Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry [1 ed.] 9781032287881, 9781032287911, 9781003298519, 1032287888

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POSTFOUNDATIONAL APPROACHES TO QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry is an edited collection that aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. What makes this book innovative is the singular focus on postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn, the new empiricisms, and the new materialisms. Postfoundational inquiry is conceived by the editors as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. While the editors name the facets of these contingent approaches and explain how they work, they do so not in order to fix a new method, but to spur new connectives. In this collection, authors take up a range of postfoundational theories such as poststructuralism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, feminist new materialism, speculative/ new empiricism, agential realism, immanent ontologies, and affect theory. Provoked by a series of reorienting questions, chapters in the book offer enactments as a way of unfurling what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. The chapters are organized according to four Openings: Atmospheres, Affects, and Hauntings; Archives, Worldings, and Sketchings; Escaping Tradition, Beginning Elsewhere, and the Politics of Doing Otherwise; Pre-personal Agencies and Thought Taking Flight. This book can be used as a standalone text in advanced qualitative inquiry courses, or as a supplementary text in courses that examine the use of theory in research.

Lisa A. Mazzei is Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, United States, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is interested in philosophically informed inquiry that opens thought to the not yet. Alecia Y. Jackson is Professor of Social Theory and Research at Appalachian State University, United States, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program. Her scholarship seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new, and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn, qualitative inquiry, and thought.

POSTFOUNDATIONAL APPROACHES TO QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

Edited by Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Y. Jackson

Designed cover image: Cover artwork (Openings) by Phillip Prince. Photo by William Barker. First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Y. Jackson; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lisa A. Mazzei and Alecia Y. Jackson to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-28788-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-28791-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-29851-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519 Typeset in Optima by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments List of contributors Foreword: Refusing man and his method in postfoundational inquiry Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre 1 Postfoundational inquiry after method: reorientations, enactments, and openings Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei Atmospheres, affects, and hauntings 2 Sonic disruptions to sexual violence lessons in the science lab: a postfoundational discursive-materialaffective-sensorial approach Bárbara Berger Correa and Jessica Ringrose

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3 Affective attunements to violence in educational inquiry: queering critique Bessie P. Dernikos and Nancy Lesko

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4 Atmospheric data and software arts: new ways of investigating the built environment Elizabeth de Freitas and Laura Trafí-Prats

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Contents

5 Absence and refusing the given Asilia Franklin-Phipps Archives, worldings, and sketchings 6 A performative and vibrant cartography: re-animating the archive Dorthe Staunæs and Pil Mengel

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7 Adventures requiring care and recklessness: a playful archive 101 Jayne Osgood 8 Common worlding pedagogies in early childhood Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Mindy Blaise

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9 Inquiry as if sketch Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair

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10 Inquiring with cascade questioning: sketching a phenomenon Malou Juelskjær Escaping tradition, beginning elsewhere, and the politics of doing otherwise

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11 “All things are one:” postfoundational inquiries and pre-Socratic western thought Marek Tesar

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12 Pedagogy in the context of postfoundational inquiry: reading-writing-thinking-making together Candace R. Kuby and Vivienne Bozalek

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13 Ontologies of possibility and loss in posthumanist inquiry: lessons from the study of systemic racism Jerry Lee Rosiek and Scott L. Pratt

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Pre-personal agencies and thought taking flight

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14 Dancing with the Chinese “wind” as postfoundational inquiry Weili Zhao

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15 Multiple storying of crisis and hope: feminist new materialisms as an emergent ethico-onto-epistemology of multiple messmates at different scales Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Teresa Elkin Postila

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16 Transversal inquiry: the “adventure of the involuntary” Maggie MacLure

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Subject Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As we wrote in our first collaborative book project 15 years ago, we owe much gratitude to each other and to those who have mentored and supported us, stretching thought to the “not yet.” We express appreciation to our academic institutions, the University of Oregon and Appalachian State University, for course release and research leave that enabled us to complete this project. We owe a special thanks to Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre for her talk, “Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New,” at the 15th Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and subsequent 2019 article that provided a framing for the book which we discuss in Chapter 1. Finally, we wish to express our sincere thanks to the authors who thought with us and responded to our challenge to produce enactments that overturn and displace limits. And of course, we extend deep gratitude to our families who always give us time and space to do this work.

CONTRIBUTORS

Bárbara Berger Correa is a PhD student at the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research interests include young people’s sexuality, feminism, inclusive relationships, and sexuality education. Her current research uses posthumanism, affect theories, and psychoanalysis to think of the entangled relationalities of flirting among teens and feminist activism in Chile. Mindy Blaise is Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Director, Centre for People, Place, & Planet, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. She is a co-founder of several feminist research collectives, including Common Worlds Research Collective, #FEAS Feminist Educators Against Sexism, and The Ediths. Her feminist, creative, and transdisciplinary research is interested in generating new worldly understandings and ways of life where differences can flourish. Vivienne Bozalek is Emerita Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape, and Honorary Professor at the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, Rhodes University. Recent coedited books include Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives with Bob Pease (Routledge, 2022), Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-come with Michalinos Zembylas, Siddique Motala, and Dorothee Hölscher, (Routledge, 2022), In conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism with Karin Murris (Routledge, 2023). She is the editor-in-chief of the open-source online journal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning.

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Elizabeth de Freitas is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer whose research includes anthropological and philosophical investigations of mathematics, science, computing, and digital life. She is Professor and Co-director of MIXI, Adelphi University’s Manhattan Institute for Studies of STEM and the Imagination. Her work has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the US National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council. She has published 5 books and over 100 articles and chapters. Publications in 2020– 2022 explore mapping experiments, sensor technology, science denialism, speculative fiction, diverse mathematical measurement practices, and images of learning in current machine learning algorithms. Bessie P. Dernikos is Associate Professor of Literacies in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at Florida Atlantic University. Her research explores the reading processes of young children in urban contexts, with a focus on the material, discursive, and affective forces that impact language and literacy learning. She is co-author of the edited volume Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies. She has also authored publications in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Early Childhood Research and the Journal of Literacy Research. Teresa Elkin Postila holds a PhD in Early Childhood Education and is a senior lecturer in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research focused on inter- and transdisciplinary theoretical and methodological possibilities in research as well as in Early Childhood Education pedagogies and practices. Asilia Franklin-Phipps is Assistant Professor in Educational Studies with affiliate appointments in Art and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY New Paltz. Asilia writes about art, aesthetics, popular culture, and pedagogy as it relates to race and education. Alecia Y. Jackson is Professor of Social Theory and Research at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC—where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies program. Her scholarship seeks to animate philosophical frameworks in the production of the new, and her current projects are focused on the ontological turn, qualitative inquiry, and thought. With Lisa Mazzei, she is co-author of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (2012; 2023), and co-editor of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry (2009). Malou Juelskjær is Associate Professor of social psychology at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. She is inspired by critical posthumanist approaches, and by feminist new materialist and feminist poststructuralist

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thinking, while also drawing inspiration from post-colonial approaches, critical race studies, and decolonial studies. She’s published two books on agential realism and has worked with diverse materials and empirical foci. Currently, she is part of a citizen initiative to buy industrial farmland and grow forests, which moves her research interests into “the planthropocene” and questions of soil-care in a more-than-human world. Candace R. Kuby is Associate Provost for Faculty Success and Professor of Learning, Teaching and Curriculum at the University of Missouri. Dr. Kuby’s research centers on pedagogies as relational in two ways: 1) the comingto-be of literacies when children work with artistic and digital tools, and 2) approaches to and pedagogies of qualitative inquiry when thinking with poststructural and posthumanist philosophies. She has (co)authored several books including Speculative Pedagogies of Qualitative Inquiry. Journals in which her scholarship appears include Qualitative Inquiry, the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, and the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy. She serves as a book series co-editor: Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research and a webinar co-host: Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry. Hillevi Lenz Taguchi is Professor of Education and since 2013 has been Professor of Child and Youth Studies specializing in Early Childhood Education at the Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Hillevi has experience of critical, feminist, and gender-pedagogies, feminist activist work in higher education, and early childhood education practices since the mid-1990s. For the last 15 years, her interest has been in the theoretical developments and transgressive methodologies as part of Posthumanist, Feminist New Materialist, and Post Qualitative approaches. Currently, she is focusing on the possibilities of onto-epistemological, emergent, and transdisciplinary work underpinned by ontological relationality. Nancy Lesko is Maxine Greene Professor Emerita for Distinguished Contributions to Education and the Executive Editor of Teachers College Record. She taught courses in the areas of curriculum, gender studies, and theories in educational research. She co-founded the Teachers College Curriculum Lab with Jacqueline Simmons. Her research has focused on gender and sexualities in school, the making of contemporary ideas of adolescence, and the affective dimensions of schooling. Her most recent co-edited book is Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogies. Her next project investigates the afterlives of the 2018 teacher strikes. Maggie MacLure is Professor Emerita in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. She was Co-Founder (with Elizabeth de Freitas) of the Manifold Laboratory for

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Biosocial, Eco-Sensory, & Digital Studies of Learning and Behaviour, and Leader of ESRI’s Theory and Methodology Research Group. She is the FounderDirector of the International Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. Lisa A. Mazzei is Alumni Faculty Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. She is interested in philosophically informed inquiry that opens thought to the not yet. With Alecia Jackson, she is co-author of Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research (2012, 2023), and co-editor of Voice in Qualitative Inquiry (2009). She is also the author of Inhabited Silence in Qualitative Research (2007). Pil Mengel is a research assistant in the Department of Education Studies at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. Her research interest is within gender, racialization, diversity work, and organizational changes. Her current work is within the project called “Affective investments in diversity work in STEM at Danish universities” where she together with the project group work with performative, new materialist, Black feminist, and affect theories. Pil holds a BA and an MA in sociology from the University of Copenhagen. Petra Mikulan currently teaches educational foundations, curriculum theory, and educational ethics in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she completed SSHRC and Killam funded postdoctoral fellowship. Her work addresses transdisciplinary and non-disciplinary intersections between ideas of vitalism and life as they pertain to ethics, feminist race and ethnicity studies, biopolitics, and post qualitative reading. With Nathalie Sinclair, she is co-author of Time and Education: Time Pedagogy against Oppression (2023). With Michalinos Zembylas, she is co-editor of Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education (in press). Jayne Osgood is Professor of Childhood Studies at the Centre for Education Research & Scholarship, Middlesex University, United Kingdom; and Professor II at Hogskolen i Innlandet, Norway. She is committed to extending understandings of the workforce, families, gender and sexualities, ‘child,’ and ‘childhood’ in early years contexts through creative, affective methodologies. She has published extensively within the post-modernist paradigm; her most recent books include Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods (2019); Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art (2019); and Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Research Observation (2023). She is currently Co-Editor for the journals Gender & Education; and Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology.

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Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw is Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Faculty of Education and director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in Curriculum at Western University in Ontario, Canada. Her writing and research contribute to the Common Worlds Research Collective (tracing children’s relations with places, materials, and other species), and the Early Childhood Pedagogies Collaboratory (experimenting with the contours, conditions, and complexities of 21st-century pedagogies). Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching interests are in American philosophy (including pragmatism, American feminism, philosophies of race, and Native American philosophy), philosophy of education, and the history of logic. He is Co-Author of American Philosophy from Wounded Knee the Present (Bloomsbury, 2015) and several papers on posthumanism and Author of two books, Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2002) and Logic: Inquiry, Argument and Order (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), as well as numerous articles on pluralism, logic, and Dewey’s theory of inquiry. Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education. She is an internationally recognized expert on gender equity in education, youth digital sexual cultures, and feminist participatory research methodologies and has collaborated on funded research on these topics with colleagues in the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe. She is the 2020 Recipient of the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, from the American Educational Research Association, which recognizes her commitment to societal impact and making research matter beyond academic audiences. Jerry Lee Rosiek is Professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon, where he teaches courses on the racial politics of education practice and courses on qualitative research methodology. His scholarship is informed by revisionist pragmatism, new materialist philosophy, critical race theory, and Indigenous studies literature. His writing has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Teaching and Teacher Education, Journal of Teacher Education, Education Theory, Educational Research, Qualitative Inquiry, and Phi Delta Kappan. His book, Resegregation as Curriculum (coauthored with Kathy Kinslow), won the American Association for Teaching and Curriculum 2017 Book of the Year Award. Nathalie Sinclair is Distinguished University Professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. She has worked primarily in the field of

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mathematics education, with a particular interest in theories of embodiment, aesthetics and materiality, and their consequences for designing and studying the use of digital technologies in the teaching and learning of mathematics. With Elizabeth de Freitas, she is Co-Author of Mathematics and the Body: Material Entanglements in the Classroom (2014). With Petra Mikulan, she is Co-Author of Time and Education: Time Pedagogy against Oppression (2023). Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is Professor in the Mary Frances Early College of Education and Affiliated Professor of both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Institute for Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on poststructural theories of language and human being and post qualitative inquiry. She’s especially interested in the new empiricisms, the new materialisms, and the posthuman enabled by the ontological turn. Dorthe Staunæs, Professor in social psychology at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, is curious about intersectional becomings in educational and datafied contexts as well as in affective pedagogies and interspecies pedagogies. Her approach is affirmative critique when she is looking for ephemeral tendencies and things left out. She finds inspiration and guidance in affect studies, posthumanism, Black studies, Black feminism, decolonial methodologies, and feminist new materialism. Currently, she is PI of two research projects Diversity work as mood work and Affective Investments in STEM at Danish Universities. http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/[email protected]. Marek Tesar is Professor, Head of School, and Associate Dean International at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He is Editor-in-Chief of Policy Futures in Education (SAGE), and current President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA), and a deputy editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory. His research is focused on philosophical methods, childhood studies, and early childhood education, with expertise in the philosophy of education and childhood. His latest research is concerned with the construction of childhoods, notions of place/space, and methodological and philosophical thinking around ontologies and the ethics of researching these notions. Laura Trafí-Prats is Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University School of Health and Education and full member of the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI). She is a former associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Department of Art and Design. Her interests include youth participation, art-based methodologies, eco-sensory studies, digital life, and children’s art. She is Co-Editor with Aurelio Castro-Varela of Visual Participatory Arts Based Research in the City: Ontology, Aesthetics and

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Ethics (2022) and with Chris Schulte of New Images of Thought in the Study of Childhood Drawing (2022). She is current PI in the ESRC-funded project Mapping spatial practices and social distancing in smart schools: Sensory and digital ethnographic methods. Weili Zhao is Professor of Curriculum Studies at Hangzhou Normal University of China. She obtained her PhD from the University of Wisconsin Madison, United States, and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With intellectual training in both discourse analysis and curriculum studies, she has been historicizing discourses, languages, and translingual practices (translation) as a material (de)colonial gesture in transnational curriculum knowledge transfer and (re)production against the modernity-coloniality problematic. She is on an international editorial team for doing a Routledge book series on Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research (https:// postqualitativeresearch.com/) and a selection of her publications are available at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Weili-Zhao.

FOREWORD Refusing man and his method in postfoundational inquiry Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre

Contributors to and readers of this book about postfoundational approaches to inquiry have, no doubt, encountered foundations that have constrained their scholarship and their lives. Those who agree with Butler (1992) that any foundations we lay down are always already contingent—that is, they are invented, made, and can therefore be refused and re-made—may, nonetheless, find themselves trapped in foundations they recognize and try to resist as well as others that remain imperceptible limits. The good news is that nonfoundational scholarship that has always refused invariable, stable foundations in favor of variation, experimentation, and creation has been available for centuries. The first task of postfoundational scholars trying to escape the foundations that have trapped them, then, may well be to study those philosophers’ theories and concepts. It is important to understand that in different onto-epistemological arrangements, structures, grids of intelligibility, systems of thought, or images of thought concepts such as knowledge, truth, being/reality, reason, language, power, agency, the human, and others are described together; that is, their descriptions align and organize the conceptual order (see, e.g., St. Pierre, 2000). Further, as Derrida (1966/1978) explained, “since these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics” (p. 281). Derrida’s caution is critical for postfoundational inquiry lest researchers try to use concepts from incommensurable conceptual orders together, for example, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept rhizome, which is antimethod, in a study that employs a methodology.

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Two concerns arise with philosophical concepts. First, as noted above, a concept may be described differently in different structures, and second, a concept that exists in one structure may not be thinkable in another. For example, the concept man—subject, I, self, person, individual with an identity, human being extracted from the rest of being—has been described differently for millennia, and the concept method—disciplinary technique used in foundational epistemes to control errant thought—cannot exist in nonfoundational or postfoundational onto-epistemologies. Though concepts like man and method are words, they are, nonetheless, powerful structures that enable us to think and live in particular ways. Words are never just words. As Derrida (1971/1982) explained, the text always already exists in relation to the world, and one of the most powerful postfoundational analyses, Derrida’s deconstruction, requires “overturning and displacing a conceptual order, as well as the nonconceptual order with which the conceptual order is articulated” (p. 329). The re-description of old concepts and the invention of new ones that enable new ways of thinking and living is, according to Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), the task of philosophy. It has also been and remains a task of scholars who always refused foundations and postfoundational scholars trying to escape them. In this essay—understanding that language and conceptual orders are folded into being—I attend to language and first briefly discuss foundationalism. Then, I describe Descartes’ foundational philosophy which has become dogmatic and almost imperceptible in Western thought. I go on to examine Descartes’ description of two concepts—man and method—which, with others, ground his foundationalism and so must be refused in postfoundational approaches to inquiry. Deconstructing those two powerful concepts has been the focus of my postfoundational, poststructural, post qualitative scholarship (e.g., St. Pierre, 2011b, 2021) for decades. I close with a suggestion for what might be done to overthrow the conceptual and nonconceptual orders of foundationalism that are baked into our thought and lives. What is a Foundation?

In this essay about postfoundationalism, I focus chiefly on the scholarship of 20th-century French intellectuals we now call poststructural who addressed the failure of foundations of Western thought made acutely apparent by World War II and subsequent 20th-century social movements. They developed different philosophical analyses and redescribed and invented concepts to critique different problematic foundations based on their expertise and interests. Importantly, they argued that foundations are not “real” even if they are powerful but are invented, made by people. Rorty (1979), for example, argued that a foundation is not a necessary truth, as is generally assumed, but desire, “a desire for constraint—a desire to find ‘foundations’ to which

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one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid” (p. 315). Foundationalism is conventionally associated with epistemology and the belief that true epistemic knowledge must rest on secure foundations. Yet if knowledge is knowledge of the world, then foundationalism is also concerned with ontology, the nature of being, of reality. Kuhn’s (1962/1970) question demonstrates the necessity of thinking epistemology and ontology together: “What must the world be like for man to know it” (p. 173)? Barad (2007), thinking with Derrida, invented the concept ethico-onto-epistemology (p. 185) to signal that our descriptions of ontology and epistemology are not neutral but ethical projects. In other words, we are responsible for the ontologies and epistemologies we invent and the world they create. What were some of the foundations, the desires, the poststructuralists refused? With Derrida (1966/1978), one might think of a foundation as an invariable, authorizing presence, a center that organizes and secures a structure but is not of the structure, is elsewhere, outside the field of play and, hence, untouchable, foundational. In an early lecture, Derrida (1966/1978) listed the following foundations: “presence, existence, substance … transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth” (p. 280). Derrida’s (1968/1982) concept différance points to what is always already differentiating, becoming different, the “playing movement that ‘produces’ differences” (p. 11). The concepts foundation and différance exist in incommensurable onto-epistemological arrangements, and they cannot be thought together. Différance will always topple foundations. Origins are often considered foundational by poststructural scholars. Foucault (1998a) described origins as “immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession” (p. 371) and ground it. But Foucault understood that the origin is not pure and pristine—the site of primordial truth— but, as Davidson (1986) explained, contaminated by “chance, passion, petty malice, surprises, feverish agitation, unsteady victories, and power” (p. 224). Foucault’s (1976/1978) re-description of the concept power as a “multiplicity of force relations immanent to the sphere in which they operate” (p. 92) is always already a threat to the stability of the origin or any other foundation. Baudrillard (1981/1988), too, critiqued myths of the origin and signs of the Real that secure ontology and then epistemology and wrote that, post foundations, “never again will the real have to be produced” (p. 167). He reminded us that reality is just a word and that what it represents varies according to ontological commitments, so reality cannot serve as a foundation for true knowledge. Lyotard (1979/1984) invented the concept paralogy to call into question grand, foundational, legitimizing metanarratives such as the liberation of humanity and the unity of knowledge that spawn smaller, everyday narratives that control and secure the truth and argued that postmodern science

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is “discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical” (p. 60). For Lyotard, all presumed foundational structures are always already in ruins. With Deleuze (1968/1994), one might think of a foundation as a given (but see Sellars 1956/1997), what “everybody knows” (p. 130), dogma, what goes without saying, what exists prior to the world of human activity, what is not variable and not called into question. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) invented a pre-philosophical plane of immanence characterized by pure variation, pure difference, composed of unformed elements, movement and velocity, forces, becomings that never come together into a stable unity, a foundation, a given. Of course, those poststructural scholars invented many other concepts that refuse the long habit of Western thought that embraces foundational logic. What is important here is not just that they called foundationalism into question but that they argued those foundations never really existed. They explained that foundationalism had been described and invented by Western philosophers like Plato and Descartes and then repeated and perpetuated for centuries as other scholars embraced it. Indeed, in reading Descartes, one can see how, in just a few sentences, he described/invented an entire onto-epistemological arrangement, an image of thought, that, through repetition and habit, continues to organize Western thought, especially Western science. One might think of foundationalism, then, as a habit found in the traditional and powerful philosophy of, for example, Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. However, foundationalism was always countered by a lineage of nonfoundational philosophers including Lucretius, Spinoza, Leibniz, James, Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon, Deleuze, and Foucault. It is to their philosophy and their concepts, especially to their ontology of immanence that poststructural and postfoundational scholars have turned. Whereas foundationalism is characterized by a two-world ontology, theirs is characterized by a one-world ontology, perhaps Deleuze’s ontology of immanence mentioned earlier (see, e.g., St. Pierre, 2019). Foundationalism assumes that Being is split between (1) the empirical world of human activity that is unstable, variable, and so cannot serve as a firm foundation for true knowledge and (2) a foundational/transcendent world outside human activity that is stable, unchanging, and a reliable source of truth. An example of a two-world ontology is Plato’s with his ideal world of Forms that never change and another human world of appearances, always in flux. Postfoundational, poststructural inquiry relies on a one-world ontology of immanence in which nothing is, nothing (not even man) exists—certainly not stable foundations or transcendent ideals. Instead, everything is on one plane and in continuous variation, always already coming into being, becoming. In an ontology of immanence, being is pure variation, limitless. But a one-world ontology is a threat to foundational epistemology, because if being is always different and changing, then knowledge cannot be secured.

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Descartes and Foundationalism

Where did foundationalism come from? A thorough discussion of that question is beyond the scope of this essay, yet a study of foundations in Western thought inevitably leads to the 17th-century Enlightenment and to Descartes, who has been called the father of foundationalism. Determined to base his philosophy on indubitable truth, the young Descartes (1637/1993) developed a method “to reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt” (p. 18). In his search for “a mode of being where doubt was no longer possible” (Foucault, 1984/1997, p. 294), Descartes rejected the body, its senses, and the entire, changing empirical world which can’t be trusted. After employing his method of doubt and rejecting one thing after the other, he wrote the following: But immediately afterward I noticed that, while I wanted thus to think that everything was false, it necessarily had to be the case that I, who was thinking this, was something. And noticing that this truth—I think, therefore I am—was so firm and so assured … I judged that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking. (Descartes, 1637/1993, p. 18) With those five words (two of which are “I”), Descartes invented a foundational philosophy, a conceptual order in which the following are aligned: (1) a two-world ontology—a description of Being that separates human being from being more generally, (2) an inward-turning epistemology that relies on the clear, rational, objective mind of man, and (3) an emphasis on a method that uses doubt to produce unshakable, true knowledge. And, as Foucault (1984/1997) noted, in Descartes’ image of thought his “mode of being is defined entirely in terms of knowledge, and that philosophy in turn is defined in terms of the development of the knowing subject” (p. 294). With his first principle, Descartes wrote into existence a foundational conceptual order that has become so habitual and pervasive in Western thought it is now almost imperceptible: true knowledge can be determined only by the clarity of the rational mind using a pre-existing method to protect true knowledge from the error and inconstancy of the human, empirical world. Only scientific knowledge, knowledge subjected to the test of scientific method, is true knowledge; and it is foundational, true everywhere, all the time. There’s no such thing as “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988) for Descartes. But this new and different relation of truth and man, the subject, Descartes’ cogito, was problematic from the beginning as Foucault (1983/1984) pointed out in the following long quotation: In European culture up to the sixteenth century, the problem remains: What is the work which I must effect upon myself so as to be capable and worthy

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of acceding to the truth? To put it another way: truth always has a price; no access to truth without ascesis. In Western culture up to the sixteenth century, asceticism and access to truth are always more or less obscurely linked. Descartes, I think, broke with this when he said, “To accede to truth, it suffices that I be any subject which can see what is evident.” Evidence is substituted for ascesis at the point where the relationship to the self intersects the relationship to others and the world. The relationship to the self no longer needs to be ascetic to get into relation to the truth. It suffices that the relationship to the self reveals to me the obvious truth of what I see for me to apprehend that truth definitively. Thus, I can be immoral and know the truth [emphasis added]. I believe that this is an idea which, more or less explicitly, was rejected by all previous culture. Before Descartes, one could not be impure, immoral, and know the truth. With Descartes, direct evidence is enough. After Descartes, we have a nonascetic subject of knowledge. This change makes possible the institutionalization of modern science. (pp. 371–372) Foucault (1998b) argued that the “great Cartesian break” was one of the most fundamental events in the history of modern philosophy because it shifted the relations between “truth and subjectivity” (p. 447) and initiated the separation of philosophy and science. After the break, an unethical scientist could produce true knowledge as long as the method (preferably mathematical) was objective. In other words, method secures true knowledge regardless of the ethics of the knower. Because of his insecurity and anxiety, his fear of contingency, and his desire for foundational truth, Descartes invented that new human being, a subject of knowledge—the cogito—a human being with a method. Ever since, those who have recognized the dangers of Descartes’ project have called into question his human being, his subject, the man he invented, and that man’s troubled relation with the rest of being. Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) also critiqued Descartes’ philosophy and pointed out that his method called into question neither (1) the nature of the “I” who thinks nor (2) the nature of thinking, thought itself. In other words, Descartes’ philosophy did not begin with doubting everything, as he claimed, but with a pre-philosophical image of thought that assumed a particular subject, his cogito, who can know the truth using a particular method—the right use of reason. After all, his cogito is a thinking subject, not a walking subject, as Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987, p. 128) pointed out. For Descartes, being equals thinking—I think, therefore I am. However, that statement is an ontological claim, a belief; it was not proven by Descartes’ method of doubt. As Deleuze (1968/1994) argued, Descartes assumed that “everybody is supposed to know implicitly what it means to think” (p. 131) and, thus, to be.

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Why have Descartes’ concepts and foundational onto-epistemology been so powerful and long-lasting? The privileged have always found attractive the cogito, whose supposed clear, mathematical, rational, systematic thought guarantees protection from the difference of the Other and the “big blooming, buzzing confusion” (James, 1911/1996, p. 49) of the unruly, unconstrained sensible world. Hoagland (2007) explained that, for Descartes, epistemology became “a practice of ignorance—a methodological inward-turning, promoting cognitive dismissal of all that lies outside its bounds of sense, and resulting in a highly sophisticated Eurocentrism” (p. 101). Centuries later, Descartes’ epistemological anxiety and his “methodological solipsism” (Rorty, 1979, p. 192) continue to plague Western thought, and the “set of transformations or mutations” (Foucault, 2008, p. 271) he introduced that created a different order of things has been normalized. However, much of the “new” work in the humanities and social sciences—posthumanism, new materialism, new empiricism, and post qualitative inquiry—shifts the focus from epistemology to ontology and away from method entirely. Refusing Foundations

What happens when foundations are called into question and even refused? As Keenan (1997) explained, the loss of foundations is the “removal of grounds, the withdrawal of the rules or the knowledge on which we might rely to make our decisions for us. No grounds means no alibis, no elsewhere to which we might refer the instance of our decision” [emphasis added] (p. 1). Without foundations and methods to secure them, one is unmoored, without the security, certainty, truth, and comfort they guarantee. No alibis—one is never off the hook—and ethics comes to the fore. What remains when the foundational is understood not just as a myth but perhaps a dangerous hoax is a different ethics—a responsibility to the possible world that is always already becoming and the invention of a “people to come” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 176). This postfoundational ethics, then, is not an acceptance of what is, an acceptance of the weight of the foundations we have invented and accept as true, but an affirmation of creation. “To affirm is to unburden, to release, to set free what lives” (Deleuze, 1962/1983, p. 185). Rajchman (2001) wrote that this affirmation: requires a belief or trust in the world and what may yet transpire in it, beyond what we are warranted to assert. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze puts the problem in terms of an original relation to the future—of a “belief of the future, in the future.” (p. 76)

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The task of postfoundational work, then, becomes one of experimentation, invention, and creation unconstrained by Descartes’ cogito and his method and girded by a trust that the world we’ve invented can be different, more just. However, that work does not happen quickly given that the dogmatic, foundational image of thought, especially Cartesianism, prevails. Rather, as Deleuze and Parnet (2002) explained, it requires “A very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor recipes” (p. 8). On the one hand, no preexisting method exists to topple the foundations our desires have created. “No method can determine in advance what compels us to think, it is rather the fortuitousness of the encounter that guarantees the necessity of what it forces us to think” (Smith, 2012, p. 181). On the other hand, philosophers who have always refused foundationalism invented many concepts, some mentioned earlier in this essay, we can use for that task. And, of course, we can invent others. Man, a Foundation

So Descartes changed the order of things, introducing a dualist ontology that separated man from everything else—Self/Other. That was a major disruption in Western thought because, as Bordo (1986) noted, for a pre-Cartesian, “prescientific understanding of the world, detachment is not an epistemological value” (p. 455). In fact, “before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved” (p. 447). The modern science instituted by this new order included not only the exact natural sciences but also the inexact human sciences—the latter imitating the former—as Man, too, became the object of science and not just a matter of opinion. The episteme of the human sciences created, in effect, “man, a being who did not exist before” (Foucault, 1966/1970, p. 363), an “empiricotranscendental doublet” (Foucault, 1983/1984, p. 319) in the “ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as a subject that knows” (Foucault, 1983/1984, 312). Derrida (1993/1994) called this new figure “man as man” (p. 67). Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) called this figure “the strange persona of Investigator advanced by the empiricists” (p. 72) who is charged with “the infinite task of knowing” (Foucault, 1966/1970, p. 244) and the creation of “new knowable objects” (p. 252), including himself. Foucault was not optimistic about either the human sciences or their man. He argued that the human sciences “are not sciences at all” (Foucault, 1966/1970, p. 366). Because of the fragility of their man, they do not rest on a firm foundation but exist in a “cloudy distribution” (p. 347), in an “essential instability” (p. 348), and are imprecise, precarious, and in peril. He even asked, “Does man exist?” (p. 322). He explained, “we are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time—and it

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is not so long ago—when the world, in order, and human beings existed, but man did not” (p. 322). It is surely interesting that, 50 years ago, Foucault suggested that the man the human sciences invented “would be effaced, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (p. 387). Of course, without man at the center of their structure, the human sciences would also be effaced. That loss, no doubt, prompts fear of postfoundational inquiry. How, then, have that man and his sciences withstood centuries of posthuman, postfoundational critique, and how do they remain credible, especially today when the undeniable empirical destruction wreaked by that man is so obvious that a new geological era has been named for him, the Anthropocene? Why do we cling to that man and live that concept? How does man continue to exist? Boundas (1991) offered an answer: “What are we? We are habits, nothing but habits, the habit of saying ‘I’” (p. x). Sauvagnargues (2013) warned of the danger of the “insidious habit of spatializing and positing an ‘I’ everywhere” (p. 43). It may be difficulat to accept that that most personal of foundational concepts, “I,” is simply a description, even a bad habit, even a disaster, but doing so can also be liberating, especially for those like Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) who have faith in a future to-come and imagine a “people to come” (p. 176), “people that do not yet exist” (p. 108). The habit of positing an “I” everywhere is difficult to break—remember Derrida’s caution— because if one invokes any of the concepts in the conceptual order in which it exists, one invokes “I” as well. Remember also that Descartes’ cogito who spawned the man of the human sciences exists in a dualist ontology, an inward-turning epistemology, and uses a pre-existing method that guarantees foundational, true knowledge. That man exists to think and to use his method to know the truth. So if one begins inquiry in that conceptual order with that particular ontology, epistemology, and method, one is immediately anchored in foundationalism and becomes that “I.” However, if one begins in a different image of thought with a one-world ontology, that “I”—who was invented in and inhabits a two-world ontology and so is separate from the rest of being—cannot be thought or lived (see, e.g., St. Pierre, 2011a). Overturning a single concept, like man, that centers a structure deconstructs the structure, but given the difficulty of refusing the “I” of foundational inquiry, it may help to refuse other concepts with which it is entangled as well. In that regard, the second Cartesian concept I discuss in this essay is method. Descartes’ man cannot exist without his method, and if one begins inquiry with method, one begins with his cogito and foundationalism. Method, a Foundation

Method is obviously foundational for the anxious Descartes—without his method (thinking, doubting) he cannot even exist, much less attain his goal of

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producing true knowledge. Modern science is grounded in a dualist Cartesian onto-epistemology that must extract man—the objective, rational scientist— from the contingent world so he can do science on it. And to avoid error, he needs a method to provide “‘crushing’ proof and ‘compelling’ demonstration, that which cannot possibly be doubted, ‘putting Nature to the rack’ as Bacon delicately put it” (McCloskey, 2001, p. 112). Near the beginning of the 20th century, logical positivism/logical empiricism was invented in Europe, furthering Descartes’ project, to ensure that the inexact human sciences are as rigorous as the exact natural sciences (see Aaronowitz & Ausch, 2000; St. Pierre, 2012). To that end, positivism claims it can measure, predict, and control being with mathematical and linguistic precision and clarity. Though some of the human, social sciences escaped positivism, many did not and are now “paradigms behind” (Patton, 2008, p. 269) and stuck in their particular foundationalism. Positivism reinforced the human science’s obsession with method to the point that inquirers in positivist disciplines cannot inquire (think) without method. Like Descartes, they must begin inquiry with method and tend to methodologize everything. Even qualitative research methodology, which was invented in the 20th century as an interpretive critique of positivism has been unable to escape it. For decades, qualitative methodology has been positivized, formalized, and scientized in textbooks, handbooks, journals, university curriculum, and other disciplinary structures that continue to separate science from philosophy. Qualitative methodology’s process—what to do—is now so clear it requires little thought: just follow the process, and the method will guarantee true findings at the end. What is puzzling is that even though qualitative methodology retains a two-world, Cartesian, scientific foundationalism, it has become the default for “new” work that claims to use a one-world ontology, e.g., new material and new empirical theories, affect theory, and so on. However, neither the man nor the method of qualitative methodology is thinkable in the one-world ontology of those images of thought in which man does not exist but is always becoming, and his method becomes irrelevant. In nonfoundational, postfoundational conceptual orders, thought not only doesn’t need a method, it doesn’t need an “I.” Postfoundational, nonfoundational inquiry, then, is marked by the absence of humanism’s man and his method. Since the institution of the human sciences centuries ago, those interested in postfoundational, poststructural, posthuman inquiry have deconstructed humanism’s man and his method, working their ruins so diligently that they fell apart. Therefore, in the “new” work that claims to be postfoundational, it is no longer enough just to critique method, to tweak it, or keep just a few of its concepts and practices. It must be refused entirely at every turn. Method can no longer upstage philosophy.

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In closing, I restate that in postfoundational inquiry, the Cartesian desire for method that tells researchers what to do to protect thought from error must be put aside. Foucault (as cited in Halperin, 1995) wrote that refusing the instrumental techniques of method doesn’t mean “there’s nothing to be done;” on the contrary, “there are a thousand things to do, to invent” (p. 53) in postfoundational inquiry. Postfoundational, nonfoundational inquiry does not begin with method. It begins with the theories and concepts of those nonfoundational philosophers who always refused method. Perhaps the best advice for those interested in postfoundational inquiry, then, is to stop studying methodology and start studying philosophy. In that scholarship, ethics becomes a commitment to images of thought that may at first seem too hard to think. But no alibis. Too much is at stake to slip back into the easy, bad habit of man and his method. Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre References Aronowitz, S. & Ausch, R. (2000). A critique of methodological reason. Sociological Quarterly, 41(4), pp. 699–719. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Baudrillard, J. (1988). Simulacra and simulations. In M. Poster (Ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected writings (P. Foss, P. Patton, & P. Beitchman, Trans.) (pp. 166–184). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1981) Bordo, S. (1986). The Cartesian masculinization of thought. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 11(3), pp. 439–456. Boundas, C. V. (1991). Translator’s introduction. G. Deleuze. (1991). Empiricism and subjectivity: An essay on Hume’s theory of human nature. (C. V. Boundas, Trans.) (pp. 1–19). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1953) Butler, J. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of “postmodernism.” In J. Butler & J. W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists theorize the political (pp. 3–21). Routledge. Davidson, A. I. (1986). Archaeology, genealogy, ethics. In D.C. Hoy (Ed.), Foucault: A critical reader (pp. 221–233). Basil Blackwell. Deleuze, G. (1983). Nietzsche and philosophy. (H. Tomlinson, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1962) Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968) Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? (H. Tomlinson & G. Burchell, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1991) Deleuze, G. & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II. (Revised edition). (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans). Columbia University Press.

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Derrida, J. (1978). Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.) (pp. 278–293). University of Chicago Press. (Lecture delivered 1966) Derrida, J. (1982). Différance. In J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.) (pp. 1–27). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1968) Derrida, J. (1982). Signature, event, context. In Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). (pp. 307–330). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1971) Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1993) Descartes, R. (1993). Discourse on method and Meditations on first philosophy. (4th ed.). (D. A. Cress, Trans.). Hackett Publishing Company. (Discourse on Method first published 1637 and Meditations on First Philosophy first published 1641) Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. (A.M.S. Smith, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1966) Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality Volume 1: An introduction. R. Hurley, Trans. Vintage Books. (Original work published 1976) Foucault, M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 340–372). Pantheon Books (Interview conducted 1983). Foucault, M. (1997). The ethics of the concern of the self as a practice of freedom. (H. Becker, R. Fornet-Betancourt & A Gomez-Müller, Interviewers; P. Aranov & D. McGrawth, Trans.) In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and truth (pp. 281–301). New Press. (Original work published 1984) Foucault, M. (1998a). Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In J. D. Fabion (Ed.), Essential works of Foucault: Vol. 2, Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (pp. 369–391). (D. F. Brouchard & S. Simon, Trans.). The New Press. (Reprinted from Hommage á Jean Hyppolite. Presses Universitaires de France, pp. 145–172, 1971) Foucault, M. (1998b). Life: Experience and science (R. Hurley, Trans.). In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Aesthetics, method, and epistemology (pp. 465–478). New Press. (Reprinted from Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 90(a), March 1985, p. 3–14.) Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 1979. (M. Snellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. Halperin, D. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography. Oxford University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Hoagland, S. L. (2007). Denying relationality: Epistemology and ethics and ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.). Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp. 95– 118). State University of New York Press. James, W. (1996). Some problems of philosophy: A beginning of an introduction to philosophy. University of Nebraska Press. (Original work published 1911) Keenan, T. (1997). Fables of responsibilities: Aberrations and predicaments in ethics and politics. University of California Press. Kuhn, T. (1962/1970). The structure of a scientific revolution (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. (G. Bennington & B. Massumi, Trans). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)

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McCloskey, D. (2001). The genealogy of postmodernism: An economist’s guide. In S. Cullenberg, J. Amariglio, and D. F. Ruccio (Eds.). Postmodernism, economics, and knowledge (pp. 102–128). Routledge. Patton, C. (2008). Finding “fields” in the field: Normalcy, risk, and ethnographic inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research. 1(2): 255–274. Rajchman, J. (2001). The Deleuze connections. The MIT Press. Rorty, R. M. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton University Press. Sauvagnargues, A. (2013). Deleuze and art. (S. Bankston, Trans.). Bloomsbury Publishing. Sellars, W. (1997). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Harvard University Press. (Essay originally published in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I., Herbert Feigl & Michael Sciven (Eds.). University of Minnesota Press, 1956). Smith, D. W. (2012). Concepts and creation. In R. Braidotti & P. Pisters (Eds.) Revising normativity with Deleuze (pp. 175–188). Bloomsbury. St. Pierre, E. A. (2000). Poststructural feminism in education: An overview. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 13(5), 477–515. St. Pierre, E.A. (2011a). Refusing human being in humanist qualitative inquiry. In N.K. Denzin & M.D. Giardina (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry and the global crisis (pp. 40– 55). Left Coast Press. St. Pierre, E.A. (2011b). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N.K. Denzin & Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.). Sage handbook of qualitative inquiry (4th ed.) (pp. 611–635). Sage. St. Pierre, E.A. (2012). Another postmodern report on knowledge: Positivism and its others. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 15(4), pp. 483–503. St. Pierre, E.A. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), pp. 3–16. St. Pierre, E.A. (2021). Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the creation of the new. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 3–9.

1 POSTFOUNDATIONAL INQUIRY AFTER METHOD Reorientations, enactments, and openings Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei

Introduction

In 1992, Judith Butler published “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’.” In that essay, Butler argues that all claims to foundations and universals are constituted by not only what gets authorized but also by what is excluded. The question for theoretical foundations, then, is how power pervades each move to establish the normative conditions of inclusions and exclusions. It is a critique of exclusions that expose the contingency of foundations, according to Butler. Rather than a nihilistic antifoundational stance (which Butler asserts is simply the other side of a binary), what is necessary is keeping any new concept open to contestation. Foundations are incessant and inevitable, Butler contends. The work, then, is not to do away with foundations but to position them as permanently contingent. Over 30 years later, Butler’s arguments still resonate, given the surge of postfoundational inquiry that has deterritorialized traditional qualitative research. What has enabled this deterritorialization is a deconstruction of method that has disturbed the normative, founding moves of conventional qualitative research: namely, the primacy of preexistent methods and humancentered representationalism. Deconstructive critiques of voice, data, analysis, experience, representation, and validity – the habits of method – have troubled these inherited humanist concepts for their exclusionary power.1 Put another way, these critiques have mapped how the normalizations of predetermined method do not recognize (and thus exclude) other forms of inquiry that are speculative, affective, atmospheric, transversal, pre-personal, involuntary, and inventive. Such critiques have made apparent the normative privileging of being over becoming, perception over sensings, phenomenological DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-1

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experience over immanence, language over matter, things over doings, presence over absence, humans over nonhumans, epistemology over ontology. Through a deconstruction of exclusions, what has emerged is the contingency of method and its instability as a foundation for thought and inquiry. Thus, one of the aims of this book is to ask: what comes after a deconstruction and critique of method? In writing about feminist theory almost two decades ago, Grosz (2011) explains that a mere critique of existing knowledge limits or constrains the production of the new. Drawing upon Foucault and the collaborative work of Deleuze and Guattari, Grosz claims that critique is not “so much about the generation of new truths, which must meet complex and normalizing conditions to be part of the true, but new thinking” (p. 77, emphasis ours). We agree with Grosz that critiquing has run its course; to stay within the realm of critique or deconstruction is to remain tethered to foundational approaches borne out of existing knowledge and practices. As generative of the unthought, postfoundational approaches are currently ushering in a shift from critique and deconstruction – to creation. Philosophically-informed inquiry and its approaches are positioned within postfoundational paradigms, borrowed from the humanities and sciences, that are enveloped in what is referred to as the ontological turn. As we have previously noted: These paradigms demand a shift from method to a reconsideration of what demands are placed on objects (things) used in inquiry: a shift from what we can know about an object (method and epistemology) to what a particular object does when we enact inquiry – thus objects of knowledge become doings with ontological force, not inert things waiting to be interpreted. (Jackson & Mazzei, 2017, p. 726) A postfoundational approach stays open to makings and reconfigurations and considers the inquirer as constituted by practices of inquiry – rather than presiding over and selecting from ready-made methods that are given in advance. This book, Postfoundational Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry, aims to move beyond a critique and deconstruction of method in order to assemble ontological enactments of inquiry. We invited authors to offer enactments as a way of reorienting toward what is unthought, not yet, and becoming. This “not yet” is that which happens “in the moment of sensing, thinking, reading, and writing in the production of the new” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, p. 5). These enactments are not bound to foundational assumptions in that they do not follow predetermined method, nor do they attempt to represent traditional accounts of fieldwork. Furthermore, they do not aim to critique or deconstruct. Instead, they overturn and displace foundations not only by attuning to

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the contingency of what emerges but also by decentering human agency in favor of pre-personal, affective encounters that are of the world. A philosophically-informed, postfoundational approach to inquiry is permanently contingent (Butler) in its emergence and responsiveness to involuntary, relational encounters – all of which open space for invention and creation. Such contingent analytic frames can only be produced in an ontology that offers an “undoing” (Butler, 2004) of universals, displacing many of the normalizing features of humanist inquiry. Yet, as postfoundational, the approaches enacted by authors in this book remain open as “sites of possible reconfigurations” to be used “in the service of an alternate production” (Butler, 1992, pp. 16–17). In what follows, we explain how we conceive postfoundational inquiry as emergent, relational, responsive, involuntary, and inventive. While we name the facets of these contingent approaches and explain how they work, we do so not in order to fix a new method, but to provoke new enactments and to spur new connectives. Postfoundational approaches to inquiry are emergent

Beginning in the midst. Putting thought in motion. Inquiry as emergent is “thought in the act” (Manning & Massumi, 2014). Postfoundational inquiry is an attunement to that which is not yet; it is inquiry ushered forth in the middle of things without a predetermined path. We have previously written of this emergence as what happens when we think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). When inquiry starts in the middle – and when we remain open to that which is not recognizable – thought takes flight and newness beckons. Thinking, Braidotti (2019) reminds us, is not a bringing forth of an immutable truth, but is instead a relational activity (p. 68). These relational events cannot be planned or willed into existence, but rather are a result of attunements and sensings of becoming with the world. Inquiry, as thought, is ushered forth in this emergence. Emergence in the context of inquiry can be felt as a process methodology – as following that which lures. Informed by Whitehead’s process philosophy (1978), inquiry shifts from subjects as knowledge makers to subjects as emerging with the world. Many of the chapters in this collection provide enactments that speak to this emergence, informed by various concepts and theorists. For example, Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila (Chapter 15, this collection) enact emergent inquiries in a rush of stories as activated in relational encounters with the work of Tsing (2015), and the multiple messmates of patches of theory, patches of documentation, water, and preschool children’s worries and questions. Such worryings and questionings are sensings – enticed by everyday water practices in the preschool bathroom. Multiple messmates are brought forth in an assemblage of water, sewers, creeks, fish, and animal and plant

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life forms. Following inventive escapes that help them imagine multiple ways of thinking, knowing, relating, and storying, Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postilla offer multiple storying as a patchwork form of collaborative knowledgeproduction in their enactment of a mutual process methodology. The focus thus shifts from an understanding of the multiple inquirers (project leaders, children, water engineers) as distant from the makings to a consideration of how these subjects – as lured – emerge in relation in this water assemblage. Debaise (2006) also theorizes the emergence of a philosophically-informed “method” in crafting an understanding of a speculative empiricism informed by his reading of James and Whitehead. Debaise asserts that any philosophical “method” is no longer a correspondence between an idea and what exists. In other words, inquiry is not a search for what is (Braidotti’s immutable truth) but is instead things in the making (p. 10). It is in an attunement to the emergence of things in the making that reconfigurings are brought forth. For example, de Freitas and Trafí-Prats (Chapter 4, this volume) speculate with digital technologies to reconsider how what is to be found in a school building is much more than the physical environment. In so doing, they create an opening to think with atmospheric data as they reposition learning environments formed in the making by “physical, temporal, and affective bodying habits” (de Freitas and Trafí-Prats, this collection). Attuning to the atmospheric conditions of school buildings, de Freitas and Trafí-Prats experiment with these digital technologies to investigate what they call “sensory-affective experiences of school buildings.” Their experimental approach brings forth the role of contingency and speculation in postfoundational inquiry that is concerned with both the political and material engagement emerging from digital transformations of life and culture. Working with students as partners to reanimate the school milieu, “the evental nature of the building was lured out of stasis by the student engagement with various technical and sensory devices” (see Chapter 4, this volume). Attuning to and sensing these openings, emergent relations in the making engender contingent and speculative postfoundational inquiry that is activated and enacted by them and the other authors in this collection. In this book, Juelskjær offers “cascade questioning” as an enactment of inquiry in an iterative (re)opening of spacetimematter worldings. In a doing inspired by Barad’s agential realism, she views the exploration of specificities as an emergent endeavor, pursued through a diffractive reading of the work of contemporary Danish postcolonial scholars as well as of historical and present-day archives. Lured by a memorial statue and its complex relations within colonialism and race, Juelskjær sensed the “cascade questioning” emerging in the act. Her approach reorients the function of questions in postfoundational inquiry: not in the conventional sense as something posed in order to find a solution, but as providing an ontological opening for the way in which questioning functions in a reworlding. Similar to Debaise’s assertion that “method” is no longer a search for what is, Juelskjær writes, “It does not mean that provisional answers cannot be crafted, but as a researcher, one

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must pause and ponder the question: What is in an answer/answering?” (see Chapter 10, this collection). In Chapter 12 on teaching as informed by postfoundational philosophical concepts, Kuby and Bozalek (this collection) center pedagogical practices as enactments informed by postfoundational thinking. Attuning to practices that disrupt traditional power relations of teacher/student, they describe these enactments as emergent, collaborative, and processual. Approaching pedagogy in this way, they focus on “how involving postfoundational inquiry in both the process and the content of pedagogies creates opportunities to think and be(come) otherwise” (Chapter 12). Working across global northern and southern contexts, and with scholars in varying stages of their careers, they create pedagogical maneuvers that refuse dogmatic techniques and produce “reading-writing-thinking-making” as processual, collective, curious learning. Also writing about emergent pedagogies are Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise in Chapter 8. Sparked by feminist posthuman frameworks in general and feminist environmental humanities in particular, Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise experiment with common worlding pedagogies in early childhood education. Starting elsewhere with these pedagogies, they “craft postfoundational inquiries that are situated, responsive, emergent, collective, and attuned to the processes of worlding” (this volume). Through their emergent approach of composing worlds, they attempt to undo the foundational presence of developmentalism in early childhood studies. In their chapter, they take up the challenge to enact new common worlding pedagogies animated by “learning with and situatedness” (Chapter 8, this volume). Like the approaches to inquiry mapped in this book, pedagogy as thought with postfoundational concepts is emergent, always in the making, and coaxed by the not yet. Staunæs and Mengel (this volume) also enact an emergent process as they name and map multiple iterations toward their development of a “performative cartography.” In their mapping, they approach archival work as contingent, agential, and experimental. Positioning archival documents as agential, they stay in the middle of multiple iterations of their project, inviting readers to sense and attune with them in these reconfigurations and reanimations. They refuse claims that policy documents are non-performative, and thereby create space for the approaches that “allow for more-than-human agency” to appear in their vibrant cartography. In their postfoundational approach, they are enticed by the archive’s capacity to affect toward expansive reimaginations of “how diversity work can be thought otherwise” (Chapter 6), making room for an emergent, affective encounter with diversity work in Danish higher education. As emergent, postfoundational approaches to inquiry happen in the middle of things, in everyday practices and beckonings. These emergences are felt as responses to encounters not of our own making, but as those which lure and attract and which reconstitute the inquirer – as taken up in the next section.

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Postfoundational approaches to inquiry are responsive to involuntary, relational encounters with the world

In her book Posthuman Knowledge, Braidotti (2019) writes: Posthuman thinking is a relational activity that occurs by composing points of contact with a myriad of elements within the complex multiplicity of each subject and across multiple other subjects situated in the world. Thinking takes the form of cartographic renderings of embedded and embodied relational encounters. These encounters can be with texts, institutions or other concrete social realities, or people. (p. 123) Postfoundational inquiry is not only situated and relational but also involuntary and uncontrolled. To be in relation is a becoming with the world in our doings and practices – a way of responding to unexpected encounters that shock us into thought (Massumi, 2002). These relational encounters are not of our own creation but are those which lure and attract. Encounters are not necessarily human, and they are of the world in our ordinary, everyday practices. Yet, encounters are so unanticipated that they draw us in, forcing us to think otherwise. In writing about the ordinary, Kathleen Stewart (2007) describes the ordinary as a mode of attunement (p. 127). It is an attentiveness to chance encounters that are spontaneous and essential to becoming. And, there is no beginning or origin for such attunements. Instead, the world beckons. These encounters with the world are “jolts that shock and surprise” (Mazzei, 2016), inviting our participation. An attunement to relational encounters is to become undone, unbounded by predetermined, static particularities of a body, a place, a space, a time. This relationality activates circuits that lead elsewhere: to what could not be anticipated, predetermined, or ordered. As Osgood (this collection) writes, “Research can no longer be thought of as time-bound, place-specific, and outcome-oriented. Instead, it must be thought of as on-going, tentacular, affective, and affecting.” In her chapter, Osgood takes us on an adventure into childhood studies and childing ways of being in the world. She does this through relational sensings and encounters as they unfold long after events have occurred. The points of contact that we encounter in our adventures with Osgood are provoked by Haraway’s invitation to engage in practices of serious play in order to reorient thought and practice. As readers, we are invited to become with/in this unbounded, playful archive in an un/relearning how to be in the world. From the relational encounters offered by Osgood (Chapter 7), we come to appreciate that “postfoundational childhood studies insist that uncertainty, speculation, and curiosity displace conventions that rest upon a search for knowability, linearity, and solutions.”

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As we wrote above, relational encounters are not limited to the human, and they are unanticipated because they emerge in the midst of our everyday doings. This relational responsiveness to the involuntary is exemplified in Zhao’s chapter and her becoming undone through a specific encounter with the Chinese wind, which happened by surprise while studying curriculum discourses at a school in China. For Zhao, wind emerged not as a metaphor but as an encounter to take thought elsewhere: beyond modern representation and the organizational logic of language. Chinese wind provoked an undoing of Zhao’s approach to inquiry into curriculum by enabling a “cut into the present, exposing deeper the coloniality of knowledge, being, and power of modernity on current Chinese people” (see Zhao, Chapter 14 in this volume). Zhao explains that this undoing, which accompanies creation, is revealed retrospectively (instead of planned for in advance). Becoming undone through encounters also reconstitutes the inquirer – thus urging a reconsideration of agency. Zhao recounts her becoming and undoing as a researcher: from one who plans and attempts to control the process of research to one who follows and responds to cosmologies that are immanent to a worlding. Agency, in Zhao’s account, is not the purview of the inquirer: the “dancing” Chinese wind is its own force, “in and out of tune, unexpected and unplanned” (see Zhao, Chapter 14, this volume). Similarly, in their contribution to this book, Berger Correa and Ringrose (Chapter  2) are “jarred and jolted” by what they first encounter as defensive masculinity in their research on sexual violence workshops in secondary schools. Working against the foundational assumptions of the larger research project that they discuss in this chapter, they “dwell upon moments of ‘failure/disruption’” in a relational encounter not of their own making. Furthermore, Berger Correa and Ringrose argue that their own feminist pedagogical practices became reoriented because of the contingency of their postfoundational approach and these affective sensings, felt intensively. Their own subjectivities as feminist researchers were reconstituted by material-sensorial “sonic booms” (i.e., classroom disturbances). The agentic force of what they deem “affective intensities” opened them to the unthought, and their enactments of attuning to their own changing affective states make the new possible – including their own researcher-becomings. Presenting a similar jolt, Dernikos and Lesko (Chapter 3 in this collection) attune to atmospheric violence in an enactment of queering critique. In a resituating of violence and a return to an earlier encounter in an elementary classroom, Dernikos accounts for the way in which she is reconstituted as an inquirer in this atmospheric milieu. Drawing attention to involuntary encounters of sonic vibrations, and enacting the sensorial affects and effects of queering critique, this queering is relationally responsive to “histories and atmospheres of violence” for the purpose of reorienting “research capacities to attune to violence” (this volume). Being captivated by these involuntary, relational encounters in a Reader’s Workshop

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with first graders, Dernikos is reconstituted when “her hegemonic ear and her Professional Expertise of the American Schooling Project” shifts, bringing forth a site of struggle in an acknowledgment of her “own complicity in reinscribing violent atmospheres” (this volume). It is in an attentiveness to these agentic undoings that create openings for Dernikos and Lesko to enact their postfoundational approach. In Chapter 5, Franklin-Phipps (this volume) extends our consideration of “the world” in her discussion of involuntary and uncontrolled relational encounters with the pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and preconceptual. She does this by positioning inquiry as attending to hauntings, both real in a material sense and imagined in an affective sense that invite new sensings and imaginings. Making room for that which has been “vanished and disappeared,” she is “interested in a conceptual exploration of how conjuring ghosts might produce new categories for knowing, being, and sensing” (see Chapter 5). In her postfoundational approach, she is inventing a way of attuning and responding to unexpected encounters in an “attention to that which is not immediately visible [that] expands efforts to know [and sense] both the present and the past” (this volume). In these jolting and surprising encounters, we are drawn in, as readers, to attune to the ghosts in our midst and how they are at work in postfoundational approaches to inquiry. Because there is no point of origin or ballast offered by “method,” new sensings and imaginings are made possible. To be in relation with the world is to create the new at the moment of invention, discussed in the next section. Postfoundational approaches to inquiry open space for invention and creation

Above, we explained that one of the facets of postfoundational inquiry is its emergence, and then we discussed emergence in relation to involuntary encounters that keep thought on the move. What happens when the unthought – the new – emerges with the world? Invention. Creation. The connectivity between emergent approaches spawned by encounters and creation is offered by Deleuze (1995) when he puts sports and philosophy in relation to offer a new image of the task of philosophy: to create. He says, in conversation with Dulaure and Parnet: All the new sports – surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding – take the form of entering into an existing wave. There’s no longer an origin as a starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to “get into something” instead of being the origin of an effort. (p. 121)

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In postfoundational inquiry (as philosophically-informed), neither method nor “the researcher” is the point of origin or the “source of movement” (p. 121, emphasis added). Starting elsewhere in the midst of everything is to attend to emergences that amount to innovation and creation. And necessary for creation are mediators: people or things, real or imaginary (according to Deleuze); we would add philosophy, concepts, and theories as mediators. “Without them nothing happens,” says Deleuze; “You have to form your mediators … you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own” (p. 125). Mediators keep thought and inquiry on the move toward creation. Mediators in this collection that emerge as both provocateurs and partners are the Chinese wind, the sketch, mathematics, the sonic booms of classroom “disturbances,” rainwater and wastewater, a memorial statue, ghosts, and many more that readers will encounter as well. Emergence, relation, movement, encounters, and mediators – all are key to postfoundational inquiry in an ontology of creation. In this ontology, the work is “tracing a path between impossibilities” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 133). He goes on to say: A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities … without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation. (p. 133) It’s impossible to rely on dogmatic method to produce the new. Yet, it’s impossible not to inquire; it’s impossible not to think. Creation is a means of escape, a non-linear rupture into possibility. And because creation is unplanned – and because it emerges from unpredictable, chance, and luck encounters (Jackson, 2017) – creation isn’t held to a universal, unified truth system. And creation doesn’t exist on the same plane as recognition, sameness, teleology, and comparison. What this portends for postfoundational inquiry is that creation is on its own plane: it isn’t solely in reaction to the old, either in a succession or as a negation. What becomes possible is the affirmative of the new. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) remind us, creation is valued for its own becoming, which “does not belong” solely to what came before (p. 96). Postfoundational inquiry is thus not merely a resistance to traditional method; its ontology carries us into the becomings to which it belongs. In this volume, Mikulan and Sinclair address the temporality of creation, arguing that the emergence of the “new” does not necessitate an opposition to the “old.” They write, “Disciplinary assertion of critique (as method) of the old is often presented as a ‘natural’ response (progression) and validation of its own difference—from that which has been” (see Chapter 9). In

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other words, critique-as-method might expose foundations, but runs the risk of replacing one for another. For Mikulan and Sinclair, they put thought into orbit in an invention of “inquiry as if sketch” offering speculative points of escape. Their postfoundational approach – using scalar thinking and sketch as a mediator to keep thought on the move – speaks to the affective intensities of invention and creation. They propose to “make kin with the old” through speculative and ontological processes that do not resolve the problem of method but keep inquiry contingent and open to both past and future configurations: the “not yet” and the “as if.” Tesar in Chapter 11 of this volume also “makes kin with the old” by starting elsewhere in a historical consideration of philosophy, methodology, and matter. He begins in the midst of a discussion of pre-Socratic thought and the way in which it has been “confined to the pre-history of Classical Greek philosophy” (this volume). Not placing this history as a point of origin, he attends to this legacy in order to invent “new” forms of inquiry in an emergence of thought that brings these “old” ontologies together with both antifoundational and postfoundational thinkers in a non-linear rupture into possibility. He argues (this volume) that “reconnecting with this legacy can serve both to disrupt established knowledge, with its normative and hierarchical order, and open new avenues toward a more ethical relationship” with that which has been marginalized within Western philosophy. Postfoundational inquiry, mediated by the texts along this genealogical journey, offers creation as a means of escape, emerging from this affirmative encounter. Rosiek and Pratt also desire to enter in the midst by acknowledging that postfoundational inquiry necessarily produces relations in which loss is inherent. In a recognition that it is impossible to rely on dogmatic method to produce the new, they turn to their mediators – posthumanist philosophies – for the promise of “engaging with racism more effectively” (Chapter 13, this collection). The authors trace the path of an involuntary encounter with the agentic capacity of racism in Rosiek’s study of racial resegregation of a public school district. The movement that made itself felt was that it was impossible to attend to the myriad of influences that enabled racist practices to flourish. That is, staying with one “unit of analysis” precluded an attunement to other forces of white supremacy. In their inventive approach, they insist that exposing and critiquing are not enough. They write, “A more affirmative anti-racist inquiry praxis is also needed, one that seeks to ontologically and relationally transform social practices and recognizes that such work will have no endpoint” (Rosiek & Pratt, this volume). MacLure (Chapter 16, this volume) begins her chapter with a provocative question: “How might the new be invented, or brought forth, given that the researcher’s ingenuity does not predate, warrant, or predict events, but is part of their emergence?” While her approach is indeed inventive, she advocates for and contends with the tensions present in practices that are open to

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chance, while at the same time constrained by those encounters that present themselves. Drawing on Deleuze, she asserts that a disorientation that makes space for the pre-personal and involuntary are prerequisite to a provocation of thought. In a discussion of her inventive approach, she insists that “analysis as explanation” is merely a return to an accounting of what already exists. Instead, she describes it as “an unfolding of the affective forces that are implicated in events, in order to think or do something new” (this volume). She offers a chance encounter for the reader in the creation of “the spider sense of the postfoundational researcher,” ending the chapter with another provocation. She writes, “The subjectivity of the spider-researcher is emergent: the contours of her faculties begin to form under the pressure of the intensities released in the encounter” (this volume). Chapters in this edited collection enact how encounters with the unthought and the involuntary unleash new concepts and approaches. Positioned thus, openings to creative potential are ushered forth in postfoundational inquiry. Ontological enactments: attuning, intervening, and co-composing

Our aim for this edited collection is to present an engagement with various postfoundational frameworks and approaches that produce new concepts and enactments. Above, we wrote about how this inquiry is positioned within an ontology of creation, and thus a focus on enactments (rather than the lived experience of fieldwork) signals this shift. Enactments are sensings, doings, and interventions activated by concepts in a thinking with. Annmarie Mol (2002) chronicles this aliveness and liveliness when she writes, “Ontology is not given in the order of things … instead, ontologies are brought into being” (p. 6). In a refusal of representationalism, enactments bring forth the question of how things work: how different attunements make something else possible. Mol is emphatic that reality is what is done, or left undone, and that these doings enact multiple ontologies. Not plural, but multiple. Rather than linear and additive, the multiple implies a “manyfoldedness” that coordinates diverse objects in a coexistence that is neither fragmented nor hierarchically contained. Ontological enactments, as multiple, are assembled by intricate relations that run alongside one another. Thus, for Mol, “Talking about reality as multiple depends on another set of metaphors. Not those of perspective and construction, but rather those of intervention and performance. These suggest a reality that is done and enacted rather than observed” (1999, p. 77, emphasis in original). By emphasizing attunements, the multiple, and the ontological, authors in this edited collection map what enactments do, not what they mean. Enactments are curations of thought that come out of our engagements with the world. They are akin to Deleuze’s “catching a wave” and being carried

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off: co-composing with the movement of thought in the midst of a thinkingdoing (Manning, 2013). Co-compositions (in the form of enactments included in this book) are not about reality but are “practices that interfere with other practices, therefore participating in reality” (Mol, 2002, p. 153). It is through a glimpse of these co-compositions, these interventions – these enactments – that readers encounter thinking, doing, and becoming differently in the context of postfoundational inquiry. In this collection of essays, scholars use theories, concepts, and materials to co-compose with and open up that which they cannot think without, mapping what emerges in a threshold with theory to create new connectives. They offer inquiry that is postfoundational in its approach, focusing on how theory and concepts engender a reorientation of thought. Our conceptualization of this book as focused on ontological enactments can be summarized as such: Scholars occupying this theoretical terrain share a departure from epistemology and method to enactments of inquiry. In other words, “things” (i.e., method, objects, subjects, knowledge) do not pre-exist inquiry, ready to be represented; rather, they are constituted (and entangled) (Barad, 2007) in particular conditions. These conditions are put under ontological scrutiny: how they emerge as temporary heterogeneous assemblages, and how they re-orient “the given” to open up to the unthought, what might be, what is possible. In this way, inquiry moves from a concern with how humans perceive their world to positing how everything is in and of the world – how thought and expression are enactments and doings that bring newness into being. The significance of this turn is not in attaching new names to old concepts, but in a recognition that the necessity of our encounters with the world require a philosophical stance that is up to the task. No longer a politics of who or what can know or speak, but a politics of what realities are formed (Mol, 1999) and how these realities are always emerging in relation. (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, p. 134) To summarize, enactments are multiple forces and doings that bring knowledge and reality into formation. In other words, knowledge and reality are not something that exist but are brought about. Inquirers, as beings in relation, make agential cuts, respond to some lures and not others, and all of these voluntary and involuntary acts are part of the production of the multiple: new worldings, different knowledges, and alternative ontological imaginings.2 The enactments presented in the chapters for this collection are these doings that intervene to produce particular realities, not reflective tellings or descriptions by a “being” (or researcher) who is experiencing reality (Blackman, 2008). The chapters in this book share a commitment to the ontological – and inquiry as creation. As such, the enactments do not offer a foundational approach to knowledge production; instead, they create new worldings.

