ that materialized during our movements beyond the traditional indoor classroom and through different publics. The students’ walking-reading-writing experiments took place directly outside the school, in the surrounding neighborhood, and some drifted through the school halls. Because this is a methodology book, in this chapter I have attempted to draw attention to

1 English literary education and language arts creations by students are rarely equated with ‘art’ in educational research. Students making macaroni landscapes, drawing with crayons, making music, or performing a play is considered ‘art’ more often than composing fiction, poetry, or a narrative (either analogue or digital) is. This annoys me. Although student work should perhaps be conceptualized as cultural productions rather than ‘art’ per se, if we are going to call some versions of student work ‘art’ (visual and performing arts and music), literary engagement should also be considered art in educational research and not just instrumentalized as ‘literacy.’ 2 Both the name of the school and all of the student names are pseudonyms, chosen by the students and me.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-4

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how the  method unfolded throughout the research-creation events and how research questions, or further propositions emerged from within the literary arts practices and walking the students and I conducted. I think with the students’ movements in public space, discussions, and cultural productions as examples of critical public pedagogies that unsettle the false binary between public-private places of learning.

(Public) pedagogies In this section of the chapter, I give an overview of public pedagogy; I conduct a brief literature review of writers’ approaches to walking throughout history; discuss research on urban walking, art creation, and social critique; and explore the potential of walking as a method of de-familiarization and social critique through lens of critical public pedagogy. The term public pedagogy is flexible and has been applied to various processes that occur in public and are perceived as having some measure of educative value (O’Malley et al., 2020). Public pedagogy has been used to discuss the effects of dominant discourses such as neo-liberalism, the effects of advertizing and corporate branding, and the learning that occurs in places like churches, community centers, or on urban streets as discussed in this chapter (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010). Much public pedagogy literature is influenced by critical pedagogy, which in turn was influenced by Marxism, critical theory, and cultural studies. Marx’s (1978) concept praxis refers to preforming actions that can change the world rather than merely representing it and influences much critical pedagogy. From this viewpoint, a pedagogical understanding that makes sense of the world is not enough: the next step is to enact emancipatory change (which is a current that also runs through much critical pedagogy scholarship). Freire (2005) influenced by Fanon’s (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, believed that education should incite conscientization (conscientização), a critical awareness provoked through consciousness-raising questioning. For Freire, once conscientization occurs, members of society no longer take hegemonic master narratives for granted. Critical pedagogues have long argued that scholars and educators need to understand how hegemony operates in society and schools. Hegemony (Gramsci, 1971) is the process that dominant powers use to maintain power—including manipulating public opinion wherein the prevailing ways of seeing the world are believed to be common sense. Drawing from theorizations of critical pedagogy, Giroux (2004) outlines how public pedagogy can be regulatory or emancipatory. However, the idea of public pedagogies being emancipatory has been critiqued in recent years, usually following the same line of thought of critiques of critical pedagogy: namely, that when critical pedagogy is positioned as emancipatory, it tends to position public intellectuals and pedagogues as liberators, sidestepping the fact that both are embedded and implicated in the very power structures they seek to disrupt

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(Ladson-Billings, 1997; Savage, 2015). White savior narratives in urban schooling might be a good example of teachers, educators, and researchers failing to recognize the systemic racism and discourses of power they are embedded in and, in many cases, benefit from. While I agree that pedagogues cannot operate outside of power hierarchies, I also acknowledge critical pedagogues’ speculative propositions and practical efforts to help incite change within power systems. This is often attempted through critiquing institutional or hegemonic narratives, challenging false consciousness and ideologies, reconsidering privilege within educational settings through the practices of deconstruction or de-familiarization, and calls for new forms of collaboration and representation. Feminism tells us that power structures are contingent and provisional. The past does not have to become the future. A majority of public pedagogy scholarship situates it as occurring outside of school in ‘public’ space. But as evidenced from the project I discuss below, ‘public’ spaces outdoors—for example, the telephone poles that students published their writings on—are institutional spaces, while seemingly private places (like a person’s body) are often up for public discussion, comment, or debate. Just as many seemingly ‘public’ squares are owned by institutions or corporations. This has left me wondering why we continue with a binary between in-school pedagogies and public pedagogies. The false binary of private and public correspondence has been taken up at length by Derrida (1987).3 Concomitantly, feminist materialist informed understandings of how publics form (wherein a public is not necessarily a group of humans but can include a variety of social-material agents coming together) complicates the entire notion of what a public is (Truman, 2016). In the increasingly institutionalized (perhaps ironically called privatized) world of texting, emailing, digital repository sharing such as Dropbox, Google Docs, or WhatsApp, little remains of private correspondence. Further, during the COVID-19 pandemic students’ homes (bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms) became part of online ‘classrooms,’ linked together by multi-national learning platforms such as Zoom (which are traded on the stock exchange). Privatepublic-institutionalized spaces meet and mix with each other in messy, shifting ontologies, and give rise to myriad publics and complex pedagogies. While public pedagogy can be said to refer to the educational, cultural, and social affects and effects of prevailing culture, Sandlin, Burdick, and O’Malley (2011) use the term critical public pedagogy to describe the ways popular and everyday culture(s) can be used to “… decode and interrupt dominant ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, militarism, and neo-liberalism” (p. 347). Tactics to queer, de-familiarize, or unsettle hegemonic public pedagogies through employing non-canonical knowledges, artistic interventions, and everyday actions feature through the history of walking scholarship and informed how I conceptualized this project.

3 I take this up in detail in Chapter 5’s postcard project.

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Walking and de-familiarization When I initially proposed this research-creation project with youth in and around their school, I drew on Michel de Certeau (1984) who describes urban walking as a productive, enunciative act, which employs a rhetoric of sorts. According to Certeau, walkers use “turns of phrase,” and “write” the city, through their “… itinerant, progressive” movements (1984, p. 134). While walking through the landscape, pedestrians (and other cultural consumers) function as bricoleurs, phrasing and rephrasing space. The layout of any given city or town organizes an “ensemble of possibilities,” and the walker “actualizes some of these possibilities,” and makes them “exist” or “emerge” through their movements (p. 98). Certeau describes how a city’s walkers form a “swarming mass,” or “… innumerable collection of singularities. Their entwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together …” (p. 97). Certeau seems to be saying that pedestrians give shape to the city through movement and create a new reading or writing of the city in the same way that a reader may read a text, or in Barthes’ (1974) writerly sense, the same way that a reader may ‘write’ a text through reading. Certeau says, “The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be …” (1984, p. 101). Everyday acts like walking can be ‘tactical’ in nature; through walking the pedestrian both affirms the limits of space inscribed through geographic, economic, societal features, but also “suspects, tries out, transgresses … the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (Certeau, 1984, p. 99).4 Suspecting, trying out, and transgressing the trajectories we speak through walking are what I view as acts of de-familiarization: deliberately making un-familiar everyday realities that we take for granted, be they spatial, social, or linguistic. Through de-familiarization, a potential for critique and possible futurities emerge. According to philosopher Braidotti (2013), de-familiarization or dis-identification “… involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for creative alternatives” (p. 88–89), or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call “deterritorialization” (p. 356). This is also reminiscent of Foucault’s (Foucault & Lotringer, 1989) call to “… re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities [and] … re-evaluate rules and institutions” (p. 462). In literary theory, de-familiarization is the act of presenting common 4 Other examples of this include the Situationist International (SI) who created various propositions, for example, the dérive (taken up later in the chapter), for re-writing or subverting established cartographies of urban space through walks, and then created alternative maps of the city. Also, the figure of the flâneur, popularized by Walter Benjamin. The flâneur has been described as playing subversive and pedagogical roles in the history of writing and art, marked the changes of their cityscapes through publications, and critiqued hegemonic/capitalist ‘structures’ and other social norms within urban settings through walking practices and extoling the virtues of idleness. However, both the idea of going for a flâneire or a dérive has been critiqued for being the purview of predominantly white male, middle class citizens, who have the social and physical mobility to stroll through the city or stand around loitering in ways that many trans, queer, women, and people of colour could/cannot (Springgay & Truman, 2018).

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or familiar tropes in new or unfamiliar ways in order to broaden a reader’s perspective. Brecht used de-familiarization (enstrangement) as a term to describe the effects/affects of his plays (Brecht & Willett, 2001). Many social movements based around walking, such as the Slut Walk, have used de-familiarization to destabilize both walkers’ and onlookers’ perspectives and call attention to social injustices that have been normalized by prevailing social discourses. The Queer Walking Tours (Truman & Springgay, 2019) that I co-coordinate with Stephanie Springgay at WalkingLab are framed around de-familiarizing understandings of place through oblique conceptual angles. Our walks begin with a proposition of where they will occur as well as a related concept: we then ask scholars, artists, and activists to take up the concept in relation to the place and give pop-up lectures on the ‘tour’ as a way of unsettling, troubling, and queering dominant histories. While there is an ethos guiding these pedagogical attempts at de-familiarization, in the spirit of research-creation as outlined in Chapter 1, it’s not possible to predict what the outcome of de-familiarization will be, other than proposing perhaps that eventually what is de-familiarized will too become “familiar” and likely require further de-familiarizing interventions (Ahmed, 2006, p. 7). While walking seems like a quotidian, everyday event that can be re-configured as an act of protest in certain circumstances, dominant culture in public spaces not only continues to decide the histories that are remembered and reproduced about places, it also decides which type of person can walk in particular places. Much of my walk with WalkingLab has critiqued how walking is positioned as everyone’s right, yet racialized, gendered, queer, and disabled people’s experiences walking in public space are often radically different than cis-able-bodied white men’s experience of walking in public space (Springgay & Truman, 2018). I draw attention to the seeming everydayness of walking in public to demonstrate how the street, the countryside, the time of day, and cultural milieu all reinforce public pedagogies on different walking subjects, effectively ‘teaching’ them where and when they are permitted to walk.

Walking and writing The premise for this project was not only focused on public pedagogy, but also considered how movement in public space might affect youth writing and cultural productions. Along with there being a long history of linking walking with social movements, there’s also a long history of linking walking and writing or ideation. For centuries, authors have used walking as a narrative device, literary theme, or as a method for creating content. Li Bai and Du Fu composed poetry about their wanderings around 8th-century China, while the Buddhist poet (and one of my favorites) Ikkyu roamed and composed poetry in Japan during the 15th century. Similarly, William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s perambulations in 18th century Britain inspired their writings (although Dorothy was considered ‘wild’ as a woman for walking alone), and Nietzsche composed much of

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Zarathustra while hiking miles daily through the Swiss Alps (as discussed in the previous chapter). A number of authors have also framed their narratives around walking, such as: Virginia Woolf ’s Street Haunting; W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn; and Harryette Mullen’s Urban Tumbleweed, a collection of 366 Tanka poems representing “a year and a day of walking and writing” in Los Angeles (Mullen, 2013, p. viii), which I used for one of the lessons discussed below. Because much of what I engage with in this chapter focuses on pieces that students wrote, I want to discuss, briefly, how the research-creation projects take up student writing, which I consider a form of art or cultural production.5 I draw on Hoechsmann and Low’s (2008) “Reading Youth Writing” to refer to the interpretation of youth behavior, recognizing young people as cultural producers, and thinking critically about what youth say (p. 21). Many scholars have troubled how teachers engage with student writing and acknowledged that we always read with bias. Ellsworth (1996) states, “we can read only through our vested interests, our own and others’ rhetorics of opinion and argument, and our desires to persuade. All readings—even the ones we think we are making simply to understand—are ‘tainted’ by purposes other than understanding” (p. 138). Within the assessment framework of literacy practices in schools, where rubrics for marking are the norm, reading often takes the form of looking for deficiencies in student writing. To disrupt this common narrative, Simon (2013) asks, what happens when teachers “shift their responses from fidelity to assessment instruments toward increased attentiveness and responsibility to student writers?” (p. 117). Simon’s question is pertinent to my research-creation project wherein the students and I engaged in reading and writing practices that account for and are responsible to the ethico-political concerns that arose. My interest in walking as an aesthetic practice, as a method for inciting creativity, and as a tool for de-familiarization is grounded in my experience as a walker who writes, and my experience as a high school English teacher.6 I was in a unique position as a researcher who is also a teacher during the research-creation project in not having to fulfill specific curricular requirements for reading and writing with my students; we had the time and space to explore other affective, ethico-political, and theoretical issues that emerged through walking and writing together rather than adhere to a particular curriculum.7 That said, as an educator, I will agree that there are identifiable skills-based ‘literacies’ (although

5 In schools, ‘art’ is often used to refer to the visual arts, music, or theatre, where creative writing often somehow gets subsumed into ‘literacy’ practices rather than being framed as an arts practice. The project took place as part of the language arts program and is inspired by literary arts. I consider the students’ writings cultural productions rather than art but use both terms. 6 I likely would not have been allowed in the school to run the project, and particularly not allowed to take a class outside, alone, the way I did without these credentials. 7 Although I saw my research as a research-creation project, I was likely seen by many staff and perhaps the students as a ‘teacher.’ And my credentials as a certified high school English teacher, and my ‘innovative’ approaches to teaching were acknowledged as a benefit for literary practice and literacy in the school.

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that’s a broad term and arguably inherently colonial) that can and should be taught within school. In case you are concerned about the specifics of how I was ticking off ‘English lesson’ tasks of reading, writing, while conducting this research-creation project: yes, the project met many curricular aims that are desirable in schools. These included the practice of orality and reading aloud, literary analysis and awareness of form, critical thinking, creative writing, peer assessment, and collaboration. Ethnographically, the students immediately reported how much they enjoyed walking as part of reading-writing, how the fresh air helped them think, how the freedom to move and the sun on their faces made them feel more creative. All of these elements were important and fed into the project’s aim to utilizing our time in English class to push toward more emergent, affective, ethico-political orientations to language, pedagogy, and practice while continuing to challenge how school curricula generally reflects and reproduces Eurowestern humanism (Mishra Tarc, 2015; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2019c). Within this Eurowestern white framework of assessing ‘norms’ of literacy, some students invariably appear more successful than others because the school-based practices taught them to mirror (and reproduce) the ways of communicating they already experience at home (Truman, Hackett, Pahl, McLean Davies, & Escott, 2020). Significantly, two of the students involved in the research-creation project went up a ‘set’ the following year (year 10) based in part on their involvement. In the UK, students are put into ‘sets’ in high school classes so that they’re all at approximately the same ‘level’ in a class. It’s known to be very difficult to move up sets once you’ve been set. Our research-creation project interfered with this structure in that I had students from varying sets all working together in our self-made class. In case my desire to unsettle Eurowestern humanism in English sounds like I don’t care about outcomes, of course I want students to do well within the logic of a system while still attempting to trouble the system from within. And I am very pleased for those two students who did move up a set. Further, although the project was successful in terms of many broad pedagogical and curricular outcomes, I want to resist making any claims about the research-creation project being inherently ‘transformative’ for the students, even though that’s often how the arts are framed as being relevant to schooling. This is an important point that Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) critiques as a “rhetoric of effects” view of artistic interventions in schools or with children and youth (p.  215). Such practices are busy demonstrating the positive or transformative effects the arts have on students and buy into the “… prevailing teleological view of education and schooling [that] requires prediction and the ability to demonstrate the effects of what we do on some desired outcome” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 215). In such a model, the arts are always instrumentalist: they promote academic achievement, are geared toward developing aesthetic perception, or (under a reconceptualist view of education) are seen as methods for making the students into “political agents” (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p. 216). These research-creation projects did not set out to make students into political agents,

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rather focused on the ethico-political matters that arose through walking and thinking, discussions, and cultural productions as prompts for further thought.

Specifics of the research-creation project Llyn High School has a large and ethnically diverse catchment area in the urban center, where many students are first generation immigrants. The students voluntarily signed up to participate and were taken out of their regular English classes twice a week, for an hour, to walk-read-write collectively in our “Walking and Writing Class.” The project was open to disabled students, but only one signed-up: an autistic young man, who wrote using an iPad and made use of assistive reading and writing programs on all tasks. Propositions throughout the project included: exploring rhythm and movement in literature through walking-writing, thinking about place through movement and video poems, walking and writing about speculative versions of the city, describing more-than-human entanglements through Tanka poetry, highlighting social injustices experienced by walking through narrative, creating linguistic maps of affective environments, composing synesthetic verses, and making a dérive map of the school. In lessons, I would introduce students to the day’s proposition—for example ‘Take a thought for a walk;’ or ‘Walk through town and speculate on a different version of the city’ (Truman, 2019b). The activation of the proposition sometimes involved reading the work of authors and philosophers who used walking as a narrative device or theme, and then a practice of walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2019) the text or proposition, often as a group. Sometimes the students also walked in pairs or alone. All of the activities involved the generation of some kind of cultural production created by the students for example written compositions, mappings, or video poems.

The mechanics of an emergent ‘method’ During the research event, on days that it wasn’t raining, the students and I used the ‘walking classroom.’ The walking classroom, as we called it, was not the designated outdoor classroom at the school, but was still outdoors (the designated outdoor classroom was setup in lecture format and because we were working collaboratively and emergently, it didn’t make sense for me to be sitting at the front of the group giving a lecture). Because I’ve been touting the necessity to attend to emergences that arise while experimenting with educational research, I will (re)present one research event here, first to demonstrate the mechanics of thinking emergently as a researcher, and second to highlight how attending to what matters (and what’s excluded from mattering) brought new questions/­propositions into the research-creation project. To do so, I will discuss an event that occurred based around African American poet Harryette Mullen’s Tanka poems in Urban Tumbleweed (2013). Mullen describes Urban Tumbleweed as a “record of meditations and migrations” of her walks over a year in diverse

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terrains including urban malls, the seaside, the desert, and Los Angeles’ streets (p. viii). As part of a walking-reading-writing event, the students and I circumambulated the walking classroom’s four picnic tables beneath umbrellas and read Harryette Mullen’s Tanka poems aloud. A Tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line, and means ‘short song.’ We took turns reading aloud as we walked. And although reading while in motion isn’t the easiest task, the Tanka format lends itself to the practice because of its brevity. The rhythm of our movements complicated the rhythm of the poems. We discussed the poems between readings as the book was passed on to the next reader. I scribbled notes about our discussions as I walked. Although we read many poems aloud (at least 18), 2 poems in particular provoked discussions that highlighted the emergence of ongoing matters of emergence-emergency for the students. The poems in question are reproduced below, and our walking-conversation notes follow below them. In writing the walking-conversation notes as Tankas, they are not direct quotations entirely, but the thrust of our conversations in a more-than-representational attempt at reporting on research. Visiting with us in Los Angeles, our friend went out for a sunny walk, returned with wrists bound, misapprehended by cops (Mullen, 2013, p. 94). What is misapprehended? They arrested the wrong bloke. How do you know it was a bloke? Is this about racism? I think so. Just because she’s Black doesn’t mean it’s about race, nor that her friend is Black. I still think it’s about race and police violence though. Whether or not Mullen’s poem was specifically about a racialized encounter with the police, we may never know. The students’ quickness to comment on race demonstrated an urgency to recognize how racialized bodies intersect with and are produced through walking in public space. As Garnet Cadogan (2016) argues, “Walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone” (Cadogan, 2016, np).8 “No thanks,” she said when he offered a sip from his flask. “You’d look good in a bikini,” he told her as she waited for the bus (Mullen, 2013, p. 28).

8 As I revisit and revise this chapter in 2020, the ongoing ‘misapprehension’ and police murders of Black people is ongoing in the US and globally.

