New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: Theory as Resistance 1975502841, 9781975502843

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: There’s No Time to Not Think • James Salvo
1 “Theory is Back”: Theory as Resistance in the 21st Century • Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre
2 Speculative (Wombing) Pedagogies: |Rəˈzistəns| in Qualitative Inquiry • Rebecca C. Christ & Candace R. Kuby
3 Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry • Sara M. Childers
4 Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity • Becky Atkinson
5 Chapter Five • Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry • Lucy E. Bailey
6 Thinking About Theory and Practicein Non-Oppositional Terms • Serge F. Hein
7 Missing Voices: A Documentary Practice About Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives in Inclusive Education • Hanne Vandenbussche, Ellen Vermeulen, Elisabeth De Schauwer, Inge Van de Putte, & Geert Van Hove
8 Lazy Pedagogy • Ryan Evely Gildersleeve
9 Global Hegemony: Unraveling Colonized Minds and Indigenous Healing • Tina Bly
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

Theory as Resistance

New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry A book series edited by Norman K. Denzin and James Salvo

New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry consists of thematic edited volumes that help us understand the philosophical concepts undergirding theory and how to put theory into practice to bring about social justice. The chapters in each volume, from established and emerging scholars and largely drawn from papers at the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, represent new directions for incorporating theory into justice-oriented qualitative research. Taking particular interest in theorists who haven’t yet had mainstream influence, the series is designed to reach a wide audience of scholars and students in the humanities and social sciences, including those seasoned in the philosophical language of theory and novices to theoretically oriented research. The series aims to bring about experimental ways of reading lives to implement radical social change. Books in the series: New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: The Arts (2020) New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: Indigenous Research (2020) New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: Theory as Resistance (2020) New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research: Performance as Resistance (2020) If you have a manuscript or a proposal for a book-length work, please send it to Norman Denzin ([email protected]) or James Salvo ([email protected]). All books published by MEP are peer reviewed. We will acknowledge receipt of your material, but it may be 4–6 weeks before we can provide initial feedback about your proposal.

New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research Theory as Resistance

edited by

Norman K. Denzin and James Salvo

Gorham, Maine

Copyright © 2020 | Myers Education Press, LLC Published by Myers Education Press, LLC P.O. Box 424 Gorham, ME 04038 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, recording, and information storage and retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher. Myers Education Press is an academic publisher specializing in books, e-books, and digital content in the field of education. All of our books are subjected to a rigorous peer review process and produced in compliance with the standards of the Council on Library and Information Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0284-3 (paperback) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0283-6 (hard cover) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0285-0 (library networkable e-edition) 13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0286-7 (consumer e-edition) Printed in the United States of America All first editions printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 standard. Books published by Myers Education Press may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for groups, workshops, training organizations, and classroom usage. Please call our customer service department at 1-800-232-0223 for details. Cover design by Sophie Appel Visit us on the web at www.myersedpress.com to browse our complete list of titles.

contents Introduction • There’s No Time to Not Think James Salvo Chapter One • “Theory is Back”: Theory as Resistance in the 21st Century Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre Chapter Two • Speculative (Wombing) Pedagogies: |Rəˈzistəns| in Qualitative Inquiry Rebecca C. Christ & Candace R. Kuby

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Chapter Three • Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry Sara M. Childers

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Chapter Four • Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity Becky Atkinson

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Chapter Five • Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry Lucy E. Bailey

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Chapter Six • Thinking About Theory and Practice in Non-Oppositional Terms Serge F. Hein

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Chapter Seven • Missing Voices: A Documentary Practice About Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives in Inclusive Education 77 Hanne Vandenbussche, Ellen Vermeulen, Elisabeth De Schauwer, Inge Van de Putte, & Geert Van Hove Chapter Eight • Lazy Pedagogy Ryan Evely Gildersleeve

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Chapter Nine • Global Hegemony: Unraveling Colonized Minds and Indigenous Healing Tina Bly

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About the Authors

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Index

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Introduction

introduction

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There’s No Time to Not Think JAMES SALVO

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he world is in bad shape. Apart from continuing and escalating injustice worldwide, we seem to be in the midst of a mass extinction event. Is there even time, some might ask, for philosophy? We can’t just sit around and think, some might say, for the urgency of our problems requires that we act now! There’s no denying that action is necessary and urgently needed, but this isn’t to say that thinking is but a luxury. It’s now, more than ever, that we need to think about our actions. Panic at the situation in which we find ourselves won’t save the day when there’s so little room for error. And in the first place, it’s the lack of reflection that’s gotten us into trouble, for this has led to thoughtless action. Thus, I’d assert that we no longer have time to continue not thinking. Resistance Activism as a Generic Ethical Orientation If we practice an activism of resistance, we should be generically activated against injustice, for an injustice to anyone is unacceptable. In other words, the requirement for membership to the group who has the right to justice is that one be anyone, meaning that everyone has the right to justice, meaning that the beneficiaries of activism are beneficiaries as such because activists are generically oriented against injustice. Inasmuch as it exists, injustice of any kind belongs to a system that allows it, and for that system to be just, any traces of injustice must be eliminated. That a system contains any injustice should be the concern of anyone who rationally identifies injustice as wrong. Anyone who lives in the world ought to feel ethically compelled to remove any injustice existing in any system, to wrest it away from

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that system so as to obliterate it. It’s true that we may not share struggles or the experiences of those struggles, but everyone must work to make it such that no one struggles because of unfairness. This is the right thing to do. How we go about doing this work is another thing. Sometimes one isn’t invited to do certain kinds of work against a particular form of injustice because that work requires an experience of that particular form of injustice. Of course, we mustn’t let our well-meaning intentions cause us to forget that we can’t force ourselves into the space of doing work we’re unable to do. Ought implies can, and we should be aware of the times when we’re unable to help, the times when what we’d offer as help would actually hold progress toward injustice back. Otherwise, though, I don’t think we need to wait for an invitation. In general, if we’re able to do something helpful about any particular instance of injustice or set of injustices, we should. This is the resistance activism of an activist. It can look like being in the street or posting things to social media, but it can also look like anything else that’s aimed at seeking justice. So we may not be able to generally describe what resisting injustice looks like, but still, might we inquire into an essential quality belonging to actions resisting injustice? I think this is possible, and that an essential quality of actions resisting injustice is that they’re all grounded in a rational ethical justification. Thus, if we seek to bring about repeatable actions that, taken together, put us in the direction of change, we must first start by making rational appeals for those types of actions. Rational appeals are all we have if we’re to exclude resorting to violent means to rid ourselves of injustice, and this is a desirable exclusion. In any just system, violence exists beyond its limit, for violence itself is outside of the law. At most, within a truly just system, the law can only address violence. Within a truly just system, there’s no law preserving violence as such, for any enactment of law preserving violence upon an individual would violate a universal right of ontological beings—beings for whom being is a concern, as opposed to ontic beings that have only being without concern as such—the universal right to be free from violence. This isn’t to say that law preserving violence doesn’t exist or isn’t sometimes necessary, only that it’s beyond the limit of justice, and is, by definition,

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always extrajudicial. Violence can preserve the law, but this can only happen in a state wherein the law is suspended. This is all to say that if resistance activism has the requirements of remaining within the system of the just, then our best hope is rational persuasion, as violent coercion is off the table. Further, toward alternative metaphors of understanding activism, we might move beyond the metaphors of violence, fighting, and war. We can think more peacefully and empathetically. For those who actually suffer through the experience of violence, fighting, and war, violence, fighting, and war are more than mere metaphors. Still, this doesn’t account for the fact that within the realms of the political, we must account for non-rational actors. And given that the laws are ones that guarantee fairness, it’s here that we sometimes think that law preserving violence is necessary. However, we shouldn’t be so quick to think that violent means are here the only way. Unless they’re entirely incorrigible, at least some would-be non-rational actors might be brought into rational political deliberation through education. Has a cleverly worded foamcore sign held by a screaming person in the street ever made a White nationalist stop and think, You know, that’s a good point? Will the suburban home floating down the Thames be the one thing that will convince people en masse to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and plastics, or did that just produce that much more waste? I’m not sure about the answer to either of these, but what if instead of temporary disruptions, we participated in sustained efforts? Here’s a moment that sticks with me, though: When Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble was published, I was in high school, but it was only a few years old when I became a Women’s Studies major in college. I struggled to understand the philosophy behind the argument, as did many of my peers. We were part of a larger conversation, but at the time, it hadn’t gained much traction outside the university. At the time, the more optimistic of us thought that perhaps we might be lucky enough to see the change thinking differently could bring to the world by the end of our lifetimes. I was among the more pessimistic. Never have I been so glad to be profoundly mistaken. The discourse that started at the university eventually found its way to mainstream culture, and though we still have improvements to

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make, we’ve come much further than I or most people that I knew at the time would’ve thought. Sure, I’d like for today’s activists to understand the idea of anti-essentialism a little better, but here, education has made a world of difference. If such a little thing—a thing like a bunch of students and professors discussing a book in scattered about classes—had made such a profound change, why can’t we repeat this today? And don’t we need the same thing to happen if we’re to have any hope at not becoming extinct? If rational, philosophical, and, in this case, scientific discourse regarding this issue can be understood and taught, maybe things aren’t so hopeless. Panic and anger can get us so far, but education and informed action is what will turn things around. Let’s partake in sustained efforts that think through our problems and let all those who have learned teach what they’ve come to know. This is an effective way to make sure that when we act, our actions will be ones that are oriented toward the good. It’s in this spirit that the present volume collects together the following essays. You want to change the world? That’s what teaching and theory is for. If there’s one thing that oppressive regimes fear, it’s learning. If through any one thing in particular, hegemony can certainly survive on ignorance alone. In This Volume . . . Chapter One opens this volume with Elizabeth St. Pierre’s essay that speaks to the necessity of both theory and teaching as we live during a time in which we face possible extinction. She offers that there’s perhaps been a failure to teach how to learn, especially if we teach from pre-existing, systematized, formalized research methodologies. She challenges us to think beyond these facile modes of thought. In Chapter Two, Rebecca C. Christ and Candace R. Kuby offer a thought-provoking reflection guided by the etymology of resistance. Resisting any easy meanings, they show how slowing or pausing the research machine can be a generative process regarding pedagogy and knowledge production. Chapters Three, Four, and Five are exemplars of what St. Pierre, Christ, and Kuby encourage us to do in carefully thinking through

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theory. Namely, these chapters take an in-depth look at the thinking of Sara Ahmed. In Chapter Three, Sara M. Childers deeply engages with different philosophical accounts of materialism. In Chapter Four, Becky Atkinson reflects upon the question of what it means to live a feminist life. In Chapter Five, Lucy E. Bailey explores the multiform ways in which theory can be a companion to us, taking Ahmed’s work as an example. In keeping with St. Pierre’s challenge to go beyond facile modes of thought, we then turn to Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight. In Chapter Six, Serge F. Hein explicates the concept of différance, and asks us to question the concept of resistance itself as a hold over from humanist and modernist thought. In Chapter Seven, Hanne Vandenbussche et al. show us how to challenge ideas of segregation with regard to disability, seeking to perform an inclusive pedagogy. In Chapter Eight, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve seeks to “put laziness to work, ironically so, in the hope of generating a lazy pedagogy as resistance to our contemporary conditions of knowledge production in academia.” Chapter Nine brings this volume to a close with an essay from Tina Bly. She considers how some central tenets and local use of postcolonial theory respond to global hegemony regarding institutional experiences of academe. She addresses Indigenous perspectives of climate change and how Indigenous epistemologies align with postcolonial theory and represent thoughts upon which we can act.

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Theory Is Back

chapter one

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“Theory Is Back”1: Theory as Resistance in the 21st Century ELIZABETH ADAMS ST. PIERRE

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he news is not so good as we approach the third decade of the 21st century. Whatever worldwide stability 20th-century post– World War II generations accomplished is rapidly and often deliberately being destroyed as safeguards established then against fascism, homophobia, nativism, sexism, racism, and on and on are overturned by private organizations as well as by state and federal law in this country and others. Our nostalgia for that romanticized past, of course, masks its inequities and ethical failures. Still, unthinkably dangerous and unethical cartoon characters, made for TV, have been elected to the highest political office in countries assumed to be stable and advanced democracies. Comparisons to the fascism preceding World War II have become common, and the diligent labor of prior leaders who fought for social justice is being unwound, secretly in many cases, in every sector of society to the point of no return. We can’t go back. All this gets local and personal, of course. Even as democratically elected leaders stoke hatred, individuals struggle to live ethical lives at the beginning of a new century already steeped in discord and fear. But regimes of power call forth resistance, and groups are organizing everywhere to refuse the terrible and unimaginable that has become “normal.” I learned theories and practices of resistance during the last decade of the 20th century from feminists, from race theorists, from the Frankfurt School critical theorists, from those we’ve since labeled poststructuralists, and from others who resisted what Deleuze (1968/1994) called the “dogmatic image of thought” (p. 148).