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Reorienting questions: prompting enactments of thought and inquiry

In this collective, we invited authors to focus on how theory and concepts engender a reorientation of thought. We emphasized invention and newness, and offered a series of questions that prompted a starting elsewhere, reorienting the given, and opening to the unthought. The reorienting questions are inspired by St. Pierre’s (2021) article, “Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New.” Based on a keynote address delivered at the 15th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in 2019, St. Pierre argues for an anti-method approach to inquiry, citing poststructural scholars. She explains that research that begins and ends with a humanist subject, and that applies a pre-existing methodology, cannot accommodate philosophically-informed inquiry. St. Pierre writes that philosophical concepts are “not intended for application to lived human experience but for reorienting thought,” and that those who work with such concepts are engaged in creating “what does not yet exist” (p. 2). Taking our cue from St. Pierre, and using provocations directly from her article, we devised sets of questions that we included in our call for papers for this book. We position the questions as generative and intervening; that is, authors do not merely “answer” the questions but work with them to enact their postfoundational approach. Nor do we regard the reorienting questions as traditional research questions that guide inquiry. Instead, they incite and animate the ways in which postfoundational inquiry is emergent, contingent, responsive, involuntary, and inventive: generating acts of creation in the threshold of theory, thought, encounters, and relations. One set of reorienting questions incites authors to focus on the emergence of their postfoundational approach:

• How do you make it up as you go? What are you inventing – how do you inquire without method?

• Where do you start – how do you begin? We directed these questions to authors as inquirers, but the “you” in the questions are taken up variously by authors to be “where thought starts” – or how inventive approaches take their own flight, without direction or origin in a process. These questions also gesture toward always being in the middle of encounters. These questions are after method in that they reorient thought and inquiry toward that which is in the making, in the midst of happenings. Another set of reorienting questions imagines lively, complex relations between “the new” and foundational norms of inquiry:

• What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability?

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• What are you overturning and displacing? What are you making room for? • How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? What do you accept, and what do you exclude?

• Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise? How do theory and concepts complicate your inquiry, rather than making it easy? The contingency of postfoundational approaches is emphasized by authors who take up these questions. Their approaches do not simply critique or deconstruct foundations but function to keep their techniques open to reconfigurations through enacting cuts and exclusions. These reorienting questions also provoke authors to “think with theory” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023) in the development of their postfoundational approach. Because postfoundational inquiry is tethered to immanent, vitalist, and/or ontological theories of agential realism, we prompted authors to reorient “the human” as they enacted their postfoundational approach with the following questions:

• How do you de-center human tendencies? • What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual?

• How does agency function in your approach? Sensings and attunements as pre-personal affects enable authors to decenter the human in their approaches. Involuntary encounters with the material, the digital, the aesthetic, the atmospheric, and even the spectral make possible an opening to the pre-individual. Agency, then, is distributed among all entities in their emergent, contingent enactments of inquiry. Finally, a set of reorienting questions takes up power and politics in postfoundational inquiry:

• What are you willing to give up? What are you not willing to give up? How is this bound to power relations?

• How is an invention of contingent approaches necessary for political processes? Postfoundational inquiry is not devoid of power and politics. Authors who engage these questions reorient foundational approaches of unjust practices, calling into question what gets left out and untouched as a function of hegemonic discourses and power relations. Curating the book

In this collection, authors take up a range of postfoundational theories, including poststructuralism, posthumanism, feminist new materialism, relational

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ontologies, speculative empiricism, agential realism, immanent ontologies, and affect theory. The authors describe their work as after method (instead of offering accounts of traditional fieldwork and representations of knowledge). As a response to the universalism and uniformity of interpretive qualitative research, philosophically-informed inquiry enables a stepping outside social science (and qualitative research in particular) in order to begin elsewhere and think otherwise. We have presented various facets of postfoundational inquiry in this Editors’ Introduction, and we have integrated chapter summaries within to show how those facets are exemplified by the contributing authors. However, we position the facets as imbricated rather than discrete; they overlap, run together, and become entangled. Nor are the facets preexisting qualities of a method. What we are naming as postfoundational inquiry remains in the realm of the “not yet” – and we are energized by an inquiry-to-come that will emerge as readers engage with the enactments in this book. When it came to arranging the chapters, we were faced with many possibilities. We could have followed our strategy in our writing of this Introduction by grouping chapters by facets. However, the chapter summaries as presented previously (in the above sections) are meant to be illustrative, not organizational. That is, all chapters in the book enact postfoundational inquiry that is contingent, emergent, relational, involuntary, and inventive. We considered assembling the chapters by reorienting questions, but the questions are not meant to gather similarities or reveal trends but to proliferate potential and divergences. We settled on shaping the book into four Openings that take the form of resonances made possible in thinking with postfoundational paradigms. Each Opening curates chapters that reverberate with intensities of thought: Atmospheres, Affects, and Hauntings; Archives, Worldings, and Sketchings; Escaping Tradition, Beginning Elsewhere, and the Politics of Doing Otherwise; and Pre-personal Agencies and Thought Taking Flight. As readers come upon each of these four Openings, they will encounter short descriptions of the echoes among the chapters, and then abstracts written by the authors themselves. They will also notice, in the abstracts, that the reorienting questions are written in bold text for drawing attention. We thus invite readers to enter our curation through what lures and what echoes – start in the midst and sense what new openings emerge. Notes 1 For a discussion of these deconstructive critiques of the habits of method from not only post qualitative scholars but also poststructural feminist philosophers, see Jackson and Mazzei (2017). 2 In Chapter 8, “Ontological Writing: Unleashing Becomings and Worldings,” we discuss enactments as “an attunement to happenings and formations in and of the world” (p. 135). Enactments emerge as a constant, continuous doing, what we name plugging in as an activation that puts thought in motion. See Jackson and Mazzei (2023).

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References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Polity Press. Butler, J. (1992). “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’.” In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds.) Feminists Theorize the Political (pp. 2–21). Routledge. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. Routledge. Debaise, D. (2017). Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead. Tomas Weber, Trans. Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1995). Negotiations, 1972–1990. (M. Joughin, Trans.) Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1990). Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is Philosophy? Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell, Trans. Columbia University Press. Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art. Duke University Press. Jackson, A. Y. (2017). Thinking without method. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 666–674. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2023). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, 2nd edition. Routledge. Jackson A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2017). Thinking with Theory: A New Analytic for Qualitative Inquiry. In Denzin, N. & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th edition). Sage Publications. Manning, E. (2013). Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Duke University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (Ed.), (2002). A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. Routledge. Mol, A. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions. The Sociological Review, 47(1), 74–89. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (2021). Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 3–9. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press. Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and Reality: Corrected Edition. D. R. Griffin & D. W. Sherburne. (Eds.). The Free Press.

Atmospheres, affects, and hauntings

Atmospheres, affects, and hauntings

Resonating among the chapters in this Opening is the use of theory, the force of the pre-personal, and the politics of postfoundational inquiry – all of which proliferate forms of atmospheres, affects, and hauntings. They share an attention to affective encounters that “charge” the atmosphere of an ordinary moment, changing the rhythm, mood, and sensings in the event.1 These generative forces are discursive, material, sonic, digital, aesthetic, and spectral. Haunted by violences, fragilities, and disappearances, the authors attune to reorientations of thought that variously emerge, dissolve, and persist. In their postfoundational approaches, the necessity of political processes moves through inquiry, felt as agentic formations that intervene to reconstitute subjectivities, places, and environments. Sonic disruptions to sexual violence lessons in the science lab: a postfoundational discursive-material-affective-sensorial approach

Bárbara Berger Correa and Jessica Ringrose In Chapter 2, Berger Correa and Ringrose use a discursive-materialaffective-sensorial frame to help them dwell on disturbances in one classroom they observed as part of a research/impact project delivering workshops on sexual violence in secondary schools in England. They first explore a pair of reorienting questions: Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise? How do theory and concepts complicate your inquiry, rather than making it easy? They outline a Baradian and Deleuzo-Guattarian infused discursive-materialaffective-sensorial framework for thinking with/about relational intra-actions, non-human agency, affective intensities, and atmospheres. They particularly DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-3

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draw upon Bessie Dernikos’ posthuman multi-sensory theories of “fleshy frequencies” and the concept of “sonic boom” to address the sensations surrounding a jolting “moment of failure” in one workshop. Making use of and dwelling with their fieldnotes, they pay close attention to words, material and spatial formations, and affective and sonic vibrations in the sexual violence workshop. Situating their approach as postfoundational, they attend to unstable meanings, becomings, and entanglements of knowing and being in our research experiences. Rather than taking the easy, normative way that would bury these difficulties, they show how this contingent framework and these concepts help to think the sonic disruptions otherwise. Considering their own researcher subjectivities as being produced by, and as a part of, the entanglements that made up the workshop process moves thought from clear understandings of the moments as students’ defensive resistance to the workshops, towards recognizing sentiments of disenfranchisement and vulnerability as important sites of struggle. Thus, they also address the reorienting question How is an invention of contingent approaches necessary for political processes? to show how dismissing requests and interjections from boys as simply resistant, defensive, or disruptive misses the political and pedagogical potential of these moments. If researchers consider “disturbances” and critiques in the classroom as genuine requests, then they can acknowledge and redress how little space men and boys typically have to be vulnerable and talk about relationships, desire, sexuality, and violence outside feminist spaces. Hence, the postfoundational approach is critical in changing how we politically engage: transforming our feminist pedagogical understandings of what these sexual violence workshops could and should do in the future. Affective attunements to violence in educational inquiry: queering critique

Bessie P. Dernikos and Nancy Lesko Dernikos and Lesko add to and queer the examinations of critique as the primary aim, method, and product of qualitative inquiry in education. Two reorienting questions guide Chapter 3: Who, and/or what, helps us to think otherwise? How do theory and concepts complicate our inquiry, rather than making it easy? Their thinking otherwise is grounded in the violence against trans/queer and women’s bodies and in theories that place violence as inescapable and endemic. They follow Eric Stanley’s direction to resituate violence as ordinary rather than as exceptional or antagonistic to research contexts. Taking up postfoundational scholarship, they emphasize the intra-active constitution of researchers’ subjectivities with violence. They call this focus on the intra-active makings of researchers’ positionalities “queering critique” – remaking what critique entails. Critique in qualitative research tends to name and identify processes and structures that undermine justice and equity aims

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of schooling to establish reliable practices of resistance. But in a postfoundational approach, such reliable practices are questionable because violence has agentic, protean capacities. Thinking otherwise with violence as a shapeshifting, vibrational force that is simultaneously constituted as an object of study along with researcher subjectivity complicates inquiry and multiplies considerations of affective approaches amid calls for justice. Atmospheric data and software arts: new ways of investigating the built environment

Elizabeth de Freitas and Laura Trafí-Prats Chapter 4 stays tuned to questions about sensory and digital research methods in the social sciences. de Freitas and Trafí-Prats respond to the postfoundational condition of qualitative research by taking cues from the fields of software studies and investigative aesthetics to explore the glitch fragility of technical research tools. They advocate for projects that are (a) politically and materially engaged with digital transformations of life and culture, (b) attentive to the atmospheric and distributed eco-sensory nature of experience, and (c) explicitly focused on the role of contingency and speculation in experimental modes of empirical inquiry. The authors explore new qual–quant mixtures of meaning, and open the black box of software, to argue that contingency is inherent to all method. This contingency, they argue, allows for a muchneeded political intervention by reclaiming and rewriting the meaning of digital data, wrestling it away from surveillance capitalists. The chapter suggests that postfoundational research might become a kind of software art that reckons with algorithmic contingency, not only as lack or deficit in representation but also as an opening onto the trans-individual and pre-personal atmosphere of the built environment. Discussed throughout the chapter is a research project about the atmospheric conditions of school buildings, including a series of experiments that engaged with school building envelopes. Their investigative approach was collaborative, working with participants to reanimate the school milieu and to reveal the incomputable dimension of lived architecture: how the evental nature of the building was lured out of stasis by the student engagement with various technical and sensory devices. The chapter responds to the editors’ reorienting questions regarding research that engages the political through attention to the contingency in research methods, while exploring the pre-personal and pre-individual. Absence and refusing the given

Asilia Franklin-Phipps Chapter 5 is a conceptual exploration of how scholars might attune to the present through an accounting of the past. Franklin-Phipps frames this effort

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in the present sociocultural and political context that each day reveals in order to expose the inadequacy of dominant meaning-making practices. This dominance has come at a great cost because even though they are ubiquitous, meaning-making practices are an inadequate way of encountering the world and others. She wonders what happens when this limit is acknowledged toward developing other practices that are postfoundational in their approach. Inspired by Avery Gordon and Saidiya Hartman, she considers the affective use of conjuring ghosts to differently attune to places, objects, events, self, and others, in order to creatively disentangle from the already and easily known. Both Gordon and Hartman write hesitantly about becoming distracted by the presence of ghosts as they encounter people, objects, texts, and places – to imagine, know, and become otherwise. Following Gordon and Hartman, Franklin-Phipps engages the following reorienting questions: What are you overturning and displacing? What are you making room for? and What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, presubjective, and pre-conceptual? She traverses her own history to ask what can be engaged when attuning to that which has been disappeared, violently vanished, or never acknowledged in the first place. She argues that attention to that which is not immediately visible expands efforts to know both the present and past. From the editors: For a discussion of the reorienting questions, see Chapter 1. Readers should also note that the abstracts in this Opening are crafted by the authors, written in third person, to introduce their chapters. Note 1 Stewart, K. (2011). “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, pp. 445–453.

2 SONIC DISRUPTIONS TO SEXUAL VIOLENCE LESSONS IN THE SCIENCE LAB A postfoundational discursive-material-affectivesensorial approach Bárbara Berger Correa and Jessica Ringrose Introduction

In this chapter, we engage with field notes written while observing the piloting of workshops in schools addressing sexual violence. These workshops were collaboratively designed with the School of Sexuality Education (SSE), a charity that delivers sexuality education in England, as part of a larger empirical research project focused on challenging sexual violence in schools and piloting pedagogical resources for teachers to deliver these lessons across a wide range of schools in England. For each observed workshop, there were one or two members of the research team as observers. The note-taking tried to focus beyond what is being said by including the materiality of the classroom space, identifying flows of movements, gestures, or emotions. Also, pre-/ post- evaluation surveys were distributed and focus groups were conducted to assess the impact of the workshops on students’ knowledge of sexual violence and discuss their reflections and suggestions for improvement. As a funded “impact” project, its official aims are tied to simplistic and linear pedagogical and behavioral frameworks, with methods designed to produce evidence that the workshops “worked.” To this end, the pre- and post-surveys were coded and analyzed quantitatively to prove the workshops were an effective tool for raising awareness and denaturalizing sexual violence practices that were previously considered part of everyday life. Yet, while this tells a nice story of social change enabled through the workshops, it glosses over the complexities, nuances, messiness, and less linear processes when engaging in these sexual violence workshops. Indeed, in the focus groups, both boys and girls critiqued the workshops were too “women-based” and “anti-man,” “neglecting men and boys’” experiences of sexual violence as DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-4

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well as not having enough content on gender diversity and LGBTQ experiences (Ringrose et al., 2022). In the project’s report, these critiques were initially interpreted as resistance to the workshops, as masculine defensiveness to feminist pedagogy (Ging & Siapera, 2018). Here, we work against the normative assumptions of the methodologies in the larger research project to dwell upon moments of “failure/disruption” during one of the workshops. By addressing the reorienting questions Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise? and How do theory and concepts complicate your inquiry, rather than making it easy?, we dwell on a failed scene of the sexual violence workshops and its multiple dimensions with a Baradian (2007) influenced frame to conceptualize what happens in the classroom as material-discursive-affective-sensorial intra-actions. Barad (2007) theorizes the world in a state of unsevered entanglement, where the material and discursive are not separated because meaning (or discourse) emerges from specific material arrangements. Thus, Barad suggests thinking of the world as emerging from intra-actions, which are causal enactments, doings that relationally and dynamically cause the world. Intra-actions are non-arbitrary; they are not subject to individual determination. Also, they are nondeterministic. Intra-actions always leave some possibilities excluded, and these exclusions keep open the possibility of other re-configurings of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 48). The Baradian concept of intra-action is also important as it restages agency as relationally shared amongst human and non-human actants, including thinking about the material and the sensorial forces at work in our research enactments and entanglements. We add the notion of affect to this Baradian frame, arguing relational intraactions are not only material and discursive but also affective (Ringrose et al., 2018). Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1987), affect is conceptualized as the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected. Thus, the relational, or entangled, condition is emphasized as everything is connected and its possibilities to act are shaped by these relationalities. There are no individual independent entities. Affect is also how these changes of possibilities to act are felt in the body, so it includes sensations, feelings, and emotions, but is in no way restricted to them (Massumi, 2015). In previous work and drawing on Deleuze, Ringrose also considered that affect is not only flat and connective but also intensive in qualitatively different ways. These “affective intensities” emerge when relationalities create affective moments that stand out, “glow” and “jar,” in research encounters which are important to take into account (MacLure, 2013; Renold & Ringrose, 2019; Ringrose & Renold, 2014). Affect can also be used to think about the atmospheres created in the research encounters. Anderson (2009) suggests that “atmospheres are singular affective qualities that emanate from but exceed the assembling of bodies” (p. 77). A classroom generates an affective atmosphere, collective sensations beyond individual bodies or feelings (Ringrose & Renold, 2016). Indeed, the

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sensorial is critical in grasping affect and we want to particularly think about the discursive-material-affective-sensorial relationalities of specific moments in the workshop. Finally, Bessie Dernikos’s (2020) notion of “fleshy frequencies” of sound in classrooms and her idea of “sonic booms” is particularly important for us. Dernikos drew on posthuman and affect theories to pay attention to Black boys viewed as disrupting the normative, white, and colonial model of good behavior and achievement at a primary classroom in New York City. She coins “sonic booms” to think of audible elements that affectively resist white supremacy and colonial impositions of being a “good learner.” She notes that the sonic is also material, calling the sound frequencies “fleshy” to show sound and bodies colliding. The focus on what sounds do challenges humanist notions of an individual discrete subject, of agency as coming solely from humans, as well as the idea of intentionality as determining material outcomes. In this chapter, we use the notions of “fleshy frequencies” and “sonic booms” to rethink an interpretation of resistance to our workshops. We stay with these disruptions and consider them as a productive space for necessary thinking otherwise of political processes. Taken together, we use this frame of the discursive-material-affectivesensorial as postfoundational. This frame stresses the constitutive effects of exclusion within the enactment of “knowledge-discourse-power practices” (Barad, 2007, p. 57). This means that the intra-actions we are a part of, and thus contribute to, when we think/research about sexuality education creates exclusions that are necessary to acknowledge. We want to make ourselves accountable for the consequences of these exclusions, thinking of them as productive rather than disruptive, or interrupting “progress.” “Thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) the material-discursive-affective-sensorial and the concepts of “fleshy frequencies” and “sonic booms” enables us to “hear” and respond to these normatively excluded scenes as disruption or as not relevant “data,” making ourselves response-able (Barad, 2007) for the silencing normative research interpretations inflicts on non-pattern-able moments. We suggest that this approach has several elements that enable us to destabilize meanings, making this approach postfoundational. These are, among others, the emphasis on the inseparability of the researcher and considering knowledge production as inevitably and intersectionally situated. This not only means that we understand knowledge production as pierced by power relations regarding gender, race, class, age, and more. It also encourages us to consider what is excluded in the creation of meaning and the power of materiality entangled with “the human.” This contingent approach helps us stay with the uncomfortable intersectional troubles (Butler, 2002; Haraway, 2016) in the classroom and ultimately come to grips with how the content and facilitation of such workshops would need to change to make room for trouble, thus shaping the political scope of our future sex-ed interventions.

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Hence, our chapter also addresses the reorienting question, How is an invention of contingent approaches necessary for political processes? Our theoretical frame emphasizes researchers are not at-a-distance but are an entangled part of the researched. So, we work through close examination of our own subjective readings of the situation, through discussion and analysis of our notes and our own responses as researchers, confronting highly charged discursive-material-affective-sensorial moments around sexual violence rather than burying them or letting them lay “undetected” (as they are in some of the other accounts of this research). We argue that this postfoundational approach is what enabled us to explore what we first read as resistance to our feminist pedagogy, and therefore shut down in the classroom, as a feeling of disenfranchisement and marginalization emanating from racialized, masculine, disciplined bodies. Considering ourselves a part of the researched, we attempt to account for what is produced as mattering when dismissing requests and interventions from boys as simply resistant, defensive, or disruptive. Instead, we consider these “disturbances” and critiques as genuine requests. This approach helped us to get another angle on the power relations at play within the workshops, getting to grips with how little space men and boys typically have to be vulnerable and talk about relationships, desire, sexuality, and violence – outside of feminist spaces. We hence suggest we need to pay attention to and create space for, these feelings and “disruptions” if we want to enable change around issues of sexual consent that ground experiences and understandings of sexual violence. Jo(l)tting down disruptive/productive entanglements

Fieldnotes are inherently subjectively “biased” and invested with subjectivity, desire, and power (Jones, 2010 as cited in Retallack, forthcoming) and thus, normatively excluded from positivistic research. Here we use notes constructed as a research summary (Jessica) and some taken at the moment (Bárbara) to outline different scenes of this workshop, especially one that jolted us. It was Monday, and we were at a secondary school in inner-city London characterized as a “super diverse” BAME (Black, Asian, Minority-ethnic) student population. The school has a very high rate of free school meals (the marker of the poverty line in England) and is also judged as “needing improvement” by the state inspectorate metrics, putting additional pressure on the leadership team around discipline and achievement. The workshop was delivered with a group of Year 10 (14–15 years old) BAME students, except for one white, male-identifying student. We were given a science laboratory with long, fixed, tall tables and stalls. Apprehension about the atmosphere and the space is felt by the researchers from the very start. It was an odd combination, a stiff lab and a feminist workshop. The tall tables and stools are difficult to sit on, and they are also noisy, with metal

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scraping on the ground. There is a general chaotic high level of noise as the students and researchers wait for the workshop to begin as narrated through Jessica’s fieldnote: I walk up to the facilitator who seems agitated as the lesson is about to begin and there is no teacher yet present in the room, the students are noisy and it’s difficult to hear. She says they need a teacher and can I go and find one. I make my way down to the office. On my way I encounter one of the male leadership staff [Sir] having a disciplinary discussion with four boys in the hallway. They are discussing the consequences of the previous session. One boy is protesting and kicking the air and moving about wildly while the teacher tries to talk to him. I go to the bottom floor and find the woman teacher telling her there is no teacher present. Looking harried, she agrees to come up with me … On the way up Miss stops to talk to Sir, asking him to come and talk to the class. When they arrive, Sir tries to quiet the group; he tells them that the previous tutor group has acted badly and shamed themselves, explaining they are getting a 2-hour detention, they will not be allowed to participate in some activity with prizes, and one boy may be excluded. To this a boy in the class yells out “for what”? Looking pained, Sir says that he won’t discuss this; they can talk later, and he asks all the students to set an example in their tutor group for the year group and be respectful to the visitor. [Jessica’s Ethnographic Fieldnote] From the outset, the affective atmosphere in this environment was “hectic” with the facilitator “agitated,” students creating loud background noise in the classroom, students kicking “frenetically” in the hallway, students yelling challenges, and the staff seeming “harried” and “pained.” The “normative” condition of quiet is attempted, but not found in this space. Collectively, there is a sense of unease. Finally, the workshop begins: After he [Sir] leaves, the SSE facilitator starts. From the start it is difficult to make herself heard. When we get to the slide of the wheel of sexual violence, the boys pick up immediately on “slut shaming.” They say mockingly and disparagingly that they want a definition of slut. A large group of them join in and repeatedly say “slut” in a derogatory way. This is purposefully to confirm slut as a shaming word, not to disrupt it. The facilitator works to challenge this and carefully explains that there is a gender double standard where “promiscuous” sexual behaviour in men is rewarded and this is punished for girls and women. One boy yells “what is promiscuous” to which the facilitator explains having lots of sexual partners. Another yells, “What is voyeurism,” another yells “what is trafficking,” and the facilitator explains. [Jessica’s Ethnographic fieldnote]

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Several boys used the tactic of loudly asking about the meaning of words like slut-shaming, promiscuous, voyeurism, and trafficking. These sonic forces interrupted the facilitator, making it difficult for her to be heard. It seemed to Jessica that they were asking about these words to say them aloud, as they are not normative words to be used in a formal lesson in school, and thus provoked chuckles between the students every time one of these words was said out loud, extending the interruption of the facilitator. One example being: Jay says something and a Black girl with red braids nearby laughs out loud. The Black boy beside her [Chico] keeps laughing and tries to stop, covering his mouth. [Bárbara’s raw notes] We think the questions above, chitchat, and laughter as enacting what Dernikos (2020) called “fleshy frequencies,” sounds that as a form of affect activate emotions and connect, change, and move bodies. An agitation and resistance – maybe against the white supremacist structure and disciplining of schooling. Maybe against the feminist content of the workshop. Or, further, maybe pointing out the oxymoron of being taught about consent at school, a mandatory institution that non-consensually disciplines bodies (Bragg et al., 2020). Chairs were repeatedly used to rock, scrape, and move in restless agitation creating noisy proclamations. During this whole workshop, the schoolteacher ineffectively tried to prevent, control, or eliminate these “noises” by pulling students apart and re-situating them across the lab, her sitting beside the “misbehaving” students or by constantly asking them to be quiet. Yet it seemed to Bárbara that her presence and efforts were fueling these agitations, that some students were humming or singing to annoy her. One Black boy separated from the others used his rucksack to do an enormous display of re-situating himself at the front of the room when separated from his mates. He steadily pulled things in and out to rearrange them, standing up and down out of his chair at the front of the classroom to mark his refusal of discipline. Many of these moves could be accounted for as examples of “protest masculinity” (Connell in Hickey-Moody, 2019). We saw many of these types of protests in our workshop observations on other sites, such as boys wolf whistling when discussing catcalling to impose mockery and to reinstate the very violence being questioned in the workshop. We have discussed these in our team as “audible masculinities” that sound out relations of dominance. Yet we want to wrestle further with their “fleshy frequencies” and “material intra-actions” within the material-discursive-affectivesensorial entanglements in the lab, thinking through the sonic, sensing these intra-actions as more than intentional protest. As Mazzei and Jackson have noted, “human voice” in any research assemblage needs to be rethought away from human-only agency: “voice in educational research is not something that is, but rather as something that

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becomes in an emergent intra-action with other agents in the agentic assemblage” (2019, p. 21). Another instance of posthuman/more than human voice occurred with the post-it notes students were given for activities in the workshops, which became intra-active agents of doings and feelings throughout the sessions: While the facilitator is leading the discussion [about the video], Jay hits a post-it, it sounds very loud and is very disruptive “ta, ta, ta” the teacher asks him to stop. Jay just speaks without raising his hand “what do you mean by identity?” Raises his hand again. HE REALLY NEEDS ATTENTION. The facilitator gives the group time to discuss with each other and goes to talk to Jay. She says to him she thinks he is smart and he can come up with an idea of what she means by identity. Jay insists he is stupid; facilitator repeats he is underestimating himself and then leaves. [Bárbara’s raw notes] Thinking with material-discursive-affective-sensorial intra-actions, it is possible to see this episode beyond the figures of the “disruptive student” as a constellation of the video being discussed, post-it, teacher, facilitator, other classmates, etc. – where each element play a role and have the capacity to affect and move the others. Notably, Jay’s disruption may not only be of disapproval and resistance to the content of the workshops but also relates to his own fears of being “stupid” or as using stupidity as a complex defense around refusal. But again, how to listen to this frequency? Until this moment, we can say that these interruptions fell within the expected for workshops on sexuality at schools, with the recurrent low-level buzz of interruptions. Yet something louder – more intense – happened while discussing the slide with the wheels of forms of sexual violence, a bit after students asked for the meaning of promiscuous, trafficking, etc. Going around the wheel [PowerPoint slide on forms of sexual violence] the same boy who asked what is promiscuous [Dustin], asks “Is it still rape if they are enjoying it?” This gets a lot of responses. Talking and loud laughing from the tables in front of him. In particular, a larger Black boy [Chico] becomes hysterical at this question and it is difficult to calm them back down. The facilitator looks very stressed. Shutting down any further discussion, the facilitator notes that rape in the law is defined as heterosexual penetrative sex (I’m not sure this is accurate?) and that any time it is not consensual meaning someone doesn’t want it, it is rape. [Jessica’s ethnographic fieldnotes] “Is it rape if you enjoy it?” Immediately a Black boy seated on the front row at the other side of the room turns around and shouts, “Are you stupid?”

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The whole group reacted with chuckles, giggling, shocked faces, and almost everyone starts talking with each other. I heard a voice of an adult woman (facilitator or teacher?) “Please don’t shout at each other.” The same Black boy at the front says to Dustin “you are weird, man.” The group is still agitated. Another Black boy seated at the front asks the facilitator, “can I answer that?” but she does not allow him and asks for silence, trying to shut down the discussion to continue with the next activity. The group of students near Dustin keep laughing and talking about rape and consent until the end of the workshop, still caught up on the discussion sparked by Dustin, disengaged from the ongoing workshop. [Bárbara’s research notes] This encounter was profoundly unsettling, not only as it happened but also later when we discussed it. We could not stop coming back again and again to the question from Dustin: “Is it rape if you enjoy it?” – as well as the question, “Are you stupid?” (echoing the subject position claimed by Jay above), Chico’s hysterical laughter, them not being allowed to speak by the facilitator, and the general frenzied atmosphere in the room. As we wrote earlier, first we interpreted Dustin’s question as pure resistance to the content. But how to not simply position Dustin as mired in defensive protest masculinity? We can expand our thought to grapple with the discursive-material-affective-sensorial penetration this question created, thinking of it as what Dernikos called a “sonic boom” (Dernikos, 2020). Perhaps we could go further, fleshing out the affective force of this boom as an electrical jolt that stayed with us long after we left the classroom. We decided to sit with the trouble of this boom/jolt and to dwell in the affective intensity as part of being response-able (Barad, 2007) to the research encounter. The decision to include our embodied selves as part of the data comes from our postfoundational approach, where we as researchers are constitutively entangled within the research and never at-a-distance. This is the ethic-onto-epistemology entanglement introduced by Barad (2007) to show the inseparability of ethics, ontology, and epistemology – and which has been applied to research practice to show how researcher and researched always intra-act, co-produce, and therefore needs to establish a keen responseability (Strom et al., 2019). We not only focused on comparing our hasty notes, research summaries, and on how our positions in the lab created different focus and re-creations of the scenes. We also considered our affective responses, the shock and puzzling, sick and distressed feelings that stuck to us – and the associations that emerged in us – by the entangled elements at that moment. By affective responses, we are talking not just about our feelings, but about our continuous and dynamic capacity of our “researcher subjectivities” to be affected, moved, and changed by these sounds and objects;

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and our registering of our passing through different states, opening ourselves into newness and the unthought, which is challenging and could only happen through our co-reproduction of the research entanglement (Lenz Taguchi, 2019). Interestingly, by analyzing these multiple subjective accounts, we found they varied in how the focal point of the episode was described. This difference is itself important and tells us about how data is co-created in the intraaction with the researcher. By cross-checking Bárbara’s and Jessica’s notes, we realize Jessica had changed “you” to “they” in Dustin’s question, as she moved from her rough fieldnotes to her research summary. Her intra-actions within this encounter had made a move from the boy asking a general question about “you” and possibly even himself (enjoying rape), to “they” interpreting that he wanted to do something to someone else. This transformation led us to discuss the multiple associations that emerged when we heard Dustin’s question. The lack of specification of the actors in the question opened up different situations that could, or not, be linked to Dustin’s agency and intention. For Jessica, it was dramatized mentally as the boy having internalized a “blurred lines” narrative from popular culture where women enjoy pain and domination sexually. Thus, Dustin was viewed as exerting this male dominance through his invocation. Bárbara thought about men fearing being told they raped the woman with whom they thought had consented sex. Also, about victim-shaming associated with men having erections while being sexually abused. Through these associations, we explore an assemblage of elements that might have been at play even if not explicitly: men as willful perpetrators, as naïve rapists, and as shamed victims. We suggest that following our associations and taking them seriously within the researcher relationalities that produced this scene beyond “human agency” helped us to think about “Is it rape if you enjoy it?” not only as a disruptive and defensive masculinity performance. It helped us think about this question as a genuine emergence, out of the “constellation” (Youdell, 2003, p. 3) of Black masculinity identity performances that push for taking up space while pushing away any show of vulnerability. We also see the jostle of diverse Black masculinities, with one boy calling Dustin both “stupid” and “weird,” and another one desperate to further challenge the question (but also silenced as disruptive). Indeed, thinking again with the discursive-materialaffective-sensorial, we can hear a ponderous “silence” (Mazzei, 2011) – a desire for order and acceptance – being imposed on this encounter with the word “rape” in the classroom. This impositional silence by the adult teachers, facilitator, and ourselves becomes a silence synonymous with white decorum, order, and rules (despite neither the facilitator nor the teacher being white women). The enormous learning potential of this moment was shut down by the facilitator imposing the technical definition of rape and ignoring a

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student’s request to answer the question and enter into some debate. Indeed, Jessica captured this in her research summary: Later the larger Black boy Chico says in the focus group interview he wishes that they would have had a chance to debate this because the facilitator wouldn’t let anyone speak to challenge the boy. He said they didn’t agree with what was going on. I asked if he really would have challenged him (because it didn’t look like it to me) and he said yes. Within this heated moment, refusing to let others speak and offering rape’s technical definition as the absence of consent seemed like the only option for the facilitator. Jessica also read the situation in a protective risk aversion sense. In her research summary, note her retrospective imposition that Chico didn’t seem as if he would have been able to challenge and debate this issue. Thus, the consequential disengagement of the group can be thought beyond “decisions made” by disruptive students. Instead, it can be thought of as a reaction emerging from the entanglement of the fleshy frequencies of protest as well as the sonic boom against the white colonial school’s disciplinary culture. A regulatory culture that silences sexual topics and refuses students’ debate and contestation. A desire to contain the boom expressed itself, but it was not containable, so its affects jarred, jolted, and demanded we grapple with them. We conclude with a discussion of what would be at stake in “staying with the trouble” at the time of such booms by allowing Black boys to (loudly and aggressively) debate sexual violence and enjoyment together. Conclusion: producing inquiry differently

The research project we have outlined demanded success in sexual violence prevention and for us to ignore, bury or leave “undetected” (Dernikos, 2020, p. 136) the discursive-material-affective-sensorial moments of pedagogical conflict. But what if these episodes of classroom chaos generate the most insight into what we might need to do to facilitate engaged and responsive learning around gender/sexuality/power/violence for multiply-located subjects? What if the facilitator had allowed the Black boys to debate the triggering statement with their peer Dustin? Asking such questions is profoundly postfoundational because it works beyond assumptions of humans as the only agents: it resists the positivistic illusion of researchers as disembodied spectators (Haraway, 1988) and of teachers as figures who must impose order and reason to enact learning. This approach led us to the realization (which we perhaps already knew but could not articulate) that allowing space for exploring the gray areas of consent

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may be more effective than offering a technical definition of right/wrong that the students learn and progress through. If we listen to Dustin’s question and Chico’s counter more as a genuine request for recognition and space, as racialized subjects calling into question disciplinary logics that seek to regulate their every move, then we may be able to create room for boys’ and men’s vulnerability, their unknowing, and their defensiveness in its complex mixtures. Our aim in this chapter was to enact: Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise? and How do theory and concepts complicate your inquiry, rather than making it easy? Methodologically, our point is that we could never learn from the impossibility of this research/pedagogical encounter if we had stuck with our evaluation surveys seeking to prove knowledge uptake and behavioral change in the classroom. By dwelling in our discomfort and deeply unsettled feelings and re-turning (Barad, 2014) to our patchwork notes, ethnographic accounts, and engaging in further discussion, we turned our initial interpretations of defensiveness and disruption to our feminist pedagogical will and educative desires into a genuine question deserving of time, space, and debate. Critical for us is the reorienting question: How is an invention of contingent approaches necessary for political processes? This way of doing research is postfoundational in its attempts to go beyond assimilating into already known structures of thought, pushing us to the very limits of normative framings of valid research (Lather, 1993). As Jackson (2017) reminds us, thinking is an act of creation and happens through an encounter with the forces of the outside. Thus, our entire approach is one of contingency, of thinking with the philosophers and concepts that help us move outside of what we already know. By seeking other ways to make sense of what happened in these classrooms, we are attempting an outside of a conventional logic of behavioral change – a break of repetition of paradigms and ideas. But critically, as feminist researchers, it is also our response-ability to take this awareness back to the school sites and charity facilitators because this sensorial dwelling should never be for academics’ sake alone (Strom et al., 2019). Where our thought has arrived has massive political implications for how sexuality education may need to create space for disruption, resistance, debate, and failure as moments to move elsewhere. The postfoundational approach is not only about research doings but pedagogical doings too. By feeling out how knowledge of sexual consent is learned and challenged, we may be in a position to create better pedagogical conditions for all. Focusing on experiences like this one might guide us in the enormous challenge that is to navigate and address masculinity defensiveness, but also in the creation of a sexuality education that offers a space for the emergence of vulnerability for everyone. And that is the transformational power of postfoundational approaches.

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References Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168– 187. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Bragg, S., Ponsford, R., Meiksin, R., Emmerson, L., & Bonell, C. (2020). Dilemmas of school-based relationships and sexuality education for and about consent. Sex Education, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2020.1788528 Butler, J. (2002). Gender Trouble. Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press. Dernikos, B. P. (2020). Tuning into “fleshy” frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20(1), 134–157. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798420914125 Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw25q Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and Masculinity. Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. Routledge. Jackson, A. Y. (2017). Thinking without method. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 666–674. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417725355 Lather, P. (1993). Fertile obsession: Validity after poststructuralism. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 673–693. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2019). Images of thinking in feminist materialisms: Ontological divergences and the production of researcher subjectivities. In Ringrose, J., Warfield, K. & Zarabadi, S. (Eds.), Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms and Education (pp. 25–35). Routledge. MacLure, M. (2013). Classification or wonder: Coding as an analytic practice in qualitative research. In Coleman, R. & J. Ringrose, J. (Eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies (pp. 164–183). Edinburgh University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. Polity Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2011). Desiring silence: Gender, race and pedagogy in education. British Educational Research Journal, 37, 657–669. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926 .2010.487934 Mazzei, L. A., & Jackson, A. (2019). Voice in the agentic assemblage. In Ringrose, J., Warfield, K. & Zarabadi, S. (Eds.), Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms and Education (pp. 16–24). Routledge. Renold, E., & Ringrose, J. (2019). JARring: Making PhEmaterialist Research Practices Matter—MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture. 24. Retallack, H. (forthcoming). Feminism in schools? A discursive-psychosocial study of teenagers’constitutions of feminist subjectivities [doctoral dissertation, University College London]. UCL Discovery. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/theses/ UCL_Thesis/

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Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2014). “F**k Rape!”: Exploring Affective Intensities in a Feminist Research Assemblage. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 772–780. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800414530261 Ringrose, J., & Renold, E. (2016). Cows, Cabins and Tweets: Posthuman Intra-active Affect and Feminist Fire in Secondary School. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman Research Practices in Education (pp. 220–241). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_14 Ringrose, J., Warfield, K. & Zarabadi, S. (2018). Feminist Posthumanisms, New Materialisms and Education, London: Routledge. Ringrose, J., Milne, B., Ging, D., Castellini da Silva, R., Desborough, K., Horeck, T., & Mendes, K. (2022). Co-producing and Researching Postdigital Sexual Violence and Activism Workshops for Under-18s Following the COVID-19 Pandemic in England & Ireland, Association of Internet Researchers Conference, Dublin, Ireland. Strom, K., Ringrose, J., Osgood, J., & Renold, E. (2019). Editorial: PhEmaterialism: Response-able research & pedagogy. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), Art. 2–3. https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3649 Youdell, D. (2003). Identity traps or how Black students fail: The interactions between biographical, sub-cultural, and learner identities, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 24(1), 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425690301912

3 AFFECTIVE ATTUNEMENTS TO VIOLENCE IN EDUCATIONAL INQUIRY Queering critique Bessie P. Dernikos and Nancy Lesko

Does criticality, as the transformative work of interpretive, intentional human agents, still have a place in our theories and research practices? And if not, what shall we do? (MacLure, 2015. p. 2)

Introduction

Two reorienting questions guide this chapter: Who, and/or what, helps us to think otherwise? and How do theory and concepts complicate our inquiry, rather than making it easy? Our thinking otherwise is grounded in the violence against trans/queer and women’s bodies and in theories that place violence as inescapable and endemic. We follow Eric Stanley’s (2022) direction to resituate violence as ordinary rather than as exceptional or antagonistic to our research contexts. Taking up postfoundational scholarship, we emphasize the intra-active constitution of researchers’ subjectivities with violence. We call this focus on the intra-active (Barad, 2007) makings of researchers’ positionalities “queering critique” as we remake what critique entails. Critique in qualitative research tends to name processes and structures that undermine justice and equity aims of schooling, and once the mechanics of violence (or racism or misogyny) are identified, “we can establish a reliable praxis of resistance” (Rosiek, 2019, p. 83). But within a postfoundational perspective, reliable practices of resistance are questionable because violence has agentic, protean capacities. Our thinking otherwise with violence as a shapeshifting,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-5

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vibrational force that is simultaneously constituted as object of study along with our researcher subjectivity complicates inquiry as we will illustrate. Atmospheres of violence

Atmospheres of violence are pervasive. In the US, a renewed war on trans/ queer youth1 and on women’s reproductive rights wages on,2 while a companion decision from the Supreme Court has reduced the ability of states to control guns,3 despite the death toll in and out of schools. The violence, horror, and cruelty of these events pervade our daily lives, texts, imaginations, and teaching. It’s like a toxic cloud that imperils breathing and stifles thought. As Stanley (2021) persuades, “there is no escape, no outside or place to hide” (p. 17): [crowd chanting:“Hell no, we don’t need Roe…”]“I can’t believe we are here again…” “HOW LOUD DO THE SCREAMS NEED TO BE?” (Fernando et al., 2022) While the violence directed at queer/trans youth and at women’s bodies shocked particular US and international populations, scholars familiar with trans histories, anti-Black racism, and neocolonial relations recognize that violence is endemic and built into the fabric of modernity and US society. The shock to our nervous system of these new laws registers the urgency of the moment alongside its familiarity, its ordinariness (Berlant, 2011). Stanley (2021) posits that in “the ways harm is coupled with, and at times intensified through claims of equality” (p. 17), we glimpse how central violence is to our concepts of modernity, democracy, and education. Accepting violence as endemic, rather than as exceptional or transitory, pushes to the forefront of our thoughts and remains there, chiding us for our failures to recognize how central it has been to institutional and individual lives in the US and to educational policy and practices. Part of the recent shocks to the nervous system involves seeing ourselves as among those targeted for disposal, as without social value or recognized need for sustenance. The shocks of anti-trans policies, the revoking of Roe, and the refusal to stem the plague of guns woke us up from liberal dreams of meritocracy and the belief that the government will protect us (Brown, 2018). And these shocks to the nervous system demonstrate the centrality of sexual politics to neoliberal governing (Bernstein & Jakobsen, 2021). They thus disrupted remaining beliefs in protection, exceptionalism, and the safety of schools. To

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experience violence as endemic is to be jolted by direct connections among marginalized groups and jarred that there is no “outside” of violence. And yet, as Crawley (2017) reminds us, the endemic violence of modernity is entangled with the violence of the Middle Passage-enslavement, and the aftermath of slavery-whiteness (cf. Sharpe, 2016). Here, whiteness becomes “a violent encounter…the acceptance of violence and violation as a way of life” (p. 6). While Crawley acknowledges that whiteness produces a subject that is at once racialized, gendered, classed, and heterosexualized (among other things), his main point is that anti-blackness cannot be understood outside of humanist metanarratives which, historically, have worked as affective straightening devices to both render anti-blackness “ordinary” and Black (and Brown) bodies illegible. As Sharpe (2016) puts it: The repetition of the visual, discursive, state, and other quotidian and extraordinary cruel and unusual violence enacted on Black people does not lead to a cessation of violence, nor does it, across or within communities, lead primarily to sympathy or something like empathy. Such repetitions often work to solidify and make continuous the project of violence. (pp. 116–117) These metanarratives texture our “critical” research practices as well, encouraging us to produce “legible” scholarship within the neoliberal academy that privileges neoliberal sensibilities or white, heteropatriarchal ways of “reading” the social, thus further reifying violence (Sharpe, 2016). Though we have both written about the endless possibilities associated with postfoundational inquiries – their openness, messiness, incompleteness – we would be remiss not to heed McKittrick and Weheliye’s (2017) warning that open possibilities, when “theorized alongside the inflexible and thick category of race,” tend to ignore the fact that it can be “awful and painful to live open and undone” (p. 28). Reconceptualizing violence as fundamental

How do onto-epistemologies of violence, such as trans/queer violence, the “policing of the womb,” and the proliferation of guns as unabridged individual rights, affect our capacities to think otherwise about both the social and qualitative research? We follow Stanley’s (2021) direction, “What we need, then, is not new data or a more complete set of numbers; our task, it seems, is to radically resituate the ways we conceptualize the meaning of violence as fundamental and not antagonistic to our current condition” (p. 31, emphasis added). In repositioning violence as fundamental to the social worlds within which our research occurs and about which we inquire and report, we recognize and hold onto the kick in the stomach, the karate-chop to the neck,

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and the club to the kneecap. We also recognize the intimate connections of violence with anti-Black and anti-Asian racism and with neocolonialism. Being critical of violences (both ordinary and overt), power relations, and social inequities in the hopes of creating social change appears to be part of the DNA of many educational scholars committed to justice (MacLure, 2015), and we place ourselves in this group. However, the limits of traditional critical work have become more apparent within the current socio-political moment. The alarming precarities and violence of our times draw many academics back into a realist mode of inquiry and rhetoric, where critique serves to challenge and probe without necessarily being generative, forgiving, or even kind (Matias, 2022). Such inquiry may offer personal satisfaction but provide few opportunities for contemplating contingencies, relationalities, and more-than-human agencies. As Sedgwick (2003) notes, paranoid criticality also tends toward a few negative affects. She suggests that a reparative orientation might replace the schooled incitement to expose the “truth” that lies beyond or beneath phenomena. Following Sedgwick (2003), educational scholars (e.g., Holmes, 2015; MacLure, 2015; Rosiek, 2019) have also incited reparative and im/material re/considerations of the conventions of critical qualitative inquiry in education. In his exploration of posthumanism and Critical Race Theory, Rosiek (2019) draws from a ten-year study of racial resegregation in a high school to conclude that racism has agential and shapeshifting qualities. He describes the affective upset involved in this recognition: It is unnerving to think of social phenomena like racism [or violence] as an agent. At least there is some promise of release when we think of institutionalized racism as the product of ideologies or discourses working mechanically. Once we understand the mechanics, we can establish a reliable praxis of resistance. We can get free of it. But the idea that racism [or violence] is a shape-shifting material-semiotic agent circulating around and through us and we are at times its objects, whether we know it or not, offers no such promise of release. (p. 83) In Cruel Optimism, Berlant (2011) portrays the non-sovereign self as attached to objects, including “the good life,” that are fundamentally hurting us or keeping us in a state of suspended suffering. Might we consider the subjectivity of qualitative researchers in a similar way? What attachments might qualitative researchers have that bind us to the positivist practices of objectivity that emphasize what we see and hear from human participants? How might attachments to particular ways of “writing up” research result in “damage centered” narratives (Tuck, 2009) or reductive data analysis? Does an attachment to an innovative or original interpretation override the prioritization of

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tangential awarenesses and/or issues? While researcher positionality statements are expected in qualitative research, such descriptions seldom broach scholars’ attachments to optimism, their rational arguments, or the practical implications of research. In aiming to “queer critique,” we interrogate reductive, reason-centered, and sedimented ideas of criticality. In short, we aim to afford greater attention and agency to histories and atmospheres of violence and to imagine how violences help constitute our researcher capacities to attune to violence. Queering critique in qualitative research

If education both fetters and frees, practices and aims that discipline and sort students also provide openings and possibilities for becoming otherwise (Colebrook, 2017). Criticality, as a part of education, operates similarly; in its ubiquity and accepted value as an aim of the humanities and social sciences, we glimpse the normalization, accompanied by rubrics and assessments, of critical thinking. Critique as an aim, method, and product of qualitative inquiry in education seems allied to the position of critical thinking in K-12 schooling: it encompasses ideas and practices that push toward openness or beyond what is known. Yet – without creation and contingency – critique can become tamed and ritualized. In order for critique to be protean, to have energy and intensity, new resources must be sought and engaged. Taussig (1992) offers an overlapping analysis of anthropology, in which the conventions of anthropological analysis and writing have become ritualized, so that critiques are forwarded but without “forces” that might bring them to a new life. Taussig writes pointedly of how anthropologists are brought to life in an anthropological subjectivity that is built upon a science that privileges Western knowledge, nations, and power relations over others. He emphasizes how the context of research has been simplified to downplay the presence, beliefs, tacit understandings, and montage methods of anthropologists who fail to recognize that “we have been mobilized as Subjects – indeed professional Anthropologizing Subjects – for the American Project” (p. 47), which, we would add, is bound to notions of racial whiteness (Muñoz, 2000). The context of research, writes Taussig (1992), is vital and largely under-explored: “First and foremost the procedure of contextualization should be one that very consciously admits of our presence, our scrutinizing gaze, our social relationships, and our enormously confused understandings of history and what is meant by history” (p. 45). Colebrook and Taussig help us pinpoint some limitations we have experienced with critique in qualitative research in education. Qualitative researchers in education do not often admit our presence, gaze, social relationships, ideas of history, or our educational beliefs and priorities. We seldom interrogate our own subjectivity as Professional Experts of the Schooling Project, one

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vital element of the American Project. Critique is also routinized within a disciplinary perspective that is tied to broader, socio-historical power arrangements, and “being critical” may position researchers as unwitting supporters of individual mobility, meritocracy, or mastery, among other effects of modern educational systems. In these ways, critical qualitative research in education may work to further sediment normativities, with their historical links to neocolonial processes of hierarchized knowledges, bodies, and affects. As Professional Experts of the American Schooling Project, most of us have taught and learned violence in the disciplinary system, in the formal curriculum, and in the hidden curriculum. Wozolek (2020) examines the hidden curriculum of violence as an assemblage, not as a single event, and she emphasizes the affective, anticipatory dimensions, as well as, the after effects. For trans children and youth (Keenan, 2017) and young Black women (Sharpe, 2016), violence regularly revolves around the surveillance of bodies, harsh punishment, and intense shaming for being out of step with normative gender/sexuality presentations. As bystanders of or active participants in such practices, violence toward disorderly bodies shapes our subjectivities in material, visceral ways. The modern subject – those whom researchers study and those they become in the process of studying others – orients modern knowledge/power arrangements. We think that these intra-active subjects (Barad, 2007) are laden with neocolonial, racist, misogynist, and violent histories that stick to our research practices, our questions, and our findings (Wozolek, 2020). How we approach subjectivity and critique in postfoundational inquiry, then, becomes crucial (Braidotti in Strom et al., 2018). According to MacLure (2015), what is needed is a form of criticality that (1) suspends judgment, (2) acknowledges critical distance is impossible and unethical, and (3) imagines the subject as immanently entangled with movement and processes, where researchers sense and map intensities, relationalities, and connections that do not equate to singular meanings or known endpoints. In our version of queering critique, we emphasize a stronger attunement to the intra-active subjectivity of qualitative researchers to “foster” alternative perspectives and capacities (Massumi, 2002, p. 14, as cited in MacLure, 2015, p. 103): The aim of criticism….is not to perform retrospective hallowing responses to events, or to texts about events. Trying, and failing, it keeps the event open, animating, and vital. The aim is then for criticism to generate its objects, to construct unexpected scenes out of the materials it makes available. (Berlant, 1994, p. 133) If we are aiming to construct unexpected scenes by keeping events open, animating, and vital, we need strategies that queer the violence of the “normative

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world” of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by attuning to the im/possibilities of affect and related vibrational sounds, tastes, touch, smells, images, and movements. Taussig (1992) offers this description of researchers’ attunement: “Knowing how to stand in an atmosphere whipping back and forth between clarity and opacity, seeing both ways at once” (p. 17). In the next section, we discuss how the plurality, openness, and vulnerabilities of vibrations enable a method of critique that helps us to “see both ways at once:” to feel “fundamental” violence while simultaneously sensing and creating alternative onto-ethico-epistemological possibilities. What could queering critique entail?

Drawing upon the work of Black, queer, and feminist scholars, we imagine queerness as a relational vibration or energy (Dernikos, 2022) that works to “bend” spacetime in ways that both account for past histories in the present (such as the afterlives of slavery, see Sharpe, 2016) and attune to/(re)organize our social words (Ahmed, 2021; Berlant, 1998; Crawley, 2021). Such an affective orientation involves being open, intimate, and vulnerable with more-than-human others and continually sensing, disrupting, and reimagining white, heteropatriarchal Western knowledge regimes to seek otherwise relations (Dernikos, 2022). We, therefore, propose that queering critique involves a reframing of criticality as a relational doing that senses and creates a sonic (along with other senses) spectrum of affective and affectional im/ possibilities (Crawley, 2017; Sedgwick, 2008), without reducing affect and intimacy to hegemonic conceptions of thinking↔feeling↔sounding. To quote Sedgwick (2008), this involves (in part) asking “how certain categorizations work, what enactments they are performing and what relations they are creating, rather than what they essentially mean” (p. 27). Furthermore, queering, as Ahmed (2021) suggests, involves attuning to the “sounding” of messy complaints or new growths which mark and recreate sites of violence, by not only remembering that violence but also refusing it. We say refuse here and not renounce, as “to renounce what we have been, to escape the noise of the social in the desire for purity, normativity, is the process of making Western Man, the person who is created by possessive individualism” (Crawley, 2021, p. 29). As Crawley reminds us, some of us are unable to renounce violence because of the way racial capitalism pervades our daily lives and works to orient us. James (2020) adds that, as long as racial, gendered, and class oppressions exist, our social theories need to account for and trouble white heteropatriarchal capitalist ideologies and practices. In order to critically inquire about/with educational systems, processes, and practices, we require models of critique that affectively attune to both the violence of whiteness (e.g., how it sounds and shapes our thinking of sound) and those otherwise social worlds not determined by white heteropatriarchal

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racial capitalism. To put it another way, sound, as an affective vibrational intensity moves and affects matter (Henriques, 2011); it is always in processcollective-relational-communal relations (Crawley, 2017), attuned to how otherwise worlds emerge amidst the violence of Western modernity. Such messy inquiries not only account for the reverberations of violence all around us (Weheliye, 2014) but also simultaneously invite “an epistemological ordering that allows for the full range of sense experience to be the grounds, not a hierarchy, of fleshed feeling” (Crawley, 2021, p. 17). Thus, queering critique has sensorial affects and effects. By drawing our attention to sonic vibrations, as a rather different object of inquiry than more conventional and ritualized processes (Henriques, 2011), critique here is not a legible process that can be controlled and predicted. Rather, “it brings you to yourself, to and through your senses and it brings you to and with others sharing” (Henriques, 2011, p. 1) pain, joy, love… Queer methods of critique, then, embrace relationality, uncertainty, vulnerability, emergence, and newness to detect the entanglement of violence, joy, love, people, discourses, histories, literacies, refusals (etcetera) that are/are not heard/felt/seen (Dernikos, 2022), while countering violence by sensing/ creating something otherwise. In this way, critique becomes an ongoing site of exploration and struggle, not something we can know… not an object that we can hold onto: “It is only a practice in which we share, a practice that has the capacity to unmake us over and over again” (Crawley, 2021, p. 18). One example of such a critique can be found in Bessie’s return to data from her dissertation research project in a New York City first-grade classroom (Dernikos, 2020). Bessie attempts to rethink moments that served as “shocks to thought” (Massumi, 2002), or something that caused her to reorient her thinking of sound as political and data as “rebellious.” Troubling the idea of the self-assured researcher in hot pursuit of definitive knowledge, Bessie explores how returning to data, while “thinking with” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) Black intellectual frameworks for sounding (see Henriques, 2011; Crawley, 2017), enabled her to feel whiteness as a vibrational force, and the subtle ways it violently shaped both classroom literacy practices and her own “hegemonic listening ear” (cf. James, 2020). Readers workshop, “rational efficiency,” and white affective rhythms

[NYC street sounds] WEEEE-ERRRRRRR-WEEEE-ERRRRRRR!... Al: Beth:

(singing the words to The Missing Piece) Oh, I’m lookin’ for my missin’ piece.…hi-dee-ho… (sighs) Al is talking about his book to us….

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Austin: Ms. Rizzo: Students: Beth: Miss Bessie: Tom: Miss Bessie: Tom:

…he’s distracting us. Sh, sh, sh! Sh, sh, sh! See, we are not suppose’ to talk. We um suppose’ to read silent. What about Al’s sharing is distracting?.… I know why. Quiet is better. It lets us get our work done. How so? …when there is no talking, the room is quiet. Like now that Al stopped singing. Miss Bessie: Do you all agree the room is quiet right now? (street sounds grow louder) Austin: Beth: Miss Bessie: Beth:

Yep. And um when we’re still. Still? When we don’t move around.

Feverishly rocking his head while pumping his fists, Al reads in a sing-song voice, that is, until his embodied singing and movements collide with the sounds of “sh, sh, sh!” Depending on which sonic frequencies we attune to, such literacy events can become constituted as pleasurable listening encounters or noise (Weheliye, 2014). For example, when first experiencing this moment, I (Bessie) found Al’s singing to be just as loud (read: noisy) as the sounds of the NYC street. In fact, I was confused by the students’ insistence that the room was at one point quiet, even though the sounds of the city seeped in through the classroom windows. Shocked, I found that the affect theories (e.g., Deleuze, Ahmed, Berlant) I “plugged into” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011) did not offer possibilities to explain why the students/teacher ignored the street sounds while policing and punishing the sounds and movements from Black boys like Al, in particular. There was something happening although I couldn’t initially hear and feel it. It was only later when I revisited this data scene while reading the work of Crawley (2017) and Henriques (2011) that I began to sense how, within mainstream educational spaces, certain sonic frequencies (e.g., street sounds, unsanctioned student talk) become coded out of white supremacist models of knowledge transmission, which re/produce racialized (gendered, classist, etc.) habits and practices of listening/hearing. For example, Beth, Austin, Tom, and Ms. Rizzo unwittingly take up these white supremacist models by discounting Al’s independent reading practices as legitimate. They instead suggest that Al’s “distracting” movements and talk are off-task and in need of intervention (“sh, sh, sh”), as they threaten the classroom’s “quiet stillness” and the other children’s own reading work (“he’s distracting us….Quiet…lets

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us get our work done”). Interestingly, the loud street sounds did not bother them, or perhaps they did not sense them. Although the literacy norms governing this first-grade class are generally perceived to be the standard within the US and other Western countries with national literacy curricula (e.g., Australia, United Kingdom), I would like to suggest that the privileging of and insistence on such norms as “the truth” is perceptually linked to white aesthetic values and anti-Blackness. Within Ms.  Rizzo’s classroom, successful literacy learners displayed a handful of discrete traits: they appropriated a flat, impoverished affect associated with autonomy, that is, with independence and individual action that were disconnected from other sounds/bodies/things; they were silent, which Tom affirmed as “quiet is better;” they were still, which Beth defined as “when we don’t move around”; and they were rational which meant making the right choice to use one’s “ready mind” to “still” the body (Dernikos, 2020). As I have argued elsewhere (2020b), “there has been an historic interrelationship between whiteness and humanity to that of silence, or the conflation of whiteness/silence to rationality/discipline/humanity and blackness/noise to irrationality/excess/barbarity” (p. 142), which remains largely invisible due to white supremacist attempts to “suppress, tune out, and willfully misunderstand some sounds and their makers and histories” (Stoever, 2016, p. 6). In this way, the children and Ms. Rizzo (along with many of us) have learned to internalize white supremacist discourses that privilege student silence as rational/efficient and unsanctioned talk as distracting/noisy. The force of such discourses washes over Beth, Austin, and Tom like heavy vibrational waves (McKittrick & Weheliye, 2017), having the power to redirect affective flows of energy toward those normative practices which reproduce literacy/literate subjects in relation to whiteness (Dernikos, 2020a, b). These affective energies impede Al’s embodied movements and talk, and diminish his overall capacity to function as a successful reader. In other words, white neoliberal norms govern the pace (James, 2020) of the children’s daily reading habits: where those sonic frequencies (Al’s singing) that disrupt “rational efficiency” must be eliminated (“Sh!”) to re/produce Readers Workshop as an individual, disembodied, silent, and still space (Dernikos, 2020b). The children’s judging and shushing, then, function as a kind of disciplinary technique that polices Al’s Black body, dishonors his literacies, and regulates the classroom soundscape by re-imposing a flat affective rhythm oriented towards whiteness (Dernikos, 2020a,b). Such dehumanizing orientations ultimately work to position Al as an unsuccessful reader. Attuning to otherwise worlds

While I (Bessie) did notice that certain sounds were policed (here, Al’s shushing), what I didn’t come to realize until much later is how first graders subtly

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resisted white, patriarchal ways of knowing, being, and doing by creating alternative realities in parallel to the hegemonic one associated with Readers Workshop/read-aloud time (Dernikos, 2020b). More specifically, I sensed how Al was tuning into a different frequency – redirecting me/us to new and exciting flows and rhythms which offer alternative modes of what literacies/ literate bodies can be(come) and who I/we might be becoming as researchers/ educators. Rather than view this literacy event as distracting or noisy, we invite you to see/hear/feel it as a vibrant-relational-mobile literacy event attuned to other spacetime frequencies not aligned with white supremacy, where Readers Workshop-time becomes otherwise. Let’s reconsider how the body of the book (The Missing Piece), as well as the sounds of the song (“Hi-dee-ho”) and street (WEEEE-ERRRRRRR-WEEEE-ERRRRRRR!), extend relationally into Al, becoming active participants in a lively more-than-human encounter full of vibratory motion (Dernikos, 2020b). The singsong loop of the “Missin’ Piece” lyrics – that is, the swishing of Al’s arms, the thump of his head as it bobs back and forth, his joy as he bursts out in song – all release flows of energy that create new sonic relationalities, thereby redirecting our attention to a host of mobile bodies reshaping what counts as literacy: Readers Workshop-time as lively, embodied, and affective, rather than silent, still, hierarchical, flat. Admittedly, I was not initially tuned into these alternative realities/practices, as my “hegemonic listening ear … [was] trained to unhear” (James, 2020, p. 55) such frequencies. Ultimately, by intra-acting with the data as “rebellious” (Dernikos, 2020a), I came to understand how my conceptions of sound were linked to dehumanizing disciplinary techniques that re/produced hegemonic sounds, feelings, habits, practices, values, and ideas, and how my own listening/hearing habits might be in fact harming students. Coda: violence otherwise

In the above enactment of queering critique, Bessie attuned to sonic bodies and reconsidered Readers Workshop/read-aloud time as an onto-epistemological atmosphere of violence in its imposition of the flat affect associated with efficient rationality, autonomy, and classroom order. By imposing reading pedagogy that mandates an individualized, disembodied, still, and silent learner, workshop-time perpetuated an autonomous view of literacy (Street, 1993) linked with white supremacy. The children’s judging and shushing helped further discipline Al’s Black body, derogate his reading, and support an affectively flat and quiet classroom that is coded as white. In this example, queering critique involved a reframing of criticality as a relational doing. When Bessie utilized Black sound scholarship to acclimate to other spacetime frequencies not aligned with white supremacy, Readers Workshop became otherwise. And Bessie’s researcher

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subjectivity – specifically, her hegemonic ear and her Professional Expertise in the American Schooling Project – also shifted. Bessie countered the violence of the literacy classroom by following rebellious data, studying Black sound scholars, and re-imagining children’s literacy as embodied, collective, and contextualized. Sensing something otherwise, critique became an ongoing site of exploration and struggle for the researcher here and her relationship with data. Thus, in our version of queering critique, we emphasize a stronger attunement to the intra-active subjectivity of qualitative researchers to “foster” alternative perspectives and challenges to the endemic and racialized violence of schooling, all the while acknowledging their own complicity in reinscribing violent atmospheres. It is not our aim in this chapter to provide the final word on educational critique, to offer all the possibilities for what queering critique might look like in practice, or to claim it makes our postfoundational inquiries any easier. While we did offer a research enactment (Dernikos, 2020a), we by no means wish to suggest that queering critique is a utopic process with clear strategies. As violence is a shapeshifting, vibrational force, we must work to continually examine violence – and our roles in reproducing such violence – with/in our postfoundational educational inquiries, not only by sensing those vibrational forces that simultaneously collide with and interrupt life but also those that refuse anti-Blackness and other forms of exclusion. As Bessie’s analysis pointed out, even when “thinking with” the kinds of “posthuman” critical practices that postfoundational scholars advocate for (see, e.g., MacLure, 2015), she initially did not notice these otherwise worlds, thereby making her [momentarily] complicit in reproducing hegemonic literacy practices, or those violences of the ordinary (Berlant, 2011) that work to label diverse students as “off-task, unsuccessful” students. Bessie’s mapping of sound-affectrace-whiteness-literacies-books (and so on) shows us the complex relations among sound, schooling, race, and violence, and how, within such violences of the ordinary, there are practices/habits that – if we attune to them – simultaneously emerge to redirect affective energy away from the histories, discourses, affects (and so on) that feel/are harmful (e.g., the privileging of silence and punishing of “noisy” bodies) and towards those that feel/are pleasurable and life-affirming (e.g., students of color reimagining literacy as lively/ affective, rather than hierarchical/still) (cf. McKittrick & Weheliye, 2017). There are, of course, other sonic onto-epistemologies to help us queer critique. For example, Sharpe’s (2016) concept of the wake as vibrational and Weheliye’s (2014) concept of phonographies likewise invite us to notice/ attune to what heteropatriarchal racial capitalism codes out of legibility so that we can begin to detect and imagine otherwise worlds amidst “the” violent world of Man. We find generative approaches for working within and against violence in different disciplines and genres; Sharpe (2016) prioritizes Black artists’ annotation and redaction practices as exemplary critique, while

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Brown (2018) considers “shared rage” as vital. Nyong’o’s (2018) interpretation of Black performers as playing with the line between authenticity and inauthenticity places critique as central to performing arts. Keeling (2007) follows black femme figures in film as haunting and disrupting hegemonic formulations and thereby making alternative social arrangements plausible. In the specific practices and contingencies of different scholarly fields, possibilities abound for staying with the trouble of endemic violence and fostering creative efforts and assemblages that include affective and sensory attunements to the subjectivities of researchers and participants. Notes 1 In the United States, anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced and/or signed into law that both deny parents the right to provide their transgender children with gender-affirming medical treatment (e.g., Texas Governor Abbott’s call to prosecute such parents as child abusers, see Nachimson, 2022) and limit what can be taught and discussed in PK-12 schools regarding sexuality and gender (e.g., Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay Bill”). 2 In 1973, the US Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in all 50 US states. On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned its earlier ruling, thus taking away a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion and returning the power to decide over to individual state governments. 3 On June 23, 2022, in the wake of increased US gun violence and deadly mass shootings, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment to the US constitution upholds a citizen’s right to carry a gun for self-defense outside their home.

References Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint! Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Berlant, L. (1994). ‘68, or something. Critical Inquiry, 21(1), 124–135. Berlant, L. (1998). Intimacy: A special issue. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 281–288. Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Bernstein, E., & Jakobsen, J. R. (2021). Paradoxes of neoliberalism: Sex, gender and possibilities for justice. Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2018). Affirmative ethics, posthuman subjectivity and intimate scholarship: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In Strom, K. Mills, T., & Ovens, A. (Eds). Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship: Critical posthuman methodological perspectives in education, pp. 179–188. Emerald Publishing. Brown, J. (2018). A world on fire: Radical Black feminism in a dystopian age. South Atlantic Quarterly, 17(3), 581–597. Colebrook, C. (2017). What is this thing called education? Qualitative Inquiry, 9(23), 649–655. Crawley, A. (2021). Susceptibility. GLQ, 27(1), 11–38. Crawley, A. T. (2017). Blackpentacostal breath: The aesthetics of possibility. Fordham University Press.

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Dernikos, B. P. (2022). ‘I want my [un]happy ending!’ Queering happily everafter with/in a primary classroom. Sex Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2 022.2082399 Dernikos, B. P. (2020a). Tuning into rebellious matter: Affective literacies as morethan-human sonic bodies. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 19(4), 417–432. Dernikos, B. P. (2020b). Tuning into “fleshy” frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound, and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20(1), 134–157. Fernando, C., Williams, A. R., Morgan, J., Hayes, C., & Morin, R. (2022). I cannot believe we are here again’: Protesters take to streets across US after Supreme Court overturns Roe. USA Today. Retrieved from: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ nation/2022/06/24/roe-v-wade-abortion-rights-protests/7723620001/ Henriques, J. (2011). Sonic bodies: Reggae sound systems, performance techniques and ways of knowing. Continuum. Holmes, R. (2015). My tongue on your theory: The bittersweet reminder of everything unnameable. Retrieved from: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/581520/2/Final%20 Holmes.pdf Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research. Routledge. James, R. (2020). The sonic episteme: Acoustic resonance, neoliberalism, and biopolitics. Duke University Press. Keeling, K. (2007). The witch’s flight: The cinematic, the Black Femme, and the image of common sense. Duke University Press. Keenan, H. B. (2017). Unscripting curriculum: Toward a critical trans pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 87(4), 538–556. MacLure, M. (2015). The ‘new materialisms’: A thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M.S. Perez & P. Pasque (Eds). Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures, pp. 93–112. Left Coast Press. Massumi, B. (Ed.) (2002). A shock to thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. Routledge. Matias, C. E. (2022). Towards a Black whiteness studies: A response to the growing field, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1 080/09518398.2022.2025482 McKittrick, K., & Weheliye, A. G. (2017). 808s & Heartbreak. Propter Nos, 2(1), 13–42. Muñoz, J. E. (2000), Feeling brown: ethnicity and affect in Ricardo Bracho’s “The sweetest hangover (and other STDs)”. Theatre Journal, 52(1), 67–79. Nachimson, S. (2022).The war on gay and trans youth. The Corsair. Retrieved from: https:// www.thecorsaironline.com/corsair/2022/3/27/the-war-on-gay-and-trans-youth Nyong’o, T. (2018). Afro-fabulations: The queer drama of Black life. NYU Press. Rosiek, J. (2019). Critical race theory meets posthumanism: Lessons from a study of racial resegregation in public schools, Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(1), 73–92, https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2018.1468746 Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (2008). Epistemology of the closet. 2nd ed. University of California Press. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Duke University Press. Stanley, E. (2021). Atmospheres of violence. Duke University Press.

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Stoever, J. L. (2016). The sonic color line: Race and the cultural politics of listening. New York University Press. Street, B. (1993). Introduction. The new literacy studies. In B. Street (Ed.), Cross-cultural approaches to literacy (pp. 1–22). Cambridge University Press. Strom, K., Ringrose, J., Osgood, J., & Renold, E. (2019). Phematerialism: Responseable research and pedagogy. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3). https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.3649 Taussig, M. (1992). The nervous system. Routledge. Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428. Weheliye, A. (2014). Engendering phonographies: Sonic technologies of blackness. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 18(2), 180–190. Wozolek, B. (2020). Hidden curriculum of violence: Affect, power, and policing the Body. Educational Studies, 56(3), 269–285.

4 ATMOSPHERIC DATA AND SOFTWARE ARTS New ways of investigating the built environment Elizabeth de Freitas and Laura Trafí-Prats

Introduction

Atmospheres are ephemeral, diffuse, dissipative, “airy,” and intensive. But they are also highly visceral, embodied, tangible, affective, and material. An atmosphere within a building forms a volatile space or metamorphic zone, conditioned by material architecture and the building’s envelope (ZaeraPolo & Anderson, 2021). The envelope plays an important role in shaping the atmosphere, and in acting as a semi-porous membrane that links feelings of an inside to an outside. The envelope, therefore, is like an interface for those who enter buildings through various thresholds that are physical, social, and emotional. Buildings are charged environments, where the atmosphere carries thousands of little affects and percepts, where sensory engagement churns up and pumps up “feeling” in specific parts of a building (de Freitas et al., 2019). Humans enter the building and carry with them their memories, anxieties, and anticipations. This chapter argues that the post qualitative field can better study atmospheric data and the flow of affect by experimenting with sensor technologies and thinking with theories of digital contingency. Digital technologies have radically altered social science practice, altering and indeed displacing conventional qualitative methods championed since the 1940s, such as interview, survey, and ethnographic observation. In particular, the use of digital “passive data” captured by sensor technology has remixed the qualitative and quantitative, opening onto new methodologies like software studies and investigative aesthetics (Fuller & Weizman, 2021; Manovich, 2002). Taking our cue from these two new fields, we respond to the postfoundational condition of qualitative research by closely engaging with the very same technical DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-6

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devices that are said to be a source of the field’s dissolution (Ruppert et al., 2013). We advocate for projects that draw from the software arts in order to do more than simply expose the bias and stupidity of software, which we take to be a fairly easy argument; our investigation goes deeper to engage the digital behind the curtain and to open up and experiment with the black box of software. We believe this allows for the most probing of political projects, as we reclaim and rewrite the meaning of digital data, wrestling it away from surveillance capitalists. We aim to show how software experiments engage with contingency, not only as lack or deficit in representation but also as an opening onto the trans-individual and pre-personal atmosphere of the built environment, which is evental and processual (Massumi, 2002). We focus on learning environments which we take to be formed by physical, temporal, and affective bodying habits – such as movements, departures, encounters, and anxieties – whereby a school building adapts and constrains the becoming of a collective student body. We also think with ideas on place and architecture from writers in cultural studies. Ellsworth (2004), Grosz (2001), and Parisi (2012), for instance, theorize links between learning, environment, and new media to explore the (1) pedagogy of place, (2) animacy of the built environment, and (3) digital media interventions. We also take inspiration from architects Pallaasma (2012) and Pérez-Gómez (2016) who offer expansive theories of synaesthetic architecture and lived architecture. In this paper, we discuss a 2020–2022 project1 that investigated sensoryaffective experiences of school buildings by (1) forging an interdisciplinary team from Education, Architecture, and Design who (2) worked collaboratively with young people and school staff, (3) using sensory ethnographic methods and mapping software to produce (4) new research methods for studying learning environments.2 This project generated new digital mapping methods that sought to raise awareness about the complex spatial practices and affective atmosphere within schools, whilst increasing young people’s understanding of the built environment. We focus on data from one school, mapping the sensory and the atmospheric, and drawing from recent anthropological writing about atmosphere. This paper discusses how students studied atmosphere by exploring both the building envelope, the interior passages, and various other architectural dimensions. We focus here on findings related to the use of (i) 360 image software and cameras, (ii) Polycam software and LiDAR scanner data, and (iii) Hyperspektiv software and GoPro video data, generated in collaboration with students as they ethnographically mapped the school. The students used the 360 cameras, iPad LiDAR camera scanners, and the GoPros to map the building envelope from the inside. The 360 images produced volumetric and navigable images, while the LiDAR scanner and the Hyperspektiv filters incited a different way of moving and visualizing the building, emphasizing the generative force of media to open

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up architecture to different kinds of corporeal and atmospheric experience (Ellsworth, 2004; Grosz, 2001). Our research speaks to the postfoundational concern with – and celebration of – contingency. This emphasis on contingency is particularly relevant to current cultural practices associated with digital life and the quantified self (Lupton, 2016; Platoni, 2015). We are not simply contesting assumptions about conventional ethnographic method, as others have persuasively done (St. Pierre, 2017), nor underlining the limits of research representation (Maclure, 2013), but advocating for a mode of inquiry that is (a) politically and materially engaged with digital transformations of life and culture, (b) attentive to the atmospheric and distributed eco-sensory nature of experience, and (c) explicitly focused on the role of contingency and speculation in experimental modes of empirical inquiry. The surrounding envelope

As part of our research, we used 360 cameras to create volumetric images of the building’s interior. These surreal and disorienting images (Figure 4.1) were taken by a 360 camera of the open courtyard space of the school. The 360 image is constructed using two 180 lenses and software that stitches the two images together. The image simulates a volumetric space, and touching the screen and dragging a finger allows one to move through the space, virtually. There are often tiny stitching glitches where the software has to fudge or smudge in order to fashion a continuous surround image. Similar 360 images are used by architects online to offer a “virtual tour” of buildings. As one touches the screen to occupy and traverse these spaces, moving around the 3D image, there is a sense that the space has been captured in a strange timeless present, and that the moving point of view is disembodied, despite being positioned within the environment. Interacting with these images, students were asked to reflect on their feelings of confinement and claustrophobia. They frequently spoke about their desire to escape or to have opportunities to leave. We used these images to disrupt the standard birds-eye view (or the drone view) of conventional architectural visions, which imagine the school building as a utopian space of rectilinear visibility and learning. Post qualitative research has much to gain from experimenting with this new 360 image software, to expand techniques of data visualization and mapping, moving away from representational images that chart fixed locations in a grid, to a notion of topological living maps. These images create a non-Euclidean layer from which mapping experiments of the space can begin differently. As Aït-Touati, Arènes, and Gregòire (2022) propose, a living map disrupts “point of view” in favor of “a resonant milieu, composed of thousands of superimpositions and actions of the beings that surround us, constantly and indefinitely produced by the movements and perceptions of those who create it” (p. 12).

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FIGURE 4.1

360 images of school atrium.

These unusual images helped the students discuss the claustrophobic atmosphere of the school building and brought attention to the surrounding envelope. We share with Sumartojo and Pink (2019) an interest in studying atmosphere as “an aspect of the way something feels to people, a contingent and fluid outcome of our perpetually configured surroundings, sensory perceptions, subjectivities and imaginations” (p. 5), and their interest in the force of anticipation and “attunement” to atmosphere, as in the work of Edensor (2012) who argues that “atmospheric attunement… is frequently anticipated attunement” (p. 1114). Students’ feelings about the environment were linked to their anticipatory feelings during their journey to school, which we also mapped out in the workshops. However, McCormack (2018) writes critically about the phenomenological assumptions that underpin some of Sumartojo and Pink’s work, and others (Böhme, 2017), and notes that “invoking atmosphere as a shorthand for an empiricism that privileges, presence, immediacy, and immersion,” is a way of

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reclaiming an authentic and prominently anthropocentric experience (p. 8). He adds, “Even as it seems to privilege immersion, atmosphere is haunted by something in excess of immediacy: that which is withdrawn from apprehension, even when actively manipulated by devices and technologies that hold onto the process of immersion” (p. 8). McCormack underscores the importance of experiments in “envelopment” that “open up different modes of being and becoming more attuned to… the affective force of atmospheres as environmental milieus” (p. 9). We agree with McCormack (2017) that the relation between atmosphere and envelopment is extremely important, and that modifying the conditions of the envelope can have implications for how different forms of life are sustained while others are untenable. Experiments that address the complexity of envelopment – in all its imagined shapes and contours – are needed to help people modify, puncture, and withdraw from atmospheres. Distorting affect

Hyperspektiv video filters are a highly ranked AR app, which offers ways of altering and modulating video through various trippy distortions and feedback loops.3 This software allowed students to modify the GoPro video that they made as they moved through the building, mapping their various trajectories through the space, so as to better capture the affect of corridors and stairways. Below are two images (Figure 4.2), each obtained with a filter on a student video that recorded movement along the fourth floor before descending the open stairs into the atrium. The bottom image used a filter that created an “ephemeral” effect that students selected for how it evoked the dangerous and foreboding nature of the building, while the top image used a visual reverb (repeat) filter to create visual echoes and material streaks, essentially destabilizing the hard lines that would otherwise separate different spaces. The filtered videos create a temporal trace of that which is seen in passing, underscoring the bodily movement of the camera operator, which is translated into bumpy streaks of banister or wall. The students used the filters to modify the material texture of the building and capture the feeling of moving through the building’s atmosphere. This data may seem rather impersonal and alien, but it raises a more posthuman perspective on the environment. We use software to explore the more than human aspect of atmosphere, unlike Sumartojo and Pink (2019), who critiqued architect Zumthor (2006) for describing atmospheres in terms of collective clouds of materiality (smoke, light, and smell) because they suspect this anonymizes the data across a trans-individual group. They are critical of posthuman approaches which they claim diminish the causal power of humans, and they are concerned that studies of “affective” atmosphere tend to decenter human perception: according to Sumartojo and Pink (2019),

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FIGURE 4.2

Hyperspektiv filters of navigation videos in the school building.

such work wrongly treats atmospheres as ephemeral, as though detached from their material grounding. They have concerns that atmosphere will be reduced to “affective fields” of molecular affect transmitted from person to person, and “diminish the importance of individual experience, environmental, social and cultural factors, and the specific configurations of places and temporalities in which atmospheres might be felt and shared” (p. 30). Sensitive to these concerns, we diverge from Sumartojo and Pink (2019) and follow Latour (2005) and Weibel (Latour & Weibel, 2005) in pursuing a more-than-human relational ontology and technical milieu. The humans in our study are central to shaping the atmosphere because they are powerfully positioned to do so, as part of this political posthuman ecology, and as

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participants in the technical process of abstraction that occurs in the project (de Freitas et al., 2022). But ethnographic work refuses the humanist image of the conscious reflexive subject while affirming the powerful agency of student participants (de Freitas, 2015). Students were empowered in workshops as they learned about software, and they were empowered by the ways in which such software allowed them to trouble conventions of visibility. Moreover, thinking about the atmosphere in posthuman terms helped them study affect as belonging fundamentally to environments (rather than individuals), which empowers people as a collective. Notably, and to trouble the theoretical water, Sumartojo and Pink (2019) positively cite affect theorists Massumi and Seigworth, who are posthuman thinkers: “For example, Seigworth and Gregg (2010: 3) argue of affect that it is ‘integral to a body’s perpetual becoming… pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter’” (Sumartojo & Pink, 2019, p.44). They turn to Massumi to help them stretch away from the phenomenological tradition: “Here atmosphere offers the ‘surplus of unacted-out potential that is collectively felt’ that Massumi (2015: 57) links to emergent and uncertain affective intensities, the potential for new configurations, for a shift in thinking or perceiving that might make new futures possible” (Sumartojo & Pink, 2019, p. 45). In the concluding section of this paper, we return to some of these theoretical delineations, after discussing one more experiment in the next section. Scanning and texture

Sensor technologies often operate at scales of discernment that are imperceptible to humans, generating data that is pre-personal, pre-individual, presubjective, and pre-conceptual, and then remixing large amounts of qualia or sense data through instant visualizing software (Carpo, 2017). This opens onto what Clough (2009) envisages: “an infra-empiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect” (p. 44). Our project sought to work with such technology so that we might further explore the infra-sensory ecologies of school buildings and the social-electrical framings of embodiment and environment (de Freitas, 2018; de Freitas et al., 2019; de Freitas & Rousell, 2021). LiDAR scanner sensors operate differently than standard video cameras; they emit pulsed light waves into the environment, which bounce off surrounding objects and return to the sensor. The time it takes each pulse to return is recorded and used to calculate the distance it traveled. This technical engagement with depth of space makes the device a kind of haptic camera (perhaps what Deleuze might have called a haptic-eye). When this haptic process of palpating the envelope or surface of a space is repeated thousands

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or millions of times per second, one is able to generate precise real-time 3D maps. The technology is similar to radar and sonar, using light waves instead of radio or sound waves. The scanner creates a “point cloud” of data, capturing the shape of objects and the depth of a room, which is then calibrated with the camera and pixel data, to create an accurate rendering of the space. This kind of technology has been used in geospatial research since the 1980s. Today it is applied in architecture to create highly accurate 3D models of buildings derived from large amounts of such data. The models are often used to retrofit the decision-making around potential building transformations, repairs, and installations. The technology is now widely available in wearable and portable devices like iPads and GoPros, although these hand-held devices operate without the same accuracy. In this project, students were able to use LiDAR scanners installed into the 2020 iPad Pro computers. These images (Figure 4.3) document a group of students scanning the environment, using the Polycam software on the iPads. After they turn on the app, the screen shows a bluish filter swiftly covered by a growing net of flickering points that suddenly reveal objects, surfaces, and fixtures. While looking at the iPad screen, one student asks about the blue holes flashing on and off around the edges of certain objects in the room: “How is it that these parts are missing?” They then realize that the LiDAR does not work like a video camera, where every object is projected onto a planar image (or a 360 image). The LiDAR is capturing depth, and the blue holes designate an absence of depth data. To resolve the glitch, they need to move with the iPad in multiple directions and speeds, to approach surfaces in order to sense the depth, texture, and volume of the space, rather than simply document “a point of view.” The depth data is indeed calibrated with the conventional camera data, so two kinds of data are synchronized to make the final scanned image. The LiDAR’s computational vision pursues this architectural space without a point of view, unlike conventional photography and cinema (Galloway, 2022). The LiDAR scanner’s computational vision does not have one point of view but rather enacts all points of view, like but different to the 360 images. These images were used to spur discussions with students about their sensory experience of the school (how they move, see, touch, smell, and feel about being in the building). The software processes the LiDAR data and renders a 3D model, presenting the school space as both hyperrealist and flawed volume, replete with uncanny details but also holes, jagged edges, and broken borders (Figure 4.4). The students explored these images using common touch screen gestures such as tap, fling, pinch open and close, engaging the familiar spaces from new and unanticipated angles, glancing from queer outer perspectives (underneath the floor or outside the window) and similarly rare inner ones (newly proximate to a surface or corner). Partly enchanted, partly confused, they compared and discussed their resulting scans, acknowledging the software’s capacity to

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FIGURE 4.3

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Students scanning the building.

compute the same model in parallel machines, while also recognizing errors, incompatible aspects, and unknowns, what Parisi (2019) describes as contingencies overwhelming rational systems. The conversations foregrounded the turbulent multiplicity of matter’s tendency towards variation and commotion (Spence, 2021, 2022). As Massumi (2002) notes, the intensity of affect resides in such atmospheric multiplicity, precisely because affect remains largely unknowable, inciting speculation and opening the space to mutation. The scanning experiment opened up the contingency of the building’s envelope, its potential for leaks, escape routes, and lines of flight (real and imagined) from the controlling institution. This approach of working closely with residents resonates with architectural practices where models are not just generated as representations of a normative reality, but function as diagrammatic tools to propel experimental thinking (Poole, 2020). The students used the software to index the limit of the interior space, to feel the constraining force of the building envelope, and push past conventions of encounter. As they scanned, their movement and activity altered, crouching, shuffling, crawling, and bending over, holding the iPad with their two hands, often swaying back and forth in front of the surfaces of walls, counters, windows, corners, as well as underneath tables and other negative spaces. They palpated the borders that separate inside from outside. These altered modes of engagement showed how the scanner is a device that attends and attunes to experiences of envelopment, confronting feelings of containment. This kind of software has proven essential in various spatial justice projects within the field of investigative aesthetics, where digital sensors and cameras are used to reveal buried stories about controversial

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FIGURE 4.4

Polycam 3D scan model.

events. Such projects recruit technology as part of the critical agenda: “The reorganization of relations between organic and inorganic sensorial matter, people and computers, can increase non-hierarchical sensorial assemblages and even seek to harvest or ‘rescue’ traces from beneath layers of erasure” (Fuller & Weizman, 2021, p. 57). This involves a “hyper-aesthetisation” or an amplification of the senses through the powers of interconnected technologies that function as “interlocutors” (p. 58), making “felt” a series of unexpected interplays between different modalities (digital, architectural, bodied). Fuller and Weizman (2021) explain that “to hyper-aestheticise is to heighten, elicit or exacerbate the capacity of bodies, technologies or states of matter to sense and increase perceptual experience; it entails an increase in sensitivity and can perhaps augment a capacity to care” (p. 58). Conclusion: technicity and contingency

The students used the digital technology to open-up the building envelope and undermine its constraints of movement and visibility, while documenting the “feeling” of corridors and passages. Our postfoundational approach brought attention to the trans-individual and pre-personal atmosphere of the learning environment. As such, our work responds to the editors’ reorienting questions about pre-personal and pre-individual factors in social research, as well as the role of contingency in research method. The building envelope

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became something animate and adaptive that refused simplistic representation (Zaera-Polo & Anderson, 2021, p. 12). The atmospheric data exposed the building as an affective environment, showing how key areas were connected not through conventional passages, but through affect, imagination, and emotional attachments. These experiments with posthuman digital ethnography allowed the students to realize the manifold shape of interior school spaces, and to “sense” the atmosphere in new ways, revealing how the building envelope joins and modulates inside and outside environments (Zaera-Polo  & Anderson, 2021). When we situated these images within other maps of the school and the community, students were able to link the interior affective atmosphere with larger processes of climate and history at various scales.4 Under current algorithmic conditions, the digital has come to be part of a “general ecology” that commingles the “natural” and the “artificial” in new uncharted terrain (Hörl, 2018). Braidotti and Fuller (2019) suggest that software processes inherit a relation to the outside, and “prehend a milieu” by incorporating cybernetic notions of loop and plasticity. Fazi (2018) argues for “computational aesthetics” to be understood as “conceptual prehension […] a grasping, seizing, or holding of the pure potentiality of an ideal” (p. 12). She argues that computing machines harbor creative contingency within them; we need to better understand the glitch fragility of digital devices and the limits of computability. Fazi’s focus on the inherent contingency of algorithms echoes similar claims from 1970s postmodernists, in particular Jean-François Lyotard who argued in The Postmodern Condition about the inherent uncertainty of any knowledge or epistemic platform or paradigm (Lyotard, 1979). Fazi brings this claim up to date. The intrinsic incompleteness within any digital infrastructure is what makes computation always already a speculative leap into contingent activity. In other words, Fazi reminds us that contingency is not an after-effect of application but is rather inherent to all machinic activity. By taking a deeper dive into the technical abductive habits of digital devices, we can make visible the quivering contingency that is at the heart of both digital life and digital methods of inquiry. This is a kind of “investigative aesthetics” (Fuller & Weizman, 2021) that directs our attention to issues of spatial justice (Kurgan, 2019; Arènes et al. 2018). With that in mind, this project uses digital technology as part of a speculative method that enlivens the school milieu, while also revealing the incomputable within computation as such (Parisi, 2017). Note that our project is both creative and critical  – our experiments rely on digital methods to materialize the incomputable of atmospheres. Software is not simply processing information and spitting out representations (de Freitas, 2022). In other words, the software experiments retroductively elicit (abduce) the material building’s incomputable potentiality. This retroductive eliciting opens the building up to new configurations – we use the software to help the students rethink and remake space and

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architecture. The software effects an abstract image that brings forth the latent potentialities in the object of inquiry – that being the latent potentiality of the school and its atmospheres. The building then becomes animate within a newly configured field of ontological relations. Research method is here transformative of the object of study, but perhaps more importantly, the evental nature of the building is lured out of stasis by the student engagement with the technical devices. Here research becomes a kind of software art that pursues the abductive (or retroductive) way that algorithms produce contingent models. Notes 1 The research discussed in this chapter was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council. Project ID # ES/V006436/1. 2 This work responds to demands in learning environment research (OECD, 2017), regarding the need for new research methodologies that can shed light on the lived experience of school buildings (Cleveland & Fisher, 2014; Dovey & Fisher, 2014; Daniels et al., 2019a, 2019b; Woolner et al., 2007). 3 https://www.hyperspektiv.com/. 4 See sample project materials at https://www.schoolatmospheres.net/.

References Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A. & Grégoire, A. (2022). Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. (Trans. Amanda DeMarco). Cambridge: MIT Press. Arènes, A., Latour, B. & Gaillardet, J. (2018). Giving depth to the surface: An exercise in the Gaia-graphy of critical zones. The Anthropocene Review, 5(2), 120–135. Bisell, D. (2010). Passenger mobilities: Affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 270–289. Böhme, G. (2017). Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces. London: Bloomsbury. Braidotti, R. & Fuller, M. (2019). The Posthumanities in an era of Unexpected Consequences Editorial for the special issue on the Transversal Posthumanities. Theory, Culture and Society, 36(6), 3–29. Carpo, M. (2017). The Second Digital Turn. Design Beyond Intelligence. Cambridge: MIT Press. Cleveland, B. & Fisher, K. (2014). The evaluation of physical learning environments: A critical review of the literature. Learning Environments Research, 17(1), 1–28. Clough, P. T. (2009). The New Empiricism: Affect and Sociological Method. European Journal of Social Theory, 12(1), 43–61. Daniels, H., Tse, H. M., Stables, A. & Cox, S. (2019a). Design as a social practice: The experience of new-build schools. Cambridge Journal of Education, 49(2), 215–233. Daniels, H., Stables, A., Tse, H. & Cox, S. (2019b). School Design Matters. Abingdon: Routledge. Dovey, K. & Fisher, K. (2014). Designing for adaptation: The school as socio-spatial assemblage. The Journal of Architecture, 19(1), 43–63. de Freitas, E. (2015). Classroom video data and the time-image: An-archiving the student body. Deleuze Studies, 9(3), 318–336.

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de Freitas, E. (2018). The biosocial subject: Sensor technology and worldly sensibility. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39 (2), 292–308. de Freitas, E. (2022). The role of abduction in mathematics: Creativity, contingency and constraint. In Magnani, L. (Ed.), The Springer Handbook on Abductive Cognition. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-030-68436-5-34-1 de Freitas, E., Rousell, D. & Jäger, N. (2019). Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation. Research in Education [special issue on “biosocial imaginaries in education”], 107(1), 10–32. de Freitas, E. & Rousell, D. (2021). Atmospheric intensities: Skin conductance and the collective sensing body. In Fritsch, J., Thomsen, B. & Kofoed, J. (Eds.), Affects, Interfaces, Events. Lancaster, PA; Vancouver, BC: Imbricate! Press. de Freitas, E., Trafí-Prats, L., Rousell, D. & Hohti, R. (2022). A poetics of opacity: Towards a new ethics of participation in gallery-based art projects with young people. In Trafí-Prats, L., Fendler, R. & Varela, A. (Eds.). Becoming Lively in the City: Essays on the Ontology, Aesthetics and Ethics of Visual Participatory Arts-Based Research (pp. 126–142). London: Routledge. Edensor, T. (2012). Illuminated atmospheres: Anticipating and reproducing the flow of affective experience in Blackpool. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30, 1103–1122. Ellsworth, E. (2004). Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Fuller, M. & Weizman, E. (2021). Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth. London: Verso. Fazi, B. (2018). Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Galloway, A. R. (2022). Uncomputable: Play and Politica in the Long Digital Age. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. (Eds.). (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2001). Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: The MIT press. Hörl, E. (2018). General ecology. In Braidotti, R. & Hlavajova, M. (Eds.), Posthuman Glossary (pp. 172–175). London: Bloomsbury. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. & Weibel, P. (2005). Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lupton, D. (2016). The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, F. (1979). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. McCormack, D. P. (2017). Stratospheric envelopes for an atmospheric mode of address. GeoHumanities, 3(2), 414–430. McCormack, D. P. (2018). Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. OECD (2017). OECD framework for a module on the physical learning environment – revised. edition. Directorate for Education and Skills Education Policy Committee. https://www.oecd.org/education/OECD-FRAMEWORK-FOR-A-MODULE-ONTHE-PHYSICAL-LEARNING-ENVIRONMENT.pdf Pallaasma, J. (2012). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, 3rd edition. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Parisi, L. (2012). Speculation: A method for the unattainable. In Lury, C. & Wakeford,  N. (Eds.), Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social (pp. 232–244). London: Taylor & Francis. Parisi, L. (2017). Computational logic and ecological rationality. In Hörl, E. (Ed.), General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (pp. 75–100). London: Bloomsbury. Parisi, L. (2019). Media ontology and transcendental instrumentality. Theory, Culture, Society, 36(6), 95–124. Pérez-Gómez, A. (2016). Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge: MIT Press. Platoni, K. (2015). We Have the Technology: How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians & Scientists are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time. New York: Basic Books. Poole, M. (2020). Allography and the Baroque agency of the objectile. In A. Beech & R. Mackay (Eds.), Construction Site for Possible Worlds (pp. 171–193). Falmouth: Urbanomic. Ruppert, E., Law, J. & Savage, M. (2013). Reassembling social science methods: The challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture, Society, 30(4), 22–46. Spence, C. (2021). Senses of place: Architectural design for the multisensory mind. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 46(5), 1–26. Spence, C. (2022). Sense-Hacking: How to Use the Power of the Senses for Happier and Healthier Thinking. London: Viking Penguin. Sumartojo, S. & Pink, S. (2019). Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods. New York: Routledge. St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Haecceity: Laying out a plane for post qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 686–698. Woolner, P., Hall, E., Higgins, S., McCaughey, C. & Wall, K. (2007). A Sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications of building schools for the future. Oxford Review of Education, 33(1), 47–70. Zaera-Polo, A. & Anderson J. S. (2021). The Ecologies of the Building Envelope. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing. Zumthor, P. (2006). Atmospheres: Architectural Environments, Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhauser.

5 ABSENCE AND REFUSING THE GIVEN Asilia Franklin-Phipps

Introduction

We are in a milieu where the vanished and disappeared are asserting their presence in such a way that they cannot be ignored. The ghosts of the past are rattling their chains and stalking the corridors. The series of tasks, passed down from one generation to another, has ignored the ghosts, affectively attaching to individualism, progress narratives, and technological advances – leading us to an impasse where the very solutions posed often reinforce the problem anew. One way to describe the situation we find ourselves in is an impasse. We are deadlocked. This is for a multitude of reasons, but one of which is that our past ways of relating to one another have failed. A history of domination, exploitation, and extraction has wrought the world that contextualizes the present, aided by an ongoing resistance to ghosts. This is of particular interest and importance to those who are tasked with producing and sharing knowledge in a meaningful capacity. Thus beginning here, at an impasse of sorts, where we have not imagined the tools of escape, I am interested in a conceptual exploration of how conjuring ghosts might produce new categories for knowing, being, and sensing. What might it mean to sharpen one’s attunement to sites of inquiry that might have otherwise been ignored? I began my career in higher education as a public college professor living in Newburgh, NY – an area rich with colonial history. George Washington’s barracks were located a block away from my apartment where mice entered through decades-established passageways. I was overwhelmed by this history because it was so palpable, but I had little idea of what to do with that past or why it mattered at all. To consider one of the reorienting questions for this edited collection, What I am making room for?, I am inspired by DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-7

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Saidiya Hartman’s astounding text Lose Your Mother (2008), where she travels to Ghana in search of ghosts, encountering different ones than she expected: “The necessity of trying to represent what we cannot, rather than leading to pessimism or despair, must be embraced as the impossibility that conditions our knowledge of the past and animates our desire for a liberated future” (Hartman, 2008, p. 13). Hartman’s text provides a useful model for some of what I am concerned with in this chapter: entering a scene hoping to know, while resisting that desire to reproduce the narrative I arrived with by leaving enough space for ghosts to reveal themselves. I also interrogate what is required to begin accounting for oneself alongside ghosts and further, who that person then becomes. Such praxis puts one out of step with the norms and therefore is not without costs or risks, but becoming disconnected from some (people, places, ideas, and dogma) creates connections elsewhere. Hartman did not only lose her mother. When I began writing this paper, I lived in a place that is geographically beautiful but distinct in the number of abandoned, burned, decaying, and collapsing buildings. Empty fields were home to old mattresses split in the middle with the contents bursting out, burned toys, rusted shopping carts, and stray cats eating chicken bones. The urban landscape that once was, vanished before our very eyes. Yet, the former glory sat alongside the rot. The rot was reserved for the Black, brown, and poor residents who came later, enduring slum lords, over-policing, gun violence, real estate speculators, deadly traffic patterns, food deserts, and toxic air and water. Disaster after disaster. The city has brick mansions overlooking the Hudson River, but with hollow holes instead of windows; evidence of squatters and misery were normal. Hillside estates with half of the once ornate building burned and the rest hidden by overgrown weeds and degrading trees. It felt strange to live among so much aggressive decay. I grew up on the west coast, where things are not as old. And if things became too old, they were often bulldozed over and something new was built on top. We never had to remember what came before (unless we chose to hang out in cemeteries or go to film retrospectives – exhuming the corpses for fashion). As a result, I linger on what we cannot and/or are unprepared to engage, even as it is often right in front of our faces as an attraction. This shifts the preindividual, pre-conceptual body well before the feeling, or the change, or the difference can be noticed or named. The city – the broken glass, the asbestos, the mold, the mice dander, the despair of racism and poverty – crept into my pores, changing me from the inside out. I became ill in all these inconvenient but non-urgent ways: a dry cough, hives, yellowish tint to my skin, hair loss, exhaustion, and heart palpitations. I became attuned to sounds, smells, and tastes of environmental and ecological racism, even though I was only on the periphery and for a brief time. Living alongside rot – ingesting it through my mouth and nose, and absorbing it through my skin – reconfigured my

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senses and sensitized me to something that I had previously only read about. I became haunted by a past that I initially felt outside of. I was not from there, nor did I have to remain. My discomfort in response to the landscape speaks to the limits of my vision and the inadequacy of my imagination. And yet, with time and attention, my encounters with the place shifted how I was able to be in the place, refusing the narrative of those who had only passed through by making room for something other. I have become attuned to the stories that rot and decay communicate about both the past and the present. For those of us dependent on observation as a route to foundational knowledge, I wonder how one might better be in the world, as we are limited in what we cannot see or refuse to see. I want to linger here, in the invisible, in order to consider how we might know and thereby become differently in relation to the past (Hartman, 2008). In my own work, I am searching for new ways of understanding the racial present as it shifts and adapts to change, while also accounting for the salience of the past. What might postfoundational social inquiry become, and who might those doing inquiry become when holding both together? New ways of thinking and being seem particularly urgent as we face both slow (Nixon, 2011) and fast violence (Colebrook, 2020), as well as overlapping and multiple crises that require the retirement of sedimented ways of knowing and understanding others, atmospheres, and ourselves. The Western philosophical dependence on sight (Hartman, 2008, p. 175) and linear notions of time has prepared us badly for our present world. The past and present are separate and apart, rather than entangled in tight knots of different sizes and shapes. We are haunted in individual and collective ways – overwhelmed by it, really – and have not developed the capacity to chart lines across effects and affects, particularly as we too often rely on the ocular alone, believing a fiction about what can be known given a particular scene. Therefore, I want to ponder the “use” of ghosts. Habits of (in)attention

Attempting to account for ghosts is not a fixation with the past, but rather a counter to an obsession with the future and moving on – which too often requires a forgetting of the past. In my case, I am interested in the passing over of the continued harm of racism that persists in our present, how denying the ongoingness of the past haunts the haunting (Gordon, 2008), and how paying attention to racism produces one as dull, out-of-touch, or hysterically fixating on things that do not really matter: “It is a form of racism to say that racism does not exist. We know this” (Ahmed, 2010, p. 84). Forgetting the past creates new ghosts that haunt the old ghosts. What were the events, large and small, that made the present inevitable? To refuse to forget turns one’s attention to the present differently and requires reckoning with that which cannot always be seen. Gordon states, “In order to write about invisibilities

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and hauntings … requires attention to what appears dead but is nonetheless powerfully alive; requires attention to what appears to be in the past but is nonetheless powerfully present” (2008, p. 42). In the United States, we are schooled and disciplined in such a way that a studied oblivion is encouraged and maintained (Snaza, 2019), particularly to dead things. I argue that is partially how we have found ourselves in the current situation: social, environmental, and political crises (Haraway, 2016; Stewart, 2007). As unwitting participants of a disciplined and dominant culture, many of us are unused to attending to that which appears dead: people, places, tragic events, and past and continuing social violence. Our attention is often trained elsewhere. We attend to death primarily by avoiding it for as long as possible. I do not mean to suggest that this is by conscious choice, but there are habits, resistances, and refusals that may produce a different orientation, what Sara Ahmed calls “affect aliens” (2010). Affect aliens are those who are not made happy by what should produce happiness – in this case, moving on and forgetting the past. In this way, affect aliens are out of step, differently in time and space, relating to the past in ways that resist norms and foundational assumptions. There are all kinds of derisive names for such people, but Ahmed recognizes these people who will not move on as the perpetual mourners, as sources of deep knowledge – attuned to the present in a way that deserves attention: A concern with histories that hurt is not then a backward orientation: to move on, you must make this return. If anything, we might want to reread melancholic subjects, the ones who refuse to let go of suffering, who are even prepared to kill some forms of joy, as an alternative model for social good. (p. 50) We fail to know the present, ignoring the signs, even as we are living alongside heaps of rotting bodies in the form of ongoing dead and dying effects. We have the same exact conversations from mass shooting to mass shooting, from police killing to police killing, from climate crises to climate crises, and from violent event to violent event. “If haunting describes how that which appears to not be there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place,” writes Gordon (2008, p. 8). Christina Sharpe’s (2016) work also grapples with questions of the ongoing presence of the past and onto-epistemological restraints to knowledge, even as we have widely lost the attention to notice and how that lack of attention is disciplined and surveilled: The methods most readily available to us sometimes, oftentimes, force us into positions that run counter to what we know…We are expected to

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discard, discount, disregard, jettison, abandon, and measure those ways of knowing and to enact epistemic violence that we know to be violence against others and ourselves. (p. 13) Being conditioned to ignore the ghosts produces one as inattentive to the seething presence that would force a refusal of givens that frame and contextualize observations, understandings, and sensory encounters. It is what is required to participate in society – this forgetting. It is easy to see the cost that we regularly pay for this, even as the costs vary in degree. Beginning with a premise that the current social landscape reflects inadequate ontoepistemological frameworks and violent givens, givens that cannot be overthought, as they are deeply embedded. To situate this problem in the broader conversation of this volume, in response to two provocations about postfoundational approaches to imagining and creating research, I will begin with the first pair of questions: What are you overturning and displacing? What are you making room for? Hauntings position me as always uncertain in a space that cannot anticipate my existence. There are ghosts among us, and I likely do not have the capacity to meaningfully engage them. Uncertainty becomes a route to new encounters with knowing (Snaza, 2019) and a way to attune in such a way that changes who and what we can become. Humans, in the ways that have been disciplined and widely practiced, are the floor, not a ceiling (McKittrick, 2020). Katherine McKittrick, following Sylvia Wynter – alongside science fiction writers like Octavia Butler – has offered vastly different conceptions of the human unconstrained by current frames. Recognizing the limits of my perspective, I question my perceptions, observations, and the concepts which inform my attunement to some things rather than others. I collaborate with others with a desire to engage the sites of contestation and conflict. Finally, I think about absences and how accounts of events, scenes, people, and assemblages are incomplete and, in many ways, impossible to know in the ways that foundational research suggests. I hope to overturn and displace the taken-for-granted of the visual. This is not a rejection of the visual; instead, I hope to critically engage the visual in order to take into account both what is not seen (or heard, or perceived) and consider how fraught perception and observation are, both historically and presently. The ghost is alive

When I was a small child, I lived in a cheap, but clean, apartment in a loud and broadly undesirable area with my mother and brother. There were many children around and there was always something to do. I remember riding in the back of a neighbor’s pickup truck, unaware of the danger but sensing

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that my mother would not approve. Our neighbors watched over all of us kids and tattled if we trampled the flowers or were fighting on the front lawn. As a single mother, my mother was anxious about our well-being, while also badly positioned to predictably manage said well-being. This existence is both structural and historical (Sharpe, 2016). On several occasions, our little family would gather in the living room to play games or watch TV, and we would hear a knock on the door. We all heard the knock. My mother would look through the peephole, then open the door to find no one there. My brother and I would rush to the door and look left and right to make sure there was indeed no one there. My mother explained to us that if we ever heard a knock on the door and opened it to find no one there, a “haint” had gotten into the house (Brown, 2021). At the time I did not hear “haint” but instead heard “Hank.” While I did not hear the word accurately, I did know that my mother meant a ghost or spirit. I did not have extensive knowledge of ghosts at that time but knew what one was in the most reductive sense. I only know that my mother was saying “haint” now because I am writing this paper and had to look it up. I always thought she was saying Hank. Maybe I assumed that this was the ghost’s name that was assigned to our family. My mother had learned about this kind of ghost from my grandmother who was from Mississippi, who had learned it from her mother who was also from Mississippi, and her mother, who had been enslaved and ended up in Mississippi where much of my extended family still resides. I do not know my mother or grandmother’s intention in telling such stories, but it is easy to imagine the social use of such stories, particularly when told to imaginative children. As a single mother, she was the only one to keep us safe. My mother might have told us this story so we would not open the door to strangers. She might have told us so that we might feel there was a presence watching over us as we fought or lied – both of which we enjoyed doing. She might have told us this to scare and excite us a little bit as both my brother and I were very curious about all things having to do with ghosts, spirits, monsters, and death even at our very young age. My mother made sure to tell us that the ghost did not necessarily have ill intent but only wanted to be let in, wanted to be acknowledged and known. The ghost wanted to be seen, even though there did not seem to be anything to see. Sometimes she would say that Hank just wanted to rest or that Hank was curious about what we were doing – being bored and alone in the spirit world. Even if the ghost was not malicious, the very thought of something that we could not see as present excited us. We ran around looking for signs – the movement of a curtain in the wind, a spoon that fell off the table, or a noise in the distance all became potential evidence of Hank. If anything was lost or missing, we blamed Hank. When my brother and I wanted to scare one

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another, one of us told the other, straight-faced and somber, that we had seen Hank. Hank became our family ghost. I tell this ghost story somewhat anti-climatically. We never did see Hank. There was never any indication that we had any ghosts after my mother opened the door. Even as we became very excited by the idea, we did not ever fully believe that Hank was real. Convincing ourselves that Hank was real was part of the fun. This is not to say that there were not any ghosts. I am only saying that none of us had the ability to see them. But this childhood memory helps me think about not only the way that we make sense of what is not there but also the limits of believing that seeing something is equivalent to knowing something. It also makes me reflect on how some people’s sight is more valuable, more trusted, and more valid than others. Sight alone can be either dismissed or valorized, depending on the seer and what has been seen. Hank and the other ghost stories my brother and I regularly exchanged gave us a sense that we knew things that other people might not know. Finally, it helps me think about approaching absence in knowledge production and research inquiry. How might we know Hank? Further, why might we want to? Does Hank want to be known? Despite not being able to see Hank, he impacted the scene that implicated our context for the living. At night, squirming under our covers, we worried that Hank was in the room with us. He changed the kinds of conversations my brother and I had. He changed our fights and threats. Hank did things to the atmosphere, and to us. Recalling Hank (and thus my postfoundational approach) is about what is not seen – unable to be seen, refused to be seen, or distorted beyond recognition. In the case of the empty doorway, the haint held the space that appeared empty and filled our imaginations and dreams. If that empty space could have been a ghost, where is that ghost now? Whether Hank was real in any verifiable or accepted sense was immaterial. The idea had seeped across the threshold, slinked through our hallways, and burrowed under our covers especially when it was time to go to bed. These prehensive sensings lead me to a second query: What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual? I will again return to a childhood memory – filtered through repeated recall and shifting perception, before I had any concepts to believe I knew anything about the world. Children, despite being widely ignored, are much better at paying attention to things that do not seem to matter, at attempting to articulate meaning without words and seeing things that others might not be able to see (Massumi, 1992). I think often about what is widely referred to as the Los Angeles Riots.1 I think about them because they are a bumpy point on the smooth recall of my memory. I am haunted. I am haunted as a Black person, but also as a Black thinker, whose job requires me to know a few things about both the past and

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present – enough to say something of use. It is an event that sticks in my body and has had implications on my adult life that I will never be able to confidently trace, even as I know they are there. I am reminded by the tightening in my chest when I hear the stale discourse that comes up when someone, who has never felt the need to protest, positions themselves to evaluate the validity of protests. I feel my heart pound when I listen to people talking about looting or resistance in the same narrow ways that they (or maybe their parents) talked about the protests then: “Why are they burning their own neighborhoods?” I was in elementary school when thousands of people protested in the streets in response to the acquittal of these police officers, what many felt was a deeply unjust verdict. But it was not only the verdict. It was layers and decades of violence culminating in an event that could not deny the ghosts: violence heaped upon violence without any explanation that accounted for the lives of the people most impacted. My father called it the Los Angeles rebellion2 for this reason. This is an example of how disparate understandings always exist, but the same old narratives emerge as common sense. Many Black people in Los Angeles saw/knew/understood/sensed the event on radically different terms. I remember it well because my now-deceased grandmother lived in an apartment only a few blocks away from where some of the biggest fires burned. The national event of the L.A. Riots sticks in my body, available for ongoing recall because it was an important event in a place that I knew intimately. The L.A. Riots stretch into Black Lives Matter, quotidian state-sanctioned violence, school funding disparities, lead in the water, babies without healthcare, and the growing white nationalist movement. The event also reaches into how the complexity of Black vulnerability to State violence has been widely captured and enclosed in dominant narratives that refuse to attend to historical patterns, even by those who are otherwise sympathetic. After the city had settled down enough to begin a process of forgetting, we drove past the store where I ran down the aisles as a child. The shopping center had been burned down. The narratives about the people that lived there predicted the event. It was plain to see on the news that people did not care much about their community or what others outside of the community thought of them. The destruction was a metonym for the people. The Black and brown people of South Central were a destroyed people, undeserving of sympathy or meaningful intervention. It’s best to move on. Before they rebuilt the shopping centers, before the scenes of fires and refusals to go home were referred to in the past tense, we drove past the blocks often because they were on the way to my grandmother’s house. I sat up from my place in the backseat to look at the charred buildings and sensed the distance between the feeling of being there and hearing about it on the news. I felt this place because I had been there all my life. I recognized the

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ladies in hats that stopped to speak to my grandmother, giving me candy out of their purses. I knew where they had the best ice cream and that the toughlooking boys who looked mean always talked sweet to little kids. While I would not have previously described it this way, I sensed the ghosts of the place and was attentive to the gap between my embodied knowledge and the discourse that emerged in the predominantly white suburb where I lived. I was a cross-cultural world traveler (Lugones, 1987), existing in multiple spaces that were often in direct tension. I did not know enough to make sense at the time, but I noticed that people in the white suburbs talked about South Central in ways that did not resonate with my sensings, making both the event and the place blurry in my mind. The day after the activity in the Los Angeles streets had escalated, my elementary school teacher, a white woman with a short blonde bob who wore overalls with bitten apples on them, took a deep breath as she stood in the front of the room and closed her eyes before beginning to talk about the riots. We had never discussed current events, politics, or anything of any importance. The biggest controversy we encountered as a class was when our class did not get to make gingerbread houses with the other classes because of our bad behavior, so it was very odd that she was talking about the news at all. The event she described was distant and vague: a series of shadows and menacing figures looting and burning – all Black, possibly gang members. But for me, those shadows and figures had sharp points and hard lines; the faces were filled in. She described the destruction of the buildings with no mention of the generational destruction of the people. She worried about her husband, who was an LAPD officer, but likely had never given a thought to the safety of those who lived in the neighborhood. To her, cops were only heroes, and she would not hear otherwise. I knew my grandmother was sitting in her apartment with her ghosts anxiously watching the news, wondering if she should have left. I knew that her neighbors were doing the same. I also knew that while they might not have liked what was happening in their community, they had a deeper understanding of why a collective of people expected to endure blow after blow without comment might eventually resort to the only kind of destruction available to them. Or maybe, I just know this now. During the class discussion, I, along with another student whom she viewed as troublemakers, strained to hear her from our position at the very edge of the classroom. We were punished by our seating assignments because we were known to read ahead of the class and laugh inappropriately. We were an odd pair. He was a white kid who never did his homework and fought with other kids. I always did my homework and kept to myself mostly. More than him, I attempted to follow directions but was also scorned by the teacher. Our low status in the classroom united us against her. We looked at each other as her eyes became wet with tears and her voice began to sound more like a whine. We were shocked to see her emotional

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display but held in our bodies how many times she had made us hold back tears with meanness, impatience, and humiliation. At one point in her remarks, she began to openly sob. She did not explain how the police had treated Rodney King nor how racial tension had been building for many decades in Los Angeles. She did not discuss how many Black Los Angeles residents had fled Jim Crow, only to encounter redlining, segregation, the Drug War, normalized police violence, incarceration, deaths of children and grandchildren, or the violence of divestment. “Such endings that are not over is what haunting is about” (Gordon, 2008, p. 139). But how could she have done any of that? How had she been prepared for the moment of the Los Angeles Riots? Her body, her own inadequate state education, her whole-hearted acceptance of social norms and foundational givens, and her raced, gendered, and classed performance – all facilitated a disciplined attention to some things at the direct refusal of others. She was not haunted by the same ghosts. She only knew the present where she and her husband were good, hard-working, law-abiding Americans: humans with no connection to past injustices, from slavery up until Rodney King’s beating. She and her husband’s safety were the only things that mattered in that scene. Their ghosts were the right ghosts. It seems unfair to name her as the sum of her inadequacies. In this retelling, I have produced her as a trope. Further, in this telling, I am fixing her in a moment in time, when she might have changed quite a bit in subsequent years. To be fair(er), what experiences, knowledge, texts, situations, or observations had she had up until the point that would enable her to read the events in any way other than the way that she did? What terror did she feel at the possibility that the world was not what she thought it was? How did that terror prompt a doubling-down of beliefs rooted in the fiction of the human? What she did not say reveals just as much as what she did say. What she was unable to see or know of the situation did not allow her to engage or acknowledge power, or even justice. Instead, she unwittingly conjured ghosts that likely took all her energy to ignore. Yet while I am focused on her, she is multiple. There were people exactly like her and many of their children are now the ones banning books and harassing Black voters in Atlanta and Philadelphia. They have earned their inheritance. They have attuned to the immediate visibility and presence of whiteness. I left the classroom that day certain that she was a liar. I did not know why, but I felt it burning in my chest. I sensed it in my desire to laugh at her tears. I felt it in her one-sided story that she told with such conviction and certainty. She would never be someone that I would trust or believe. Before her performance, I had disliked her, but after that I absolutely hated her. My friends would ask me why I hated her so much and I never had a good answer, because I did not know. I only felt. Looking back, I wonder if my feelings of contempt came from her inability to connect her feelings of grief and fear to mine. She ignored the lines,

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historical and present, that connected her to me – our borders were shared. We were intimately entangled. Her police officer husband and my grandmother were living out a history in the present, in the same exact place. We were both worried – she was worried about her police officer husband who had a baton, a gun, the power of the State, and signed up to be a police officer. I was worried about my grandmother – who was a waitress at the time, and Black in America. The teacher was so certain that she knew everything she needed to know about the situation. Her husband told her everything she needed to know about the community on fire, and she communicated that to a room full of elementary school kids without hesitation. I did not know anything; I was a kid, but in many ways, I sensed much more about the matter than she did. Her words, her tears, even her overall dress reminded me of something that I could not yet say: I was attuned to her disdain, and visible to me was her ghostly comfort with the version of a world that produced me as inadequate and inconsequential. Her derision was a result of race but also because I was a kid. This pre-conceptual memory turned to anger, which vibrates across both time and space. I am haunted by these ghosts, even now, because in many ways they are still present. Conclusion

I am always interested in the limits of cross-racially relations and how the pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual are at work. Bodily reactions to encounters hint at a complexity that we often do not engage or name. A dear friend of mine is a therapist in New York City. She once told me that often when I say something about race or racism that counters her beliefs, she first pays close attention to the reaction in her body: heart and breath. She says that she has learned to resist the first emotion and instead listen to her body, attune to the atmosphere, and turn over what I have said in an exploratory manner – mining the empty space among my body, words, and hers, exploring what she could be missing. She is conjuring ghosts guided by her curiosity about what is felt but not visible or named. She practices attending to what is present, but has historically escaped her notice, has been suppressed by disciplining, or contained and explained by narratives so old and worn they have escaped questioning. She has had to learn to do this as a therapist, but this ability has allowed a complex and ongoing relationship despite our different social locations, orientations, and experiences, more possible. We do not have to be stuck in our tension but can engage that tension in meaningful ways. She has to do this to connect and relate to clients different from herself in the service of their healing. What might researchers do, stilling their judgment, silencing the narratives that have organized the world around us to connect differently with sites of inquiry in ways that matter? Out of a concern for justice.

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We have inherited categories that habituate attention, reproducing familiar frames albeit sometimes with new names. This reproduction is unproductive for knowing and becoming differently, even though it is often all that is required. In this chapter, I suggest researchers (myself included) experiment with sensing the social and refusing an over-reliance on the ocular – necessarily directing attention and energy elsewhere. Attempts such as these interrupt the loop of description (McKittrick, 2020) toward something more akin to invention. Invention requires reorienting, overturning, displacing, and making room. This never is an easy task, but practicing experimentation necessarily makes room for the unexpected. We can all practice not believing what we see or believing that that is all there is to engage – and use such events where there is something to know as an opening rather than a conclusion. Ghosts and concurrent confusion, curiosity, and even terror offer hints for what is present, not visible but felt when given a chance. Notes 1 The 1992 Los Angeles riots, also referred to as the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, occurred in the spring of 1992 after four police officers were acquitted for the violent beating of Rodney King. Thousands of people protested/rioted for nearly one week following the announcement of the verdict. Dozens of people were killed, thousands were arrested, and property damage was estimated to exceed 1 billion dollars. 2 While the media and many whites referred to these days of unrest as riots, minoritized community members and leaders had complained of racist violence by the police force and instead referred to these “riots” as an uprising or rebellion to protest this legacy of violence and racism.

References Ahmed, S. (2010). The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brown. (2021). Conjuring the Ghost: A Call and Response to Haints. Hypatia, 36(3), 485–502. https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2021.41 Colebrook. (2020). Fast Violence, Revolutionary Violence: Black Lives Matter and the 2020 Pandemic. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 17(4), 495–499. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11673-020-10024-9 Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hartman, S. (2008). Lose Your Mother. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lugones, M. (1987). Playfulness, ‘World’ traveling, and loving perception. Hypatia, 2(2), 3–19. Massumi, B. (1992). A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Cambridge: The MIT Press. McKittrick, K. (2020). Dear Science and Other Stories.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On Blackness and being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Snaza, N. (2019). Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Archives, worldings, and sketchings

Archives, worldings, and sketchings

The lively relationship between “the new” and “the old” echoes among these chapters. Rather than positioning the new and old as dialectical, static, binary oppositions, the authors in this Opening attune to resonances that beckon between-the-two. Making room for play and experimentation among archives and worlding practices, they enact glimpses of lines, sketches, algorithms, imagery, and questionings that stretch the old toward new becomings. Contingencies vibrate and linger among the co-compositions to reorient processes of inquiry as entangled, emergent, unruly, and speculative. A performative and vibrant cartography: re-animating the archive

Dorthe Staunæs and Pil Mengel Chapter 6 discusses and conceptualizes a performative cartography that builds on and reconfigures archival documents (generally) and more specifically, the archive on diversity work at Danish universities. When researching atmospheric work and thereby pre-subjective, pre-conceptual, and pre-individual elements of life, methodologies need twisting away from human-centered approaches but without skipping the entangled human. In line with this, the authors take up the following reorienting questions: What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and preconceptual? and How does agency function in your approach? In so doing, they attempt a postfoundational endeavor of expanding postfoundational techniques and the field of inquiry. They build a performative cartography with the aim of foregrounding archive material on diversity work as an agential phenomenon and reconfigure the archive into a vibrant and extended DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-9

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space. The performative cartography is enacted in five consecutive experimental and experiential iterations. Besides reconceptualizing the archive and its documents, this involved an algorithm and an online laboratory with visual interfaces for different audience groups. When attuning differently to documents on diversity work, experiences of in/visibilities “kick back” into the archive and re-animate what the archive of diversity work (and thereby diversity) can become. Adventures requiring care and recklessness: a playful archive

Jayne Osgood Chapter 7 offers a Playful Archive that t(h)reads a path through research undertaken in childhood studies over the author’s past decade, insisting that uncertainty, speculation, and curiosity displace conventions that rest upon a search for knowability, linearity, and solutions. The intention is for this Playful Archive to weave the promise of postfoundational inquiry through a series of provocations and propositions. The partial glimpses offered through images, poetry, and accounts of speculative research practices gesture towards the potential that doing research differently can make in pursuit of making a difference in the world – research is understood as affective, unruly, and ultimately activist in the difference it makes in how it comes about, in the act, and how it lingers and haunts long after. The chapter works with a range of feminist theories and philosophies but is most heavily indebted to Haraway and her invitations to: seriousplay, go visiting, and to engage in practices of worlding as a means to reorient both thought and practice. The chapter seeks to address the reorienting questions: What gets overturned or displaced when engaging in postfoundational research? What are you making room for? The chapter contends that complexifying what research is, how it is done, and what it generates involves bringing matter, affect, philosophy, ethics, and theory together to push aside taken-for-granted practices and pursue research in an altogether different key. Common worlding pedagogies in early childhood

Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Mindy Blaise In Chapter 8, the authors propose common worlding pedagogies, that challenge developmentalism, as postfoundational inquiries. In so doing, they engage the following reorienting questions: What are we overturning and displacing? What are we making room for? Who, and what, helps us to think otherwise? and How do theory and concepts complicate our inquiries, rather than making it easy? Pacini-Ketchabaw and Blaise draw on their empirical work in early childhood centers across Canada and Australia in

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which they emphasize worlding practices, learning with, and situatedness. They share aspects of how they think with and enact these concepts by briefly describing two projects that reconfigure child-waste relations. The authors have been thinking and experimenting with common worlding pedagogies in early childhood education for over a decade, shifting the focus of their research from the child as the central becoming-knowable subject about the world to the complex, entangled, mutually affecting, and co-shaping childworld relations. Experimentations with these postfoundational techniques expose, displace, and overturn normative discourses of developmentalism that seem to have a stranglehold on early childhood education. They do not propose common worlding pedagogies as guidelines but as practices that allow attention to be paid to the worlds that are worlded with others (human and more-than human) in the doing of research. Inquiry as if sketch

Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair Mikulan and Sinclair ground their postfoundational approach in the claim that researchers are interpellated by the binaries that pervade Western thought. Thus, their inquiries concern the fabulative conditions under which they have come to matter and the possibilities of thinking as if they did not pertain. In Chapter 9, “Inquiry As If Sketch,” they explore the following two questions. First, how might postfoundational inquirers think, fabulate, and speculate in a mode of as if inquiry? Their method draws on diagramming as well as on Souriau’s notion of the sketch. They also pose how researchers might engage postfoundational approaches in ways that refuse the kinds of scalar thinking that reifies and recenters them as new foundations (arkhè); a related provocation is how to approach inquiry as if the foundational– postfoundational binary did not pertain. They include some sketches and lines throughout their chapter that offer speculative points of escape. The theories and concepts that they think with are found in the writings of Taussig, Ferreira da Silva, Glissant, Souriau, Ingold, Stengers, and Whitehead. The first reorienting question they take up is, How is the possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? They address this specifically in their treatment of the inclusive approach to foundational and postfoundational. They show how it is possible to make room for the new while making kin with the old, without requiring the dialectic, progressivist tendency to replace or overturn. Then, they address the reorienting question, Who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise? They show how mathematics helps to think otherwise, not in the objective, positivist way that it is usually understood, but in its contingent, yet abstract manner of modulating relations that do not depend on experience.