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That’s happened to me. Not a bikini comment but random men telling me things. I stroll along and they say to smile or cat call. I would like to walk in the park, through the trees Alone but I can’t If I do and something happens to me it’s my fault not theirs. Our perambulation ceased. The students exploded in a torrent of affirmation and critique. The girls exclaimed about different accounts of street harassment they’ve experienced walking to and from school. The boys were genuinely concerned and listened. These public pedagogies frame the school day and trickle into what is learned ‘in school.’ I scribbled: walking, race, gender. Although one of the initial propositions of the lesson was to demonstrate how Tanka form lent itself for accentuating (rather than capturing) the ephemera of daily life, something in the mixture of the movement, the reading, the passing of the book between us, the wind, and the student bodies forced us to focus on those two poems. Those poems lingered in the air and resonated differently: they had a different affective force and mattered differently in conjunction with all the other forces of the day. I then set the students a task to write their own Tanka about an ephemeral event while walking in the city. A few focused on human relations. For example: Fancy new house Fancy new boardwalk Push out the poor folk Everything glitters Push out the poor folk Make the single moms work more. (Sikeena, brown first-generation British girl) Most focused on more-than-human relations in their walks and the ecologies they live within. Seagulls are surprisingly friendly they’re hated for their methods of survival and I hope to feed them mango again soon. (Rowan, white British boy) Engel-Di Mauro and Carroll (2014) discuss how “environmental education in cities is often defined as one of inadequate access to nature, as though cities were not ecosystems” (p. 73). The students were not under the illusion that nature is elsewhere, although many were concerned with how poorly many humans interacted with non-human animals and plants, litter in the city (which is a major problem in Cardiff ), as well as climate change. The next lesson, we walked outside, read the poems aloud and discussed them. I scribbled: more-than-human

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ecologies, transcorporeal-relations, place. These emergent themes shared characteristics of many of Mullen’s poems that we had read and were politically attuned to place and the more-than-human world. Engel-Di Mauro and Carroll (2014) argue that when we begin with the “presupposition that people are apart from nature,” and that environmental destruction is elsewhere, through that bifurcation we also cease to see how colonial histories are relevant to learning about nature (p. 73). The division of ‘Man’ (Wynter, 2003) from ‘nature’ enables environmental degradation, racism, and sexism, gentrification and colonization continue; for ‘Man’ these problems happen elsewhere, not in everyday interactions. When I looked over all of the students’ writings and our discussions from the first research-creation event, affective anxieties around the environment, race, gender, and power circulated through not only the key poems by Mullen that the students gravitated toward, but also the students’ own poems. MacLure (2013) discusses how, during what she calls the ‘pedestrian process’ of thinking and writing about research, something ‘not-yet-articulated’ can take over and effect a “kind of quantum leap that moves the writing-writer to somewhere unpredictable. On those occasions, agency feels distributed and undecidable, as if we have chosen something that has chosen us” (pp. 660–661). MacLure calls this a kind of encounter with ‘data’ that glows. To me it feels more like emergences that ooze, as I don’t view my walks-talks writings with students as ‘data’ so much as emerging research. There are the words, the walking, and the discussions, and then there’s this inhuman affective oozing: excesses that kept drawing my attention and the students’ attention during the research-creation project and lure my attention now as I re-articulate it. In Chapter 1, I outline this as affirmation. In the event and now, there were many aspects of the walking, writing, discussing that I could focus on, but as Ahmed (2008) states, “… there is a politics to how we distribute our attention” (p. 30). I highlight this phrase by Ahmed to accentuate the agency and responsibility of researchers within a research project. Research-creation, as I’m conceptualizing it, emerges in the middle of the event and provokes new propositions, new questions rather than solutions, but at the same time charges me as a researcher and my participants with an ongoing responsibility for how we distribute attention and what we affirm.9 By attending to what ‘mattered’ and was ‘excluded from mattering’ while conducting the Tanka exercise, our focus shifted. Micro-political gestures and affects made the research change shape and provoked research questions/concerns I will focus on here. These grew from the research event. Including: 1. In what ways do walking and writing contribute to understandings of the intersectionality of race, gender, and power? 2. How do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal understandings of place? 9 Of course, sometimes in research we might be charged to investigate something specific like students’ scores in phonics or reading speed or some such measurable. That kind of qualitative research was not my focus in this project.

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The students and I continued to walk, write, read, and experiment together for months. The following section cuts in descriptions of some in tasks, the students’ own writings, and various theories to help think-in-movement with the first question; the following chapter takes up the second question with a more specific focus on ‘place’ and some different projects with the students.

Interrogating ‘lived cartographies of power’ Proposition for students: Based on William Blake’s London, de-familiarize your walk to or from school. Write about a pressing matter of social injustice you notice. William Blake’s poem London features on the National Curriculum and describes the city of London as ‘charter’d’—suggesting control, surveillance, and constraint, and focuses on a variety of social inequalities the narrator notes during a walk through the capital. Based on the proposition, the students took notes during their walk and wrote the poems during the following class sessions. Each of the 18 students in the study composed a poem on topics as broad as urban gentrification, litter and environmental degradation, online bullying (which they report often happens during leisurely strolls to and from school), poverty, racism, and sexism. I’m going to focus on the poems that addressed the intersectionality of gender, race, and power and some of our discussions around these issues. An emergent conceptualization of race, gender, and class would view them as events—born of relations—rather than as pre-existing subject positions. As Puar (2012) states, “Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it” (p. 52). From this perspective, the intersection of forces or folds emerging at certain moments co-constitute how/who/what is produced, although the complexity of these processes are often “mistaken for a resultant product” (Puar, 2012, p. 52). Each person at each moment is a complex interplay of differing inheritances—family background, financial status, political affiliations, color, race, religion, ability, aesthetic impulses—that do not entirely pre-exist but are produced through their relations and eventing. I hold this conceptualization in tension with intersectionality when thinking about the students’ research-creation projects. Intersectionality is an analytical approach used in (originally Black) feminist thought that conceptualizes race, gender, and class as intersecting markers that reinforce marginalization of certain subjects, while simultaneously critiquing how that plays out socially, politically, and representationally (Crenshaw, 1991). Thinking intersectionality requires us to attend to the ‘intra-actions’ of markers such as race, gender, sexuality, or ability in order to develop more nuanced understandings of power and oppression (Puar, 2015). In recent years, intersectionality has been critiqued by Black scholars for a variety of conflicting

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reasons, including: its growing institutionalization (where ‘diversity’ is used to hide existing power structures rather than actually disrupt them); attempting to make false equivalencies between different kinds of marginalization (for example, equating a queerness to Blackness and using them interchangeably as ways of understanding oppression); and for circulating away from the Black feminist scholars’ intellectual labor that spawned the movement (Nash, 2008, 2019). Similarly, Puar (2012) argues how, as a method, intersectionality is now often used to qualify the “specific difference” of “women of color” (p. 51). In so doing, Puar argues the category ‘women of color’ has been “simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous application and yet overdetermined in its deployment” (p. 51). In this view, intersectionality begins to operate against its own premise: rather than a subject emerging through the intrasection of a multitude of factors, markers are determined beforehand (such as race and gender) and consequently some subjects (women of color) are seen as already given. This constantly produces ‘Others’ and views difference as already different from. Noting the importance of intersectionality but also its limitations, Puar (2012) continues to work with the concept but holds it in ‘friction’ with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage to see how they can work together to produce new understandings. I continue to think frictionally with both intersectionality and my ongoing research into theories of affect, the feminist materialisms, and the speculative to consider the ‘lived cartographies of power’ students wrote about and discussed (Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010, p. 136) I roam through the sexist streets Where the cat calling is non-stop Too many people I meet Will tell me to ‘smile,’ or to ‘take off’ my top. (Maggie, white first-generation British girl) In much walking literature, and literature about walking, the ‘walker’ is presumed to be unaffected by gender, sexual orientation, race, or ability and able to move freely through place and space. Heddon and Turner (2012) articulate how in many instances walking methods—particularly psychogeography—has extoled walking as form of detachment “without much concern for the specificity of one’s own body and cultural position” (p. 227). Psychogeography is an activity of paying attention to the corporeality of walking in space and casting off usual relations, in order to become more ‘enlivened’ by movement and place; in this way, it is similar to the idea of the Flâneur that Springgay and I (2018) critique, in that it is often the purview of white cis-enabled male walkers who have the freedom to move in particular ways through public spaces. The students conducted their regular walks to and from school in daylight and practiced de-familiarizing: thinking differently about their regular walks (rather than a feeling

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of detachment). In that regard, they were situated rather than casting off concern about their bodies and cultural positions. Ahmed (2006) writes, “The habitual can be thought of as a bodily and spatial form of inheritance” (p. 129). Particular bodies do appear to inherit habitual ways of responding—or particular bodies have ways of responding thrust upon them. As the students highlighted in their writings and discussions, race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability are difficult to ‘cast off’ and the specificity of bodies and cultural positions can often feel assigned rather than chosen when moving through public space. Studies show that 85% of young women in the UK have been sexually harassed in public spaces. Maggie’s opening stanza highlights her own experiences of sexism, surveillance, and affective fear while walking. The tension between being asked to either smile or take off her top highlights the varied ways that cis-gendered-female bodies are policed while moving though public space, and concomitantly how trans-feminine people are also policed. Similarly, chests are often discussed as a matter of public discourse when parents chest-feed children in what’s considered public space (Freedman & Springgay, 2012) Every time I strut through the lane I grab my keys just in case I hold them so tight, it causes me pain I have them for protection, they make me feel safe. (Maggie) I was interested in Maggie’s use of strut and roam to describe movement through space. I asked her about: I used the verb roam because when girls are attacked, they always blame the girls or say, ‘why were they out alone or roaming about?’ I used strut because it sounds overconfident, or like a sex worker and sex workers are always getting blamed for walking anywhere. They even get blamed for being killed. (Maggie) Maggie’s verb choice reclaims how roam and strut are used to describe girls and women, while simultaneously juxtaposing those same terms with everyday sexisms. This creates tension in both stanzas: In the first stanza, a woman roams and is sexualized; in the second, she struts and is fearful of injury. In neither case are the verbs entirely reclaimed nor re-signified, a point Maggie and her classmates were all too familiar with. Ringrose and Renold (2012), following Judith Butler, discuss how the term SlutWalk is a re-signification wherein an “injurious term is re-worked in the cultural domain from one of maligning to one of celebration” (p. 334). However, they note that young women’s usage and reclamation of a term is contingent on social positions such as popularity and even the status of having a boyfriend. For example, when one of the girls in their study breaks up

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with her boyfriend, she no longer feels comfortable using the re-signified term ‘slut’ as the term had “once again become too dangerous to ‘try on’” (p. 337).10 A girl is warned by her Dad Not to wear that skirt Apparently, it’s her fault If she’s trapped by someone bad Because she’s not locked up in a vault! (Rhian, white British girl) Rhian wrote her poem in third person. When I queried her about whether it was something she noticed while walking, she revealed it was about her own family—and an ongoing conversation about what she can and can’t wear in public space. Rhian felt angry that her dad commented on her clothes when he never commented on her brothers’ clothes, and was concerned with her safety in public space and did not worry about her brothers: It’s like that saying: don’t tell your girls not to get raped—tell your boys not to rape! I even said that to him. He knew what I meant. But he still says I should be careful. Meanwhile my brothers have more freedom. (Rhian) The pervasiveness of rape culture and the normalization of the threat of sexual violence for girls has reached worldwide exposure with the #metoo movement. Ivinson and Renold (2020) recently conducted research on gendered experiences of place in Wales, exploring in part how girls’ movements are restricted in public space. Renold (2019) has conducted ongoing research into high school girls’ experiences of sexism within school environments and in public spaces, covering topics such as verbal harassment, horn honking, and sexual abuse, and has an ongoing arts-based intervention in Welsh schools based on girls’ reports of boys attempting to lift their skirts at school using rulers. I related Renold’s research to the students as we walked in the courtyard discussing Rhian’s poem and they exploded into stories of harassment not only with rulers, but also upskirting 2.0 with smart phone cameras (when someone takes a photograph or video up another person’s skirt). It has recently been made a criminal offence in the UK and happens in ‘public’ spaces as well as ‘institutional’ spaces. Attacks are usually directed to cis-gendered-females.11 As we discussed 10 The irony of even these false binaries of public space and private space is that large percentages of women and girls are assaulted, and or killed, at home, by a family member or intimate partner—rather than a stranger in public space (WHO, 2017). 11 All the students in the project were cis-gendered, and none disclosed being queer. In discussions they were vocal about how trans and queer people are often subjected to bullying or harassment (outside of school), and that racism is prevalent (also outside of school).

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upskirting, one of the boys in the group made the observation that the term upskirting doesn’t entirely capture the horror and humiliation upskirting causes. The students discussed how terms can hide meanings, or in the case of Maggie’s word usage of ‘roam’ and ‘strut’ above, when the media describes a victim of a crime, words like ‘roaming’ can make it seem as though they were asking for the trouble that befalls them. This discussion relates to another poem, composed by Sikeena that had a stanza that addressed being a feminist and how it is framed: A feminist is told that her struggle is old And asked why she hates men And she needs to explain what the term means again (Sikeena, brown first-generation British girl) This prompted several students to discuss how the term feminist is often used toward them in a derogatory way—as if an insult. We discussed how words through usage become invested with certain meanings for a time and although other social groups might use the same words, they are not used in the same way. Through repetition and usage, words generate affective tones and demonstrate how language maintains a material force in social and political struggles that students are inducted into both inside and outside of school settings. Many critical theorists have discussed how pedagogy is felt viscerally and affectively by bodies as they move through pedagogy’s space/time (Ellsworth, 2004), and there’s growing research into how affect circulates in literacy practices.12 This research-creation project exemplified how the time and space of pedagogy extends beyond the confines of the classroom into larger publics, accentuating the need to account for more politically emplaced, spatially distributed understandings how pedagogy affectively lands on certain bodies and subjects. Stacy Alaimo (2016) discusses an ethics of inhabitation that calls attention to these issues. An ethics of inhabitation in our research-creation project would highlight the situatedness of corporeal knowledge, the movement of walking, and their relations to the hetero-patriarchy and ongoing gendered violence as exemplified above. Inextricably linked to the hetero-patriarchy is white supremacy and nationalism which another student, Abida (a brown first-generation British Muslim girl who wears hijab) highlighted in her poem; and the digital networks of power that Marc (a white autistic British boy) discussed in his poem. Abida’s poem highlights how movement on the street is scaled at both the minute and personal and the global and impersonal at the same time in Brexitera Britain: Everyday we are treading on eggshells Being outrageous raises alarm bells 12 See (Boldt & Leander, 2020; Ehret & Leander, 2019; Kuby, 2019; Niccolini, 2016; Truman et al., 2020).

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Simply wearing hijab is suspicious Can’t we express ourselves, and can you stop being so vicious? (Abida) Abida’s poem emerged out of the interplay of many forces. A few that we discussed are Cardiff’s tendency toward whiteness and masculinity as experienced through bodily movements in the city; the (im)possibility of writing about race; and the affective hunger during daylight hours of Ramadan. Abida participated in all of the research-creation activities within the larger project. But her experience writing the poem (well, refusing to write it for weeks) was significant emergence within the larger project that required a re-calibration for me, the other students, and her. Along with discussing the content of Abida’s poem, this section focuses on the affective pedagogies and publics that circulated around Abida’s (not)writing of the poem as another way of thinking about the race, gender, and power and transcorporeal relations to place. Abida did not write her poem the same way the other students did. She arrived at the walking classroom with notes about what she wanted to write about. She began, and then struck out words. Began again, struck out words again. During one of our classes, the opening line: White people think that … marked her page. Then she tore it up. Abida said, ‘I want to write about race but don’t want to write about race.’ She smiled. I told her we could wait, or she could write on another topic (or she didn’t’ have to write a poem at all if she didn’t want to). We continued to experiment with walking and writing and to think-inmovement with various other mini research-creation projects as spring turned into summer. Ramadan began. Abida observed the fasting and did not consume food or drink between dawn and sunset. The following lesson, we went for a walk and took photographs for a video poem and then returned to the picnic tables. Students worked on various tasks as we had several small projects on the go. Abida had finished all of the other tasks and said she’d like to work on her Blake-inspired social-(in)justice poem. She went for a stroll with her paper and pen. She lay on the grass for a bit and then announced that she was too hungry to concentrate on the poem. She wrote about food instead. At the end of class, Abida handed me a long list of what she’d like to eat: chips and a falafel wrap, I crave a potato salad with a chicken breast alongside and beetroot, cucumber, carrot, sweet corn, and a nice cold juice. If this were a regular class in a regular classroom, I’m not sure what my response would have been. Taking a situated account of the intersectional dynamics at work in our research-creation project, I was a white teacher trying to support Abida in writing her poem (about whatever topic she chose) without pushing her to, and she a racialized student in hijab asserting her right to write on her own terms, including her refusal to write (Tuck & Yang, 2014). Tuck and Yang (2014) engage Audra Simpson’s (2007) critique of the preponderance of narratives in the social sciences that highlight the pain of socially oppressed groups. They discuss how all social science research is settler colonial research and posit ‘refusal’ as

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a generative mode that tells researchers what is off-limits, and what ways of life will not be adhered to: this has similarities with Glissant’s (1990) conceptualization of opacity where Black lives refuse to render themselves legible or transparent within Eurowestern frameworks. Abida refused to perform ‘student writes poem’ in a normative way—she refused to write during class time—although she continued to come to our research-creation walking and writing classes. We kept arriving at frictive and affective impasses: it was clear that although Abida may not have been writing a poem, but she was working. Her refusal was work, although not the kind of ‘work’ that is valorized in school.13 In keeping with the research question that emerged from the Tanka exercise about the intersectionality of race, gender, and power, I was moved by the affect of both Abida’s fasting and her refusal to write, coupled with her ongoing engagement with the research-creation projects. The following lesson we walked out the back field and practiced ‘taking a thought for a walk’ as a warm-up activity before attending to the poems in progress. The sun poured. We returned to the walking classroom’s shade. Sticky students slid onto the benches beneath the square umbrella shadows and completed a free writing exercise. The fasting’s presence was palpable; it was not only housed in Abida’s body but was inked out onto other students’ notepads: anxious for Abida … feeling thirsty for Abida … could she get sun stroke …? The intensity of the fasting (supposedly taking place inside a particular body) circulated publicly as an affective pedagogy among the whole group of students. A common quotation from affect theory invoked in qualitative research is when Teresa Brennan (2004) describes walking into a room and feeling its atmosphere. She says, “[t]he transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The ‘atmosphere’ or the environment literally gets into the individual” (p. 1). Affect is often configured as being felt from the ‘outside,’ the circulation of Abida’s fasting demonstrates how affect can flow in more than one direction transcorporeally. Abida’s fasting operated affectively across numerous bodies in the classroom and both strengthened and diminished those bodies’ ability to act. For Abida’s body, the affective hunger and a thirst paradoxically appeared to limit her ability to write and then provided her a unique space to write from. The fasting became an agent in her writing. The fasting had force. The fasting bodied. Near the end of the research-creation project, after Abida had finished all her other tasks and all the other students had completed their poems, we walked together beneath the awning in the courtyard because it was raining. Abida wanted to talk about how she could not write the poem in school: the forces preventing it included being too hungry, too thirsty, not wanting to write about 13 Abida’s actions were frictional and an example of what I discussed in Chapter 1 about practicing a politics of slowness outlined by Stengers (2005) with regard to Bartleby. Kara Keeling (2019) extends discussions on Bartleby and argues that his queer temporality and refusal operates in opposition to capitalistic time and western humanism.

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race, wanting to write about race. I asked whether there was somewhere she could write it? She said she would prefer to write it at home. The following morning Abida sat with sister at 4 am before she ate and drank for the day and composed her poem. She read it aloud to us all the next lesson. Even in the 21st century, laws are exceptional to some Discrimination takes place on a daily basis Racial – verbal and physical abuses and nothing is ever done (Abida) Abida’s poem calls attention to the racist, sexist, Islamophobia circulating in public spaces that land differently on her than many other students in the class; the affective dimensions of public space and classroom rules and regulations impact students differently. Koskela and Pain (2000) describe how fear is the guiding affective marker in women’s experiences of walking in urban areas and I would add that this fear is often compounded for racialized and trans-queer people.14 Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) demonstrates how some spaces or places, such as the city street, are barred from the experience of certain people, even as those spaces co-produce such feelings. She states, “[t]he “matter” of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing oneself or being seen as white [or brown] or black or mixed does effect what one “can do,” or even where one can go, which can be re-described in terms of what is and is not within reach” (p. 112). Fear of violence through walking on the street is both gendered and racial for Abida and highlights how globalization increases threats to cultural difference despite the high mobility rates of minority populations around the world (Appadurai, 2006). Abida’s first line, Everyday we are treading on eggshells could be read as a trite or cliché metaphor. However, she did activate her verb—she wrote tread, rather than walk—and we had practiced verb activation in our walking classroom exercises. And the image of eggshells is a delicate yet potent one to consider in regard to the task the students were completing, which was to describe walking in the city. Abida is not literally treading on eggshells, but as her poem goes on to describe, she is figuratively treading on eggshells despite living in the United Kingdom and attending a school in a ‘safe’ neighborhood. There is a political urgency in Abida’s writing. Her own local experience walking while wearing hijab is networked and connected to others internationally as evidenced by ongoing media discussions of racialized violence around

14 Following the vote for Brexit, according to the Home Office Report in the UK (2016) “The number of race hate crimes increased by 15 per cent (up 6,557, to 49,419 offences) between 2014/15 and 2015/16” (p. 5). A concomitant and intersectional issue is the fact that there was a 147% rise in hate crimes aimed at the LGBTQ community in July/August 2016 (since Brexit) compared to the same period in 2015.