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The richness and creativity of that post–World War II theorizing was thrilling, provocative, and immediately useful, but that period was followed, for some, by what Braidotti (2013) called a “zombified landscape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia,” as well as “theory fatigue” (p. 5), even the presumed death of theory. I must say that I never experienced such fatigue, nor can I imagine the death of theory. Before I became an academic and studied theory(ies), I felt stymied at every turn, frustrated that I couldn’t explain or justify my gut resistance to what in my doctoral studies I found language for—patriarchy, classism, the abuse of common sense, and so on. I had no language to speak that resistance until I learned theories and their concepts that gave me power to think, argue, and resist. Theory saved my life. It still does. Some people say we don’t need theory—that it’s elitist, over-rated, too hard to understand—and that we just need better practices—what works. The continuing deployment of that tired and wrong-headed theory/practice binary, thinkable only in a particular and typically unnamed theory, is not only astounding but also very dangerous. I agree with Colebrook (2014) in the long quotation that follows: In many respects theory, far from being an academic enterprise that we can no longer afford to indulge, is the condition and challenge of the twenty-first century or age of extinction: “we” are finally sensing both our finitude as a world-forming and world-destroying species, and sensing that whatever we must do or think cannot be confined or dictated by our finitude. . . . Theory, or distance from the real, is necessary: “we” are faced with an existing world that, precisely because it exists, is not ourselves; without that “outside” world there could be no inner subject, no “we,” no agent of practice. But this existing world to which we are definitively bound is therefore impossible: the given world is given to us, never known absolutely. We are not paralyzed by this distance from the world, for it is the distance that provokes both knowledge and practice (Stengers, 2011); but the distance nevertheless entails that practice cannot form the ground of our knowledge (“do what works”) nor can knowledge ground practice (“act according to your nature”). To avoid theory and pass directly to practice would require forgetting that the self of practice is only a self insofar as it is placed in a position of necessary not-knowing. (pp. 32–33)

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“We” are, indeed, living in the age of extinction and, with each new climate report, the date on which Earth will no longer be able to support human life draws closer. Indeed, I feel as if I’m living in one of those disaster movies that begins with a quick sequence of clips of TV news reports featuring the worst-ever hurricane, tornado, flood, earthquake, or heat wave. After that horrific prelude, the camera switches to a group of embattled humans, some “we,” trying to survive the end times. Interestingly, Braidotti (2017) recently wrote that “theory is back” (p. xiv)—the end times seem to demand it. She listed, among others, the following new critical theories: animal studies, globalization studies, internet studies, reconciliation studies, death studies, trauma studies, eco-criticism, conflict studies and peace research, and human rights-oriented medicine. Times change, history happens, and we need new theories to think about the world given to us and the world we create. Ever since theory helped me understand that the “I” and the “we” we believe ourselves to be is simply one description among many possible other descriptions, I have been obsessed with re-thinking human being as a practice of freedom. Reading Rorty’s (1986) statement below at mid-life was transformational, liberating, and challenging: The urge to tell stories of progress, maturation and synthesis might be overcome if we once took seriously the notion that we only know the world and ourselves under a description [emphasis added]. For doing so would mean taking seriously the possibility that we just happened on that description—that it was not the description which nature evolved us to apply, or that which best unified the manifold of previous descriptions. (p. 48)

Rorty sent me to philosophy, searching for other descriptions of being and human being that had not become normal, taken-forgranted, and real, for “speculative possibilities that exceed our present grasp, but may nevertheless be our future” (p. 48). But different descriptions of being and human being have long been available in an aberrant line of speculative philosophers—e.g., Lucretius, Leibniz, Spinoza, James, Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari—some of whom are also called philosophers

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of immanence—e.g., Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Bergson, and Deleuze. In fact, much work that calls itself “new” (e.g., new materialism, new empiricism) is not so new but a return to philosophical thought that was always different from the traditional, dogmatic line of philosophers—e.g., Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. Perhaps we hope that thought but ignored for centuries may enable a different “we” and a different life. Smith (2012), writing about Deleuze’s work, explained how philosophical thought can push against the “we” and the “I” that have become habits, can put the dominant description of human being in play, in variation: Like each of us, the philosopher—or the artist or the mathematician—begins with the multiplicities that have invented him or her as a formed subject, living in an actualized world, with an organic body, in a given political order, having learnt a certain language. But at its highest point, both writing and thinking, as activities, consist in following the abstract movement of what Deleuze calls a “line of flight” that extracts variable singularities from these multiplicities of lived experience—because they are already there, even if they have been rendered ordinary [emphasis added]—and then makes them function as variables in order to make them function together in a singular and non-homogeneous whole, and thus participate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”—for instance, the invention of new compositions in language . . . and at the limit, the creation of a new world (through singularities and events). (p. 185)

I read much hope in Smith’s words and Deleuze’s thought, but I doubt we have enough time before the end times to do the hard work of thinking differently so we can live differently. Hope lives side-byside with despair, and I survey the classes of 18- and 19-year-olds I teach at my university as I explain different descriptions of human being to them—hoping something I say will stick—and, at the same time, fear the earth will not sustain them to a ripe old age. We may have mourned the death of the subject in the 20th century, but, in the 21st, we mourn the death of all of human being, no matter how we describe it. Despair finds every era, and when I was a new academic in the 1990s, I liked to repeat the words of 20th-century scholars who, in their era’s despair, struggled to keep going. Foucault (1983/1984)

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wrote that he proceeded with a “pessimistic activism” (p. 343); Tony Kushner (as cited in Lather, 1995), with a “non-stupid optimism” (p. 3); and Cornell West (1995), with “an audacious sense of hope, not grounded in optimism.” I fear optimism and hope have mostly dropped out of my life, and I’m left with Foucault’s pessimistic activism because, as Deleuze (1986/1988) wrote, “we continue to produce ourselves as subjects on the basis of old modes which no longer correspond to our problems” (p. 107). Why we repeat the same instead of creating difference has become my overarching ethical question. To be sure, the new critical studies Braidotti identified require a different ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) arrangement that enables a different description of being and, especially, of human being, a being who refuses the old Enlightenment binaries—man/ nature, male/female, human/nonhuman—who is not the “master” of the universe but completely entangled with all being. Barad put it this way: To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future. (p. ix)

This is not a new idea, of course, that human being is not separate from, prior to, and privileged over other forms of being; it can be found in that aberrant line of philosophers listed earlier. So why did Barad’s statement seem so radical in her 2007 book? Why haven’t we studied those philosophers? Why haven’t their ideas been taken up and become imperceptible in everyday thought and living as have those of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel? Who wins by living his life as master of the universe? The master, of course.

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But the aberrant philosophers, especially Deleuze, I think, “give us a philosophy of the impersonal, the pre-individual and the non-subjective, a philosophy where the concept of subject plays a minor part, if any part at all” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 93). In that image of thought, humanist Enlightenment philosophy and its subject is displaced so that another philosophy and its description of human being—a minor being without exceptionalism can be thought. This is classic deconstruction: reverse the binary to illustrate the violence of the binary and then overturn the structure in which it exists so that something different can be thought. But again, the thought of those aberrant philosophers has been available to us for centuries. Why have we not taken up that thought? As a student of Foucault and as a feminist, I argue that whose thought dominates is a matter of power and politics and, further, that the dominant thought is not rational or natural or given. And I repeat my argument that all those so-called aberrant, minor theories we’ve thought for centuries are right there waiting for our study and our use in critiquing whatever has become normal and true. Critique enables freedom. In regard to critique and resistance and the freedom they promise, Butler (1995) asked a key question almost 25 years ago: “How is it that we become available to a transformation of who we are, a contestation which compels us to rethink ourselves, a reconfiguration of our ‘place’ and our ‘ground’” (p. 132)? How do we become available to those other descriptions of being and human being our forebears have thought? Her theoretical question takes us to the personal, of course, and believing education can be transformational, I have tried to make the aberrant as normal as the conventional in my teaching and writing. My politics, my resistance, has been to give my students as much theory as possible so they have different analytics to bring to their work and lives. Like Braidotti, I discourage repetition and encourage students, once they’ve done their homework and studied the already thought, to invent new theories for this new century. Foucault (1982/1988) helps me here. He wrote the following: My role—and that is too emphatic a word—is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes that have been built up at a certain moment

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during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that is the role of an intellectual. (p. 10)

Indeed. I remain convinced that having diverse and contradictory theories to live with is a powerful practice of resistance. I close with some comments about theory’s relation to social science research methodology, which it seems we must always address in the social sciences. I’ve learned after many years of teaching both theory(ies) and qualitative research methodology that that relation is seldom taught or learned. A research methodology course might begin with a nod to theory but, typically, quickly shifts to a pre-existing, stand-alone, (almost) theory-free methodology that’s been formalized and systematized in a textbook—a methodology with a process that promises to fill “gaps” in foundational knowledge. As I’ve explained elsewhere (St. Pierre, 2012), that approach works only in logical positivism. Nonetheless, in the social sciences, methodology almost always trumps theory, probably because, as Steinmetz (2005) wrote, logical positivism is the “epistemological unconsciousness” of the social sciences. After many years in academia, I am more and more convinced that there are too many social scientists who cannot name the ethico-onto-epistemological arrangement that enables the methodology they use. I suspect this may be more a failure to teach than a failure to learn, but it is also a failure to teach how to learn, how to escape the normalized, disciplinary boundaries of disciplines. Typically, disciplines and their methodology(ies) are repeated without question: we learn what the discipline teaches us and then teach that to our own students. But I believe another failure of teaching is at work here as well. My sense is that we teach pre-existing, systematized, formalized research methodologies because they’re easy to teach—after all, we have many, many textbooks now that lay out the research “process” from A to Z and tell new researchers exactly “what to do,” even though Thomas Kuhn explained in 1962 that textbooks disappear scientists’ disagreements, creating a false consensus about the field. John Law (2004) observed the same and asked, “How to move from the legislations that we usually find in the textbooks on method? Away from

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the completed and closed accounts of method?” (p. 141). In the end, it’s much easier to teach students a process-driven, instrumental, pre-existing methodology from a textbook than it is to teach students how to read and how to think—how to thrive in the “rigorous confusion” (Lather, 1996, p. 545), experimentation, and creativity that thought can bring to bear on itself. I believe that by the time a methodology textbook is written, the methodology is closed, shut down, dead. In fact, a participant in a recent conversation about the exhaustion and perils of pre-existing research methodology claimed that “qualitative research is dead.” Another expressed dismay that qualitative research has been reduced to interview research, which is quite efficient but lacks that validity criteria for excellent qualitative research, length of time in the field. I have argued that the 19th- and 20th-century pre-existing, systematized, formalized research methodologies we teach and learn in the social sciences are incommensurable with the “new” theories and their different descriptions of being and human being. The old methodologies focus on epistemology and its rational/empirical binary that aligns with Descartes’s mind/body binary. They begin with an assumption that we know what the world is like (the world has to fit the method) and that humans pre-exist the world. Those methodologies are knowledge-productions machines focused on repetition (which is all that’s possible if you always follow the same process), filling supposed “gaps” in knowledge with something recognizable, laying down foundations, and telling the truth about (representing) the world. I believe the age of extinction in which we live demands a great deal more of us than social science that sidelines theory. Theory is back—back not only to help us think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) but also to begin with theory(ies) and concepts that re-orient our thinking. I’m beginning to believe that ethics and rigor in the new inquiry demand we begin with reading and studying philosophy—the rest will come.

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References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2017). Theory is back. In E. Horl & J. Burton (Eds.), General ecology: The new ecological paradigm (pp. xiv–xv). London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. Butler, J. (1995). For a careful reading. In S. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell, & N. Fraser (Eds.). Feminist contentions: A philosophical exchange (pp. 127–143). New York, NY: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2014). Death of the posthuman: Essays on extinction (Vol. 1). Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Deleuze, G. (1988). Foucault (S. Hand, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1986) Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968) Foucault. M. (1984). On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader (pp. 340–372). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. (Interview conducted 1983) Foucault, M. (1988). Truth, power, self: An interview with Michel Foucault (R. Martin, Interviewer). In L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, & P. H. Hutton (Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 9–15). Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. (Interview conducted 1982) [no translator given] Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London, United Kingdom: Routledge. Kuhn, T. (1962/1970). The structure of a scientific revolution (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962) Lather, P. (1995, October). Naked methodology: Researching the lives of women with HIV/AIDS. Paper presented at the Revisioning Women, Health and Healing: Feminist, Cultural and Technoscience Studies Perspectives Conference, San Francisco, CA. Lather, P. (1996). Troubling clarity: The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 525–545. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London, England: Routledge.

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Lecercle, J.-J. (2002). Deleuze and language. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Rorty, R. (1986). Foucault and epistemology. In D. C. Hoy (Ed.). Foucault: A critical reader (pp. 41–50). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. Smith, D. W. (2012). Concepts and creation. In R. Braidotti & P. Pisters (Eds.), Revising normativity with Deleuze (pp. 175–188). London, England: Bloomsbury. Steinmetz, G. (2005) The epistemological unconscious of U.S. sociology and the transition to post-Fordism: The case of historical sociology. In J. Adams, E. S. Clemens, & A. S. Orloff (Eds.), Remaking modernity: Politics, history, sociology (pp. 109–157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (2012). Another postmodern report on knowledge: Positivism and its others. International Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, 15, 483–503. West, C. (1995, February 24). Race matters. Lecture at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.

Endnote 1

See Braidotti (2017, p. xiv).

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chapter two

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Speculative (Wombing) Pedagogies: |Rəˈzistəns| in Qualitative Inquiry REBECCA C. CHRIST AND CANDACE R . KUBY

O

ne morning, we (Candace and Becky) connected via Zoom (a videoconferencing platform) for our weekly video chat and opened a brand-new document on Google Drive. We had been invited to participate in a plenary session titled “Pedagogy as Resistance” at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). We were excited about this opportunity, but before we could agree to be in it, we felt we needed to have an idea about what we would say—a novel idea for a conference presentation, we know. But as we looked at each other on the Zoom screen and talked through the information provided about the session, the Google Doc largely stayed blank. Resistance. We had not thought about or written about resistance before . . . or so we thought. . . . What would we say? So, we stared at the Google Doc and at each other some more, talked some more, and finally did what we “do best”—we looked up resistance in the Apple Dictionary tool. If we had not been asked to think with resistance, we might never have looked up the word resistance, and then we might not have had any of the productive thinkings1 that ultimately led to the writing of this chapter. This is an interesting example of the entanglement of research and writing with the “outside” world. If our research and writing had never

1 We often purposefully use the word thinkings (and later thinked, too) instead of thoughts (and thought) because for us, thought(s) is a word that refers an act that has been completed—it is over; thinkings and thinked, however, allow for ongoing (albeit possibly past) thinking action, as there is no end to thinking.