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Inquiring with cascade questioning: sketching a phenomenon

Malou Juelskjær Chapter 10 focuses on Where do you start -- how do you begin? How do you make it up as you go? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability? To take up these reorienting prompts, cascade questioning is offered as a way of inquiring into/co-enabling a research phenomenon. Juelskjær follows an agential realist ontology as formulated by Karen Barad, considering questions as worlding practices (instead of subjectobject relations between the knower and that which is to be known). Cascade questioning, as a postfoundational approach, is about tracing entanglements while at the same time producing – and enabling – entanglements. In other words, inquiry is part of the phenomenon that emerges through questions – but not to be answered one-to-one. Rather, cascade questioning sustains an ongoing and open process, providing a space for sensing and being with questioning to consider the multitude of directions it enables in a search for insight. As iterative, cascade questioning opens multiple entanglements of time, space, and events. The workflow and rhythms of cascade questioning open, move, hold, and entangle multiple spacetimematterings, troubling a conventional sense of linearity – also in relation to (what is known as) research methods. This is a specific technique that materializes the research and the more-than-human bodies of the research phenomenon as well as highlights a sensitivity towards the response-ability of entanglements and the differences they make. To enact a postfoundational approach, Juelskjær draws upon elements from an analysis involving a memorial statue. With this specificity, research as an emergent process is also about Spivak’s incitement of “doing homework.” From the editors: For a discussion of the reorienting questions, see Chapter 1. Readers should also note that the abstracts in this Opening are crafted by the authors, written in third person, to introduce their chapters.

6 A PERFORMATIVE AND VIBRANT CARTOGRAPHY Re-animating the archive Dorthe Staunæs and Pil Mengel

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It’s actually, really interesting. It feels… something feels off and wrong […] I’m not sure I know exactly what is wrong about it, but there is just […] a feeling that it’s just off somehow. (lab-participant)

I was thinking that the word clouds tend to represent what is visible […] you know, all the invisible forms of diversity kind of get left off a little bit. (lab-participant)

Every historian of the multitude, the disposed, the subaltern and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actors. (Hartman, 2019, p. xiv)

Introduction

As an alternative to representational approaches, this chapter discusses and conceptualizes a performative cartography that builds on and reconfigures archival documents and the archive on diversity work at Danish universities. The performative cartography is based on the assumption that diversity work is more than representation and numbers. Diversity work is atmospheric work (Ahmed, 2014). The performative cartography was initiated and provoked by

DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-10

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the critical claim that authorized documents on diversity and anti-racism are non-performative (Ahmed, 2006). When researching atmospheric work and thereby pre-subjective, preconceptual, and pre-individual elements of life, methodologies need twisting away from human-centered approaches but without skipping the entangled human. In line with this, we attempted a postfoundational endeavor of expanding methods and the field of inquiry. The notion of contingent foundations is an ontological weakening of the status of foundations without doing away with foundations as such. Our ambition was to design a performative cartography with the aim of foregrounding archive material on diversity work as an agential phenomenon and reconfiguring the archive into a vibrant and extended space. Turning up the volume for the capacity “to affect and be affected” (Spinoza, 1677/2001), we enacted our performative cartography as consecutive experimental and experiential iterations. Besides assembling an archive of more than 700 pages of documents concerning diversity work at six Danish Universities that hosted STEM-disciplines, our cartography involved an algorithm and an online laboratory with interfaces showing visuals for different audience groups. The visuals were produced prior to an online lab by transforming piles of archival documents into ephemeral (word)clouds of densities and (haunting) absences. The clouds’ pictures underscore diversity work as an atmospheric endeavor energized and energizing pre-subjective, pre-individual, and pre-conceptual matters, thereby strengthening the documents’ capacity to plug into the experiences of its viewers. Finally, when attuning differently to documents on diversity work, experiences of in/visibilities “kicked back” into the archive and re-animated what diversity work (and thereby diversity) could be. As we will show through enacting the iterations, conceptualizing the cartography takes deep inspiration from imaginative approaches to archival work on the disposed, enslaved, and subaltern (Hartman, 2008, 2019; Philip, 2008); speculative fabulation on wor(l)ding otherwise (Haraway, 2011) and the neologism “hauntology,” describing haunted ontologies (Barad, 2010). In what follows, we will rewind the experimental and experiential iterations and their effects, as well as argue how this may be understood as postfoundational ambitions of attuning to the pre-subjective, pre-conceptual, and preindividual intensities of the archive. First iteration: foregrounding documents as agential

The experiment we describe marked the inauguration of a larger research project concerning Affective Investments in Diversity Work at Danish Universities.1 In line with a decision by parliament in 2013, The Taskforce for More Women in Research established in 2015,2 and the EU Horizon research

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program, Danish universities have launched and strengthened several initiatives on diversity in recent years. Annually or bi-annually, universities launch new action plans claiming to work on diversity and equity. The action plans are perceived as cornerstones in the diversity work and the result of hours of policy work by employees and managers. In addition to and connected to these plans, one can find thousands of minutes from meetings, preparation literature, presentations by employees, students, and experts, a number of webpages, folders, and pamphlets. The time spent and the affective investments associated with all of these documents on diversity work are enormous. Due to the universities’ investments in this textual work, we, therefore, decided to collect the pre-existing documents on diversity work at the universities. We assembled huge numbers of different kinds of documents and filed them away in a regular desktop folder.3 This was a way of creating a preliminary mapping of what was already invested and ingrained in the modern institution of the university around diversity work. As Ann Lisa Riles (2006) puts it, “[d]ocuments appear at every turn in the constitution of modern bodies, institutions, states and cultures” (p. 5), thus indicating how documentation and the fabric of documents are ingrained in the (welfare) institutions of modern societies. Diversity work at universities is no exception. Documents are navigational tools for formal diversity workers as well as management and employees. However, Sara Ahmed (2014), who coined the phrase “diversity work as atmospheric work,”4 challenges the value of such documents when she claims that institutionally authorized documents are “non-performative speech acts” in the sense that they do not do what they say they are doing (Ahmed, 2006). For instance, action plans on antiracism, she argues, are non-performative; not because of external conditions but because they fail to bring about what they name – i.e., antiracist practices. In other words, Ahmed questions whether the documents represent any diversity work that is actually happening. According to Ahmed, the documents, as well as the anti-racist work they are supposed to represent, are “non-performative” as they do not perform or create anything. Instead of “just looking at university documentation on diversity for what it says” or represents, Ahmed suggests doing an ethnography of texts, interviewing diversity workers, and following how texts are circulated and taken up (Ahmed, 2006, p. 105). Thinking along postfoundational lines, we agree with Ahmed on the non-representational nature of documents. However, we differ (as does the previously mentioned Riles) on the claim of non-performativity. Are policy documents really just non-performative “much ado about nothing?” A trivial (word) play? Could they be re-staged and thereby become agential in another sense? Ahmed’s alternative suggestion (doing ethnography and interviews) not only brackets the documents but also primarily addresses and expands upon human voices and meaning-making. In that sense, her approach does not allow for the documents to be considered agential matter, perhaps leading

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to the conclusion of diversity documents as anti-performative or nonperformative. Whilst being depressed by Ahmed’s critique of the missing action potential of documents, we additionally felt provoked by the antiwperformative claim that only foregrounds human agency while leaving the archive and its documents in a state of non-agential existence. Moving towards the idea of (non-)agential potential, the postfoundational approach is not to question what has agency but to push forward methodologies and designs that allow for more-than human agency to appear (Despret, 2016). However, a second and more profound iteration was needed that helped us attune not only to documents differently but also to the entire assemblage – the archive – in another way. The second iteration was to reconceptualize the archive and emphasize it as part of (but not object of) the methodology, which we discuss next. Second iteration: attuning to the archive otherwise

The archive is a prolongation and extended form of power in dire need of being challenged and extended. As Hartman (2019) explains, when researching the multitude as an archival matter, one must grapple with the limits as well as the scope of the archive. Developing our postfoundational approach meant expanding how diversity work had been previously considered. The challenge is taken up when the archive on diversity work is enacted as not only a place representing diversity work but also as a site with the potential of “doing critique” and “getting to know otherwise” (Butler, 2004), a site of “possible configurations” (Butler, 1992), when attuning to the archive differently than through representational tools. Instead of thinking of the archive and its documents as representing organizational life, and thereby splitting and distancing the archive from organizational life, we stage the archive and its documents as part of the organizational life of Academia as vibrant life that can prompt affects and enable empathic encounters (Gheradi & Cozza, 2022). When attuning differently and respecting the vibrancy, complexity, absences, and holes in the archive, we learn from Saidiya Hartman (2008) and M. NourbeSe Philip (2008), among others. By engaging with different material, they show how they got to know something, or someone, that is hardly registered in an archive, where only law texts and other documents are left: such as, for instance, minutes, invoices, criminal records, and insurance papers. Their answer is to rethink the notion of the archive while offering a critical fabulation that fills in the gaps and imagines what might have been said or done – not as a way of telling lies or far-fetched stories, but as a postfoundational and counter-historical maneuver that is attuned towards absences and ephemeral matter. For instance, Hartman (2008, 2019) scrutinizes old photos of the black ghetto and starts wondering about the feelings

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and experiences of a human shape in a window. In these moments, Hartman’s speculations are sparked by the shadow and light of a photograph and elaborated by her knowledge of the black afterlife of enslavement. Another example is the speculative fabulation presented in the book Zong by M. NourbeSe Philip (2008). Zong is the name of the slave ship where 150 Africans were

FIGURE 6.1

Oceanic images – animating voices, cries, screams, groans, gasping, pains, and curses. From Philip (2008).

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thrown overboard due to a navigational error that led to a longer trip with not enough provisions. This tragedy can be encountered through legal proceedings around the insurance issues concerning Zong’s cargo and the enslaved people thrown overboard by using several oceanic images of singled-out words that, in a sense, animate the voices, cries, screams, groans, gasps, pains, and curses that one can imagine took place when the captured were being discarded during the Middle Passage (Figure 6.1). Despite the dramatic character of NourbeSe Philip’s and Hartman’s material on enslavement, death, and the afterlife of slavery, and even though the archive they re-animate, compared to our local folder of Danish university documents, is more encompassing and violent, their work has largely informed our speculative mode and practice; a speculative mode and practice that aims for an affirmative technique of attention, an ethico-political engagement, a fabulative practice of wor(l)ding that entails taking ethical responsibility for the futures that are co-created through researching, thinking and writing (Haraway, 2016). When attuning differently by respecting the vibrancy, complexity, absences, and holes of the archive, other elements may take hold. The second iteration, therefore, is followed up by a third that returns to the documents but animates them in a new fashion. Third iteration: re-animating the documents

The question that came to our mind was how we could foreground and reconfigure the archive material into agential and affective phenomena. As our postfoundational approach emerged, the methodological premise of working with document archives turned to thinking of methodological experimentation and staging the archives as performative and not representative (Blackman, 2012): that is, as inventive strategies for prompting affect and producing forms of affective entanglements. The third iteration, then, aimed to experiment with designs allowing the pre-subjective, pre-personal, pre-individual, and pre-conceptual to be sensed. Turning the documents into visuals and thereby allowing the content to appear in another way could lead to the archive being pictured differently, where intensity (or lack thereof) on certain subjects and categories might become perceptible. In that way, re-animating the documents could facilitate a different (and possibly more profound) way of engaging the sensorium. Such intensities enabled more affective engagement than reading hundreds of documents page by page. In the third iteration, the piles of documents were put into a text-based program, Voyant (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016). Voyant, which means “to see,” already contains in the name a sensorial and affective dimension. By using the program’s algorithm, the archival material was refigured as a range of pictures of words singled out and placed arbitrarily on a blank page (also

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sometimes referred to as a “word cloud”). Voyant made a number of word clouds presenting each of the six universities and each STEM-department, as well as a word cloud assembling all the archive documents in an overall picture. The question to be explained further in this third iteration is how the picturing of word clouds is not a representational mapping but a performative mapping. Word clouds are often used for a quick overview of a certain subject matter (Park, Griffin, & Gill, 2012). A word cloud is a visual presentation of the frequency of words used in a document, a statistical summary, which, however, does not say anything about context or meaning. The size of the words pictured in the cloud resembles the frequency. Bigger words mean higher frequency (Heimerl, Lohmann, Lange, & Ertl, 2014; McNaught & Lam, 2010). As early as 1976, Stanley Milgram and Denise Jodelet conducted an experiment resembling ours in which Parisians were asked to draw a map of Paris and point out the elements of the capital that came to their mind. The aggregated result was visualized in a figure of the 50 most cited elements. The name of each element (for instance, the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame) was resized proportionally to the number of mentions using a bold typography. Milgram and Jodelet did not conceptualize their aggregated visualization as a cloud; however, the presentation of higher frequencies with larger font sizes resembles the well-known figure of today’s word clouds (Viégas & Wattenberg, 2008) (Figure 6.2). Milgram and Jodelet’s inventive work on the “cartographic form” points to how a large number of documents requires a method-making overview while simultaneously and qualitatively indicating where affective intensities are invested. In Milgram and Jodelet’s own framing, Paris was the ontology – and mapping was the representational method. They stayed with the representations and pointed back to the viewer’s cognitive schemes. However, reading their experiment through a postfoundational lens and vocabulary, the maps were agential ontologies deeply entangled with the world they worded, the people that spoke the words, and the people reading the maps. In this sense, the word clouds can be thought to short-circuit the perceived divide between qualitative and quantitative methods by showing intensities instead of numbers, simultaneous formations instead of linearity, and relationalities instead of one-dimensionalities. Additionally, visualized intensities, formations, and relationalities affect their viewers. The aesthetics (the visual appearance and scope) of the clouds invited the spectator into the spatial ambiance of the scrutinized subject. In that sense, Milgram and Jodelet’s (1976) use of word clouds was a mapping that did not represent; their clouds worlded Paris. Our archive turned into word clouds as a performative cartography also does more than merely present a picture of the archive. Paraphrasing Donna

FIGURE 6.2

Milgram and Jodelet’s map – presenting Paris. From Milgram & Jodelet (1976, p. 96). Figure on the 50 most cited elements. The name of each locale is shown in a size proportional to the number of subjects who included it in their hand drawn maps of Paris.

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FIGURE 6.3

Reconfigured archive – aesthetic word clouds. One cloud with documents in Danish translated to English (left), and one cloud with English written documents (right).

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Haraway (2016), the formation of word clouds wor(l)ds the archive of diversity work, as Milgram and Jodelet’s map wor(l)ds Paris. Each word cloud curated a kind of snapshot of more than 400 pages, thereby facilitating another way of reading the archive by undoing a linear reading from page one through the 400 following pages. In our third iteration, the word cloud (by visually presenting the most frequently used words in the archive) did not only show or picture the archive – it wor(l)ded both what diversity work (and diversity) might be as well as what diversity work and diversity work excludes. The word clouds offered a spatial, multitemporal reading (ten years in one shot) and ordering of several hundred pages. In this way, it also revealed priorities of diversity work over time, such as targets, action plans, early scholars, and professorial positions (Figure 6.3). Fourth iteration: underscoring the archive’s capacity to affect

The final iteration concerns how the reconfigured archive of documents has the capacity to craft an imagination about and beyond the archive, and thereby co-create diversity futures otherwise. In Milgram and Jodelet’s experiment, the map showing large and small highlights of Paris mattered in the way one, as the map-viewer, could move around and be affected by Paris. The cloud’s and thereby the archive’s capacity to affect was the target for the fourth iteration of our experiment. In our experiment, turning the material into word clouds allows us to foreground the agentic capacity of archival documents and deem them able to “speak” (Stengers, 2000) in another tone, both visually and metaphorically. Nothing new was put into the archive, but the intra-action between the program and the archive facilitated another configuration that foregrounded other, more sensorial elements than before. Referencing Barad (2010), when reconfigurations happen, everything is new and everything is the same; in the sense that the format of cloud pictures underscores diversity work as an atmospheric endeavor involving the rising and falling of intensities, high and low pressures, and relations and formations to the pre-subjective, pre-individual, and pre-conceptual matters. In this way, the picture re-animated diversity work as pulsating, atmospheric work. The reconfigured archive turned out to be not only an agential cloud but also an affective cloud that enabled aesthetic endeavors. As argued by others (Rivadeneira, Gruen, Muller, & Millen, 2007; Bateman, Gutwin, & Nacenta, 2008), word clouds, the spatial priorities, the size of the font, the colors, and the discursive meaning of the words presented envelop the viewer while enacting “a capacity to affect” the viewer cognitively and bodily. While trying this on our own sensorium, we decided to invite people to online labs so that screens with the word clouds could be explored and that different groups of interested human interlocutors could be affected by the clouds, thereby breaking up the archive further. We, therefore, arranged a

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series of online, explorative, pop-up-laboratories across cities and continents. The labs involved different groups of academic managers, diversity workers, representatives from founding bodies, and national and international researchers. We introduced one another to begin with, and then we introduced the project, the experiment, and the ethical guidelines. On people’s individual computer screens, we showed a cavalcade of word clouds with an automated time-lapse of eight minutes. The documents, now reconfigured as word clouds, thereby acted as “reversed touch screens” (Staunæs, 2018). When a new cloud appeared, we loudly voiced the question: “What catches your eyes, and what does this make you feel?” So, where Ahmed interviewed people on their reflection upon daily work guided by action plans, and thereby bracketed the documents. To the contrary, we allowed the reconfigured documents to directly incite impulses of diversity work that could affect the people watching, while the questions allowed them to voice their gut feelings and moods, what they immediately sensed and felt, as well as their reflective minds and theoretically informed analysis of the series of word clouds. The different word clouds functioned in this iteration as agential in the sense that they did not only present the words in the archival files but also captured and triggered elements of the pre-personal, pre-subjective, pre-individual, and pre-conceptual elements that circulated in the archive. Thereby, new conversations were initiated about the affective investments and atmospheres that channeled and energized processes of formal and informal diversity work and how that is linked to certain bodies and not others. As previously stated, the cloud performs the amount and intensity of specific words. Many mentions are rendered as large words printed in thick font. No mentions mean empty space and no intensity. This hits the affective registers of the viewers; for example, it seems as if diversity in a Danish University context is primarily aligned with gender, i.e., women. One participant wondered: It feels like diversity [in Denmark] is read as gender is read as women […] [it] gives the feeling of diversity as a kind of woman problem […] yeah that we need to fix the women […], we need to fix women, which is a target figure for diversity. The interlocutors began speculating if diversity work in the Danish context was only about promoting and including women. Most surprisingly, the word “men” materializes as another prime figure in the word cloud. It was nearly as big as “women.” Paraphrasing Sylvia Wynter, “men” became an overrepresented figure (Wynter, 2006). Diversity work reconfigured as clouds also re-centered Man. Unfortunately, this was not much of a surprise for some participants, whereas the gender fixation felt weird and uncomfortable for other

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participants, especially from settler societies where diversity work would have meant targeting issues of racialization and racism. The assemblage of clouds, screens, and claims led again to utterances about absences in the word cloud: “I was thinking that the word clouds tend to represent what is visible […] you know, all the invisible forms of diversity kind of get left off a little bit.” The circulation of utterances ran into feelings of absence in the archive. Absences became noticed when, contrary to diversity as gender, as women and men as over-representation, the word cloud pointed out where the intensity or the level of (affective) investments were low. Here it also pictured non-investments, which again affected deeply. As one noted, “It’s really interesting. It feels… something feels off and wrong. I’m not sure I know exactly what is wrong about it, but there is just a feeling that it’s just off somehow.” With this cliff-hanger, that something pre-conceptual, pre-meaning felt wrong, we move to the fifth iteration, allowing the archive to expand further – knowing and feeling that the algorithmic endeavor affirms tendencies as well as refusals of the archive. The fifth iteration: allowing the archive to be expanded

The experimental design involving algorithms, online labs, and screens invites an attuning with the archive and to affect the human sensorium to engage with more than reading the words. It allowed a sensing and feeling of the clouds. The clouds allowed the documents to be encountered as “vibrant matter” (Bennett, 2010) rather than non-performative or dead matter, and they permitted the animacy in the expression of the sentience and aliveness of the referents (Chen, 2012); here, the word clouds affectively “kick back” into Academia. In sum, the reconfiguration from documents to clouds, as well as the online showcasing hereof, assists in exploring the pulse of the archive; what counts as diversity work at the university as well as what is absent, ephemeral, and haunting the archive. The overall design becomes a performative cartography that enables a living and vital archive to take place and, vice versa, to extend and affect the archive in return. The visualizing of intensities hinted at what was ephemeral and even missing in the word clouds’ white sea of nothingness, namely the haunted and racialized absences of Danish diversity work and thereby also the ignorance towards “the disposed and the subaltern,” to paraphrase Hartman (date). Thereby, the performative cartography actually foregrounded ontologies that were seemingly absent. In other words, that which haunted (Barad, 2010) the archive, such as racial blindness/illiteracy in diversity work, were brought into being. Knowing about the risk of reproducing the authority of documents and how politics arises from everyday refusals, Hartman’s speculative fabulations demand a mode of exploration that forces the reader to pause, move slowly,

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wait, and return; to find indexes and missing points. Her approach refuses the nicely fitting figure that claims to know what is represented. Instead, her fabulative approach attends to and affirms that which is not foregrounded; what is absent but perhaps still haunting. It registers the banalities, refusals, repetitions, ironies, movements, empty spots, and voids. This way of re-animating the archive made room for new conversations and re-imaginations of how diversity work could be otherwise. The pictures prompted feelings like surprise, boredom, disappointment, resentment, joy – as well as an urge to act. When approached as a kind of speculative mapping, the linking of the word clouds to these fabulations takes the form of an ethico-politico engagement and inventive methodology. Visual representations are not a one-to-one cartography of the archive but enable speculations in the sense that they anticipate what is not yet fully realized: or, the prepersonal and pre-conceptual. The word clouds do not capture the diversity work conducted but rather the assemblage of an algorithm, the screens, the word clouds, and the participants related to and who took part in the university and affectively envelop and energize future diversity work. Rather than evaluating or criticizing diversity workers or the university’s take on diversity work from the outside or forming an already established foundation, the postfoundational cartography allows us to place agency elsewhere, and thus reset common conversations among diversity workers, decision-makers, and researchers on diversity, gender, and race in the Nordic “afterlife” of migration, enslavement, colonialism, war, and pandemics. The performative cartography holds the possibility of moving ahead of pure criticism of the archive while aiming at a vibrant methodology that reconfigures the archive, as well as inciting the capacity to affect and be affected. This imaginative and creative line insists on the affirmative critique (Raffnsøe, 2015; Raffnsøe, Staunæs, & Bank, 2022) that traces the tendencies and impulses in a material (Anker & Feltski, 2017). This chapter insists that even if a trace or tendency is only minor, it has the potential to craft a diversity future at the university otherwise. Acknowledgement

We would like to extend gratitude to M. NourbeSe Philip for permission to include the image from her book Zong. We would like to thank Sasja Lassen for her careful, state-of-the-art work with word clouds as a research tool that informs the chapter. Furthermore, our thanks go to the diversity workers at the six Danish universities who assisted us carefully when building the largescale document archive on diversity work. Finally, a special thank you goes to the analytically skilled participants at our different online labs, nationally and internationally, and not least the researchers around Affective Investments in Diversity Work at Danish Universities Iram Khawaja, Mante Vertelyte and Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen.

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Notes 1 Based on the thesis that diversity work is mood work, the overall project aims to explore and learn from the affective practices taking place in and across micromilieus at Danish universities, particularly in STEM. See https://projects.au.dk/ diversity-work-in-stem. 2 https://ufm.dk/en/publications/2015/recommendations-from-the-taskforce-formore-women-in-research. 3 To investigate the affective investments in these navigation tools and in diversity work at the university more broadly, and specifically in STEM-areas (ScienceTechnology, Engineering, and Math) at Danish Universities, we collected a huge number of documents on diversity work covering six Danish universities with STEM-departments between 2013 and 2020. Our archival documents come from diversity work at physics institutes, natural science faculties, and the universities’ overall diversity work. We have filed away all the collected documents in a regular desktop folder on our university’s shared drive, sub-organized in respect of university, department, institution, and type of document (such as authorized action plans as well as formal and informal documents including minutes, reports, evaluations, assessments, workshop concepts, etc.). 4 In this project, we are inspired by Sara Ahmed’s term diversity work as mood work. Starting with Heidegger’s phenomenological notion on stimmung (attunement), Ahmed develops and queers this term to theorize about not being in the mood. For Ahmed, atmospheric work is the effort to process and eliminate affective tensions, the work to adjust and reorient oneself through the slightly indeterminate sensations: the vague, capricious, fleeting, the little drag in the stomach, the little icing that affects (due to collective and affective structures of a situation involving, for instance, racialized issues). We take inspiration in Ahmed, but working within a new materialist approach, we extend the scope a bit: atmospheric work or mood work is then the efforts of slowing down or fuelling affective intensities that channel and circumscribe the processes through which racial-ethnic and gendered experiences (or more broadly experiences on diversity) become invested.

References Ahmed, S. (2006). The Nonperformativity of Antiracism. Meridians, 7(1), 104–126. Ahmed, S. (2014). Not in the Mood. New Formations, 82, 13–28. doi:10.3898/ NEWF.82.01.2014. Anker, E. S., & Feltski, R. (2017). Introduction. In E. S. Anker & R. Feltski (Eds.), Critique and Postcritique. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. doi:10.366/E1754850010000813. Bateman, S., Gutwin, C., & Nacenta, M. (2008). Seeing Things in the Clouds: The Effect of Visual Feature on Tag Cloud Selections. Paper presented at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (pp. 193–202). ACM: New York. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matters. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Butler, J. (1992). Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds.), Feminist Theorize the Political (pp. 3–21). New York: Routledge.

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Butler, J. (2004). “What Is Critique?”. An Essay on Foucualt’s Virtue. In S. Salih & J. Butler (Eds.), The Judith Butler Reader (pp. 302–322). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies. Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Gheradi, S., & Cozza, M. (2022). The Atmospheric Attunement in the Becoming of Happy Object. That Special Gut-feeling. In B. L. R. Simpson (Ed.), Doing Process Research in Organizations: Noticing Differently (pp. 16–38). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Despret, V. (2016). What would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Making Kinship in the Chtulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2011). Speculative Fabulations for Technoculture’s Generations: Taking Care of Unexpected Country. Australian Humanities Review, 50(5), 1–18. Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe, 26(11), 1–14. Hartman, S. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Heimerl, F., Lohmann, S., Lange, S., & Ertl, T. (2014). Word Cloud Explorer: Text Analytics Based on Word Clouds. 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 1833–1842. doi:10.1109/HICSS.2014.231. McNaught, C., & Lam, P. (2010). Using Wordle as Supplementary Research Tool. Qualitative Report, 15(3), 630–643. Milgram, S., & Denise J. (1976). Psychological Maps of Paris. In S. Milgram (Ed.), The Individual in a Social World. Essays and Experiments (2nd ed., pp. 87–113). New York: Holt, RInehart & Winston. Park, S., Griffin, A., & Gill, D. (2012). Working with Words: Exploring Textual Analysis in Medical Education Research. Medical Education, 46(4), 372–380. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2923.2011.04184.x. Philip, M. N. (2008). Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adumu Boateng, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Raffnsøe, S. (2015). What Is Critique? The Critical State of Critique in the Age of Criticism. Outlines, 18(1), 28–60. Raffnsøe, S., Staunæs, D., & Bank, M. (2022). Affirmative Critique. Ephmera. Theory and Politics of Organizations. Retrieved from http://www.ephemerajournal.org/ contribution/affirmative-critique. Riles, A. (2006). Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rivadeneira, A., Gruen, D., Muller, M., & Millen, D. (2007). Getting Our Head in the Clouds: Toward Evaluation Studies of Tagclouds. Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose, California, USA, April 28-May 3, 2007. Sinclair & Rockwell (Producer). (2016). Text Analysis and Visualization: Making Meaning Count. In J. Unsworth, S. Schreibman, R. Siemens, S. Schreibman (Eds.), A New Companion to Digital Humanities (pp. 274–290). New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118680605.ch19. Spinoza, B. (1677/2001). Ethics (Part III). London: Wordsworth Editions.

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Staunæs, D. (2018). “Green with Envy”. Affects and Gut Feelings as Trans-Corporeal, Affirmative Critique of New Motivational Data Visualisations. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(5), 409–421. doi:10.1080/09518398.2018. 1449983. Viégas, F. B., & Wattenberg, M. (2008). Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization. Interactions, 15(4), 49–52. Wynter, S. (2006). On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being of Dèsêtre. Black Studies towards the Human Project. In L. R. Gordon & J. A. Gordon (Eds.), Not Only the Master’s Tool. African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (pp. 107–169). Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers.

7 ADVENTURES REQUIRING CARE AND RECKLESSNESS A playful archive Jayne Osgood

Down the rabbit hole: worlding in childhood research

There has been a steady growth in childhood studies framed by postfoundational philosophies and practices (see Diaz-Diaz & Semenec, 2019). My most recent work, influenced by feminist philosophers and science scholars (Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Anna Tsing, Stacy Alaimo, Erin Manning, and Kathleen Stewart – amongst others) contributes to this growing scholarship. It takes up the invitation to go off the beaten path, to engage in practices of deep hanging out where the researcher becomes infected and affected by that which she researches. This mode of researching makes demands that cannot be predicted in advance of “going into the field” (and in fact, calls into question what constitutes the “field”). Postfoundational childhood studies insist that uncertainty, speculation, and curiosity displace conventions that rest upon a search for knowability, linearity, and solutions. However, postfoundational research with children is frequently met with hostility, suspicion, and censure because de-centering the human is considered unthinkable as it risks erasing the child (Murris & Osgood, 2022; Osgood & Mohandas, 2022). Notwithstanding such skepticism, MacLure (2015) views postfoundational approaches as adventures requiring care and recklessness. This chapter attempts such an adventure by weaving emergent, theory-into-practice approaches that de-center the human by attuning to affective forces, taking matter seriously, and exploring the potential for transdisciplinary approaches to generate different knowledge, differently.1 In the spirit of care and recklessness, Haraway’s (2016) SF philosophy2 is variously enacted to take up worlding practices which generate myriad unanticipated embodied, affective, and sensory encounters through the everyday ebb and flow of life, and that DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-11

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FIGURE 7.1

Down on the ground (Osgood, 2023).

continue to resurface long after the research happens. As Haraway (2013) states: What I call worlding... is knowledge-making and world-making that inform a craft that is relentlessly replete with organic and inorganic critters and stories, in their thick material and narrative tissues… … There is a tight coupling of writing and research – where both terms require the factual, fictional, and fabulated; where both terms are materialized in fiction and scholarship. (p. 2) What “research is” and how it is undertaken is radically reconfigured and as such freed from temporal and disciplinary boundaries. This chapter re-turns (in the sense of aerating, turning over, composting, following Haraway, 2008) immersive encounters, atmospheres, hauntings, and memories which intensify ontological insecurities when old certainties associated with research are displaced. A poetic middling: the qualia of post qualitative inquiry

Wondering Wandering

Adventures requiring care and recklessness: a playful archive

with a childing curiosity about the arts of Noticing Attuning Sensing     S l o w i n g To ask: What else? What if? What emerges From deep hanging out From being open to surprise     Tap into your inner child Allow yourself to…. Feel Taste Smell Hear Touch The world as it becomes Through everyday happenings   Compos(t)ing Re-turning Aerating Dwelling In a slowed down state of Discovery   Making Crafting Scrabbling Storying Other ways to Think Feel Do Research

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The abysmal middle of post qualitative inquiry

Along with others in this collection, this chapter asks: What gets overturned or displaced in such research adventures? What are you making room for? The chapter then attempts to extend these reorienting questions to explore the capacities for postfoundational inquiries to create space for careful and reckless creative experimentation; to consider how ethics become reformulated; and ultimately to ask what other stories are made possible that can make some sort of a difference in the world. These questions are complex, interwoven, and potentially unanswerable but persistently resurface and demand attention when the limits of humanist, anthropocentric representationalism become indisputable in childhood studies that unfold in the Anthropocene. What “research” is, the reasons it is undertaken, and the potential it has to make a worldly difference are called into sharp focus. Research can no longer be thought of as time-bound, placespecific, and outcome-oriented. Instead, it must be thought of as ongoing, tentacular, affective, and affecting. MacLure (2015) writes of the need for immanence, the imperative to get caught up with the movements and processes in which we are entangled. As she states: The middle can be a depthless and directionless (non-)place where subjects and objects no longer behave themselves or take up the places allotted to them by the rules of theory, methodology, or institutional discourses. (p. 106) Ulmer (2017) reminds us that, as a more-than-human endeavor, post qualitative research cuts across education, justice, and environmental concerns, and attends to the urgencies of the Anthropocene (climate change, political violence, and technological threats). She stresses that “where posthumanism departs from interpretivism … is the equivalent emphasis placed upon bodies of nonhuman matter” (p. 837) and goes on to encourage the privileging of “creative experimentation over the delivery of definitive answers” (p. 837). Scholars working with postfoundational methodologies effectively recast how and why research is done. The objective is to produce different knowledges and outcomes in ways that understand agency to be a material entanglement (Strom et al., 2019). Postfoundational research has real consequences both in the moment and long after, and it holds the promise of actively reshaping the world by taking up creative possibilities to intervene. This is a fundamental shift that actively displaces the “god trick” identified by Haraway (1988)  – of the impartial, objective, at a distance, dispassionate man of science, and instead celebrates the partial perspectives, situated knowledges and deep political commitments of the feminist researcher – that is, the figure of the “mutated modest witness” (Osgood, 2020b).

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Furthermore, this foundational shift insists that ethics are done differently, more confederately, and more posthumanly. The philosophical underpinnings of post qualitative inquiry insist that ethical commitments reach beyond a narrow moral responsibility for others (humans) to a relational, ongoing response-ability in each moment to the “somethings happening” (Stewart, 2011). This involves attuning to atmospheres, to what research agitates, and to what the affective forces set in motion generate elsewhere. Haraway (2016) argues that responding to life on a damaged planet involves making trouble – getting in the thick of things, acknowledging that we are part of, and contributing to, the world’s differential becoming through processes of sympoiesis – or becoming-with. Haraway (2008) considers care vital to this trouble-making mode of research, which she defines in terms of curiosity: Caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning. (p. 36) Ethically this manifests as ongoing processes of curious-care and capacities to respond. Undoubtedly, research practices (shaped by flattened ontologies that make space for the non-and-more-than-human, creative experimentation, re-casted ways of knowing and doing, and a heightened/deepened sense of ethical response-ability founded upon curious care) are alien and misaligned with old orthodoxies and institutional expectations. Research then is no longer in search of answers to predefined questions, or as Manning (2016) asserts: What emerges from a study will never be an answer. What emerges will be patient experimentation. What emerges will be another mode of encounter, another problem, another opening onto the political site, as yet undefined. (p. 13) The significance of qualia in post qualitative inquiry (Osgood & Guigni, 2016) is felt through dwelling upon and amongst: the materiality of research, the porosity of boundaries, the hauntings and bodily registers that are triggered from research that privileges affective attunement to what is unfolding, and the pursuit of unfurling tentacles. Worlding privileges optics reliant upon what is sensed, felt, and tuned into (Osgood & Andersen, 2019). Despite more than two decades of postfoundational inquiry across education studies, there remains hesitancy, distrust, and frequent conservatism from key gatekeepers to research shaped by these considerations. This testifies to the highly effective subversive, disruptive work that postfoundational inquiry undertakes. But it also ensures that more conservative, recognizable and knowable forms of research persist as “authoritative knowledge.”

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Whilst increasingly present in specialist journals, conferences and networks, there are countless examples where post qualitative inquiry is denied space, ridiculed, or shut down altogether. This landscape creates conditions of (im)possibility for the post qualitative researcher, that must be navigated because it has profound implications for the shape research takes and the extent to which it (is permitted to) articulate(s) its underlying philosophical tenets. This is perhaps precisely the reason we need adventures shaped by both care and recklessness – that is ethical and radically curious. As a community, postfoundational researchers are compelled to continue to take risks, to defy convention, and to strive for research that is deeply and unapologetically political – research that is activist (Osgood et al., 2016). These challenges and tensions are encountered daily and come with a “loss of ontological security when we refuse to allow ourselves to be carried to a place of safety by dogmatic thinking or the comforts of methodology” (MacLure, 2015, p. 104). Taylor et al. (2022) stress that post qualitative inquiry offers possibilities for deepening research relations and for expanding feminist indiscipline in its refusal to flatten research/ers into grids of knowledge. It is by sharing ways of resisting disciplinary grids of knowledge that the postfoundational research community directly challenges the status quo and creates opportunities for innovation. The remainder of this chapter offers glimpses into “methodologies without methodology” (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016) that emerge from an ongoing commitment to research that disrupts taken-forgranted ideas about how knowledge gets produced. The emergence of childing methodologies: adventures in care and recklessness

As I have argued previously, childhood studies framed by postfoundational philosophy involve emergent methodologies that align closely with childing (Kennedy & Kohan, 2008) ways of being in the world, privileging open-ended exploration through bodily, haptic, sensory encounters with the world as it unfolds through the everyday and often unremarkable (Osgood, 2014, 2015, 2023; Osgood & Mohandas, 2020, 2022; Osgood et al., 2020; Holmes et al., 2018). As adult researchers this demands that notions of anthropocentric expertise are given over to a willingness to un/re-learn how to be in the world. Aesthetic explorations with cork (Figure 7.2) provide a lively example of postfoundational childhood research. We (Osgood & Odegard, 2022) re-turned, aerated, and sat with the hauntings agitated by a pedagogical encounter with cork in a Norwegian kindergarten. In our commitment to pursue methodologies without method, we sat with what unfolded and tuned in to the surprises residing in the seemingly not very much. Taking cork to the heart of our inquiry we allowed our optics to wander, and we attended to the relationalities between cork and “child” in a worldly, confederate sense.

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FIGURE 7.2

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Aesthetic Explorations with Cork (Osgood & Odegard, 2022).

Taking our cue from a Norwegian preschooler’s curiosity with cork (its feltness that incited haptic explorations with teeth, nails, force, and velocity) we attempted to attune to childing capacities to notice, recognizing bodily explorations as astute observations of the “what else” (Manning, 2020). This involved pursuing tentacular lines of inquiry that reached far beyond normative explanations and resisted reinscribing narratives of biophilia, innocence, nature, and purity. Rather, we arrived at granular stories of the feral effects (and affects) of the temporal and colonial displacement of matter – stories simultaneously disruptive and generative (Tsing et al., 2020). With curiosities provoked, a methodology emerged that invited us to explore “what else” cork might potentiate. Attuning to feltness, embodied encounters, oral investigations, and a willingness to be open to what the texture, scent, and taste of the corks might agitate, we began to “seriouslyplay” (Haraway, 2016). It was by rummaging and foraging around our houses, through kitchen drawers, and in the depths of craft boxes that piles of cork stoppers were assembled. Rolling cork between fingers; resting it palm-up as it captured the sun; biting down on its spongy surface; inhaling the acrid scent of old wine traces; throwing it against the wall to watch it bounce haphazardly across the room; studying printed words etched along the sides. Taking our cue for aesthetic explorations of “natural materials” from young children set in motion a raft of uncomfortable affects. Aside from wondering

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what cork is and what cork does, we were prompted to explore what and where else cork can take posthumanist inquiries into childhood of the Anthropocene. This insisted upon a project of tracing and delving into long-buried colonial, heteropatriarchal, capitalist histories where the non-innocence of cork became apparent, and where the figure of the child surfaced in surprising, troubling, and sometimes harrowing ways. Attuning to the unfurling of cork lines and staying with the discomfort of sticky knots generated other ways to encounter “child” which we unraveled by delving into unlikely archives, unfamiliar journals from disciplines outside our own, and confronting formulas and equations about the “science of cork” that we would never have entertained had we abided by the disciplinary regimes that so powerfully determine how childhood studies should be undertaken. Venturing off the beaten path in pursuit of other stories about childhood, via cork, is fraught with vulnerability, risk, and a sense of fraudulence. This is precisely the sort of adventure in care and recklessness that is necessary if we are to take seriously children’s place in the world and our human response-abilities to exercise an ethic of care to the world as endlessly pastpresentfuture (Haraway, 2016). Koro-Ljungberg (2016) characterizes such approaches as “methodologies without methodology” because “researchers are simultaneously working within and against existing methodological structures, ideas, and established literature” (p. 6). She goes on to argue that methodologies without methodology might be thought of as productive failures shaped by a commitment to reinvent and re-envision methodologies as they come into being. Research then becomes more creative and improvisational – replete with surprises, confusion, disorientation, discomfort – and sometimes fun! The objective becomes to make the familiar strange, or following Derrida, to become a foreigner in one’s own language. Undertaking childhood studies that consciously decenters the human subject from investigations sets in motion all manner of suspicion and doubt. Such research must tread a careful balance between conforming to recognizable tropes whilst allowing itself to be open to the unexpected, but never in search of knowable and readily codified accounts of childhood. Koro-Ljungberg (2016) stresses that methods become temporary structures that melt, transform, circumvent, infiltrate, and dis/appear while opening new directions in inquiry. Figures 7.2 and 7.4 take childing engagement with the world as a starting place from which to circumvent and infiltrate normative ways to undertake research in childhood contexts. (More) seriousplay: curating an arts-based workshop

Whilst (k)not-knowing – being open to the knotty, not-yet-known – is useful, the postfoundational researcher nevertheless comes to research laden with theories, philosophies, politics, and passions. Putting theory to work, as

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proposed by Jackson & Mazzei (2023), is a productive and political move. It enables research to move away from technicist, formulaic, linear, and causal logic, thereby challenging narrow ways in which to view and make sense of the world. It is in “thinking with theory,” at all stages of research, that postfoundational inquiry pursues knowledge of other kinds. The integration of creative and artistic experimentation into research practices, alongside a deep investment in theory, results in a heightened comfort with the inevitable uncertainty that comes with partially finished thought and practice. Entering the field, unsure of what will take shape, being open to what hails our attention and thinking with theory is messy work that requires heightened ethical response-ability through care-full research practices. Figure 7.3 depicts a curated arts-based workshop that invited curious and speculative engagement. The materialized figuration of glitter was central to this workshop (Coleman & Osgood, 2019). At each stage of the process, theory was put to work to consider the care and ethics involved in preparing and dismantling a postfoundational workshop involving glitter. A series of questions, reflections, and diffractions were agitated concerning what might unfold, what did unfold, and the affective and embodied traces that were left. Taking glitter seriously through arts-based practice involved dwelling upon the design, choreography, and management of a workshop committed to seriousplay with glitter. Taking matter seriously involved playful experimentation with what it is, what it does, and what we then do with what glitter does – as an ethical,

FIGURE 7.3

Encounters with glitter: ethics, politics and care in arts-based research.

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care-full political feminist experiment in thinking-feeling-doing deeply that was reliant upon childing sensibilities encountered in previous research undertaken with child-researchers (Osgood, 2018, 2019a, 2019b). As Figure 7.4 depicts, glitter holds capacities to hail attention, to demand a critical engagement, to slow down, notice, attune, and be open to what it can do. Taking our cue from this childing inquisitiveness, we sat with the trouble that glitter agitates and attended to the further questions it provoked as it deepened our worlding sensibilities. Taking seriously the endless, everyday entanglements with glitter involves attending to its feral effects as they emerge. Feral effects (Tsing et al., 2020) manifest in processes of manufacturing, consumption, and dispersion throughout multiple ecosystems. These feral effects potentiate glitter as a teller of rich, colonial, gendered, sometimes deadly, always worldly stories that allow for the promise of postfoundational research to surface. The workshop generated an atmosphere of discomfort and uncertainty; an affective ecology emerged from the material-discursive capacities of glitter. We were cognizant of glitter as matter frequently viewed with disdain

FIGURE 7.4

Glitter’s doings (Osgood, 2019).

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and held accountable as a significant micro-plastic polluter (Osgood, 2019a). During the workshop, we categorized glitter as “natural,” “new,” or “recycled,” and arranged it accordingly on three tables. The “natural” biodegradable mica glitter was arranged with other “natural” materials including leaves, shells, stones, and string. The “new” brightly colored plastic glitter was provided with glue, scissors, and free newspapers (from the Murdoch empire). The “recycled” glitter came from home and included glitter glue, glitter nail varnish, half-full pots of glitter, and was arranged with other materials including pipe cleaners, sequins, and a left-wing newspaper. The tensions, complexities, and uncertainties of playing with glitter as a methodology without method raised important questions about the imperative to be attentive to what gets generated when research is undertaken in novel ways. Or, as Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) asks, “How are researchers involved in the making of the world?” (p. 39). She suggests: As blurred boundaries deepen entanglements and interdependencies, the ethico-political demand persists and maybe intensifies for elucidating how different configurations of knowledge practices are consequential, contributing to specific rearrangements. Even more than ever before, knowledge as relating – while thinking, researching, storytelling, worlding, accounting – matters in mattering of worlds. (2017, p. 28) Participants were asked to gravitate towards the table that appealed to them, given minimal instruction, and advised that they would move to another table, leaving their creations behind. Lively discussions unfurled; connections were made to the surfacing of glitter in everyday lives – attention was turned to what it means, what it does, where it goes, what it agitates, and to our (human) response-abilities in the myriad glitter ecologies in which we are implicated. The glitter was undertaking significant material-discursive work. The unsettling and generative residues of the glitter took on a dynamism that could not be predicted, raising deeply troubling political questions that continue to live on long after the glitter was vacuumed and the artwork stowed away. Elevating glitter as central to educational research is not without risks; glitter is dismissed as a frivolous, irrelevant, pollutant with little to offer educational research. As an adventure in care and recklessness, this glitter workshop agitated a deep engagement with the consequences of human exceptionalism. Acknowledging that glitter traverses disciplinary boundaries allowed us to wrestle with pressing questions concerning the urgencies of the Anthropocene: from the complexities of micro-plastic pollution; to LGBTQ+ glitter bomb activism; to the sparklification of contemporary girlhood; to child labor and lung disease caused by mica mines in India (see Osgood, 2019a for a fuller account).

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The feltness of research: disrupting knowability and linearity

The glimpses into research from a playful archive scattered throughout this chapter allude to a speculative (k)not-knowing that rests upon an underlying conviction to the feltness of research. Taking seriously Haraway’s (2008) notion of research as “visiting” shifts the shape that inquiries take. Knowledge is generated from a position of being open to surprises; it is by attuning to atmospheres, halting moments, sensations, and uncomfortable affects that it becomes possible to exercise what Tsing (2015) terms “radical curiosity” to find wonder in the everyday, unremarkable and mundane. In a previous publication: From Multispecies Tangles and Anthropocene Muddles: What can Lichen Teach Us About Precarity and Indeterminacy in Early Childhood? I recount the potential for “visiting” in childhood research to tune into the unremarkable (lichen, dead pigeon, virus, chewing gum) to open other ways to encounter the world and tell other stories about childhood (Figure 7.5). Early childhood contexts are typically viewed as unremarkable – shaped by routines, habits, and structures designed to promote linear development through knowable progress. Postfoundational research troubles this construction by taking inspiration from childing ways of being in the world. Reconfiguring the everyday and unremarkable that is routinely (assumed to be) found in contemporary childhoods involves attending to the non-innocence of material-discursive assemblages that work to generate and sediment ideas

FIGURE 7.5

Lichen (Osgood, 2022).

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and practices (e.g., glitter: Osgood, 2019a; blocks: Osgood 2019b; Osgood & Mohandas, 2020; backpacks: Osgood & Andersen, 2019; animal figurines: Osgood & Mohandas, 2021; picturebooks: Osgood & de Rijke, 2022; playgrounds and outdoor spaces: Osgood, 2022; Osgood & Axelsson, 2023; dress up: Osgood, 2014; Osgood & Giugni, 2015). Being active in world-making practices involves bodily engagement; curious, philosophically informed exploration; and open-ended experimentation with all the senses (as the examples with cork and glitter have illustrated). The concern becomes with the feltness of the world, where encountering the more-than is an ecology of practices that embodies transversality that generates more-than-one-creation (Manning, 2013). As such, research finds expression beyond textual accounts of what was found, what was represented, and what it means in terms of knowledge about “the child.” World-making practices agitate affective responses that often defy textual accounts. As such, an ecology of practices in childhood research becomes transdisciplinary and generative (Osgood & deRijke, 2022; Osgood et al., 2022). Researchers engage in/with poetry, photography, children’s literature, crafts, and artwork in the pursuit of finding other ways to grapple with how child/hood(s) are produced in the Anthropocene. This typically culminates in the non-normative curation of manuscripts that rupture taken-for-granted and established modes of researching and framing childhood. Taylor et al. (2022) stress the imperative to contest the linearity and separation of stages that mark conventional research practices. MacLure’s depthless middle is worth remembering. All elements of research are entangled and coalesce in unexpected ways; projects have multiple beginnings where planning and doing become inseparable. Allowing ourselves to get lost in the depthless middle is central to postfoundational research. It is in the depthless middle that hauntings are (re)awakened and unlikely, sensed relationalities bubble up to guide research investigations back to places already visited and off on adventures devoid of cartographic lines. The undoing of normative ideas and practices of qualitative inquiry is deeply unnerving and as such incites extensive critique on the grounds that “anything goes.” With the displacement of old methodological orthodoxies comes the assumption that research concerned with affect and materiality, and shaped by creative experimentation, is necessarily less trustworthy. But as this chapter illustrates, the demands felt by researchers undertaking research that generates, interacts, and grapples with affective forces demand a heightened accountability for how all aspects of research matter. A tight coupling of writing and research

Adventures in care and recklessness might find expression in published manuscripts such as this. How research is presented in published outputs

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is a further important consideration for the postfoundational researcher. Returning to Haraway’s (2013) insistence that “there is a tight coupling of writing and research – where both terms require the factual, fictional, and fabulated; where both terms are materialized in fiction and scholarship” is a timely reminder that ideas about linearity, segmentation, truth, and validity in research are fictions. Recognizing and working with the tight coupling of writing and research makes the curation and crafting of manuscripts intricate, demanding, joyful acts of relational, collaborative, tentacular storytelling. The development of a “scrabbling down the back of the chair methodology” provides one example of the tight coupling of writing and research. This emergence of a methodology without method makes explicit the messy affordances of co-researching with a child. In the pursuit of generating knowledge about childhood literacy in novel ways, the approach consciously defies convention to create space for heightened ethics. In de Rijke et al. (2023) we take up the figure of the bag lady (as proposed by Haraway 2016 via Le Guin) to develop a “scrabbling methodology.” We were guided by a children’s picture book, the intensities of living through lockdown and home-schooling, and what was literally found down the back of our chairs. The research refused planning, deliberation, precise control, or orchestration; rather it was conceptually and practically oriented to undoing the anthropocentric intentionality of research. It was through scrabbling together (with a child researcher and

FIGURE 7.6

Scrabbling methodology (de Rijke et al., 2023).

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a host of non-human and more-than-human others as curated in Figure 7.6) that an in-between, processual, and indeterminate activity allowed for unforeseen assemblages to emerge through unexpected human–non-human choreography. Careful and curious; adaptive and sensitive

The glimpses of postfoundational research presented throughout this playful archive are illustrative of the emergent nature of creative methodologieswithout-method. Research intended to generate affect poses an ethical responsibility and highlights the need for a radical reappraisal of normative approaches to research ethics in educational research. Postfoundational approaches refuse to fit narrow humanist compliance to merely “do no harm” to human participants. The confederate, worldly, relational nature of posthumanist research insists that ethics must be understood both more broadly and more precisely, as an ongoing, moment-by-moment response-ability. Haraway (2008) stresses the imperative to exercise the ability to respond ethically, with curiosity and care, to relational becomings as they unfold. This is not something that can be readily conveyed to university ethics committees, or funding bodies, but is widely understood within postfoundational research communities. The pursuit of creative, experimental research, by definition, resists the pursuit of predictable and knowable formulas. The increasing influence and inflection of arts-based approaches to educational research contributes to ensuring that the field remains lively and dynamic – and that knowledge through research-creation is endlessly uncertain, generative, and inconclusive. It is committed to persistently opening inquiries to the emergence of an ongoing curiosity (Haraway, 2008) which is not about discovery, or getting things right but finding ways for research to realize its political potential to disrupt, upturn, and actively make a difference in how worlds are made. In seeking to address what I am overturning or displacing through undertaking postfoundational childhood studies, this chapter has gestured towards ways in which postfoundational research can break free from the orthodoxy surrounding normative research, making room for what Ferrando asserts (2014): A posthumanist methodology has to be adaptable and sensitive; it has to indulge in its own semiotics, hermeneutics, pragmatics, metalinguistics, in order to be aware of the possible consequences which they might enact on a political, social, cultural, ecological level. (p. 13) The curation of adventures in care and recklessness traced through this chapter attest to how research mutates as it becomes intimately attuned to

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everyday rhythms, atmospheres, and unfoldings in the pursuit of making a tangible difference. Notes 1 ‘The ‘Playful Archive’ as it unfolds in this chapter curates a collection of research artifacts and extracts from research undertaken over the past decade; www. jayneosgood.org provides a platform and space to further dwell amongst the archive but what is offered in this chapter are glimpses intended to provoke and illustrate the potential of postfoundational methodologies-without-method in childhood studies. 2 SF is a philosophy offered by Haraway that brings together a raft of SFs that together provide an innovative, transdisciplinary approach to undertaking research, SFs include: situated feminisms, science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, string figuring, so far. Approaching research through these multiple lenses opens out investigations and invites a serious playfulness that generates research that defies convention and is always open to creative experimentation with the objective to actively participate in world-making through differential engagements with human, non-human, and more-than-human.

References Coleman, R., & Osgood, J. (2019). Glittering practices: What gets produced through feminist new materialist methods, practice research and pedagogy? Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology, 10(2), 61–86. de Rijke, V., & Osgood, J. (2023). What can a method of scrabbling with Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction offer conceptualisations of ‘the child’ in the Anthropocene? In J. Deszcz-Tryhubczak, & M. García-González (Eds.). Children’s Culture Studies after Childhood (pp. 154–174). Amsterdam: Benjamins Publishing. Diaz-Diaz, C., & Semenec, P. (2019). Posthumanist & New Materialist Methodologies. Singapore: Springer. Ferrando, F. (2014). Towards a Posthumanist Methodology. A Statement in Narrative Posthumanism. Frame, 25.1, May, Utrecht University, pp. 9–18. https://www. frameliteraryjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Frame-25_01-Ferrando.pdf (accessed January 10, 2023). Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (2013). SF: Science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, (3). https://doi.org/10.7264/ N3KH0K81 Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2023). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Holmes, R., Jones, L., & Osgood, J. (2018). Mundane habits and methodological creations. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.). International Research Handbook on ChildhoodNature.

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Kennedy, D. & Kohan, W. (2008). Aión, kairós and chrónos: fragments of an endless conversation on childhood, philosophy and education, Childhood & Philosophy. 4 (8), 5–22. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research. Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota Press. Maclure, M. (2015). The ‘new materialisms’: A thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M. S. Perez & P. Pasque (Eds.). Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures (pp. 93–112). London: Taylor and Francis. Manning, E. (2020) Radical pedagogies and metamodelings of knowledge in the making.  CriSTaL: Critical Studies in Teaching & Learning, 8, 1–16.  https://doi. org/10.14426/cristal.v8iSI.261  Manning, E. (2016). The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2013). Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murris, K., & Osgood, J. (2022). Risking Erasure? Posthumanist Research Practices and Figurations of ‘Child’. Special Issue, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(3), 208–219. Osgood, J. (2023). Down on the ground: The material memoir of the posthuman childhood researcher. In J. Osgood (Ed.). Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Research Observation (pp. 51–68). London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J. (2022). From multispecies tangles and Anthropocene muddles: What can lichen teach us about the precarity in early childhood education? In C. Blyth, & T.K. Aslanian (Eds.). Children and the Power of Stories (pp. 51–68). Singapore: Springer. Osgood, J. (2020a). Queering understandings of how matter comes to matter in the baby room. In L. Moran, K. Reilly, & B. Brady (Eds.). Narrating Childhoods across Contexts: Knowledge, Environment, and Relationships (pp. 213–236). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Osgood, J. (2020b). Becoming a ‘mutated modest witness’ in early childhood research. In Shulte, C. (Ed) Ethics and Research with Young Children. London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J. (2019a). You can’t separate it from anything!: Glitter’s doings as materialised figurations of childhood (and) art, in M. Sakr, & J. Osgood, (Eds.). PostDevelopmental Approaches to Childhood Art (pp. 111–135). London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J. (2019b). ‘Materialised reconfigurations of gender in early childhood: Playing Seriously with Lego’, in J. Osgood, & K. Robinson, (Eds.). Feminists Researching Gendered Childhoods, Chapter 5 (pp. 85–110). London: Bloomsbury. Osgood, J. (2014). ‘Playing with Gender: Making space for post-human childhood(s)’ in J. Moyles., J. Payler & J. Georgeson (Eds.). Early Years Foundations: An Invitation to Critical Reflection (pp. 191–202). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Osgood, J., & Andersen, C. E. (2019). A feminist new materialist experiment: Exploring what else gets produced through encounters with children’s news media. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 20(4), 363–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1463949119888482 Osgood, J. Andersen, C. E., & Otterstad, A. M. (2022). Portal-time and wanderlines: What does virusing-with make possible in childhood research? Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodologies, 13(3), 208–231.

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Osgood, J., & Axelsson, S. (2023). Arboreal Methodologies: The promise of getting lost (with feminist new materialism and Indigenous ontologies) for social studies. In B. Varga., Montreal, T., & Christ, R. (Eds.). Be(com)ing Strange(r): Towards a Posthuman Social Studies (pp. 93–109). New York: Teachers College Press. Osgood, J., & de Rijke (2022). “That’s enough!” (But it wasn’t): The generative possibilities of attuning to what else a tantrum can do. Global Studies of Childhood, 12(3), 235–248. Special Issue: The spectacle of ‘tantruming toddler’: Reconfiguring child/hood(s) of the Capitalocene. Osgood, J., & Giugni, M. (2016). ‘Reconfiguring ‘quality’: Matter, bodies and becomings in early childhood education’ in G. S. Cannella, M. Salazar Perez, & I. Lee. (Eds.). Critical Examinations of Quality in Early Education and Care (pp. 139–156). New York: Peter Lang. Osgood, J., & Giugni, M. (2015). Putting post humanist theory to work to reconfigure gender in early childhood: When theory becomes art becomes method. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(3), 346–360. Osgood, J., & Mohandas, S. (2022). Grappling with the Miseducation of Montessori: A feminist posthuman re-reading of ‘child’ in early childhood contexts, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(3), 302–316. Osgood, J., & Mohandas, S. (2021). Figuring gender in early childhood with animal figurines: Pursuing tentacular stories about global childhoods in the Anthropocene. In M. Tesar (Ed.). Global Childhoods Sage Handbook (pp. 205–218). London: Sage. Osgood, J., & Mohandas, S. (2020). Reconfiguring the ‘Male Montessorian’: The mattering of gender through pink towering practices, Early Years, 40(1), 67–81. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2019.1620181 Osgood, J., & Odegard, N. (2022). Crafting granular stories with child-like embodied, affective and sensory encounters that attune to the world’s differential becoming. Australian Journal of Environmental Education Journal, 38, 227–241. Osgood, J., Semenec, P., & Diaz-Diaz, C. (2020). Interview with Jayne Osgood. In C. Diaz-Diaz & P. Semenec (Eds.). Posthumanist and new Materialist Methodologies: Research After the Child (pp. 47–60). Singapore: Springer. Osgood, J., et al. (2016). Re-imagining anti-bias education as worldly-entanglement. Chapter 15 in R. R. Scarlet (Ed.). Anti-Bias Approaches in Early Childhood Education (pp. 183–202). Sydney: Multiverse Publishing. Stewart, K. (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space, 29, 445–453. Strom, K., Ringrose, J., Osgood, J., & Renold, E. (2019). Editorial: PhEmaterialism: Response-able research and pedagogy. Special Issue: Reconceptualising Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), 1–39. Taylor, C. A. et al. (2022). Regarding string: A theory-method-Praxis of/for co-compos(t) ing feminist hope. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.7577/rerm.4910 Tsing, A. L., Deger, J., Saxena, A. K., & Zhou, F. E. (2020). Feral Atlas: The More-ThanHuman Anthropocene. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. https://doi. org/10.21627/2020fa Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ulmer, J. (2017). Posthumanism as research methodology: Inquiry in the Anthropocene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30, 9832–9848.

8 COMMON WORLDING PEDAGOGIES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Mindy Blaise

Introduction

Inspired by feminist posthuman frameworks in general (Åsberg & Braidotti, 2018; Braidotti, 2013) and feminist environmental humanities in particular (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018; 2019), we have been thinking and experimenting with common worlding pedagogies in early childhood education for over a decade now.1 Our experimentations with these methods expose, displace, and overturn normative discourses of developmentalism that seem to have a stranglehold on early childhood education. These normative discourses assume “to know in advance who the individual should be,” prescribing “a trajectory that will mold the child into an ideal citizen who will serve an already-specified society” (Vintimilla & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020, p. 633). In other words, masqueraded behind developmental logics, early childhood education readily accepts and works towards the shaping of a rational, lifelong learner, and independent subject (Vintimilla et al., 2021). We accept that developmentalism, and the logics that ground it, are constantly adapting to meet neoliberal demands; thus, they are not going away. Rather, they are constantly reshaping and reconfiguring subjects and worlds. For instance, we are wary of the inconspicuous developmental discourses that continue to emerge in the 21st century; we sense child development lurking across Anthropocene narratives that have become “a spectacular device that reproduces the image of the ‘human’, allowing us to contemplate our continued presence and survival upon the earth” (Grech, 2022, p. 35). Rather than declaring specific guidelines or methods as solutions to developmentalism, we focus on worlding practices and what these practices do – and what they do not do (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2016). DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-12

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Through common worlding pedagogies, we craft postfoundational inquiries that are situated, responsive, emergent, collective, and attuned to processes of worlding: The very notion of common worlds is an active, inclusive, more-thanhuman one, which is borrowed from Latour (2004) but also inspired by Haraway’s (2008) generative and collective ‘worldings’. More like an aspirational verb than a descriptive noun, common worlding or the commoning of worlds requires a persistent commitment to reaffirm the inextricable entanglement of social and natural worlds – through experimenting with worldly kinds of pedagogical practice. (Taylor, 2017, p. 1455) Common worlding pedagogies shift the focus of our research from the child as the central becoming-knowable subject mastering the world around them and refocus on complex, entangled, mutually affecting and co-shaping childworld relations. This shift is not straightforward; it takes effort, practice, and attentiveness. And, at times, it might lead to unwanted connections and relations. Because nothing is guaranteed when working with common worlding pedagogies, this is not an “anything goes” approach. What matters are the attentive and thoughtful attempts towards practices of composing worlds. It is a mode of feminist scholarship “… necessary for growing different kinds of worlds” (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018, p. 501). To show how we use common worlding pedagogies to create alternatives to developmentalism, we provide empirical glimpses from our postfoundational research with waste pedagogies. These glimpses emerge from ongoing research in early childhood centers across, what is presently known as, Canada and Australia (see Climate Action Childhood Network, 2019). To critically analyze the dominant Rs waste practices (reduce, reuse, recycle), we attempt to refigure the child-waste relations that support developmentalism. Based on capitalist and neoliberal principles, the 3Rs program focuses on teaching children to manage waste by, for instance, sorting plastics and saving water. None of these practices offers a critical analysis of waste itself, nor do they attend to children’s relations to it. Taking seriously the agency, liveliness, disordering, movements, and transformations of waste materials (Bennett, 2010; Edensor, 2005; Moore, 2012), our common worlding waste pedagogies directly challenge humanism’s insistence that human reason gives us the sole capacity to exercise intentional agency. Drawing directly on Myra Hird’s (2012) waste research of the microbial underground of landfills, common worlding waste pedagogies are grounded in a feminist ethics of vulnerability that calls on us to “consider ourselves as vulnerable to, and with, our environment as latecomers to life’s already long established flourishing and failing within a volatile landscape” (p. 464).