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the globe. It’s as though Abida spoke directly to Trump, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), and white-nationalistic bigotry with this line: We are a group of people trying to undergo a transformation But not for the reasons of altering a nation. (Abida) I want to assert that I don’t see it as a ‘victory’ for me as the researcher that Abida eventually wrote her poem, although I think it’s an important poem. I’m very wary of educational stories that focus on pedagogies that turn a student’s refusal to complete tasks into an overcoming story, or an opacity into a transparency, or ‘no’ into ‘yes,’ particularly if the researcher/educator is white and the student is racialized (Truman et al., 2020). I am, however, very interested in Abida’s home literacy practices, and what I’ve described elsewhere as an inhuman15 literacy in that the affective process surrounding her writing/not writing upsets normative accounts of what counts as a literacy practice (Truman, 2019a). Abida’s home literacy practice and the space generated by sitting and writing with her sister is aligned with discussions of affirmative refusal as put forth by Leanne Simpson (2017). Simpson draws from Jarrett Martineau’s dissertation work to describe how people of color and Indigenous people may engage with the arts and other modes of living as resurgent and affirmative constellations away from settler colonial capture. School literacy and literary practices embedded in Eurowestern notions of value and assessment procedures often fail to acknowledge that students may be doing literacy/literature in ways that are unrecognizable to the system. It was only because Abida trusted our group enough to tell us about her home writing practice that I even know about it. But even if I were not told about it, it wouldn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Thinking with both Abida’s report of her home writing practice, and the writing she created, highlighted once again how the time and space of classroom pedagogies (and the street’s pedagogies) are never neutral with respect to gender, race, class, or ability. And how there are other time/ spaces that are much more amenable to writing and thinking than classroom spaces (regardless of how seemingly innovative or ‘inclusive’ the classroom is). While home literacy practices, or home pedagogies, similar to classroom pedagogies are not considered ‘public pedagogies’ within public pedagogy literature (O’Malley et al., 2020), in my research, the shifting ontologies between private and public space demonstrates a proliferation of different kinds of publics at work in a host of pedagogical situations. As part of the conclusion of this chapter, I will briefly discuss Marc’s poem (which read more like a manifesto than a poem), that takes up a different form of public pedagogy, and intersecting power networks at work in pedagogical

15 See Chapter 1 for an explication of how I think through the inhuman in relation to Eurowestern humanism.

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situations. Similar to Abida’s poem, which used walking as a metaphor for her first line, Marc’s poem begins: I slowly stroll through the depths of the Web. Marc is autistic and used assistive software to read and write on a screen. His tablet was always in hand, so when he went for a walk down the street, he argued that he also ‘walked’ through the web. Assistive software and hardware were necessary for Marc as a learner, yet he was also concerned about privacy, surveillance culture, and capitalism on learning platforms and the Internet: We need to wake up to the ‘Terms’ of the Internet We need to wake up to the ‘Terms’ of learning platforms. Where hacking and encryption are made illegal. And ‘private’ messages are not private. It’s been several years since Marc wrote those lines. Yet, as I read it now, it seems predictive of our current moment where there’s an increased shift to online learning globally and increased datafication of our daily lives (Hong, 2020), while COVID-19 has helped generate exponential growth in EdTech and the increased influence of Google Classroom and other multi-national learning platforms on schooling. Each of the student’s writings taken up in this chapter engage with affective relations that are intensely personal, yet linked to larger networks. To think with Marc’s experience, I draw on Alaimo (2010), who introduces the term transcorporeality to describe a more-than-human conceptualization of relationality that includes “material interchanges between human bodies, geographical places, and vast networks of power” (p. 17). Marc’s writing invokes a transcorporeal awareness of how digital space is inextricably linked to corporeal experience of the time and space of pedagogy. During my research-creation project at Llyn High School, Marc was the only student using assistive software for all of his tasks. However, since COVID-19, universities, K-12 schools, and practitioners have been herded into developing courses on platforms owned by for-profit companies that promise to offer solutions to the challenges of the global population being forced into online learning. While these are welcome interventions for many teachers and students, as Marc points out, on each of these proliferating platforms it’s not always clear what’s happening to users’ data (Marachi & Quill, 2020).16

16 I have been using Perusall in teaching. It’s a fabulous group reading platform that aligns with my love of marginalia that I discussed in Chapter 2, and my interest in collaborative thinking and reading processes. Perusall is ‘free’ to use although the developers outline that they may be collecting the data generated by users for further development of products. That seems okay for now, but what if Perusall were sold, what would happen to the data, the marginalia, the ideas?

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Where wealth is made by selling our data to others But we have no rights, because there are no laws It’s hard to make laws about things you don’t understand. Marc’s astute lines reach into the future and the EdTech boom we’re currently living through (2020–2021). EdTech is radically altering all levels of schooling and most educators, researchers, and administrators are perhaps too tired or busy to notice that we’re all (consenting) subjects in a longitudinal datafication study. Marc also made it clear that digital platforms are important resources for disabled students like himself, and educators. However, EdTech is not necessarily driven through a desire for accessibility, nor a concern for critical pedagogy: it’s frequently driven by capitalism and capitalistic logics (Selwyn & Gašević, 2020; Williamson, 2020). So, while we need accessible learning platforms, we need to ‘wake up’ to their terms and assert the difference between assistive technologies and signing up for a life of corporate surveillance. It’s been a few years since I saw Marc and I keep thinking of him this year and what he might think about fostering collective queer-feminist resistance to multi-national corporatization of learning (Cifor et al., 2019), glitching (Russell, 2020) them: he was adamant about the need for hacking to be legal and I wish I’d asked him more about that. I’ve argued in the past that there’s a multitude of ‘publics’ that are generated through pedagogical encounters, and that public pedagogy happens in schools not just in public space (Truman, 2016, 2019b). The current digital-transcorporeal corporatization of learning that’s happening ‘in’ schools—where ‘school’ right now often located in students’ not-so-private bedrooms—continues to affirm my argument for public pedagogy’s reach into the ‘classroom’ and ‘private life.’

Generating publics The students ‘published’ their writings for this particular task on wooden telephone poles throughout the city center and surrounding the school when we finished this part of the project. The proposition to post the writings in the city where other walkers could encounter the poems came from the students themselves, rather than from me, and they thought it was important that the poems be ‘in place,’ as in where their own thinking had occurred. I view the micro-political or minor gestures of posting the writings on poles as a form of critical public pedagogy. Rogers (2016) outlines how arts-based youth cultural productions, such as posters or zines when displayed in public space, can function both as a form of participation in the life of a community as well as “help shape the community’s future” (p. 270). Such interventions re-insert youths’ “contesting narratives of citizenship” back into the city (Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008, pp. 493–494) as if “part of a critical community” (Low, 2011, p. 71). Dillabough and Kennelly (2010) discuss how the neighborhood is both a metaphor and a “practical site for the organization of youth practices” that

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S tudent poem. The photograph shows a hand-written poem that was ‘published’ by being pinned to a telephone pole. The writing in the photograph is too small to read. Graffiti and an urban street can be seen in the background.

highlight the connections between place and the “affective attachments” of those who live in them (p. 135). I didn’t try to ‘measure’ what effect/affects the action of posting the writings onto poles throughout the city had on other pedestrians. I know they were read by several passers-by who paused while the poems were tacked onto the poles. The poems are likely sun-bleached or dissolved in rainwater by now or covered by other posters and ephemera. But when I think back to those months walking, writing, and thinking together, I am heartened by the students’ respectful attention to the affective forces at work on each other as we moved in public spaces, and the critical discussions we had inspired by their cultural productions.

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Truman, S. E. (2019b). SF! Haraway’s situated feminisms and speculative fabulations in English class. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-018-9632-5. Truman, S. E. (2019c). White Deja vu: Troubling the certainty of the English canon in literary education. English in Australia VO, 54(3), 53. Truman, S. E., Hackett, A., Pahl, K., McLean Davies, L., & Escott, H. (2020). The capaciousness of no: Affective refusals as literacy practices. Reading Research Quarterly, 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.306. Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2019). Queer walking tours and the affective contours of place. Cultural Geographies. Online first: doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/1474474019842888. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530265. Williamson, B. (2020). Education technology seizes a pandemic opening. Current History, 120(822), 15–20. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2021.120.822.15. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation–An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Permissions Part of Chapter 3 was previously published as Truman, S. E. (2019). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465 Reprinted with permission from Taylor and Francis.

4 MORE-THAN-LINGUISTIC RHETORICS Writing (speculative) mappings of place

This chapter engages with two further smaller research-creation projects completed during my time with secondary English students at Llyn High School (introduced in Chapter 3). Chapter 3 took up the notion of public pedagogies and cartographies of power that the students experienced while walking to and from school, and how they ‘published’ their creative productions on poles in public space. This chapter focuses on a literary mapping project the students completed inside the school and speculative cartographies they wrote about their city, as ways of further exploring situated pedagogies and transcorporeal relationships with place. The chapter begins with a brief overview of place, embodiment, and situated learning in social science and educational literature combined with discussions of walking and map-making practices. I then introduce the proposition for the linguistic mapping project that emerged from within the larger research-creation project, which was to consider how walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal understandings of place.1 Transcorporeality, as theorized by Alaimo (2010) underlines the ways in which humans are entangled with the inhuman world, geopolitical networks of power, and inseparable from the environment.2 As a proposition for the first project I discuss, the students conducted dérives,3 working in pairs to consider toponarratives4 that were then linguistically ‘mapped’ using literary devices. This project occurred over a number of classes, resulting in the creation 1 At the beginning of the research-creation project discussed in the previous chapter, inspired by the students’ writings and discussions I formulated two questions. This was the second question. 2 As a way of thinking about how bodies extend beyond a bounded form, Weiss (1999) introduced the notion of intercorporeality where being embodied is “never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (p. 5). 3 Dérive is French for drift. 4 Heddon and Turner’s (2010) toponarritives are explained below.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003104889-5

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of a series of linguistic cartographies of school. In the following section of the chapter, I discuss a speculative writing practice the students conducted as a way of mapping different future-pasts for their city prompted by Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities. To conclude, I then think with two of Calvino’s speculative cities and consider the potential of fiction for highlighting the challenges and affordances of empirical research.

Being in place and situated learning Educational theorists in the west have written about space, place, and embodiment for more than a century. Dewey (1963) recognized the effects of environmental factors and previous lived experience on a person’s learning and argued for a more situated approach to pedagogy. Situated pedagogy acknowledges the everyday lives of students and the environs students interact with outside of school hours. As exemplified in Chapter 3’s research-creation project, my research is aligned with critical scholars who argue for the need to deepen both individual and social models of embodiment to account for more politically emplaced, spatially distributed understandings of bodies and place (Stephens, Ruddick, & McKeever, 2015). There are many disparate ideas on what makes place, ‘place’. It could be argued that place necessarily pre-exists human relations, or conversely that it’s through humans that place takes on meaning. Many cultural geographers have considered how place, like bodies, is inherently multiple and in a state of becoming, rather than fixed. For example, Massey (2005) views place as an event thrown together through relations; in the “event of place” there is “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing” (p. 141). Scholars Pink (2012) and Ingold (2007) discuss the notion of emplacement that includes the sensing and perceiving body and place. Emplacement, according to Pink (2011) enables a fuller interpretation of place-events as an ecology. Such a recognition according to Pink recognizes both the contingencies of a place and the historicity of processes that come together in the event of place. In this view, the school is not a pre-existing place, but an assemblage of heterogeneous elements and interrelated processes including relations with land and non-human animals. Walking is often characterized as a method for exploring place, including place as storied, place as determined from outside, place as process, and place as a site of belonging/not belonging (Springgay & Truman, 2019a). And the concept of relationality is often used by walking researchers, when considering how walking participants make sense of place through the embodied sociality of walking (Pink, Hubbard, Maggie, & Radley, 2010). This relationality challenges theories of embodiment that are embedded in individual subjectivity to think about networks or webs of dynamic intersections, where to be embodied is to emerge in relation with other bodies, objects, social conventions, artworks, and texts that exceed an individual’s bounded form. In such a view, the ‘bodies’ of research participants and researchers are not fixed, but partially materialized

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through environmental factors—and also have the potential to affect other bodies that surround them. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) address and critique Eurowestern understandings of embodiment, emplacement, and place in their scholarship. They highlight how particular accounts of embodiment are too often expanded on to make universal claims about an emplaced subject while neglecting “the situated realities of historical and spatial sedimentations of power” (2015, p. 36). As the poems discussed in Chapter 3 highlight, different people have radically different experiences of the same pedagogical spaces—whether that pedagogical space is a public street, a stand of trees, or a classroom. In her investigations of the embodied effects of colonization in pedagogical spaces, Roxana Ng (2012) states that hierarchical control does not only manifest in the form of intellectual clashes but also through “… a confrontation of bodies…Power plays are both enacted and absorbed by people physically …” (p. 346). Ng’s attention to embodied experience echoes bell hooks’ (1994) critique of the Cartesian split and call to recognize “… the body in relation to teaching” (hooks, 1994, p. 191) as well as other education scholars’ discussions of the relationship between embodiment and different ways of knowing in pedagogical spaces/places (Aoki, Pinar, & Irwin, 2005; Somerville, 2013; Springgay & Truman, 2019a). Greenwood and Smith (2014) argue that place-conscious education can be key in challenging conventional understandings of diversity in education where critical issues such as race, class, and gender frequently slide into abstractions. They assert that to be effective, place-conscious education must be situated, and understand that lived experience always “takes place somewhere” (p. xxi). Further, on occupied lands such as North America and Australia, it is important to recognize how even well-meaning place-based approaches that attend to social constructions of critical issues can simultaneously erase ongoing settler colonialism (Springgay & Truman, 2018; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). Tuck and McKenzie (2015) argue for a responsible rethinking of place, accounting for Indigenous understandings of Land that consider its “nonhuman inhabitants and characteristics” as important agents in the manifestation of place (p. 40). In my research at WalkingLab with Stephanie Springgay (2018, 2019b) we have thought with Juanita Sundberg’s (2014) articulation of Indigenous feminist activists’ commitment to ‘walking-with.’ Walking-with challenges the notion of both a solitary walker in walking studies as well as inherently convivial ideas of relation-building and placemaking in the social sciences and pedagogical research.

Transcorporeal affects of place Provoked by the emergent question that was discussed in Chapter 3—How do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal understandings of place?—the students and I conducted a walking-thinking-mapping research-creation project that charted the relations which make up the place they call ‘school.’ Mapping is a common practice in schools across subjects. Because the students at Llyn High

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School and I were operating as an English class within curricular scope of the department of English language and literature, the students’ maps of place drew on literary theory.5 They used a series of literary devices such as listing, hyperbole, alliteration, rhyme, and synesthesia to create narrative cartographies of the school. These more-than-representational maps visually and linguistically attempt to re-present ‘places’ in the school as well as posit alternative versions/ names of places. As propositions for the project, the students walked with the ideas of a toponarrative (Heddon & Turner, 2010) and Situationist practice of the dérive (drift). A toponarrative, according to Heddon and Turner is a way to story a place and must be completed by at least two walkers. The significance of moving as more-thanone person and more-than-one author was intentional, in that it was aligned with the notion of walking-with, as well unsettling how writing often functions in school: where an individual student composes a poem, or essay, or work of fiction. A dérive is a Situationist International technique of walking that involves a playful awareness of the psychogeographical effects that are encountered through movement, and always happens in groups. Psychogeography refers to the effect/ affect of a place or geography on the emotions and behaviors of individuals. On a dérive (which normally happen outdoors), groups of people negotiate movements together, ‘drifting’ through the city and remapping it through movements (and often transgressions). No one person is in charge of how the group walks. Numerous scholars and artists have used versions of the dérive to map space, including Richardson (2014) who discusses how she and student psychogeographers at the University of Leeds “emotionally” mapped their campus (p. 151). As Springgay (2008) proposes, drifting provokes an intimacy where knowledge of place is not something grasped from a distance but emerges through a proximity that is facilitated by the movement of walking as a group. However, as noted by the students in their conversations and journal writings, proximity does not always produce comfort, care, or convivial relations.6 The intimacy of a dérive is a frictional encounter that rubs against public space and the school, producing intensive affects that are always entangled with power and never neutral. As I’ve drawn attention previously (Springgay & Truman, 2018), many scholars have critiqued the Situationists and their tactics of casually transgressing societal norms as the purview of males in pursuit of ‘laddish thrills’ (Massey, 2005, p. 47). As Rose (2014) states, an “uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny and neocolonialism lurks within much psychogeography and has since its inception” (p. 150). The students and I discussed these issues as well as the merits of enacting

5 Plenty of scholars use mapping in schools or pedagogical situations: often using drawing or other modes of representation. Linda Knight’s exquisite inefficient mappings are a great example of more-than-representational maps (Knight, 2019, 2021). 6 In fact, during the dérive as we passed a classroom and overheard a teacher admonishing a student for something that had happened. Tom, one of the students on the dérive said quietly, ‘he just sounds so unhappy – you can hear it in his exhaustion how much he must hate his job.’

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a ‘drift’ within the school.7 The students were intrigued by the notion that within a dérive, the idea is to drop usual ‘relations’ and set out to explore ‘appealing’ and ‘repelling’ places as well as ‘switching stations’ where there is an urge to change direction. They were eager to try this out in school, although the places of repulsion may outweigh the places of attraction, as one student noted. And as several students noted, conducting a ‘drift’ in school and defamiliarizing relations is an exciting activity—deliberately walking in out of bounds places in the city may be dangerous, particularly for racialized, disabled, and queer and trans students. A point that echoed awareness and concerns raised in Chapter 3. For the dérive, no one student (nor I) chose our directions. We moved as a relational mass through the hallways, two gymnasiums, up and down stairwells, and onto the school grounds. The students composed their linguistic maps as pairs and attended to the how of place by feeling together transcorporeally. Alaimo (2010) introduces the term transcorporeality to describe a more-thanhuman conceptualization of relationality that includes the exchanges between humans, geographical places as well as “vast networks of power” (p. 17).8 These exchanges also include words. Thinking and walking and writing transcorporeally underlines the ways in which humans are entangled and inseparable from the environment. The next section does not only focus on what the students know or experience through their place-making practices, but also considers how the stairs, dusty shelves, human teacher voice, stale smells, soft breezes, and prevailing school imaginary come to matter affectively, literally, and transcorporeally.

Place: The cleanest air ever breathed flows in currents carried by the turquoise tapping on the keyboard. The dustless musk of perfect white spray-tanned on every wall As an enabling constraint, the students experimented with using synesthesia while composing their narrative cartographies. Synesthesia is a literary device wherein the writer uses words associated with one sense to describe another. The students’ synesthesia dérive was a minor practice of deterritorialization of both language and place; the deliberate mixing of sensory descriptions disrupted the habitual use of language to describe smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound and conveyed the affective responses of the students in complex ways. Affect refers

7 The Headteacher did announce our project several times during the months I was at Llyn High school in the morning briefing, so we didn’t get ‘in trouble’ while drifting through the halls and surrounding school grounds. 8 Some scholars have written about bodying in relation to the microscopic world. For example Colebrook (2014) invokes the notion of a virus as a “form of rampant and unbounded mutation” (136) and discusses how a virus cannot be defined as embodied because it’s not a living system: it exists only as a parasite in a process of ongoing invasion. While thinking about the human form and its relations, Bennett (2010) outlines how flesh is populated by other bodies and bacteria that outnumber human genes more than 100 times: what we call the human body is actually “an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes” (pp. 112–113).

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to the intensities and viscosities that operate on, between, and in excess of individuated ‘bodies:’it highlights how desire and forces move among relations that include people, non-human animals, texts, and the environment.

Place: Salted sweat grunted out of limbs The word synesthesia can refer to a psychological or neurological disability in which sensory stimulus from one sense is mixed up with another sense. This can include seeing a particular color associated with a number, or a sound associated with a visual representation.

Place: The booming laughter glimmers with mockery In creative writing synesthesia refers specifically to figurative language that includes a mixing of senses. It is a common poetic technique but is not necessarily taught as one in secondary literary education at the students’ year level. That said, the students had no trouble understanding the concept.

Place: The grit buzzes off the painted walls Some famous examples of synesthesia in literature come from well-known writers who also walked as part of their practice. Basho (the wandering Japanese poet), and Baudelaire (also known for his contributions to the figure of the Flâneur).

Place: The air takes on a different taste, sweet and hazy. Splinters of the soft brown shades linger humid on my eyelids Although affects may have been felt trans-corporeally, which were then codified and represented in the above writings, they arguably remain anchored to human bodies as the active agents in the linguistic mapping process: the representation of place through words was enacted by humans just like all of this writing is being read by another human (presumably you are a human). That said, language is also a transcorporeal-material practice, and communication through language or a ‘map’ can evoke an affective experience of place for listeners-readers-viewers in other time spaces.

Making do with more-than-linguistic rhetorics As ordered as they attempt to be, schools are full of curious things: out of date posters or announcements, bits of fruit balanced on windowsills, errant notes dropped out of pockets. These kinds of things caught the students’ attention as we walked articulating how ongoing interactions between humans and morethan-human things influence how place is produced and emerges as what we might call ‘school.’ For Bennett (2010), ‘thing-power’ is “…the curious ability

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of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). This capacity to animate or act is in conversation with Latour’s (2005) concept actant which describes the agency of both human and non-humans, and how they both might alter the outcome of an event. Following Bennett and Latour, the students and I practiced paying attention to non-human actants during the dérive and what I began to call more-than-linguistic-rhetorics. Rhetoric usually refers to oral or written skills of persuasion. Within this conceptualization, there is generally an agent (human speaker or writer) who deploys rhetoric to convince a reader or listener, while the media activated (the rhetoric) is inert until deployed by the speaker-writer and impressed upon a listener-reader. A more-than-human account of rhetoric would consider not just the agency of the speaker-writer—and the agency of the listener-speaker—based around a linguistic code, but also the emergence of persuasive ‘rhetoric(s)’ in other forms of relation and matter. And we experienced these throughout our walks. The rotten banana covered in dust on the window ledge in the stairwell, the angle of light and insect chatter in the outdoor walking classroom, the oozing toilets in the boys’ bathroom (only the boys went in!), and the mirrored windows into the examination hall all enacted an affective agency in place-making process. Engagement with these various rhetorics persuaded the students and me toward new understandings of school as place. The more-thanhuman actants, the movement of the students, and the writing all enacted what Latour (1999) might call fait-faire or making-do. Making-do is “accomplished along with others in an event, with the specific opportunities provided by the circumstances. These others are not ideas, or things, but nonhuman entities … propositions, which have their own ontological gradients …” (p. 288). In such a world, many actants assert a transmaterial influence on the emergence of place.

Matters that mattered and ways that they mattered The disjointed wandering of many body minds (human and inhuman), abrupt pauses to take notes, and the more-than-representational maps that employed varied literary devices, visual representations, and humor troubled our understanding of place and place-making practices. I will discuss a few that drew my attention when looking at the maps. The (re)presentations of place here in this book use linguistic and visual forms: different rhetorics, different agencies, different enmeshments with place.