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encountered the “problem” of the word resistance, these thinkings might never have been thinked, produced, or written.2 We were also surprised to find that we used the word resistance in our own focus group interviews with students following the courses we taught.3 Thus, resistance became “visible” to us in a way we did not “see” or notice before as we returned to the focus group data. We realized that we asked students, “Do you expect to come across any resistance or challenges to these [more disruptive] approaches [of qualitative inquiry]?” This was not something we had thought deeply about until this point—the use of the word resistance in our question and/or what a word such as resistance could produce for students and for us as instructors and researchers. Because of the entanglement of being asked to present at the ICQI panel with/in our research, something new (be)came. In Resisting Easy Meaning . . . But, for now, back to the word resistance and its definition and etymology. We engage in what we call (re)etymologizing, in order to look at the meaning and trouble the meaning of a word at the same time—to interrogate its meaning and origins as a way to encounter something new and spark new thinking (see Kuby & Christ, 2020a, for discussion on [re]etymologizing).4 resistance |rəˈzistəns|  noun 1. the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to prevent something by action or argument 2 We are reminded of Smith’s (2012) writings about Deleuze’s views on thinking: “thinking is a process of learning or apprenticeship that is initiated by one’s encounter with a problem, and necessarily stems from the depth of one’s own ignorance” (p. 143, emphasis in original). (One of) our problem(s) in this case was the word resistance. 3 Together, we have been thinking and writing about our pedagogies of qualitative inquiry since 2015 (e.g., Kuby & Christ, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020a, 2020b). We have pursued institutional review board consent from students in several qualitative inquiry courses we have taught together and individually. After the courses are over, we meet in focus group formats with students to discuss their experiences in the courses. 4 All definitions included in this chapter come from Apple’s Dictionary tool. We keep italics in the original but keep only bolding of the word we are defining along with its pronunciation. We also delete examples of the word being used and derivatives of the word for ease of reading. These definitions were all pulled on or before October 7, 2019.

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• armed or violent opposition • [in singular] (also resistance movement) a secret organization resisting authority, especially in an occupied country • (the Resistance) the underground movement formed in France during World War II to fight the German occupying forces and the Vichy government; also called maquis 2. the ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely • Medicine & Biology lack of sensitivity to a drug, insecticide, etc., especially as a result of continued exposure or genetic change 3. the impeding, slowing, or stopping effect exerted by one material thing on another 4. the degree to which a substance or device opposes the passage of an electric current, causing energy dissipation. Ohm’s law resistance (measured in ohms) is equal to the voltage divided by the current • a resistor or other circuit component which opposes the passage of an electric current PHRASES  the path (or line) of least resistance an option avoiding difficulty or unpleasantness; the easiest course of action ORIGIN  late Middle English: from French résistance, from late Latin resistentia, from the verb resistere ‘hold back’ (see resist) At first, we were struck by the idea that resistance is an “attempt to prevent something by action or argument.” We asked ourselves, “Is that what we are doing when we engage in resistance? Are we attempting to prevent something? What are we preventing? What are we holding back? And why?” We needed to go deeper, so we followed the path of least resistance and looked up resist.

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resist |rəˈzist| verb [with object] 1. withstand the action or effect of • try to prevent by action or argument • succeed in ignoring the attraction of (something wrong or unwise) • [no object] struggle against someone or something noun a resistant substance applied as a coating to protect a surface during some process, for example, to prevent dye or glaze adhering ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French resister or Latin resistere, from re- (expressing opposition) + sistere ‘stop’ (reduplication of stare ‘to stand’). The current sense of the noun dates from the mid 19th century Resist, from late Middle English, from Old French, from Latin resistere from re–, expressing opposition, and sistere meaning stop. Re–. Sistere. Expressing opposition to “stop.” So, not stopping? “So,” we asked ourselves, “how are we engaging in pedagogy as resistance as ‘not stopping’?” We see our pedagogy as resistance—as not stopping—in the sense that we do not stop supporting students, that we do not stop challenging normative and taken-for-granted practices of pedagogy and researching, and that we do not stop engaging the best we can in ethical, relational practices with students, colleagues, and all those with whom we research and live. We also do not stop seeking more complicated understandings of the world and how to live with/in it. But resistance, for us, is not only about not stopping. In thinking about our pedagogies for the ICQI panel and in writing this chapter, we were drawn to writings by Julietta Singh (2018), Bronwyn Davies (2014), Vivienne Bozalek (2017), Jasmine Ulmer (2017), and Leigh Patel (2016), who cause us to think about notions of mastery, listening, slowing, and pausing in the academy. For example, in Julietta Singh’s (2018) new book, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, she writes,

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drawing on Helene Cixous, that “mastery is everywhere” (p. 1) and writes of “dehumanist solidarity” in the hopes of reaching toward “other modes of relational being that may not yet be recognizable” (p. 1). She looks closely at decolonization—and the process of undoing colonial mastery by producing new masterful subjects. She argues the “discourse of anticolonialism, which was geared toward the future, did not interrogate thoroughly enough its own masterful engagements” (Singh, 2018, p. 2). Or said another way, she questions the “dismantling of mastery through an inverted binary that aimed to defeat colonial mastery through other masterful forms” (Singh, 2018, p. 3). And although we are not explicitly doing a decolonizing read of the pedagogies of qualitative inquiry (QI), we do think Singh’s writing is provocative for us to think with. In teaching and learning, the discourse of mastery is prevalent. There are objectives we decide students should “accomplish,” and our aim is to provide learning opportunities for students to “know” or master the content. As Singh (2018) writes, “there is an intimate link between the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mastery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even virtuous” (p. 9). Could we say that about the content of pedagogies in QI? How might we resist a mastery narrative in the pedagogies of QI? What practices and ways of being might we engage with? One practice might be emergent listening. When writing about preschoolers and agency in learning communities, Davies (2014) says: If the members of any community . . . are to have agency—that is, the power to engage with others in ways that open up the capacity for thought and being—they cannot be bound, mind and body, by an overriding or closed set of rules and definitions dictated by powerful alliances, whether those be from government or from groups within the community itself. While each one of us might harbour a desire to have our own truths become the only truths, it is important to recognize that when truths become unquestionable, dialogue is suffocated; and it is dialogue . . . [that] make[s] a “deep contribution” to the always-evolving story of their community. That deep contribution cannot be made-to-order through an orchestrated assent to the already-known. (p. 9)

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If we think of community here with regard to the QI community and academia more broadly—not to mention the individual research communities we and our students are a part of—then we have to think about the truths that circulate about what QI should look like and what pedagogies of QI should look like and include. What are the powerful alliances that suffocate agency, dialogue, and deep contributions? Are we asking our students, through our pedagogies, to assent to the already-known ways of knowing, being, and doing QI? How do we resist that? Davies (2014) goes on to write about “emergent listening”—that which begins with the known but is open to the not-yet known, the new ways of knowing and being—and we would say also new ways of doing and teaching of QI. Davies writes about emergent listening as transgressive. Or perhaps as a way of resisting? Another practice of resistance might be slowing. We are inspired by the scholarship of Vivienne Bozalek and Jasmine Ulmer, who, in their own ways, are urging scholars into Slow scholarship and Slow ontological practices. Bozalek (2017) writes of how the corporatization of universities has led to an increased pressure for scholars in the academy to publish quickly and prolifically. Ulmer (2017) writes in relation to the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements and thinks with these Slow movements to articulate writing a Slow Ontology as a site of creative intervention. And slowing might actually lead to a productive pause. We are inspired by Eve Tuck’s introduction to Leigh Patel’s (2016) writing on decolonizing educational research, specifically in relation to a pedagogy of pausing. Patel (2016) also writes in the book about pausing: Perhaps the best move that educational researchers can do, in the interest of decolonization, that is to say eradicating, dismantling, and obliterating colonialism, is to pause in order to reach beyond, well beyond, the most familiar tropes in education and education research. (p. 88)

Patel’s (2016) call for the pause interrupts our thinking and causes us to stop for a minute to (re)think the constant drive for action as perhaps reifying the inequities (and colonialism) we seek to resist in the first place.

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Thus, we take a moment to pause our chapter as we write, to engage perhaps in a form of emergent listening that slows us down to consider our pedagogy in new ways. In this case, these pauses take the form of excerpts from transcripts of focus group conversations with master’s- and doctoral-level students5 the semester following an introductory QI course that Candace taught, as seen in the following section. We hope you pause to listen and think with us. Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down Pam: [Sketching; see Figure 2.1] . . . the other night, I left there [another class] thinking [pause] all qual is poststructural; you can do whatever you want as long as you can justify it. It’s poststructural, period. Candace: Interesting. Pam: And so, I don’t care what kinds of little paths they want you to go on, because of what you said, every person is different, there is no way we can capture exactly the same, whomever it is . . . so, whatever you work on, is truthfully—although I would never pick a poststructural methodology, I don’t think; I’d probably go more traditional paths—I just, I just kept shaking my head, it’s like—it’s all poststructural; it’s all do whatever is necessary. So. Candace: Interesting. Pam: My other question .  .  . This is more of a question or a struggle . . . One of the things I still struggle with . . . wanting to do something new. One thing I still can’t understand in the traditional methods is, they always take you back to the old, all the base theories, the seminal theories. Why do we always have to keep going backwards? Why is research never giving me the latest, see where we’re at; now, supposedly they claim all this is building on one another, but you can’t just go here [“new” in Figure 2.1]; you have to know who Foucault is, you have to know who Vygotsky is, you have to know who Bandura is—before you even start; at least that’s where it seems like they’re always starting [“theories” in Figure 2.1], so 5

All student names are pseudonyms.

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how are we ever going to get anything new, if we’re always reaching way back to the beginning and having to rebuild this path, and then the next person rebuilds this path and then the next person rebuilds this path, which is what I do like about, somewhat, of the disruptive [approaches to QI]. Why can’t I start with my data right here [“my research time/space” in Figure 2.1]? Okay, if you want me to talk about them [the old scholars, written as “theories” on sketch], I can. But let’s get these people up to where I’m at, and bring in some more from this direction [from “new” at the top of Figure 2.1], and then maybe I am building new because I’m . . . Candace: Hmmm. Pam: Well, anyway, that is kind of what I’m thinking. I don’t really understand why everyone always forces us to go back to those pieces. And they are the only people counted as [pause] really good [pause], I mean, research. That’s just—that can’t be true. There have to be people at this level [“new” in Figure 2.1] who have already discovered or moved up and some variances. How come they are not considered important enough as a starting point? Because you don’t grow very fast, if you don’t keep building on, they say they are building but we keep going back to the same starting point. And so I am confused by that. And I’ve never really had anybody, in the classes I’ve had so far, be able to explain that to me. So that’s what my picture is about [see Figure 2.1]. Omie: I would say that is even beyond just research classes. I think that is other types of, um, disciplines also, right? They want you to go back to read those kind of founding works and then build on that. I’ve found that is a common trend, what you [Pam] are talking about. Pam: I think it is good for everyone to know from where they come. If that is what they are having us do, that’s fine. Here’s where I started and here’s where we are now. But I don’t ever feel like it’s been explained that way. It’s more like, well you have to find, you need to find a base theory, or you need to go back and start. Well, what if I’ve found this article [“new” in Figure 2.1] that was resonating really well, why can’t I start here [“new” in Figure 2.1]? And build from that? Who made these people [older theorists,

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Figure 2.1. Pam’s sketching during the focus group conversation “theories” in Figure 2.1] so wonderfully special? Just because they were cited a lot? That doesn’t really mean a lot to me, although I am not a qualified researcher yet, so . . . Candace: [pause, exhales a big sigh]. In an effort to be pedagogical, we resist (providing) easy meaning by not “interpreting” the transcripts for you, our readers. We, instead, hope you are engaging with/in the pause with us and seeing what this excerpt produces for you. We offer you some questions to (continue to) provoke (y)our pausing/thinking: •

Pam asks us: “Why do we always have to keep going backwards?” and “Why can’t I start with my data right

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here?” and “Who made these people [‘old’ theorists] so wonderfully special?” How might you answer these questions yourself and/or if a student asks you? •

For Pam, there seems to be a difference between knowing where you come from and being forced to go back. How do you engage yourself and your students in the notions of literature reviews and conceptual and/or theoretical frameworks in relation to their data and inquiries?

•

Omie sees similar trends to what Pam is seeing in other disciplines (outside of QI). In what ways are we connecting QI to its many outsides (different disciplines, fields, traditions, etc.)? What other disciplines, fields, and traditions influence/shape QI (pedagogical and researching) practices?

•

Pam states, “I’m not a qualified researcher yet”—as if someone or some standard will eventually tell her that she is qualified. What does this term qualified researcher do to/with/for you and your students?

•

How do we perpetuate the notion of a “qualified researcher” in how we teach? Or in statements that students and pretenured faculty hear regarding playing it safe in the tried-and-true methods and then after tenure you can take risks and do something new? Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .