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In this chapter, we engage with two sets of reorienting questions that ground this volume: What are we overturning and displacing? What are we making room for? and Who, and/or what, helps us to think otherwise? How do theory and concepts complicate our inquiry, rather than making it easy? These reorienting questions help us to conceptualize common worlding pedagogies within postfoundational approaches to inquiry. This is of significance because new modes of inquiry and theoretical frameworks are necessary to challenge “… the idea that nature or the environment simply ‘is’” (Neimanis et al., 2015, p. 68). We attend to the kinds of inclusions and exclusions common worlding pedagogies require, the displacements of normative discourses that are necessary, as well as the need to create new narratives that account for the complex lives children inherit. None of these questions have easy answers, but they indicate long-standing feminist concerns of justice, power, and care which we engage with next. Worlding, learning with, and situatedness

As a postfoundational inquiry, common worlding pedagogies demand engagement with logics and concepts that reside outside of the narrow confines of traditional qualitative research. We address three crucial concepts that ground our research: worlding, learning with, and situatedness. As the phrase suggests, common worlding focuses on worlding practices or the making of worlds (Haraway, 2016). We are interested in the kinds of worlds that we might create through our research collaborations in early childhood education contexts. We take on board the critique of the Euro-Western epistemologies that support the notion of a “one-world” framework (Law, 2015; Carney et al., 2012), and recognize that there are infinite human and more-than-human worlds within worlds (Escobar, 2018). Common worlding pedagogies encourage us to wonder how might children learn to inherit imperfect and collapsing worlds? More specifically, how do children inherit toxic plastics and water scarcity? And in doing so, how might learnings about these inheritances occur not with abstract ideas but with the concrete practicalities and materialities of plastics and water in children’s everyday lives? Focusing on everyday and ordinary moments that come our way is foundationally feminist. By developing postfoundational modes of attention that do not assume to know what will come helps us grapple with how children might co-inhabit with dangerous and unruly more-than-human others. Our common worlding pedagogies do not set out to improve individual children’s physical, emotional, or cognitive development; instead, they are about collectively remaking worlds without getting rid of the mess or idealizing pure and innocent worlds. The task is to world worlds that can be sustainable, generative, and liveable for all (human, more-than-human, non-human).

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Inspired by Isabelle Stengers’s (2015) suggestion that we are to open ourselves to worlding practices, common worlding pedagogies shift from learning about the world as if we can ever really master it, know it, and fix it, towards experimenting with practices of learning with worlds (e.g., Pacini-Ketchabaw & Nxumalo, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw & Blaise, 2021). In our waste project, the aim is not “learning about” how to recycle plastic or reduce the use of water (as in the 3Rs approach). Practices of recycling and reducing require objective and detached engagements and are mainly concerned with individual children’s ability to function in a neoliberal society. This entails placing a used plastic bottle into a recycling bin or only using water for drinking, feeding, and cleaning. These individualized practices put waste “out of sight and out of mind” and work towards making plastics and water an abstract idea. The 3 Rs approach is based on learning about the world, positioning the world as the object of study and humans as the knowing subjects. This tendency to separate humans from the world involves the transmission of knowledge and actions that are learner-centric and assumes that there is only one world. Instead, common worlding pedagogies, in their postfoundational approaches, invite us to learn with worldly relations. Learning with is modest and relational because it occurs through everyday moments and encounters. Learning with involves attending to possibilities for flourishings in our common worlds – flourishings that involve life-sustaining relations for not only humans but also more-than-human and non-human others (e.g., plastics, water, fish, plants, rocks, and soil). For us, making room for learning with is akin to ecological justice requiring that we attend to multiple relations and to others in their specificities. Staying with specificities involves giving up the god’s eye view from nowhere: the objective and rational researcher who generates universal and generalizable facts about the world and its inhabitants. Situated knowledges, non-innocence, and vulnerability are feminist principles of common worlding pedagogies (Haraway, 1988; 2008; 2016). Taking such a stance is challenging because it exposes us to the unknown and to unknowns. It requires that we hesitate, slow down, and work with humility (Stengers, 2015). It requires a shift from reacting to responding. Yet, this is also dangerous because early childhood education expects and reveres rationalist, technocratic, and problemsolving approaches through developmental logics that set out to know. Usually, this knowing involves what the individual child either can or cannot do. Never does this binary, either/or logic make room for something different, something more, or even unpredictable alliances between humans and all other lives and forces. Attending to worlding practices, learning with worlds, and staying with specificities requires attentiveness, curiosity, and experimentation. Using common worlding pedagogies, we aim to create openings in highly contested spaces. In other words, we hint at what might be possible in, or what might emerge from, encounters – without necessarily seeking a final truth or

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a “research finding” (Haraway, 2008; Tsing, 2015). We pay close attention to how we might undo, reposition, and make strange the taken-for-granted notion of humans within unconventional encounters. Ultimately, it is in awkward or unexpected relations that we are moved to care differently, to see our entanglements with worlds, and to acknowledge our vulnerabilities. The ethics of how to respond to contested relations is often complicated. And common worlding pedagogies are interested in attending to these complexities to create otherwise relations. For instance, these approaches ask: how do we care for toxic plastics and depleted water sources? How do we learn to live well with materials that can hurt us or water that cannot sustain us? Could a generalizable response be considered dangerous? And is such a response even possible? Common worlding with water and plastic in early childhood

Our projects are always situated in the here-and-now of practice, avoiding binary thinking or trying to find a grand solution to contemporary problems. Because these inquiries happen on-the-ground, they never produce an easy or a simple solution, but sometimes they demand a problematic response. Common worlding inquiries are never decontextualized, sanitized, or stripped clean of complexities. Attending to water’s liveliness

An example of how common worlding pedagogies work in relation to worlding practices can be found in a year-long water inquiry conducted in an early childhood center in Boorloo (Perth), Western Australia that involved educators and children learning and cultivating the art of paying attention by bringing water forward in their waste inquiry. This was done by creatively experimenting and thinking with water logics to cultivate more ecologically responsive and responsible relations with water (Neimanis, 2013). Water scarcity and climate variability have a long history in this particular region of Australia and have affected how Western Australians have understood and related to water as a resource to consume. Not only is Australia the most arid inhabited continent on Earth, but since the 1970s, this region of Western Australia has also been experiencing extreme drought. In response, humans have relied heavily on “out of sight and out of mind” groundwater for their needs. This overreliance on groundwater has created the illusion of a limitless water supply (Morgan, 2015) and it positions water as an abstract idea. It is this imaginary that we attempt to reconfigure in our work with children through common worlding pedagogies: Three small, rectangular, and clear plastic trays, each filled with water, sit outside on a wooden table. White art paper has been placed underneath

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the trays. One tray has been filled with ice cubes, another with room temperature water, and the third with warm water. Mary and Sylvia are busy putting their hands in these water trays, making comments about the water. “Oooh, it’s icy”, “This water is slippery”, and “Drippy and slow” are overheard. Amongst the chatter, we hear a “plomp”, the sound of something softly thumping against the plastic water tray. A small ice cube slips out of Mary’s hand, gently hitting the side of the plastic water tray, making this subtle sound. Mary tries again, holding an ice cube with her fingers, but it quickly slips away. Closing her tiny hand around another melting ice cube, it too squeezes out and “plomps” into the water, causing a few water drops to spill out of the tray, splashing onto the white paper. Squeezing her hand into a small tight fist, Mary then slowly opens her hand wide above the white paper, and together we watch droplets of water falling. Dipping both hands into the water tray, Sylvia then raises them high up, and together we watch the drip, drop, dripping of tiny water droplets falling onto the paper. Over and over again she does this. She tries the manoeuvre with an ice cube, holding it high up, above the paper. And then, suddenly the ice cube shoots out, and hits the table, bouncing onto the ground. Instead of rushing to get the ice cube, Sylvia stands tall, taking her slightly wet hand and stretches it out and over the white paper. She then brings all of her fingers together, and with a smile, says out loud as each water droplet falls, “Drip … drop … drip” … (Blaise et al., 2022; p. 18) Working with common worlding pedagogies, we invited children to learn the logics of water that feminist environmental humanities Astrida Neimanis offers (2009, 2012, 2013). Neimanis (2009), provoked us to situate ourselves in relation to lively bodies of water. Bodies of water are “… always coming from somewhere and moving somewhere new, [are] always different–perhaps not in its chemical scientific properties, but in terms of its forms, rhythms, and gestational potentials” (p. 165). Neimanis presents several watery ways of being, including gestational, the capacity to dissolve, medium of communication, differentiation, the archive, and unknowability. Attending and attuning to these logics was important as they drew us deeply into the matter of water and encouraged a different positioning between children and water not grounded in mastery (Neimanis, 2013). These logics also helped us to pause and appreciate what water can do in a thinking otherwise; as life giving and life ending; as powerful and transformational; as so much more than a simple thing in itself (lake, ocean, river) but a medium of communication. Using video to record the ordinariness of water splashings and drippings, micro water movies were made and the studio turned into a screening room at the childcare center. With lights dimmed, water movements were stretched,

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slowed, and projected onto the wall. Water movements powerfully drew children in as they began noticing the slippery contours of each dripping drop. Stretching a hand out towards the projected water wall, tiny fingers trace each drip, each drop. Then turning bodies become water bodies. Relations were being transformed as water movements brought children closer, and they began tracing with their fingers the contours of moving water. These movements then brought children’s bodies towards and into water drippings and droppings to the floor. As water logics captured children’s curiosity, our practices shifted from learning about water to learning with this life-sustaining resource. Methodologically, children’s frames of noticing expanded, making room for and engaging with water’s movements, liveliness, and relations. In doing so a shift was made from focusing on water as a discrete resource that can be managed, recycled, or reduced toward water as an unknowable and unpredictable companion in life that required arts of noticing (Tsing, 2015). Water became, and was, an active participant with children. As children followed water and its movements, the developmental logics of separability, human exceptionalism, and containment were interrupted in the classroom. Different ways of noticing, such as “...look[ing] around rather than ahead” (Tsing, 2015, p. 22) played a part in forming and reforming children’s relations with water. Children joined water in its movings, slippings, and drippings expanding their sensibilities and sensorial capacities. It is here, where worlding practices put into motion the composition of worlds. Queer synthetic curriculum for the Chthulucene

Like every morning, a group of eighteen-month to two-year-old children enter their room after spending time in the gym. However, today the room contains over a hundred plastic bottles suspended from the ceiling, standing on shelves, and gathered in groupings covering most of the classroom’s floor. Plastic welcomes the children into the carefully curated space. Various shapes and sizes of water bottles and pop bottles still hold reminders of their commercial branding… Bottles fly through the classroom, roll across the floor and tables, invite unanticipated sounds. Children find a delicacy in plastic. Bodies and bottles join forces to move in unison, rhythmically concealing each other. (Pacini-Ketchabaw & MacAlpine, 2022, p. 8) This narrative briefly describes a moment in the making of what we called the “queer synthetic curriculum” for the Chthulucene in an early childhood education classroom in Ontario, Canada (Pacini-Ketchabaw & MacAlpine, 2021; MacAlpine & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2022). Using common worlding pedagogies as a move towards overturning and displacing hidden neoliberal discourses

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in early childhood education’s responses to plastic waste, we experimented with the idea of learning with plastics. Thus far, confronting and responding to plastic waste has been limited to fragmented approaches that control excess plastic waste, failing to fully address waste processes and plastics’ liveliness beyond mere management practices that hyper-separate humans from waste (Davis, 2015). These waste management practices fail to pay attention to the complex relations humans have with plastics and with processes of waste(ing) (Boetzkes, 2019). Attentive to and carefully worlding worlds with plastics, we situated our processes for the queer synthetic curriculum within Haraway’s Chthulucene. Because the Chthulucene refuses to pit the human and more-than-human against each other, we were able to make up stories “of ongoing multispecies practices of becoming-with” (Haraway, 2016, p. 55). Situating our work within the Chthulucene provoked us to consider, in our early childhood practices, the “thick, fibrous, and lumpy” now in which children live – a now that inevitably includes synthetic polymers. As we experimented through multiple encounters with plastic in the early childhood classroom, we made a few subtle but important moves that led to the creation of the queer synthetic curriculum. First, we shifted from the upward-looking, detached Anthropos concealed in early childhood education’s waste remediation initiatives that train children to become good environmental stewards by managing the (externalized) plastic “problem.” Second, acknowledging that plastic cannot be extracted from children’s lives in the 21st century, we engaged with creative strategies to learn to live with plastics’ toxicities without necessarily celebrating them and to find ways to grapple with the horrors they bring. Third, we accepted the mixed affects that plastic affords. On the one hand, plastic brings sensorial pleasures and possibilities “with its smooth surfaces and bright colours,” as well as “the fantasy of ridding ourselves of the dirt of the world, of decay, of malfeasance” (Davis, 2015, p. 349 as cited in Pacini-Ketchabaw & McAlpine, 2021, p. 4). On the other hand, plastic brings guilt as we are reminded of the ecologically toxic times we live in. Fourth, we worked with the impossibility of separating plastics out from children’s bodies. Finally, we treated plastic as chthonic queer matter that, on one hand, recognizes it as a potent petrochemical compound unleashed from the earth, organic and inorganic at the same time. And on the other hand, acknowledging that it “exists outside of the proper logics of decay and transformation, in its own category of creation, where microbes and bacteria have not yet widely evolved to use its incredible energy sources” (Davis, 2015, p. 233 as cited in Pacini-Ketchabaw & McAlpine, 2021, p. 4). Using common worlding pedagogies, we invited slow, situated pedagogies in which children became immersed in the tensions of plastics, the capitalist petroleum complex, and our waste-precarious times. We supported children

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to notice plastic, not to dismiss the challenging realities they are inheriting. Without guarantees or innocence, we hoped that children would be able to learn how plastic endures, to become attuned to their immediate synthetic surroundings, and to respond to the troubled worlds in front of them rather than to ideal worlds of innocence. In other words, carefully attending to worlding practices, we intended to refigure young children’s relationships with plastic –- hopefully cultivating response-ability or, in Haraway’s (2016) words, considering: the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met. (p. 130) Conclusion

Two sets of reorienting questions have guided how we have presented this chapter: What are we overturning and displacing? What are we making room for? and Who, and what, helps us to think otherwise? How do theory and concepts complicate our inquiries, rather than making it easy? We have drawn from two waste studies to show how common worlding pedagogies overturn human’s desires to always know, to always fix, and to always be in control in relation to plastics and water. Our empirical glimpses provide insights into how common worlding pedagogies help us to do this complex work with children and waste materials. Instead of trying to uncover truths about plastics and water from safe and distant points of view, our research is concerned with the kinds of worlds that are worlded, how we might learn with others, and where our inquiries are situated. Unconventional encounters and experimenting with plastics and water are of importance to us because of what they might do to alter childwaste relations. In the waste project, we worked with children to create conditions that made it possible to encounter complex worlds and notice how humans are both immersed in and part of water logics and synthetic worlds. Common worlding pedagogies made room for these movements and child developmentalism was overturned and displaced. In doing so, these inquiries are postfoundational. As postfoundational work, there are no ready-made processes, procedures, methods, or practices for carrying out this kind of research. Instead, it required us to “re-orient thought to experiment and create new forms of thought and life” (St. Pierre, 2020, p. 163). This in turn takes practice and a willingness to think and work with uncertainty, both of which are not easy to do within the normative discourses of developmentalism.

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Note 1 See http://commonworlds.net/.

References Åsberg, C., & Braidotti, R. (Eds.) (2018). A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag. Blaise, M., Pollitt, J., Merewether, J., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2022). Resilience as more-than-human. In P. Kelly & P. Kraftl (eds). Young People and the Anthropocene (pp. 17–30). London: Routledge. Carney, S., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (2012). Between faith and science: World culture theory and comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 56(3), 366–393. Climate Action Childhood Network. (2019). Climate Action Childhood Network Website. https://climateactionchildhood.net/ Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press Davis, H. 2015. Life and death in the Anthropocene: A short history of plastic. In H. Davis and E. Turpin (eds). Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (pp. 347–358). London: Open Humanities Press. Edensor, T. (2005). Waste matter: The debris of industrial ruins and the disordering of the material world. Journal of Material Culture, 10(3), 311–332. https://doi. org/10.1177/1359183505057346 Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hamilton, J., & Neimanis, A. (2018). Composting feminisms and environmental humanities. Environmental Humanities, 10(2), 501–527. Hamilton, J., & Neimanis, A. (2019). Five desires, five demands. Australian Feminist Studies, 34(102), 385–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2019.1702875 Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies, 4(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Hird, M. J. 2012. Knowing waste: Towards an inhuman epistemology. Social Epistemology, 26(3–4), 453–469. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2012.727195 Law, J. (2015). What’s wrong with a one-world world? Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 16(1), 126–139. Moore, S. A. (2012), Garbage matters: Concepts in new geographies of waste. Progress in Human Geography, 36(6), 780–799. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132512437077 Neimanis, A., Åsberg, C., & Hedrén, J. (2015). Four problems, four directions for environmental humanities: Toward critical posthumanities for the Anthropocene. Ethics and the Environment, 20(1), 67–97. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Nxumalo, F. (2015). Unruly raccoons and troubled educators: Nature/culture divides in a childcare centre. Environmental Humanities, 7(1), 151–168.

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Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (2016). Common world childhoods. Oxford Bibliographies in Childhood Studies. https://doi.org/10.1093/OBO/9780199791231-0174 Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Blaise, M. (2021). Feminist ethicality in child-animal research: Worlding through complex stories. Children’s Geographies. Https://doi.org/10.108 0/14733285.2021.1907311 Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & MacAlpine, K.-A. (2022). “Queer Synthetic Curriculum for the Chthulucene: Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 8(1), 1–22. MacAlpine, K., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (in press). Storying with Plastic Excess: Relations with Plastic in Early Childhood Education. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. https://doi-org.ezproxy.ecu.edu.au/10.1080/14681366.2022.2156582 St. Pierre, E. A. (2020). Why post qualitative inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 163–166. Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. https://doi.org/10.1 080/13504622.2017.1325452 Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vintimilla, C. D., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2020). Weaving pedagogy in early childhood education: On openings and their foreclosure. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 28(5), 628–641. https://doi.org/10.1080/13502 93X.2020.1817235 Vintimilla, C., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Land, N. (2021). Manifesting living knowledges: A pedagogists’ working manifesto. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2021.1955051

9 INQUIRY AS IF SKETCH Petra Mikulan and Nathalie Sinclair

She looked blankly at the canvas … Where to begin? (Woolf, 1930, p. 243)

Introduction

You know that feeling when reading multiple sources for research, when beginning an inquiry, and your brain traces all these different lines and trails from various texts, until an affective sketch begins to form in your mind? And when you reach that threshold where the chaotic lines converge, you feel the urge to get up and walk, do something else? Because the affective intensity of that feeling of being at the cusp of the unknown that is beginning to outline itself in front of you, as if sketch, is too much to bear, too much to write down with those definitive strokes? Ambiguous, opaque, flimsy, risky (sketchy), imperfect. Not there yet, but almost, as if possible. Sketch = ƒ verb and noun ƒ movement, gesture, trace, splash/squirt, affect between and/or extemporaneous states ƒ quick study (vs. drawing), experiment, freehand, spontaneous, traces ‘error’ ƒ work to-be-made, unfinished Anthropologists, archeologists, ethnographers, and other researchers in the humanities and social sciences have used the practice of drawing as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-13

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viable tool, metaphor, educational component, and essential part of research and documentation for centuries. These days, this practice is gaining renewed attention in visual, digital, and cultural anthropology, as in the work of Ingold (2011), Taussig (2020), and Aït-Touati et al. (2022). Drawing as a conceptual device is not new in philosophical inquiry either. As a concept, it has been used to investigate the phenomenological, discursive, and ontological questions of proximity and distance, inside and outside, being and becoming. It is therefore interesting that in the field of educational research, the practice of drawing and sketching has not yet taken hold as a pedagogical tool, given the disciplinary similarities with anthropological and ethnographic research subjects, goals, and aims. In this chapter, we focus on sketch as a conceptual device and a pedagogical tool of inquiry. We ask: How might the gestural trace of sketch be associated with educational traces in inquiry? How might a sketch’s ability to “trace time” engage with educational and postfoundational concepts of inquiry to make room for the new while making kin with the old, without requiring the tendency to critique, replace or overcome? The word sketch comes from Greek skhedios, a “temporary, extemporaneous, done or made off-hand.” It is related to schema, “form, shape, appearance,” and Italian schizzo, which is “a special use of schizzo ‘a splash, squirt,’ from schizzare ‘to splash or squirt,’ of uncertain origin” (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=sketch). We use sketch rather than drawing because of its transient mode of aesthetic existence. While a drawing can be complete, marked with details, composing a wholly negotiated representation of an artistic expression, sketches lack that final stroke that indicates the completion of an artistic event. Sketch is a wager in the modality of possibles, a perpetual tense of might have been, a counterfactual conditional. Taking an example from art, we could say that if an artist had filled in just a few more marks, lingered longer, or had not stopped when they did, then the drawing, painting, or sculpture (as a building up or filling in the sketch) might have turned out to be completely different. The difference between sketch and drawing in the sense proposed here can be discerned in how Virginia Woolf (1930) contrasts two stages of Lily’s painting process in the novel To the Lighthouse: She looked blankly at the canvas … Where to begin? – that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made. (pp. 243–44)

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then There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision. (p. 320) Sketch is a multimodal passage1—an intensive transitive concrescence2 (a coming together) of gesture, prehension,3 and the observed, itself of ontologically equal status as that of things being represented, observed, interpreted. The richest aspects of marks, traces, and gestures in a sketch are the multitudes of presences that are an absence, the evocativeness of which are dependent on singular fragments of reality that are foreign to their own becoming. For example, the traces of teachers’ movements around lunchtime at a recent conference are enough to sketch out the observed in an interfold between worlds, on the margins of being (negotiations of space and time, domesticity of school room, visibility and invisibility, relations between gender, race, and materiality) (Figure 9.1). It is not only these singular traces, taking shape without our having engendered them, that are emphasized in a sketch; it is the “flurry of evocations to which we remain deaf” (Stengers & Latour in Souriau, 2015, p. 63). We understand sketching as a quick study of gestures, impressions, affects, objects, and movements that does not define what becomes realizable or realized. That is, a sketch does not represent, but dramatizes that which becomes realizable and realized in the process of inquiry. The two are positively co-present. This excludes any prior animating force pertaining to either the researcher, the observed, texts, or their readers. Something in a sketch resists translatability and useability because what is made in a sketch is framed by the points of view and the worlds the researcher inhabits. Therefore, any sketch is an intimate and political and cultural work. For Ingold (2011): the practice of drawing has little or nothing to do with the projection of images and everything to do with wayfaring—with breaking a path through a terrain and leaving a trace, at one in the imagination and on the ground, in a manner very similar to what happens as one walks along in a world of earth and sky. (p. 178)

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Sketching teachers’ movements at conference lunchtime.

Study 1: a girl with a remote control

Written observation: She sits on the floor, looking up at the TV. Her legs are crossed, head bent back, arms resting on her knees. She moves her thumb over the remote rapidly, flipping through channels. Three minutes pass and she flips back and forth, undecidedly. Disappointed in the lack of shows that spark her desire to watch, she rocks back and forth. She huffs and puffs. Flipping through channels. She looks passive and uncomfortable. Thumbs still rapidly pushing the forward and backward buttons on the remote control. She picks a song, she watches halfway and fast forwards it. She decided to find her favourite song, “Chicken Attack.” She watches it on repeat, four times. Seemingly content. Thumbs resting (Figure 9.2). Sketch I is an image of what I (Petra) perceived while focusing on drawing an image of a girl and TV. This is an image because the drawing follows closely the symbolic representation most of us see when we imagine a girl, a TV and a remote. I thought to push further in sketch II and not look at what

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I was sketching. I kept my eyes on her, as I traced lines impressed on me. In sketch III, I pushed further. I kept my eyes on her, this time focusing on my affective impression of something that stuck out to me. So the lines of her eyelashes, her hair parting, her arm resting and the remote direction. In sketch IV, I focused on her motions as speed, trying to respond to her gestures in motions of sitting, looking, facing, and flipping through channels. Finally, in

FIGURE 9.2

Sketch as study of concrescence of diverse modes of prehension. Following lines. Lines following something in me.

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sketch V, I focused on what I sensed as frequency, including the frequency of motion on the TV. Later in the day, and before taking a photograph of the sketch, sitting down to write it out in words for the purposes of this chapter, I looked at it closely again. It brought back my emotional attunements of what I was observing and drawing with my hand. I added oil pastels of green for calm, blue for fluttering like butterfly wings, and red for irritation. I also remembered a detail that escaped me the first time. I remember her left hand resting on her knee, clenching her fingers in a fist—orange. The scale against which we understand sketching as an intensive transitive mode of inquiry (as wayfaring) is a particular degree of risk—of success or failure of anaphoric movement towards ‘completion’ of the inquiry to-bemade. A sketch implies an imperative of error or failure; of the possibility of non-actualization of the possibles not observed, not prehended; all those compossible and incompossible, infinitesimal resonances, echoes, frequencies, and quantum temporalities that leave no impression on the researcher, yet carve out traces in the research event by virtue of absence elucidated by the observer’s lack of response-ability. Study 2: academic job talk

Reorienting question 1: How is the possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? I (Petra) have been attending public, academic job talks as part of my research into colonial regimes of this hazing ritual in faculties of education. As I listened, I sketched. The presenter is the one-eyed bird in the center. The audience is the river. The centrifugal forces at the top are possibles I, II, and III. Time and space are here expressions of frequency and dimension, relation, movement, memory, imagination, and impression. The words/thoughts were inscribed onto the sketch later in the day, as part of remembering, lingering, wayfaring, moving with the absences, lines, back and forth, in and out of scale (Figure 9.3). After the talk, the committee members asked the audience to comment, or send an email directly, but related to the job description only. What if a sketch was a valid (i.e., ‘objective’) inscription of thoughts, judgements, observations, and reflections—alongside a written text? Sketch as a speculative research-graphic is concerned with empirical inquiry, but addresses the speculative tense of counterfactual, a tense of might; that is, how might we live with the questions of our empirical inquiry, given the speculative “insistence of possibles?” Lines and gestures, memories and impressions, movements and frequencies. These diverse modes of concrescence (in any given sketch as speculative research-graphic), are virtual and actual compositions, counter-compositions, dis- and de-compositions of worlds that converge and diverge according to their own manners of spatiotemporal modulations. Importantly, they are not a result, nor condition, of the

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FIGURE 9.3

Sketch as speculative research-graphic.

already established (foundational) modes of extractive geologic that always already allows and justifies systems of thought and knowing that sustain a particular image of history and of proper selves (as homo faber) (see Mikulan, 2022). Stengers (2018) writes that: the possible, banished in the name of modern rationality based on facts claiming to impose themselves in the mode of authoritative statement, has

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returned like a bolt, unleashed by its official banishment. So impossible? And in any case, they will have to raise the pragmatic question par excellence: does the possible whose insistence I sense add or detract from the situation? (p. 20) This pragmatic question of the “insistence of possibles” is in sharp contrast with questions of dis-placement and over-turning in postfoundational approaches. As we argue elsewhere (Mikulan & Sinclair, 2023), education is the insistence on linear, progressive modes of thought, reasoning, knowledge, and imagination. These persistently colonial regimes of addressing the “monstrous outside” of thought are also deeply embedded in educational structures of reading, writing, and doing research. In refusing to question time, education inquiry affords, extends and continually reproduces colonial operations of thought as conditions and foundations of what it is to be human and/or nonhuman in diverse modes of being and becoming. Study 3: student self-inquiry

At the end of the year, I (Petra) ask students to sketch their experience within the teacher program as part of their ongoing self-inquiry. Here are some of their inquirings:

FIGURE 9.4

Self-Inquiry as if sketch 1.

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FIGURE 9.5

Self-Inquiry as if sketch 2.

Most of the “new” theory and philosophy in education is essentially a question of temporality. Disciplinary assertion of critique (as method) of the old is often presented as a ‘natural’ response (progression) and validation of its own difference—from that which has been. Such orientation begins with already fully actualized research modes and models of paying attention

Inquiry as if sketch

FIGURE 9.6

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Self-Inquiry as if sketch 3.

(observing, explaining, describing, categorizing, intra-acting), revealing some condition or foundation to its own implied (predicated) temporal processes of inquiry (i.e., some form of deference, finality, repetition or remediation). By contrast, sketching as a speculative and material mode of aesthetic-affectiveinscriptive fabulation, as seen in the students’ sketches above, speaks to risk; a speculative gesture ingressed in as if (might have happened, will have happened now). With inquiry as if sketch, it is possible to make room for the new in postfoundational approaches, while making kin with the old, seeking not merely to re-place and re-turn, because it “can only be ‘resolved’ speculatively, by risking it in response to the demands of each particular situation” (Mikulan, 2022). Sketching risks a speculative gesture in a different tense. It is open to past and future conditional temporalities. Immersive, transitive, impressionistic and improvisatory line tracing, dis-finished, remembering later, wayfaring in the past—sketching as speculative research-graphic bursts open the different modes of existence to various modulations of spatiotemporalities of past and future possibles and impossibles as if converging and diverging all at once. The two are positively co-present: The bridge that no one thinks to build, of which we have not even conceived the possibility – but for which all the materials are available, and

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whose nature, span and form are perfectly determined so as to provide a sole solution to a problem, for which all the data is complete though unrecognized – this bridge exists with a virtual existence that is more positive than the one that was begun, but whose completion was rendered impossible by a flaw or faulty design. (Souriau, 2015, p. 113) In Tina Campt’s (2017) words, this is “the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen now,” as an “imperative rather than subjunctive—as a striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present” (p. 17). Herein lies a caveat to possible—“when possibles are absorbed in education’s ‘monopoly of the Real’ as that which offers intelligibility and continuity, what they make important alongside, is the machinic contingency of the negative” (Mikulan & Wallin, 2022, p. 207). On a macroscopic scale, inquiry as if sketch would sacrifice the modern synthesis of “outside of thought”: […] in favour of transitive contamination (irreducible, virtual, both absolute and uncertain, inachieved) [which] is a sacrifice pledged in the name of negativity understood as a saying, a quality of difference to become an impassivity, a tense expressed in the infinite transitive discontinuity, a negatif. As a non-propositional quality in its infinite transitive tense of adjectival expression, a negatif is a saying rather than said, because it is without relation, nothing other than itself. (Mikulan & Wallin, 2022, p. 207)

Reorienting question 2: who, and/or what, helps you to think otherwise?

In a brief video discussion of the three modalities of her social justice research—the critical, the speculative, and the creative—Denise Ferreira da Silva (2019) describes the thought experiments of the speculative modality that “try to expose how we think.” A picture of a triangle is shown, populated by dots, with a dashed vertical line separating dots on the left from dots on the right. She asks the viewer to try to connect dots from one side to the other, which will necessarily involve making segments that go through the dashed vertical line. If you really want to avoid going through the center, you can draw curved lines that actually exit the triangle. This thought experiment illustrates the way in which necessity functions (as in the association of blackness and criminality, and the

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subsequent justification for police brutality, in Ferreira da Silva’s example), but can succumb to speculative possibles.

This act of letting the line exit the triangle, because it can—and not because it ever has in the past—is precisely the kind of speculative leap that occurs in inventive mathematics, where new dimensions are added; infinite planes created; and a variety of cuts, folds, stitchings, morphings, temporary dotted lines, and suggestive arrows create worlds that have never existed and that do not play by the rules of existing ones. The hand-pencil interplay is precisely what concerns the philosopher of mathematics, Gilles Châtelet, whose study of inventive mathematics pays attention to “the dynasties of gestures of cutting out, to diagrams that capture them mid-flight, to thought experiments” (2000, p. 10). By connecting Châtelet’s work to critical cartography, de Freitas et al. (2022) use mathematical operations to create new geo-spatial imaginaries that exceed simply metric distances and Eurocentric mapping regimes. Their experiments involve the use of mathematical operations, such as inversion, as a creative abstraction to produce new relations among partner cities in an international curriculum collaboration—they work to enfold the colonial violences of the past while also fabulating new relations that instantiate another possibility—a reversal, for example, of periphery and center (see also AïtTouati et al., 2022, for a similar exercise in “Gaia-graphy”).

To return to the problem articulated above, about the temporal assumptions linked to education, sketching might begin with the spatial imaginaries

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we currently live with, such as the pervasive image of time-as-arrow. Drawing the line (you can do it too—draw as you read), shown on the right, responds to the continuity, upward moving feeling of learning. This is not a representation of learning, of a “life out there,” but a mode of freezing a sustained affective response to something there, “outside of thought.” From this simple sketch, which is neither static nor dynamic, but caught between the two as a cinematic still, and redolent with implications, we can experiment. We do not want to begin with experience as the phenomenological pre-condition to sketching gestures, rather, we take sketching as its own source, before or beyond human experience/intentionality. Thus, we do not draw on experience as the source domain, but work directly with the sketching to explore new experiences, new possibles, à la Ferreira da Silva. So, from the steady, straight arrowed line, take the pencil for some detours.

Releasing linearity. Linear functions, studied in algebra, assume a particular kind of relation in which one quantity changes in direct proportion to another: y = mx + b. Such behavior is mainly found in school mathematics textbooks; in the real world, error, exceptions, and errancy abound. But that simple equation contains infinite possibility. The x can raise to a new power of x2 or x5; new blips and modulations can be formed with terms like 3x4 and −0.4x3. What possibles do such powers and modulations offer? Bumpy roads. Retracing steps. Attention to curvature and tempo (speeding up, slowing down). Rhythms of being and becoming. Draw the squiggly line and think “learning” as you go.

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Ignoring singularity. Cutting out transgressive sections can sometimes happen in mathematics, like when an equation doesn’t behave properly. Dividing by zero is not allowed, for example, and can cause a singularity. So we switch from single continuous sweeps to bracketed sections. Discretized events are defined on specific intervals. Now when you draw, you must lift your pencil, move your hand in a mid-air, ungrounded leap, alighting somewhere—anywhere?—on the page. We lift the pencil because we can. We might feel the absence, the hole, of the missing part—something lost, dead, something forgotten—or the skipping over of something dull, something painful. Or, we might feel the still as a slice of life, two mountain peaks poking through the clouds, exposing something but hiding another.

Admitting quantum superposition. The mathematics of quantum mechanics must account for ontological indeterminacy—for things being simultaneously both one thing and another. Take four pencils and draw with them all at once and think of the other pencils that you haven’t used. The lines don’t touch, they pursue their own modes of existence, as a stratigraphic montage. Multiple pencils mean there is no single origin—no beginning from which things grow and progress. There is no coherent whole as soon as there are many paths. But each line requires a particular kind of caring, to avoid conflation and generalization.

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Abandoning continuity. Mathematics constantly engages in the schizophrenia of the continuous and the discrete. There is always a number between any two given numbers—between 1 and 3, there’s 2; between 0 and 1, there 0.5; between 0.5 and 0.6 there 0.5555; and so on—but do all those in-betweens make up a continuity? Now you are not so much lifting the pencil but poking at the paper, like a bird pecking at strewn seeds. Your hand does gesture towards a continuity, but it knows better; it respects the rhythm of staccato taps, errantly moving—not forward, not backward, but just moving, in stills. All these sketches offer possibles, modes of expressing the “pursuit of knowledge” in a tense of as if; of learning, knowledge, progress, hierarchies, binaries, and so on in ways that avoid reification of method as always already an origin or a beginning (arkhè) of something pre, new, or post foundational. Looking at them is not enough… you have to move your hand and feel what they force it to do. If these sketches were to become the imaginaries with which we understood necessity, then we would require different justifications for schooling, for governance, for justice. If there is no monumental continuity, only a becoming of singular continuities (to follow Whitehead), then each new period, new day, new year becomes an event, to live, to piece atomic bits into some kind of flow. If failing to learn or to act properly is not seen as sliding back in time—downward and to the left—but popping up or gaining momentum, the regimes of remediation and retribution alter drastically. If every life led is a multiplicity of lives leading, only parts of which are actualized, how do we think of nature, nurture, accident, and randomness? These sketches are mathematically motivated—they intensify the spatial imaginary of time-as-arrow by inflecting them with particular mathematical concepts (linearity, continuity, singularity)—and as such, can produce relations that do not depend on habits and lived experiences. They do not replace or overturn time-as-arrow, or even each other. They are meant to be instaurative; inviting, provoking the reader’s hand to respond to their own traces. There will be what you see, once you make your own sketch; but also the feeling of your fingers on the pencil—now holding tightly, and then loosening up—and your hand on the page, brushing along in rhythmic ways. We see these as significant to sketching in part because of their escape from ocularity, but also a channeling of the affects and prehensions that make up the possible and the otherwise. For this reason, sketching as an educational practice of postfoundational inquiry insists with a force of an ethical demand. No longer bound up with one or the others, an ethical ability to respond is placed on/ within a milieu between those involved in the research event—the one and the others remain opaque, distant, intact by one’s desire to know, capture, enclose, extract, recognize, represent. Instead, singular milieus fold divergent and convergent forces of an ethical response.

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Conclusion

Our anti-foundational approach—within the context of the questions we take up—provokes inquiry in a different mode and tense. We illustrated how we might think, fabulate, and speculate in a mode of as if inquiry. Our technique drew on diagramming as well as on Souriau’s notion of the sketch. We addressed this specifically in our treatment of the inclusive approach to foundational and postfoundational thought. That is, we thought about how it is possible to make room for the new while making kin with the old, without requiring the dialectic, progressivist tendency to replace or overturn the so-called old. We illustrated how mathematics helps us think this, not in the objective, positivist way that it is usually understood—but in its contingent, yet abstract manner of modulating relations that do not depend on experience. Our goal was to model how we can engage postfoundational approaches in ways that refuse the kinds of scalar thinking that reifies and recenters them as alternative, other, or new foundations. Notes 1 Souriau tried to avoid the words creation and creativity in order to show the imperative of error or failure; of the possibility of non-actualization of the possibles. The question is just how, when, and how much of existence is happening or being instaurated anew in each singular interval, in the passage between the autonomy of the infinite series of possibles on the one hand, and the autonomy of the actual on the other? The employment of possible/virtual is to affirm that, for example, between parts of a sketch and its finished whole (diastemic relationality as Souriau will call it, evoking a cut, splitting, or gap), there is a multimodal passage, an intensive transitive space or interval, itself of ontologically equal status as that of things. It is this virtual link that is positively concrete, fanning out in a novel togetherness the identity of which is indifferent to the spatio-temporal distribution of its terms or parts. For more, see Souriau’s The Different Modes of Experience (2015). 2 Whitehead’s term for a growing together of different modes and modalities in a given event. A milieu of correspondence and response. 3 Whitehead proposes the term prehension (modelled on Leibnizian “apprehension”) for “the general way in which the occasion of experience can include, as part of its own essence, any other entity, whether another occasion of experience or an entity of another type. This term is devoid of suggestion either of consciousness or representative perception. Feelings are the positive type of prehensions” (Whitehead, 1967, p. 234). When occasions perish, they “pass from the immediacy of being into the not-being of immediacy” which does not mean that they are nothing, for they remain a “stubborn fact” (Whitehead, 1967, p. 237).

References Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A. & Grégoire, A. ([2019] 2022). Terra Forma, trans. A. Demarco, Cambridge: The MIT Press. Campt, T. (2017). Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Châtelet, G. ([1993] 2000). Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, trans. R. Shore and M. Zagha. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academy Press. de Freitas, E., Sinclair, N., le Roux, K., Solares-Rojas, A., Coles, A. and Ng, O.L. (2022). New spatial imaginaries for mapping international curriculum projects: Creative diagrams, mapping experiments, and critical cartography. Qualitative Inquiry. Ferreira da Silva, D. (2019). Transformative theory of justice. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCMLwdJqHZ0. Ingold, T. (2011). The Life of Lines. London and New York: Routledge. Mikulan, P. (2022). An ethics of refusal: A speculative pragmatic challenge to systemic racism in education. Educational Theory, 72 (1), 529–548. Mikulan, P. & Sinclair, N. (2023). Time and Education: Time Pedagogy against Oppression. London: Bloomsbury Press. Mikulan, P. & Wallin, J. (2022). Terminal protagonism: Negation and education in the Anthropocene. In Jagodzinski, J. and Beier, J. (Eds.), Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene (pp. 199–211). Palgrave Macmillan. Souriau, É. (1943/2015). The Different Modes of Existence. (E. Beranek & T. Howles, Trans.). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Stengers, I. (2018). Another Science Is Possible. (S. Muecke, Trans.). Polity Press, Cambridge, MA: Wiley. Taussig, M. T. (2020). Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Whitehead, Alfred North ([1929] 1978). Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan. Woolf, V. (1930). To the Lighthouse. New York: Rosetta Books.

10 INQUIRING WITH CASCADE QUESTIONING Sketching a phenomenon Malou Juelskjær

(Intro) What is in a question?

While writing a book on “thinking with agential realism” (Juelskjær, 2019), a book also working with agential realism through a memorial on the transatlantic slave trade and Danish colonial history, I became fascinated with the practice of asking questions to explore ways of thinking with agential realism. Inspired by Karen Barad’s use of the term cascade experiments (2007), I called this cascade questioning: questioning as iterative (re)openings of specific spacetimemattering, as worlding practices, as diffractively tracing and enabling entanglements while sketching a research phenomenon. Cascade questioning is a (creative) process that goes on and on. That is, not questions in the conventional sense of something (some thing) to be answered – nor subject-object relations between a knower and that which is to be known. The ontological and philosophical specificity of questioning matters, and it seems important to stay with and zoom in on the art of questioning, and thus questioning what a question is and what is the question’s “function,” given that “research questions” are such a key activity in research. In their conversation with Daniela Gandorfer, Barad notes: […] I am trying to provide an ontological opening for taking into account that the questioning is part of the world and the reworlding of the world, in particular ways and not others. This matters greatly; indeed, it is an integral part of mattering otherwise. Questioning goes all the way down. (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 18) Primarily inspired by agential realism, I will offer some reconfigurations of working with a specific research phenomenon, aided by cascade questioning DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-14

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as a way of “beginning” a phenomenon-driven, emergent research process.1 The chapter is structured as sketches of various moments in a research process, but is, of course, a retelling that has pedagogical aims, intended to inspire readers to sit with and perhaps in some way use to diffract their own (past-future) research practices. Supported by a concrete case, the focus is on how postfoundational inquiry may cascade as affective, multi-directional material-discursive, spacetimematter processes. From object to phenomenon. It did not start with a research question. Not even with a question. But there was something in the air. It was 2017, marking the 100-year anniversary of “Transfer Day,” when colonial Denmark sold (!) the then-Danish Virgin Islands to (!) the US. Colonially themed exhibitions were being arranged at museums and art galleries, and various talks and conferences were being held to commemorate the centennial. Perhaps this would lead to the emergence of cracks in the national colonial narrative.2 Such emerging possibilities pulledpushed-drew me in. A gift was offered to Denmark from USVI: a replica of the “Freedom Sculpture” that, since 1998, had been situated on each of the islands to commemorate the abolition of slavery in 1848. The sculpture was to be placed in Copenhagen (Denmark’s capital). Upon receiving the gift, Danish politicians voiced: “A memorial of the times when Denmark was a slave-trading nation is a good idea. We should not hide away the past.” It was furthermore underlined that the “colonial chapter,” as it was referred to, “… is a dark chapter in our history,” and that receiving the memorial and placing it in a prominent public space “could be the beginning of an enhanced awareness about our relationship with the West Indies.” This led me to ponder: What is in receiving the memorial? How might precarious spacetimematter (post)colonial relations of USVI and DK hereby be reworked? How might “enhanced awareness” materialize – and as what? What might it involve to (re-)learn the national colonial narrative? This pondering guided my initial curiosity and the push-pull toward this specific memorial (Figure 10.1). To enable an inquiry into – or to trace iterative differentiation of – if and how receiving the memorial enacted forces of worlding colonial relations otherwise (as well as whether and how this would create shifts in how Denmark would take up responsibility), I began a spacetimematter mapping (Juelskjær et al., 2021, p. 136) of the memorial’s multitudinous entanglements. This involved turning the memorial from an object or physical entity into a phenomenon. While everyday sensing would have it that a memorial is a stand-alone object in the world, in an agential realist framework, there are no stand-alone entities. Instead, agential realism crafts a relational, processual ontology where “[…] relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. […] The world is intra-activity in its differential mattering” (Barad, 2007, pp. 139–141)3. Phenomena, not things, are the primary relational unit; they are complex processual entanglements. The Freedom Sculpture as a specific research phenomenon is a relational

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The Freedom Sculpture, made by Ghanian-American sculptor Bright Bimpong. Its location is next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with Christiansborg, where the Danish Parliament’s resides, to the far left.

“entity” that is thickly threaded through with Danish–Virgin Islands colonial history, as well as with (commemorating) the transatlantic slave trade, and it is threaded through with living and non-living bodies, contemporary politics, its physical location, and so on.

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As “[t]he world is intra-activity in its differential mattering” (ibid.), neither “the world” nor the phenomenon “sit still,” but are ongoingly wor(l)ded: they come to matter. As a researcher, it is necessary to attune one’s sensorium to matter in the dual sense of meaning and mattering – a materialization of particular practices of delineation, boundary setting, and articulation. Furthermore, this sort of research process involves sensitivity toward how and what different spaces and times matter as part of the research phenomenon: As specific ongoing reconfigurings of space and time, phenomena are diffracted and temporally and spatially distributed across multiple times and spaces simultaneously. Barad (2007) highlights this in the concept spacetimemattering. Time, space, and matter are not external entities but are specifically enacted and reconfigured as “part of” the phenomenon. This furthermore implies a different causality. Causal relations are established by the agential cuts of intra-actions; that is, as part of the phenomenon. This is also why and how questioning the possible shifts enacted through the memorial’s arrival in Denmark involves an inquiry into the reconstitution of the spacetimematter of (post)colonial relations. This unhinged causality is also crucial in grasping what questioning does – something to which I return later in the chapter. Homework

The work presented here concerning the memorial and colonial history is not a contribution to the body of knowledge concerning the complex history or its entanglements with contemporary realities.4 The scope is limited to sketching a postfoundational approach focused on the doings of questioning in relation to exploring-enabling a phenomenon in an inquiry inspired by agential realism. At the same time, I include sufficient “specific content” to underline that there is no plug-and-play method. The work done, the affects, the specificity of working with questions – including questions of justice – are entangled with the phenomenon, meaning that each research process must be tuned to its own specificities. The push-pull and affective qualities with the move from viewing the memorial as an object, to approaching it as a phenomenon that the cascade questioning set in motion, initiated a “doing homework” (Spivak, 1990). Doing homework involves examining one’s epistemological and ontological assumptions and the privileges within these assumptions: “Doing homework is a key practice in unlearning that which one has learned; unlearning privilege, especially the privilege of sanctioned ignorance that allows the perpetuation of silence about ongoing colonial violence” (Sundberg, 2014, p. 39). A process of learning again and again about what privileges do; a re-learning of how to be part of acting and responding differently. In that respect, cascade questioning is not a random practice that can take you “anywhere,” but a manner of responding and enabling response (that is, response-ability as used by Haraway, Barad, and others).5

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Generating diverse materials: diffractive reading

A heterogeneous collection of material-discursive materials was generated in an exploratory manner for (non-finite!) crafting the phenomenon. Documents, articles from Danish and USVI newspapers concerning Transfer Day, photos taken during museum visits, Google image searches, digital archives on Danish colonial activity, novels, memorials to the transatlantic slave trade in different countries, and public and academic discussions concerning these memorials all found their way to the spacetimematter mapping (Figure 10.2). This was not a linear process of first “gathering” and then “analyzing” materials. Rather, it was an ongoing enfolding of materials, iteratively diffracting them through each other, as “[p]henomena are differential patterns of mattering (‘diffraction patterns’) produced through complex agential intra-actions of multiple material-discursive practices” (Barad, 2007, p. 140). In geometry and physics, diffraction describes the bending of waves around an obstacle. The concept was re-adapted, first by Haraway and later Barad, to challenge representational accounts of scientific knowledge production and further re-conceptualized to support an alternative way of thinking about difference, approaching it as differential and fundamentally non-binary.6 Agential realism draws on a notion of diffraction from quantum physics, where diffraction manifests the very nature of light (as wave/particle). Barad points to how knowing and being are thus entangled and that knowing is a material practice; the diffraction apparatus cannot be separated from that which it diffracts and the patterns formed. As such, diffraction can be understood as a practice that modifies bodies and relations in an encounter (Schrader, in press). Diffraction is “an iterative (re)configuring of patterns of differentiating-entangling” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). Reading diffractively is thus a process of bringing something (for example, materials from the list above) “in touch.” This is a process of getting to know “one another” as specific entanglements (and thus not opposed); that is, a being/becoming that is part of the diffraction, materializing in the intra-active process of diffracting through. The act of diffracting is an act of entangling – and “sitting with” the entangled differentiating. Reading diffractively is thus about paying attention to the specificity of the diffraction patterns. It is a reading through of already entangled matter, rather than a reading of two clashing entities/materials “up against” each other. This further involves paying attention to how the researcher, research questions, and results are of the diffraction patterns; that is, it does not involve external observation of a linear process: “[…] this ‘I’ that is not ‘me’ alone and never was, that is always already multiply dispersed and diffracted throughout spacetime(mattering), including in this paper, in its ongoing being-becoming is of the diffraction pattern” (Barad, 2014, p. 181–182).7 As mentioned, the diffractive practice in relation to the memorial involved a workflow of cascade questioning – to which I will now turn. In the subsequent section “Diffracting voices: listening to the void,” I outline a fraction of such a process.

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FIGURE 10.2

List of material and snapshot of work board.

Cascade questioning

The research is itself part of the phenomenon that comes into being through the initial pull-push toward “some(un)thing”/ a call from something/ somewhere – or however one may experience the coming into being of a specific focus. I found it challenging to sketch the phenomenon while respecting the onto-epistemological ground rule that the phenomenon is dynamic, coming

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into (spacetimematter-)being with each intra-action, and that the readers are also part of these intra-actions. How to craft a text enabling these qualities? The framing of (research as) cascade experiments assisted me in embracing the im/possibility of this sensed challenge to not turn the phenomenon into yet another (albeit different) object. In gesturing toward the quality of a cascade, Barad draws inspiration from Alice Fulton’s (1998) poem “Cascade Experiment” : “A cascade in Fulton’s sense is not a serial chain of consequences, an inevitability set in motion by some initial act, but an iterative reconfiguring of possibilities entailed in our passional advances toward the universe” (Barad, 2007, p. 364). A cascade experiment is an emerging and continuously explorative opening of possibilities, with no conventional causality of a beginning and end point: “The future is not the end point of a set of branching chain reactions; it is a cascade experiment” (Barad, 2007, p. 394). In her poem, Fulton also writes that “faith is a cascade;” as such, one might further say that a cascade experiment is an affective investment with indeterminate consequences. The concept of cascade experiments became a springboard for cascade questioning. I found that one way to keep the research process going and open – while writing about it – was to engage in questions. Every question opened a space for sensing and being with the question and a multitude of possible directions to take in search of insight. This line of questioning hereby opened a space of multiple entanglements of time, space, and events – and their qualities and textures. As a researcher, this can help attune oneself to the specificities, to a posthumanist sensorium (Juelskjær, 2020) in which sensing is the thresholding of intra-active, provisionary boundaryentanglements of here-there, there-then, inside-outside. Cascade questioning is thus a worlding practice, tracing and simultaneously producing entanglements. The questions do not come into being to be answered one to one. The workflow and rhythms of cascade questioning open, move, hold, and entangle multiple spacetimematterings. This is a specific research and reader space to inhabit while materializing the phenomenon and the human and more than human bodies of the research phenomenon. It does not mean that provisional answers cannot be crafted, but as a researcher, one must pause and ponder the question: What is in an answer/ answering? The questions are enabled through the differentiating-entangling of the diffraction pattern – questions that do not call for binary thinking. In other words, “below” this activity is a questioning of the idea of set divisions and binaries (past/present, nature/culture, mind/body, local/global, cause/ effect, and so on) as the questions arrive from within the diffraction: they are part of patterns of differentiating-entangling, and not of pitting two clashing entities against each other. Furthermore, the opening is done specifically with a doing of ongoing justice work (Reardon et al., 2015; Barad, 2010); of finding ways to cultivate spaces that can accommodate the response-ability of entanglements and the differences they make. It is not a matter of fooling

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around. When experimenting, one shares responsibility not only with “what is” but also with “what may come to be” (Barad, 2007, p. 364) and what may yet to have been (note the unhinging of a conventional understanding of causality). In this case, it is also a matter of doing one’s homework. Diffracting voices: listening to the void

Sketching a phenomenon involves many different processes (see also Reardon et al., 2015; Barad, 2021; Juelskjær, 2019), one of which may be to follow the lead of specific affective qualities of entanglements. As I explored various materials, I was puzzled by a seemingly absence of tension surrounding the receiving of a memorial to slavery from the descendants of those Denmark once colonized. Tuning into this affective state materialized (matter-meaning) a question: What is avoided in the receiving, to turn the memorial into a (seemingly) docile object? Further, how did “Denmark” keep iterating a “morally superior,” “innocent,” and “clean” present-day position? Exploring such questions involves paying attention to the materialization of particular practices of delineation, boundary setting, and articulation. As a phenomenon also encompasses specific and ongoing re-configurations of spacetimemattering (the coming into being of the specificities of entangled space, time, and matter as part of the phenomenon), it is productive to zoom in on the delineations involved in the making-past and making-present. What connections are continuously enacted and cut to produce an “innocent Danish present?” In his 2017 New Year’s speech, the sitting Danish Prime Minister said: This year marks 100 years since Denmark sold the [Danish] West Indies to the United States. And thereby put an end to a cruel chapter in our history. Many of Copenhagen’s beautiful old houses and mansions were built with money earned from the toil and exploitation of slaves on the other side of the world. It is not a proud part of Denmark’s history; it’s shameful. And fortunately, it is in the past. In the present day, Danes are fighting against oppression. For freedom. And that is something of which we can be proud. (Lars Løkke Rasmussen) The Prime Minister’s position was shared with several parties: “None of the political parties [Dansk Folkeparti, Socialdemokraterne, Venstre, Konservative, Liberal Alliance] see any sense in apologizing for something that was committed by long-dead Danish people” (Ritzau, 2017). This logic was in sync with discussions at the 1998 celebration commemorating the 150 years of Danish formal abolition of slavery, with utterances such as, “It makes no sense that people who have not personally been involved in trading slaves should apologize to people who have not been the subject of slavery” (1998).

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Enabled by what may be termed an “apparatus of linear progression of time and nation,” and of history as thin slices of events (something which is also materialized in all the different timelines of Danish colonial history that are available via various on- and offline resources), “the colonial chapter” is left further and further behind. This enables the ability (unaffected, so to speak) to define the past as shameful and unforgivable, but also as something in the past – with no relation to contemporary Danish society. Entangled with this theory of linear historicity are notions of “a body” or “a person” connected to the question of responsibility. The relation to colonial history is enacted as looking back across a huge gap – a void – between what Denmark is now and what Denmark was in (a specific moment of) the past. What is in a void? “The void, in classical physics, is that which literally doesn’t matter” (Barad, 2018, p. 230). In several papers, Barad has analyzed “the void” in quantum physics and how colonial ideas are inside of physics: Land occupation, as a mode of empire building, has been and continues to be tied to a logics of the void. […] The doctrine of terra nullius is one such tool of empire building. Whatever the specific nature of the alleged absence, a particular understanding of the notion of the void defines the colonialist practices of avoidance and erasure. (Barad, 2018, p. 230) Barad’s analysis and use of the void were helpful to think with. It is ontologically different from the conventional understanding of a void as empty. In their (queered) quantum physical interpretation, the void “is no longer vacuous. It is a living, breathing indeterminacy of non/being. The vacuum is a jubilant exploration of virtuality” (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 210). Concepts are not standalone objects, but rather material-discursive enactments of specific worlds, and should not be forced onto other material. Instead, they may be opportunities for careful and diffractive investigation. The concepts of the void and avoidance could however assist in an understanding/ wor(l)ding of what is going on with the assumptions of an “innocent Danish present,” and in exploring specificities of the void in the relation between Denmark and the United States Virgin Islands as it is continually produced in the Danish national context. The void in the colonial relation is an assumed emptiness, a nothingness between past and present. There is seemingly nothing connected, no temporal continuities. It is a temporal gap combined with an ontology of the body as a bounded, individually possessed entity: gaps between historically differently situated bodies, and gaps defining how bodies may and may not be placed in proximity of (individual and collective) responsibility. Analytically, a specific colonial logic of nothingness is identified – a logic that is far from empty. This non-emptiness is explored in the next analytic move (which was in effect already part of the prior): diffracting

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the official Danish voices with USVI voices. Doing so brought to the fore the specificity of the respective assumptions concerning what is a body, what is the past, what is a-voided, who gets to “leave a past behind,” and what might constitute different worldings of conditions of responsibility. I accessed different materials, including documentaries and YouTube videos. Among the USVI voices: I think that everybody is on his or her individual journey […] when you take all of us collectively, many of us are on this spectrum of healing. (Wane James)8 You do not have the right to significantly participate in the destruction of a people for 300 years and then just walk away […] Make concrete attempts to repair the wrongs that were committed. (Wane James) When I see some of the older larger buildings [in Denmark] … our blood is in there […] that is never going to go away. There is a slight lump in our throats when we think about these things. (Olaf Hendriks) I was raised by my grandmother to know that the Danes were particularly awful […] Virgin Islanders swimming from St. John to Tortola to escape the incredible hardships of slavery under Danish rule.9 Reading these utterances, and further reading them diffractively through the voices of Danish officials, creates – within the research process – an affective material-discursive space of being-becoming with these troubling entanglements and agential cuts of time and bodies. The violence of the void, affecting more cascade questioning:

• • • •

What determines what a body may feel? What is the time and scale of a victim’s body? And a perpetrator’s? What is the beginning and end of a victim’s body? Does the body end with the skin? Or with the son and daughter, who may see and feel the traces of being whipped on the body of their parent? Or with the grandchild sensing the trembling of their grandparent’s voice? When and where? • Throughout history, time, being, who is granted the possibility of living an “individual life” as “a liberal humanist subject?” And through what exclusionary practices? • Who/what gets to decide when and where a victimized body ends? How are such violent cuts continuously established, of the bodies of victims and

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perpetrators, of then and now, responsibility and carefreeness? How can such oppositional cuts be undone (re-done)? • How is “carefreeness” produced … non-sensing, non-caring? And in what sense might this also be a form of inherited wound? • What is the temporality of an institution? How is it possible that institutional responsibility be measured in the lifetime of bodies? • (keep going….) There is so much that calls for attention and careful re-writing and analysis between these (and many more) iterations (see Belle et al. 2019; Bastian, 2003; Yanique, 2015). With cascading questions, space and time are suggested to sit with questions, to let them “sink in” and take them somewhere and somewhere else. To “present”/perform the questions in the above manner may incite the reader’s own cascading questions. This may create an affective material-discursive space and time of being and becoming with these troubling entanglements and cuts of bodies. The performativity of the questioning is further a manner of opening the specificities of the theories and ontologies of time, space, bodies, affects – the notion of individual bodies and separate nations that is continuously enacted in the Danish colonial material-discursive practices. Further, questioning the idea of the separateness of bodies in and across space and time is done specifically through the question of responsibility and where responsibility may and may not end and begin. So, cascading questions and their many possible answers further enable diffraction patterns and are thus also materializations of phenomenal bodies: materializations of entanglements of bodies, nations, histories, and a multitude of practices. It is a specific onto-political opening of the political climate and the logics entangled with the reception of the Freedom Statue. At the same time, it is also an opening of spaces for response-ability in the manner of re-doing the conditions of possibility of avoidance; that is, it is an attempt to disturb and work against the iterative colonial violence. And a move toward starting to work across the void of continuously enacted non– responsibility.10 Zooming in: diffracting through

Another way I engaged with questioning was through photos of memorials, zooming in on different details, and diffracting through specifics. I considered the material composition of the memorials and their entanglements with visitors’ bodies and their surroundings. From one move to the next, each iteration generated questions concerning the materials – not as an object but as a phenomenon. These activities soften and open one’s gaze, or open the entire sensorium. What at first glance appears to be a hard surface becomes a tissue of different times, spaces, atmospheres, and meaning-mattering – with each iteration, a shift occurs in how the materials are sensed (Figure 10.3).

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FIGURE 10.3

Work board: statues, memorials, situations.

The gesturing hands of various sculptures encourage a cascade of questions concerning the spectrum of vulnerability and strength: questioning what it may mean to make a decolonial attempt on different scales. As the next iteration diffracts the materials used to sculpt these hands (ranging from polystyrene to Zimbabwe marble, to wood), a new sense of vulnerability emerges and a new spectrum opens up, questioning intergenerational wounds and the im/possibility of healing. Zooming in on visitors to the memorial results in cascades of questions about mourning, ignorance, and indebtedness. And so it continues; each iteration is an invitation to respond and question. From object to phenomenon: a sensorial practice

The diffractive practice allows for all sorts of materials to enter the process. Placing images and utterances in proximity gets the questions going, materials respond, kick back – and enable touch: “Matter is condensations of responseability. […] So much happens in a touch: an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times – are aroused […] Touching is a matter of response” (Barad, 2012, p. 206). In an agential realist sense, turning a memorial from an object to a research phenomenon is a matter of touching and enabling touch of and from a multiplicity of spaces, times, and matter (matter-meaning). Cascading (exploring and enabling diffraction patterns) takes thought elsewhere.

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Not without a compass, but navigating through response-ability, through the capability to enable touch in its specificity. The affective registers (the push-pull) of touch called for a doing of homework. Other postfoundational research projects will touch and call for something different (a key point when conducting such an inquiry). The opening of the research (“Where do you start – how do you begin? How do you make it up as you go? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability?”) is a crafting of spaces that may enable response(ability), responding differently. As a specific enactment of postfoundational inquiry (inspired by agential realism), a core premise for my exploration of the Freedom Statue was letting go of (the idea of) simple linearity. The inquiry’s “beginnings” – and every other “moment” – involved crafting cascade questioning as opening and holding spaces of specific material reconfigurings of spacetimemattering involved in the (diffractive practices of) sketching a phenomenon. Opening a (agential-realist-inspired) research process is furthermore also about being touched and allowing the responses to reshape how to become different, which is then gesturing toward an ethics or onto-politics accompanying the cascade questioning. Notes 1 The chapter is written with a “first-person narrator;” the “I” is an enacted and entangled multiplicity. 2 There exists a Danish national narrative concerning the country’s colonial past (and present) somewhat akin to what Gloria Wekker calls “white innocence.” In White Innocence (2016), Wekker explores Dutch paradoxes: the coexistence of denial of racial discrimination and colonial violence alongside racism and xenophobia. Accessing an archive documenting over 400 years of Dutch colonial rule, Wekker challenges Dutch racial exceptionalism by undermining the dominant narrative of the Netherlands as a “gentle” and “ethical” nation. This certainly resonates to some degree with the Danish positioning and archive. However, specificities matter. Agential realism views the exploration of specificities as a diffractive endeavor, which I pursue, not least, through a diffractive reading of the work of contemporary Danish postcolonial scholars and of historical and contemporary archives. I further draw on Vron Ware in the call for specificities: “I think there needs to be more transnational conversations about the historical memory of colonialism, looking at that particular question of how different countries’ colonial pasts are being re-visited, reworked, forgotten etc.” (Ware in interview, Blaagaard, 2011, p. 160). See also Tami Navarro’s online analysis “From Danish west indies to America’s poorhouse – Reflections on Transfer One Hundred Years On”. http:// smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/danish-west-indies-americas-poorhouse. 3 In Juelskjær et al. (2021), Barad describes an approach of turning an object into a phenomenon that they use (for pedagogical purposes) in teaching. See also Reardon et al. (2015). 4 On Danish colonial relations, see for example Belle et al. (2019), Danbolt and Myong (2019), Jensen and Simonsen (2016), Nonbo Andersen (2018), Yanique (2007, 2014). I may add that “turning” this violent and precarious colonial history into “methodology” is something I do with a degree of trepidation and hesitation. For diffraction of agential realism with post- and decolonial resources, see e.g., Murris and Bozalek (2022). For artwork, interviews, and reflections regarding the

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colonial relationship between the former Danish West Indies and Denmark see for example artist La Vaughn Belle www.lavaughnbelle.com/ and artist Jeanette Ehlers www.jeannetteehlers.dk/. See also the writer of novels, essays, poets, and short stories Tiphanie Yanique, who grew up in St. Thomas (now tenured associate professor at Emory University, US). There is an onto-political or ethico-onto-epistemological point to this; you cannot “un-do” something, because material practices ( of learning) leave “marks on bodies,” as Barad underlines. Un-learning is not an erasure, but a re-learning, a learning differently. There is much to be explored concerning diffraction throughout Barad’s work (especially since quantum physics is at the heart of their theorizing), but this is beyond the scope and limitations of this chapter. For more on diffraction, see also Schrader (2010, 2012, 2022). Schrader (in press) may also be consulted in relation to the specificities of the work of Haraway and Barad and their treatment of diffraction. Additionally, see Schrader and Juelskjær (2023). See Bozalek & Zembylas (2017) for a discussion of diffraction in relation to reflection and reflexivity. Further, a growing body of work uses diffraction in various research endeavors, see, for example, Juelskjær et al. (2021), Murris and Bozalek (2022), and Thiele (2014). All agential realist concepts presented imply processes of iterative enfoldings of specific spacetimematter – which also implies an unhinged causality. This quote and the next two stem from http://den-vestindiske-arv.dk/outro/ vestindiske-stemmer/. TiphanieYanique, from “We carry it within us,” by Helle Stenum. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=PxRkKS7t_zY. https://stthomassource.com/content/2018/02/15/ danish-film-takes-honest-look-at-colonial-past/. In Barad’s (2018) diffractive reading of the novella From Trinity to Trinity, they note “It is in the bodily bringing together the different structures of nothingness – tracing their entanglements – that the world can mourn and that the unnamed come to matter and are recognized as part of the ongoing reworlding of the world” (p. 241).