Memory matters A peculiar (re)presentation that occurred on four of the students’ maps was an elephant (close up drawing by Emma and Jagdev). Apparently, an elephant painting used to hang in a particular stairwell that we passed through, but it had been removed several years earlier. The elephant, moving from physical form, to memory, to speech, to drawing enacts how place emerges through a relation of

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various actants. The specific circumstances of the walk (the fact of a past presence of elephant remembered by certain individuals and described then represented by others) shows the (haunt)ological (Derrida, 1994) relations that co-produce place.

Literary devices matter The students narrated space using various literary devices including personification, alliteration, hyperbole, metaphor, sarcasm, rhythm, and rhyme. The use of listing as a literary device (Alex and Angharad’s map) links seemingly disparate agents into a tense unity. Bogost (2012) states how listing as a form of “ontographical cataloging” abandons the idea of an “anthropological narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail” (pp. 41–42). For Bogost, lists promise disjunction instead of flow, although they often flow linguistically. Bogost argues that this disjointedness is a remedy for “Deleuzian becoming” (p. 40).9 While taking the form of concrete poetry (where the shape of the poem hints at the content), the rhymes and meter in this list-poem also evoke a feeling of how a trip up those particular stairs at Llyn High School feels: Thunder of feet Rough walls High climb Food falls Spider webs Peeky holes Cold air Bell tolls The last line likely relates to the school bell ringing, intertextually invoking the funeral toll in John Donne’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Critique matters As demonstrated in the full maps (Figures 12, 13) the students’ writings were evocative and affective. And after we completed the walk and began to map it linguistically, I noticed another aspect of mapping emerge: the students’ narrative cartographies both complicated (critiqued), and reified the prevailing school imaginary. By school imaginary, I mean the prevailing image or narrative of school as a place for students to develop into well-rounded, ‘productive’ members of society. In this imaginary, education is viewed a kind of ‘becoming cultured’ 9 This disjointedness would align with Derrida’s hauntology above; in the Specters of Marx Derrida invokes Hamlet’s ‘time is out of joint,’ and many queer theorists, crip theorists, and futurists also invoke temporal dis-junction as a mode of rupturing linear/normative time (Freeman, 2010; McRuer, 2018).

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S tudent map of school (a) By Dylan and Dewy. The linguistic map, created in pencil shows a variety of school places and ideologies as experienced by the students.

and this cultural reproduction is based on shared values that, through adherence to them, generates cultural and social capital (Bourdieu, 2006). Subverting this view, many students renamed places in the school: the office is called ‘swivel chair blues’ and the cafeteria is called ‘the gorge’ in Dylan and Dewy’s map. Several other students took opportunities to critique aspects of the school imaginary with humorous descriptions evoke what Halberstam (2011) calls the “toxic perversity of contemporary life” (p. 3) under neoliberalism. For example, a sippet from Max and Sandip’s map discusses the ‘Blue Place for lonely people’ where the ‘clogs of Brains Working hard’ was later changed to “Brains Washing hard.” Engaging with the capitalistic, social, and cultural structures that underpin education, Massumi (1992) proposes that his readers ask any politician what school is for and the answer that returns will be something like: to build good citizens. Massumi (1992) argues that building good citizens actually means “to-make-young-body-docile” which will in turn create a “docile worker” (p. 25). Massumi’s assertions are similar to what many educational sociologists have argued for decades: that schools, through both a hidden and overt curriculum generate and maintain existing social-economic arrangements that prepare students for predesignated roles in the labor force (Apple, 1995; Bowles & Gintis, 1976). The students had similar misgivings about the function of school. In this regard their maps, following Jameson’s (1991) discussion of ‘cognitive mapping’

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S tudent map of school (b) By Rhian and Sikeena. The linguistic map, created in pencil shows a variety of school places and ideologies as experienced by the students.

can be seen to “endow the individual subject[s] with some new heightened sense of [their] place in the global system” (p. 54). For example, Rhian and Sikeena’s map highlights the examination room as a place and the students within it as “Data Source” where the invigilator resembles a judge with a gavel and there’s no entry (or no exit!) permitted to/from the room. Not all the maps rewrote nor critiqued the imaginary of school as place. Most significantly, Rhian and Sikeena’s map began as a critique yet culminates in an embrace of seemingly neoliberal language and ideologies regarding school as a place for achieving goals, and perhaps it exemplifies how well the place of school operates as a finely tuned engine for making young body(mind)s ‘docile.’ Their map moves from the dystopic ‘Data Source’ image to the ‘Embracing of Madness’ (see monkey-person image on monkey bars) through a series of stations in school where neoliberal rhetoric flows (see words like ‘inspiration,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘learning is a lifestyle,’ and second person pronouns addressed to the reader which we all know is a way of getting readers on side, don’t you agree?) to the peak—literally the back hill behind the school where they felt ‘invincible.’ However, Rhian and Sikeena don’t appear to be describing the physical places we walked through and in that regard their map functions transversally or ideationally: rather than being ‘true’ to the physical locations of the school as place, they hint at what place evokes (or is supposed to evoke). Which was after all

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what we were exploring with the research-creation project. And I hope they do feel invincible. Their map also exemplifies how the forces (and rhetorics) that oversee the power of investment in education control the mechanisms of creative production and commodify knowledge and futures (Trifonas, 2000). Rhian and Sikeena describe school as a place that helps you achieve particular goals and become successful if you try hard and are ‘innovative,’ and ‘inspired’: so why as a researcher am I so wary of their map? Their map confounds me and reminds me that the rhetorics of place are present at different time scales: perceptible and remembered in different ways. There’s a trans-temporal aspect to their map in that it discusses the past, present, and future of particular subjects moving through the school as place-event. But what I didn’t see coming was a map that takes up and utilizes the neoliberal language of striving-to-overcome so effectively. They mapped ‘school’ and its narrative of success with rhetoric that invoke the normative practice of benchmarks, outcomes, and proficiency: their map shows the ‘route’ toward becoming ‘invincible.’ The school imaginary they map is aligned with liberal, capitalist, democratic system that perpetuates the idea of ‘educate yourself, get a degree, be successful, gain social-cultural-economic capital!’ The over-arching narrative is how to self-actualize within this system that also fosters the narrative that if you don’t ‘make it,’ you (ideal subject projected into the ideal future) are to blame. If the Situationists intentionally set out to think space and place differently through the dérive, and break the habit of representation in their maps, was Rhian and Sikeena’s map a failure? I don’t think so. But it caused me to pause and continues to cause me to pause—like an emergency that oozes. Rather than mapping place as immediate, Rhian and Sikeena’s map operates at a different scale: it is transcorporeal, trans-temporal and relationally engaged with neoliberal rhetorics (both linguistic and spatial) that many of us chose to ignore, didn’t recognize, or wanted to map out of the place of school. Historically, the Situationists’ maps re-jigged and re-worked the city as a form of critique and deterritorialization. But do such maps have any long-term effects? Perhaps Rhian and Sikeena’s map has a different kind of efficacy. The language of striving to overcome and other characteristics of their map intrigue me, even as they appear to (particularly because they continue to) reify the image of school as a map or narrative story of becoming invincible. Seen in conjunction with the other students’ maps, their map demonstrates how complex, entangled, relational, and transversal a stroll through school and mapping place can be.

Trans-bodied-events In reviewing both my notes on the walks and the students’ more-thanpresentational maps of the school, I began to think of the non-human bodies (like words, odors, and memories of elephants in stairwells) and the relations between such bodies, as events, and recognized the effect that such events had on a transcorporeal production of place. This radical-materialist thinking of

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bodies and the relations between them as events accentuates how a variety of transcorporeal influences mix to produce the image of school as place. In this regard however, wherever, and whenever Rhian and Sikeena conceptualized their image of school—perhaps during the walk, or during some other point in their education, or most likely a tangle of various events remembered or dreamed up—their map functions transcorporeally across various spaces and times. And their map continues to event relationally with those who encounter it. The making of ‘place’ is complex, unfinished, and transcorporeal. Further to this, the walking dérive mapping exercise revealed how peculiar publics, or collectives of events combine to make school as place. Recognizing these forces as transcorporeal causes different ethical questions to emerge as transcorporeality insists on recognizing our continual interactions with other humans and things (both of which I’m now conceptualizing as both events and bodies). Alaimo (2010) writes that the ethics that emerge from transcorporeal relations are “uncomfortable and perplexing” (p. 17). The synesthetic maps and other writings reveal the ways that students understand institutional space, and its effect on student bodies and learning. The seemingly simple task of strolling through the school and mapping it is entangled with innumerable forces vying for significance including linguistic and more-than-linguistic rhetorics (events) that actively persuade how place is produced. As noted, these include everything from memories of physical attributes of place that have disappeared, prevailing educational discourses, as well as myriad sensory experiences student bodies encounter through movement. Certeau (1984) states, “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world’s debris” (1984, p. 107) For Certeau (1984) the ‘materials’ that make up a story including rhetorical devices, and previous forms and content get arranged into constructed frameworks but are always shot through with ellipses, drifts, more-thans, less-thans or what he calls a “sieve-order” (p. 107). The students’ maps (re)present this sieve-order in action as well as displaying the affective excess that oozes through the gaps. Through walking as a group and paying attention to affective experiences and then ‘representing’ those experiences through various language devices, the students challenged occularcentrism as well as the notion that the senses are internal to individual bodies, while contributing to discussions on how place is produced transcorporeally. And there’s a further transcorporeality to such mapping practices as here you are, somehow touched across time and space by traces, images, and descriptions of these places.

Speculative cartographies The research-creation events and students’ writings-mappings that I’ve discussed in this chapter (and Chapter 3) have forced me to reconsider how movement and writing co-produce place transcorporeally. Additionally, the work highlights how movement and writing can both reify and trouble the intersections of race,

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gender, and power relations (human and more-than-human). As a not-conclusion to this chapter, I will discuss another research-creation project that the students of Llyn High School completed that also emerged from our discussions within the larger research-creation project. Near the end of the four months I was working with the students at Llyn High School, we were walking in the field behind the school discussing the relationship between movement and thought, and the relationship between sensory experience and speculation. We mused about whether speculative thought fuels creative writing as much as affective or sensorial experiences do—and whether a speculative idea was in fact affective or sensorial and real without being actual. I asked the students whether ideas ever came to them whilst walking—seemingly out of nowhere. Their staccato “yes, yes, yes-yes, yes, yes” punctured the walk. Several students articulated how strange thoughts and funny ideas come to them while walking, or how they dream up devices to build as engineers. Our chat got me thinking about the mechanics of thought in movement, and the relationship between walking in a city and speculative writing about a city. This inspired me to bring Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997) as a proposition for our next lesson. During the next class the students read aloud some of the inspired descriptions of speculative, yet beguiling cities in the collection. In the book the character of Marco Polo sits with the Tartar Emperor Kublai Khan and intrigues him with tales about 55 different cities Polo has visited throughout the empire. As soon as the descriptions begin it is clear that the cities are not actual, in the concrete sense, but cities of the imagination, cities of ideas, speculative cities. And perhaps they describe one particular city through various angles. It’s all unclear. What is clear is how evocative and intriguing Calvino’s writing is. The students agreed. Following speculative fiction authors and queer feminist scholars, I view speculative thought technology for worlding different future-pasts from within a situated context (Haraway, 1991; Keeling, 2019; Truman, 2019). The students’ next task was to walk through Cardiff and speculate a version of the Welsh capital inspired by their situated movements: transcorporeally connecting them to possible futures. Each of the students’ writings focused on something fantastical about a speculative Cardiff, including a student named Dewy’s description of a city of paradoxes, where “Cardiff is growing smaller and shrinking larger…Every person has a pointless job that is of great importance…The society is mostly built on individualism but with a sense of community …” Dewy’s account reads almost like a critique of globalized late capitalism and emphasizes Haraway’s situated feminisms of class and labor. Another student, Angharad, proposed a city made up of floors: “There are hundreds of floors and each floor is the size of a large city. The higher you go the more spectacular the floors. Only one man got to the highest floor because his grandmother and then his mother rode the elevators their entire lives.” Angharad’s version of the city reads both like a speculative allegory of neoliberal ideals and a testament to a mother’s and grandmother’s devotion to making things ‘better’ for their children.

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Although the speculative pieces were only a few 100 words long, many of the students proposed versions of Cardiff that could be seen as improvements on its current social and political tendings. For example, Rachel describes observing Cardiff from above while walking on tightropes that connect the city from endto-end and where people appear genderless, as “petals in a rose garden” that wind and weave on their way through the day. Rachel posits that viewing Cardiff from above makes judgement difficult and hopes that “maybe ground level will be like this one day.” The student Abida’s rendition of Cardiff had a socialist bent where “you work purely out of goodness, all injustice in the world can finally be faced hand in hand … and poverty will be eliminated.” Georgia pushes egalitarian aspirations beyond the human realm and proclaims that in Cardiff “every single animal and person has equal rights.” While not all of the students’ writings inspired towards a ‘better’ world, many posited accelerationist or dystopic musings of a stroll through the city as a post-apocalyptic site. For example, Jagdev describes the traces of a nuclear power plant explosion where “shadows can be seen where something or someone got in the way of the immense heat that vaporized half the city.” Other students offered descriptions of wandering through the remains of human-made climate, industrial, or war disasters, and Owain describes the city as “crypt” where yellow-eyed humanoids “generally crawl on their hands and feet,” as if in some kind of reverse evolution. Fredric Jameson (2007) presents the dilemma of whether speculation is tethered to the empiricist postulation “nothing in the mind that was not already in the senses,” meaning that even our “wildest imaginings are collages of experience,” thereby binding the imagination to whatever mode of production it hails from (p. xiii). For Jameson if this is so, it would spell the end of both utopic thought and science fiction. I’d like to think that we could think outside of our own inherited context if we desired to. In the case of this project, the worlds the students discuss were speculative yet very much linked to their situated understanding of place, their contemporary milieu, and personal concerns for the future. In this regard, teaching and practicing speculative writing can be a radical pedagogical act wherein students practice world-building through identifying absent but potential presents and futures, a practice that many Indigenous, Black, and disability scholars use to affirm decolonial, resurgent, and crip futures through the arts (Delany, 2009; Simpson, 2017; Wong, 2020).10 As Imarisha (2015) asserts, decolonization of the imagination “is the most subversive and dangerous form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born” (p. 4). In this regard, speculative thought, re-storying or re-narrating (McKittrick, 2015) the past and future can be crucial ethico-political practices for undoing regimes of power, while acknowledging that it is not a neutral practice. For example,

10 I have written about this project elsewhere that takes up speculative thought and speculative fiction in more detail in conversation with Black and Indigenous thinkers (Truman, 2019).

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mainstream speculative thought frequently functions within a Western progress model that perpetuates linear versions of time and universalized futures that continue to abstract the material and situated conditions of race (Nyawalo, 2016). Eugenics is built on speculation: a worlding practice toward a ‘whiter’ more ‘able’ future, so it’s important to recognize that speculative thought is not necessarily inherently social justice oriented but rather a tool that needs to be wielded with responsibility and care. After the students read their speculative cities to each other and discussed their own writing practices, and the potential and pitfalls of speculation, they posted on telephone poles for other people to read. This was a way of ‘publishing’ their writings and answering back to the ‘real’ city and its inhabitants as affirmations (or refusals) of different futures.

Linking speculative writing with research methods In my recent work with Elizabeth de Freitas, we’ve written about speculative fiction can be used to think about contemporary issues in science education and social science inquiry (de Freitas & Truman, 2020b, 2020a). In that spirit, I will end this chapter by thinking about speculative fiction in relation to research methods, drawing on Calvino’s speculative-temporal-topias in Invisible Cities. As I walked and read Calvino’s stories with the students, and then walked and speculated on the city of Cardiff with the students’ own writings, two of Calvino’s speculative cities drew my attention as ways of thinking about research methods. Although it’s not the focus of this book to go into detailed analysis of Invisible Cities, this is a book on ‘methods,’ so I will briefly highlight how one city in the book evokes the relation between movement-thought and representation, while another depicts the fallibility of calculations: both areas of interest to someone writing up research. First there’s Valdrada—the city above a lake where all actions are mirrored simultaneously to the occupants. However, these actions don’t matter as much as the images which possess a ‘special dignity’ and the awareness of the images prevents the city’s inhabitants from ‘succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness.’ The description sounds like representation working seamlessly with the event: except it’s backwards and slightly out of sync as all actions are in a mirror. Reading about Valdrada makes me feel like I’m in a hall of mirrors where events are represented immediately, yet also feel infinitely deferred and remind me of the difficulty of attempting to conduct a research event while ‘documenting’ it. Also, Perinthia—the city built by astronomers to reveal the order of the gods on earth and the harmony of the firmament. But which after several generations Perinthia is peopled with all unpredicted inhabitants including children with multiple heads. The astronomers who calculated the city are now faced with a difficult choice: they must admit that their calculations were wrong or recognize that the order of the gods is “reflected exactly in the city of monsters” (and that

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they are ableist jerks). Or third, their calculations may have been right, and the order of the gods is reflected as they predicted: but they need to reconfigure their thinking to understand what has emerged. Perinthia can be seen as an allegory for how unpredictable the gods can be, but it also makes me consider how research projects work: does a research project begin with assertions toward a specific outcome? What happens when the outcome doesn’t fit the initial predictions? Research-creation as a way of thinking further, making problems and being uncertain might help the astronomers of Perinthia reorient their approach. I hope that in the future I can continue to work with (speculative) fiction’s indeterminacy, and the transcorporeal relations between bodies, movement, places, words, and thought as part of my research in the social sciences.

References Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isr123. Aoki, T. T., Pinar, W. F., & Irwin, R. L. (2005). Curriculum in a new key : The collected works of Ted T. Aoki. Mahwa, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. Apple, M. W. (1995). Education and power. (2nd ed.) London: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or, what it’s like to be a thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bourdieu, P. (2006). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In Inequality: classic readings in Race, class, & gender (pp. 257–271). London: Taylor & Francis. Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America : Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. New York: Basic Books. Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible cities. London, UK: Vintage. Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Irvine: University of California Press. Colebrook, C. (2014). Socially invaded: The biosocial subject. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32, 556–570. doi: https://doi.org/10.1068/d3203rev. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020a). New empiricisms in the anthropocene: Thinking with speculative fiction about science and social inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420943643. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020b). Science fiction and science dis/trust: Thinking with Bruno Latour’s Gaia and Liu Cixin’s the three-body problem. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, (36). doi: https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/036.e02. Delany, S. (2009). The jewel-hinged jaw: Notes on the language of science fiction. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx : The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. London: Routledge. Dewey, J. (1963). Experience and education. New York: Collier. Freeman, E. (2010). Time binds : Queer temporalities, Queer histories. Durham: Duke University Press. Greenwood, D., & Smith, G. A. (2014). Place-based education in the global age : Local diversity. Psychology Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York, NY: Routledge. Heddon, D., & Turner, C. (2010). Walking women: Interviews with artists on the move. Performance Research. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2010.539873. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Imarisha, W. (2015). Introduction. In W. Imarisha, & A. M. Brown (Eds.), Octavia’s Brood: Octavia’s Brood: Science fiction stories from social justice movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Ingold, T. (2007). Lines : A brief history. London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (2007). Archeologies of the future: A desire called utopia and other science fictions. London, UK: Verso. Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York, NY: NYU Press. Knight, L. (2019). Inefficient mapping: The ethical wayfinding potential of drawing while walking. Journal of Public Pedagogies. doi: https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1192. Knight, L. (2021). Inefficient mapping: A protocol for attuning to phenomena. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books. Latour, B. (1999). Pandora’s hope : Essays on the reality of science studies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: SAGE Publications. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. McKittrick, K. (Ed). (2015). Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McRuer, R. (2018). Crip times: Disability, globalization, and resistance. New York: NYU Press. Ng, R. (2012). Decolonizing teaching and learning: Toward an integrative approach. In Valences of interdisciplinarity : Theory, practice, pedagogy (pp. 250–266). Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press. Nyawalo, M. (2016). Afro-futurism and the aesthetics of hope in Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and Kahiu’s Pumzi. Journal of the African Literature Association, 10(2), 209–221. Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: Social semiotics and the phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 261–272. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835. Pink, S. (2012). Situating everyday life: Practices and places. Situating Everyday Life: Practices and Places. doi: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250679 Pink, S., Hubbard, P., Maggie, O., & Radley, A. (2010). Walking across disciplines: From ethnography to arts practice. Visual Studies, 25(1), 1–7. doi: https://doi. org/10.1080/14725861003606670. Richardson, T. (2014, January). Schizocartography of the University of Leeds: Cognitively mapping the campus. Disclosure. Committee on Social Theory. Rose, M. (2014). Confessions of an Anarcho-Flaneuse of psychogography the Mancunian Way. In T. Richardson (Ed.), Walking inside Out: Contemporary British psychogeography (pp. 147–162). London, UK: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan Press. Somerville, M. (2013). Place, storylines and the social practices of literacy. Literacy, 47, 10. Springgay, S. (2008). Body knowledge and curriculum: Pedagogies of touch in youth and visual culture. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. London, UK: Routledge. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019a). Counterfuturisms and speculative temporalities: Walking research-creation in school. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2019.1597210 Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2019b). Walking in/as publics: Editors introduction. Journal of Public Pedagogies, (4), 1–12. Stephens, L., Ruddick, S., & McKeever, P. (2015). Disability and Deleuze: An exploration of becoming and embodiment in children’s everyday environments. Body & Society. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X14541155. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067. Trifonas, P. (2000). Jacques Derrida as a philosopher of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 32(3). Truman, S. E. (2019). SF! Haraway’s situated feminisms and speculative fabulations in English class. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11217-018-9632-5. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research : Theory, methodology, and methods. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Tuck, E., McKenzie, M., & McCoy, K. (2014). Land education: Indigenous, post-colonial, and decolonizing perspective on place and environmental education research. Environmental Education Research. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2013.87770 8. Weiss, G. (1999). Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. New York, NY: Routledge. Wong, A. (2020). The last disabled oracle. Retrieved August 15, 2020, from https://bleedonline.net/program/assembly-for-the-future/the-last-disabled-oracle/

Permissions Part of Chapter 4 was previously published as Truman, S.E. (2019). SF! Haraway’s Situated Feminisms and Speculative Fabulations in English Class. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38(1), 31-42. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9632-5 Reprinted with permission from Springer Nature.