In our pausing, we return to the word resistance, only this time from within the pause, with fresh eyes and a desire to “reach beyond,” and we begin by (re)interrogating the prefix re–. re- |rē| prefix 1. once more; afresh; anew: reaccustom |reactivate • with return to a previous state: restore |revert

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2. (also red-) in return; mutually: react |resemble • in opposition: repel | resistance 3. behind or after: relic | remain • in a withdrawn state: recluse | reticent • back and away; down: recede | relegation 4. with frequentative or intensive force: redouble | resound 5. with negative force: rebuff | recant ORIGIN from Latin re-, red- ‘again, back’ The original meaning of resist incorporates the second meaning of re–: “in opposition.” Resist: In opposition to stopping. But what if to resist was not about opposition to stopping, but rather, stopping “once more; afresh; anew” (another meaning of re–) or “with frequentative or intensive force” (yet another meaning of re–). Rather than resistance as not stopping, what about a resistance that stops afresh, anew, or a resistance that stops with frequentative or intensive force. If we stopped, or paused, intensively, what would be produced; what would (be)come? Now, up to this point, we have focused on the meaning of resistance and have followed its path, but another very important word is in the title of the original panel: pedagogy. So, as we do, we looked up the word pedagogy and followed its path to pedagogue. pedagogy |ˈpedəˌgäjē| noun (plural pedagogies) 1. the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept ORIGIN late 16th century: from French pédagogie, from Greek paidagōgia ‘office of a pedagogue,’ from paidagōgos (see pedagogue)

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pedagogue |ˈpedəˌgäg| noun 1. a teacher, especially a strict or pedantic one ORIGIN late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’ + agōgos ‘guide’) We were surprised by words such as strict and pedantic, but those will have to wait for another discussion at another time. Focusing on the origin of pedagogue, we read “a slave who accompanied a child to school” from pais, paid– meaning “boy” and agōgos meaning “guide” (Did you know this was the meaning/origin of the word pedagogue?! We did not previously know this . . .). A boy guide.6 Patel (2016) reminds us that “[l]earning is fundamentally about transformation. It is coming into being and constantly altering that being” (p. 76). And so, we ask—as we have elsewhere (Kuby & Christ, 2020a), “How is being a ‘boy guide’ connected to transformation? What needs to happen for the ‘boy guide’ to transform?” (p. 140). Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down Candace: So how did you define or understand qual[itative] research at the beginning of the semester and how are you understanding it now [one semester later]? Andrew: I thought [before the qual course] it was very straightforward, and I thought it was easy. . . . I thought qual[itative research] was like a clean slate; you could just sit down and look for things and pick people’s brains and try to structure and find new concepts. I really like qual for that. But I had no idea that it [qualitative research] was deeper than that, it was actually theories, and the paradigms and all that stuff, so that is really something that I got out of the class. To kind of see that you have to structure what you are doing in a certain way. And it needs to make sense. You can’t just be like, oh, I’ll do 6 Also see Kuby & Christ (2020a) for more (re)etymologizing and additional thinkings on the word pedagogue.

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focus groups, and this is it. You have to actually think about what you are doing and have purpose in your methodologies. So I think that really made me, probably, a better thinker. I think it allowed me to structure my ideas better and to build purpose in what I am doing. Candace: Okay. Um, so was there anything that confused you at first, so whether it was the content of what we were talking and reading about or something that we were asking you to do, like assignments or something like that, that was confusing at first but now you understand or get the why behind it? Andrew: I wanted so much more, of, direction; it is not the best word. But I remember that you kept saying, “It depends, it depends.” And to me, that wasn’t satisfying. I need to understand, like, what is it [qualitative research]? “Well, it depends” [Dr. Kuby said in class]. And I was like, “AHHH!” [lots of laughter from Andrew, Candace, and research assistant). And I think I have a better appreciation of that now. Candace: Okay. Andrew: I feel like, I catch myself saying, “It depends,” all the time now in my qual two [qualitative research methods II course] because I am like, “No.” There’s different perspectives, like, it depends [laughter from research assistant and a little from Andrew]. I say it with conviction, but at first I was like no, no, no, no, like, stop this for a second now [lots of laughter from all]; there has to be some track or path that I can follow, but I feel much more comfortable now being like, no it’s, it really depends. So that is probably a really big take away [from the course] for me. Candace: Okay. So would you have suggested me do something differently in the moment or do you feel like that was okay? Andrew: I think, I think it had to happen that way. I think it was okay for me to kind of have that realization over time that, like, you know what, nope, I’m going/growing [can’t distinguish on audio recording] on this idea like that, it actually does depend. Yeah. Candace: Okay.

. . .

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Candace: We [as a class] had discussions over how you define them [paradigms], overlaps between them, um, can you have more than one, can you change them in each study that you do? So how do you understand paradigms now? How do you feel . . .  Andrew: It depends. Candace: It depends?! [laughter] Andrew: I feel like it’s, um, my understanding is that it is probably desirable to have one main paradigm, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that you can’t change. . . . As you do research, I think you change research, but I think research also changes you because you learn new things, and you get a new context and I think that it’s okay that your perspective or paradigm evolve a little bit or shift. Again, in an effort to be pedagogical, we resist easy meaning by not “interpreting” the transcripts for you, our readers. We, instead, hope you are engaging with/in the pause with us and seeing what this excerpt produces for you. We offer you some questions to (continue to) provoke (y)our pausing/thinking: •

Andrew says, “You have to actually think about what you are doing and have purpose in your methodologies.” In what ways do we ask our students to think (in a Deleuzian sense, meaning we have thoughts all the time, but thinking is rare)? And in what areas of our pedagogy do we actually not ask our students to think? How can we provide pedagogical spaces that shock thought and force thinking?

•

Andrew responds to Candace’s question: “This idea like that—it actually does depend.” And notice, the student uses Candace’s “own device” back on her; therefore, we cannot expect certainty or clarity of knowing from our students, which we perhaps often feel is a goal of teaching/learning. How does uncertainty expressed by our students change what is possible in the pedagogies of QI? How does a phrase, perhaps as simple as “it depends,” open up space for new ways of thinking, knowing, be(com)ing, and doing QI?

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•

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Andrew states, “I think you change research, but I think research also changes you.” If we believe research changes you, then many taken-for-granted norms and practices of research don’t seem thinkable, or at least we have to be open to uncertainties and newness in inquiry practices. And in turn, as Andrew states, we change research. As Lather and St. Pierre (2013) remind us, we have made it (qualitative research) all up. We are reminded to be open to the not yet known of research. And again, what needs to happen for the boy guide to change/transform? Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .

While thinking through all this, we came across this quote from Anzaldúa (2000): “When you’re in the midst of the Coatlicue state— the cave, the dark—you’re hibernating or hiding, you’re gestating and giving birth to yourself. You’re in a womb state” (p. 226). Coatlicue is the Aztec goddess who birthed the moon and the stars and is also known as the “mother of the gods” or “our mother” or “our grandmother.”7 For Anzaldúa, when you come out of the Coatlicue state, you are changing worlds. But before you can be (re)birthed, you need to gestate. gestate |ˈjeˌstāt| verb [no object] 1. carry a fetus in the womb from conception to birth • (of a fetus) undergo gestation. • develop over a long period ORIGIN mid 19th century: from Latin gestat- ‘carried in the womb,’ from the verb gestare Gestation is a time of being carried in the womb, and you “rest” when being carried. But gestating is not inactive; there is actually 7

This information was gathered from “Cōātlīcue” (n.d.).

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a lot happening during the period of gestation. You are developing something over a period of time. It is a lively, yet rest(full) time. So, we think about this gestating and (re)birthing as the process of transformation that is/would be required for learning—for altering your being in the world—as Patel (2016) writes. And in order to be (re)birthed, you need to gestate. So, we ask, in what ways can we create spaces for students to gestate in their learning and in what ways can we gestate in our teaching/pedagogy? And back to resistance… if resistance is not about not stopping but, rather, about stopping with intensive force, the idea of pedagogy as resistance fundamentally comes under questioning. Maybe pedagogy as resistance is not about stopping something or preventing something from happening but really about stopping with intensive force. If to resist is to stop again (and again), you are allowing for a long(er) period of gestation: waiting, slowing, pausing, developing, transforming. If you do not stop, gestation cannot occur, and therefore, neither can we (re)birth—no transformation. So, perhaps pedagogy is not necessarily about being a boy guide after all. How can we guide others, if we do not stop, pause, gestate ourselves? Instead of guiding boys, what if we were wombing pedagogy? Wombing—not necessarily in a gendered sense (but yes, always already also in a gendered sense, just as the word pedagogy from its origin is always already also gendered). But we are thinking more about wombing as being in relation to. We can only be(come) transformed in relation. Wombing has an element of withness. We cannot be alone if we are being carried. Then there is the (re)birthing. Again, we are not alone in this, nor is it easy. And it is difficult and violent because we are being transformed into a new state. But the gestation period helps prepare us for difficult, violent transformation. In Resisting a Conclusion . . .  So, we, in our writing, are attempting to practice the resistance that we are advocating for—in some senses, we were forced to stop, to think about what resistance meant and/or did for/with/in us. And with that stopping (be)came something quite productive, which also caused

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us to consider how, when we do not stop, or pause, our pedagogical (and researching) practices, we might reify the power structures and inequities that we actually seek to resist. Leigh Patel (2016) writes: Learning is fundamentally about transformation. It is coming into being and constantly altering that being; it is a subjective and often messy act. It is, in essence, letting go of a rung we have a firm grip on in order to fumble with the specter of a different rung. Coming into being is in essence about being-in-relation. (p. 76)

So, we advocate for a slowing, a pausing, “withstanding the action or effect of” the research machine—or perhaps said as wombing practices and pedagogies as slowing, pausing . . . this does not mean to be inactive, but it is about gestating for/toward a better future; we are intensively pausing and still doing and responding in relationships, and we are resisting the neoliberalism current to go, go, go that, in its wake, reifies inequity and does not allow space and time for transformation. Valarie Kaur, at the end of her Watch Night speech,8 reminds us—in giving birth—the midwife reminds us first to breathe . . . and then push . . . and if we do not push we die . . . So, we call for us all to engage in wombing pedagogies of resistance or else we die . . . . . . but before we can get to the time of pushing, we must gestate and breathe and then . . . we can push.

8 In this speech, Kaur (in the video posted by Worldwide Trends, 2017) begins by telling the story of her grandfather’s emigration from India to the United States, where he initially was imprisoned for being Sikh and seen as foreign. She continues the speech, describing past and ongoing acts of violence and oppression committed against those who have been labeled as “Other” in the United States, and asks, “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? . . . What if our America is . . . waiting to be born? . . . What if this is our nation’s great transition?”

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References Anzaldúa, G.E. (2000). Interviews/Entrevistas (A. Keating, Ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Bozalek, V. (2017). Slow scholarship in writing retreats: A diffractive methodology for response-able pedagogies. South African Journal of Higher Education, 31(2), 40–57. doi: 10.20853/31-2-1344. Cōātlīcue. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 13, 2020 from https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C5%8D%C4%81tl%C4%ABcue Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. New York, NY: Routledge. Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2018a). An ethico-onto-epistemological pedagogy of qualitative research: Knowing/being/doing in the neoliberal academy. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, M. Zembylas, & T. Shefer (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education (pp. 131–147). London, England: Bloomsbury Academic. Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2018b). Productive aporias and inten(t/s)ionalities of paradigming: Spacetimematterings in an introductory qualitative research course. Qualitative Inquiry, 24, 293–304. Kuby, C.  R., & Christ, R.  C. (2019). Us-ing: Producing qualitative inquiry pedagogies with/in lively packets of relations. Qualitative Inquiry, 25, 965–978. Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2020a). Speculative pedagogies of qualitative inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. Kuby, C.  R., & Christ, R.  C. (2020b). The matter we teach with matters: Teaching with theory, theorizing with (textbook) bodies. Qualitative Inquiry, 26, 71–80. Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 629–633. Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to answerability. New York, NY: Routledge. Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, D.  W. (2012). Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Ulmer, J. B. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 201–211. Worldwide Trends. (2017, February 28). Valarie Kaur, a Sikh, talks about the future and acceptance of different races, people, etc. . . [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2uv6-2FVhA

Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry

chapter three

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Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry SARA M. CHILDERS

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n 2015, I published a chapter on motherhood in an anthology titled Teacher, Mother, Scholar: Re-Envisioning Motherhood in the Academy (Young, 2015). The chapter “More Mother Than Others: Disorientations, Motherscholars, and Objects in Becoming” (Childers, 2015) was prompted by an experience I had with a group of moms when I started my new position as an assistant professor. Working from the middle of this “strange ontological haunting” (St. Pierre, 2019, p. 13) that plagued my thinking and left me disoriented, I wrote in an attempt to dislodge myself from the emotional by-products to focus on the problematic of the motherscholar as a becoming subject. In the paper delivered at the 2019 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) conference, I addressed how I approached thinking motherhood and academia differently, utilizing the conceptual work of Sara Ahmed as a reorientation of thought (Childers, 2019). In this chapter, I revisit that approach, consider the position of phenomenology and critical materialism in the current moment, and bring some concepts from Ahmed’s 2006 text, Living a Feminist Life, to bear on this thinking back through the “well-worn lines” of theory. I end with a reflection on the paradox of writing as reorienting disorientation. Toward Disorientation This was the moment of misrecognition: My partner Mark and I are standing on the sidelines, watching our kids at their first soccer practice. It’s the first semester in my first job as an assistant professor at a large university in a small town where

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Theory as Resistance everyone knows everyone and children’s extracurricular activities become intense adult social hours. What appears to be a small welcoming committee approaches us, three women in their late 30s to 40s, who I’ve seen with their children at the playground or in my neighborhood. Where are you from? When did you get here? Where are you living? What school do your kids attend? “What department are you in?” they ask Mark directly. “Not me. She works for the university.” “I’m in the College of Ed.,” I say. They turn back to Mark, “Oh, then you’re one of us.”