References Barad, K., & Gandorfer, D. (2021). Political desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24(1), 14–66. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3240–3268. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. Barad, K. (2018). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, remembering, and facing the incalculable, in Eco-Deconstruction. New York: Fordham University Press, 206–248. Barad, K. (2012). On touching—The inhuman that therefore I am. Differences, 23(3), 206–223. Bastian, J. A. (2003). Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Belle, L. V., Navarro, T., Sewer, H., & Yanique, T. (2019). Ancestral Queendom: Reflections on the Prison Records of the Rebel Queens of the 1878 Fireburn in St. Croix, USVI (formerly the Danish West Indies). Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab Og Kulturformidling, 8(2), 19–36. https://doi.org/10.7146/ntik.v7i2.118478.

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Blaagaard, B. B. (2011). Workings of whiteness: Interview with Vron Ware. Social Identities, 17(1), 153–161. Bozalek, V., & Zembylas, M. (2017). Diffraction or reflection? Sketching the contours of two methodologies in educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education [Online], 30(2), 111–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398 .2016.1201166. Danbolt, M., & Myong, L. (2019). Racial turns and returns: Recalibrations of racial exceptionalism in Danish Public debates on racism, in Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference, ed. P. Hervik (pp. 39–61). London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-3-319-74630-2_2. Jensen, N. T., & Simonsen, G. (2016). Introduction: The historiography of slavery in the Danish-Norwegian West Indies, c. 1950–2016. Scandinavian Journal of History, 41(4–5), 475–494. Juelskjær, M., Plauborg, H., & Adrian, S. W. (2021). Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice. London: Routledge. Juelskjær, M. (2019). At tænke med agential realisme. Frederiksberg: Nyt fra Samfundsvidenskaberne. Juelskjær, M. (2020). Mattering pedagogy in precarious times of (un) learning. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 1(1), 52–79. Murris, K. eds. (2022). In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism. New York: Routledge. Nonbo Andersen, A. (2018). The reparations movement in the United States Virgin Islands. The Journal of African American History, 103(1–2), 104–132. Reardon, J., et al. (2015). “Science & justice: The trouble and the promise” (Jenny Reardon, Jake Metcalf, Martha Kenney, Karen Barad). Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 1(1), 1–36. Spivak, G. C. (1990). The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. Schrader, A., & Juelskjaer, M. (in press). Diffraction. In Routledge Handbook of Interpretation in Qualitative research, eds., K. Murris, & M. Koro. London: Routledge. Schrader, A. (2010). Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science, 40, 275–306. Schrader, A. (2012). Haunted measurements: Demonic work and time in experimentation. Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23(3), 119–160. Schrader, A. (in press). Diffraction as cross disciplinary methodology between science, arts, and STS (Science & Technology Studies, in Diffracting new materialisms: Emerging methods in research and higher eduction, eds. A. Bayley and J.J. Chan. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wekker, G. (2016). White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Escaping tradition, beginning elsewhere, and the politics of doing otherwise

Escaping tradition, beginning elsewhere, and the politics of doing otherwise

The chapters in this Opening enact what it is to give up, cut, or exclude foundations in order to begin elsewhere and do otherwise. The contingency of postfoundational approaches is emphasized, and the authors’ approaches do not critique or deconstruct foundations but function as escape to keep their techniques open to reconfigurations. The authors escape not only foundational knowledge and identity – but also they escape traditional aspects of inquiry such as critique and representation. These cuts and break aways enable a starting elsewhere; as Grosz writes, “To simplify Deleuze’s and Guattari’s position, we can say that ‘in the beginning’ – a beginning understood in evolutionary terms – there is chaos, the whirling forces of materiality without limit, without boundary.”1 Thus the act of beginning is always in the midst of doings that are otherwise and that are ontologically political and urgent. “All things are one:” postfoundational inquiries and pre-Socratic Western thought

Marek Tesar Chapter 11 addresses several of the editors’ reorienting questions vital to postfoundational inquiry: Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? and How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? What do you accept, and what do you exclude? These reorienting questions are inserted at the intersection of philosophy, methodology, and ideas around matter, which are the coordinates of new empiricism. The first question leads this chapter on a historical track to retrace the origins of the concerns of “matter” and “materiality” that have infatuated post qualitative inquiry. Tracing this question takes the inquiry back to pre-Socratic DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-16

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Western thought, where debates about empiricism, matter, and metaphysics formed the foundation of Western philosophical and methodological thought. After providing an introductory framing of pre-Socratic philosophy (in particular, of Thales’ thought) through the lenses of an archaeological/deconstructionist framework, the chapter explores how the canonization of Western philosophy – and in particular, the transition from orality to written text – has confined pre-Socratic thought to the pre-history of Classical Greek philosophy. The chapter then uses this poststructuralist analysis as a stepping stone to imagine “new” forms of inquiry within a postfoundational perspective by taking up the second of the above-mentioned, reorienting questions. The argument retraces the theoretical gesture operationalized by St. Pierre, but moves in a different direction by using “philosophy as a method” to recover the marginalized thought of pre-Socratic philosophers and think with the ontologies of the ethical relationship with a thought. This chapter argues that reconnecting with this legacy can serve both to disrupt established knowledge, with its normative and hierarchical order, and open new avenues toward a more ethical relationship with the voices and thoughts that are sometimes marginalized, objectified, and deadened within the canonical timeline of Western philosophy. “All things are one” is a strong call for thinking about postfoundational theories and offers the possibility to re-think the marginalized preSocratic thought as embedded in postfoundational thinking. Pedagogy in the context of postfoundational inquiry: reading– writing–thinking–making together

Candace R. Kuby and Vivienne Bozalek Chapter 12 considers how enacting postfoundational inquiry in both the process and the content of pedagogies creates opportunities to think and be(come) otherwise. Kuby and Bozalek focus on the reorienting question: Who and what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise? They share several interrelated concepts that inspire their pedagogies, such as intra-action and diffraction; processual learning and the event; and collective and relational. They discuss various pedagogical projects and practices which have as their focus postfoundational philosophies and the doing of inquiry. Through the collaborative partnership of two universities, one in the United States (University of Missouri) and one in South Africa (University of the Western Cape), the authors have involved graduate students as well as academics and practitioners interested in using postfoundational philosophies in their work. These face-to-face and online pedagogical sessions have involved collaborative interviews on post qualitative inquiry, collaborative reading and writing texts, and multimodal pedagogies with artistic and embodied pedagogical and inquiry processes. Kuby and Bozalek offer pedagogical examples to expand on the following four areas regarding the process and content of

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pedagogies, as they take up the ideas of several postfoundational theorists: First, engagement with and responses to philosophical ideas is collaborative and democratic with all participating, rather than the binary of the teachers suggesting and the students carrying out the work. Second, reading–writing– thinking–making together as supervisors and students provides opportunities for a disposition of curiosity, trying to make sense of difficult philosophical ideas. Third, reading–writing–thinking–making with philosophical concepts and texts has led to various openings for co-writing and co-publishing texts or other audio–visual presentations together, in this way rendering each other capable – there are no pre-existing individual producers of knowledge. Fourth, the chapter addresses how reading–writing–thinking–making are undeniably political processes, where knowing is situated, incomplete, and partial. Ontologies of possibility and loss in posthumanist inquiry: lessons from the study of systemic racism

Jerry Lee Rosiek and Scott L. Pratt The study of racism is humbling, in part, because of the personal complicities it inevitably reveals. But humbling also because racism has proven capable of exceeding the grasp of foundational diagnosis; its form shifts, adapts to our interventions, and evolves over time. It is therefore more than any single representation can capture. Posthumanist philosophies offer practices of inquiry not completely contained by the goal of representation and thus may hold promise for engaging with racism more effectively. However, there are costs – because relinquishing the goal of representing the world also requires a transformation of our politics. To consider the costs – both possibilities and loss – Chapter 13 poses the following reorienting questions in the move beyond representationalism: What are we willing to give up? What are we not willing to give up? How is this bound to power relations? The third reorienting question is taken up by the authors to specifically ask how such inquiry might help to navigate the subject involved in anti-racist struggle. Many posthumanist theorists argue that contemporary social analysis relies too exclusively on practices of critique and needs to develop more affirmative practices of analysis. These affirmations often take the form of a general celebration of ontological openness and new relational possibility. Highlighting such possibilities is inspiring, but not enough to inform engagements with social scourges like racism. If posthumanism is to fulfill its promise of providing a practice of social analysis that can address the pressing social issues of our day, a practice of advocating for specific forms of onto-political commitments will be needed. One challenge to doing so is that any affirmation of specific ontological relations entails a concomitant abandonment of many other viable relational possibilities. This kind of loss has been affectively and politically obscured by centuries of epistemic foundationalism. The chapter

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concludes by arguing that a process of collectively mourning such loss will be needed if the political promise of posthumanist social analysis is to be fulfilled. From the editors: For a discussion of the reorienting questions, see Chapter 1. Readers should also note that the abstracts in this Opening are crafted by the authors, written in third person, to introduce their chapters. Note 1 Grosz, E. (2011). Becoming Undone. Duke University Press. p. 77.

11 “ALL THINGS ARE ONE” Postfoundational inquiries and pre-Socratic western thought Marek Tesar

Greek philosophy seems to begin with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the primal origin and the womb of all things. Is it really necessary for us to take serious notice of this proposition? It is, and for three reasons. First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, because contained in it, if only embryonically, is the thought, “all things are one.” (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 122)

Introduction

This chapter contributes to this anthology by addressing several questions vital to postfoundational inquiry for the tension they engender toward a disruption of existing paradigms and a reorientation of thought: Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? and How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? What do you accept, and what do you exclude? In my contribution, I apply these questions at the intersection of philosophy, methodology, and ideas around matter that identify the coordinates of new empiricism. While this theoretical crux has been explored in a number of papers and special issues (see, for example, St. Pierre, 2016 & 2021; St. Pierre et al., 2016), the foundations of new empiricism have not yet been fully discussed and debated from a postfoundational stance. The first reorienting question I address – Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? – leads this chapter on a historical track to retrace the origins of the concerns of “matter” and “materiality” that have infatuated post qualitative inquiry. Tracing this question takes the inquiry back DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-17

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to pre-Socratic Western thought, where debates about empiricism, matter, and metaphysics formed the foundation of Western philosophical and methodological thought. After providing an introductory framing of pre-Socratic philosophy and, in particular, of Thales’ thought, I reflect, through the lenses of an archaeological, deconstructionist framework, on how the canonization of Western philosophy has confined pre-Socratic thought to the pre-history of Classical Greek philosophy. Furthermore, the transition from orality to written text has stripped Thales’ thought of the same ontological dignity of foundational figures like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Thinking with the preSocratics disrupts the “naturalized” canon by showing how it performs the difference between “philosophy” and the “history of philosophy” – that is, the way the canon hierarchizes thought along a linear, progressive timeline. I then use this poststructural analysis as a stepping stone to imagine “new” forms of inquiry within a postfoundational perspective by taking up a second set of reorienting questions – How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? What do you accept, and what do you exclude? My argument here retraces the theoretical gesture operated by St. Pierre (2021) but moves in a different direction by using “philosophy as a method” (Tesar, 2021) to recover the marginalized thought of pre-Socratic philosophers and think with the ontologies of the ethical relationship with thought (Jackson & Mazzei, 2011). On Thales and matter

Pre-Socratic philosophers were Greek thinkers who were active between approximately the 5th and 6th centuries BC. They have rich and intriguing histories when it comes to thinking about the kosmos and matter; however, their work does not have overtly didactic or pedagogical value. The main intellectual project of pre-Socratic thinkers was, in fact, an inquiry into the relationality between human subjects and the world around them. These ideas would often be related to the ontologies and epistemologies of the world, rather than to the concerns of praxis or the metaphysics of human subjects. Pre-Socratic thinkers rejected the poetic account of the gods, which was the commonly accepted thinking and presentation of philosophical ideas of life and kosmos at their time. By rejecting those notions, they performed one of the very first Western philosophical breaks from a tradition, in both an ontological and methodological way. Pre-Socratic thinkers positioned their view on the basis of an explanation of the world order and the empirical method. Their focus was to nourish an empirical way of approaching a philosophical problem and consider the empirical method and science as ways to explain and speculate about people, places, and things. In their view, the world becomes known as kosmos, an ordered arrangement that is natural and inherently intelligible in its own right, rather than being subjected to

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supra-natural intervention of gods or other matters. Pre-Socratic scholars see the material and discursive matters of the world as one. For example, Xenophanes claims: “And she whom they call Iris, this too is by nature cloud/ purple, red, and greeny yellow to behold” (Freeman, 1983, B32). And in this narrative, “Iris” is understandably the rainbow, which will now not be considered as a supernatural being, who is outside of this world, sheltered from the physical and material world order. Therefore, in pre-Socratic intellectual projects, philosophical and scientific thought become one. The delineation between philosophy and science (or between humanities and natural sciences) did not exist, and these paradigm concepts were considered as part of one knowledge system. They were more than just interlinked; they were inseparable and embraced by a single method. My discussion here is centered around Thales of Miletus – one of the socalled Milesians (from Miletus, current Turkey), along with Anaximander and Anaximenes.1 Thales of Miletus is known via Aristotle’s narrative in which he is positioned as the first thinker to examine the “causes and principles” of the natural world and natural phenomena. Furthermore, we also know from Aristotle’s writing in Metaphysics that Thales declared “water” to be the first cause, the beginning. This has critical implications for breaking the tradition from the then-established origin questions of cosmology as determined by poet Hesiod. Aristotle provided further praise for Thales. He claimed that Thales was the first scholar to successfully predict a solar eclipse and that he introduced geometry and engineering to Greece from Egypt. Milesians had an interest in materiality, in the kosmos, in what could be seen as a scientific method. For the Milesians, this interest became equally important to the “discursive” questions into the causes and principles of substance and change. Reading Aristotle’s accounts of them it becomes clear that their position towards people, places, and things was an inquiry that wove together the material and discursive analytical territory. Aristotle refers to Thales as an “inquirer into nature,” which is different from all those thinkers from the past who were using poetical myth-making as a strategy to explain the world. Thales’ inquiries into nature are fascinating for current post-thinkers. He was willing to explain any places or things only in terms of their matter. The matter was what mattered to him. Aristotle links Thales’ claim that the world rests on the water with his view that water was the archē, or fundamental principle, and adds that “from which they come to be is a principle of all things.” Thales claims both that the original state of things was water and that even now (despite appearances), everything is really water in some state or another. In other words, water is the originating principle of nature, and the nature of matter was a single material substance. Thus, Thales is one of the first material monists (Waterfield, 2009). Aristotle also refers to Thales as the first “mathematician.” He explains that Thales’

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objective in “thinking” was not to enrich himself but to prove to his fellow Milesians that philosophy (and science) could be useful for people (what a wonderful ethos!). However, one of Thales’ thoughts that is the most relevant to the theoretical and methodological post- and new turns is the argument on the organic qualities of matter. As we learn from Aristotle, Thales believed in the capacity of matter – matter is alive and has subjectivities. Aristotle wrote about it in De Anima: “Thales thought all things are full of gods.” In other words, because magnets move iron, the movement of matter indicated that this matter contained life. One could make a scholarly claim today that this life is analogous to the vibrant materiality described in Bennett’s (2010) work: Each human is a heterogeneous compound of wonderfully vibrant, dangerously vibrant, matter. If matter itself is lively, then not only is the difference between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. (p. 13) Similarly, the materialism of Thales was mainly focused on nature and the qualities of things. Thales and his fellow Milesians were trying to define the nature of substances from which all material objects are supposed to be composed. Furthermore, Thales, according to Aristotle, was asking questions such as, “What was the nature of the object so that it would behave in its characteristic way?” – referring to a notion which I find absolutely intriguing: “the way a thing is ‘born.’” Thinking with no writing

Pre-Socratic thinkers had an interest in the ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies of life and the world around them. The significant knowledge they had accumulated was passed on to posterity and shaped some of the key concerns of philosophy for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In doing so, it ultimately contributed to the forming of the pathways of the Western philosophical canon. At the very same time, pre-Socratic knowledge has points of incongruence with the guiding assumptions of Western philosophy, making the postfoundational inquiries viable. This is visible in the challenges they present to the idea of the object/subject dichotomy; the question of matter in relation to the discursive readings of the world; challenge to the individual subject and their take on a collective; and the challenge to scientific inquiry. As argued by Mazzei, “Thinking inquiry without first thinking my philosophical approach is impossible” (in Mazzei & Jackson, 2022, p. 4). This is something that is rooted in the theoretical premise of the pre-Socratic thinkers. Pre-Socratic thought serves both those who have established the foundations

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and those who challenge the very idea of foundations. So there is a strong connection between where the postfoundational inquires locate themselves now, and where pre-Socratic thought began. Yet, this connection remains largely unexplored and undertheorized. PreSocratic thought is rarely operationalized by contemporary approaches. On the contrary, it appears mostly confined to philosophical studies of the history of Western philosophical thought – which have not been kind to pre-Socratic philosophers and thinkers. Their take on the kosmos and ontologies typically form passive accounts in textbooks, only mentioned in the footnotes, as evidenced in some of the key Western texts on the history of philosophy (e.g., Cahn, 1990; Copleston, 2003). The texts engage with pre-Socratic thought in frequently unproductive ways, which do not offer the recognition or active engagement that their work deserves. Behind the marginalization of pre-Socratic thought, there are, certainly, hermeneutical issues related to the absence of original texts and the fragmentariness of the sources passed on to us. Indeed, it is not easy to access specific arguments or views in the fragments that are available. The assumptions and principles that Aristotle sees as constituting the philosophical foundations of their theories are, for the most part, implicit in the claims that Milesians make, without any clear statements. Interactions with pre-Socratic thought present an ethical dilemma to the contemporary scholar: whose account do we read, and whose interpretation do we analyze? What I suggest is that the challenge posed by thinking with pre-Socratic philosophers – “thinking with no writing” – is a generative one, because it encapsulates a potential disruption of established knowledge and an opening to the multiplicity of philosophical “origin” stories. To explore this generativity, I now turn to examine the main interpretive concerns related to the access of pre-Socratic thought and use them to denaturalize the Western philosophical canon, problematize its timeline of knowledge, and expose its political implications in an archaeological-Foucauldian and deconstructionistDerridean vein. One of the main concerns for scholars in working with pre-Socratic thought is the question of sources and interpretations. There are no complete original texts to read; there are barely any primary sources to refer to; and preSocratic thought really becomes part of the perspective of the generation of thinkers that came after them (questions about translations notwithstanding). However, we do have in the texts of others, later thinkers and philosophers, preserved fragments and pieces of texts that claim to be “true originals,” no matter how incomplete they seem (and scholars are right to question both the notions of “true” and “original” in that statement). The forced reliance on the next generation of philosophers and thinkers who paid homage to and incorporated fragmented ideas (or quotes) about and from pre-Socratic thought is problematic. The traditional view of the

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study of philosophers or thinkers (also in the field of education) is to return to and read the original scholar to form an argument from accessing the original thought. In the Western philosophical and research tradition, it is thus highly unusual to study the metaphysics of thinkers whose original texts we do not have access to (as they no longer exist or never existed in the first place). To access and experience the episteme generated by the pre-Socratic thinkers, we have to rely on the writing of another generation of ancient philosophers. Importantly, this deferral implies the claims that the later generation had direct access to the worldviews of the pre-Socratics, that there was an oral tradition, and that pre-Socratic thinking was separated by “just” a couple of centuries. As such, to debate, analyze and understand pre-Socratic thought requires a complex “restoration,” “reconstruction,” and “revisiting” of both the pre-Socratic era and pre-Socratic thinkers. In such a process, there is a lot of space to muddy the history, which is related to the perspectives that consider history and philosophical thought without claiming objectivity (Jones & Jenkins, 2011). When this is related to the question of how to treat a thought when there is no “original” text, many historians of philosophy argue that we have the ability to understand and make an accurate, true, and real claim – which are problematic statements from the post- perspectives. Perhaps the most striking link can be made with Indigenous thinking where we lack the texts but rely on generations of Elders and thinkers to pass knowledge from generation to generation until they are written down and studied, thus becoming part of the broader discourse. Western scholars then rely on written narratives rather than original traditions. They cite those sources (and accept them) rather than seek the “truth” or “accuracy” of the oral tradition. The second concern is in the inaccuracies and problems with naming this group “pre-Socratic.” It suggests that they cannot be named and do not have a distinct enough framework to be named without reference to the prolific Socrates, with whom many in modernity would argue that philosophy (not only Western) started. In addition, the premise of “pre” may also refer to how Socrates’ work led to the separation of axiology – for example, values, morals and the hard matters, problems, and issues represented by the physical qualities of the world – issues as they relate in cosmology in the pre-Socratic thinking. Pre-Socratic thought or pre-Socratic thinkers are the common terms in philosophy that relate to the literature of this preceding period. However, the term pre-Socratic can also be perceived as highly problematic. The naming of the group comes from the current chronological perspective and refers to the period before “Socrates” and his teaching and scholarship. It disempowers these scholars as it positions them as not scholars in their own right, who can be judged and defined on their own merits and work with kosmos, or on their own take on ontology, epistemology, and axiology. The naming is also a fairly broad-brush stroke across diverse thinkers, scholarship, teaching, and

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even time periods. Some of these scholars don’t have much in common other than that their work occurred before Socrates. The naming of this grouping as “pre-Socratic” is an invention of modernity, and it partly represents an attempt to reignite interest in ancient philosophy (alongside the neoclassical style in art and architecture). This attempt at the resurrection of public interest in these thinkers via naming and denoting the linearity and relationality with the period that followed had perhaps some intentionality; on the other hand, it has further resulted in marginalizing their contribution to the scholarship. Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? What I want to stress here is that the concerns related to the hermeneutic engagement with pre-Socratic thought expose the implicit hierarchization of knowledge that accompanied the construction of the Western philosophical canon. Often pre-Socratic thought is considered a “history” rather than an active project in the field. As the term “pre-Socratic” suggests, these thinkers have been consistently positioned on the temporal timeline of the history of Western philosophy in relation to Socrates and his followers. Not having their own “name” or “label” suggests that their inclusion in the Western philosophical canon is not necessarily as thinkers in their own right. When we use the label of “pre-Socratic” when discussing the history of philosophy (and also considering philosophical method), we attach a certain scholarly inferiority to their work, as if the real thinkers,” and “real philosophers” started after Socrates presented his philosophical project. Aristotle is particularly critical of them. He sees them as his intellectual ancestors, however, not of the same ontological pedigree. He sees them as naïve in a certain way and not worthy of deeper philosophical debate, as they failed their philosophical project in his eyes due to their own doings, as he argues in his Metaphysics and De Anima texts (Aristotle, 1987, 1999). Despite the marginal position they have been relegated to in the Western philosophical canon, pre-Socratic thinkers are important to consider when debating contemporary methodologies and philosophies. Their work is linked with the sensibilities of the birth of method, with new and innovative thinking about ontology and epistemology and the first attempts to perceive and utilize axiology. Their ideas about people, places, and things were innovative and challenged the established status quo of the day. The inquiry that they brought into thinking about method would position them as “transdisciplinary” today. They were philosophers as well as scientists. They experimented and they speculated. They sought relationality and connectedness through their positioning in the world (Barnes, 1982). Performative postfoundationalism

In the previous section, I have taken up the reorienting question Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? – which has led

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me to retrace the genealogy of the concerns about matter and materiality, championed by postfoundational inquiry, back to the legacy of pre-Socratic thought. By reflecting on the marginalization of pre-Socratic philosophy and its positioning within the Western philosophical canon, I have exposed the “naturalization” of canonical knowledge and the way it organizes thought along a linear and progressive timeline, in which the pre-Socratics perform the function of the “ancestors” of classic philosophy yet at the same time are not assigned the ontological position of founders. This act of disruption identifies, in a postfoundational perspective inspired by the work of St. Pierre (2021), the stepping stone for the production of new methods and inquiries. In this section, I bring my discussion toward this next generative phase by engaging with a second reorienting question: How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old”? Scholars who consider or work with post- and new inquiries face the perpetual call for something “new,” something “fresh,” something “undiscovered.” It is the idea that scholars need to or should find a new theory, concept, or thinkers which are not yet present in the field in order to legitimize their work. The focus on “new” can often be the commonality among some of the work that is currently conceptualized in that space. This is not a critique, as these new approaches to the intersections of philosophy, methodology, and education have been very productive and provocative for both scholarship and practice. However, newness for newness sake should not be the driving force. This chapter gestures towards an alternative way forward, that does not pass from a refounding of philosophy2 but rather calls for a more ethical approach with the voices of the scholars and their thinking. Elsewhere, I have phrased this approach as “philosophy as a method” (Tesar, 2021). Philosophy as a method identifies the call for an ethical relationship with an original thought. It does not relate to philosophy being used, utilized, or implemented; it is the philosophy itself that is the method. It is the intersection of philosophy, education, and methodology that form the “philosophy as a method” approach, which is productive and allows us to conceptualize new ideas and thoughts. “Philosophy as a method” differs from philosophical methods that are used in studies of “how to do philosophy,” “how to use philosophy,” or “how to have a conceptual or theoretical framework.” These “how to” methods – with a focus on “doing” – often relate to a particular body of systems, with clear links to theories and arguments, and concepts that exist. They do work with the idea of argument, skepticism, dialecticism, and other ways of rationally teasing out what philosophy is in a way of answering questions of metaphysics – knowledge, reality, space, time, and existence. However, for philosophy as a method – as an ethical relationship with thought – it is the axiological approach – the liminal space between ethics and aesthetics – that comes to play and causes us to formulate a question rather than give an answer. Philosophy as a method

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presents an argument that philosophy itself is a method; it is the epistemology, ontology, and axiology of a thought (Tesar, 2021). Philosophy as a method here becomes the means to revive and operationalize the legacy of pre-Socratic thought, to think with them as a philosophy rather than about them as in the canonical, linear, normative vision of the history of Western philosophy. They become one with postfoundational inquiry and form its fluid framework. They offer us a generative link between ‘philosophy as a method’ and postfoundational inquiry. “All things are one”

Postfoundational inquiry is emergent and responsive to the ontologies of ourselves, and open to acts of experimentation, as Mazzei & Jackson argue in their Introduction to this anthology. The birth of method arises from work with fragments of knowledge and memories with no direct evidence from preSocratic original texts. The question thus arises, why should postfoundational inquirers care about pre-Socratic scholars? For example, new empiricism engages the work of so many magnificent thinkers, their theories, and philosophical projects. Some of these projects encompass a lifetime of work and thus call for a lifetime of study. It took a lifetime to conceive and produce it, so it should take a scholar a lifetime to study them (Deleuze comes to mind; but also Foucault, Derrida, and others). So, why is it important to know about pre-Socratic thought? In this chapter, I have argued that reconnecting with this legacy can serve both to disrupt established knowledge, with its normative and hierarchical order, and open new avenues toward a more ethical relationship with the voices and thoughts that are sometimes marginalized, objectified, and deadened within the canonical timeline of Western philosophy. In the passage that opens this chapter, Nietzsche describes the philosophical import of Thales’ proposition that “water is the source of all things” along three points: its tension towards the description of “the primal origin of all things;” the anti-metaphysical, empirical path that it delineates to proceed in that direction – a “language devoid of image or fable;” and its embryonic thought that “all things are one” (Nietzsche, 1996). Two reorienting questions that guided this chapter were Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning? I have pointed out how early philosophical thoughts on “matter” and “materiality” have not only established and challenged foundations but also permeated postfoundational inquiry. Thus, pre-Socratic thoughts as foundations serve as an important mechanism for the production of alternative ontologies and epistemes; as vibrant acts that are not static. “All things are one” is a strong call for thinking about how the postfoundational theories and methodologies conceive of matter, and Thales’s work, therefore, does have significant implications. The pre-Socratic thinkers’ deep knowledge and the lack of written and available texts bear resemblance to

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the strong oral traditions of Indigenous ontologies, which powerfully articulate the intersections of discourse and matter (Jones & Hoskins, 2016; Rosiek et al., 2020). Yet also at the very same time, it highlights how little is actually written to compliment, challenge, and add to the Western ontologies in a written form. In Indigenous communities, these everyday Indigenous metaphysics may be encountered by talking with Elders; however, on the other hand, the number of Indigenous scholars who circulate the writing of those ideas is limited, albeit growing (e.g., Mika, 2018; Smith, 2021; Stewart, 2020). The act of utilizing philosophy as a method – of Western scholars “doing the role of Aristotle” in relation to indigenous scholars is very important – albeit not for them, but with them, as scholars such as Alison Jones (2021) have modeled. How is your possibility of something “new” implicated in the normative “old?” What do you accept, and what do you exclude? is the possibility to re-think the marginalized pre-Socratic thought as embedded in postfoundational thinking – where philosophy as a method, the ethical relationship with thought, is the heart of the matter. Notes 1 This chapter will not provide a fully formed view on the pre-Socratic philosophical project, as that lies outside of the scope of what is possible (or desirable). 2 The central question “what is philosophy?” is asked by nearly every philosopher and every philosophical project. Almost every philosopher tries to ask this question (and even provide some answers) of how this question could play out in the ontologies of their philosophical project, resulting in such a text titled What is Philosophy? (from Deleuze & Guttari to Agamben, albeit often we find a very different focus on “what” and “is”).

References Aristotle. (1987). De Anima (On the Soul). London: Penguin Classics. Aristotle. (1999). The Metaphysics. London: Penguin Classics. Barnes, J. (1982). The Presocratic Philosophers. London: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cahn, S. M. (1990). Classics of Western Philosophy. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Copleston, F. (2003). A History of Philosophy Volume 1: Greece and Rome. London: Bloomsbury. Freeman, K. (1983). Ancilla to Pre-Socratic Philosophers. A Complete Translation of the Fragments of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2011). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research. Viewing Data across Multiple Perspectives. London: Routledge. Jones, A. (2021). This Pākehā life. Wellington: Bridgett Williams Books.

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Jones, A., & Hoskins, T. K. (2016). A mark on paper: The matter of indigenous-settler history. In Taylor, C. & Hughes, C. (Eds.): Posthuman Research Practices in Education, pp. 75–92. Palgrave MacMillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082-6 Jones, A., & Jenkins, K. (2011). He Kōrero – Words between Us: First Māori – Pākehā Conversations on Paper. Wellington: Huia Publishers. Mazzei, L. A., & Jackson, A. Y. (2022). Inquiry as Unthought: The Emergence of Thinking Otherwise. Qualitative Inquiry, 0(0). https://doi-org.ezproxy.auckland. ac.nz/10.1177/10778004221096854 Mika, C. (2018). Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. London: Taylor & Francis. Nietzsche, F. W. (1996). Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. Washington, DC: Gateway Editions. Rosiek, J. L., Snyder, J., & Pratt, S. L. (2020). The New Materialisms and Indigenous Theories of Non-Human Agency: Making the Case for Respectful AntiColonia Engagement. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), 331–346. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800419830135 Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Bloomsbury. St. Pierre, E. A. (2016). The Empirical and the New Empiricisms. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 111–124, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616636147 St. Pierre, E. A. (2021). Why Post Qualitative Inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 163– 166, https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420931142 St. Pierre, E. A., Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2016). New Empiricisms and New Materialisms: Conditions for New Inquiry. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 99–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616638694 Stewart, G. T. (2020). Maori Philosophy: Indigenous Thinking from Aotearoa. London: Bloomsbury. Tesar, M. (2021). “Philosophy as a Method”: Tracing the Histories of Intersections of “Philosophy,” “Methodology,” and “Education.” Qualitative Inquiry, 27(5), 544– 553. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420934144 Waterfield, R. (2009). The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12 PEDAGOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF POSTFOUNDATIONAL INQUIRY Reading-writing-thinking-making together Candace R. Kuby and Vivienne Bozalek

Introduction

The editors of this collection asked authors to consider several questions related to postfoundational philosophies and doing inquiry otherwise. While we have thought with all of their questions in the process of writing this chapter, we have particularly focused on how involving postfoundational inquiry in both the process and the content of pedagogies creates opportunities to think and be(come) otherwise. We focus thus more specifically on the reorienting question: Who and what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise? To start, we share who (philosophers) and what (concepts) we think with and thus teach with. We share a backstory to our partnership to situate our chapter contextually. Next, we engage in four examples from our collective teaching-learning experiences. First, we consider how collaborative, Slow reading might be used to disrupt teacher/student binaries. We think-with a course on Multimodal Pedagogies and Post Qualitative Research where, amongst other activities, we engaged in a Slow reading exercise. Second, we consider how processual, collective, curious learning can happen through pedagogical practices such as conceptual speed dating, which we tried out in the online discussion sessions we held for postgraduate students between the webinars on Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry. Third, we think-with the process of concept creation, when becomings happen through the creation of new meanings where disparate phenomena and ideas are put together. In this way, it becomes apparent that subjects and objects do not pre-exist but come into being through relationships. Fourth, we propose that the political is always already embedded in pedagogical processes. For example, in north-south relations and knowledge-making processes, we considered these DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-18

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political issues by putting forward opportunities for collective composing that do not give preference to one locale. Such opportunities were enabled by collaboration in Google Drive documents and canvases. This made it possible for people in the group to take collaborative risks by engaging in Slow writing and reading practices. Finally, we end the chapter by circling back to the question: Who and what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise? Postfoundational philosophies become pedagogies

We often use the phrase “post qualitative” in our writing. We understand this as twofold: 1) resisting the taken-for-granted, normalized ways of doing qualitative inquiry and 2) inquiry inspired by post philosophies (St. Pierre, 2011; 2021a, b, c; 2022). In this edited collection, the phrase postfoundational is used. In their Introduction, the editors Mazzei and Jackson draw upon Judith Butler’s (1992) work which troubles claims about foundations and universals; they refer to Butler’s argument that “foundations are constituted by not only what gets authorized but also by what is excluded.” Therefore, postfoundational inquiry is not so much a call to do away with foundations but to position them as permanently contingent, open to reconfigurations, and assisting in alternative productions thus, postfoundational (see Editors’ Introduction, this volume). We see the terms post qualitative and postfoundational inquiry as compatible – and in fact, inextricably linked – in that they both draw upon post philosophies, and both encourage openings and newness or alternative productions in doing inquiry. Both have “exposed the normative foundations of qualitative research such as pre-existing methods and methodology and human-centered representationalism” (see Editors’ Introduction). We focus this chapter on several postfoundational philosophers and concepts that produce pedagogies for/with us. We are inspired by writing on concepts as methods for thinking differently in pedagogical encounters (Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). One such concept is Karen Barad’s (2007) neologism intra-action, which we understand as relational ontology, where agencies are mutually entangled. In Barad’s agential realism, agencies do not pre-exist relationships as individual elements but emerge through their intra-action. Related to intra-action is the concept diffraction. Diffractive practices in research have largely been developed in response to dissatisfaction with “reflexivity,” which is grounded in representational logic. Donna Haraway is one such feminist philosopher who expressed dissatisfaction with reflexivity, which she saw as mirroring and reflecting the same elsewhere, and proposed instead diffraction as a metaphor, which dealt more with the effects of differences that matter. Karen Barad took the notion of diffraction further. Within quantum physics, diffraction is about being in multiple places at one time and multiple times in one place, as well as having multiple entities in one being. Further, diffraction in quantum physics is about entanglements, where

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there is never absolute separation. Thus, what often might appear as separate entities, having sharp boundaries or edges (such as theories, disciplines, texts, oeuvres) are always already entangled. Barad also proposes diffraction as a methodology for reading philosophies through each other, doing justice to the fine details, in order to come up with new insights. We also draw upon concepts of the event and processual learning (Manning & Massumi, 2014). The event is derived from Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978) work and taken further by Manning and Massumi. Massumi refers to the event as an occasion where there is something happening, creating a generative pedagogical space-time, which is open to the emergence of new concepts and activation of as-yet-unthought ideas through a field of relations and affective tonality (the climatic mood of the event). A pedagogical event makes itself felt if there is a collective sense of the “more-than,” a sense that something which is germinating has occurred. Similarly, what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise are the notions of collective and relational, inspired by Barad and Gandorfer’s (2021) collaborative modes of sense-making, thinking, and reading. Manning and Massumi’s pedagogical work in the SenseLab, as well as Harney and Moten’s (2013) work on the sociality of study in the Undercommons, all philosophically understand that collective learning is predicated upon a relational ontology where subjects, objects, and entities come into being through relationships. All of these concepts relate to the neologism ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007) which understands that we come to know through our being and doing in a lively powered world. Thus, in the examples that follow, we theorize these postfoundational concepts in relation to our pedagogical moves. We view postfoundational pedagogies as “emergent, responsive to specific (temporary) conditions, and attuned to what has been previously foreclosed to make room for experimentation and creation” (see Editors’ Introduction). It is a both/and. Both traces of what might be called traditional pedagogies and reconfigurations and openings to newness (or post philosophical inspired pedagogies). Speculative pedagogies of qualitative inquiry are one way of articulating what happens when pedagogies are inspired by postfoundational philosophies (Kuby & Christ, 2020). Our coming to be together as pedagogues and inquirers

We have been involved in creating a number of different face-to-face and online pedagogical courses and programs for graduate students, academics, and practitioners interested in understanding and embodying postfoundational philosophies for their work. Our partnership began in 2016 when Viv reached out to Candace and inquired if we wanted to connect and discuss a possible project through the collaborative partnership of our universities (Candace at the University of Missouri, United States, and Vivienne at the

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University of the Western Cape, South Africa). We submitted an internal grant proposal to our universities and were funded to create a course for higher education institutions (HEIs) in Cape Town on multimodal pedagogies and post qualitative inquiry in 2017. This was mainly a four-day in-person live-in course held at an intimate conference venue set in a valley of the mountains of Stellenbosch.1 About a month after the in-person portion, culminating course projects were shared in a hybrid format. This course was one of the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC) courses offered to academics across the four HEIs in the Western Cape. The course, entitled Multimodal Pedagogies and Post-Qualitative Scholarship in Higher Education Teaching and Learning was designed by the facilitators, including ourselves and Denise Newfield (University of the Witwatersrand), Daniela Gachago (Cape Peninsula University of Technology), Elmarie Constandius (Stellenbosch University), Kristy Stone (University of the Western Cape) and Lucia Thesen (University of Cape Town). It was envisaged that the course participants would bring one of the courses/ modules that they are currently teaching to consider how multimodal pedagogies might be used to enhance the course and how post qualitative inquiry could spark inquiries in their research areas. Participants were provided with literature on multimodal pedagogies and post qualitative inquiry. In addition, we engaged in activities such as force-full concept mapping, finger painting, walks, a tasting at a nearby winery, creating with clay, making digital stories, communal readings, and composing (oral) poetry. A second collaborative project began in 2019, with funding support from our universities, on the topic of post philosophies and the doing of inquiry. We wanted to facilitate a space open to a greater range of people, specifically newer scholars and doctoral students – our own students as well as people we didn’t know yet – to create an online learning community. We were interested in collaborating across our university settings because we saw the need to bring together a group of scholars who had an interest in post philosophies and their impact on how inquiry is done in HEIs across the world. We were particularly interested in learning from a range of international scholars who had experience with post philosophies and the doing of inquiry, as well as those who had previously written about post philosophies and what this meant for doing research. The Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry webinar series kicked off in August 2020 and was held on the third Thursday of every month until September 2021, with a total of 14 sessions. Each session was recorded through Zoom and made available on YouTube.2 Two weeks after each session, we hosted a virtual debriefing session with our current and former students about the webinar and suggested readings from the panelist(s). Over time these became known as WEBing sessions (see Kuby & Bozalek, 2023). We engaged in concept speed dating, collaborative writing and sharing, making on digital canvases (i.e., an open digital space to

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add texts, images, and/or drawings), and eventually (co)authored response pieces to the webinar panelists in a special issue(s) of Qualitative Inquiry (see Volume 29, issue 1, 2023). We asked our students to consider the question: What did the webinar(s) produce for you? As we discuss below, the students were a bit nervous about coming into a group they didn’t know (a mixture of Candace’s and Viv’s students who for the most part didn’t know each other); however, bonds developed. Collaborative, slow reading disrupts teacher/student binaries: found poetry

Our approach in teaching is to create spaces that reduce or resist the binary of teacher vs. student and the assumptions inherent with those roles. Engagement with (post)philosophical ideas and responses to these ideas, in our courses, is collaborative and democratic with all participating. This practice disrupts the binary of the teachers suggesting “right” interpretations and the students memorizing and reciting information. Below we use the word “participant” often, instead of teacher or student, as we found ourselves very much engaged and learning alongside “students,” and “students” involved in processes of teaching and facilitation. One way we resist teacher/student binaries is by inviting Slow reading, writing, and making practices during class sessions (see Bozalek, 2017, 2021, 2022; Ulmer, 2017 for more on Slow scholarship and writing). Slow is not about the speed or slowness of linear temporality, but about queering time. Neither is it about returning to an idyllic past. Carl Honore of the Slow movement referred to Slow as tempo giusto meaning the right speed (Gearhart & Chambers, 2019, p. 9). Slow practices address concerns that Thompson and Harney (2018) have about capitalist practices in the academy where reading is absent in the classroom and students are sent off to read on their own. They refer to this as outsourcing reading to individual workers in their homes, which they see as an unfair academic practice. Instead, they propose a reading camp as a convivial place of refuge where participants engage in a form of study together (Harney & Moten, 2013), through Slow reading to each other. Similarly, in the 2017 CHEC course, we had readings assigned, but we also provided space to read-write-think-make together inspired by the postfoundational practice of Slow reading as relational study, where teacher/student binaries were disrupted through an intra-action among texts and participants. Candace facilitated a discussion on the article “Beyond an Easy Sense: A Diffractive Analysis” (Mazzei, 2014) in a session on post qualitative inquiry. She invited the participants to create an oral found poetry from the article as a way to slow down our reading and think about the concepts and big ideas that were sticking with us; places we wanted to think more about in a collective; places we were surprised by and/or found a connection to our inquiry

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practices. Each person chose one sentence, one phrase, and one word from the article. Then we went around the room in a circle composing the poetry. The first time around we read our sentences, one after the other. Without stopping, we went around the circle again and read our phrases. And likewise, a third time around, and read our word. From this oral poetry we paused, talked with partners and as a collective about our noticings and what the poetry (and the article) produced for us. We discussed lingering questions and connections to our inquiry practices. Our understandings of the article were both individual and collective and knowledge was produced from both teachers and students. What emerged was not planned as we had to be open to newness and questions that we might not be able to answer. Slow reading then is a pedagogical practice informed by and aligned with postfoundational approaches that are responsive, and that make room for invention and creation. As Barad writes, diffraction is always a collaborative process of thinking and reading – reading together produces an opening up of thought, where nothing is assumed about what is already familiar and what is new (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). Pedagogical moves like composing poetry create spaces for resisting the teacher/student binary through invitations toward collective, relational knowledge-making and inquiry. So, while we engaged a traditional pedagogical move (i.e., asking students to read an article) we also invited them to not have to know what it meant individually and rather opened space for collective sense-making and/or to just see what the reading produced for/ with them and us even if they weren’t comprehending it. A both/and pedagogy inspired by Barad’s writing on how they walk around in words and sentences to invite possibilities for new insights to flash up (Barad, 2017; Barad & Gandorfer, 2021) and a response to the call from scholars to Slow readingwriting-thinking-making (Thompson & Harney, 2018). Processual, collective, curious learning: (concepts) speed dating

Secondly, reading-writing-thinking-making together as participants (i.e., as both teachers and students) provides opportunities for being together in common, where a disposition of curiosity, trying to make sense of difficult philosophical ideas, imbues the way in which the participants, the text(s), and the discussions are entangled and intra-act with each other (Barad, 2007). The teaching/learning happens in process-oriented modes of knowing/being/ doing rather than as individually consumed, finished products (Manning, 2016; Massumi, 2015a; Thompson & Harney, 2018). In one of our WEBing sessions, there was a suggestion to try out conceptual speed dating, a technique which has been practiced for several years at Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s SenseLab, and which has been adapted for classroom use by its participants. The reason the SenseLab started using

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it was to escape from hegemonic practices of some experts who give their wisdom and interpretations to those who are regarded as less knowledgeable, who become silenced in traditional higher education pedagogical forms of interaction. In asymmetrical relations, with gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality at play, forms of epistemic injustice are produced when certain ways of knowing, being, and doing in the classroom are privileged. In order to address such concerns, speed dating, which allows intra-action with concepts and others’ ideas simultaneously was a means of making room for exploratory and collective thinking processes in the moment. Informed as it is by Massumi’s processual relational philosophy, speed dating emerged as a postfoundational pedagogical enactment. Speed dating, in its focus on two people engaging with a concept(s), is able to embrace and create a counter-space of group dynamics that emerge from neurotypical, competitive academic environments. It produces understandings through hearing various iterations on one concept, thus expanding thought, as there is no preconceived notion on what a concept can do or is – the concept comes into being through speed dating. This is processual learning in a collective, relational event. What emerges is as-yet-unthought (Manning, 2016). Inspired by Massumi’s (2015b, 2017) conceptual speed dating, we engaged via Zoom in a process where we grappled in a number of partnerships with the concept of immanence. We used the breakout room function and rotated in/out of rooms with each other to see what readings, thinking, and our discussions about immanence together produced for the process of concept speed-dating as described by Dawkins (2017). In conceptual speed dating, texts and what are identified as “minor” concepts are regarded as generative. There is no one meaning of a particular concept, with each engagement with the text and a different person, new meanings are produced. For us, the newness that emerges is how working with both the same and different concepts and different groups of people at different times, different fields of thought, and in different material arrangements (for example, online or face-to-face in the flesh) is always invigorating and surprising in terms of what flashes up. We also remember participants’ expressions of appreciation regarding what a pleasurable, intimate, risky, and inventive process concept speed-dating was and how sense-making and understanding were expanded in the intra-active processes. The techniques of conceptual speed dating enable new ways of being and imagining with concepts. No pre-existing subjects (or concepts) nor individual knowledge producers: force-full concept mapping

Thirdly, reading-writing-thinking-making with (post)philosophical concepts and texts provides ways to overturn ideas that research methodologies need to be foregrounded upfront. This has the potential to lead to co-writing and

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co-publishing texts or other audio-visual presentations together, rendering each other capable (Bozalek, 2021; Despret, 2013), a process where all are coming into learning together intra-actively – there are no pre-existing subjects who know or who don’t know, nor are there individual producers of knowledge. Erin Manning (2020) expresses this process in her discussion of how concepts come into being: None of this is an individual’s work. The writing, the thinking-with, the sociality, is what brings the concept to expression. A concept is oriented by the path it draws forth. The concept is less ours to claim than ours to follow. (p. 11) In a similar vein, Elmarie Costandius, a co-facilitator of the CHEC course wrote in our planning notes: “Creativity is often enhanced when unconventional things (these can be a material object, subject, existing concept or theory) are forced together to form new meanings.” Here, plugging in (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) ideas, sensations, and materialities which are seemingly unrelated can produce the new; hence they are force-full. The process is unpredictable and requires experimentation, attentiveness, and openness – as well as an expansive context with time and space to explore. It is the event – or what Manning and Massumi (2014) refer to as a “something happening” – which creates enabling-constraints and constraining-enablements influencing what becomes possible to create. Each event is entirely different in terms of the affordances which are made possible. Elmarie’s CHEC workshop session began with forcing new meanings with unrelated images and words. Each participant was asked to choose one concept to think-with for the force-full mapping (see Kuby & Christ, 2020, pg. xxi–xxiv for discussion of the word force-full). The concept should be a complex one that has the possibility of generating multiple meanings. This was interspersed with discussions on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of concepts, as well as multimodal pedagogies and post qualitative inquiry, including the text of Jackson and Mazzei (2012). Participants were given exercises to link their concept to a sociopolitical issue or an issue in the participants’ classroom, then to link it to an existing theory (using the Jackson and Mazzei text 2012 text as an example). The concept was then plugged into a material object, after which a final concept was eventually arrived at, a title chosen for the concept, and a paragraph written on the concept. This process of concept-making requires large pieces of paper to allow for new concepts being formed from previous ones. The pedagogical invitation fosters space for intra-actions of each participant with their disciplinary homes, theoretical interests, life experiences, and curricular expectations in relation to concepts. The mapping is an important part of the process of discerning entanglements and differentiations as it allows participants to understand concepts in their

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inseparability and differences. Thinking with concepts rather than doing a more traditional literature review produces new imaginaries for taking forward the potentiality of encounters that force intra-actions of seemingly disparate ideas into as-yet-unthought entanglements (Manning, 2020; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). As Elmarie wrote in her facilitator notes: We hope that these linking exercises and zigzag engagements open up new thoughts and images that the participants will find productive. In a very modest way, we will try steering away from the universal by following a simple process of linking unrelated concepts and experimenting with material, in a tangible and embodied way. The final aim for the developed concepts is to not remain a concept, but to become a process. (borrowed from Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. 1) Over several days, we moved from 2D paper and writing on our concept maps to creating-with discarded library books, 3D paper, glue, tape, and so forth (see Figure 12.1). Then participants were invited to experience and intraact with others’ concepts. Participants added connections and inquiries with post-it notes to others’ concept maps (see Figure 12.2). Thus, in the force-full concept mapping, not just people (participants in the course) but also concepts are seen not as individual nor human centered, but rather intra-related and be(com)ing (Manning, 2020).

FIGURE 12.1

Example of 3D concept mapping.

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FIGURE 12.2

Experiencing others’ concept mapping.

Political processes and taking collaborative risks in slow writing: collective composing in Google Drive documents and canvases

Reading-writing-thinking-making are undeniably political processes, where knowing is situated, incomplete and partial and where geopolitical contexts and transdisciplinary endeavors all contribute to the materialization of ideas (Haraway, 2016). This creates opportunities for escaping the narrow boundaries of our disciplinary training in research methods and for acknowledging how all matter, including disciplines, are shot through with the political (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). For us, it is important to think postfoundationally in how we write, read, make with and for others to bring historically excluded forms, participants, and knowledges to the surface. This is inspired by postfoundational philosophical ideas that intersect with theories on race, gender, ability, Indigeneity, and other ways of labeling (e.g., Jasbir Puar, Jennifer Nash, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Mel Chen, AnaLousie Keating, Alexander Weheliye, Stefano Harney, & Fred Moten). Working across global northern and southern contexts perhaps brings this consciousness more to the fore. However, it is one thing to engage in collaborative projects together across these spaces, but another to attempt to change which knowledges are valued in the academy – and how

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publishing in journals and books is rewarded or not. We see post-philosophically informed pedagogies as an ethico-onto-epistemological project, where what and whose knowledges matter, including the importance of disrupting and undoing the onto-epistemological violences of colonialism (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). Writing in the academy is usually experienced as solitary and sometimes a frustrating and negative experience. Academics, particularly those who are new to the university, are placed under enormous pressure to increase the number of their publications and citations evident in metrics such as the h-index. There are also increasing demands to undertake peer reviews for journals, which is largely unseen and unpaid work that does not much benefit the academic but through which the whole system of higher education is dependent for rating, employing, and giving grants to academics. Despite these pressures to “publish or perish,” writing can still be a fruitful and even pleasurable process and a valuable form of thinking and creating (e.g., Gale & Wyatt, 2016; Manning & Massumi, 2014; Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). The WEBing sessions provided communal online spaces in Google Drive (both Google Docs and Google Drawing canvases) for us (students and teachers) to write synchronously across the global north and south, locations including Brugge, Belgium; Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa; Columbia, Missouri, United States; Tallahassee, Florida, United States; and Los Angeles, California, United States. For many of our monthly sessions, we began by drawing and writing in one Google Drawing canvas for about 10–15 minutes. Often, we’d insert quotes from the webinar panelists’ publications, images and photos, and our inquiries and confusions. After, we began talking (and continuing to create on the canvas) (see Figure 12.3). In a similar fashion, we had one Google doc that became our shared writing document for WEBing sessions. We sometimes spent 10–20 minutes, each

FIGURE 12.3

Google drawing canvas.

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person chose a color, and then we wrote reactions to and thoughts about the previous webinar session on the communal Google Doc. When this time had elapsed, all stopped writing and each person had an opportunity to read their piece aloud to the other participants. There was at first some hesitation from the US group as they had not tried this process online before, and it might be seen as quite risky to write one’s responses (without time for editing) and then have to read it to a group of people, many of whom they had never met (in person). However, those who became regular participants soon started to relax, becoming more willing to be open and transparent when they perceived the atmosphere to be one of acceptance, encouragement, and nonjudgment, and reported that they started to find the sessions fruitful for their own and later collaborative writing with each other. The WEBing participants were invited by us to develop a piece of collaborative or single-authored writing to be peer-reviewed for a special issue of the journal Qualitative Inquiry on the Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry webinar (see Kuby & Bozalek, 2023). The editors of the journal were very supportive of involving novice and more seasoned writers contributing to the special issue by responding to one or more of the webinar presentations which were featured in the journal. Thus, the thinking-writing for the special issue took place over a 14-month period, slowly without planning or outlining an article in an emergent fashion until the last few months. This allowed our focus to be on thinking-making rather than the production of an article. Two PhD students decided to write manuscripts for the journal on their own, mainly because they were required to have single-authored publications for their theses. Others, however, set up partnerships across north-south global contexts and co-wrote manuscripts, in some cases never having met their writing partners in the flesh. These practices of cross-pollination across northsouth contexts provide opportunities for questioning conventional, western/ Eurocentric, inherited norms and patterns of participation in knowledgemaking which we see as postfoundational as it is relational, collective, and political. It still remains evident that individual rather than collective writing is rewarded in academic scholarship and that Northern journals and publishing houses retain their privileged status for rewarding academics in terms of status and remuneration. Producing pedagogies differently through inquiry with concepts

As we end our chapter, we circle back to the reorienting question we posed earlier: Who and what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise? In our writing and examples, we have illuminated how in providing spaces to generate playful collaborative processes, it might be possible to bring forth the unknown, disrupt the familiar, and engage in processes of thinking otherwise – for all involved. Our “students” (both in the courses we’ve taught face-to-face and in

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the WEBing sessions we facilitated virtually) are either graduate students and/ or instructors in higher education who do research. We believe the pedagogical encounters produced us all differently as doers of inquiry. What we have learned from working together is how important it is to provide opportunities for knowing, being, and doing together that could lead to possibilities of a/effective, pleasurable, imaginative, and responsive ways of expressing ourselves and pedagogies. We situate these within postfoundational philosophies, specifically, we are inspired by the concepts of collective and relational ontologies that engage with the unknown or the as-yet-unthought. We start our pedagogies with concepts rather than pre-set methods, bringing the strange into relationship with the familiar to forcefully create new. We believe, philosophically and pedagogically, that the atmosphere or affective tonality that is created, not just the physical space itself, produces the coming-to-be of learning as an event. It is an ethical atmosphere or climate that is created in the moment. The experimental processes can produce vulnerability and risk in the space as new relationalities are intraactively produced through a variety of material-discursive arrangements. The courses and webinars that we have been involved with have allowed experimentation with alternative and heterogeneous ways of reading, writing, thinking, making, publishing, and reviewing across sometimes disparate contexts, which we would hope might contribute to some helpful pedagogical ways of engaging with postfoundational philosophies in higher education. Our pedagogical moves are a “shock to thought” for many of our students and ourselves, which help to create a commotion where there is a “something doing” (Massumi, 2015a, p. 53). For us, it is not only important for ourselves and our students to become knowledgeable about postfoundational philosophies and theories, but we also need to keep seeking alternative ways of engaging with these theories through our pedagogical and scholarly practices in higher education. Notes 1 https://www.montfleur.co.za/. 2 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4P_GUK6QV2Wp_OAWEpw87Q/about.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2017). What flashes up: Theological-political-scientific fragments. In C. Keller & M.-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science, and new materialisms (pp. 21–88). New York: Fordham University Press. Barad, K., & Gandorfer, D. (2021). Political desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory & Event, 24(1), 14–66. muse.jhu.edu/article/780766.

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Bozalek, V. (2017). Slow scholarship in writing retreats: A diffractive methodology for response-able pedagogies. South African Journal of Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 40–57. Bozalek, V. (2021). Slow scholarship: Propositions for the extended curriculum programme. Education as Change, 25. https://doi.org/10.25159/1947-9417/904 Bozalek, V. G. (2022). Doing academia differently: Creative reading/writing-with posthuman philosophers. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 552–561. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 10778004211064939 Butler, J. (1992). Contingent foundations: Feminism and the question of ‘postmodernism’. In J. Butler & J. Scott (Eds.) Feminists theorize the political (pp. 16–17). New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Despret,V. (2013). Responding bodies and partial affinities in human–animal worlds. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(7/8), 51–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413496852 Dawkins, R. (2017). Tools for jimmying experience: Conceptual speed dating on Facebook. First Monday, 22. https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/7746/ 6564 Gale, K., & Wyatt, J. (2016). Working at the wonder: Collaborative writing as method of inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(5), 355–364. Gearhart, S. S., & Chambers, J. (2019). Introduction: Contextualising speed and slowness in higher education: In. S. S. Gearhart & J. Chambers (Eds.) Reversing the cult of speed in higher education: The Slow movement in the arts and humanities (pp. 1–36). New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Harney, S., & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. New York: Minor Compositions. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London: Routledge. Kuby, C. R., & Bozalek, V. (2023). Post philosophies and the doing of inquiry: Webinars and WEBing sessions become a special issue(s). Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1), 3–6. Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2020). Speculative pedagogies of qualitative inquiry. London: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2017). Using concept as method in educational and social science inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 643–640. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2020). Toward a pragmatics of the useless. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015a). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity. Massumi, B. (2015b). Collective expression: A radical pragmatics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, Radical Pedagogies (Spring), 59–88. http://www.inflexions. org/radicalpedagogy/main.html#Massumi Massumi, B. (2017). The principle of unrest: Activist philosophy in the expanded field. London: Open Humanities Press. Mazzei, L. A. (2014). Beyond an easy sense: A diffractive analysis. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 742–746.

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Richardson, L., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2005). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 959–978). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 611–625). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. St. Pierre, E. A. (2021a). The lure of the new and the hold of the dogmatic. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(5), 480–490. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420939133 St. Pierre, E. A. (2021b). Post qualitative inquiry, the refusal of method, and the risk of the new. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), 3–9. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419863005 St. Pierre, E. A. (2021c). Why post qualitative inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), 163– 166. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420931142 St. Pierre, E. A. (2022). Poststructuralism and post qualitative inquiry: What can and must be thought. Qualitative Inquiry, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004221122282 Thompson, T. S., & Harney, S. (2018). Ground provisions. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 120–125. Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/ lkcsb_research/5901 Ulmer, J. B. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 201–211. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1077800416643994 Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. New York: Free Press.

13 ONTOLOGIES OF POSSIBILITY AND LOSS IN POSTHUMANIST INQUIRY Lessons from the study of systemic racism Jerry Lee Rosiek and Scott L. Pratt

The affirmation gestured forth with enthusiasm of the body is at once ethical and political. In its absence, life tends to mire in the pathic tendency to respond corporeally to an irritation or a prodding in the negative, by avoidance or denial. When life falls too much under the hammer of pathic necessity, it loses its spring, and the less surplus value it generates. The more life activity falls under the sway of the pathic tendency, the more it suffers from the corresponding deficit of passion. Brian Massumi, 2014, p. 42 What Animals Teach Us About Politics

This is not a simple or pain-free process, of course, but anger and opposition alone are not enough: they need to be transformed into the power to act so as to become a constitutive force… Braidotti, 2019, p. 36 Posthuman Knowledges

Introduction

One of the challenges of developing a postfoundational practice of inquiry lies in figuring out what, substantively, such a practice is affirmatively doing. “Post” implies a critical movement away from something—in this case away from the idea that epistemic representations can be guaranteed by some exclusive relation to underlying metaphysical “foundations.” But what does postfoundational inquiry move us towards? This is one of the central questions taken up by the philosophical movement loosely described as posthumanism.1 This literature aspires to something more DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-19

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than a research practice whose primary analytic is to set aside the untrue, the unreal, and the unlikely, and call whatever is left a triumph of intelligence. Having spent our careers immersed in such critical analysis, primarily, but not exclusively, focused on critiques of systemic racism and settler colonialism, we see the value of incisive exposure of contradiction and misrepresentation. Nonetheless, an exclusive reliance on critique often feels as if it offers little guidance for constructive justice and healing actions. Its agonism, however well-justified, can be exhausting. Critique alone offers a community born of resignation to cognitive leftovers, not one born of embodied attraction to a shared futurity worth the vulnerability of creating together. One of the appeals of contemporary posthumanist philosophies is their call for more vital practices of inquiry, practices more affirmative than what are usually found in both the positivist and critical social sciences. It would be a mistake, however, to think achieving such practices would be easy, to think such a practice is sitting out there, available to us if we were just to clear out some misconceptions. That fantasy itself is a product of old critical habits. Affirmations without appeal to epistemic foundations entail something like an expression of desire, maybe love, or at least chosen solidarities, which in turn entails vulnerability. So the reorienting questions arise, What are we willing to risk in pursuit of social inquiries that yield contingent affirmations? What are we willing to give up? And how do power, politics, and ethics figure into how such affirmations are made—or not made? What follows is speculation about what a more affirmative practice of social inquiry will entail in which we use the study of systemic racism to illustrate the stakes. The logical limitations of critique

Concern about the limits of critical forms of reasoning is common, one frequently expressed by many contemporary scholars. For example, in his widely cited essay “Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern,” philosopher of science Bruno Latour (2004) asks: My question is simple: Should we be at war, too, we, the scholars, the intellectuals? Is it really our duty to add fresh ruins to fields of ruins? Is it really the task of the humanities to add deconstruction to destruction? More iconoclasm to iconoclasm? What has become of the critical spirit? Has it run out of steam? (p. 225) Karen Barad (2007), Brian Massumi (2014), Rosi Braidotti (2019), Iris van der Tuin (2011), Claire Colebrook (2021), and many others have raised similar questions about the utility of critical reason and voiced calls for a more affirmative practice of social analysis.