5 POSTCARDS FROM STRANGERS Queer-non-arrivals on a long-distance walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way

 inhole photograph in Lindisfarne. The pinhole photograph shows the shadowy P image of me standing in front of a shadowy cross. Photo by Sarah E. Truman.

In summer 2015, I traveled along St. Cuthbert’s Way on a research-creation project I called ‘Postcards from Strangers: Queer the Long Walk’.1 I drew on the tradition of Letterboxing from 19th-century England as an inspiration for how 1 My co-traveler, David Ben Shannon (Shanny as he’s referred to in the postcards) and I also composed songs as we walked—recording found sounds, melodies we came up with, rhythms brought on by movement, and lyrics: some of which feature on the post cards. Each night as we drank ale in pubs we would pour over our notes, recordings, and the lyrics I’d written and transpose them into a recording program. I discuss our ongoing research-creation project in the next Interstice. For the purposes of this chapter, I’m mostly focusing on the framing of the postcard project.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-6

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I might document and engage with research-creation on the walk. Letterboxing was a precursor to geocaching and originally took the form of people leaving postcards, addressed to oneself in hidden places on specific walks in Dartmoor. Strangers who found the postcards would hopefully post them back to the people who wrote them and left them in hidden places under rocks or within tree trunks, hence the name Letterboxing. I modified the tradition of Letterboxing in two ways during my walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way.2 This chapter focuses on one modification of the project which was to pen 30 postcards (displayed throughout this chapter) to myself during the walk as an in situ investigation into how walking long distances relates to my own ideation process. As an enabling constraint, I limited my writing for each postcard to one side of the card. And for the picture side of my postcard, I  took photographs using a makeshift pinhole aperture on my DSLR of 30 spots along the walk. I didn’t hide the postcards for others to find as people did in the historical Letterboxing tradition. Firstly, because I didn’t have access to a printer to print off the photo side of the postcard; secondly, I didn’t want to pay for postage and then have them get lost; and thirdly, I realized after I’d written the first few that I had forgotten to leave room for my address on them! In that regard, the ‘postcards’ were created during the walk but assembled in a different time/space (similar to Derrida’s postcards in his book, The Post Card). The words and images offer queer temporal versions of the landscape, my own thoughts about encounters along the way, and discuss some ethico-political concerns that emerged during the walk. 3 This chapter contextualizes the project and thinks with a few concerns that emerged regarding theory, method, and postcarding. St. Cuthbert’s Way is a recently designated footpath (in 1997), although it was created along a route that has been used in part as a Christian pilgrimage site for over 1000 years. St. Cuthbert’s Way is not as well-known as the Camino or other pilgrims’ paths through mainland Europe. However, several people who discovered the postcards I left on posts did respond that the significance of the path as a pilgrimage route affected their walk. I did not choose St. Cuthbert’s for

2 The other modification of Letterboxing I enacted was pinning 30 blank postcards, postage-paid, and addressed to myself on wooden posts along the trail in plastic. I left a note inside, requesting those strangers who found the postcards to write to me and tell me about an event on their own walk along the trail, and then post the postcards to my letterbox (13 were returned but they are not the focus of this chapter). Incidentally when choosing the stamps for this project, I was excited to find 150th-anniversary stamps from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Pinning postcards to poles with little images of Alice, the Mad Hatter, and Cheshire Cat pleased me in an intertextual, nonsensical, affective way by the strange public it formed. As all stamps in the UK, the queen’s silhouette lurks in the corner, while her Machin series head is the main subject of the other stamps on the postcard. The common reading of Carroll’s work now is that it predicted our postmodern era (of non-sense and paradox). The images add another intertextual layer to the notion of queering walking, writing, and posting. 3 Many events and impressions that emerged during the walk and are articulated or hinted at in the postcards also feature in songs that I co-composed along the walk (discussed in following Interstice).

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its religious affiliation. I chose it because it’s near Durham, where my Northern Irish Catholic family migrated to and where my mother was born, and on the border of Scotland and England, the two countries my father’s family is from. I knew my Catholic grandmother might have liked and possibly also been miffed that I was walking along a footpath affiliated with St. Cuthbert. Although St. Cuthbert was from the Celtic tradition (and consequently predates the division of Catholics and the Church of England by 800 years or so), he is now considered the Patron Saint of Northern England and is Anglican. My grandmother would not have liked the notion of queering any kind of path. On my website (http://sarahetruman.com/postcards-from-strangers/) the 30 postcards (narrative side and pinhole side are displayed as well as ALT text for readers). Here only the words are represented due to illustration limits. Please read them: they are an important aspect of the research-creation project. This chapter is me contextualizing the project and thinking further with it.

Epistolary ontologies The guardians of tradition, the professors academics, and librarians, the doctors, and authors of these are terribly curious about correspondences (what else can one be curious about at bottom?), about p.c., private or public correspondences … curious about texts addressed, destined, dedicated by a determinable signer to a particular receiver (Derrida, 1987, p. 62). In The Post Card (1987), Derrida states: “a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity to not arrive torments it with an internal drifting” (p. 489). Derrida discusses the ongoing and inherent divisibility of a letter and consequently its signifiers, addressee, and author, all of whom undergo divisibility between the moment of inscription and (non)arrival. I’ve always been inspired by Derrida’s writing style in The Post Card, and the content of his writing about postcards. I borrowed both as propositions for the research-creation project in that I enacted the epistolary genre (through postcard writing), as well as drawing on his theorization of a postcard ontology around sending and receiving letters. Derrida’s ontology is not an ontology of fixed identities (sender/author) and (receiver/reader) but an ontology in movement; he writes that the post card is “lost for the addressee at the very second when it is inscribed, its destination is immediately multiple, anonymous …” (Derrida, 1987, p. 79). Here is the dilemma: no form of communication can be received unless it has been sent, thus all communication is perpetually sent, but meaning might never arrive. Of course, Derrida pushes this even further to argue that it’s not only the ‘sender’ who is not fixed, but even the ‘receiver’ of a communication

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who might always, by chance, not “arrive” (Derrida, 1987, p. 191). This is similar to how Barad (2015) discusses lightening as a queer communication system in that through non-local relating there’s no ‘sender’ or ‘recipient’ until after the transmission has already occurred. Derrida’s The Post Card plays with two systems—within the law (where things are delivered) and in fugitive spaces (where messages circulate beyond control). As Norris (1987) notes, for Derrida, “something must always escape in the reading of a text, no matter how subtle or resourceful that reading” (p. 116). Derrida’s epistolary writings touch on questions of intimacy and strangeness, closeness and distance, situatedness and transience, and the potential of non-arrival in all forms of communication. The radical openness of Derrida’s conceptualization of futurity enacted through his texts catalyzes my thinking on how chance works as a differential in the forming of publics, and the emergent pedagogies that such thinking allows for. The possibility of an always-arriving (non-arrival) necessitates for me a speculative openness to “say yes to who or what turns up without any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification … ” (Derrida, 2000, p. 77). This plays into Derrida’s notion of hospitality and the strange stranger arrivant—the idea of being open to what emerges—which I see linked to an ethico-political (in)tension (Springgay & Truman, 2018) to affirm (or refuse) what does arrive during research and relates back to my theorization of research-creation in Chapter 1. Derrida (2000) outlines the Law of Hospitality as an unconditional welcome of strangers’ arrival: Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female (Derrida, 2000, p. 77, italic in original). For Derrida, the Law of Hospitality is different than the ‘laws’ of hospitality. Because laws (lower case) are determined by social groups, governments based on what is acceptable to accept. And such laws will necessarily limit the Law of Hospitality. I had thought of this when considering saying ‘yes’ to whatever appeared on the walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way. But following the Law of Hospitality, would mean not only accepting pleasant or even challenging ‘strangers’ that work toward a better world—following the Law of Hospitality would mean saying yes to everything (and who wants to do that? Isn’t that what the donkey does in Zarathustra?). An affirmation to say ‘yes’ before determination, anticipation, or identification acknowledges that we can’t know before arrival, but we can be ethico-politically attuned to what does arrive and act from there. I hold Derrida’s notion of hospitality in tension with the theory of non-arrival (how could we be hospitable if there’s no sender or receiver, no

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pre-existing subject to arrive?) and in conjunction with the commitment to critically engage with whatever does arrive. And a hearty respect for refusal and saying no, or affirmatively refusing (Simpson, 2014; Simpson, 2017). When planning the postcard project, along with thinking with Derrida, and inspired by Barad’s discussion of lightening’s queer temporalities of communication, I turned to queer theory to consider how it might help me think otherwise about strange but intimate (non)arrivals that might emerge during the project, and how I would respond to them.

Queer We can understand queerness itself as being filled with the intention to be lost. Queerness is illegible and therefore lost in relation to the straight minds’ mapping of space. (Muñoz, 2009, p. 72) Queer theory is often used to describe practices and theories that unsettle norms, and to call attention to how sexuality, gender, and race are produced and regulated through Eurowestern humanism’s whiteness, heteronormativity, ableism, and temporal logics. The idea of the perpetually sent, never arriving postcard occupies a queer time-space. Morton (2010) speculates how a queer approach to ecology could adopt the notion of the ‘strange stranger,’ which is Morton’s translation of Derrida’s arrivant. He writes: “[t]o us other life-forms are strangers whose strangeness is irreducible: arrivants, whose arrival cannot be predicted or accounted for” but with whom we are queerly intimate both now and in futurity (p. 277, italics in original). This queer (strange) intimacy evokes the paradoxical auto-antonym of the inhuman that Jeffrey Cohen (2015) calls an “estranged interiority” (p. 10) where ‘in,’ in the inhuman can operate as both as negative prefix (presuming difference from the human) while simultaneously also describe being within or of the human (as an intimacy). Morton’s queer ecology postulates how evolution occurs through entering into intimate relations with ‘strangers’ in order to undergo a transformation and become something new (and of course the identity that enters the strange relations is not fixed). This intimacy with strangers reminds me of speculative fiction author Octavia Butler’s (2000) Oankali—an alien species that create offspring through genetically bonding to another species (and transforming both the other species, and themselves). Many qualitative researchers in the social sciences and humanities take up the word queer to describe letting go of traditional research boundaries such as data and theory, or researcher/researched, and utilize ‘queer’ as methodology. However, many queer scholars have argued for the need to account for “located histories of precarity” (Luciano & Chen, 2015, p. 94) and the lived reality of people who don’t enjoy the benefit of being opportunely queer (Truman & Shannon, 2018;

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Truman & Springgay, 2019).4 For example, Sandilands and Erickson (2010) argue that there’s a “strong relationship between the oppression of queers and the domination of nature” (p. 29). And such a statement can also be applied to the relationship between the domination of nature and people of colour through ongoing colonization that queer theory does not always address.5 Importantly, Muñoz (2010) calls attention to whiteness in queer research where “‘[q]ueer’ sensibilities are theorized and understood through lenses that are largely academic, western, white, and privileged” (p. 57). As such, theorists have argued against homonormativity where affluent, white (usually cis-gay-men) are in the foreground as the ideal queers, while poor queers, trans, racialized, or disabled queers become marginalized (Puar, 2007). In this regard queerness (or the ability to be publicly queer) is linked to social capital, masculinity, colour, and class (liberal humanism) where the ability to queer and access to is contingent on “regimes of mobility” (Puar, 2007, p. 22). If cosmopolitan, western educated, liberal queer subjects ‘pass’ as acceptable, while racialized or disabled people do not—queerness is not finished. It can’t be finished. Muñoz (2009) states, that queerness is what “lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing,” as such, queerness operates speculatively, in the “insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (p. 1). For Muñoz (2009) “we are not yet queer,” (p. 1) queerness has not yet arrived and similar to Derrida’s postcard ontology, perhaps never can arrive, or will arrive queerly.

4 There’s been ongoing discussions about whether the term queer should only be used by people who occupy a queer subject position or as Sedgwick (1993) ponders ‘that what it takes–all it takes–to make the description “queer” a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person’ (p. 8). Conversely, Edelman (2004) argues that queerness cannot define an identity but only disturb one. For Halberstam (2005) self-identification as ‘queer’ has a place in queer theory, but thinking beyond subject identification and with a queer relationality opens up new possibilities for understanding space and time beyond ‘opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction…according to other logics of location, movement, and identification’ (p. 1). Understanding queer as non-normative logic of space-time, Halberstam outlines ‘queer time’ as time outside normative temporal frames of inheritance and reproduction, and ‘queer space’ as new understandings of space enabled by the ‘production of queer counter- publics’ (p. 6). For this postcard project, and the following project discussed in the next interstice, and my ongoing work with WalkingLab and Oblique Curiosities, I invoke queerness as a way of thinking obliquely and unsettling norms (but it is also mobilized as a self-identification). 5 This is very relevant to the postcard project and the following music project in that Shanny and I, while thinking with queer theory throughout our walk, were very much aware that we ‘passed’ in the English countryside through a whiteness that made our queerness moot. This was likely in part because we were read as a cis-hetero couple and were in motion, not stopping long in towns: our experiences in the countryside may be different if we lived there but our whiteness (and speaking English and being able bodied) definitely ‘passed’ while passing through.

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The structure of a postcard Along with theorizing epistles, Derrida also performs the epistolary genre in the Envios chapter of his book The Post Card (1987). Envios is printed as a series of snippets, dated as if transcribed from previous postcards, and addressed to a singular ‘you,’ presumably a lover who is never identified, or perhaps to Derrida himself. Postcards apostrophize; they speak to someone. To you, but this is an indeterminate you—or an indeterminate me (I addressed mine ‘Dear Me’ as both an exclamation, and as a greeting to my future self ). And although a postcard is a seemingly private message addressed to someone particular, the structure of a postcard (without an envelope) and how it circulates, makes it a ‘public’ document—the postal workers, and any number of other people may sneak a peek at the message. In Derrida’s case, in Envois, the postcards have now been ‘republished’ in book form, similar to this book, or my postcards being uploaded onto my website. But this new format continues to leave the author of a note open to being read, and (mis)understood by readers—the author’s meaning does not necessarily arrive. And Derrida’s own writing in Envios enacts this non-arrival with lacuna both in and between the letters. On the picture side of the postcards that Derrida supposedly wrote on initially (before they are reproduced in book form and consequently no longer postcards) are identical versions of an image of Plato and Socrates that Derrida claims to have discovered at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.6 But this is likely just another element in the structure of the epistolary genre he’s emulating. As a reader, I am never sure if Derrida actually did find any postcards at Bodleian and purchased the lot, or whether he pretends to have the postcards in recreating them in book form. I’m also uncertain if “Derrida” is even the author of the postcards; he signs his initials at the end of only the first postcard and then in a footnote states he does not blame the reader for not trusting the initials! McQuillan (1999) argues that we should read Derrida’s Envois as if they were a ‘short story,’ or fiction. And perhaps all writing is: something to remember when writing up research. All of these nebulous variables inherent in the epistolary structure of Derrida’s text bring up questions of how writing works, questions of deferral and delay

6 When studying the image on the back of his postcards of Socrates and Plato in The Post Card (1987) Derrida questions, whether average people realize how Plato and Socrates have ‘invaded our most private domesticity, mixing themselves up in everything, taking their part of everything, and making us attend for centuries their colossal and indefatigable anaparalyses?’ (p. 18). He speculates on what’s happening in the image—Plato stands behind Socrates, perhaps with an erection directing him, causing him to write! Derrida then makes a striking statement regarding Plato’s and Socrates’ relationship. Historically it’s been thought that Socrates didn’t write, that Plato did, as Socrates’ student. Socrates, as Plato’s teacher preceded him, but Derrida inverts this by stating, “Socrates comes before Plato, there is between them – and in general – an order of generations, an irreversible sequence of inheritance. Socrates is before, both in front of, but before Plato, therefore behind him” (p. 20). Plato didn’t merely write Socrates’ dictations for him, he is post-Socrates! There’s many ‘posts’ in The Post Card. Notably, Derrida does call the picture the ‘back’ of the postcard (p. 45).

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of an author’s thoughts, questions concerning how the addressee of a piece of writing affects its meaning, and questions of public-private forms of writing that postcards necessarily balance. The content of Envois also demonstrates the practice of writing whilst travelling, as Derrida (or the narrator of the letters) describes his own travels in the postcards—everything about the postcard practice is in motion. However, this is not a movement that is fixed or linear between two pre-existing subjects.

Thinking with the postcards I wrote The research-creation event was co-composed through walking to exhaustion, inscribing postcards, leaving postcards on poles, taking pinhole shots, pausing in different ecosystems, and getting lost (quite a few times) and having fights with my friend Shanny. The size of a postcard is of course an enabling constraint about how much writing I could put on each: they vary from around 80–120 words as was the proposition to attune to absence and presence, and more-than-represent the affective encounters of the walk. In looking at the postcards now, they remind me of Certeau’s (1984) uptake of synecdoche and asyndeton as stylistic features of written texts. Synecdoche is the act of using a word or phrase that refers to part of something rather than a whole such as saying, ‘I have wheels’ to mean that ‘I have a car.’ Asyndeton is the elision of conjunctions or other linking words in a sentence such as saying, ‘she lived a brief, cruel, mean life.’ Certeau’s pedestrian rhetoric uses both elements. While synecdoche expands conceptualizations of space to show how a piece of something refers to a more-than (a tuft of heather refers to the moor), asyndeton elides and creates gaps where “every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot” (Certeau, 1984, p. 101). Postcards operate with synecdoche and asyndeton: affective punctures along St. Cuthbert’s linked together in gaps.

Regarding pinholes photographs on the postcards Because they typically require long exposure times, pinhole cameras are usually mounted in one place for the duration of the shot. Moving the camera during the exposure time can produce ghostly gestures, a palpable effect of rhythm and light. Pinhole photography is not a likely candidate to take on a long walk unless you have breaks to stand around waiting for the long exposures. The pinhole cameras I normally use are built out of a shoebox or coffee tins, where the image is burned into photopaper and needs to be developed. Not practical on a long walk. On the long walk I brought my DSLR, and a pinhole ‘lens’ that mounts onto the camera (although pinholes are actually lens-less) and took pinhole photos and videos of the landscape and then later took pinhole photos of my pinhole photos and videos on my laptop. The pinhole lens that mounts on my camera is not as small as a regular pinhole, so doesn’t require terribly long exposure times but still produces ghostly, restless images that remind

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126  Postcards from strangers

me of palimpsests of the landscape(s) (although not nearly as crisp as a proper pinhole due to the size of its aperture). Wearing or holding the camera as I walked, the walking pinhole images disorient perceptions of space and time. As Ahmed (2006) states, “[m]oments of disorientation are vital” (p. 157). For Ahmed, queer politics might require disorientation in order to become re-orientated toward new potentialities, which is similar to Munoz’s argument for queerness as imbued with the “intention to be lost” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 72). The images, which undulate and animate assemblages of human and non-human encounters do not represent the walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way but incite new modes of thought and different practices of relating and disorientation. As a method, the pinholes set the event of thinking-making-doing in motion. They are a thinking-with practice: a way of performing method as an affective, relational ecology.