That statement, “You’re (not) one of us,” was the shifting ground of thought. Whatever the women were, I was not, or at least not in the same way. The effect of recognizing my spouse as “one of (them) us” left me with an experience of misrecognition, illegibility, and illegitimacy in relation to these other mothering bodies. What was I then? I felt de-subjectivized and decoupled from a subject position, that of mother, through which I oriented and made sense of myself. A counterfeit mother, what was it about my orientation to the academy that disrupted thought so much so that my spouse was more mother than I was? I was confronted with the illegibility of my identity as a “mother” because of my simultaneous identity as a “scholar.” I found less discomfort in my meetings with other mothers if I “reverse-covered” (Yoshino, 2002) and omitted any discussion of my academic life while engaging in typical conversations about childcare or family. Similarly, when I attempted to participate in political discussions about educational equity that consumed our small town, my academic expertise in the issues proved to disrupt what were intended to be conversations that bonded the mothers through a shared experience of protecting their children from a failing system. If I wanted to appear as a mothering subject within this local context, I was expected to cover my concerns about racial inequity and put my educational background aside because this critique, in turn, destabilized their political identities as progressive, middle-class White mothers whose children went to school with “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995). This inability to bridge motherhood and scholarship made each engagement with them less and less worthwhile, and this was unsettling to me from an academic perspective.

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I often use writing to work through the storm in my mind and through concepts and philosophies to think differently. Rather than unproductively stew in my emotions, I wanted to use the energy of this experience to consider the motherscholar identity and reconceptualize the disorientation and dis-ease. I had been reading Queer Phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) and found it helpful for shifting my thinking away from how I felt toward a provocative engagement with subjectivity through a phenomenology of objects and relations. Mother and scholar were worked through a framework of critical materialism and feminist new materialism. What emerged was a discussion of how “the motherscholar as a becoming subject that takes shape through her orientations towards objects and how her proximity and nearness to objects invokes dis-identifications and disorientation” (Childers, 2015, p. 114). Turning toward objects helped me reconceptualize power relations ontologically as practices witnessed in the relations of bodies, objects, and histories. As I participated in the ICQI conference, I sat through many a session scaffolded by the work of Karen Barad (2007) and other scholars performing what has been labeled feminist new materialism. As I delivered my paper utilizing critical materialism and Ahmed’s 2006 approach to a phenomenology of objects, I paused to say, “I feel like I’m saying a dirty word,” as the concepts of “phenomenology” and “lived experience” passed through my lips. Phenomenology has fallen out of fashion, in part, because of its attention to lived experience, which has been critiqued and picked apart by feminists (see Scott, 1991, for her influential critique), and now from the perspective of new materialism, for years. Ahmed was not carrying the same cache at this conference as her new materialist sisters, and some comments lead me to believe that the turn in phenomenology toward objects is misunderstood or misrecognized as a return to traditional phenomenology à la Husserl (1931/2013) or Heidegger (1962/2008). Misrecognitions The problem of feminist new materialism as it relates to my work on racial equity in schools (Childers, 2017) has been its limited utility for thinking about the oppression and inequity that permeate

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students’ lives and their agency as educational subjects. The emphasis on the more-than-human was limited in the analysis and critique necessary to honor the very real material experiences of students of color and low socioeconomic status in urban schools (Childers, 2016). Critical materialism serves as a framework that does not throw the “babies” of culture, social, discourse, living and breathing out with the “bathwater” of humanist thinking. Similarly, it broadened the scope of interrogating the motherscholar in deep relation to not only objects but also histories, socialities, and discourses. Through this approach, the motherscholar is a relational subject in becoming, one that gets produced at the interstitial affectivediscursive-material relations with the world, both human and morethan-human. She emerges as an assembling of bodies, objects, and socialities that irrupt through language and being in such a way that it provokes relations of discomfort when we are confronted with this “oblique” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 92) figure—a mother who is a scholar or a scholar who is a mother; she appears askance in the world through her alignment with objects that appear inappropriate to her identity, and this subtly undermines language, category, and norms. Assembling and becoming across multiple relations move thinking away from essence and fixity of identity or constrained subjectivity toward multiplicity, potentiality, and the possibility of something new. Critical materialism promotes a phenomenology of objects that imagines these as part of the equation of experience. I heavily relied on the work of critical materialist scholars because they provided another route into the problematic of the motherscholar. I see new feminist materialism and critical materialism as not only sharing important onto-epistemological claims but also having significant differences when it comes to understanding lived experience. An assembling of thought, “new feminist materialism” (Hekman, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) reinvigorates the material, or matter, for thinking. This brand of social theory emphasizes the agential capacity of matter (i.e., objects) and the more-than-human (nonhuman or animal) to destabilize the presumption that matter plays a passive role in the world. The discursive turn is downgraded because “language,” which is in concert with the human, the social, and representation itself, “has been granted too much power”

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(Barad, 2007, p. 132). This posthuman onto-epistemology articulates practices of knowing and being as mutually implicated, but matter matters more here. Barad (2007) emphasizes “intra-action” (p. 33) between human and more-than-human bodies to demonstrate how nature and matter are always already acting on and with the human. Objects, things, animals, what have you, are mutually constituted and remain entangled with a force of their own. Critical materialism emphasizes the inseparability of the human and the material as well but such that the real, social construction, and lived experience remain in play. According to Coole and Frost (2010), For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist ontologies, the challenge here is to give materiality its due while recognizing its plural dimensions and its complex, contingent modes of appearing. (p. 27)

Matter matters and remains in the company of the social and the cultural. Coole and Frost (2010) emphasize that there is also a more Marxist materialist mode of social analysis that entails paying attention to the material, historical, and sociological structures of international political economy that lend context as well as practical inertia to identities that entail unequal life chances. It calls for a detailed phenomenology of diverse lives as they are actually lived—often in ways that are at odds with abstract normative theories or official ideologies. (p. 27)

Critical materialisms do not shy away from the materiality of lived experience, whereas posthuman materialisms desire to undo the subject entirely with an emphasis on the posthuman and the more-than-human. The lived experience of the human is not a dirty idea, but what is different is how lived experience is thought. Through a phenomenology of objects, the becoming motherscholar takes shape through active orientations toward objects (and these objects take shape in relation as well), and the proximities and distances between invoke disidentifications and disorientation.

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Here is a brief example: Thinking about objects, it is apparent how what we are oriented toward as mothers and scholars are often not aligned. Objects help orient us to the world; when I turn to my desk, computer, and books, open my document, place my fingers against the keys, I am oriented toward academic pursuits. These objects help me to do the work that I do. My intra-actions with and through these objects produce local performative enactments of becoming scholar. The mother that is a scholar simultaneously turns towards incongruent objects like children and manuscripts, and engages in dissimilar actions such as child care and writing, that tend to be viewed and sometimes experienced as exclusive, such that turning towards one often presents a potential turning away from the other. I argue that motherscholars make apparent that one does not necessarily have to turn purely one way or the other, though these multiple and coincidental turnings produce often painful disorientations as we take up these competing locations simultaneously. As we are unsettled from one particular subjectivity of mother or scholar and become motherscholar as an assemblage of multiple relations, we disorient ourselves and others, and it is in the disorientation that new possibilities emerge. (Childers, 2015, pp. 114–115)

Although new materialism provided fodder for thinking, I took a turn toward critical materialism to bring matter, history, discourse, bodies, and experience all into relation. Doing so made space for attending to the discursive and social construction of motherhood that produces motherhood as a site of racialization, gendering, and heteronormativity. It opened the category to critique not just of the construction of motherhood but also of the material experiences of women living motherhood differently. Similarly, it allowed me to engage the nature/culture binary and why the thought of the motherscholar or the real body of a motherscholar in disjointed relation pushes in on preconceived notions and assumed compatibilities, creating an opportunity to see multiple configurations of a subject and how it acts in concert with the world. Power relations took an ontological turn as practices of living were witnessed relationally to consider why some bodies appeared to be more “mother” than others. I turned to objects to think about

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subjects because subjectivity arises in relation, but I utilized critical materialism because it acknowledged that human living and meaning-making are happening in the in-between of bodies and objects, again calling for “a detailed phenomenology of diverse lives as they are actually lived—often in ways that are at odds with abstract normative theories or official ideologies” (Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 27). My experience of my body in relation to other mothers, to children, to the objects, including my physical placement near or far from the objects implicated in motherhood and scholarship, arranged my subjectivity. But the recognition that turning away or turning toward an object, while making me illegible or ill fitting to those around me, my orientation to mothering and scholarship was living out of the “complex plural dimensions” of motherhood and scholarship, not mutually exclusive but always constitutive. It was the disjointed living out of socially constructed subject positions, the interpolation of my body as not mother or scholar enough, that prompted my writing and allowed me to recognize disorientation as the stuff of living. This new kind of phenomenology of objects via critical materialism was useful and produced different thinking, but it still felt like a dirty word, and I was indeed cautioned against the tyranny of lived experience. The Well-Worn Lines of Theory The presentation of my ICQI paper (Childers, 2019), in which the words lived experience and phenomenology felt against the grain in relation to the other well-worn lines of theory being traveled by panels and presenters, evinced a disorientation of thought. Rather than begin from places of comfort and ease, where we fit our orientations and follow lines, I start (again), now from the dirty words. Disorientations “expose how orientations are organized .  .  . how they shape what is socially as well as bodily given” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 158). If “disorientation is the way to describe the feelings that gather when we lose our sense of who it is we are” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 20), then at ICQI, I experienced being off-path, out of cadence, and stepping out of line through critical materialism, lived experience, and a phenomenology of objects.

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I began reading, writing, and teaching with new feminist materialism back around 2011. Seeing new feminist materialism as a theoretical framework in education or qualitative journals was becoming more and more common. Its eventual irruption was, for a while, novel, and its critique of discourse and the human felt like new “lines of rebellion and resistance that gather over time to create new impressions . . . on the skin of the social” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 18). One can see its further impression as it is far more common now to see the theoretical approach in journals that showcase qualitative inquiry. The concepts of intra-action, becoming, relation, or the attention to objects were at one time more obscure to education and qualitative inquiry as a field; a case in point: My rejection letter from a position I applied for in 2013 explicitly stated that the committee was not aware of the theoretical approach I was using in the paper I submitted with my application, that approach being new feminist materialism. I share this loose timeline of my relationship to the theories of new materialism to illuminate that what was once “new” now no longer is. We can debate if it was ever a new way of thinking, but regardless, new feminist materialism has shifted from a new impression to its own well-worn lines in the theoretical imaginary of qualitative inquiry. Using Ahmed, we can imagine the engagement with theory through writing as a path, line, or trajectory that can be followed, because it has been taken by others. According to Ahmed (2006), in following the path, the taken-for-granted gets produced: “We follow the line that is followed by others: the repetition of the act of following makes the line disappear from view as the point from which we emerge” (p. 15). The once-novel approach to thought, the line of new feminist materialism, becomes a well-worn line as it is traveled by others. A kind of assurance, “when we face the direction that is already faced by others” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 15), we know that we are doing the right thing. Engaging new feminist materialism in qualitative inquiry as it has gathered steam creates its own kind of collectivity that provides that sense of assurance, of doing the “right” thing, by utilizing a common theoretical language that connects one with other like-minded folks. I feel lined up with folks I want to be in line with; I feel like my body is pointing toward objects of shared understanding; I feel like we are sharing a train of thought.

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When we become oriented by theory, we become oriented to each other through thinking, oriented to shared thinking, oriented to a conversation of thought, we also can displace thinking or disorient other modes of thought. If we think of these well-worn lines of thought as “an effect of how energy, time, and resources are ‘directed’ toward an object” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 119), we can see how energy, time, and resources have been directed toward new feminist materialism to produce an orientation of bodies thinking in concert, traveling a more common path. Where I become concerned is when thought gets on a path that is taken for granted. As I read more and more articles with a new feminist materialist approach, I often wonder whether is the “tail” of theory is “wagging the dog” of inquiry? Has new feminist materialism reached its own hegemony? What other paths of thought are disregarded in favor of falling in line with others? And how does the act of repetition through following a path traveled by others create a kind of reorientation, comfort, and ease, even when we think we are shaking up thought? I wonder this for myself and for “the field.” Reoriented Starting from the place of experience, I used critical phenomenology about living as a motherscholar or a writer through critical materialism and a phenomenology of objects. Although not a wellworn path, it was a path traveled by myself, my reading group, and my co-panelists as we followed this line together. Paradoxically, I utilized a theoretical perspective about disorientation to “orient” myself back to the world and to colleagues. Each time I write, regardless of the approach, I experience a reorientation to the world as I sort myself out in relation to it. This is not a good or bad thing or a dirty word. It is just part of becoming with the multiple complex relations of writing, thinking, and living.