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It would be self-contradictory to spend too much time here offering a critique of critique. It will, however, be worthwhile to point out that there is a basic principle of critical argument that lies at the heart of most modern social science, one often referred to as the law of the excluded middle. It states that every claim is true or it is not true. There is no middle or third possibility. This principle may sound too narrow to describe most social analyses, especially contemporary postfoundational inquiry. However, the law of the excluded middle is more pervasive than its formal expression might suggest. It is presumed by all inquiry projects that seek to reveal a truth by discrediting its opposite or an alternative view that obscures it. It underwrites positivist and post-positivist studies that employ the method of rejecting a null hypothesis. Such studies posit that two or more phenomena either have a random relation to one another (the null hypothesis) or they have some form of shared causal relation.2 Through the use of sophisticated statistical techniques, they demonstrate that the relationship between phenomena is not random, thus disproving the null hypothesis. According to the law of the excluded middle, its opposite is confirmed—that there is some form of direct or indirect connection between the phenomena being studied. Karl Popper (1963) referred to this as the logic of falsification upon which he argued all modern science is based. Similarly, critical theoretic studies seek to reveal the real workings of the world by exposing the contradictions between prevailing ideologies and the material realities of peoples’ lives. The idea is that once the distortions of ideologies are dispelled, according to the law of the excluded middle, an undistorted view of the operation of capitalism will remain and become clear (Habermas, 2015; Horkheimer, 2020; Willis, 2017). Deconstruction also relies on the principle of the excluded middle, but without the expectation of arriving at an undistorted view of the world. Deconstructive reading is the practice of identifying contradictory metaphysical premises within the rhetorical structure of a text or argument. Jacques Derrida (1998) argued that such contradictions are not mistakes, but rather are inevitable given the arbitrary nature of linguistic signification. Identifying these contradictions allegedly loosens the grip a foundational metaphysics of presence has on our imagination of social possibility—contradictory claims cannot be authoritative representations of the real. This kind of deconstructive analysis, however, does not provide guidance about specific ways to act responsibly within that freedom. Although usually taken for granted as part of the very definition of rationality and critical thinking, the logical law of the excluded middle is neither necessary nor universally applicable. As Rosi Braidotti (2019) observes: The heteroglossia of contemporary data defies the logic of the excluded middle and demands complex topologies of knowledge, for subjects

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structured by multi-directional relationality. Critical reason today is contingent and nomadic in character. (pp. 125–126) Braidotti’s point can be illustrated by the example of research on racism and racial inequality. Racism is neither a singular nor stable phenomena. As legal scholar Michelle Alexander (2010), speaking of the way anti-Black racism in the US evolved from slavery, to Jim Crow laws, to the contemporary mass incarceration of Black citizens, explains: Any candid observer of American racial history must acknowledge that racism is highly adaptable. The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged…This dynamic, which legal scholar Reva Siegel has dubbed “preservation through transformation,” is the process through which white privilege is maintained, though the rules and rhetoric change. (p. 21) In other words, racism and the relationalities it creates are nomadic. Its insidious movement reaches into our theorization and often coopts inquiry methodologies that have been offered as tools of liberation. Ideals of objectivity and colorblindness have been used to both deny and reinscribe racism (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008; Rosiek, 2019). Marxist critique of capitalist economics has helped us understand the materiality of racism and insist racism is a distraction from the struggle against class oppression (Leonardo, 2013). Poststructural anti-essentialism has helped us understand the way white supremacy gets encoded into scientific objectivity (Wynter, 2003). It has also inspired pre-emptive dismissals of personal testimonies about experiences of racism because such stories allegedly risk reifying racial categories of identity (hooks, 1990; Hames-García, 2011; King, 2017). The protean character of racism suggests that effective anti-racist inquiry cannot be bound by the law of the excluded middle because racism cannot be comprehensively represented, nor ever conclusively said not to be present. It evades final semiotic capture and ontologically manifests in the very processes by which we seek to represent it. Some version of this understanding informs critical race theory’s assertions that racism is a permanent feature of US culture (Bell, 1991), Sylvia Wynter’s observation that Western humanism has always been anti-Black (2013), and contemporary Afropessimism’s rejection of emancipatory knowledge projects (Wilderson, 2020). Methodologically this means that exposing and critiquing racism will never be an adequate anti-racist analytic or political praxis. A more affirmative anti-racist inquiry praxis is also needed, one that seeks to ontologically and

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relationally transform social practices and recognizes that such work will have no endpoint. Posthuman empiricism

Like early modern idealism, pragmatism, and poststructuralism, posthumanist philosophies reject the idea that there is a single reality, ontologically separate from inquiring subjects, one that guarantees the accuracy of our representations of the world. Posthumanism, however, is distinct from these other anti-foundational philosophies in several ways, of which we will mention three. One distinguishing feature is its rejection of anthropocentrism, the centering of the human knowing subject as the starting and ending point of all inquiry. Instead, posthumanist philosophies regard subjectivity as fluid and porous, constituted in relational assemblages that include both human and non-human agency, knowledge systems, and material conditions, that change over time (Braidotti, 2019; Dixon-Román, 2017; Rosiek, 2019). This is related to a second distinguishing feature, an emphasis on the ontological generativity of knowledge work. If subjectivity is fluid, dynamic, and distributed then knowing cannot be a simple act of describing a world passively awaiting representation. Instead, it is a form of specific relational becoming, and establishing particular subject-object relations, or agential intra-actions, among many possible relations. Social inquiry, therefore, might not seek to produce only knowing subjects but also bring into being affective relation and social subjectivities that are part of distributed social movements (Braidotti, 2019; Jackson, 2020; Nxumalo, 2016; Puar, 2020; Snaza et al., 2014; Wynter, 2015). A third distinguishing feature is an emphasis on embracing responsibility for the ontological consequences of non-foundational modes of analysis (Barad, 2007; Bozalek, 2020; Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Wolgemuth et al., 2022). If inquiry is a form of becoming that establishes some viable subject/object, agent/agent relations among many possible relations, then they require justification not through a perfect match with an exogenous world but instead through reference to the qualities of the futurities they enable. Rosi Braidotti (2019) summarizes the relation between ontology, fluid subjects, and a more speculative and affirmative form of social analysis in her recent book Posthuman Knowledge: Subjectivity is not restricted to bound individuals, but is rather a co-operative trans-species effort that takes place transversally, in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past  – in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries. These in-between states defy the logic of the excluded middle and, although they allow an analytic function to the negative, they reject negativity and aim at the production of

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joyful or affirmative values and projects. Poststructuralism paved the way for this approach, but the posthuman turn materializes it and composes a new ontological framework of becoming-subjects. (p. 33) Writing about one particular posthumanist inquiry practice, diffractive analysis, Iris van der Tuin (2014) explains further the relation between a more affirmative practice of inquiry and ontologies of the future: Reading insights diffractively allows for affirming and strengthening dynamic links between schools of thought (screened memories) or scholars that only apparently work toward the same goals….Generating new concepts or traditions, new epistemologies and new futures along dynamic lines, without “newness” being based on oppositional binarism, these concepts, traditions, epistemologies and futures are always generated with the texts and projected futures of the past, and in the living present as always/ already moving towards a future (time cannot be pinpointed, because we are too late when we say “now”). (pp. 234–235) This temporal shift in posthumanist philosophy and theories of inquiry holds exceptional political promise. It invites a scholarship that can develop realistic proposals for the future based, not on their causal inevitability, but instead on their desirability. Celebrating openness

The most common affirmations found in the posthumanist theory literature are general celebrations of freedom and possibility. Once the hegemony of representationalism—the idea that there will be a singularly true description of the world—is set aside, then what most frequently follows is a call for methodological experimentation, openness, pluralism, and novelty, at a general level. For example, Barad (2007), remarking on the ethical and political purposes motivating her theorizing, writes: I cannot simply say what needs to be said (as if that were a given) and be done with it. Justice, which entails acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all. There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly. (p. x)

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Rosi Braidotti (2019) similarly identifies posthumanism’s signature qualities as openness to relational possibility, increased receptivity to a wider range of affects, and responsibility to address injustice: Posthuman scholarship also entails a qualitative shift in methods, collaborative ethics and, I may add, relational openness. As argued in the previous chapters, thinking in posthuman times is about increasing the capacity to take in the intensity of the world and take on its objectionable aspects. (p. 39) Reflecting on the influence of Deleuze and Guattari in her work, Elizabeth St. Pierre (2014) also writes of the ability of their philosophy to open the way to ontological novelty. Underscoring the openness, she suggests it is difficult, if not impossible to specify the forms that novelty can take: Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari provided new concepts—intensive, futural concepts with their own speeds and rhythms that slow us down because they don’t fit existing ontologies and so open things up, helping us think new modes of being…their concepts (e.g., assemblage, rhizome, bodies-without-organs) can be methods that enable new research practices that can neither be described in advance of a study nor easily described at the end. (p. 14) These few excerpts do not suffice to establish a pattern, but hopefully those familiar with this philosophical and methodological literature will find this theme familiar. The celebration of possibility, generativity, and creativity found in the methodological literature influenced by posthumanism is inspiring. The remarks about openness and possibility are often accompanied by mentions of a wider scope of responsibility for social inquiry. But it is the theme of openness that seems to get more headlines and more column inches. The limits of calls for openness

There is a tension between these two themes, openness and responsibility, at least as they are frequently discussed. At an impressionistic level, the emphasis on the general indeterminacy and open-endedness of inquiry seems to blunt the claims of an expanded practice of onto-ethic responsibility. For what good is an expanded ethical responsibility, if that responsibility is rarely specified or, worse, cannot be specified? It falls back into the logic of the law of the excluded middle by presuming the negation of the constraints of epistemic foundationalism necessarily leads to (an unspecified) amelioration. Why would we think such interpretive freedom would lead to goodness and

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not unethical excess, neglect, or harm? There is very little historical evidence to support this confidence. Enlightenment ideals of individual freedom are used to underwrite rapacious capitalism and genocidal settler colonialism. Marxist critiques of class oppression are used to rationalize state totalitarianism. Poststructuralist deconstruction laid the groundwork for post-racialism and what Leonardo & Dixon-Román (2018) call post-colorblindness, which is little more than a cover for a renascent white supremacy. There is no prima facia reason to presume posthumanist celebrations of unbounded becoming would avoid similar complicities. In fact many scholars (e.g., Ahmed, 2013; Byrd, 2011; King, 2019; Rosiek, et al., 2020; Tuck, 2010) have raised concerns about a presumed (white/Eurocentric) innocence underlying posthumanist calls for moving beyond humanist subject/object ontologies and identitarian politics (e.g., Braidotti, 2019, p. 39) without offering a robust account of how resistance to white supremacy and settler colonialism is to be otherwise enacted.3 Alexander Weheliye (2014) warned in his book Habeus Viscous: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human: We should all remain cautious…about the complete disavowal of subjectivity in theoretical discourse, because within the context of the AngloAmerican academy, more often than not, an insistence on transcending limited notions of the subject or identity leads to the neglect of race as a critical category as we have seen in scholars such as Judith Butler. (p. 48) Scholars have raised similar concerns about the premature disavowal of gender identity. Claire Colebrook (2000), for example, commenting on Deleuze and Guattari’s readings of Virginia Woolf not as woman, but as becomingwoman, asks: “Just what are Deleuze and Guattari doing when they take Woolf and the women’s movement away from the concepts of identity, recognition, emancipation and the subject towards a new plane of becoming?” (p. 3). Other feminist scholars such as Elizabeth Grosz (1993, 1994), Jasbir Puar (2011, 2012), and Anna Bogic (2017) have expressed similar caution, even as they find utility in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. Postfoundationalism is not inherently virtuous, nor can it be presumed to proceed from neutrality. Even after letting go of foundational ontologies, we still bring our histories, habits, and institutional embeddedness into our inquiries. Celebrations of openness affirm a freedom of relation beyond what we inherit and dwell in the resulting surfeit of possibility but do not yet risk the vulnerability of affirming specific ethical and political relations. What often goes unacknowledged is that remaining at the threshold in this way, surveying possible relational paths but affirming none in particular, is itself a particular

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kind of onto-ethical and affective relation with ethical and political consequences. Failing to acknowledge the peculiar character of this relation of suspension risks naturalizing a different kind of foundationalism, one that avoids a definitive ontology of the object, but beatifies an ironic cosmopolitan subject. Responsible affirmations

If analysis is an ontologically performative process of becoming that generates new modes of being (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019; Jackson & Mazzei, 2023; St. Pierre, 2021), then there can be no general relation to inquiry, not even one that can be characterized as preliminary indeterminate openness. Every engagement generates specific relations with material, discursive, ethical, and political consequences. Attending to those consequences is, we offer, the work of responsible inquiry. This does not mean we can completely predict the consequences of analysis, through a reinstatement of positivist fantasies of epistemic mastery. But neither can attention to the relational consequences of inquiry be deferred to a later moment of enactment, because the deferring is itself a relation that incurs consequences. Within a foundationalist ontology, the purpose of inquiry is epistemic—accurate description or incisive critique. Ethical and political considerations are treated as a matter of application of the knowledge generated. In the absence of ontological foundations, ethical and political considerations flood back into the details of research practice. Every moment of analysis is simultaneously epistemic, ontological, and political. The lead author’s study of the racial resegregation of a public school district (Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016; Rosiek, 2019) can provide illustrations of this.4 That study examined the impact the racial resegregation of schools within a US school district had on the students enrolled at the time. In the course of this study, which consisted of hundreds of interviews with students, teachers, parents, as well as archival research, it was impossible to comprehensively capture the influence of white supremacy through any single unit of analysis. Evidence was provided that racism was operating through individual bias and interpersonal microaggressions, through material economic structures like property values based on school zoning lines and city council efforts to recruit a manufacturing facility to the town, and through the discursive impacts on the narratives that circulated about students attending the all-Black school. Each of these forms of evidence was called for and made possible by distinct theoretical frameworks (individual bias—the psychology of bias; property values—Marxist critical theory; discursive impacts—poststructuralism). Synthesizing these divergent analytical approaches was not possible, because they carried mutually exclusive ontological implications. Focusing on individual racist attitudes and microaggressive behaviors as the ultimate cause

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of larger aggregations of institutionalized racism was in direct tension with critical theoretic analyses that identified macroeconomic concerns like property values and industrial capital interests as the cause of institutional racism and individual behavior as epiphenomenal to those macrosocial. Similarly, a poststructuralist focus on the way white supremacist discourses both drove individual behavior and shaped capital interests contradicted the individualistic and economic interpretations of events. These different approaches to analysis also produced different and somewhat immiscible subject effects. Individualistic psychological frameworks positioned interpreters as objective spectator subjects, critical theoretic frameworks positioned interpreters as subversive subjects who can see behind the veil of a positivist ideology, and poststructuralist analysis positioned interpreters as ironic subjects suspicious of any causal explanation. Not only were these mutually exclusive forms of onto-affective relation to the phenomena of racial segregation in schools, they also all had different implications for action. Instead of attempting to synthesize these accounts, the book’s analysis took the form of Jackson’s and Mazzei’s (2013) “plugging in” which involves “being deliberate and transparent in what analytical questions are made possible by a specific theoretical concept … and how the questions that are used to think with emerged in the middle of plugging in” (p. 264). The analysis moved back and forth between different theoretical frameworks opportunistically, letting the phenomena determine the appropriate unit of analysis. The plugging-in process, however, was complicated and the effects of the school resegregation did not always, or even frequently, fall into discrete kinds aligned with distinct theories. For example, students in the westside all-Black feeder zone were assigned to a 60-year-old building while the other zones received new high school buildings. This had material consequences, in terms of the types of facilities and technology available to students. It also had discursive effects, by becoming a symbol of the low regard the district leaders had for students attending that school. The older school building’s material limitations and implication of neglect in turn became weaponized by students at other schools as a way to implicitly and explicitly insult students who attended the Westside School. All of these things are terrible and compelled a response. But the disparate forms of available analysis involved tradeoffs. These trade-offs felt politically fraught. At some level, the phenomena were driving the emergent possibilities for analysis, but it didn’t determine them. We as thinking persons were also agentially emergent in this process of analysis, and within that agency were relational choices and responsibility. Each “plugging in” to a theoretical framework also involved a plugging out—or an unplugging—from alternative theoretical frameworks, their assumptions, and their horizons of possible action and consequence. Focusing on the structural economic explanations seemed to let individuals off the hook for their racist

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microaggressions and led to a de-emphasis on anti-racist educational interventions. Focusing on white supremacist discourses de-emphasized the material effects of racial segregation in the schools and de-emphasis on enforcing material inequity. Focusing on the material inequity between the schools seemed to ignore the central salience of racism to the resegregation process We have no easy recipe for navigating this ontological and axiological churn. Our experience working within this and similar onto-political liminalities has been that the devil is in the details. Each analytic move entails material-discursive trade-offs whose implications complicate or preclude other analytic moves. Relational loss is entailed in every analytic affirmation. Responsible inquiry, thus, includes accountability for the possibilities affirmed as well as for the losses of relational possibility. Ontological loss in posthumanist inquiry

Posthumanism changes the underlying logic of inquiry from a logic of representation to a logic of becoming. In a logic of representation, an inquiry supports a claim by critically invalidating other competing claims. Even in poststructural practices of inquiry where the ideal of accurate representation is problematized, the deconstruction of truth claims is considered a positive accomplishment because it interrupts metaphysical overreach and self-deception. There is a shared affective character to these various uses of a logic of critical representation; it is always couched in narratives of accumulation and growth. Elimination of false or unfounded views is not considered a loss, even if we were attached to these views, because they were not grounded in reality in the first place. Instead, the elimination of false or unfounded views is regarded as gain, a movement towards some more accurate collective edifice of knowledge or at least toward an intellectually honest ambivalence. A logic of becoming, on the other hand, presumes that many paths of relation are viable. Like a logic of representation, a process of elimination is involved. Every relational act precludes some other relational possibilities. If we stand, we cannot remain sitting down. If we say something, we cannot take it back. If we plug into one theoretical framework, we are not plugging into another theoretical framework (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023). And from those initial becomings, different horizons of possibility for subjectivity, agency, and relation unfold. Unlike a logic of representation, relations not made are not rendered ontologically unviable. They are real possibilities and so their displacement—the roads not taken—constitute ontologically substantive loss. This suggests that posthumanist calls for more affirmative approaches to social analysis, will cut two ways ontologically and affectively. Every inquiry is a particular form of becoming and therefore not some other form of becoming. This should not be controversial. Karen Barad (2010), writing about

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entanglements and ontological cuts, states explicitly that “intra-actions necessarily entail constitutive exclusions” (p. 254). These exclusions, Barad avers, are as much a part of the ethical responsibility incurred in inquiry as are the relations affirmed. The work of posthumanist inquiry, therefore, will entail more than the generally positive affect of affirmation. We will also need a practice of acknowledging loss of relational possibility. Doing so will mean getting specific about both, through speculative analysis of the possibilities and futurities an inquiry enables and those it disables. This is something we still wrestle with in our own work. The promise of postfoundational approaches to inquiry is that they offer the means for life, community, and vitality beyond the Enlightenment traps of logical necessity, statistical efficiency, and anthropocentrism. They can help us to build community around shared visions of the future that, however improbable, are ethically needed. Doing this responsibly will require more than a shared vision of what is worth affirming. We will also need shared acknowledgment of the relational possibilities that do not make our collective Baradian cuts. It is through a shared recognition of and mourning for the loss of those possibilities that an inclusively ethical postfoundational inquiry can be achieved. Notes 1 For the purposes of this essay this term refers to scholarship that focuses on protean relational ontologies and alternatives to Western humanist conceptions of knowledge, politics, and ethics, but not scholarship that focuses on technological blurring of the boundaries between human and not human. (See Ferrando (2013) for more on this distinction). 2 This is not to say that one of the phenomena being studied necessarily causes the other. Correlation is not causation. It might imply two or more phenomena are influenced by the same exogenous factor. The basic exclusion is: there either is or is not some form of connection aligning the manifestations of the phenomena. 3 Tiffany King (2019) provides an excellent and incisive summary of these concerns and the positive possibilities that can emerge by attending to them in her essay “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight.” 4 For other examples of scholars using posthuman theory to analyze institutionalized racism and colonialism see Bozalek (2020), Dixon-Roman (2017), Higgins (2016), Jackson (2020), Jackson and Mazzei (2023), Nxumalo (2016), Puar (2020), Rosiek (2019), Springgay and Truman (2022), Wozolek (2020), Zembylas (2018).

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Bell, D. (1991). Racial realism. Connecticut Law Review, 24, 363–379. Bozalek, V. (2020). Rendering each other capable: Doing response-able research responsibly. In Murris, B. (Eds.), Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines (pp. 135–149). London: Routledge. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Byrd, J. A. (2011). The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Colebrook, C. (2000). Introduction. In Buchanan, I. & Colebrook, C. (Eds.), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (pp. 1–17). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Colebrook, C. (2021). Can theory end the world? Symploke, 29(1), 521–534. Derrida, J. (1998). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dixon-Román, E. J. (2017). Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction and Quantification in Education. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ferrando, F. (2013). Posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahumanism, and new materialisms: Differences and relations. Existenz, 8(2), 26–32. Habermas, J. (2015). Knowledge and Human Interests. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hames-García, M. (2011). Queer theory revisited. In M. Hames- García & E.J. Martínez (Eds.), Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (pp. 19–45). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. hooks, b. (1990). Postmodern blackness. Postmodern Culture, 1(1), 510–518. Horkheimer, M. (2020). The state of contemporary social philosophy and the tasks of an institute for social research. In D. M. Kellner & S. E. Bronner (Eds.), Critical Theory and Society: A Reader (pp. 25–36). New York: Routledge. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2013). Plugging one text into another: Thinking with theory in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(4), 261–271. Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. (2023). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research, 2nd Edition. London: Routledge. Jackson, Z. I. (2020). Becoming human. In D. M. Kellner & S. E. Bronner (Eds.), Becoming Human (pp. 25–36). New York: New York University Press. King, T. L. (2017). Humans involved: Lurking in the lines of posthumanist flight. Critical Ethnic Studies, 3(1), 162–185. Leonardo, Z. (2013). Race Frameworks: A Multidimensional Theory of Racism and Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Leonardo, Z., & Dixon-Román, E. (2018). Post-colorblindness; Or, racialized speech after symbolic racism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(14), 1386–1387. Massumi, B. (2014). What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Murris, K., & Bozalek, V. (2019). Diffraction and response-able reading of texts: The relational ontologies of Barad and Deleuze. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 32(7), 872–886. Nxumalo, F. (2016). Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(5), 640–654. Popper, K. R. (1963). Science as falsification. Conjectures and Refutations, 1(1963), 33–39. Puar, J. K. (2020). “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. In C. McCann & S. Kim (Eds.), Feminist Theory Reader (pp. 405–415). New York: Routledge.

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Rosiek, J. & Kinslow, K. (2016). Resegregation as Curriculum: The Meaning of the New Segregation in Public Schools. New York: Routledge. Rosiek, J. (2019). Critical race theory meets posthumanism: Lessons from a study of racial resegregation in public schools. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(1), 73–92. Rosiek, J. L., Snyder, J., & Pratt, S. L. (2020). The new materialisms and Indigenous theories of non-human agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), 331–346. St. Pierre, E. AS. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward “post inquiry.” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 1044–1064. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J., & Weaver, J. A. (2014). Toward a posthuman education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39. Springgay, S., & Truman, S. E. (2022). Critical Walking Methodologies and Oblique Agitations of Place. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(2), 171–176. Tuck, E. (2010). Breaking up with Deleuze: Desire and valuing the irreconcilable. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 635–650. Van der Tuin, I. (2011). “A different starting point, a different metaphysics”: Reading Bergson and Barad diffractively. Hypatia, 26(1), 22–42. Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Wilderson III, F. B. (2020). Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing. Willis, P. (2017). Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. London: Routledge. Wolgemuth, J. R., Marn, T. M., Barko, T., & Weaver-Hightower, M. B. (2022). Radical uncertainty is not enough: (In) justice matters of post-qualitative research. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(4), 575–593. Wozolek, B. (2020). Assemblages of Violence in Education: Everyday Trajectories of Oppression. New York: Routledge. 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. Zembylas, M. (2018). The entanglement of decolonial and posthuman perspectives: Tensions and implications for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education. Parallax, 24(3), 254–267. Zuberi, T., & Bonilla-Silva, E. (Eds.). (2008). White Logic. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Pre-personal agencies and thought taking flight

Pre-personal agencies and thought taking flight

In this final Opening, the authors unsettle the foundational assumptions of anthropocentrism in an attunement to involuntary, relational encounters with the world. Using immanent, vitalist, and/or ontological theories of agential realism, the authors co-compose with mediators such as wind, water, and spiders. Thought takes flight as echoes of the pre-individual reverberate among their postfoundational approaches – which are invented as they go. “Plays of chance,” “rushes of stories,” and “dancings with wind” are enactments that activate new imaginings for the “not yet.” Pre-personal agency is distributed among all entities in their emergent, contingent enactments of inquiry. Dancing with the Chinese “wind” as postfoundational inquiry

Weili Zhao In Chapter 14, Zhao develops “wind” into a philosophical concept with implications for doing postfoundational inquiry. It revisits and entangles her previous research projects to frame and scaffold three reorienting questions: Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you overturning and displacing? and How does agency function in your approach? Zhao’s argument unfolds in five dimensions. First, it revisits her serendipitous discerning of the Chinese “wind-education” discourses as an example to demonstrate the complexity as well as trickiness in posing the contingent “starting point” question in postfoundational inquiry. Second, it puts to work Foucault’s and Heidegger’s critiques of modern Western representational language and elaborations of archeological/historical modes of inquiry, providing a theoretical and methodological orientation that helps her to reorient and restart her research toward a postfoundational trajectory of “dancing with the wind.” Third, it DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-21

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illustrates the foundational assumptions exposed and overturned by the dancing wind, including, among others, modern grammar, representational language, conceptual signification, as well as a trope of anthropocentrism that disorders language as an object of, and/or means for, human expression. This anthropocentric human-language disordering foregrounds the attribution and distribution of “agency” in humanist and posthuman research (i.e., Barad’s quantum field theory and agential cuts) to which she turns to unpack as the fourth dimension. Zhao also reads into a Daoist wind-forest story to explicate an ancient Chinese onto-epistemic wisdom of correlative cosmology and a hierarchical distribution of human and non-human agency. Finally, this paper discusses new implications that “dancing with the wind” has for doing postfoundational inquiry and how this “wind” approach has reshaped her agency as a Daoist researcher-un-learner along the way, already folded into an immanently entangled “winding” field. Multiple storying of crisis and hope: feminist new materialisms as an emergent ethico-onto-epistemology of multiple messmates at different scales

Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Teresa Elkin Postila In Chapter 15, the authors offer an example of multiple storying as a patchwork, or a rush of stories as Anna L. Tsing has called it. The text consists of patches of theory, methodological propositions, events of inquiry, and photographic articulations taken by children in a collaborative study led by Teresa Elkin Postila. An inquiry of this kind, both in-situ collaborative inquiries and as an academic text-productions, necessarily involves what Haraway names multiple messmates, while focusing on a shared matter of concern as framed by Stengers. To enact their multiple storying approach, they first take up the reorienting question: How do you make it up as you go? They explain how the concerns of the (In)finite water inquiries emerged from preschool children’s worries and questions about water, during periods of heavy rainfall, drought, and water scarcity, due to climate change, in the Stockholm Archipelago. In this collaboration of knowledge production, mundane everyday water practices in the preschool bathroom were connected to explorations of what lurked beneath opened man-hole covers in the street outside. AI robots were inserted by water-engineer messmates in order to gather information about clogging and needed maintenance of the sewage system – a system that is connected to the Baltic Sea. Messmates on the scales of time and space were also involved in these collaborative inquiries. By detailing the questions that arose of the history and future of the life-conditions and living-arrangements for drinking-water, fish, frogs, and the vegetation on the shores of a creek close to the preschool, the authors enact the reorienting question: How do you de-center human tendencies? Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila argue

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that  these inquiries incited multiple forms of articulations and storytelling, which evolved from the intra-actions in the assemblage of messmates at different scales. These multiple stories produce an imprint of childrens’ situated collaborative engagements with water, as well as scientific facts and fabulations of hope for adults to take up, take in, and act upon. Transversal inquiry: the “adventure of the involuntary”

Maggie MacLure Drawing on Deleuzian philosophy, Chapter 16 explores the question of how an immanent ontology might be actualized in/as postfoundational practice. It includes some enactments from the author’s own and others’ research. How might the new be invented, or brought forth, given that the researcher’s ingenuity does not predate, warrant, or predict events, but is part of their emergence? The chapter considers the potential of a transversal method. This would involve a patient attentiveness to the forces that are coalescing in, and as events, in order to creatively intervene in their unfolding. We must learn to be open to the incursion of that which can be sensed, even though it is not conventionally meaningful, knowable, or representable. The chapter addresses several reorienting questions: Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability? How do you make it up as you go? What are you inventing – how do you inquire without method? How do you de-center human tendencies? and What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual? The chapter resists, however, any notion of invention as “making it up as you go” if this is understood as unconstrained “play.” It advocates practices that are indeed open to the play of chance but are also constrained by an encounter that in the words of Deleuze, “forces us to think.” It is this combination of chance and constraint that contains the germ of an answer to the question of how immanent inquiry might work. The question is pressing, given that postfoundational researchers cannot count on the comforts of structure and conventional method to provide our starting points, trace our paths, and guarantee our truths. From the editors: For a discussion of the reorienting questions, see Chapter 1. Readers should also note that the abstracts in this Opening are crafted by the authors, written in third person, to introduce their chapters.

14 DANCING WITH THE CHINESE “WIND” AS POSTFOUNDATIONAL INQUIRY Weili Zhao

Where/how to start? Encountering the Chinese “wind”

To me, postfoundational inquiry is more of a philosophical orientation than a clear-cut replicable method. Instead of learning a set of so-called postfoundational inquiry toolkits as a starting point, I feel I rather performed some research that, retrospectively, accidentally bears upon some postfoundational features. In this sense, it is not that I learned postfoundational inquiry as a starting theoretical method. Rather, it is in doing some research that incessantly exposes, displaces, and overturns foundational assumptions that I gradually realized and learned what this line of postfoundational research could look like. Henceforth, where do I start and how do I begin? in doing postfoundational inquiry becomes an intriguingly worthy question to ask and reorients thought. Does postfoundational inquiry have a set starting point at all? Does not this “starting point” indicate an essentialism at all? How shall we discern such a “starting point” analytically out of an entanglement of cutting points? In this line of thinking, I would rather say that I discerned or encountered a turning point in doing my doctoral research at the University of WisconsinMadison in the United States over ten years ago that incidentally exposes some naturalized assumptions, otherwise enveloping us as foundational common senses. In exposing, this turning point re-orients, that is, re-starts, my intellectual mode and path of inquiry, no longer totally reducible to the normative parameters of humanist qualitative research. My doctoral research was to examine China’s current education and curriculum discourses and knowledge (re)production as an (dis)assemblage of East and West, and past and present, hoping not to fall into a colonial epistemological-theoreticalmethodological trap of using the Western theories to explain away the DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-22

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Chinese data. I was quite puzzled and lost about “where to start” until, on my school visit back in China, I serendipitously discerned a school-motto, made up of “wind” discourses and inscribed on a school wall (see Figure 14.1). The school-motto “wind” discourse literally says, “school wind, teaching wind, and learning wind” – each term followed by a few semantic fillers after a colon. For example, “learning wind” literally means “diligent, questioning, thinking, and creative.” I grew up with such schooling wind-education discourses in China, but I had never really seen this discursive and cultural “wind + education” connection. This is partly because I, as other modern Chinese people, naturalize the three Chinese terms, xiaofeng, jiaofeng, xuefeng, as concepts, or linguistic metaphors, which semantically mean “school atmosphere, teaching manners, and learning styles;” henceforth, I failed to see the literal connection between “wind” and “education” in the Chinese culture. In this sense, these “wind-education” discourses are prevalent and yet largely silent in modern China. School wind:

seeking truth, seeking practicality, seeking newness, and seeking beauty Teaching wind: true heart, warm heart, loving heart, and full heart Learning wind: diligent, questioning, thinking, and creative Nevertheless, I saw this literal “wind + education” connection one day when I was translating my Chinese school-visit notes into English. The Chinese notion “wind” suddenly caught me, setting me to wonder: why wind, not water? At that moment, my naturalized translingual equalization between “xiaofeng, jiaofeng, xuefeng” and “school atmosphere, teaching manners, and learning styles” was suspended and overcome by a deliberately opted-for

FIGURE 14.1

School-motto wall inscription.

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literal paraphrasing as “school wind, teaching wind, and learning wind,” foregrounding the culturally unique “wind-education” discourse/connection as a re-starting point for my doctoral research (which I later portray as “dancing with the wind”). Honestly, I am still not sure how such literal discerning happened then and there, except that I had an intellectual background in linguistics and discourse studies and presumably was quite sensitive to discourses and language. Back then, I was also reading Michel Foucault and Martin Heidegger on their postmodern critique of the Western modern grammar, the representational language, and conceptual mode of signification, and on their archaeological/historical mode of inquiry for explicating alternative historical possibilities to help cut into the present. Intellectually, I had developed a guiding research question for my doctoral studies, provoked by Chakrabarty (2000) and others, that is, how it is possible to explicate Chinese educational sensibilities as they are with and beyond the Western categories and frameworks. These few listed strands can all count as possible starting points out of an entanglement for co-agentively producing my postfoundational dimension of doctoral research. To borrow Barad’s (2007) thinking, these points are already intra-linked as an entangled phenomenon, with some becoming more salient than others at certain moments as effects of agential cuts. In this sense, where do I start or how do I begin is a tricky question, as there is no foundational “starting point” but an already dynamically-changing entanglement, with one focal point possibly and temporarily re-adjusting the inquiry process toward a new direction. My discerning of the Chinese “wind + education” discourses, as one such temporary and contingent point, was partially inspired by and responsive to the thinking of Foucault and Heidegger on an archaeological mode of inquiry and critique of modern Western discourse/language. Critique of representational language and archaeological mode of inquiry

Foucault (1973) argues that modern language since the beginning of the 17th century turns into an enclosed linguistic system where meaning largely rests with the synchronic grammatical arrangements within each statement along a signifier-signified mode of signification. That is, we are subject to a trap of philology, presuming the legitimacy of modern grammar as a foundational principle for our meaning-making. To emerge from such a trap, Foucault proffers one strategy to “disturb the words we speak, denounce the grammatical habits of our thinking, and dissipate the myths that animate our words” (p. 298), to reveal language in its crude being. To borrow Heidegger’s (1978) terms, language can be an ontological being rather than human expressions in that language speaks and human beings dwell.

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Foucault and Heidegger both resort to an archeological-historical mode of inquiry to expose and overturn the modern human-centered representationalism for alternative onto-episteme. For example, Heidegger (1966/1981) maintains, “Thought will be transformed only through thought that has the same origin and determination” (p. 62). To him, a historical inquiry is distinct from the usual history-of-ideas mode of inquiry that traces the linear development/transformation of certain ideas over the centuries. The latter already presupposes the static existence of something and only asks about the formula and the definitions of the essence of something, whereas a historical inquiry asks about the happening and the movements that something has taken historically, of which the formula and the definition are only the residuum and sediment. Furthermore, Heidegger (1967) argues that the historical happenings and movements of something are not necessarily the already established and past actual movements, but could also be in a form of acquiescence (my italics) no longer going on in the present yet still constituting as a basic form of the presence of the history. This is because what is actually past does not exhaust what has been. To Heidegger, the purpose of this historical mode of inquiry is not to merely acknowledge how something was before, but to pose for decision how essentially it still is today. Put differently, the detour into the past is to access the present. Foucault calls such historical inquiry a “history of the present” which he grants a privilege over all the other disciplines in his discussion about today’s human sciences. He clarifies that discourses are linked in a historical fashion such that the present is an effect of conditions of historical possibilities. Henceforth, in studying an ensemble of theoretical discourses concerning language, economy, and living beings in The Order of Things (1973), Foucault didn’t try to establish the a priori (im)possibilities of such knowledge but sought to do a historian’s work by showing the simultaneous functioning of these discourses and the transformations that accounted for their visible changes. In other words, archaeology concerns knowledge constitutive in its condition of possibility rather than a history of ideas or sciences. It is an inquiry, which, by going upstream in the history of discursive formations, knowledge, and practices, seeks to discover on what basis knowledge and theory becomes possible. This archaeological-historical mode of inquiry thus involves an epistemological shift from viewing time, history, and tradition as being some static, irreversible, and irreducible essences (data) to re-configuring them as happening, events, movement, and moments of arising possibly external to any timeline. The aim of disrupting the fixed and canonized tradition and history is to set back into motion the original inner happenings of something by tracing its way back to its self-laid grounds to find itself anew out of them. This new founding and finding are to shed new light on and render accessible the otherwise enclosed or excluded present educational reforms and discourses.

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Foucault-Heidegger’s archaeological mode of inquiry has been quite insightful to my research over the years as a methodological orientation, rather than a ready-made method. It is an orientation that detouring into the past can help to cut into the present. For example, my dancing with the wind among the historical texts helps to explicate how “wind” still works as a mode of reasoning in making educational knowledge and subjects. Similarly, detouring into differences (i.e., Western thinking and language) helps (me) to cut into the self (i.e., Chinese language and thinking). Such detour-access orientation provides a methodological strategy for doing postfoundational inquiry to the extent that detouring into the past/other helps to expose the otherwise naturalized foundational principles that constitute and ground the present/self. In so doing, we can possibly “begin elsewhere and think otherwise” (see editors’ Introduction). What to overturn and displace? Modern grammar, representational language, and human-language disordering

Foucault-Heidegger’s thinking reorients my rendering of Chinese windeducation discourses away from a modern representational trope, provoking my research toward a postfoundational gesture. Specifically, with “school/ teaching/learning wind,” I no longer asked a grammatical-semantic question of “what do they mean?” but an epistemological one of “how did wind and education get historically interlocked in the Chinese culture?” This reorientation reconceptualizes “wind” no longer as a modern conceptual signifier, but rather, as a mode of thinking/reasoning grounded in, and sedimented from, the ancient Chinese wisdom. This re-orientation set me onto a journey of dancing with the “wind” which, I retrospectively realized, moved toward an unanticipated wandering and wonderland of openings and un-learnings. In this sense, “dancing with the wind” entails a surrender of my subjectivity to follow and attune to serendipitous and unexpected encountering, analogically symbolizing a postfoundational gesture, neither built upon pre-existing methods or theories, nor anticipatory, but only re-countable backward. As a postfoundational mode of inquiry, “dancing with the wind” exposes and overturns, among others, modern grammar that disciplines representational language as well as an anthropocentric human-language (dis)ordering. In so doing, it accidently exposed me to Confucius’ own envisioning of educational thinking and praxis as one originary foundation of China’s educational discourses, not reducible to the Western framework and vocabularies. Specifically, following the dancing “wind” opened me to the rich (con)textures and (over)tones of the Chinese language itself and ancient texts beyond the grip of modern representation. For example, more than “air in movement,” the Chinese “wind” says etymologically, “wind blows, and insects get germinated and transformed within 8 days” (Shuowenjianzi). Put simply, the

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Chinese character of “wind” has an inherent sense of “transforming,” or, as Kuriyama (1994) rightly puts it, “the fascination of the Chinese winds lay in their power to transform” (my italics) (p. 23). It is this inherent “transforming” sense that Confucius draws upon in envisioning teaching and learning along a Yijing hexagram called guan (observation). This hexagram, itself having nothing to do with teaching and learning, zooms in on one ritual scenario where the Son of Heaven washed his hands but not yet offered the sacrifice, with a pious outlook and in front of his subjects. Confucius added a couple of comments and envisioned it into an ideal, exemplary, and contingent teaching-learning movement between sagely emperors and his subjects that happens like wind blowing over and transforming the earth. Indeed, it is by following and attuning to the dancing wind that I was accidently exposed to Confucius’ own educational envisioning, which could be taken as an originary, not original, re-source of the entire Confucian teaching and learning, with “wind” arguably as the signature language of Chinese education, making possible today’s prevalent and silent wind-education discourses in China (Zhao, 2019a, 2019b). In other words, Heideggerian-Foucauldian historical-archaeological mode of inquiry enabled me to disrupt and suspend the modern Westernized representational thinking and a “trap of philology” (Foucault, 1973) that assumes the legitimacy of language in making meaning by the synchronic grammatical arrangements within statements. Instead, it sets into motion the original inner happenings of the presently silenced “wind-education” rationale by tracing its way back to its historical-cultural-philosophical self-laid grounds to find itself anew. The historical-cultural-philosophical returning is not for nostalgia, but to better cut into the present, exposing deeper the coloniality of knowledge, being, and power of modernity on current Chinese people. As an example, imprisoned by a modern (Western) grammar and trap of philology, Chinese people fail to see the culturally-historically unique assemblage between the Chinese “wind” and educational thinking and praxis as an episteme beyond the Western brackets. Such historical-cultural-philosophical returning provides not merely an alternative thinking of China’s curriculum, but rather, an alternative thinking of alternatives. My “wind” research along a detour-and-access (detouring into the Western scholarship to access the Chinese self, and detouring into the Chinese past to better access its present) cartography of knowledge, language, and education blurs the geographical and epistemic boundaries of East, West, past, present, human subjects, non-human objects, and representational language – and into a plural epistemic timespace to engage in varied forms of knowledge. Within such epistemic timespace, language is no longer assumed to exist as a legitimized and enclosed system; meaning is no longer decided by the grammatical arrangements of statements; education is no longer about a neoliberal seeking of outcome and profit; and doing research

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is no longer merely to apply a pregiven framework to certain contexts. My dancing with the “wind” is more of an itinerant encounter, a de-centering and re-centering of various signposts, a processing, something that can only be recounted backward rather than anticipated ahead of time. How agency functions with the dancing wind

I have elsewhere theorized my “dancing-with-the-wind” research trajectory as a Daoist onto-un-learning way (Zhao, 2019a, 2019c) to highlight the transformation of my own subjectivity from an agentive researcher who largely controls and demands into an un-learner or studier who mostly follows, responds, and attunes to the dancing yet unexpectedly changing “wind.” Such agency transformation flattens otherwise normalized anthropocentric disordering between the researcher and the researched, mind and body, and humans and environs. Here I would like to further elaborate on the attribution and distribution of agency from three dimensions that have enveloped and transformed my own inquiry over the years with the dancing wind. First is a humanist conceptualization of agency as a human-only character bound up with a person’s subjectivity and identity. Second is a posthuman distribution of agency to both human and non-human matters and cosmic beings, as explicated in Karen Barad’s (2007) quantum field theory and agential cuts. Lastly, I introduce a Chinese Daoist wind-forest story for an ancient correlative cosmology that portrays the cosmic world as a dao-qi field. Furthermore, I theorize a Chinese hierarchical distribution of human and non-human agency in dialogue with Barad’s agential cuts. Within the humanist parameters, the researcher assumes an agentive role in researching the researched through actions like identifying the research topic and collecting and analyzing data. That is, the researcher has some capacity to do research intentionally and intellectually, as he or she is “an autonomous, independent thinker, a human body in time and space, acting upon a world that he [sic] is not already part of” (Murris et al., 2022). Such human-centered ontologies attribute self-consciousness and language to human species only, thus elevating human species to be superior to the other-than-human without such human-possessed capabilities. With such ontologies, only humans have agency or agentive subjectivity, and language is human expression or a tool that human subjects avail of to express and communicate. In my case, I initially analyzed the Chinese educational discourses and language as the researched object, with humans availing of them as a tool or object. However, my agentive subjectivity as a researcher was overcome when following the dancing wind took me to its historical-etymological definition of “wind blows and insects get germinated and hatched within 8 days,” and other ancient texts like “wind has 8 directions that correspond to 8 musical

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tones and 8 seasonal timings.” Each Chinese character looks familiar to middle schoolers, but when put together, words get stuck in the tracks and the ancient statement doesn’t make any sense to us modern people, imploding our representational mode of signification. Put simply, by reading into the ancient texts, I found myself in the hands of language, not vice versa, overturning my agentive subjectivity and identity. The Chinese notion “wind” language is no longer an object of knowledge but becomes an agentive materiality that demands me to follow and attune to. That is, language, no longer inert things waiting to be interpreted, becomes doings with ontological force that construes and constructs my human subjectivity. To borrow posthuman thinking, language becomes a material thing by itself and takes up an agentive power, like the nonhuman (e.g., trees and animals) and inanimate matter (e.g., furniture). Human agency already constitutes and enfolds both human and nonhuman elements like water, cells, and breathing air. Such distribution of agency to both humans and non-humans calls for a different imagination of the cosmic world or nature, no longer simply “there” or “given” in human perception, but an entangled field wherein cosmic beings, human and non-human are already immanently intra-linked and become distinguishable only as determinately bounded through their relationality. For example, quantum field theory suggests that beings are indeterminate and extend ontologically across different spaces and times as entanglements. Picking up quantum field theory, Barad (2007) develops an agential realism that queers nature/culture, human/nonhuman, material/discursive, micro/ macro binaries, as well as epistemological-ontological-ethical-political separations. With a grounding relational ontology, agential realism depicts entities not as preceding over, but arising from, relational entanglements through agential cuts as a non-causal part of a phenomenon that performs. Seen this way, agency does not reside with this or that entity but shifts to human-nonhuman collectives that never stand still. Through agential cuts, nonhuman things and forces (e.g., atmosphere, food, affect) actively shape and constrain the bodies they encounter, including the humans who never fully possess or control them (see Murris et al., 2022, pp. 28–29). Put differently, the agential cut “enacts a local causal structure in the marking of the measuring instrument (effect) by object (cause), where ‘local’ means within the phenomenon” (Barad, 2007, p. 175). Furthermore, the agential cut does not have to involve humans who enact with will or intention. It can involve matter, the world, or the universe as “[o]nly part of the world can be made intelligible to itself at a time, because the other part of the world has to be the part that it makes a difference to” (Barad, 2007, p. 351). The agential cut is also a temporary separation between entanglements, enacting a temporary resolution between subject and object and creating a temporary determinacy within a phenomenon that is inherently indeterminate ontologically and

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semantically (see Murris et al., 2022, pp. 30–31). Distinct from a Cartesian cut with boundaries in place and entities pre-existing relationships, an agential cut is not an actual cut but a simultaneously cutting together/apart, with the subject and object remaining entangled. Intriguingly, the dancing Chinese wind alerts us to an ancient Chinese “correlative cosmology” (Ames, 2011; Zhao, 2021) that portrays the cosmic world as an immanent field constitutive of an animating-transforming qi (chi – cosmic energy) field and ‘myriad things’ (humans included). Its many animated and focal manifestations are subject to a flux of change. Rather than form into natural kinds of atomistic beings, these “things: are divided into yin-yang qualities and correlational roles. For example, “woman: is less of a fixed entity than the various relational contingencies of wifing, mothering, and daughtering. Furthermore, these cosmic beings, often called “ten thousand myriad things,” are already intra-linked as being ontologically equal and epistemologically different. The below Daoist wind-forest story portrays an image of such a correlative dao-qi field. Taken from the book Zhuangzi, this story is about a master who, by forgetting/losing his mind and body, is authentically exposed to a myriad of wind forms and sounds, all naturally happening in a concerto movement as follows: Once the wind blows-works, then the 10,000 crevices and holes howl forcefully with different sound features …. In the mountain peaks and forests, some giant trees have holes and crevices in the varied shapes of noses, mouths, ears, vases, cups, mortars, mud-holes, puddles. And their winds sound like murmurers, whistlers, yellers, suckers, shouters, wailers, resonators, screamers. The first-earlier gusts of winds resound with a yuuuu and the later-following winds chime in with an ouuuu. With a light-breezy wind there comes a pleasant-light harmonizing chord/movement; with a gale wind, there comes a loud-noisy harmonizing chord/movement. However, when the violent wind comes, the tree crevices become sheer silent as if all stuffed to a limit, and then you start to see the wavering and quivering of the trees (after the limit is transcended). (my translation) With this wind-forest story, the cosmos is basically a pluriverse, not made up of disparate things, but simply a worlding or naturing, “an active, ongoing, auto-generative process as experienced from within it” (Ames, 2011, p. 61). To borrow Barad’s (2007) words, “We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world” (p. 185). That is, meaning doesn’t come from an external source but arises in situ. Furthermore, this wind-forest story gives more nuances to “the dancing wind” as well as my “dancing with the wind,” both of which I conceptualize with generative

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postfoundational force. On the one hand, “wind” has multiple forms and sense as a capricious material force and being, permeable into and immanent with other intra-linking material cosmic beings. It dances with varied tempos, whether harmoniously or not, yet its dancing is not up to humans to decide. It is a materiality that can not only give force to but also attune to other beings. On the other hand, my dancing with the wind indicates my following and attuning to the capriciously dancing wind, in and out of tune, unexpected and unplanned. Both dancing defies a set route or a fixed goal, bearing upon or exhibiting some postfoundational features. Nevertheless, this correlative cosmology foregrounds a relationality between humans’ experience and their lived world, somewhat different than Barad’s agential cuts. Chinese relationality occurs not by bringing humans and their lived world together as two separate domains, but by “deepening the productive continuities” therebetween, which emphasizes the agentive role that humans play in co-flourishing in the world. Yet, such agentive “deepening” and “co-flourishing” doesn’t give full agency to human beings. The former is not the causal effect of human intentions and willpower. Instead, human beings’ agentive power lies in suspending their anthropocentric subjectivity, immersing themselves into the cosmic world as one of the “myriad things” that are ontologically equal. It also lies in their onto-hermeneutically observing, being exposed to, and attuning to the Dao movement as expressed in the entangling-unentangling flux of the “myriad things.” Implications for doing inquiry differently

To reiterate, this paper revisits and entangles my previous research trajectories with the dancing wind as an attempt to evoke some implications for doing postfoundational inquiries, investigating specifically three reorienting questions: Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you overturning and displacing? and How does agency function in your approach? Postfoundational inquiry, as Mazzei & Jackson state in their editors’ Introduction is 1) emergent, 2) responsive to specific (temporary) conditions, and 3) attuned to what has been previously foreclosed to make room for experimentation and creation. Furthermore, it considers the inquirer as constituted by practices of inquiry, rather than a presiding subject or identity or agent ready to pick up some theories and methods. Speaking to these features, I envision “dancing with the wind” in this paper as a postfoundational gesture, foregrounding the dancing “wind” as being dynamic, material, immanent, auto-generative, and capricious, defying any set routes and targets. Seen this way, dancing with the wind provides the following new implications, or rather, considerations and orientation in doing postfoundational inquiry for me. First, a postfoundational line of thinking is not some theory to start with but rather a philosophical orientation with new

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onto-epistemic-ethical significance. For example, the onto-epistemic-ethical is itself entangled and inseparable. When we look at certain phenomena, it is crucial to scrutinize our standing positions and naturalized assumptions, and how to discern an agential cut to start with. Put differently, as a temporary and contingent starting point, it helps to discern some turning points in our unconsciously naturalized humanist research that could possibly implode and displace foundational assumptions to begin anew and think otherwise along a postfoundational direction. Second, postfoundational inquiry attends to materiality as it is the materiality that constitutes the entanglement of our doing and living onto-epistemeethically. The Chinese notion “wind” in my case is no longer an object of knowledge but becomes an agentive materiality that demands me to follow and attune to. That is, wind becomes a newly imagined concept that bears upon philosophical significance and ontological force in guiding and configuring the parameters of my inquiry. Similarly, language becomes more agentive in my writing to the extent that it calls to question from time to time the formal features of our syntax. For example, how can we place objects, knowledge, and non-human materialities in the place of a grammatical subject to enforce and express the ontological doings of material things, body, and matter? Lastly, a postfoundational line of thinking entails an incessant reconsideration of “I/me” (or my agency) as an effect of agential cuts in a temporary phenomenon, cut apart/together from the always performative entangled. My wind inquiry for example turns me into a Daoist onto-un-learner, taken from a Dao De Jing statement, “a follower of learning gains whereas a follower of dao loses, losing upon losing reaches wuwei (nonaction), and wuwei (nonaction) to wubuwei (non–non-action, i.e., full activity” (Chapter 48). I use “unlearning” to paraphrase the notion of losing, forgetting, or letting go, which indicates a suspension or bracketing of the knowledge, skills, viewpoints, values, identity, will, or intention subsistent in a foundational and instrumental learning logic. That is, a follower of dao lets go of such added-on baggage and instead follows, attunes to, and co-responds to the dao movement immanent in a dynamic relationality of myriad things (humans included) in the cosmos, putting me in an incessant re-turning process (Zhao, 2019c). References Ames, R. T. (2011). Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Barad, K. M. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1966/1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

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Heidegger, M. (1978). Letter on humanism. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Basic Writings (pp. 213– 265). London: Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1967). What Is a Thing? (W. B. Barton, Jr. and V. Deutsch Trans. with an analysis by E. T. Gendlin.). Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company. Heidegger, M. (1966). Spiegel interview with Martin Heidegger. Trans. by W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us.” In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (1981) (pp. 45–67). Chicago: Precedent Publishing. Murris, K. (Ed.) (2022). A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research across Disciplines. New York: Routledge. Zhao, W. (2019a). China’s Education, Curriculum Knowledge, and Cultural Inscriptions: Dancing with The Wind. New York and London: Routledge. Zhao, W. (2019b). Re-invigorating the being of language in international education: Unpacking Confucius’ ‘wind-pedagogy’ in Yijing as an exemplar. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 40(4), 474–486. Zhao, W. (2019c). Daoist onto-un-learning as a radical form of study: Re-imagining learning and study from an Eastern perspective. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38(3), 261–273. Zhao, W. (2021). Eastern Ethico-Onto-Epistemologies as a Diffracting Return: Implications for Post-Qualitative Pedagogy and Research. In Murris, K. (Ed.), Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide, pp. 85–98. New York and London: Routledge.

15 MULTIPLE STORYING OF CRISIS AND HOPE Feminist new materialisms as an emergent ethicoonto-epistemology of multiple messmates at different scales Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Teresa Elkin Postila

Introduction

In this chapter, we will offer an example of multiple storying as a patchwork, or a rush of stories as Anna L. Tsing (2015) has called it. The text consists of patches of theory, methodological propositions, and patches of documentation from events of inquiry, as well as photographic articulations taken by children from the collaborative inquiries in a research-project led by Teresa Elkin Postila (2019, 2021a, 2021b, 2023). Presenting multiple storying means diverging somewhat from the academic text as usual, while nevertheless complying with a traditional academic text practice of arguing for, in this case, a specific trajectory of postfoundational Feminist New Materialisms inquiry (henceforth FNM). Drawing from Karen Barad’s (2007) theorizing, we propose an emergent ethico-onto-epistemology, underpinned by ontological relationality, theorized by Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2023), as a slight but critical difference from a relational ontology (Law, 2004). The meaning of these concepts, among others, will be discussed and demonstrated in the upcoming multiple storying. An inquiry of this kind, both in-situ collaborative inquiries, and as an academic text-production, necessarily involves multiple messmates (Haraway, 2008) – while focusing on a shared matter of concern (Stengers, 2010). The concerns of the (In)finite water inquiries emerged from preschool children’s worries and questions about water, during periods of heavy rainfall, drought, and water scarcity in their environment in the Stockholm Archipelago  – due to climate change (cf., Strandmark, 2017). With these concerns as points of departure, Elkin Postila undertook 32 weeks of collaborative inquiries with preschool children, water, a nearby creek, the underground water- and sewage-pipe systems, water-engineers, and multiple other DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-23

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human and more-than-human material messmates. As this chapter unfolds, the involved multiple messmates are presented as co-constitutive agents of a natureculture collaborative knowledge production (Haraway, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2017). Methodologically, the inquiries during the (In)finite water project evolved as the process went along, following traces of worry, curiosity, wonder, interferences, and unexpected turns of events. In these emergent ethico-ontoepistemological collaborative explorations, active forces of intentional human interferences were enacted into the already ongoing intra-actions among multiple messmates (cf., Colebrook, 2014; Lenz Taguchi, 2017). The researcher performs what Karen Barad (2007) calls agential cuts when planning and enacting such interferences, but is nevertheless perceived as decentered vis-à-vis forces of ongoing interferences and intra-acting forces among other human and more-than-human agents (Colebrook, 2014). Thus, the human messmate-researcher cannot be understood as the only possible starting point of knowing during events of inquiry, as feminist postfoundational science theorists have argued for three decades. However, as authors, we inevitably remain the constructors of the articulations of events presented here as multiple storying. Our main source of inspiration is the post-anthropological work of Anna L. Tsing, and especially The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015). Her collaborations with Donna Haraway during the last 25 years have advanced Haraway’s (2008, 2016) methodologies of SF: as in Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figuring, Scientific Facts, So Far, etc. SF is equally important for our thinking and doing, which we take to be postfoundational academic work. The postfoundational in our feminist new materialist storytelling approach

‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with)’ /…/ it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with /…/ what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) The quote by Haraway with reference to Marilyn Strathern (1990) can, in the precarious contemporary condition, be read as an urgent outcry in response to a globally shared crisis of climate change and an accelerated extinction of species. It matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with, but also, what stories we tell about feminist, racialized, and ethnic obstructions, and about provocations against democracy. We also read the quote in relation to the way feminist scholars, for almost 40 years have challenged taken-for-granted, foundational ways of knowing from

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a “natural” and “objective” position from “nowhere;” i.e., “the God Trick” (Haraway, 1988). “Nowhere” centers the hu(M)an and constitutes a problematic anthropocentrism; Haraway and her fellow feminist science theory scholars have inspired subsequent FNM scholars to equally contest (Braidotti, 2022). The FNM turn to ontology (e.g., Hekman, 2010) has, however, further problematized anthropocentrism with reference not only to naturalist forms of inquiry but also to phenomenological, critical, and poststructuralist forms of inquiry that center human experiences, culture, language, and discourse (e.g., Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2007). We have taken up the work of feminist science theorists Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Isabelle Stengers, and the post-anthropologist Anna L. Tsing, and their respective scholarship matters to how we read the quote above in a manner that carefully avoids a practice based on negations: i.e., stating what something is not to make your point. This practice, which has been helpful for poststructural and critical theorizing, constitutes a problematic anti-foundational, anti-humanism, anti-(natural)science, and thus an anti-realist stance (e.g., Bryant, et al., 2011; Haraway, 1985; Harding, 2015). It forms the basis of a negative ontology, which undermines the possibilities of an ontology of the affirmative, indeterminable, and evades the possibilities of imagining stories yet untold. Following Haraway’s thinking in her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), we read the above quote as an inventive escape from a negative logic and anti-sciencerealist stance, to rather engage in multi-disciplinary, post-critical, situated, and affirmative productions of multiple forms of knowing (cf. Haraway, 2008, 2016; Tsing, 2015). The quote can help us imagine multiple ways of thinking, knowing, relating, and storying: some of which might produce innovative technologies, which in another space-time situatedness might become destructive war machines (Haraway, 1985). Haraway articulated multiple situated versions of the real in her manifesto and showed how each of them mattered in different ways for different agents, in situated socio-historical and material conditions. The Cyborg Manifesto was written in a manner as to avoid producing new binaries to be transgressed into an imagined “third.” which immediately risks becoming the new theory or ontology of the One. This can be summarized in the key phrase: “one is too few, but two are too many” (Haraway, 1985, p. 177). In the context of FNM theorizing, this also applies to some versions of a relational ontology and some versions of immanent ontologies. Claire Colebrook (2014) has warned us that presenting ontology in unproblematized fashions as an ecology and autopoietic system of interconnected life risks resurrecting a metaphysics of the One. The One, binaries, and dichotomies can, however, be escaped by identifying, accepting, and living-with the mess and the multiplicity of ways of knowing and worlding, as Haraway (2016)

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suggests. This is a mess that we need to navigate in and live with, as ethically as we possibly can, on behalf of and together with other concerned, situated messmates. In this chapter, we will offer multiple storying of theory and knowing produced during the (In)finite water inquiries – against the background of considering the postfoundational as a multiplicity of messmates in intra-action, and co-constitutive messy relations, to simultaneously navigate, contest, and be in an affirmative and creative production with. The storying presented below in italics are rewritten versions of Elkin Postila’s researcherprocess-documentations with references to scientific sources inserted. The photographic images were taken by preschool children and arranged by Elkin Postila with consent to be published from children and guardians. We also present seven temporal methodological propositions to think and act with, while planning and enacting a collaborative, emergent ethico-ontoepistemological inquiry. These propositions will be inserted as scattered bulleted points among patches of theory, and storying. It is the patchiness (Tsing, 2015) – i.e., the mix of theory, bulleted point propositions, and the storying, including the photographic articulations from the (In)finite water inquiries – that demonstrates what multiple storying might involve: and how the reading and/or telling of a rush of stories, according to Tsing (2015, p. 37), constitutes a postfoundational approach. Multiple storying as co-emerging knowledge productions among multiple messmates in ontological relationality

The postfoundational, in line with Haraway’s (2016) quote above, necessarily involves how we think, know, and tell stories of knowing in various ways. This includes stories about how knowledge and worlds (i.e., realities) are produced, and who or what can be understood to take part in such situated productions of knowing.

• Figure out the collective problem of concern (Stengers, 2010) and who or what is involved. The children paid much attention to their bodily fluids, water-closets that disposed of these fluids and matter, and to the water itself – in the various forms available to them inside and outside the preschool. Where does the water take our pee and poop? Where does the rain go after the heavy rainfall? Where does the tap-water come from? Is it the same water as in the toilet? Facts about the Swedish production-system of drinking water, and that drinking water is used to flush toilets and wash clothes, only to re-enter the hydrosocial cycle (Linton & Budds, 2014) and become drinking water once

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more, sparked humorous and curious questions and worried concerns. These also concerned the various life worlds and living conditions of water in seas, rivers, creeks, and systems of technologies of drinking water-production and sewage-treatment plants. The children wanted to understand how the watermessmate at these different scales is connected to its ongoing life-sustaining intra-actions in and outside their own bodies. They posed questions about bacteria, pollution, and contamination on the scale of the molecular, and wondered how what they came to know on the scale of both the molecular and the sea-scape affected species with whom they had everyday faceto-face relations: frogs, birds, trees, grass, plants, and pets (Haraway, 2008; Tsing, 2015). These concerns were highlighted in May, as a period of serious drought unusually hit this area of the Archipelagos. And then, in June came the heavy rainfalls, causing serious flooding, affecting the living conditions of everything and everyone in different ways. So, who and what can take part in productions of knowing? One of the most momentous theoretical insights from our early readings of Karen Barad (2007) is the decisive message that knowledge is produced as any kind of agent is involved in the process of mutual intelligible-making with other agents. This applies equally to the intentional knowledge production taking place with/in scientific research apparatuses, and to any other already existing entanglement or assemblage of multiple messmates (cf. Lenz Taguchi, 2017). Importantly, a messmate also refers to cultural discourse, ideas, notions, works of art, scientific facts, bodies and agents of matter, and living species of various kinds. In the ongoing materialdiscursive (Barad, 2007) and natureculture (Haraway, 1985) intra-actions, neither matter nor discourse, nature nor culture, is taken to precede the other: they co-exist, are co-constituted, and are co-constituting of each other (Barad, 2007, p. 185). From this follows, as Barad (2007) writes, that “the practices of knowing cannot fully be claimed as a[n] [exclusively] human practice” (p. 185).

• Figure out who or what the collaborator messmates (Haraway, 2008) are at different scales (Tsing, 2015). Water, the powerful and precarious messmate of these inquiries, makes up all living species and bodies, in the past, present, and future. Bodies and species ingest and discharge water (Chen et al., 2013). The water that we socially, technically, and chemically construct as drinking tap water may have been incorporated long ago in a dinosaur or been released as wee from grandma’s body. The sum of water is constant (cf. Oki & Kanee, 2006). It is thus reused, recycled in its circular movements, and taking numerous shapes and forms, through and with human and more-than-human bodies and matter, over time and space. When approaching this perishable taken-for-granted entity, and its multi-ontological forms and states, it demands us to notice, pay attention to, and engage with multiple ontologies and their relations.

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Photo-collage 1 The weeks following the heavy rainfalls, human water-engineer messmates were invited into the collaborations, and they opened manhole covers to allow access to the underworld of the complex tunnel systems perforating this part of Sweden’s most heavily urbanized areas. Children were encouraged to follow green-glowing coloring-substances and robot-messmates to detect clogging in the system from one manhole to the other. They first noticed and then carefully listened to the water’s different ways of sonically communicating its force, its ravaging, and its relative depth and amount. This had the water technicians reconnected with their own embodied knowledge and professional practices of using their hearing as a taken for granted daily practice to evaluate the conditions in the underground system. All forms and kinds of messmates are producers of knowing, given their specific ontological life circumstances: water in different forms and in different historical times and places, manhole covers, tunnels with their green-glowing-coloring-substances, AI robots, human hearing, and sonic articulations. Barad (2007) tell that the practices of knowing are not limited to humans, and Tsing (2015), thinking along the same lines, states that “making worlds is not limited to humans:” [A]ll organisms make ecological living spaces, altering earth, air, and water /…/ In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. /…/ Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. (p. 22) What Tsing states above overlaps with both her and our readings of the biologist Lynn Margulis (1998), who shows that “there is no clear separation between the organic and inorganic, between an organism and its environment”: because organisms have the capacities of creating and transforming

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their living environments, as discussed so well by Žukauskaitė (2020, p. 144). Margulis’ (1998), but also Haraway’s (2016) respective definitions of the concept of sympoiesis can be summarized as “making-with” or “worlding-with” in situated contexts that vary over scales of time and space. This definition ontologically constitutes a contrast to the idea of a self-sustaining and selforganizing system in relative equilibrium (Maturana & Varela, 1980). Relationality, in Margulis’ and Haraway’s way of theorizing, based on knowing from biological evolution, opens up for interferences and chance causing different trajectories of developments, and shaping very different living arrangements, as Tsing (2015) calls them. Margulis’ (1988) arguments of a “planetary cognition” with various kinds and forms of consciousness ascribed to all bodies and matter – from living cells to societies – challenges anthropocentrism and decenters the human thinking mind as an exclusive and centered knower – within both naturalist, phenomenological and poststructuralist epistemologies – but without dismissing the strong force and impact of human discursive thinking in its relations with other embodied forms of cognition (cf. Lenz Taguchi, 2017, 2022). During the engagements with the water-engineer’s use of coloringsubstances and robot messmates, the children developed an intimate sonar noticing of the various “voices” of water, due to water-volumes, force, and movements. This evoked critical engagements when noticing the relative absences of water during a period of drought, and thus the more frequent echoing silences in the tunnels. The attention was drawn to aspects of water scarcity: not just in relation to what that meant for humans but for all other messmates. The arts of noticing and awareness of co-constitutive contaminations had come to the children’s critical attention.