Landscapes of absence and presence “Whiteness became established as a right to geography, to take place, to traverse the globe and to extract from cultural corporeal and material registers” (Yusoff, 2018, p. 69, italics in original). Land and landscape are concepts often entwined in walking literature and the act of walking. Britain’s walking heritage is rich and includes many ancient trackways, green lanes, and footpaths, such as the Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester and Canterbury that walkers and pilgrims continue to use. There’s a preponderance of literature about walking in the UK: including books and articles about actual walks, the lost art of walking, and literature that features characters walking in the landscape or through cities. According to Wylie (2005) a walk in the English countryside “involves at least some attunement with the various sensibilities still distilling from sublime and romantic figurations of the self, travel, landscape and nature” (p. 235). These romantic geographies are re-affirmed in much contemporary walking literature, through many of the postcards that strangers penned to me about their walks, and through poems of the UK’s ‘great poets’ that remain part of the canon. As a British-Canadian with a background in English literature, most trips I take into the British countryside are layered with memories of literature I’ve read as if the landscapes themselves are co-extensive and have evolved with the literature rather than preceding it. I pass a sign to Canterbury and I think of The Canterbury Tales and Bath’s wife pausing on her travels and spinning stories in a country Inn; I drive on the motorway and see a sign to Tintern Abbey, and I think of waters rolling from their mountain springs and seclusion; and at the mention of Derbyshire, I envision the character Elizabeth Bennet gazing across the lofty Peak District. This material entanglement of words, bodies, and vistas affects the land and landscape (and notably, two, if not all three of those pieces of writing are fictions!) I have similar experiences in cities with regard to pop bands and literature. As demonstrated in the postcards I wrote, learning

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that Virginia and Leonard Woolf stayed in Wooler, a town along St. Cuthbert’s Way, somehow made the place seem welcoming. This affinity between narrative, literary figures, and land allows for a relational landscape entwined in stories to appear pre-given. And without an understanding of how imperial power relations pervade the English canon, the assumed social, cultural, sexual (hetero), and racial attunement (whiteness) of literature can also appear co-extensive with the landscape. Semiotic-material-ecological entanglements: Britain’s romantic literary identity helps produce contemporary nationalist and preservationist logics. Williams (1975) critiques the propensity of books about the countryside to bemoan the loss of rural life and its concomitant culture. One of which Williams quotes (but doesn’t add a reference for) says, “A way of life that has come down to us from the days of Virgil has suddenly ended” (as cited in Williams, p. 18). Such a sentiment is frighteningly reminiscent of slogans from current nationalist movements around the world: the sentiment that the ‘good old days’ are gone (not that contemporary nationalists would cite Virgil). It becomes apparent that something as quotidian as walking in rural settings can lend itself to nationalist sentiments. A day-walker we met in Wooler, who had recently moved to the area, reported (unprompted!) to Shanny how pleased she was that there are no people of colour or immigrants in her new town. What made her think she could say that to him? In the English countryside, white bodies are what Ahmed (2006) calls “somatic norms,” and Shanny’s form was read as ‘normal’ by that woman even though he was not from her town (p. 133). Pointedly, ‘queer’ as a subject marker did not queer the pervasive shadow of whiteness. Knowles (2008) discusses how whiteness is produced and flourishes in rural Britain and bolstered by histories (and the ongoing presence) of colonialism and slavery. For Knowles, the British “countryside stands for more than it is: it produces, embodies and sustains whiteness on behalf of the nation” and maintains a position as the core of British identity (p. 170). Rural settings must not be seen as superficial backdrops but rather material-relational-agents in the proliferation of whiteness and ‘Britishness.’ It’s important to remember how the depredations of other lands, genocide, and slavery were key practices in generating the money that boosted Great Britain to become ‘great’ leading up to and through the industrial revolution. Many of the great estates that were built in the 17th and 18th centuries and their surrounding towns were funded through the profits of slavery abroad. Yet, the ancestors of those who were enslaved or had their land stolen abroad are made unwelcome when they arrive in rural landscapes; these are points that the romantic poets, artists, and endurance walkers omit when describing the sublime beauty of the British countryside. There have been artistic interventions and critiques into the whiteness of the British landscape, including Ingrid Pollard, a Black British photographer (1988) who created a series of photographs of people of colour in rural settings entitled Pastoral Interlude. The photographs disrupt common-sense ideas of rural/city

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landscape binaries, by placing racialized bodies in pastoral scenery. Inscribed beneath the photographs are phrases that articulate the reality of Britain’s imperial history, and the affective experiences of racialized people out for a stroll in the countryside. Beneath one photograph of a Black woman sitting in the Lake District are these words: “I thought I liked the Lake District; where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread” (np). Wandered lonely as a cloud is Wordsworth’s poem, also known as Daffodils, but the person in Pollard’s photograph does not wander in the Lake District whimsically as Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy encountering a host of daffodils 200 years ago; instead, she feels dread. While another, featuring a Black man in a country stream holding a net, states “a lot of what MADE ENGLAND GREAT is founded on the blood of slavery.” The colonial history of Britain is very present in the present. Pollard also designed postcards that were presented as a series of billboards entitled Wordsworth’s Heritage (1998). Describing the project, Pollard discusses how she’s visited the Lake District many times throughout the years, “deliberately searching out England’s timeworn countryside the way it’s always been” and how she would look through postcard stands in search of one that shows a “sunny upland scene with a black person standing, looking over the hills” and how she fantasizes about finding it (cited in Finney, 2014, p. 44). One of her postcards features a drawing of Wordsworth and four pictures of a Black group of walkers pondering “matters of History and Heritage.” 7 According to Derrida inheritance and responsibility are inextricably (and aporetically) linked: The concept of responsibility has no sense at all outside of an experience of inheritance. Even before saying that one is responsible for a particular inheritance, it is necessary to know that responsibility in general (‘answering for,’ ‘answering to,’ ‘answering in one’s name’) is first assigned to us, and that it is assigned to us through and through, as an inheritance (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2004, p. 5). This tension between inheritance and responsibility is aporetic, in that we cannot choose what we’ve inherited, yet are deemed subjectively responsible for it as if we can stand outside of inheritance, critique it, and then assume responsibility for what we’ve inherited. Derrida posits an interesting way out of this dilemma by invoking “finitude” (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2004, p. 5). Only something finite inherits what is “larger and older and more powerful and more durable” than

7 For further investigations of race in different landscapes, look up Canadian academic Jacqueline Scott’s Black Outdoors: https://blackoutdoors.wordpress.com/about/ and the US project, The Black Outdoors: https://www.theblackoutdoors.com/aboutus.

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itself however that same finitude “obliges one to choose, to prefer, to sacrifice, to exclude, to let go and leave behind” (Derrida & Roudinesco, 2004, p. 5). In that regard, there is something unique in finitude and in the finite actions we make within inherited contexts that have the power to modify both the inheritance and the future. This finite situatedness is similar to Haraway’s (1991) paradoxical situated knowledges of feminist objectivity, where instead of standing outside of an event objectively assessing it, understanding comes from within the inherited context. Consequently, it also engenders response(ability) and affirmation for the future while understanding that such a position is not fixed. The British landscape is heavy with colonial histories (and futures). And as this project materially demonstrates also entangled transcorporeally with a politics of place in Canada. I walked in the British countryside, and penned postcards to myself to read once I returned to Canada, and asked strangers to also post postcards from the United Kingdom, back to Canada. But, as Simpson (2014) articulates, all Canadian cities exist on Indigenous lands, and “Indigenous presence is attacked in all geographies” (p. 23). The violence of settler colonialism is not contained in the arrival of settlers but continues through occupation (and the arrival of my seemingly benign postcards). The Postcards from Strangers project highlighted how novel reverberations, oblique movements, snippets, and vignettes of thought-in-movement, in conjunction with walking and land, allow different ethico-political concerns to arise. The whole entangled process allowed me to think of research as a strange ecology. This ecology as a tangled association of humans, non-humans and movement that demonstrates a move away from the nature/culture binary. Extending from this, the multiple variants, humans, texts, weather patterns, and the postal system operate as active ‘participants’ in the emergent public and emergent pedagogy of this project. For example, I left one of the postcards on a post in the middle of the causeway, about a mile offshore, at low tide. I crossed this stretch of water at low tide, but as the water levels shifted and changed, the water itself became entangled in a pedagogy of non-arrival, and strange arrivals. And all of the postcards I wrote to myself were all nearly lost when Shanny and I left my bag in the train station in Durham (we had been taking turns carrying it because both of our things were in the one bag). We were already boarding the train when we realized that neither of us had the bag (and of course had walked to the very end of the platform before realizing this). I ran back into the station (which we had been sitting in for over an hour). Shanny held the train doors open. We were reprimanded by the conductor, but I got back on board in time! The (non)arrival of the postcards at my home in Canada brought up considerations of settler colonialism, as did thoughts I had whilst walking past Cessford Castle. These atemporal ecologies of movement and thought demonstrate how seemingly unconnected events and places relationally affect each other. Thoughts are material. Relations are material. There’s a relational, lively ecology across all matter.

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134  Postcards from strangers

Pedagogy also occurs across relational networks. Rather than viewing pedagogy as an intentional engagement based on a pre-existing set of known agents, the Postcards from Strangers project exemplifies how ethico-political concerns arise during interactions rather than pre-existing them, as well as troubling the notion of self-contained and intentioned senders and receivers. The project has pushed me, as a researcher to think about how I receive texts, how I read, what I am open to, or hospitable toward, and what I affirm—even if it was ‘I’ who penned the original postcard. Further to this, the recognition of emergence, deferral, and non-arrival challenges my long-standing notions of epistemology. In preoccupation with an author’s (stranger’s) thoughts being ‘sent’ to a reader (me), I could presume that ‘knowledge’ or ‘knowing’ pre-exists being written or spoken as if it is something an author possesses and then dispenses through writing to the reader—or by ‘me’ speaking to ‘you.’ However, if the subject is not fixed and predetermined, I cannot then presume that fixity should be required for ‘knowledge’ to occur: knowledge is also emergent in an encounter rather than pre-existing it and emanating from a particular source. Perhaps knowledge, like being, is dynamic, unfinished. In that case, the writing subject (author) does not ‘possess’ knowledge that they inscribe through writing (or speaking) for others to gobble up: knowing emerges through relation.

References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology : Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities: Trans*/matter/realities and Queer political imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. doi: https://doi. org/10.1215/10642684-2843239. Butler, O. (2000). Lilith’s Brood. Grand Central Publishing. Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cohen, J. (2015). Stone: An ecology of the inhuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. doi: https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.194063 Derrida, J. (1987). The post card : From Socrates to Freud and beyond. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (2000). Of hospitality. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Derrida, J., & Roudinesco, E. (2004). For what tomorrow : A dialogue. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. London. New York: New York University Press.

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Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In D. Haraway (Ed.), Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 149–181). New York, NY: Routledge. Knowles, C. (2008). The landscape of post-imperial whiteness in rural Britain. Ethnic & Racial Studies, 31(1), 167–184. Retrieved from http://10.0.4.56/01419870701538992. Luciano, D., & Chen, M. Y. (2015). Has the queer ever been human? GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 183–207. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2843215. McQuillan, M. (1999). Information theory: From the postcard to the telephone book and beyond. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 13(2), 139. Retrieved from htt p://10.0.4.56/10304319909365788. Mortimer-Sandilands, C., & Erickson, B. (2010). Queer ecologies : Sex, nature, politics, desire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Morton, T. (2010). Guest column: Queer ecology. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 125(2), 273–282. doi: https://doi.org/10.1632/ pmla.2010.125.2.273. Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York, NY: NYU Press. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-6141. Muñoz, L. (2010). Brown, queer and gendered: Queering the Latina/o ‘Street-Scapes’ in Los Angeles. In K. K. Browne, & C. J. Nash (Eds.), Queer methods and methodologies: Intersecting queer theories and social science research (pp. 55–68). London, UK: Routledge. Norris, C. (1987). Derrida. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pollard, I. (1988). Pastoral Interlude. Retrieved from http://www.ingridpollard.com/ pastoral-interlude.html. Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Sedgwick, E. K. (1993). Tendencies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376781. Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan Press. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)Tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19. Truman, S. E., & Springgay, S. (2019). Queer walking tours and the affective contours of place. Cultural Geographies. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019842888. Williams, R. (1975). The country and the city. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Wylie, J. (2005). A single day’s walking: Narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast path. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 30(2), 234–247. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2005.00163.x. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

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INTERSTICE III Oblique Curiosities

As mentioned in the previous chapter, I completed another research-creation project simultaneously with the Postcards from Strangers event. Throughout the five-day trek, David Ben Shannon1 and I composed songs (or the beginnings of impressions of songs) as we walked. During the walk we scribbled lyrics, recorded found sounds, and invented rhythms and beats based on footfalls and sketched them into GarageBand (later moved over to Digital Performer). For this project, we were inspired in part by Oblique Strategies (1975) created by Brian Eno, the musician, and Peter Schmidt, the painter. Oblique Strategies are series of propositions, constraints, and activations printed on separate cards, originally printed in an edition of 500 (now available as an app). Eno and Schmidt created them to inspire questioning, rethinking, and experimentation in their creative processes. Inspired by Oblique Strategies, we came up with our own propositions (some deliberate, others that happened upon us), including: walking to exhaustion, forgetting food and water, making up nonsense words, recording footfalls, and getting lost (much of this is also recorded on the postcards I etched and are discussed in the previous chapter). The songs that we wrote evoke our experiences on the walk, and the already felts that we brought with us, but do not try to ‘represent’ the landscape. In the years since, whenever we’re on the same continent we continue to work on the songs (and they’re still not finished!). They can be accessed at: https://soundcloud.com/oblique-curiosities/sets/queer-sonic-cultures-anaffective-walking-composing-project

1 Shannon and I began working on our first songs together in 2011, but this was our first deliberate research-creation project.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-7

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The songs are an example of the ‘more-than-representational’ (Truman, 2016; Truman & Shannon, 2018) aspect of research-creation. And how the practice of creating art can as Springgay argues, instantiate theory (Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020). The songs themselves are the research-creation practice and an engagement with theory: for example, one lyric says, ‘it’s okay to say no’, which is not a direct rebuttal to Derrida’s ‘yes,’ but in conversation with it; and lyrically/musically many of the compositions engage with queer theory and affect theory. Shannon and I continue to write songs as Oblique Curiosities [www.obliquecuriosities.com] as a way of both thinking with theory and concepts, and as instantiations of theory and concepts (Shannon & Truman, 2020). Two of our new songs engage with speculative fiction as sites for luring different future-pasts. These include Alpha Centauri (ft. Kate Pahl) as celebratory anthem for a genderqueer-affirming future-past; and Cosmic Beavers (ft. Kathryn Yusoff ), which is a future-past speculative-topia where giant beavers live in a ‘time dam’ and shred Lewis and Clark (and other invaders) rather than allowing them to chart their colonial path across Turtle Island.

References Eno, B., & Schmidt, P. (1975). Oblique strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas. Shannon, D. B., & Truman, S. E. (2020). Problematizing sound methods through music research-creation: Oblique curiosities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920903224. Truman, S. E. (2016). Becoming more than it never (actually) was: Expressive writing as research-creation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 13(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.10 80/15505170.2016.1150226 Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The intimacies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. doi: https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19.

6 TWEETS & CRITIQUES FROM @POSTQUAL DIFFRACTOR BOT

This chapter focuses on the textual bodies of qualitative research, specifically the tweets generated by a Twitter bot called PostQual Diffractor Bot (with the handle @postqual). The bot’s ongoing tweets are a research-creation project I developed as both an artistic and theoretical intervention into the contemporary academic milieu in which I find myself. The bot performs a parody of our current academic concept-ecology (concept-economy) using ‘postqualitative’ sounding phrases1. This chapter begins with a brief gloss of the theoretical orientations that inform what has been called postqualitative research. I then describe the mechanics of how the bot operates. The latter half of the chapter thinks with some of the PostQual Diffractor Bot’s generated Tweets as critiques and provocations for the future of qualitative research.

‘Postqual’ Postqual refers to ‘Postqualitative,’ a term popularized by Patti Lather and Elizabeth St. Pierre (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013) in a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. The issue raised important questions about the state of feminist research in an era of “neo-positivism,” “big data,” and “metric mania,” and the scientification of qualitative research generally (p. 629). In the years since, what circulates as the nebulous body of postqualitative research methods/methodologies draws on theories that are aligned with the ‘ontological turn,’ including the new materialisms, posthumanisms, and vital materialism— many of which I draw on in my own research. In case it’s unclear, I want to

1 What better way to celebrate my parody than to write a chapter about it!

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 weets from PostQual Diffractor Bot and Sarah E. Truman. Bot’s tweet reads: T ‘Process: for a post-meaning-led conceptualization of ethico-politicality.’ Truman’s response reads: ‘Post-meaning indeed.’ Bot’s response reads ‘Onto-epistemological lines of flight into the actual: a postqualitative proposition.’

point out that I genuinely see value in the theoretical underpinnings of feminist materialisms and the desire to conduct research differently, and I’ve been arguing throughout this book for interdisciplinary research. However, I have ongoing concerns—which the bot as overt parody critiques—of how some of what circulates as postqualitative research manifests within the neoliberal concept ecology it seeks to unsettle. I am specifically satirizing postqual here because its cascading conceptual phrasings lend itself to bot generated tweets. However, the ongoing push for the new is part of the concept-economy2 that drives the academy, not just postqualitative research.

Bot background The idea behind PostQual Diffractor Bot was to take common postqual terms and ‘diffract them.’ This was a parody of the proliferating ‘postqualitative sounding’ titles, contemporary academe’s ramped up push to publish and circulate research online in an era of Altmetric calculators, for-profit multinational publishing conglomerates, and accelerating research ‘excellence’ frameworks. None  of

2 I conceive of it as a neoliberal concept-economy because of how we as academics buy into and proliferate neoliberal ideals (seemingly unknowingly) along with concepts. How this operates in the academy includes citational indexes, productivity measurements, guilt at not working constantly, the push to publish and produce, and come up with the ‘new’ and market/circulate it constantly.

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 weets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. This list of eight assembled tweets by the T bot read: ‘Floating data-assemblages in the Chthulucene: affirming minor politics,’ ‘Experiment-with attaching a Go-Pro to your grandparent: world the postqualitative turn,’ ‘Diffracting more-than-humanism in thick time: the ethico-political cleaving of the future of mobile architectures in kindergarden,’ ‘Rhizoming the future of rhizomatic research: Deleuze and the rhizome,’ ‘Mapping the conference presentation: why postqualitative research needs data haecceities,’ ‘Boil and drink your interview transcripts: queer the postqualitative turn,’ ‘Visceral methods: a landing site for affirming capitalism,’ ‘An affective sense of post-politics.’

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the bot’s outputs are meant to be titles of actual papers (although you’re welcome to use them: just be sure to cite @postqual). In fact, I added the term bot to the PostQual Diffractor’s original name on Twitter, as I was concerned that some of its followers might not understand that it was in fact a bot tweeting made up phrases rather than actual paper titles or propositions (although some of them sound like pretty good paper ideas if I’m honest). I named the bot a ‘diffractor’ because diffraction is a term that’s frequently invoked in research that calls itself postqualitative. Karen Barad’s (2007) writings have popularized the term diffraction and it has been taken up widely as a concept and method in research that calls itself ‘postqualitative,’ and other research inspired by the new materialisms. Instead of using criticism as a modus operandi in scholarship, or reflection (which only produces sameness), the idea of a diffractive reading looks “… for patterns of differences that make a difference … in the sense of being suggestive, creative and visionary” (Barad, 2007, pp. 49–50). In physics, diffraction is what happens to waves when they pass through apertures: they bend, interact with other waves, and create troughs where they cancel each other out, or peaks where they amplify each other, and this generates a diffractive pattern. The term/concept diffraction has been used to think about the material and semiotic figurations of what happens in research, and what is produced through reading differing theories/data/facts through each other. An important and politicized aspect of diffraction as a metaphor is to think about how when a diffractive pattern materializes—in bands of white and black, or absence and presence—it demonstrates what ‘matters’ in research (is present), but also probes us to consider what and who is being left out of ‘mattering’ in research (is not present).

Conditions of possibility: the mechanics of the @postqual bot The term bot is short for robot.3 A bot is a form of artificial intelligence, but it does not have the capacity to learn, it just repeats the tasks I’ve set it within certain parameters. In this case, it runs a computer script automatically once it’s set up. If you’re on Twitter and mention the @postqual bot, it will respond, but only through generating the same kind of tweets it’s already generating. The bot operates using Tracery Script, which is a story or replacement grammar in JSON ( JavaScript Object Notation) developed by Kate Compton. Writing a grammar in Tracery requires you to author a set of keys and values: a key being a symbol or word or phrase that can be replaced by other symbols or words or phrases (values).

3 Etymologically ‘robot’ comes from a Czech word for slave. I don’t particularly like the term, but it is the term used to describe the function of bots online because they do not have the capacity to act beyond instructions given to them.

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In order to make the @postqual bot sound like postqual, I had to populate my keys with postqual sounding values (i.e., terms/words). Below is an example of the key “verbing,” which I named the present participle verb form of my grammar. The key “verbing” can be replaced by many different values, for example, three from the long list include: “affecting,” “entangling,” and “montaging.” "“verbing”": [“affecting”, “entangling”, “montaging”] I also wrote keys for adjectives, nouns, etc. After writing the various keys and their interchangeable values, I arranged them in sentences that will expand to make different meanings. I’m only showing you one of the keys (the “verbing” key) so you can see how it operates. #verbing.capitalize# #subdis# data: #cpt#, #dis#, and #ism#.” Here’s an example of how it expanded and Tweeted in one instance: Montaging non-representational data: event, ethico-politicality, and new materialism. It could also have expanded as this (where “Entangling” is used instead of “Montaging.”) Entangling non-representational data: event, ethico-politicality, and new materialism. Of course, the bot doesn’t only change one of the keys, but all of them every time it generates a new tweet. Each of the various keys in that sentence have up to 20 values that can expand. So, this sentence alone has a lot of potential renderings as tweets by the @postqual bot. The bot has about 20 different sentences populated with various keys that substitute different values, tweeting once a month at this point (it used to tweet once a day but was getting on my nerves). As a research-creation project the bot performs a computational poetics: its content is imbricated with its form, and its tweets operate as an ongoing “mode of inquiry” (Manning, 2013, p. 229) that allow me to think through a phenomenon (in this case the state of the field) by producing the very thing I want to investigate.