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References Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Childers, S.  M. (2015). More mother than others: Disorientations, motherscholars, and objects in becoming. In A. M. Young (Ed.), Teacher, scholar, mother – re-envisioning motherhood in the academy (pp. 111–126). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Childers, S. M. (2017). Urban educational identity: Seeing students on their own terms. New York, NY: Routledge. Childers, S.M. (2019). Disorientations as/in Feminist Inquiry, presented at International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois, 2019. Urbana, IL. Coole, D., & Frost, S. (2010). New materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: The New Press. Heidegger, M. (2008). On being and time. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. (Original work published 1962) Hekman, S. (2010). The material of knowledge: Feminist disclosures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (2013). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology. New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work published 1931) Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. London, England: Routledge. Scott, J. W. (1991). On the evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17, 773–797. St. Pierre, E. A. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry, 25, 3–16. Yoshino, K. (2002). Covering. The Yale Law Journal, 111, 769–939. Young, A. M. (2015). Teacher, scholar, mother – re-envisioning motherhood in the academy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity

chapter four

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Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity BECKY ATKINSON

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eading Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) reoriented me to feminism by provoking reflection on the question, “How have I lived a feminist life?” Although I do not think I ever left it because I have what Ahmed (2017) called “feminist tendencies” (p. 6), I think the way a feminist thinks most of the time, and I write and teach feminist theory; my reading Ahmed’s book provoked reflection on whether and how I have been intentional in my feminism. Have I been a bad feminist? In her introduction, Ahmed (2017) offers a starting point for responding to my query when she asserts that she intended the book to be an “intervention in academic feminism” to make feminist theory more accessible but ended up writing a lingering examination of her own feminist becoming and doing, building a “slow argument” to show how “feminist theory is what we do when we live our lives in a feminist way” (p. 11). Deliberations on what my living my life in “a feminist way” meant expanded and became more textured as I read Roxane Gay’s 2014 Bad Feminist, wondering how Gay, the “bad feminist,” would speak to Ahmed, who might be considered the “good feminist,” and how reading their insights might complicate my thinking about my own feminist commitments. As I read across and through both books, I recognized each writer’s ultimate commitment to the necessity of living feminism as Ahmed’s (2017) “slow argument,” acknowledging that it is a necessary but flawed but argument because, as Roxane Gay (2014) reminds us, I am flawed, as are all feminists, all humans. Ahmed and Gay demonstrate how and what living a feminist life does and means in everyday words and experiences, even though I can imagine one raising an eyebrow at the other, at times.

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So all feminists, the bad as well as the good, are flawed. For example, perhaps feminists have not made it clear enough that they never claimed that “women should have it all,” as Gay (2014) points out in her critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. In her chapter entitled “Brick Walls,” Ahmed (2017) accuses White critical scholars, including feminists, of reassembling Whiteness in their championing of their critical stance: “I have called critical racism and critical sexism this: the racism and sexism reproduced by those who think of themselves as too critical to reproduce racism and sexism” (2017, p. 155). Similarly, Gay (2014) claims that part of her hesitation to own up to the feminist label comes from the “willful disinterest in incorporating the issues and concerns of black women into the mainstream feminist project” (2014, p. 308). We make mistakes of commission and omission, one reason living a feminist life is a slow argument; it requires constant reflexivity, readjustment, resistance, and reorientation. The flawedness means that living a feminist life 1(a) never ends nor rests because we make mistakes even while the struggle with patriarchy persists and, chameleonlike, hides itself in the political and cultural context; and 2(b) never achieves its ultimate goals because not only is the finish line constantly reconstructing itself, but so also are feminist lives as well as we self self-reflect and forgive ourselves and each other, expand awarenesses, and enlarge the field of women who live feminist lives. This is how living a feminist life is a slow argument because the terms of the argument change with cultural change; as a living argument, it is one that is built in of flesh, spirit, and words, piece by piece, insight by insight, experience by experience, articulated temporally and relationally to/within constantly shifting cultural dynamics. That sort of nimble, responsive, and flexible living argument calls for constant reorienting to the dynamics of cultural, political, and personal change, so it is slow. Thus, reorienting is a key process in living a feminist life as feminism shows a dynamic ability to continuously respond to change at the personal level, and to cultural critiques questioning the need for feminism, as well as to feminism’s ongoing concerns about violence toward women, equality of in pay and rights for women, and the implications of ever-present misogyny and patriarchy. Reorienting and resisting

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are necessary processes in living the slow argument of feminism. The succeeding parts of this paper chapter address these processes. Reorienting Reading feminist texts provides touchstones for reorienting as I found in reading Ahmed (2017), and Gay (2014), remembering how reading feminist texts has always affected me. The companion texts Ahmed (2017) brings to the surface as she reviews the feminist writings in her feminist toolkit were some of those that drew me to recognizing the feminism I had always been living and offered intellectual scaffolding for merging theory with life—Audre Lorde, Patty Lather, bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, Chris Weedon, Bronwyn Davies, and Judith Butler. I was also compelled by Jane Addams, Virginia Woolf, Madeline Grumet, Sari Biklen, Mary Dalton, and Gloria Anzaldúa. One of the characteristics of feminism as something we do or live is its sensational quality. Because living a feminist life is a living and a doing, even if a slow argument, it must be done and lived in the flesh and in the senses as we engage with the world to “make sense of what does not make sense,” as Ahmed says (2017, p. 21). She continues to explain her assertion that “feminism is sensational,” noting that feminism provokes, stirs up trouble, challenges conventions, reveals and turns into the problem, becomes sensational in its “sensible reaction to the injustices of the world. . . . register[ed] at first through our own experiences” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 21). Building on that comment, I add that feminism being sensational means that words and experiences drawn from everyday life through which we come to feminism are given epistemic status. Ahmed’s (2017) selection of words to name the concepts she describes reflects this. The terms she shares are theoretical, intentionally expressed in physical/material language from “the usual activity of life” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 13), as in the “killjoy,” who in revealing the problem becomes the problem; “sweaty concepts,” referring to our difficult working out the sense of things when we are “thrown by things” such as racism, sexism, inequality, and persistent violence toward women that break us out in sweat as we wrestle with them and provoke others to wrestle with them; “willfulness,” the insistence on being heard and seen and being taken into account;

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“feminist snap,” when the last straw has been laid on the feminist’s back; “brick walls,” the constant reinvention and resurgence of persistent sexism and agential racism despite one’s best efforts, terms developed in Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed, 2017); and in her elaboration of the “stickiness” of emotions and their objects, introduced and developed in her 2015 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Concepts, especially concepts given sensational names drawn from life experiences in the flesh and spirit, name the feeling and sensing of those flesh and spirit experiences from the dailiness of living. They “are in the worlds we are in” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 13) and give us handholds we can use to understand our experience as one of patriarchal violence, silencing, or apathy. We use them to make sense of what does not make sense. We find them useful because the words are accessible, are at our fingertips, and fit well to our hands. We use these handholds to reorient ourselves in relation to the violence of all kinds we and others have experienced, to ongoing struggle, to making sense, and/or to obdurate brick walls. Concepts from the usual activity of life offer “reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing” (Ahmed 2017, p. 13). Such handholds anchor us as new waves of unexamined assumptions about feminism distort what we do, question our motives, and give us ground for resistance. Concepts from life provide handholds to cling to when we are shattered and our hands grow sweaty. By intentionally using sensational words laden with physicality, Ahmed (2017) succeeds in “drag[ging] theory to life” and sent me reexamining my research inquiries into the feminist pragmatism of Jane Addams, whose work seems to resonate with Ahmed’s. Although this connection may be random, Addams lived and wrote in a time when few women were seen as theory creators or philosophers, for that matter. Addams was both as well as a sociologist. Like Ahmed, Addams used her own everyday words from the usual activity of life to narrate and contextualize the processes and issues concerning her in developing her social ethics of democracy. Addams (1902/2002) drew on the notion of “perplexity” to describe the intellectual and emotional labor of a destabilizing experience when encountering something unknown or of something that resists understanding or change or when questioning a conventional practice that is similar

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to Ahmed’s “sweaty concepts”—something with which we grapple to make sense of to the point of sweating. For Addams (1902/2002), a perplexity demanded a personal involvement in the puzzling circumstance, and in the working out of understanding, one must reevaluate presuppositions and conventional wisdom. Addams (1902/2002) saw perplexities as opportunities for growth, for action, and for reflection as does Ahmed (2017) in the laboring with “sweaty concepts” such as racism, patriarchy, and violence. Ahmed (2017) wrote, “The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty” (p. 13), much as Addams (1902/2002) urged in her wrestling with difference and what it meant for a democracy. If a perplexity initialized an inquiry, Addams (1902/2002) conceptualized the untheoretical sounding “sympathetic understanding” as a method for extending inquiry into human relations their circumstances. She conceptualized the moral obligation of intentionally seeking perplexities as engagements with difference as a way challenge biases, believing that using sympathetic understanding to make sense of one’s relation with difference would ameliorate the ills of bias (Addams, 1902/2002). The point here is that in the slow argument that is living a feminist life, women construct and live theory from their doing and living, as what Ahmed (2017) names “a set of arguments” from the quotidianness of work and home. Because these constructions arise from the everyday labor of home and work, they change as new perplexities arise and call for reorienting to the perplexity or for grappling anew with a “sweaty concept,” the most persistent and vexing of which is the “Why?” of violence and oppression directed toward women. Realizing how Addams (1902/2002) dragged theory to life as does Ahmed (2017) more than 100 years later draws us into the community of women who have been doing this for years. Reading with a community of feminists also reorients us both through reading the texts and through the conversations the texts generate. As one member of my reading group commented about our shared conversations about Ahmed’s (2017) and Gay’s (2014) books, they are “oxygen!” They open up breathing space for reorienting, finding new handholds, and exploring new words, new experiences, shared experiences and struggles, and shared questions. On one memorable occasion, I took that conversation with me to a departmental program

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meeting dominated by male conversation and chest-beating and then shared it with the other women in my program when we met for lunch after the meeting to reground ourselves, express our anger, and give each other oxygen. Because I was reading Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed, 2017) with a virtual community of feminist scholars, we peopled a field of women who felt as described by Audre Lorde (1982) in Zami, a feminist biomythography that had a great impact on me. One of the early conversations our group shared was coming to feminism through reading. The first feminist companions many of us had were found in the books we read as girls and adolescents—biographies of various famous women; novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou; and poetry by Sylvia Plath. For many, Audre Lorde (1982) was an early companion and remains a mainstay of a feminist reading kit. Engaging in these textual encounters with the books of childhood and adult womanhood; with Ahmed’s, Gay’s and Addams’s words; and with those of other feminist writers is practicing—doing— living—feminism; it is a feminist act that critically engages the body politics that entangle and ensnare women, particularly women of color, and invites reorienting, reconsidering, and performing new and renewing old acts of resistance (Bailey & Atkinson, 2018). And these engagements with body politics through feminist texts shift in constant motion in sustaining feminists’ sustained protest of patriarchal and racist violence because the political and cultural landscape is in constant motion and the violence continues. Furthermore, for the book group, this field of women formed virtually across many states and bodies of water, our conversations enveloped and expanded the reading. We shared personal concerns alongside the companion texts, a part of practicing feminism. Ahmed (2017) encourages, “An embodied experience of power provides the basis of knowledge” (p. 10); thus, we shared knowledge of similar experiences as women academics, such as departmental meetings as vehicles of silencing and institutional violence, and neoliberal institutional demands that stifle time and energy for work that matters. One member remembered the pain her mother had lived through as a young girl in wartime followed by a battle with cancer that ended

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her life, another was recovering from extensive shoulder surgery, one member’s husband died unexpectedly, one was struggling with ongoing symptoms that were difficult to diagnose, and one had hip surgery shortly before her husband had back surgery. These personal concerns from work and home wove into the fabric we were weaving through our reading conversations. Through our personal and political conversations, we were, as Ahmed (2017) wrote, bringing “theory back to life” (p. 10) in a way that reoriented us to feminism, to living a feminist life. From this experience, I acknowledged my own need for the constant nurturing in reading and hearing the voices of women. Of late, I have been undergoing treatment for very early Stage I breast cancer and am now cancer-free. Women carried me like a current through the lumpectomy (my female surgeon held my hand as I was “going under”) and the radiation. I was amid a community of women as we shaped a sanctuary for ourselves dressed in our hospital patient gowns with the woefully insufficient backs sitting in the women’s dressing area with other female cancer patients awaiting our turns for radiation. We checked to make sure the ties in back were secure. We asked each other how we were doing. We shared our names, our diagnoses, our families, our careers. One woman from South America had lived in Alaska for 40 years and on her move to Alabama to be with her son developed breast cancer. Another woman with tongue cancer and losing hair on the back of her head would leave after her treatment to take care of her grandchildren. The first woman I shared a conversation with had worked in a regional bank for 40 years and in her retirement developed throat cancer. We talked about the best milkshakes one could find. The radiation techs were for the most part women, and they, too, were part of the community as we were all dealing with a common threat and trusting that the male-dominated field was doing the right thing. Resistance Reading feminist texts is an act of resistance because they offer vocabulary and concepts to name and describe our experiences and to walk alongside us as we engage perplexities and use the “sweaty concepts” to be intentional in our acts of resistance to the ever-present

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violence and discrimination practiced toward women, in our constant questioning of the status quo that oppresses so many. As Ahmed (2017) expressed, the difficult questions, “the harder questions, are posed by those feminists concerned with explaining violence, inequality, injustice” (p. 9) and relentlessly taking them up again and again. Just reading feminist texts enacts resistance, especially in posttruth times, a time when a Missouri congressman proclaims his opposition to abortion, confident in his scientific belief that no child would be conceived in a “legitimate rape.” Reading feminist texts with other women augments the scope and power of that resistance. But the majority of women do not necessarily read feminist texts. They read women’s fiction, for the most part, and they do not necessarily read it as feminists. Yet they receive the messages about women and women’s lives with men. This is Roxane Gay’s forte as a novelist herself and a literary critic. Gay models reading women’s fiction as an act of resistance illustrated through her critiques of popular culture and how we consume it, particularly “women’s fiction.” She reads as a feminist, albeit the bad feminist she embraces. Following her thinking through her commentaries illuminates the explicit, as well as nuanced, reading feminists, the bad and the good, need to do when reading these popular texts and watching television and movies. Gay (2014) harshly critiques popular writing such as Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (2011) and the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (2005) as examples of “women’s fiction” that offer “happily-ever-afters” that do not count the cost of male-dominated heterosexual happiness. On the other hand, Gay’s (2014) outspoken enthusiasm for The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008) partially stems from the author’s demonstrating that “happily-ever-after” comes at a price as we read how the flawed heroine Katniss “with issues” (p. 146) gave everything for the flawed peace that ends the series. Gay (2014) owns up to her girlish bad feminist adoration of Peeta, the male protagonist and Katniss’s team member, whom Gay describes as “a place of solace and hope, and he is a good kisser” (p. 138). Gay (2014) comes clean and explains that her love of these books grew from her admiration for the damaged Katniss, “a young woman [who] is fierce and strong but human in ways I find believable, relatable” (p. 146).