Photo-collage 2 The noticing of water-absences was observed in the greenery, as well as the life of insects, frogs and toads, in the preschool yard and in and around

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the close-by creek. This noticing involved paying sonic attention to the vulnerability of species of greenery. Attention was drawn to the sonic play of leaves in the surrounding aspens when leaves were dry, which differed a lot from their sonic play after rainfall. Messmates such as frogs’ and toads’ watery bodies were observed to transform as they presented a physiological stressed state of being, caused by drought (Rollins-Smith, 2017). This noticing was critically connected to the extensive daily watering of a nearby golf course, which spurred emotional, critical, and ethical responses to further engage and stay with. Children’s articulations during play, drawings, and in verbal discussions at lunch erupted. This enhanced educators to want to learn more. Educators also identified the need to talk to parents about the children’s concerns and how these might play out and could be processed in the family.

• Figure out the various scales (Tsing, 2015) of knowledge production (epistemologies) that the collaborative problem needs to engage with and how knowing at different scales make-themselves-intelligible (Barad, 2007) to each other. If we think about species making themselves intelligible to each other in different ways, depending on each of their life conditions and living arrangements, along the lines of thought from Barad, Haraway, Margulis, and Tsing, it becomes productive to talk in terms of ontological relationality, in Lenz Taguchi’s (2022) conceptualizing. Ontological relationality differs from a relational ontology, as understood in terms of a flat ontology and/or an all-encompassing, auto-poetic, and self-sustaining system of interconnection (Maturana  & Varela, 1980). Ontological relationality acknowledges the presence of a multiplicity of simultaneous ontologies (or realities) as significant otherness (i.e., life-world-environments and life conditions) at different scales (Tsing, 2015). These are in intelligiblemaking relations (but also in non-direct, and merely indirect relations) of different intensities and force, and involving relations at, between, and traversing different scales (Bryant et al., 2011; Stengers, 2010; Lenz Taguchi, 2017; Tsing, 2015). Importantly, ontological relationality means conceiving each species’ or matter’s (organic or inorganic) different form of life conditions and living arrangements as encounters between different ontologies (cf. Tsing, 2015). The above is demonstrated in Lenz Taguchi’s (2022) discussion of octopus-human relations as narrated and depicted in the documentary film My Octopus Teacher.1 Moreover, this applies not only to multiple messmates of species, bodies, or matter as exemplified above but also across multiple forms of knowing: embodied, affective knowing produced by different organic and inorganic bodies/matter, and scientific facts, derived from all different kinds of epistemologies as they are underpinned by various ontologies (cf., Lenz Taguchi, 2017). In the (In)finite water inquiries, these messmate-facts

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consisted of facts about the chemistry of water, geology, water engineering, AI technologies, different species life conditions (frogs, insects, trees, grass, etc.). This logic of the multiple, as a patchwork of different ontological stories, and thus a version of the real, and what they might be able to produce together, is what ontological relationality is about. The precariousness of water scarcity emerged as an urgent matter of concern during the (In)finite water inquiries to be actively dealt with. Scientific facts as new messmates encountered children’s lived, bodily experiences of living, or visiting friends, in archipelago summer houses in areas with constant water scarcity: houses without running indoor-water or water-toilets, but with outdoor water-pumps and outhouses only. All of this provoked imaginary future existential scenarios, and new, both critical and affirmative, and creative, stories of knowing, which were articulated during play, everyday situations, as well as during project-discussions. In the case of the (In)finite water inquiries, the researcher, with her embodied scientific facts as a geo-scientist, invited children as situated knowers with their concerns, worries, and questions about water in their environment. Queries that depend on their specific life circumstances as human beings, having to do with their embodied needs, but also affection to, and experiences of, water for play, pleasure, and transport. These life conditions and circumstances clearly differ from that of water itself – water, about which humans know something, but far from everything. Water has been forced into material-discursively constructed drinking water and sewage infrastructures to fit human local needs for thousands of years. Humans have observed the behavior and force of water to explore the possibilities of various forms of mutually intelligible-making collaborations in situated material environments for human (cultural) purposes. In Stockholm, this infrastructure is relatively young but has not been modernized since the early 18th century in some parts of the city. This means that the assemblage, or apparatus of knowing (Barad, 2007), that makes up the hydrosocial cycle (Linton & Budds, 2014) – by which water and society make and remake each other – can be explored in a multiplicity of ways and considering various messmate life conditions. Each of these messmates produces its own articulation or story, as either an epistemological form of knowledge production by a human or as a sound or absence of a specific sonic-play as water.

• Figure out the situatedness and space-time-mattering (Barad, 2007) life conditions for the multiple messmates involved at different scales (Tsing, 2015).

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Photo-collage 3 As the inquiries inside and outside of the preschool proceeded, a specific question of urgency surfaced about how the past and present and future is entangled in the space-time-mattering assemblage of the drinking-water and sewage-treatment systems. A very strong sense of wonder was sparked by the complex underground system of pipes and tunnels, making up the natureculture collaborative intelligible-making hydrosocial cycle system. An essential part of this system is basically out of sight in its underground system, which intrigued the children’s imaginative, speculative, humoristic, and contra-factual thinking. And yet, it is equally present and tangible in its intraaction with our bodies as we go about our daily habits in bathrooms and kitchens. We are entangled with this nature-culture collaborator-messmate, which maintains contemporary society as we live it.

• Figure out how ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007) as an emergent, making-it-up-as-you-go kind of knowledge production can be productive of collaborative knowing in difference-making endeavors. The space-time-mattering co-constituting facts of the Stockholm underground water- and sewage system history made itself heard, seen, and present, after extreme rainfalls in the area that flooded the streets and some basements of homes of children. The invited municipality water-engineers illustrated how flooding occurs, showing the children that the width of the tunnels is constructed based on a calculation to predict how much water these wide waste-water tunnels can transport during a flooding. However, the water will

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inevitably also run above ground, due to the quantity, intensity, and force of the downfall. This means that the water treatment plants are unable to treat all water. Some of the wastewater enters the Baltic Sea untreated and uncleansed. Such scientific facts as intra-acting messmates, compelled both fascinations, fear, and care for the water and its life conditions: other messmates, such as fish, birds, plants, and humans. Critiques in relation to the vulnerability, resources, production, and consumption of water in today’s societies were articulated by the children, addressing the water-engineers, the researcher, and other adults. Critiques that had to be taken seriously and be actively dealt with, without putting the responsibility on the children as the minor human messmates they actually are in this complex natureculture assemblage.

• Figure out how to attend to an affirmative critique of the workings of human socio-material and historical power/knowledge intra-actions (Åsberg, Thiele, van der Tuin, 2015) taking place at multiple scales and with multiple agents involved (Haraway, 2016; Tsing, 2015).

Photo-collage 4 The subtle conditions of the production of knowing as a mutual, intelligiblemaking process in assemblages of multiple messmates are why Barad (2007) writes about any kind of inquiry in terms of an ethico-onto-epistemology. Barad emphasizes ethics as the necessary state of consciousness of an inquirer, who always enters into practices of inquiry accompanied by a multiplicity of messmates of embodied experiences and prior knowing. Not the least, is the researcher accompanied by her own socio-historically situated intentions, political or personal desires and wants, and the forcefulness of her scientific beliefs and arguments (Åsberg, Thiele & van der Tuin, 2015).

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These are undoubtedly forceful messmates in the mix of intelligible-making natureculture knowledge productions (c.f. Lenz Taguchi, 2017). Barad, Haraway, and Tsing all, albeit mostly indirectly, refer to the operations of these in terms of the knowledge/power bind (Foucault, 1980). The power/knowledge bind makes us critically aware of the forceful human involvement in the present state of precarity. “Precarity is the condition of our time,” explains Tsing (2015), and adds: [W]hat if our time is ripe for sensing precarity? What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the center of the systematicity we seek? (p. 20) An emergent ethico-onto-epistemology implies that knowing and the production of reality are simultaneously produced in an emerging and evolving process, “made up as we go.” As we have shown, we thereby rely heavily on the theorizing of Barad’s (2007) concepts: onto-epistemology and space-timemattering. Onto-epistemology, as referring to the entangled emergence of knowing-being, as mutual intelligible-making processes that alter life worlds and life conditions at different scales (Lenz Taguchi, 2022). And space-timemattering, as activating conditions of time and space as crucial for the intraactivities and transformations that take place, or do not, in that emergence of reality-creating-knowing.

• Figure out how the art of noticing (Tsing, 2015) in the onto-epistemological process of “making-it-up-as-you-go,” and how it can be a productive force in inquiry and in the story-telling practice that constitutes a rush of stories (Tsing, 2015). When enacting this kind of emergent inquiry, the task is to practice a collaborative and relational art of noticing of how the messmates at different scales intra-act, contaminate each other, and make knowing realities (worlding) together (Tsing, 2015). An art of noticing can be about paying attention to, and acknowledging the mundane everyday life conditions of human bodily routines as connected, and as intra-acting with problems at other scales. It involves questions, facts, and explorations at various scales, always in the process of making themselves intelligible to one-another, or not. The (In) finite water inquiries started with the curiosity and fascination that children have with the fluids of their own bodies, and how those fluids of different forms and densities, and paper, are all mixed with water and flushed away somewhere. These everyday, mundane intra-activities and relations between multiple messmates of different kinds and at different scales enabled different arts of noticing. Each of these would produce different kinds of articulations

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in their intelligible-making worlding-knowing processes. Multiple storying depends on how the involved messmates articulate themselves in ways that the human researcher eventually can pick up and represent as scientific work: such as sonic articulations taped by a recorder or expressed by vocal cords; drawings and maps of underground systems; photographs; children’s documented questions to adults; and propositions of how things in this world might change and be otherwise. Hence, the scientific materializations, or analysis if you will, of emergent ethico-onto-epistemological inquiries are produced as a patchwork of multiple forms of intra-acting storying (Tsing, 2015). This corresponds to how the FNM scholars Cecilia Åsberg, Kathrin Thiele, and Iris van der Tuin (2015) have put an emphasis on the possibilities of multitheoretical productions of knowing in mixed materializations in FNM scholarship; including art, activism, fiction, and poetry. Irrespective of the forms of articulation of multiple storying, the aim is the production of differing or difference (Braidotti, 2022); that is, a difference to how the problem of concern is perceived, conceptualized, or understood to act from (c.f. Lenz Taguchi, 2017, 2022). For this to happen, a multiplicity of versions of the problem is needed in order to make new connections and open up for the (im)possible and the transformative new (Åsberg, Thiele & Van der Tuin, 2015; Stengers, 2010). Multiple storying in closing

The rush of stories running through this chapter conveys what it might be to live in the Anthropocene at this particular place and in this particular time, and as a particular messmate, whether that messmate is water, sewage, a manhole-cover, a child, a water-engineer, or a researcher. Together, they produce situated natureculture articulated stories that we argue classify as what Harding (2016) calls “strong objectivity.” Strong objectivity, as Harding (2015, p. 50) writes, aims to harmonize a multiplicity of useful techniques and knowings in order to tell patches of multiple realities – but without aspiring to tell a story or “theory of everything,” or the One (Haraway, 1985). The In(finite) water emergent ethico-onto-epistemological collaborative inquiries produce together multiple storying about the natureculture hydrosocial cycle and water’s infrastructure, in a situated context of multiple affected messmates. In the context of this chapter, we, as scholars of early childhood education, have chosen to put an emphasis on the traces and imprints of children’s – albeit human but indeed minoritarian messmates – situated, collaborative engagements with other messmates. And with human intimate knowing comes response-ability (Haraway, 2008, 2016). To respond to, act, and care for, emerged as emotional engagements of anger, sadness, fright, hopelessness, fighting spirit, and action, in this emergent collaborative knowledge production of multiple messmates.

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So, what can this kind of collaborative and emergent form of knowledge production do, as these inquiries produce critical worlding-knowing, but also, hopefully, glimpses of hope? Hope, for responsible and response-able messmate adults to take up, take in, and act upon. As an effect of the engagements with preschool children and water as primary messmates during the (In)finite water inquiries, municipal waterengineers and water technicians collaborated with Elkin Postila to initiate a version of a citizen science project in this region of Stockholm. The focus of this project is to continue collaborations with young children and their educators in preschools. It involves children and educators in observing and testing the water in the regions’ stormwater ponds on a regular basis. These municipality ponds collect rainwater and runoff water after heavy rainfalls from roads, parking lots, and buildings, and became sites of regular visits for the children who were engaged in the (In)finite water inquiries. Involving children and preschool staff in such a citizen science project produces a sense of hope when contributing in a collaborative engagement to an issue of joint concern. To summarize

In this chapter, we have offered multiple storying as our take on how a post-anthropocentric form of feminist new materialist educational inquiry might be performed in terms of an emergent ethico-onto-epistemology. The reorienting questions of How do you decenter human tendencies? and How do you make it up as you go? have guided our postfoundational approach. Post-anthropocentrism implies efforts to decenter human tendencies; this implication is highlighted throughout the chapter as we emphasize the enactment of a collaborative inquiry involving multiple messmates. Multiplicity, in this specific sense, necessarily decenters the human as the starting point of knowledge production. Moreover, we emphasize the fact that all messmate agents are producers of knowing as a part of their particular ontological life circumstances: whether extremely remote or immediately, all messmate agents are entangled with human forms of knowledge productions in the age of the Anthropocene. Due to the forcefulness of human discursive power-productions in the power/knowledge bind (Foucault, 1980), we make it our task to point out that our inquiry needs to bring specific attention to, as well as critique, what is produced in specific intra-actions where humans and human knowledge/power productions are most obviously involved. As for the emergence of this kind of postfoundational inquiry: this is all about the evolving process of thinking-doing as you go about your collaborative explorations, acknowledging and working with the heat of the frictions (Tsing, 2005). We “make it up as we go” in various material life-circumstantial

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and material-discursive encounters, and in the emerging new queries that evolve in these frictions. So, what might be produced, and what are we inventing in this process? It isn’t really a question of inventing, but rather a question of collaborative production of other or new possible ways of knowing in the encounter between involved messmates. This production will always depend on where we (responsibly) steer our attention and, so to speak, make our agential cut as researcher and/or author (Barad, 2007). Knowledge production in any form will always, in the way we see it, be an emergent method/methodology where doing, knowing, being affected, and living in specific life circumstances are co-constituted in an entangled production. Hence, we see no sense in further maintaining an idea of doing inquiry without method, as St. Pierre (2011) has suggested. It would perhaps be better to talk in terms of post-method and post-methodologies as postfoundational approaches. Doing multiple storying, or a rush of stories (Tsing, 2015), constitutes for us such emerging post-methods-methodologies. The multiple storying provided in this chapter composes for us, just as much an affirmative critique, as a hope of creativity and possible alternative realities. At least, our hope is that this form of multiple storying of being and knowing with and of the world in the Anthropocene might become productive of new potential engagements, questions, and concerns of children, families, teachers, municipality engineers, and technicians. Because, these are stories in need of articulation in many different ways if they are to be seriously addressed in local, national, and global policies – to be acted upon. Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Anna Palmer for her creative feedback on this text, and the editors for their insightful reviews. Note 1 The film has been produced by Netflix and is directed by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed.

References Alaimo, S., & Hekman, S. J. (Eds.). (2008). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Asberg, C., Thiele, K., & Van der Tuin, I. (2015). Speculative before the turn: Reintroducing feminist materialist performativity. Cultural Studies Review, 21(2), 145–172. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2022). Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge & Medford: Polity Press.

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Bryant, L., Srnicek, N., & Harman, G. (2011). Towards a Speculative Philosophy/The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: RE-Press. Chen, C., MacLeod, J., & Neimanis, A. (Eds.). (2013). Thinking with Water. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP. Colebrook, C. (2014). Sex after Life: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 2. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Elkin Postila, T. (2019). Water as method: Explorations of locally situated environmental issues together with preschool children. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), 222–229. Elkin Postila, T. (2021a). (O)ändligt vatten. En studie om hur förskolebarn som kännare engageras i samhälleliga miljöfrågor. [(In)finite water. A study of how preschool children as connoisseurs engage in social environmental issues.]. PhD Thesis, Stockholm University. Elkin Postila, T. (2021b). Stories of water: preschool children’s engagement with water purification. Cultural Studies of Science Education. (Online First) https://doi. org/10.1007/s11422-021-10075-3 Elkin Postila, T. (2023). An ecology of practices – The hydrosocial cycle as a matter of concern in preschool children’s explorations. Nordisk barnehageforskning. Nordic Early Childhood Educational Research, 20 (4), 25–42. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972– 1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshal Joh Mepham and Kate Sober. New York: Pantheon. Haraway, D. (1985). Manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the 1980s. Socialist Review, 80, 65–108. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble. Makin Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press. Hekman, S. (2010). The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harding, S. (2015). Objectivity & Diversity. Another Logic of Scientific Research. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2017). “This is not a photograph of a fetus”: A feminist reconfiguration of the concept of posthumanism as the ultrasoundfetusimage. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(9), 699–710. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417732644 Lenz Taguchi, H. (2022). Feminist new materialism: A story of different ways of articulating octopus-human and nature-culture ontologies. Key-note Address AMOS (After Method in Organizational Studies), June 17th 2022 Västerås, Sweden. Linton, J., & Budds, J. (2014). The hydrosocial cycle: Defining and mobilizing a relational-dialectical approach to water. Geoforum, 57, 170–180. Margulis, L., (1998). Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Amherst, MA: Basic Books. Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston, MA: Reidel) Oki, T., & Kanee, S. (2006). Global hydrological cycles and world water resources. Science, 313(5790), 1068–1072.

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Rollins-Smith, L. A. (2017). Amphibian immunity-stress, disease, and climate change. Developmental & Comparative Immunology, 66, 111–119. St.Pierre, E. A. (2011) Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.). Sage Handbook of Qualitative Inquiry (4th ed., pp. 611–635). Los Angeles, CA: Sage. Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Strandmark, A. (2017). Baltic shore-lands facing climate change. PhD Thesis: Stockholm University. Strathern, M. (1990). The Gender of the Gift. Berkley: University of California Press. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press. Žukauskaitė, A. (2020). Gaia theory: Between autopoiesis and sympoiesis. Problemos, 98, 141–153.

16 TRANSVERSAL INQUIRY The “adventure of the involuntary” Maggie MacLure

Introduction

How might the new be invented, or brought forth, given that the researcher’s ingenuity does not predate, warrant, or predict events, but is part of their emergence? This chapter draws on Deleuzian philosophy to explore the question of how an immanent ontology might be actualized in postfoundational practice. It is influenced by the concept of “transversality” as this appears in Deleuze’s (2000) work Proust and Signs.1 It includes some examples from my own and others’ research. These examples show how postfoundational methodology might transform the work of empirical research. They also testify to the transversal power of examples themselves, which contain folded within them the potential for unexpected connections. As I have suggested elsewhere, a transversal method might look more like divination than interpretation (MacLure, 2021), involving a patient attentiveness to the forces that are coalescing in, and as events in order to creatively intervene in their unfolding and follow the transversal connections that they afford. This requires us to become, and to remain open to, the incursion of something that can be sensed, even though it is not conventionally meaningful, knowable, or representable. From the list offered by the editors, this chapter is animated by the following reorienting questions. They are intricately implicated in one another:

• Where do you start – how do you begin? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability?

• How do you make it up as you go? What are you inventing – how do you inquire without method?

• How do you de-center human tendencies? DOI: 10.4324/9781003298519-24

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• What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual? This chapter resists, however, any notion of invention as “making it up as you go” (see second question above) if this is understood as unconstrained “play.” It advocates practices that are indeed open to the play of chance but are also constrained by an encounter that “forces us to think” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 12). It is this combination of chance and constraint that, for Deleuze, contains the germ of an answer to the question above, of “Where do you start?” within an immanent ontology. This question is pressing for postfoundational inquiry, given that we cannot count on the comforts of structure and conventional method to provide our starting points, trace our paths, and guarantee our truths. Where to start?

We tend to think of the world as organized in hierarchies of significance, in principle at least. Things and concepts relate to one another according to what they hold in common and where they belong in an order of importance: from general to particular, height to depth, abstract to concrete, mind to body, ideology to illusion, and so on. This conceptual architecture houses many variants of conventional qualitative method and provides researchers with their starting points; or at least, it indicates how to start. It tells us how to think about the inquiry ahead and sets us off on the dull adventure of gathering stuff (data, ideas, experiences, etc.), to be sifted and sorted into themes or categories based on relations of hierarchy and resemblance (this is an example of a more general theme; these items belong together under that code ….). This often leaves us dissatisfied when things fail to exhibit these orderly relations. We feel disconcerted when the patterns we seek and the unities we strive for are messed up by material that obscures generalization, or deflects explanation, or confounds boundaries – between, for instance, matter and ideas, thinking and feeling, language and the body, human and nonhuman. You could say that method’s vocation is to manage such disappointments: to erase or side-line the seemingly superficial so that we can see through or behind or above it to something deeper, truer, bigger. Most significantly perhaps, the conventional model of inquiry installs the researcher as the self-knowing subject, able to adopt a position outside or above the field of inquiry in order to master it, even when we also claim the benefits of immersion in that very field. In terms of getting started, there are two big challenges for immanent inquiry therefore: to think without the predictive scaffolding of hierarchical relationality and to disabuse ourselves of the conviction that we are the owners and the progenitors of our own decisions – that they are born within us and are ours.

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Rather than relying on human intentionality or a general Will-to-Truth, Deleuze argues that there must be something both involuntary and necessary at the starting point for thought. We need to be forced to think by an unanticipated encounter. It is this double thematic of constraint and chance that sets thought in motion, and this always involves a certain violence: “We search for truth only when we are determined to do so in terms of a concrete situation, when we undergo a kind of violence” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 11). Intelligence is not primary therefore but always “comes after,” awakened by the impression left by an encounter or the movement of desire. In previous work I have written of the “glow” in somewhat similar terms, in the context of encounters with qualitative data (MacLure, 2013): an incipient sensing, unwilled and prior to thought, out of which new connections and resonances begin to unfold. But perhaps “glow” suggests too gentle a shock to thought, in contrast to the more emphatic disorientation of the Deleuzian “violence.” And perhaps the idea of the glow retains unwelcome traces of human subjectivity, suggesting an impression felt and validated “inside” the boundaries of a still-intact human body. Nevertheless, both concepts posit something pre-personal and involuntary as a prerequisite and a provocation to thought. When we undergo the violence (or the glow) of an encounter, our sense of agency and intentionality is perturbed, “as if we have chosen something that has chosen us” (MacLure, 2013, p. 661). Deleuze envisages an activity of “pure interpreting, a pure choosing that has no more subject than it has object, because it chooses the interpreter no less than the thing to interpret” (2000, p. 83; original emphasis). Deleuze discusses Proust’s famous example of the taste of a madeleine, which conjured childhood experiences of tasting his aunt’s tea-soaked madeleine on long-gone Sunday mornings in the town of Combray. Both subject and object are displaced in such involuntary associations. The subject/narrator no longer chooses in the conventional sense. And the relation between the two sensations is not one of external resemblance, in which one comes to represent the other, but rather of an indefinable quality common to both. Moreover, the involuntary association does not merely recall or invoke the past Combray as a context for a present sensation. The memory internalizes and envelops the difference between the two occasions, allowing the town of Combray itself to unfold before the narrator, like little Japanese paper flowers in water. This is not Combray as it was ever actually experienced however, but rather its virtual sense that cannot be reached via voluntary memory or cognition, in which the difference between past and present, and the two sensations, is internalized and becomes immanent. This example from Proust/Deleuze holds several pointers, or perhaps “morals,” for postfoundational inquiry. First, it demonstrates how an unanticipated encounter may set something in motion. It instructs us that the question of where to start is a matter of being open to the operation of chance – to what

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Deleuze called “the adventure of the involuntary” (Deleuze, 2000, p.  62). Second, it acknowledges the force of sensation and felt impression as provocations to thought. This is not to argue that thought, or “intelligence,” can be dispensed with. However, intelligence always “comes after” (p. 64). Third, Proust understands this process as creative: a matter of coming “face to face with something which does not so far exist, to which it alone can give reality and substance, which it alone can bring into the light of day.” Finally, the example helps us to think differently about relationality: it steers us away from relations founded on abstraction, resemblance and hierarchy, and parts that fit neatly into wholes, and helps us to think about relations that are transversal: that is, associative, intensive, and virtual. To borrow a later, but related, concept from Deleuze, transversal thought is diagrammatic: it casts a line from the known to the unknown by taking the “witch’s flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 41). It makes “a map which engenders the territory to which it is supposed to refer” (Bogue and Semetsky, 2010, p.116). Taken together, these “morals” point to the usefulness for postfoundational inquiry of a Deleuzian transcendental empiricism in which the virtual and actual are “two sides” of all events. Such an empiricism goes beyond subjective or lived experience, to tap into the virtual intensities that insist in events. In transcendental empiricism “the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness)” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977, p. vii). Transversality

The example of Proust’s madeleine also cautions us that the import of the encounter may not, indeed probably will not, be fully comprehended at first. Combray, for Proust, did not unfold unproblematically following the inexplicable “joy” triggered by the taste of the madeleine. It demanded persistence, effort, and disappointment before the import appeared to the narrator. A kind of training or apprenticeship in thinking and sensing differently is needed, if we are to conquer “stock notions” and learn to forge and follow transversal relations across things and domains that do not obviously belong together (Deleuze, 2000, p. 18). Transversal relations are, from the viewpoint of hierarchical reason, “unnatural.” In place of obedient, “filial” relations (such as those between parent-child, state-subject, and so on), we must be open to heterogeneous and inhuman modes of relating (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 242). In tracing such relations, we cannot rely on the vertical ladders of ascent and descent provided by hierarchical reason, nor the linear bonds of resemblance. Transversal thought obliges us to leap, making connections across heterogeneous elements without homogenizing these by flattening out their

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differences (see MacLure, 2013 and below for examples). Transversality, Sauvagnargues (2014) writes, “torques structure on its machinic diagonals and anarchic connections” (p. 220). The leaps of transversal interpretation are not the product of felt bodily sensations alone, moreover: there must be some pre- or trans-personal force or intensity – in other words, affect – that moves us to make connections. Otherwise, we risk remaining within our bodily confines and are likely merely to “construct our own private museum” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 25). Nor should we put too much faith in conventional language. It is rather a question of fashioning means, or methods, for accessing the unrepresentable sense that inheres in utterances – that which escapes capture by propositional language (Deleuze, 2004). We need also to challenge our reliance on observation as the primary mode of accessing and analyzing events and cultivate instead more haptic or synaesthetic modes of sensing. This is a hard lesson for qualitative research, which has drawn much of its energy and insight from ethnographic practices of observation, and which has relied on representational language as the primary mediator of truth and reality. It is important to resist the temptation to start from the big, obvious questions that impose themselves when we embark on social or philosophical inquiry, and to cultivate instead an alertness to the vitality of small, energetic events and the transversal associations that these might afford. This approach can be seen in Rachel Holmes’ (2016) posthuman account of an encounter with a piece of video data, entitled “My tongue on your theory,” in which a group of boys surround a girl in the school playground, grabbing her and pulling at her clothes in a whirling game of “Catch a girl kiss a girl.” Stirred by the violence of her visceral response to the incident, Holmes refuses to submit to the big questions or orientations that would conventionally frame interpretations of such a scene, though she never loses sight of them. She lists these familiar frames: boisterous play, children’s peer cultures, gendered behaviours and interactions; playground ‘games’ as exercise, developing the child’s power of independent movement, journeys of discovery; theories of animal and human play; inquiry-based, child-centred, experimental learning; the pleasure principle, children’s unconscious motivations, creativity and liberation; bodies as sites of gender constitution and relations. (Holmes, 2016, p. 665) Instead, Holmes traces a transversal path set in motion by the felt violence of the data event as it “gnawed” at her body, fabricating a “monstrous,” synaesthetic creation of “fibre-flesh-affect” from art works, gothic literature, feminist and queer theory, educational discourse, decomposition, blood, guts, anger, disgust, and, ultimately, hope.

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The problem with big, general questions is that they tend to lead to “abstract truths that compromise no-one and do not disturb” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 11). We need to be open, as Holmes’ research shows, to the power of the minor2 instance to compromise and disturb. In my own work in the field of childhood research, I have tried to think outside of the structures provided by developmentalism, or the (formerly) new sociology of childhood, or multimodal theory, or poststructural discourse analysis. This is not to deny that such frameworks have been deeply transformative of my own thinking, nor that they may well enter into the research assemblage at some point. However, they are not enough in themselves to set creative or disturbing thought into motion. For this, I have, like Holmes, had recourse to those small, energetic moments of perplexity that hold the power to halt “the fleeting pace that generates indifference,” in Bal’s (1999, p. 65) memorable phrase. For instance, in a project on so-called challenging behavior in early years classrooms, from which Holmes’ article above also emerged, my colleagues and I found ourselves exercised by small incidents – the ripples of repercussion set in motion by a child’s fidgeting, or the bringing “forbidden” objects into school, or not sitting still, or not visibly “listening,” or refusing to speak when invited by the teacher, or speaking when not invited (MacLure et al., 2012). We tried to resist reaching for socio-cultural or psychological explanations for these behaviors. Rather, we dwelt with these moments for the intensities and incipiencies that they seemed to harbor and began the task of unfolding them to follow the transversal connections that they offered. Often enough nothing happened. Specific instances that at first seemed promising turned out not to contain, folded within them, enough energy or intensity to fuel the glow, or trigger the violence, of creative thought. Other events seemed to be brim-full of potential connections, but we were not up to the task of creatively submitting to their turbulence in order to make new relations and arrive somewhere else. Sometimes, however, the “adventure of the involuntary” did indeed transpire. In one instance, we found ourselves curious about “forbidden” objects – small items (toys, hair bands, jewelry, trading cards, etc.) that were removed from children as they entered the classroom, to be returned at a later date. “External” reasons for such confiscations abound in school lore and official documents: for instance, to avoid distractions, discourage envy, or keep children safe. We were more interested, however, in the strange intensities that these “liminal” objects harbored – in their power to disturb the boundaries between home and school, “good” and “bad” objects, proper and improper relations. The transversal path that unfolded from these objects touched on airport security checkpoints, the magical agency of Winnicott’s “transitional objects,” and the uncanny affects of surrealist objects. This path opened onto clandestine relationships between young children and inanimate objects and the challenge that these pose to adult-child relationality

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as the foundation of learning. We glimpsed the potential that might be released by making more space for inhuman relations in the classroom. In a more recent piece of research involving two-year-olds in a nursery school (MacLure & MacRae, 2022), some instances of imitation caught our attention: a boy becoming an ice cube melting in a microwave; a girl typing at the computer keyboard and answering the (imaginary) phone. These imitations had a trance-like quality, where the child seemed to be caught up in the event that they were creatively enacting, and in so doing accessing and actualizing the virtual dimensions of events. We were inclined to resist dominant framings of imitation as an early developmental stage of learning about the world through copying or mimicking and began to see it as a dynamic and immanent relation of folding of inner life and the outside world – as “creative involutions” of the virtual and the material rather than an immature stopping point on the path to adulthood (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 273). It is important, I think, not to be deceived or discouraged by the apparent “smallness” of examples such as these. Seen from the viewpoint of hierarchical reason, which values above all the supposed ascent from the particular to the general, or the descent from the superficial to the deep, examples seem to demand their own obsolescence as they become taken up into higher levels of importance. But an example enfolds multitudes in its potential for connection, and the associative leaps of transversal thought bring disparate things into contiguity without erasing the incalculable distances between them. Contiguity, Deleuze (2000) writes, “does not reduce distance to the infinitesimal but affirms and even extends a distance without interval, according to an ever astronomical, ever telescopic law that governs the fragments of diverse universes” (p. 93). Inquiry at the limits of language

I often find myself working the borderline language and matter, where strange intensities inhabit the unspeakable or the barely-speakable. It is on this frontier that one can find openings onto transversal adventures. I find myself attracted to the “junk” material of qualitative data –– the stuff that lurks in the interstices of meaningful language and abject matter. Hence the appeal of hummed refrains, repetitive sounds, agitated gestures, recalcitrant silences; of the wet stuff and the breathy stuff such as tears, sniffs, and laughter. Sauvagnargues (2014), explicating Deleuze’s concept of style, describes it as “a tension that puts language into relation with its intensive border: unformed matter, musical sound, or asignifying cry, in other words, the deterritorialization of sense that carries language to its limits” (p. 228). I have tried to introduce a similar tension into the fabric of qualitative inquiry, putting language into intensive relation to attempt a deterritorialization of sense.

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The frontier between language and the body is often a violent one. This is clear (though typically overlooked) in the visceral disgust that often infuses acts of linguistic racism, classism, and ableism. Minority ways of talking are all too often characterized as meaningless or deplorable by reference to base bodily functions or animal noises (as “grunting” for example, MacLure, 2011). But the threat of existential violence that inhabits the frontier of language and the body can also be mobilized for literary, educational, or political work. For instance, in The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus (2012) taps into the occult and asocial violence in language, in his narrative of a plague-ridden world in which the speech of children has become lethal to adults. Unmoored from its supposedly core function as a stable vehicle of communication and conviviality, the performative force of language strikes directly and destructively upon bodies, short-circuiting the mediations, and the illusory comforts, of representational language. A somewhat similar trope, of language as plague or virus, appears in Bruce McDonald’s film Pontypool, where exposure to a virus inherent in language turns those exposed into cannibals. Wallin (2012) uses Pontypool to elaborate a critique of the kind of curriculum theory that envisages curriculum as a convivial conversation that is open to, and supportive of difference and diversity. Wallin rejects the representational model of language underlying such theorizing on the grounds that it can only represent the world as it already is, and therefore cannot mobilize the dynamic force of difference. Wallin takes the inhuman force of Pontypool’s viral language as an instantiation of Deleuze’s (2004) concept of sense, as “the incendiary contact point between the [linguistic] proposition and the world” (Wallin, 2012, p. 377). The excess of sense, as that which overflows and disturbs the equilibrium of language, can be mobilized, Wallin argues, to deliver the Deleuzian “affective shock to thought” that curriculum theorizing needs (p. 379; original emphasis). The valorization of sense and affect presents a particular challenge for postfoundational inquiry, as it involves a critique of the deeply ingrained assumption that the prime function of language is to act as a vehicle of communication. This critique extends to “meaningful” language and its illusory promise of the power to explain the world through the attainment of “understanding” (c.f. Wallin, 2012). We might need to cultivate a Proustian indifference to the clarity of meaning and to that which is “intentionally spoken” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 22, original emphasis) in order to register the performative power of language as a force that acts on and in “us”: “Words themselves instructed me,” Proust remarked, “only if they were interpreted in the fashion of a rush of blood to the face of a person who is disturbed, or again in the fashion of a sudden silence” (quoted in Deleuze, 2000, p. 59). Instead of conceiving of analysis as explanation, which amounts to accounting for what already exists, we might think of it instead as explication – an unfolding

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of the affective forces that are implicated in events, in order to think or do something new. Transversal inquiry and the problematic of relationality

Colebrook (2019) notes that unconstrained relationality appears to be “an exemplary posthuman and postmodern term” (p. 175). She identifies however some ethical and ontological problems with posthuman theories that leave no place for the “radically non-relational” in a world that is held to be endlessly reconstituted through mobile relations of global simultaneity. Colebrook detects an “implicit moralism” (p. 175), and indeed an all-too-human narcissism in such visions of unconstrained posthuman relationality, which is always implicitly framed by the values of hegemonic cultures masquerading as an undifferentiated “humanity.” She notes that Indigenous and minoritized cultures often do not recognize their own beliefs and practices in these imaginaries of total relationality, and indeed that they are often harmed by the demand to erase the specificity of their own beliefs and practices as the price of entry into relation. From the viewpoint of Indigenous cultures, Colebrook notes, a radical cut in relationality may be preferable, allowing incommensurable worlds to co-exist. Colebrook (2019) finds some relief from the colonialism that lurks in posthumanist visions of unconstrained relationality in the nomadic philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, arguing that this “forge[s] a politics that is both radically non-relational and runs counter to the moralities of emergence” (2019, p. 189). There is also a kind of non-relationality inherent in the movements of transversal interpretation that Deleuze (2000) finds in Proust: The entire work consists in establishing transversals that cause us to leap … from one Albertine to another, from one world to another, from one word to another, without ever reducing the many to the One, without ever gathering up the multiplicity into a whole, but affirming the original unity of precisely that multiplicity, affirming without uniting all these irreducible fragments. (p. 82; original emphasis) The spider-sense of the postfoundational researcher

In the final pages of Proust and Signs Deleuze (2000) considers the question, “What is the narrator, ultimately, in himself?” (p. 117). He notes that the narrator-hero seems unable to mobilize the usual array of senses and faculties, being apparently “incapable of seeing, of perceiving, of remembering, of understanding …” (p. 117). What, then is this incapacitated subject, and how

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does it work? Deleuze announces, with a certain flourish, that it is nothing other than “an enormous Body without organs”: But what is a body without organs? The spider sees nothing, perceives nothing, remembers nothing. She receives only the slightest vibration at the edge of her web, which propagates itself inside her body as an intensive wave and sends her leaping to the necessary place. Without eyes, without nose, without mouth, she answers only to signs, the merest sign surging through her body and causing her to spring upon her prey … The spider-Narrator, whose web is the Search being spun, being woven by each thread stirred by one sign or another: the web and the spider, the web and the body are one and the same machine. Though endowed with an extreme sensibility and a prodigious memory, the narrator has no organs insofar as he is deprived of any voluntary and organised use of such faculties. On the other hand, a faculty functions within him when constrained and obliged to do so; and the corresponding organ awakens within him, but as an intensive outline roused by the waves that provoke its involuntary use. Involuntary sensibility, involuntary memory, involuntary thought … (Deleuze, 2000, p. 117; original emphasis) The spider is a figuration of immanent, involuntary production. Perhaps the postfoundational researcher could learn from such inhuman creativity, allowing herself to be sprung into action by the tugs of affect upon the web of the research, whose threads extend from the world to the depths of the body from which that web is simultaneously being spun: web and spider, research and researcher, “one and the same machine.” The subjectivity of the spiderresearcher is emergent: the contours of her faculties begin to form under the pressure of the intensities released in the encounter. Conclusion: returning to the questions

As noted at the outset, the reorienting questions that were selected as frames for the chapter are inextricably interrelated: they can be seen as offering different angles or points of view on the problematic of doing postfoundational inquiry without the comforts of method and the “safe hands” of the rational, human subject. I will end however by separating them out. Where do you start -- how do you begin? What are you questioning, and how does your approach stay open to questionability? The reorienting question – Where do you start? – dramatizes the whole problematic of immanent inquiry because it presupposes that which immanence denies – that is, a determinate point of origin to be decided, or detected by the researcher. Following Deleuze, I have suggested that the starting point for postfoundational inquiry could be conceptualized as an “adventure of

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the involuntary,” where the overweening ambition of the human interpreter is disabled by the conjoint operation of chance and necessity afforded by an unexpected encounter. Perhaps the question could be reformulated as the impersonal Where does it start? Or even It starts… The latter construction, according to Deleuze (2004, p. 118), is the “fourth person singular,” the impersonal, pre-individual form of the “pure event” (p. 172). The approach questions the pre-eminence of the rational subject and the architecture of hierarchical reasoning and representation that supports conventional qualitative inquiry. This questioning stance is sustained by a focus on the “minor” or the overlooked, and a resistance to what were called, above, “the big, obvious questions.” As to whether the approach remains “open to questionability” in terms of making itself available to critique, this would need to be answered on performative grounds, in terms of what a particular piece of research or claimed insight does. Does it open new lines of action or thought or new ways of seeing or sensing? Does it enhance rather than diminish the capacities and prospects of those with a stake in the question (both human and nonhuman)? How do you make it up as you go? What are you inventing – how do you inquire without method? A postfoundational approach is inventive in that it is diagrammatic or transversal. That is, it attempts to leap, or to throw a line, from the known to the unknown. This always involves a struggle against the accumulated habits of thought and deed that crowd the space of invention. I suggested above that attending to sense, as that which exceeds representation, offers one way of attempting to bypass common sense and normative assumptions. It could be said that a postfoundational approach does indeed involve “making it up as you go,” as the question presupposes, to the extent that it is processual, unfolding, and acquiescent to chance. That is the aspiration at least. However, it is important to distinguish invention from unconstrained play. Such play was characteristic of postmodern theory and practice. The exhilaration/despair induced by the “crisis of representation,” when the text became unhinged from the world, often resulted as Wallin (2012) notes in “narcissistic free-play,” and “the unmotivated over-production of novelty” (p. 377; original emphasis). I am undecided as to whether the transversal approach I have sketched above can be described as inquiry “without method.” It certainly eschews method if this is understood in terms of the Platonic mission to subordinate difference to “the powers of the One, the Analogous, the Similar and even the Negative” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 59). But I wonder if working without method might lead to an “anything goes” attitude in postfoundational inquiry. Or that it might, once again, install (human) subjectivity as the engine of inquiry: without method, would we risk merely building “our own private museum” in Deleuze’s words quoted above? I think we need something like

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a method – call it machinic, or perhaps clinical, since it involves following signs and symptoms – to protect us from relapsing into old habits of representational thinking and the centering of the human subject (see next question). How do you de-center human tendencies? The project of decentering underlies the attempts above to displace human agency, intelligence, and intentionally as the driving forces of inquiry, reconceptualizing this instead as an “adventure of the involuntary.” This project similarly shapes the attempt to think transversally, connecting across heterogeneous elements – human, inhuman, and immaterial – without erasing or assimilating their differences. What about your approach is pre-personal, pre-individual, pre-subjective, and pre-conceptual? The de-centering of human tendencies unequivocally demands attention to the impersonal and pre-individual singularities and intensities that compose the “I.” In the discussion above, I showed how this can be attempted by learning to focus on the minor, the abject, the a-signifying, and the overlooked – on that which breaks the “fetters” of representation, in Deleuze’s (1994, p. 138) words. Deleuze’s spider, which provided the final stopping-off point in the transversal leaps from which the chapter was spun, provides a useful aid to thinking about how an inhuman agency might “work” in the machinic production of research. Notes 1 The concept of transversality was developed primarily by Guattari (2015) and figures prominently in the conjoint writing of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987). I focus however on its appearance in Deleuze’s earlier, sole-authored book on Proust, as the concept is elaborated there in a form that makes its relevance to postfoundational inquiry clear, in its account of how the interpretation of signs can be a creative act of transversal movements. The influence of Guattari insists in this work too however: the notion of transversality is most clearly addressed in the new material that Deleuze added in 1972, when his relationship with Guattari was well established. 2 The minor, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, is a form of cultural production from within a dominant or major culture and its signifying regimes. Minor practices work to deterritorialize sense and signification, causing language to falter or stutter, and release its asignifying forces. The minor is always political, since it connects individuals to their wider milieu in ways that bypass and disrupt conventional systems of meaning and order, providing openings onto difference and change. The minor is also collective, calling forth a people still to come (see Deleuze & Guattari, 1986).

References Bal, M. (1999). Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bogue, R., & Semetsky, I. (2010). Reading signs/learning from experience: Deleuze’s pedagogy as becoming-other. In I. Semetsky (Ed.), Semiotics Education Experience (pp. 115–130). Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense. Colebrook, C. (2019). A CUT IN RELATIONALITY: Art at the end of the world. Angelaki, 24(3), 175–195. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2000). Proust and Signs. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. (2004). The Logic of Sense. Trans. M. Lester and C. J. Stivale, Trans. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 1. Trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari F. (1986). Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. D. Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What Is Philosophy? Trans. H. Tomlinson & G. Burchill. London and Brooklyn: Verso. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2002). Dialogues II. Trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. Guattari, F. (2015). Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971 (1972). Trans. A. Hodges. Cambridge, MA: Semiotext(e)/MIT Press. Holmes, R. (2016). My tongue on your theory: The bittersweet reminder of everything unnameable. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 662–679. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2015.1075704 MacLure, M. (2011). Qualitative inquiry: Where are the ruins? Qualitative Inquiry, 17(10), pp. 997–1005. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800411423198 MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658–667. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788755 MacLure, M. (2021). Inquiry as divination. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(5), 502–511. MacLure, M., & MacRae, C. (2022). Folding Froebel with Deleuze: Rethinking the significance of imitation in early childhood. Global Education Review, 9(1), 54–62. MacLure, M., Jones, L., Holmes, R., & MacRae, C. (2012). Becoming a problem: behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom. British Educational Research Journal, 38(3), 447–471. https://doi.org/10.1080/01411926.2011.552709 Marcus, B. (2012). The Flame Alphabet. London: Granta. Sauvagnargues, A. (2014) Cartographies of style: Asignifying, intensive, impersonal. Qui Parle, 23(1), 213–238. Wallin, J. J. (2012). Representation and the straightjacketing of curriculum’s complicated conversation: The pedagogy of Pontypool’s minor language. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(4), 366–385.

SUBJECT INDEX

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. acquiescence 217 adventures 101–116; adaptive and sensitive 115–116; arts-based workshop, curating 108–111; in care and recklessness 106–108; careful and curious 115–116; childing methodologies 106–108; feltness of research 112–113; knowability 112–113; linearity 112–113; post qualitative inquiry 104–106; seriousplay 108–111; worlding in childhood research 101–103; writing and research 113–115 aesthetics 14, 19; computational 61; and ethics 176; explorations with cork 106, 107; investigative 21, 51, 59, 61 affect 5, 24, 25, 28, 29, 38, 42, 44–45, 51, 59, 61, 68, 82, 86, 90, 91, 94–97, 113, 115, 130, 206, 221, 250, 252; aliens 68; defined 24; distorting affect 55–57, Ringrose on 24; theory xxviii, 15, 25, 44 affirmative critique 97, 236, 240 agency xix, 3, 5, 7, 14, 19, 24, 25, 28, 31, 39, 40, 57, 81, 88, 97, 104, 120, 181, 199, 204, 205, 245,

248, 254; more-than-human 5, 39; pre-personal 211–224 agential: cuts 12, 150, 156, 212, 216, 220–224, 227, 240; intra-actions 151, 199; realism 4, 14–15, 147– 148, 150–151, 148, 159, 159n2, 181, 211, 221 agonism 196 Anthropocene 104, 108, 111–113, 119, 238–240 anthropology: cultural 131; digital 131; visual 131 anti-Black 198; racism 37, 39, 198; antiblackness 38, 45, 47; anti-racism 86–87; anti-racist work 87; Western humanism 198 anti-trans policies 37 archaeological mode of inquiry 216–218 archive 4, 6, 81–98, 101–116, 124, 151, 159n2; allowing to be expanded 96–97; attuning to 88–90; capacity to affect 94–96 art of noticing 237 arts-based workshop 108–111 assemblage 3–4, 41, 48, 96, 97, 234, 236; agentic 29; materialdiscursive 112; non-hierarchical sensorial 60; relational 199; research 28, 248; unforeseen 115

258

Subject Index

atmosphere(s) 7, 8, 19–22, 24, 26, 27, 30, 42, 67, 71, 75, 95, 102, 105, 110, 112, 116, 157, 191, 192, 215, 221; attunement 54; and building envelope 51–52; data 21, 51–62; defined 37; distorting affect 55–57; and posthuman approach 55, 57; of violence 37–38, 40, 46, 47; work 86 attention 7–8, 67–68, 74, 76; postfoundational modes of 121 attuning/attunement 11–12; to archive otherwise 88–90; to otherwise worlds 45–46; to relational encounters 6; to violence in educational inquiry 20–21, 36–48 audible masculinities 28 axiologies 172, 174–177, 205 becoming xxii, xxviii, 1–3, 6–7, 9, 12, 20, 22, 66, 81, 180; becomingwith 105, 126; logic of 205; ontologically performative process of 203; relational 115, 199; as researchers/educators 46; of singular continuities 144; unbounded 202 Black Lives Matter 72 Black masculinities 31 Black women, and violence 41 building envelope 51–52; and contingency 52–53, 60–62; mapping of 52; surrounding envelope 53–55, 54; and technicity 60–62 built environment 21; animacy of 52; investigating 51–62; pre-personal atmosphere of 52 canonical knowledge, naturalization of 176 Cartesianism xxvi “cartographic form” 91 “Cascade Experiment” (Fulton) 147, 153 cascade questioning 4, 84, 147–159; diffracting through 157–158; diffracting voices 154–157; diffractive reading 151, 152; generating diverse materials 151, 152; homework 150; inquiring with 147–159; listening to the void 154–157; object and phenomenon 158–159; sensorial

practice 158–159; as worlding practice 153; zooming in 157–158 causal relations 150, 197 chance xxi, 9, 11, 213, 232, 244–245, 253 childhood research 82, 83, 101–104, 106, 108, 112–114, 120, 121, 248 childing methodologies: adventures in care and recklessness 106–108; emergence of 106–108 China 214–224; wind-education 211, 215–216, 218–219 Chthulucene: Haraway’s 126; queer synthetic curriculum for 125–127 Classical Greek philosophy 166 co-composing 11–12 collaborative process of thinking and reading 184–185 collective learning 182, 185–186 colonialism 4, 159n2, 251; Nordic afterlife of 97; ontoepistemological violences of 190; settler 196, 202 common worlding pedagogies 122; in early childhood 119–127; learning with 121–123; and situatedness 121–123; worlding with water/plastic in early childhood 123–127 computational aesthetics 61 concept mapping 188, 189; force-full 186–188 Confucius 218–219 contingency/contingent approaches i, xix, xxiv, xxviii, 1–5, 7, 10, 13– 15, 20, 21, 25, 26, 33, 39, 40, 48, 52–54, 59, 81, 83, 86, 140, 145, 165, 181, 211, 216, 219, 222, 224; and building envelope 52–53, 60–62; invention of 20, 26, 33; technicity 60–62 contingent foundations 1, 86 continuity 140, 142, 144 correlative cosmology 212, 220, 222–223 creation: described 9; postfoundational inquiry for 8–11 creativity 145n1, 187, 201, 240, 247; inhuman 252 critical cartography 141 criticality 40, 41; paranoid 39; reframing and queering critique 42–43

Subject Index

Critical Race Theory 39, 198 critique 41; disciplinary assertion of 138; of method 2; in qualitative research 36; queering (see queering critique) cultural anthropology 131 curious learning 185–186 curriculum xxviii, 7, 41, 45, 141, 187, 214, 219, 250; queer synthetic 125–127 De Anima (Aristotle) 172, 175 deconstruction xx, 1–2, 197; deconstructionist-Derridean vein 173; poststructuralist 202; principle of the excluded middle 197; reading 197; of truth claims 205 desire xx–xxi, 236, 245; Cartesian xxix; educative 33; and fieldnotes 26 deterritorialization 1, 249 developmentalism 82, 119 différance xxi diffracting voices 154–157 diffraction 109, 151, 157–158, 160n6, 181–182; of agential realism 159n4; collaborative process of thinking and reading 184–185; defined 151; in geometry and physics 151; intra-action 181; patterns 151, 153, 157; from quantum physics 151, 181–182; voices 154–157 digital anthropology 131 digital technologies 4, 51 discretized events 143 discursive-material-affective-sensorial approach 19–20, 23–33; as postfoundational 25; and sexual violence workshop 26–33 diversity 86, 97, 250; gender 24 diversity work 5, 81–82, 85–88, 94–97 documents: foregrounding, as agential 86–88; foregrounding as agential 86–88; re-animating 90–94 drawing: as a conceptual device 131; sketch and 131 early childhood: common worlding pedagogies in 82–83, 119–127; common worlding 5, 82–83, 119–127 ecological racism 66

259

educational inquiry: affective attunements to violence in 20– 21, 36–48; materialist 239 emergence 3–5 emergent 8, 11, 13–15, 29, 57, 81, 84, 101, 186, 115, 120, 148, 177, 182, 191, 204, 211, 212, 223, 226–240, 252; ethicoonto-epistemology of multiple messmates 212–213, 226–240; methodologies 106, 115; pedagogies 5; postfoundational inquiry as 3–5; research process 148 empiricism 199–201 enactments: defined 11; ontological 11–12 encounters 11–13; affective 3, 19; embodied 107; empathic 88; involuntary 3, 6–8, 14, 211; material-discursive 240; pedagogical 181, 192; relational 3, 6–8, 211; research 24; sensory 69, 101, 106; unconventional 123, 127 endemic violence 37–38, 48 entangle/entanglement 15, 20, 22, 84, 86, 120, 123, 147, 150–151, 153, 156–157, 181–182, 187–188, 216; affective 90, 154; disruptive/productive 26–32; ethic-onto-epistemology 30; material 104; multitudinous 148; performative 224; relational 221; research 31; unsevered 24 epistemologies 170, 174–175, 177; colonial 214; ethico-onto182, 190, 212–213, 226–229, 235–239; form of knowledge production 234; onto- 237; preSocratic thinkers interest in 172 ethical dilemma 173 ethico-onto-epistemology xxi, xxi, xxi, 30, 39, 160n5, 182, 190, 212–213, 226–240; emergent 212–213, 226, 237, 239; of multiple messmates at different scales 212–213; neologism 182 ethics and aesthetics 176 ethnography of texts 87 events 19, 72–74, 182; articulations of 227; artistic 131; climatic mood of 182; collective 186; controversial 59–60; discretized

260

Subject Index

143; economic interpretations of 204; of inquiry 226; literacy 44, 46; national 72; predict 10, 213, 243; pure 253; relational 3, 186; two sides 246; violent 68, 72, 247; virtual dimensions of 249 feltness of research 112–113 fleshy frequencies 25, 28 force-full concept mapping 186–188 foundation(s) xx–xxii, 1, 2, 10, 14, 83, 86, 97, 137, 145, 165, 166, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 181, 195, 196, 203, 218, 249; Butler on 1; man as xxvi–xxvii; refusing xxv–xxvi; method xxvii–xxix; theoretical foundations 1 foundationalism xx–xxi, 202–203; and Descartes xxiii–xxv; epistemic 167, 201; performative 175–177; scientific xxviii gender diversity 24 great Cartesian break xxiv Greek skhedios 131 haunted ontologies 86 hauntology 86 human agency 3, 31, 88, 221, 254 human-centered representationalism 181, 217 human-language disordering 218–220 hyper-aesthetisation 60 Hyperspektiv software 52, 55 immanence xxii, 2, 104, 186, 252 Indigenous ontologies 178 (in)finite water inquiries 226–227, 229, 234, 238 inquiries 223–224; archaeological mode of 216–218; with cascade questioning 147–159; events of 226; (in)finite water 226–227, 229, 234, 238; postfoundational 211–212, 214–224; posthumanist 205–206; and sketching 130– 145; see also postfoundational inquiry; transversal inquiry “insistence of possibles” 137 intervening 11–12 intra-actions 24, 94, 148, 150, 181, 206, 213, 227, 229–230, 239; agential 151, 199; and diffraction 181–182; material

28; material-discursive-affectivesensorial 24, 29; neologism 181; relational 19, 24 invention 76; postfoundational inquiry for 8–11 investigative aesthetics 21, 51, 59, 61 involuntary 1, 3, 10–15, 213; encounters 3, 6–8, 14, 211; encounters, and postfoundational inquiry 6–8; transversality 243–254 Jim Crow laws 74, 198 knowability 6, 82, 101; disrupting 112–113 law of the excluded middle 197 learning: collective 182, 185–186; curious 185–186; processual 166, 182, 185–186 LiDAR scanner 52, 57–58 linear functions 142 linearity 142; disrupting 112–113 linguistic racism 250 listening to the void 154–157 living map 53 Los Angeles Riots 71–74, 76n1 man: as concept xx; as foundation xxvi–xxvii mapping: 3D concept 188; performative 91; representational 91; speculative 97 masculinities: audible 28; Black 31; protest 28 material intra-actions 28 materialism of Thales 172 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 171, 175 method xix–xxix, 1–15, 20, 21, 40, 42, 53, 60–62, 83, 91, 106, 111, 114, 115, 138, 144, 150, 166, 170, 171, 175–178, 197, 213, 214, 218, 240, 243–244, 252–254; as concept xx; as foundation xxvii–xxix; postfoundational inquiry after 1–15 The minor (Deleuze and Guattari) 254n1 modern grammar 218–220 more-than-human 42, 46, 84, 104, 115; agency 5, 39; agents 227; material messmates 227; relational ontology 56

Subject Index

multiple storying 226–240; in closing 238–239; as co-emerging knowledge productions 229–238; of crisis and hope 226–240; feminist materialist storytelling 227–229; ontological relationality 229–238; overview 226–227; postfoundational approach 227–229 natureculture collaborative knowledge production 227 neoliberal sensibilities 38 neologism intra-actions 181 nonfoundational inquiry xxviii, xxix non-innocence 108, 112, 122 object and phenomenon 158–159 oceanic images 89 online pedagogical courses 182 onto-epistemological violences of colonialism 190 onto-epistemologies: dualist Cartesian xxviii; ethico- xxi, 30, 160n5, 182, 190, 212–213, 226–240; foundational xxv; nonfoundational xx; postfoundational xx; sonic 47 ontological enactments 11–12 ontological loss in posthumanist inquiry 205–206 ontological relationality 226, 229–238 ontological turn 2 ontology/ies xxi–xxiii, 11, 233–234; agential realist 84; collective 192; of creation 9; definitive 203; dualist xxvi, xxvii; of ethical relationship 170; foundational 202, 203; haunted 86; humancentered 220; immanent 213, 228, 243–244; Indigenous 178; more-than-human relational 56; negative 228; one-world xxvii, xxviii; of possibility 167–168, 195–206; postfoundational inquiry 177; pre-Socratic thinkers interest in 172; processual 148; production of alternative 177; relational 181–182, 192, 206n1, 221; subject/object 202; twoworld xxvii; Western 178 openness 200–203; limits of calls for 201–203 origins xxi

261

otherwise worlds 43, 47; attuning to 45–46 paralogy xxi paranoid criticality 39 passive data 51 pedagogies: collaborative 184–185; collaborative risks in slow writing 189–191; force-full concept mapping 186–188; inquirers and 182–184; overview 180–181; political processes in slow writing 189–191; in postfoundational inquiries 166–167, 180–192; and postfoundational philosophies 181–182; processual/collective/ curious learning 185–186; production through inquiry 191– 192; reading- writing-thinkingmaking together 166–167; slow reading and teacher/student binaries 184–185; speculative 182; traditional 182 pedagogues 182–184 performative cartography 5; archive, expanded 96–97; archive’s capacity to affect 94–96; attuning to archive otherwise 88–90; foregrounding documents as agential 86–88; overview 85–86; re-animating the documents 90–94 performative mapping 91 phenomenon and object 158–159 philosophically-informed inquiry 2, 4 philosophies: postfoundational 181–182; Thales’ proposition 177 philosophy as a method 170, 176– 177; argument 177; ethical relationship with thought 176; legacy of pre-Socratic thought 177; of Western scholars 178 ‘Playful Archive’ 116n1 plugging-in 15n1, 187, 204, 205 positivism xxviii post-colorblindness 202 postfoundational inquiry xxix, 82, 202; after method 1–15; childhood studies 101; as emergent 3–5; emergent and responsive 177; for invention and creation 8–11; involuntary/relational encounters 6–8; pedagogy in 166–167,

262

Subject Index

180–192; performative 175–177; philosophers 181; philosophies 181–182; and pre-Socratic Western thought 165–166, 169– 178; reading– writing–thinking– making together 166–167; wind-education as 211–212, 214–224 posthumanism 39, 195–206; empiricism 199–201; logical limitations of critique 196–199; ontological loss in posthumanist inquiry 205–206; openness 200–203; overview 195–196; responsible affirmations 203–205 posthumanist inquiry: loss in 167–168; ontologies of possibility and loss in 167–168 posthumanist sensorium 153 post qualitative inquiry 104–106, 181; abysmal middle of 104–106 poststructural: analysis 170; antiessentialism 198; deconstruction 202 power xxi; exclusionary 1; and postfoundational inquiry 14; relations 25–26, 39–40, 167 pre-conceptual 22, 57, 66, 71, 74, 90, 94, 213, 244; elements of life 81, 86 prehension 132, 145n3; conceptual 61; sketch and diverse modes of 134 pre-individual 8, 14, 22, 57, 60, 71, 75, 81, 86, 90, 213, 244, 253, 254; elements of life 86 pre-personal: agencies and thought 211–213; atmosphere 52 pre-Socratic: knowledge 172; philosophers 170; philosophy 166, 170; Western thought 165–166 pre-Socratic thought/thinkers 169– 178; ethical dilemma 173; marginalization of 173 pre-subjective 8, 71, 75, 81, 86, 90, 213, 244, 254; elements of life 86 problematic of relationality 251 processes: philosophy 3; plugging-in 204; political 189–191; slow

writing 189–191; vulnerability and experimental 192 processual learning 166, 182, 185–186 processual relational philosophy 186 pure event 253 Qualitative Inquiry 184, 191 qualitative research 40–42 quantum: field theory 221; mechanics 143; physics 181; superposition 143 queering critique 20–21, 36; in qualitative research 40–42; reframing of criticality 42–43; sonic vibrations 43 queer synthetic curriculum 125–127 racism 10, 36, 67, 198; agentic capacity of 10; anti-Asian 39; anti-Black 37, 39, 198; anti-racism 86–87; ecological 66; environmental and ecological 66; linguistic 250; systemic 167–168, 195–206 “radical curiosity” 112 rational efficiency 43–45 re-animating the documents 90–94 relational 3, 6–8, 14, 15, 19, 24, 25, 31, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 56, 91, 105, 106, 113, 114, 115, 122, 145n1, 148, 166, 167, 170, 175, 181, 182, 184–186, 191, 192, 198, 199, 201–206, 211, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 229–238, 244, 246, 248, 251–252; assemblage 199; becoming 115, 199; events 3, 186; intra-actions 19, 24 relational encounters: attunement to 6; postfoundational inquiry responsive to 6–8 relationalities 198 representational: language 216–220; mapping 91; representationalism 200 research: feltness of 112–113; writing and 113–115 responsible affirmations 203–205 “reversed touch screens” 95 rhizome xix Roe v. Wade 48n2

Subject Index

school buildings: claustrophobic atmosphere of 54; distorting affect 55–57; scanning and texture 57–60, 59–60; sensoryaffective experiences of 52 school workshops: critique of 23–24; on sexual violence 23–33 scrabbling methodology 114, 114 SenseLab 182, 185–186 settler colonialism 196, 202 sexism 19–20 sexual violence: and discursive-materialaffective-sensorial approach 26; school workshops addressing 23–33; see also violence SF philosophy 101, 116n2, 227 singularity 143, 144 situated knowledges 104, 122 situatedness and worlding 121–123 sketches: and drawing 131; mathematically motivated 144; as multimodal passage 132; and phenomenon 147–159; as speculative research-graphic 135 sketching risks 139 slow reading 184–185 slow writing: collaborative risks in 189– 191; political processes 189–191 Socrates 170, 172–175 software arts 21, 51–62 sonic booms 25, 30 space-time-mattering 234–235 speculative: empiricism 4, 15; gesture 139-140; mapping 97; modality 140; mode and practice 90; pedagogies 182; postfoundational inquiry 4; research practices 82 subject/object ontologies 202 sympoiesis 105, 232 systemic racism 167–168, 195–206 teacher/student binaries 184–185 technicity: and building envelope 60–62 tempo giusto 184 Thales of Miletus 171–172, 177 thinking with 11, 15, 19, 25, 29, 43, 47, 109, 170, 172–175, 188 thought xix–xx; emergence of thought 10; enactments of 13–14; inquiry as thought 3; in motion 3, 15n2,

263

245; pre-personal agencies and 211–213; pre-Socratic Western 165–166, 169–178; reorientation of thought 12, 13, 19, 169; thought experiment 140–141; thought in motion 3, 15n2, 245; transversal thought 246, 249; Western methodological 166; Western philosophical 166 3D concept mapping 188 360 image software and cameras 52–53 traditional pedagogies 182 transatlantic slave trade 147, 149, 151 trans children/youth, and violence 41 transversal inquiry 213, 243–254; at limits of language 249– 251; overview 243–244; postfoundational researcher 251– 252; problematic of relationality and 251; transversality 246–249 transversality 246–249, 254n1 undoing 3, 7, 190; agentic 8; of normative ideas and practices 113 unknowability 124 vibrant materiality 172 vibrant matter 96, 172 violence: atmospheres of 37–38; in educational inquiry 20–21, 36–48; endemic 37–38, 48; as fundamental, reconceptualizing 38–40; otherwise 46–48; sexual 23–33 visual anthropology 131 voices, diffracting 154–157 vulnerability 20, 31, 122, 158, 202; Black 72; emergence of 33; and experimental processes 192; feminist ethics of 120 waste management practices 126 WEBing sessions 183, 185, 190, 191 Western: methodological thought 166; pre-Socratic 165–166; philosophical thought 166; thought 83;

264

Subject Index

whiteness 38; affective rhythms 43–45; heteropatriarchal racial capitalism 42–43; innocence 159n2; violence of 42 wind-education 211, 215–216, 218–219 word clouds 91, 94 worlding 5, 7, 12, 81–84, 101–103, 105, 110, 147, 148, 153, 156, 222;

in early childhood 119–127; and learning with 121–123; pedagogies 82; practices 84; and situatedness 121–123 writing and research 113–115 Zoom 183, 186