What is the bot producing? The bot’s tweets are a conceptual cascade of proliferating postqual titles or propositions that I consider both humorous and serious. Encountering the bot’s tweets

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 weets from PostQual Diffractor Bot. The list of three assembled tweets read: T ‘Newness’ as method: postqualitative research for graduate students,’ ‘Endless propositions for data-assemblages: atmospheric data of data play through neo-liberalism,’ ‘Animacies of shredded data: against a postqualitative inquiry.’

remind me of Henri Bergson’s (1914) argument that comedy occurs through the image of “something mechanical encrusted upon the living” (np), which (let’s face it) is kind of how the academy (and art) operates: it’s hilarious and serious. In the case of the bot, the medium is partially the message. The JavaScript, and the keys and values I wrote perform sometimes sensible, other times absurd postqual phrases that operate as a humorous recursive critique of the field itself, but also reflect the ongoing deluge of data and information on academic social media in general and the reproductive speed encouraged in academe. Similar to other bots that satirize the academy, from how people engage with it on Twitter, the PostQual Diffractor Bot for the most part seems to generate laughs and hopefully critical refection.4

Ways of reading (structural bodies of the bot) The temporality of Tweets, and how most users use the Twitter platform, means that tweets arrive as single micro blogs of up to 280 characters on an individual’s timeline. When read as a list on the PostQual Diffractor Bot’s page, the tweets are a performance of mashed-up theories outputting in a decontextualized ‘data deluge’ (de Freitas, 2017) or what Alan Liu (2008) might call a ‘data pour:’ an ‘overflowing uncontainable excess’ (Liu, 2008, p. 81, as cited in

4 See Oblique Curiosities’ song Icepick in my Eye as another research-creation project that considers humour in the proliferating concept economy.

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Hayles, 2012, p. 179). The syntax holds up, but the combination of concepts teeters on the absurd in many of the tweets, particularly when read as a list. I realize that the levels of irony and satire generated by the bot’s tweet are likely commensurate to a reader’s understanding of the concepts referenced, and familiarity with ‘ontological turn’ as it is manifested in qualitative research. The bot’s tweets have a lot of intertextual (or diffractive) references. In that regard, understanding the bot’s parody requires a reader to arrive with a reading repertoire. I understand the bot’s tweets as recursionary: recursion being a procedure that turns “a text’s logic back on itself ” (Truman, 2016b, p. 111). In this case, the ‘text’ is the field of postqual. The funny thing about recursion, and parody, is that it can be productive of something more. Despite setting up the bot as parody, it has surprised me with some of the tweets it has generated. Like all satire, the tweets can be both humorous and serious simultaneously. They provoke thought about the state of the field:

 weet from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweet reads, ‘The onto-epistemological T whiteness of postqualitative research.’

Indigenous studies and Black studies scholars, while not often writing explicitly about the postqualitative turn, have consistently drawn attention to how much engagement with the foundational theories that inform postqual (i.e., posthumanism, new materialisms, and object oriented ontology) can reinscribe the white Eurowestern humanism they seek to disrupt ( Jackson, 2013; King, 2019; Tuck, 2010). Similarly, methodologists in the field of social science have also warned against the depoliticization of the new materialisms, uptakes of affect theory, the ontological turn, and postqualitative research.5 Specifically, Jessica Gerrard, Sophie Rudolph and Arathi Sriprakash (2017) have raised concerns about postqualitative research’s focus on experimentation with data artifacts— such as transcripts—rather than prioritizing participants “who gave their time, and allowed the researchers to witness, participate, and be involved in their lives” (p. 390).

5 For example: (Gerrard et al., 2017; Mayes, 2019; Nordstrom, 2021; Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi, 2019; Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2019; Springgay, 2020; Truman, 2019).

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At the center of Gerrard, Rudolph and Sriprakash’s critique is a question of power in research; they argue that the ‘postqualitative’ fixation on the form and contingency of ‘data,’ and experimental engagement with materiality, runs the risk of eclipsing matters of responsibility that researchers ought to attend to in our social-cultural milieu. For Gerrard, Rudolph and Sriprakash, responsibility remains embedded in ongoing racial, gendered, and class-based inequality and colonialism. Considering the fetishization of data and method and researcher self-reflection, they write: It is hard not to interpret this as self-reflexivity folded so tightly back onto itself that it has forgotten that there are other people involved in qualitative (post or not) research. (Gerrard, Rudolph, & Sriprakash, 2017, p. 392) On another register, Springgay and I (Springgay & Truman, 2018) have written against the instrumentalization of art practices as modes of experimenting with data, or as a methods of dissemination across postqualitative research when such practices do not consider the lineage of radical arts that have disrupted method, data, and representation for decades. In this regard, the arts are ‘pre’ qual, not ‘post’. Springgay (in Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020) has repeatedly argued that the arts instantiate theory however ‘[t]he arts are typically undervalued in the academy. And yet, they are often appropriated by researchers in order to justify or exemplify “alternative” practices of doing research’ (p. 249). The search for new methods in research (and new concepts), particularly through instrumentalizing the arts, ironically echoes modernist calls ‘to make it new’ that also align with the ideals of capitalism. Thinking with these critiques it’s clear that material experimentations in qualitative research must consider whether they’re offering something that is helpful in an anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-ableist, queer way, or, through a fetishization of doing data differently and embracing ‘the new,’ (particularly if that ‘new’ is peppering in Black and Indigenous scholarship without meaningful engagement) reinscribing neoliberal ideals of academe. My intention with the bot, and this chapter, is not to discourage researchers from engaging with the theoretical foundations that underpin the ontological or new materialist turn. Rather, I offer the bot and this chapter as a clarion call to reassess where the field is heading and reaffirm a feminist politics of engagement. As such, to close, I want to mention how some of the Tweets caused me to think beyond parody and take the bot seriously. To risk sounding like a parody of my parody, I have viewed some of the tweets as propositions of sorts. Propositions are both actual and speculative: they draw from actuality to propose what could be (Whitehead, 1978). For Whitehead, propositions link feelings to possible worlds and lure feeling. These two tweets, posted four months apart, propose radically different futures for any kind of research:

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Tweets from the PostQual Diffractor Bot. The tweets read: ‘Neoliberalist postqualitative research – a lure for feeling,’ ‘Anti-colonialist post-qualitative research – a lure for feeling.’

What possible world are we luring?

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bergson, H. (1914). Laughter: An essay on the meaning of the comic. New York, NY: Macmillan. Retrieved from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h. htm. De Freitas, E. (2017). The temporal fabric of research methods: Posthuman social science and the digital data deluge. Research in Education, 98(1), 27–43. doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/0034523717723386. Gerrard, J., Rudolph, S., & Sriprakash, A. (2017). The politics of Post-qualitative inquiry: History and power. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(5), 384–394. doi: https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800416672694. Hayles, N. K. (2012). Digital media and contemporary technogenesis. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637. Jackson, Z. I. (2013). Animal: New directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism. Feminist Studies, 39, 669. King, T. L. (2019). The Black shoals: Offshore formations of Black and native studies. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 629–633. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398 .2013.788752. Liu, A. (2008). Local Transcendence: Essays on postmodern historicism and the database. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham: Duke University Press. Mayes, E. (2019). The mis/uses of ‘voice’ in (post)qualitative research with children and young people: Histories, politics and ethics. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(10), 1191–1209. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.201 9.1659438. Nordstrom, S. (2021). I’m Nebraskan Compost, Not Posthuman. Paper presented at American Educational Research Association Conference, Florida, USA.

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Ringrose, J., Warfield, K., & Zarabadi, S. (2019). Feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education. London, UK: Routledge. Rosiek, J. L., Snyder, J., & Pratt, S. L. (2019). The new materialisms and Indigenous theories of non-human agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419830135. Springgay, S. (2020). Feltness: On how to practice intimacy. Qualitative Inquiry, Online First, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420932610. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464. Truman, S. E. (2016b). Intratextual entanglements: Emergent pedagogies and the productive potential of texts. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S. E. Truman, & Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 91–107). New York: Peter Lang. Truman, S. E. (2019). Inhuman literacies and affective refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and secondary school English. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), 110–128. doi: https:// doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465. Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The intimacies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Tuck, E. (2010). Breaking up with deleuze: Desire and valuing the irreconcilable. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 635–650. doi: https://doi. org/10.1080/09518398.2010.500633. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality, corrected edition. New York, NY: Free Press.

7 UNDISCIPLINED Reaffirming transdisciplinarity in social science and humanities research

Alphabet with ampersand (Moore, M., 1863, p. 5).1

1 This work is in the public domain, but the good librarians at University of North Carolina said they’d appreciate being referenced. The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/moore/moore.html

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My grandmother, discussed in Interstice I, was not the first person to end something using ‘and.’ As demonstrated in the image from The Dixie Primer (Moore, 1863), historically it was common practice for children reciting the Alphabet to end on ‘And’ as the 27th letter. However, presumably it sounded strange to say ‘X, Y, Z, And’ aloud, so children were taught to say ‘X, Y, Z, and per se and’ meaning ‘and by itself ’ in Latin. The ampersand, as we now call it, is a Mondegreen of the phrase and per se and. The logogram of the ampersand (&) predates its name by almost two-thousand years. Its form comes from a ligature made from two letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ or ‘et’ meaning and. According to Garfield (2012) its first use is credited to Marcus Tiro’s shorthand writing method in 63 BC. Ampersands have mutated in shape and been influenced by the age of print, the invention of typefaces, and of course modern computing.2 The Ampersand: its origin and development (Tschichold, 1953) traces hundreds of versions of the ampersand throughout the ages and includes a version of the ligature based on graffiti that was preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD! As a mode of scholarly activity, research-creation operates through the tripartite expression of an artistic practice, theory, and research. This book has demonstrated how I’ve organized research-creation projects with scholars, students, and alone. In each exemplification, I’ve used some form of artistic practice as a way of thinking through a proposition or problem by (co)creating what I wanted to understand. What makes research-creation different from strictly an art practice by itself—which, as we all already know, can instantiate theory perfectly well— is this theoretically informed research component that’s occurring as part of a research project. And the art practice is occurring within the academy. Theory primes the projects: it informs the methods and thinking during the projects and after the project is over. In the various chapters in this book, I’ve engaged with different theories to write about the projects based on what emerged and felt significant at the time. And I’ve already made specific claims throughout the book across different fields. In the spirit of the ampersand, in this concluding chapter I think further with some of what has emerged through running these various research-creation events over the past several years, and some ands and hyphens for the future of research.

Where are you and what are you really thinking about just now? In the methodology chapter, I wrote about situated speculation as a precursor to research-creation and an ongoing practice throughout research. I also spoke about chance. As I sit down to write this concluding chapter during the Christmas

2 One of my personal favorites is Claude Garamond’s 16th-century version where you can still see the ‘e’ and ‘t.’ If you type this on a computer like I have you need to use the italic version of Garamond (&). I have a tattoo of this on my flesh.

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break 2020–2021, in a global pandemic, I feel a visceral aversion to writing. As a proposition for breaking through this feeling, today, I pulled a card from my Oblique Strategies deck (Eno & Schmidt, 1975). It said: “What are you really thinking about just now? Incorporate.” Situating myself, what I’m thinking about, and incorporating. My current research project focuses on science fiction.3 I’m working on an interdisciplinary and cross-curricular project with English teachers, STEM teachers, and arts teachers that extends my ongoing work into speculative thought, stories, and literary education. I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction, reading a lot about science fiction, and thinking about what makes science fiction ‘science fiction.’ A recurring concept in science fiction is the notion of the Novum, first put forth by Marxist futurist Ernst Bloch (who also inspired Muñoz’ (2009) queer utopic futurities4) to describe a new moment of something unthought that propels toward a new order (Csicsery-Ronay, 2008). In science fiction literary scholarship, the novum was introduced by Darko Suvin (1979) to represent a new thing that is scientifically plausible yet does not exist in our current world (hence making the text ‘science fiction’ rather than fantasy or some other kind of fiction). The novum can be an object or a process and (I believe) does not need to be ‘new’ but also could be something that’s been forgotten in a particular context or not registered at the time. A lot of the science fiction I’ve been reading is set in the near future, in a world recognizable to the one I currently inhabit, but with some slight difference or novum that’s activated: for instance, SL Huang’s story, The Woman Who Destroyed Us (2018) centers on the invention and introduction of selective brain augmentations that modify people’s personalities and allow some students to perform better on tests and gain admission to Ivy League universities. Reading such stories causes me as the reader to say ‘oh, that actually could happen.’ And then think, ‘well, if that did happen it could cascade into …’ Or, ‘what’s that commenting on with regard to eugenics, ability, and what makes us ‘human’ etc …’ In many ways, these stories are similar to thought experiments that philosophers use to probe us to think about the current world differently. As such it could be argued that many science fiction texts are more a commentary on where we are

3 I’m also working as part of the Literary Education Lab at University of Melbourne on projects with the Stella Prize focused on bringing women and non-binary authors’ writing in schools; collaborating on some new SSHRC-funded WalkingLab projects; and my ongoing music making with Oblique Curiosities. In many ways extending the various projects I mention in this book, although the literary projects are not what I’d call ‘research-creation.’ 4 Although Bloch’s Novum was future oriented, Muñoz activates his Marxist utopianism as a method for queer theorists to excavate nascent elements from the past and animate them within the present. Muñoz (2009) argues that these ‘ephemeral traces’ and ‘flickering illuminations’ from other times might assist us in accessing queerness’ “still unrealized potential” (p. 28). This potential, or cultural/affective surplus could appear as novums perhaps, although Munoz’ uptake is utopic, and novums are by no means only utopic in science fiction.

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now than the future, and do their best work when they help us defamiliarize our thinking about our current world. During this past year of long periods of lockdown, alone in my house in Melbourne due to COVID-19, I noticed that my reading and thinking about science fiction and the actual news become increasingly blurred. It was as though science fiction couldn’t keep up with reality.5 As a reading/thought experiment, I started to treat the news as if it were science fiction and ask myself: what’s the novum here? where did this world that’s being described extrapolate from? what might happen if it continues down that trajectory? how is this defamiliarizing my thinking? as well as continuing to read actual science fiction. In the next sections, I will discuss two news stories that felt like they could have been science fictions as I read them, particularly for how they defamiliarized my thinking about education and interdisciplinarity. One story is about predictive technologies being used to assign exam scores in the UK; the other story is about bushfires affecting animals (and others) in Australia. The stories, while seemingly quite different, both describe a world that is accelerating due to capitalism and reminded me of how necessary interdisciplinary collaboration is to make sense of our current moment. The apocalypse is never singular; it is always multiple. In its multiplicity the apocalypse is unimaginable. (Wolf-Meyer, 2019, p. 4) The first news story that read like it should be science fiction took place in the UK. Due to COVID restrictions, high school exams were cancelled across the UK and an algorithm was used instead to predict students’ final grades for their A-Levels, which play a large part in determining university admissions (Duncan, McIntyre, Storer, & Levett, 2020). The process was not very sophisticated and used two inputs: (1) a specific student’s current grades for the year; and (2) the historical track record of their school. As a consequence, many students from lower social-economic areas and comprehensive schools had their grades brought down due to historical grade achievements of other students who had attended their school. This caused many high school students to have offers from universities withdrawn. As this flared up in the news, I learned about a student in the UK whose own experience of the exam algorithms mirrored a dystopic science fiction story she had written. The student, Jessica Johnson had won the Orwell Prize Senior Award in 2019 for a short story she wrote called A Band Apart. Johnson’s story is set in 2029 and imagines a system where students are sorted into bands based on

5 Unfortunately, the news out of the US this year did not read like SF to me. It read like the inevitable outcome of what the country has been building towards in its decision to continue to make white supremacy its organizing principle.

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their class background which decides the trajectories of their future. Ironically, due to the algorithm used in real life, Johnson had her own English A-level result downgraded from an A to B, causing her to lose her place at the University of St Andrews (Murray, 2020).6 I found the news around these stories fascinating for a few reasons. I was interested in how Artificial Intelligence (AI)7 was being incriminated in the news for reinscribing classist and racist logics (Atanasoski & Vora, 2019; Benjamin, 2019). But AI reinscribing racism and classism and extrapolating it is not new. We already know that this happens. Instead, what was interesting for me was how it took this historical moment—a moment of computer-generated predictions assigning grades to students during a pandemic—for the nation to mobilize and protest against a system that’s always been unfair. We know the school system is unfair: rich kids do tend to do better on exams and go to grammar schools and ‘better’ universities (Havergald, 2015; Jerrim & Sims, 2019). So, if it had been a normal year and wealthy students did better on exams (as we all can predict they would, like they always do) there would have been no protests. However, when this ongoing inequality was predicted (and nearly carried out) by a computer algorithm, it somehow became unbearable.8 I’m curious whether exams will be protested in coming years if the end of the pandemic signals a return to ‘normal’ or whether everyone will go back to being okay with a system that continues to privilege the wealthy, the neurotypical, the middle class, and (certain communities of ) the white. But I’m particularly fascinated by how it took the combination of a pandemic and predictive technologies, extrapolating what usually happens to capture the cultural imaginary and incite protests if only for a year.9 This affirms my belief in the power of (science) fiction, and how we might need reality rendered in different ways in order to realize what’s already happening: in this instance, to be shocked out of the lull of thinking education is ever fair. The second story that read like it should be science fiction and has haunted me for months took place in Australia. The story outlined how an estimated 3 billion animals burned or were displaced during Australia’s worst fire season on record in 2019–2020 (Gergis, 2020). I was in Melbourne during the fire season. Although I was living hundreds of kilometers from the burning, I was awoken in my sealed house by the smell of smoke for days. Each morning when I awoke

6 After protests, teachers were allowed to assign the students final grades, but many students were forced to choose different schools during the mix up due to timelines on acceptance, and the real problem remains: the system is classist and racist so no wonder the AI acted the way it did. 7 It’s probably a stretch to make this about AI: it was after all a fairly simple equation, but it was definitely about reinscribing bias through predictive technologies. 8 The headlines should have read: People angry at machines for pointing out what they’re usually okay with. 9 What usually happens generally not specifically. The specifics of people like Johnson’s story is probably what did incite the protests, and of course the specifics of all the other students who worked hard and had their grades brought down by their milieu. But there’s always specifics if we look for them.

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and inhaled the burn, I thought of Alaimo’s (2008) transcorporeality. So I don’t mean the bush fires sounded like science fiction: they had clearly happened. However, the number 3 billion burning or displaced animals defamiliarized me the way science fiction does. Now 3 billion is a number I have read many times with regard to money. I know that 1 billion is a 1000 million. To try to get a grasp of the number 3 billion, I tried to visualize what 3000 animals might look like. I thought I could maybe arrange them in a park near my house for scale. But then multiplying those 3000 animals by one million rattled my brain: I couldn’t comprehend what 3 billion burning and displaced animals might actually look like, even though it had happened around me. This caused me to wonder if 3 billion was a number that a human like me could count; I have since learned that for a human to count 3 billion would take 753 years, counting 16 hours a day.10 All of this made me think of Morton’s (2013) idea of the hyperobject, which is often discussed in regard to the Anthropocene and climate change. A hyperobject is something that occurs at a scale that is beyond humans’ ability to conceptualize. For example, climate change: it’s happening, we’re part of, yet might only ever get glimpses of its effects due to our puny brains and short lives. But that doesn’t absolve us from responsibility for what’s happening climactically because of humans and will continue to happen if we don’t change our ways as a species. This has made me consider if we have an ethical obligation to address climate change in the English curriculum through the literary texts we teach. And I think we do. Many of the texts written by students at Llyn High School (Chapters 3 and 4) centered on climate, environmental degradation, animal rights, and concern for future generations. They wrote compellingly and I haven’t specifically addressed them in this book partially because I have been wary of tropes aligning childhood with ‘nature’ and the concomitant white innocence (Yusoff, 2018) that is projected onto youth around topics like climate change and the Anthropocene (Malone, 2016; Taylor, 2013). But in this current moment of climate tipping point and raging pandemic, I am emboldened by re-reading the students’ writing, wherein several not only discussed climate change, but also highlighted the impacts of interspecies injustice which speaks to the current COVID-19 crises several years before the climate marches caught global attention. Such news reinforces my thinking that climate change and science denialism (de Freitas & Truman, 2020) are topics that need to be addressed in English literary education. And of course, part of discussing science denialism is to understand that some people have good reason to distrust science because of its ongoing history

10 Computer scientist Luc De Mestre did the math for 1 billion and I multiplied it by 3. See: https://www.quora.com/How-long-would-it-take-a-human-being-to-count-to-1-billionone-at-a-time/answer/Luc-De-Mestre?ch=10&share=c356eb25&srid=unbbF. Also, I think a great circle of hell for billionaires would be to have to count their billions. And if they lose count they have to start again and that is their punishment for accruing so much during life on a planet where people are starving and animals are burning.

Undisciplined 157

of racist, sexist, and ableist practices. Part of what literature as a subject in school does well (when it’s not beholden to exam culture and white monoculture) is allow students the opportunity to consider different world views and grapple with ethico-political concerns across disciplines, which is part of my current research.11

Reaffirming transdisciplinarity And so, what does all this have to do with finishing this research-methods book and research-creation? Well, what all this confluence of literary fiction, theory, non-fiction, climate disasters, pandemics, algorithms, injustice, and protest keeps showing me is how much I rely on transdisciplinarity, defamiliarizing my own thinking, and arts practices to make sense of the current moment I find myself in as a researcher. At the beginning of the book, I cited scholars who argue that, as an interdisciplinary practice, research-creation calls for rigor across disciplines including the artistic mode that’s being activated (Loveless, 2019; Shannon & Truman, 2020; Springgay, 2019; Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020). I think that transdisciplinarity may be housed in a single person in some instances, but depending on the topic, or complexity of what’s being investigated or created, the interdisciplinarity is likely housed across various people working with each other and across fields.12 We need to be more undisciplined and work together.