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Gay (2014) observes that strong women resist and suffer and survive the unendurable. Even though Gay (2014) claims that she is not strong, she finds strength in stories such as Katniss’s. I find it significant that in this essay she refers to the brutal gang rape and subsequent humiliation she suffered and endured as a middle school student. Somehow, she read her story of enduring brutality and suffering alongside Katniss’s unendurable pain and struggles and found “the tempered hope that everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for” (Gay, 2014, p. 146). In sharing this in her book, Gay (2014) also provides evidence of the need for fiction that provides stories of girls like the girls who read them, stories that offer salvation in forgetfulness and resistance to ugly realities. Even though not touted as such, stories such as these enact a feminist reaching out to share pain. Gay’s (2014) comments on these works of fiction demonstrate the range of feminist critique picking its way through the plethora of what is called “women’s fiction” to assess the depictions of what being a woman means through the representations of women heroines. Gay (2014) uses similar feminist lenses to critique some national magazines’ depictions of feminism that seem to say “there is something wrong with feminism” (p. 308) because they imply that there is a right way to be a woman and a right way to be a feminist and that women keep getting it wrong. Gay (2014) derives this from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s metaphor in a 2012 article “The Atlantic” that feminism is “a nice girl .  .  . [who] .  .  . has become the easy lay of social movements.” Wurtzel (2012) critiques women who choose to stay at home as “1% wives” to support her argument that gaining economic equality is all that feminists need to do to succeed. Besides the narrowminded, distorted, and very White vision of feminism and its concerns Wurtzel’s (2012) article offers, Gay (2014) points out, as does Ahmed (2017) with her feminism as slow argument being lived rather than a static consensus, that there cannot be an “essential feminism” by which all feminists are measured as good or bad. There is not and cannot be one goal that by achieving it will wipe out the necessity for feminism. Distortions such as this put forth by women who consider themselves feminists clearly demonstrate the necessity of feminism, the necessity of reorienting

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and enacting resistance to any essentializing of what living a feminist life is and does. That is one of the reasons Ahmed (2017) wrote that living a feminist life, one that makes everything questionable, is exhausting. Using the concepts, she offers to engage in the daily work of living the slow argument that is feminism in the spaces of home and of work “reorient(s) us” in worlds in which we feel, “frankly, bewildered” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 12). She honors the resistance of the “killjoy” who continuously hits her head against the patriarchal wall, the concept of “feminist snap” when resistance becomes inevitable, and the accusation we have all experienced of “being too much”— too loud, too rebellious, too quiet, too sarcastic, too big, too small, too stubborn. We want to be accused of “willfulness,” recognizing it as a necessary force in sustaining a feminist life. Reading others’ experiences and sharing conversations about our reading and our responses to the texts nourished and challenged our book group to consider willfulness in our daily lives, to be willful, and to keep asking questions—to make everything questionable. Ahmed (2017) asserts, “To live a feminist life is to make everything into something that is questionable” (p. 132). To do so, we need our feminist companions and companion texts for oxygen that reorients and gives breath to resist and keep on reorienting and resisting. Finally, in living a feminist life, we are ourselves feminist texts to be read with and alongside others. Living a feminist life is a necessity more than it has ever been and requires more feminist companions to share the struggle. Even as I write this, I share occasional texts with a colleague who is also finishing a manuscript—a feminist companion sharing page totals. The women at the cancer center with whom I shared conversation may not have been feminists, but we shared our daily living as women dealing with a toxic adversary. As feminists, as women, we need each other, and we need feminism in whatever form it shapes itself. We ourselves embody what Ahmed called “feminism as a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splattering, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility: to take care” (2017, p. 17). Such a charge stirs us to search for other feminists and to read and write more feminist texts that can be companions along the

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way for ourselves and future feminists not even born yet. Reading feminist companion texts among companions arms us and arms the future for the post-truth world through helping us recognize, resist, and act as allies and companions in seeking possibilities for transformation even when/if we do not see it happening in our lifetimes or in the future. References Addams, J. (2002). Democracy and social ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. (Original work published 1902) Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion. London, England: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. London, England: Routledge. Bailey, L., & Atkinson, B. (2018). Embodied reading practices as feminist resistance in post-truth times: Lessons from Ahmed. Paper presented and conference proceedings for Research on Women in Education, San Antonio, TX. Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York, NY: Scholastic. Gay, R. (2014). Bad feminist: Essays. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. James, E. L. (2011). Fifty shades of grey. New York, NY: Vintage books. Lorde, A. (1982). Zami: A new spelling of my name: A biomythography. London, England: Persephone Press. Meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. Los Angeles, CA: Little, Brown. Scovell, N. & Sandberg, S. (2013). Lean in: Women, work and the will to lead. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wurtzel, E. (June, 2012) 1% wives are helping to kill feminism and make the war on women possible. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www. theatlantic.com.

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Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry

chapter five

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Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry LUCY E. BAILEY

We can theorize by “staying close to the every day.” —Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017, p. 11) Do not adjust to an unjust world. —Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017, p. 84)

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n this chapter,1 I draw from the work of feminist theorist Sara Ahmed to consider how it has served as a “companion” for me in recent years, intruding, nourishing, dis/orienting, and re/orienting me as I “stay . . . closer to the everyday” (2017, p. 11) as a place for theorizing what she calls a feminism fueled by the “dynamism of making connections” (p. 3). Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion (2004), racism in institutional life (2012), and, most recently, Living a Feminist Life (2017) have been resources for teaching and thinking about contemporary feminist inquiry. For Ahmed, theory arises, in part, through “staying close” to the sensations, events, and puzzles of the everyday and working their dimensions through thick, textured description to surface how power works on and through bodies in pervasive, mundane ways. Her work has much to contribute to feminist inquiries both in and out of the academy. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017) describes her “feminist tool kit” of resources that function as balm and “companion texts,” in her daily labor as a feminist diversity worker. Her companions are diverse, ranging from films to the scholarship of feminists of color, providing nourishment for her to “proceed on a path less trodden” (p. 16). We all have these touchstones to which we return, again and again, that can fuel us, dis/orient and re/orient us, and aid

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us in working the words of our worlds, whether such words are orientation, theory, willfulness, sticky, diversity, feminism, methodology, inheritance, or responsibility, in wrestling with “how to live,” and in “thinking about how to live” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 1). Ahmed’s work has functioned as such a touchstone in my daily labor, inviting me to pick up words; turn them over and around, as she does; and ponder, resist, and stretch their meanings and applications to dis/orient and re/orient my thinking. She uses concepts that connote the haptics of institutional engagements and struggles, such as brick walls, homework, and feminist “snap,” to trace how power relations reflect and manifest in embodied sensations; how they sort, arrange, and orient bodies; and how they demand tangible sweaty labor to unsettle and resist them. Here I focus on three recent engagements nourished by Ahmed’s companionship: first, the importance of teaching feminist inquiry; second, feminist haptics as “homework”; and, third, the sticky (Ahmed, 2017) concept of feminist inheritances (see Bailey, 2018). Each is a site that works the contours of feminist inquiry. Teaching Feminist Inquiry: The Same Things Keep Coming Up We enact feminism in how we relate to the academy. —Ahmed (2017, p. 15)

Ahmed (2017) insists that we “learn from how the same things keep coming up” (p. 9). In thinking about and teaching research courses in a public university, I have found that the same things keep coming up. The academy speaks a type of grammar “all the way down to the letter, to the bone” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 4), shaping the language, spaces, and conditions in which inquiry approaches become intelligible and cultivating the dispositions that allow or persuade people to take them up. Fields produce certain kinds of languages in which we can “move around” once we learn their governing grammar (Ahmed, 2017, p. 9), and as we learn those languages, they cultivate norms through orienting, directing, and “giving residence to [our] bodies” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 115). Iris Marion Young’s (1980) classic

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feminist work on body comportment underscores the minute gendered orchestrations of such powerful processes in inscribing into the very fibers of bodies the gendered parameters of how they move and residences that feel possible to inhabit. Methodological norms work much the same way, moving and orienting bodies, suggesting that we should look, collect, record, memo, write, code, theme, and theorize in particular ways as the “shoulds” and “musts” can seep into and direct our bodies, making it difficult to move and think in other languages. Both “momentum” and “disciplinary fatalism” can propel us in following along the paths laid before us (Ahmed, 2017, p. 150), cultivating orientations that necessitate feminist attention. We are invited to practice “methodological taxidermy” at every turn, dusting off our designated sets of tools, questions, purposes, and terminology for research design that give the appearance of life even as they sit frozen, decontextualized, and bloodless in our academic curio cabinets (Bailey, 2017; 2019, p. 96). Many of us feel these taxidermic impulses deeply as we wrestle in our institutional contexts with the latest assessment initiatives and retention demands and feel a bit more free to breathe in such spaces as the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) that supports the productive cacophony of multiple methodological or even anti-/non-/sans/post-/trans-methodological languages. Working against taxidermy is an ongoing feminist project. One way I have tried to do so is through incorporating resources for feminist inquiry in varied research courses, a set of dis/orientations that can interrupt the flow of dominant methodological traffic in refusing design prescriptions, embracing openly ideological inquiry, and pondering the dimensions of what contemporary inquiries might look like if they take up “sticky, sweaty” concepts (Ahmed, 2017) of resistance, transformation, embodiment, disruption, critique, advocacy, responsibility, collaboration, and/or push against the boundaries of the intelligible (see Lather, 2006). Although feminism can happen in any space, moment, or inquiry and need not proceed under that sign, naming modules or courses in the institutional fabric as “feminist inquiry” is a mechanism of visibility in its potential to dis/ orient us from prescriptions for methodology-as-usual and to invite us to consider the work we might do if freed from its constraints.

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This body of approaches has a long history that demands both protection amidst methodological instrumentalism as well as ongoing “willful” use (Ahmed, 2014) and theorizing to intervene in often “bewildering” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 12) worlds riddled with violence and injustice. Preserving these intellectual/activist legacies in inquiry also involves unsettling uniform prescriptions and origin stories of what constitutes “feminism.” Depending on the inquiry space, we have had diverse companions along the journey, including the scholarship of Ahmed, Cynthia Dillard, Mary Margaret Fonow, Audre Lorde, Patti Lather, Tsianina Lomawaima, Janet Miller, Wanda Pillow, and Adrienne Rich, among others, some trans* and queer work that destabilizes conceptions of gender and sexuality, some gentle narrative pieces, some fist-raising diatribes,2 and a hands-on collection that details the complexities of conducting feminist activist ethnography in neoliberal contexts (see Craven & Davis, 2013). Blogs, websites, and museum visits are generative feminist sites as well. In some spaces, students read exemplars on black feminist analysis (Evans-Winters, 2019) , eating problems (Thompson, 1992), nail salon workers’ experiences (Kang, 2012), and gendered dimensions of tattooing (Inckle, 2007), among others, to consider how feminist thought can guide and nourish inquiry across diverse fields and in diverse ways. In many cases, this type of work was entirely new to the community members, and some voiced disappointment that they had not learned about it earlier in their schooling. Discussions about texts and our toxic political climate were alive, electric, and filled with possibility as people wrestled with how these companion texts might fuel their research, teaching, and lives, which is precisely a feminist point: Feminism is a dis/orientation and a re/orientation to the workings of the “everyday” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 9). In this sense, feminist re/orientations are ontological as much as epistemological or methodological in imploding boundaries among one’s movement in daily life, work, teaching, gathering in community, or engaging in inquiry. This rich field of possibility, this electricity, could also fizzle at powerful moments when discussions hit against the “brick wall” (Ahmed, 2017) manifestation of dominant doctoral academic grammar

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and the palpable fear rather than promise it can embody: The Dissertation. The Committee. The Gatekeepers. Getting Out. Here the types of questions that keep “coming up” are jarring and serious and familiar to me as a teacher across diverse courses: “I’ve never thought of research, as Dillard (2012) does, as a kind of responsibility. What if my committee doesn’t see it that way? What will people say if I want to work with my community? What if I want to do an activist project? Will my committee let me do this work?” And a powerful question, “What if we don’t feel like we can do this work? That we should just do the dissertation and do this work later?” Working the words of these lived worlds—can we, allowed, let me, should, what if, my committee—and witnessing the embodied transformation from excitement to uncertainty that can, at times, accompany them reflect the heavy flow of institutional traffic and emissions that we all breathe in, that we, in fact, read about in our companion texts, in which governing “norms give residence to bodies” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 115). Forging feminism in daily life and inquiry; fighting the racist, colonialist, capitalist patriarchy in its varied guises; pursuing research as nourishment, resistance, and responsibility; stretching the boundaries of the possible—it is all worthy, all compelling; we want to do it—but maybe we should do it later. The questions that “keep coming up” in these generative spaces speak to the continuing labor of forging feminist subjectivities in institutional terrain made for “some bodies” more than others (Ahmed) and some pathways of inquiry rather than others: feminist inquiry, inquiry without methods, counter-storytelling—Will people let us? These are legitimate questions that underscore how power gets divvied up around groups of “we/us/people” and embody im/proper spaces and times to do feminist work. Perhaps feminist inquiries seem particularly “willful” (Ahmed, 2014) because they refuse to keep their politics to themselves. As Ahmed (2017) notes, “when a path is harder to follow . . . you might find an easier route” (p. 46). And encountering some compelling texts or taking a class or two may not be enough to dis/orient and reorient our pathways. As Ahmed (2012) described in her critique of university diversity and inclusion efforts, institutions can use the opening of a women’s center or hiring a queer woman of color to testify that they have achieved