11 A current project I’m co-directing with Larissa McLean Davies at the Literary Education Lab in collaboration with Aboriginal literary scholar Sandra Phillips centres on Australian climate fiction: specifically, Aboriginal climate fiction (Phillips, McLean Davies & Truman, under review). While I do not consider the project itself to be research-creation, it is centered on artistic practices (literary texts) and collaborating across disciplines. We were recently on a panel with climatologist Joëlle Gergis—whose news article on the 3 billion animals burning precipitated this section. Through talking to Joëlle and other colleagues, it’s apparent to me that those of us in the arts and literary education research need to seek out interdisciplinary collaborations to make sense of climate change (Gabrys & Yusoff, 2012;de Freitas & Truman, 2020). 12 I do wonder how we develop and maintain interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration in a system where the majority of academics are increasingly overworked, time-poor, and precariously employed in an institution that cultures, fosters, and rewards individualism. And where artistic practices are often only folded into collaboration when they serve other disciplines. STEAM in education and educational research is a good example of this. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) gets an extra ‘A’ which inserts Art, insofar as it serves STEM. This art-ification (Keeling, 2019) of labor serves a neoliberal agenda. Indeed Keeling (2019) outlines how the concept of interdisciplinarity itself can signify a “mode of knowledge production that can meet the challenge and demands of contemporary capitalism” (p. 10).

INTERSTICE IV Hyphen

To end this book, I will invoke the hyphen. This interstice was supposed to be earlier in the book but now I think it belongs at the end. Ending on a hyphen. In a postcard in Chapter 5 [page 129], I discuss hyphens and whether a person that I met in a pub would have been more interested in my verbal response to a question if I’d mentioned that my response was hyphenated (I think not). I do think about hyphens a lot though, and whether they’re pretentious when encountered in academic writing. I’ve decided that they are not. But they’re also not inherently a good idea, nor neutral: a hyphen is a forced milieu. A place where two different logics or practices are brought together to create a third. In this milieu, different movements, ideals, or entities become co-implicated while still maintaining difference: affecting while also affected. In terms of research-creation, the hyphenation means taking both the research and creation seriously, and what’s generated through their mutual implication seriously. Alison Jones and Kuni Jenkins (2008) highlight this mutual implication through the use of the term ‘colonizer-indigene’ and argue that any research in settler colonial contexts ‘always and necessarily reaches back to our shared past’ (as cited in Tuck & McKenzie, 2015, p. 163). In this instance, the hyphenation is not reduced to a convivial relation but an ongoing responsibility that is (in)tension (Springgay & Truman, 2018). While recognizing the need for responsible relation building and the mutual implication of hyphenation, there may also be a necessity to affirmatively refuse (Martineau, 2015; Simpson, 2017) hyphenation altogether.13 I’m thinking 13 I realize the irony that I’m invoking Indigenous thought to assert for the need for white thought to de-hyphen itself from claiming relation to spaces that it’s not welcome. I draw on Martineau and Simpson to acknowledge the action of affirmative refusal which articulates how there are worlds and ways of life and resurgent arts practices occurring outside of white capture altogether that should not be forced into a milieu with whiteness. The responsible hyphen (or implication) would be for white thought (and its thinkers) to refuse any claim to these spaces (and stop being around everywhere all the time).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-10

Interstice IV 159

specifically about Black and Indigenous arts practices and futures: practices that white settlers should not be allowed to hyphen to and claim mutual implication in when those spaces are flourishing. We don’t get to make convenient hyphens. There are many hyphens (visible and not) at work in the academy, and theory, and research, and art. Some are milieus of responsibility, mutual implication, and working together. While others function like capitalism: ‘hey that’s cool (and profitable!) I’ll hyphen myself to that.’ Think about the hyphens in your life and scholarship. There are perhaps things that are not hyphenated that should be. And perhaps things that are hyphenated that should not be. Proposals for the future of research-creation: Affirm some hyphens. And/or Refuse some hyphens.

References Alaimo, S. (2008). Trans-corporeal feminisms and the ethical space of nature. In S. Alaimo, & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 237–264). Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Atanasoski, N., & Vora, K. (2019). Surrogate humanity: Race, robots, and the politics of technological futures. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Csicsery-Ronay, I. J. (2008). The seven beauties of science fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. de Freitas, E., & Truman, S. E. (2020). Science fiction and science dis/trust: Thinking with Bruno Latour’s Gaia and Liu Cixin’s the Three-body problem. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, (36). doi: https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/036.e02. Duncan, P., McIntyre, N., Storer, R., & Levett, C. (2020). Who won and who lost: When A-levels meet the algorithm. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/education/2020/aug/13/who-won-and-who-lost-when-a-levelsmeet-the-algorithm. Eno, B., & Schmidt, P. (1975). Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas. Gabrys, J., & Yusoff, K. (2012). Arts, sciences and climate change: Practices and politics at the threshold. Science as Culture, 21(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.20 10.550139. Garfield, S. (2012). Just my type: A book about fonts. New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Gergis, J. (2020). The great unravelling: ‘I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse.’ Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2020/oct/15/the-great-unravelling-i-never-thought-id-live-tosee-the-horror-of-planetary-collapse. Havergald, C. (2015). Affluent children reach top universities no matter the system. Times Higher Education, Retrieved December 20, 2020, from https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/affluent-children-reach-top-universities-no-matter-system. Huang, S. L. (2018). The woman who destroyed us. In W. Roush (Ed.), Twelve Tomorrows  (pp. 13–38). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Jerrim, J., & Sims, S. (2019). Why do so few low- and middle-income children attend a grammar school? New evidence from the Millennium Cohort Study. British Educational Research Journal, 45(3), 425–457. Retrieved from http://10.0.3.234/berj.3502. Jones, A., & Jenkins, K. (2008). Rethinking collaboration: Working with the indigene-coloniser hyphen. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 471–486). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Keeling, K. (2019). Queer times, Black futures. New York, NY: NYU Press. Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Malone, K. (2016). Reconsidering children’s encounters with nature and place using posthumanism. In Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 32. doi: https://doi. org/10.1017/aee.2015.48. Martineau, J. (2015). Creative combat: Indigenous art, resurgence, and decolonization. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Victoria. Moore, M. B. (1863). The Dixie primer (3rd ed.). Raleigh, NC: Branson, Farrar & Co. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects : Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. New York, NY: NYU Press. https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.47-6141. Murray, J. (2020). Student who wrote story about biased algorithm has results downgraded. Retrieved August 21, 2020, from https://www.theguardian. com/education/2020/aug/18/ashton-a-level-student-predicted-results-f iasco-in-prize-winning-story-jessica-johnson-ashton?f bclid=IwAR0taUDiPggY8jCo_ Q0SvlrcgWKCUD8YjUMYsBVn597uzoTO5Z1hDi2XjA0. Shannon, D. B., & Truman, S. E. (2020). Problematizing sound methods through music research-creation: Oblique curiosities. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406920903224. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Michigan Press. Springgay, S. (2019). Research-creation in practice. Public lecture. School of Art. Melbourne, Australia: Design and Architecture. Monash University. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2018). On the need for methods beyond proceduralism: Speculative middles, (in)tensions, and response-ability in research. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(3), 203–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464. Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction : On the poetics and history of a literary genre. London, UK: Yale University Press. Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Abingdon: Routledge. Truman, S. E., Loveless, N., Manning, E., Myers, N., & Springgay, S. (2020). The intimacies of doing research-creation: Sarah E. Truman interviews Natalie Loveless, Erin Manning, Natasha Myers, and Stephanie Springgay. In N. Loveless (Ed.), Knowings and knots (pp. 221–250). Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press. Tschichold, J. (1953). The ampersand: Its origin and development. Frankfurt: D. Semplag. Tuck, E., & McKenzie, M. (2015). Place in research : Theory, methodology, and methods. London, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Wolf-Meyer, M. J. (2019). Theory for the world to come. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

INDEX

actual 8–11, 19 affect xxi, 2–6, 11–13, 17–18, 20, 21, 23, 48, 69, 70, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80–85, 87, 94–97, 103, 112, 124, 130, 147, 153, 158 affective attachments 85 affective refusals 80–83 affirmation 9–11, 16, 19–23, 25, 34, 43, 44, 45–46, 75, 106, 116, 132, 134, 140, 143, 159 affirmative refusals 9, 19, 22–23, 75, 84, 106, 116, 118, 158–159 affirming chance 20–21, 116, 152 agential cut 18–19, 62 Ahmed, Sara 1, 3, 11, 12, 23, 61, 69, 75, 78, 83, 126, 128 Alaimo, Stacy 80, 85, 92, 96, 103, 153 Alpha Centauri 140 amor fati 1, 20, 56 ampersand 151–152 and xiii–xiv annotation see marginalia Anthropocene 62, 156 anti-racist xx, 25, 62, 148 apparatus 18, 37–38, 40 apparatus of literary production 37 archive 23–24; anarchiving 24; ­counter-archiving 24 art-ification 157 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 144, 155 Arts Based Educational Research xx asyndeton 124

Barad, Karen 8, 17–19, 36–37, 43, 62, 116, 118, 144 Barthes, Roland 35, 68 Barney, Daniel 44, 52–53, 55 becoming 8, 15, 43, 93, 99 Benjamin, Ruha 155 Benjamin, Walter, 68 Bennett, Jane 9, 96, 97–98 Bergson, Henri 18, 146 Black Studies 12, 24, 147 Blackbird 46–48 Blake, William 76 Bloch, Ernst 153 bodymind 16–17 Brault, Christine 48–49 Brennan, Teresa 82 Brexit 80, 83 Burdick, Jake 66–67, 84 Butler, Judith 18, 45, 78 Butler, Octavia 118 Cadogan, Garnet 73 Calvino, Italo 93, 104, 106 cartography 68, 76, 77, 93, 95, 96, 99, 104 Certeau, Michel de 68, 103, 124 chance 20–21, 116, 152 Chen, Mel 3, 5, 12, 118, citational politics 1, 25, 61–63 climate change 74, 156–157 Colebrook, Claire 96 colonial logics 23 Cosmic Beavers 140 COVID-19 31, 67, 85, 154, 156

162  Index

Crenshaw, Kimberlee 76 critical disability studies 7, 17, 44 critical public pedagogy 66, 67, 76–87; see also public pedagogy curriculum studies xvii, xix, xxi dark precursor 8–9 de Freitas, Elizabeth 18, 106, 146, 156, 157 Debaise, Dieter 10 defamiliarization 22, 66–70, 76, 96, 154, 156, 157 Deleuze, Gilles 8–9, 22, 34, 43, 56, 68, 77, 143 den Heyer, Kent 48–49 dérive 68, 72, 92, 95–96, 96, 102–103 Derrida, Jacques 20, 21, 23–24, 31, 35, 36, 51, 67, 99, 112, 114–132 differenciation 8 differential 7–9, 11–12, 19, 37, 116 differentiation 8 diffraction 19, 43, 52, 141, 143–146, 147 disability 7, 17, 44–45, 105; see also bodymind; critical disability studies Doctor Who 4 Drucker, Joanna 38, 50 Edelman, Lee 120 EdTech 85–86 Ellsworth, Elizabeth 70, 80 embodiment 17, 92, 93–94 emergence 11, 15–19, 81, 98, 134 emergent method 72–75 Emergence ⇔ emergency 15–17, 19, 73, 102 emplacement 93–94 enabling constraints 19, 55 English education xvi–xvii, xxi, xxii, 65–109, 153, 155, 156–157 English literature xvii, 1, 4, 34, 37, 52, 72–76, 95–97, 104–107, 126–130, 157 envios 122 Eno, Brian 53, 139 estrangement see defamiliarization event 15–19 Fanon, Franz 22, 66 feeling 9–12, 19, 82–83, 96, 130, 149, 153; lure for feeling 9, 148; see also hapticality feminism xvi, xix, xx, 7–11, 14, 17–18, 20, 25, 40, 61–62, 67, 76–77, 80, 86, 94, 104, 132, 141, 142, 148

feminist materialisms xvi, 1–2, 4, 7, 17–18, 20, 61–62, 77, 104; see also new materialisms Flâneur 54, 68, 77, 97 Freire, Paulo 66 Foucault, Michel 18, 68 Gabrys, Jennifer 11 Gaztambide-Fernández, Rubén 71–72 gender 4, 7, 10, 17, 18, 43, 56–57, 67, 74–78, 94, 104, 105, 118, 148 gender-based violence 74–78 Gerard, Shannon 49–50 Gergis, Joëlle 155, 157 Gerrard, Jessica 147–148 Gin, Kwoi 48–49 Giroux, Henry 66 Glissant, Édouard 22, 82 Guattari, Felix 34, 56, 68, 77 Halberstam, Jack 100, 120 hapticality 12, 23 Haraway, Donna 7, 16, 23, 37, 43, 104, 132 Harney, Stefano xix, 12, 23 hauntology 99 Hayles, N. Katherine 35, 52, 57, 146 Heddon, Dee 77, 92, 95 hegemony 4, 66–68 homo narrans 5–6 homo oeconomicus 2 homo politicus 2 homonormativity 120 hooks, bell xix, 62, 94 hospitality 20, 116–117 humanism 2–6, 13, 22, 71, 82, 84, 118, 120, 147 hyphens 129, 152, 158–159 Icepick in my Eye 148 indeterminacy 18–19, 62, 017, 122 inhuman 2, 4–6, 20, 75, 93, 98; inhuman literacies 84 (in)tensions 14, 116, 158 intercorporeality 92; see also transcorporeality interdisciplinary xvi–xxii, 56, 142, 153–154, 157; see also transdisciplinary intersectionality 10, 18, 75–77, 81–83 intertextuality 35–36 intratextuality 31, 35, 45, 51, 53 Islamophobia 83

Index 163

Jackson, Alecia 19 Jackson, Heather 38–39 Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman 5, 147 Jameson, Fredric 35, 100, 105 Joy Division 11 Kazi, Rosina 42–43 Keeling, Kara 7, 13, 22, 82, 104, 157 Knight, Linda 95 Kristeva, Julia 35–26 Ladson-Billings, Gloria 66–67 Latour, Bruno 9–10, 13, 17, 98 Lau, Yam 50, 52–53, 55 Leggo, Carl 46–48, 52 letterboxing 110–112 literacy 4, 65, 70–71, 80, 84; see also inhuman literacies Loveless, Natalie xv–xvi, xx, 1, 10, 16, 22, 140, 148, 157 Luciano, Dana 3, 5, 118 MacLure, Maggie 38, 75 Manning, Erin xv–xvi, 1, 9, 45–46, 140, 145, 148, 157 marginalia 15, 32–34, 37–57, 85 Martineau, Jarrett 22, 84, 158 Massumi, Brian xv, 34, 39, 100 mastery 3–4, 62 McCormack, Derek 11, 25 McKenzie, Marcia 94, 158 McKittrick, Katherine 2–3, 5, 12, 23, 25, 62, 105 Meyer, Hazel 54 Minh-ha, Trinh T. 43 minor 34–35, 56, 86, 96, 143 more-than-human xix, 5, 17, 36, 72, 74–75, 85, 98, 104, 143 more-than-representation 2, 6, 23–25, 48, 73, 95, 98, 140; see also representation Morton, Timothy 118, 156 Moten, Fred xix, 12, 23 Mullen, Harryette 70, 72–75 Muñoz, José Esteban 5, 7, 13, 19, 118, 120, 126, 153 Murphie, Andrew 20, 24, 39 Nash, Jennifer 77 new materialisms 1, 4, 8, 18, 38, 141, 144, 145, 147–148; see also feminist materialisms Ng, Roxana 94 Ng-Chan, Taien xviii, 48–49, 52–53

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 9, 15, 20–21, 31–35, 37, 40–56, 69 non-arrival 116–122, 132–134 novum 153–154 O’Malley, Michael 66–67, 84 Oblique Curiosities 26, 55, 120, 139–140, 146, 153 Oblique Strategies 139, 153 Ollmann, Joe 40–42 opacity 22, 82, 84 Palmer, Tyrone 4, 11 pinhole photography 110, 112, 124–126 Pollard, Ingrid 128–130 Postcards 110–138 PostQual Diffractor Bot 141–149 postqualitative 141–149 proposition 9–13, 19, 45–46, 69, 72, 74–76, 92, 95, 114, 124, 139, 144, 149, 152–153 psychogeography 77, 95 Puar, Jasbir 4, 12, 62, 76–77, 120 public pedagogy 66–69, 74, 84–86 publics 14, 56, 65, 67, 84, 86–87, 103, 116, 120 queer non-arrivals see non-arrival queer temporalities 15, 20, 22, 25, 112, 153 queer theory xvi, xx, 2, 4–5, 7–15, 40, 42, 62, 77, 83, 86, 96, 104, 118–121, 126, 140, 153; and white exceptionalism 13, 128 Queer Walking Tours 69 queering 67, 69, 112, 114, 116 race 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 18, 42–43, 61–62, 73–76, 106, 118, 130; see also whiteness racism 69, 73–74, 79–85, 126–132, 155 radical empiricism xix, 25–26 Rankine, Claudia 31 recursion 48–49, 147 refusal 9, 22–23, 62, 81–84, 106, 118, 158–159; see also affective refusals; affirmative refusals Renold, EJ 78–80 research-creation i–158 responsibility 18–22, 70, 75, 106, 130–131, 147, 156, 158–159 rhetoric xvii, 68, 101, 102; more-than-linguistic rhetorics 97–98, 102, 103; pedestrian rhetoric 124; rhetoric of effects 71

164  Index

rigorous activation 14–15, 21–22 Ringrose, Jessica 78–79 risk 13–14, 18, 147; minimizing risk 18 Romantic tradition 73, 126, 128–130 Rudolph, Sophie 147–148 Sandlin, Jenny 66–67, 84 Schneider, Rebecca 23 school imaginary 96, 99–102 science denialism 9, 156–157 science fiction xvii, 105–106, 153–157 Sedgwick, Eve 21–22, 120 Seigworth, Greg 11 SenseLab xvii, 39–40, 45 settler colonialism 24, 81, 84, 94, 132, 158 Shannon, David Ben 6, 9, 15, 17, 24, 49, 55, 62, 110, 139–140, 157 Shaviro, Steven 10, 16–17, 46 Shildrick, Margit 33–35 Simon, Rob 70 Simpson, Audra 22, 62, 81–82, 132 Simpson, Leanne 22–23, 84, 105, 118, 158 Singh, Julietta 3–4, 62 situated knowledges 7, 132 situated pedagogy 93–94 situated speculation 6–7, 11, 13–14, 15, 152–153 Situationist International 68, 95 Snaza, Nathan 1, 4, 40, 42, 71 speculative fiction 10, 52, 104–107, 118, 140 speculative middle 16 speculative philosophy 7–11 Springgay, Stephanie xv–xx, 1, 3, 9, 11, 16, 24, 44, 51, 56, 68–69, 72, 93–95, 116, 140, 148, 157 Sriprakash, Arathi 147–148 St. Cuthbert’s Way 110–138 Stengers, Isabelle 10, 22, 25, 82, Stewart, Kathleen 22 Storying 3–7, 105; see also homo narrans strangers 112, 116, 118, 126, 132, 134; arrivant 116; strange strangers 116, 118 student mapping 96–106 student writing 70, 73–87, 96–106 Sundberg, Juanita 94 Suvin, Darko 153 synecdoche 124 Tarc, Aparna Mishra 71 textuality 32, 35–37

toponarrative 92, 95 transcorporeality 75, 81–82, 85–86, 92–97, 102–107, 132, 156 transdisciplinary xv–xvii, 1, 151–157; see also interdisciplinary Tremonte, Mary 55–57 Trifonas, Peter 36, 52–53, 102 Tuana, Nancy 22 Tuck, Eve 22, 81, 94, 147, 158 Turner, Cathy 77, 92, 95 Übermench 40 Undercommons 13 Vadgama, Nirmal 52 VanderMeer, Jeff 52 Vannini, Phillip 25, 48 virtual 8–11, 13, 19, 39 viscous porosity 22 walking and dis/ability 44–45, 69, 85–86; and gender 44, 69, 74–85; and ideation 32–34, 69–70, 110–112; and mapping 94–103; and method 14, 65–66, 68–76, 92–93, 95–96, 110–112; and race 44–45, 69, 74–77, 79–85, 126–132; and writing 34, 65–66, 69–85, 95–106, 110–138 walking-with 72, 94–95 WalkingLab xviii, 14, 26, 69 Ware, Syrus Marcus 24 weak theory 21–22 Weaver, John 4, 51, 55 Whitehead, Alfred North xi, xiv, 9–10, 16–17, 149 whiteness 2, 3, 5, 18, 23, 24, 42, 44, 68, 71, 81, 118, 120, 120, 126, 128–129, 147–148, 157–158; masturbatory white nonsense 62; white innocence 156; white nationalism 84, 126; white saviour 67, 84; white supremacy 10, 12, 80–81, 106, 154 Woolf, Virginia 38, 50, 70, 128 Woolner-Pratt, Kai 53–55 Wynter, Sylvia 2–5, 26, 42, 75 youth cultural productions 86–87; see also student mapping; student writing Yusoff, Kathryn, 4–5, 62, 126, 140, 156, 157