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effective diversity work in some form even as their entrenched institutional practices remain oriented to serving some bodies over others. Incorporating curricula about diverse inquiry approaches directed to action, community, critique, and responsibility can similarly work toward inclusive efforts in graduate education yet lack the broader supporting apparatus (culture, committees, faculty and peer familiarity, program and dissertation genre requirements) to enable that work to come to fruition. Even so, I want to urge students: Do what you want, read, push, imagine, and find your institutional allies and companion texts to do work that needs doing rather than leaving convictions at the dissertation’s door to negotiate “the way it is” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 150), a messaging history that feels hardened into barriers. Ensuring that diverse feminist work is visible in inquiry spaces remains important “homework” for cultivating research imaginaries and practices as well as creating future pathways of inheritance. Ahmed’s (2017) theorizing reminds us that such work is ongoing and notes that “the more people travel upon a path, the clearer the path becomes” (p. 46). The deep path of creative feminist work, some decades old and some hot off the press, can provide companionship, can help in softening the cumulative feeling that the path is not yet wide enough to allow easy travel, to imagine searching for new allies, to push against institutional walls, and to recognize how power is at work in our very orientations. The Feminist Haptics of “Homework” Feminist theory is what we do at home. —Ahmed (2017, p. 7)

Feminist “homework” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 7) is haptic, sweaty labor. The term invites us to consider how attention to feminist haptics as a form of “homework” might enhance inquiry through highlighting the haptic dimensions of power that manifest in both the touch and feel of institutional “brick walls” and forms of resistance that might help build other dwellings (Ahmed, 2017). Ahmed’s

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concept of homework has been a recent companion for me in analyzing the work of a Canadian feminist artist and teacher, Ellen Wright, a graduate of York University in Toronto, Ontario, who engaged in a multiyear process of Arts Practice Research for her dissertation project (Wright, 2019).3 Considering Wright’s art practice has led me to consider how, in conversation with Ahmed, the haptics of feminist theorizing, teaching and inquiry might be forms of the homework Ahmed (2017) describes in Living a Feminist Life. Arts Practice Research is a body of approaches for exploring the process of creating, what James Elkins (2006) describes as the “day to day experience of making—its exact pedagogy, its method, knacks and skills, its feel” (p. 246; cited in Wright, 2019, p. 2). Loveless (2019) argues that artistic practices such as “research-creation” are “site[s] of generative recrafting” that both “trouble disciplinary relays of knowledge/power” and invite more “creative, sensually attuned modes of inhabiting the university” (p. 3). Such practices disrupt methods and research products-as-usual and neoliberal university cultures to nourish the reconfiguration of practices throughout the university (Loveless, 2019, pp. 9–10). Although definitions among this body of approaches are contested and unfolding, the emphasis is on artistic practice and creation. In that sense, these approaches differ from arts-based research that involves collecting art products as data or engaging in art to help make meaning of data or to represent findings. Instead, arts practice–based research focuses on the integration of doing, touching, thinking, and sensory work involved in the creative process itself—in Wright’s (2019) case, exploring the haptics of home through committing a range of what she calls “sensory misdeeds” in domestic spaces. The focus of what I am calling Wright’s “homework” is on the generative process of making. The role of embodied touch is central to her project to disrupt and remake the material objects of the home through the haptics of arts practice. Wright engages in a variety of misdeeds. She blends seemingly incommensurable materials in her work, including salt, cold cream, bacon fat, wire, doilies, paint, eggs, fur coats, mirrors, fragile tracing paper, bulky household furniture, and Vaseline, among others. Her labor includes slathering a 1950s vintage middle-class woman’s dress with bacon fat to “obliterating” a classic cookbook through stabbing

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and smearing it with Vaseline and crumbs to transform this thick “cooking archive”—a place of memory and instruction (Wright, 2019, p. 22)—into something that appears chewy and textured enough to consume. At times, these engagements evoked her repulsion. She describes stepping back with nausea from massaging bacon fat and lard or stuffing elegant dress shoes with cold cream, reflecting on the experience and pedagogy of the creative process, pondering its haptic and aesthetic properties, and then turning away to engage in other forms of making. Her labor is palpable even as she underscores the inadequacy of writing to capture its haptic dimensions (Wright, 2019, p. 55). Her projects include juxtaposing lard and chocolate, making Jell-O with house slippers, ripping apart fur coats to line a makeshift closet, and even creating a “rancid fat dress covered in flies and maggots [that became] appealing to her” even while “the making of it, [was] not” (Wright, 2018, p. 41). In her characteristic style of playing with words, Ahmed (2017) notes that “feminism is homework,” a kind of “self-assignment” in which we engage that “works on as well as at our homes,” because many of us inhabit bodies that “have much to work out from not being at home in a world” (p. 7). Whether homes are academic, domestic, or community structures, they remain complicated symbolic and material sites to carry out feminist work because they are saturated with sticky histories of power. Women’s social place has frequently circled around the domestic in all its tyranny and productivity—and such homework has been utterly haptic. We can consider how the touch and feel of mundane tactile engagements within home spaces repulse, invite, and form subjects, including feminist subjectivities, that might work to resist, reform, and re-create ways to be “at home,” much like the touch and feel of pushing against the dominant flow of methodological traffic in educational spaces. Read through Ahmed’s framing, I see Wright’s arts practice as homework, engaging in haptic labor that surfaces the politics and embodied dimensions of the domestic through working its various constituting sticky substances and reconfiguring the materials that constitute home spaces. Wright’s (2019) focus on the haptics of making resists concretizing artwork as a “research text” (p. 95), “representation,” or product of “knowledge” to instead

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emphasize the inherent temporality of domestic objects and dwellings produced through embodied sweaty, labor. To Wright (2019), art is both “encounter” and pedagogy (p. 66), which she illustrates through making, rubbing, transforming, painting, and covering various objects with gooey substances while thinking, reading, and processing about what they do to and for her. We can reconfigure ourselves through such haptic labor. Read alongside Ahmed, Wright’s practices have implications that transcend the intricate haptics of ripping apart coats and getting the mysterious qualities of gelatin to hold together. From the outset, this labor symbolizes to me that homework is necessarily ongoing sensory, haptic labor, like the work of feminism, pushing against walls and inviting disruption, process, and practice rather than a completed product that is seamlessly intelligible within institutional research logics. Attention to haptic homework invites all kinds of productive questions for feminist inquiry: How might attending to haptic practice as constitutive elements—or the very purpose of inquiry—produce new ways of being at home? How can these methodological disruptions in our home spaces move against taxidermic impulses to fuel new purposes, outcomes, and trajectories of inquiry? How might these inquiry practices create more inhabitable home spaces? What might such spaces look and feel like? How might they take us up? For me, Wright’s compelling images of 600-pound blocks of lard juxtaposed with creamy chocolate and a fat dress covered in maggots alongside hairy closets and dissolving gelatin—all textured, material, and sensory disruptions—evoke the haptics of diversity homework that I sense in Ahmed’s pages and observe in teaching inquiry: sweating, pushing against institutional and methodological walls, staying with the nausea and pleasures, dismantling and reconfiguring common domestic materials, and trying to name and work the difficulties through thick sensory description. Like Ahmed’s (2017) concept of homework, Wright’s (2019) labors are not oriented to tidy closure; they represent and invite endless messy new practices, configurations, and ways of making and being.

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Companionable In*her*itances We might aim “to reside as well as we can in the spaces that are not intended for us.” —Ahmed (2017, p. 9)

I recently revisited Bud Goodall’s (2005) well-known concept of “narrative inheritance” as a touchtone to consider what feminist narrative in*her*itances might look like (Bailey, 2018). In that essay, I played with the term inheritance to displace the heir with her to work through the politics of constructions of family, the desire for origin stories that fuel patriarchal narratives, and feminist theorizing that has stretched notions of kinship to better account for diverse ways of living and connecting. The materiality of home spaces as well as Ahmed’s (2017) intentional practice of citing feminist foremothers are other forms of feminist in*her*itance. In continuing to work the dimensions of inheritance for feminist inquiry amid neoliberal accountability and productivity tallies, the struggle for grant funding, and the ranking of publications, I think considering the diverse ways feminists can reconfigure forms of inheritance that operate outside of conventional inquiry and publishing logics is useful. Much has been written about the power and politics of field formation through citation practices, academic genealogies, and the implications of the dominance of English as the primary language for publishing scholarship (e.g., see Lillis & Curry, 2010). Reading and producing scholarship are, of course, thoroughly embroiled in the institutional politics of time—who has the power to control one’s time, in which spaces, and with which resources and support and to share with which audiences. In the context of doctoral research courses discussed earlier, there are clear implications for “epistemic justice” (see Fricker, 2007) in terms of whose knowledge claims and activist work we can make visible in which academic spaces to enable some texts to become companions—and thus inheritable in conventional academic genealogies. Fricker (2007) describes forms of epistemic injustice that include the act of dismissing one’s knowledge claims, when one is “wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (p. 20) or in being unable to contribute forms of knowledge

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to the world that can make one’s experiences intelligible to others. If “aligning bodies” is a “mechanism” of power (Ahmed, 2017, p. 55) in the grooves and grammar of institutions, then which knowers are absent, present, or un/intelligible in the terrain of inquiry is also a matter of epistemic justice. We might even consider the pace and volume of work produced these days as a matter of serious epistemic concern for all justice-oriented scholar-practitioners simply because it exceeds our capacity to engage with much of it, use it productively, and thus become folded into formal academic knowledge processes. These conditions beckon feminist theorizing. Hilton Kelly’s (2019) provocative recent call for a “moratorium in publishing in educational studies” reflects a similar spirit. He details how publications in educational studies are “simply not trickling down to classroom teachers, school administrators, and boards of education” (Kelly, 2019, p. 4) in usable ways. He also notes that conferences have become more about “presenting and documenting” one’s work than serious political and intellectual exchange (Kelly, 2019, p. 4). Perhaps this is another form of academic taxidermy in which one is constantly invited to stuff, collect, and display for the pleasure of one’s own home spaces. Yet, in addition to these concerns, underscoring that scholarship is only one form of potential feminist inheritance is important. As it is, much daily feminist work is unintelligible in the institutional logics of citation practices that become systems of inheritance, such as the kinship and care work (di Leonardo, 1986; Hochschild, 2012) of teaching and service, the page after page of track changes one leaves in the margins of student papers, the carefully crafted philosophy sections in syllabi, the rhythm of encounters in hallways as bodies “turn . . . this way or that, impress[ing] upon others, affecting what they can do” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 189). Just as Ahmed (2017) notes it is difficult to find “less tired words” to refer to the ongoing institutional issues demanding equity work (pp. 98–99), also difficult is finding less tired ways to refer to the relentless dimensions of “care work” in higher education that continues to fall more on some bodies than others. These patterns of inequity are fundamentally connected to the availability of time and intellectual energy for producing the primary material of academic inheritance. In addition, for various

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reasons, including changes in higher education, much dissertation work never becomes published in other formats (see Evans, Amaro, Herbert, Blossom, & Roberts, 2018, as an example in psychology) to enter wide networks of communal academic scholarship. There are hierarchies in circulation and access. It seems productively dis/orienting to redirect the traffic of inheritance to envision other flows of information and bequests. We might imagine networks that move back, forth, and sideways, rather than in unidirectional ways, taking up different people, ideas, texts in diverse, circuitous arrangements. Rather than passing down or bequeathing objects, inheritances might involve a productive brew of well-known feminist scholarship, new dissertations, hallway conversations, and embodied arts practice. Wright’s (2019) dissertation work, in fact, might be an aspect of my inheritance. Some of my most meaningful engagements with Ahmed’s work have been nourished in a community of feminists whose academic inheritances overlap with mine and who constantly fuel my thinking. Reading varied texts together and talking through the details of our workdays has re/oriented us toward new understandings of the work of familiar companions (Ahmed, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Renato Rosaldo) and introduced us to ones as well, such as Eli Claire’s (2017) Brilliant Imperfection and Roxane Gay’s (2017) memoir on Hunger (see Bailey & Atkinson, 2018). This meaningful collaborative work is ongoing as our list of ideas for books competes for attention with the daily demands. These encounters do not reflect traditional academic inheritances in the form of words, citations, and entities. They are dis/orienting forms of feminist inquiry and inheritance. Varied home spaces— activist gatherings, book groups, classrooms, hallways, hiking trails, playgrounds, arts practice inquiries—can enable academic kinship formations and trajectories of inquiry whose “findings” never land on journal pages. They might swirl in the space of a Zoom meeting, channel through text messages, emerge in a classroom, or propel a policy change. These processes and provocations of temporal disruptions, entangled moments, people, haptics, places, and texts that orient our bodies, ideas, desires, and time seem simply un/inheritable in conventional forms of inquiry or inheritance.

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Feminist theorizing and inquiry remain vital re/orientations in living a feminist life. They should never become a specific set of practices, concretized and replicated in their own grammar, but a process of making and moving “built from many moments of beginning again” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 6) as conditions beckon and demand. Ahmed’s theorizing invites us to continue to work practices, words, and ourselves anew in the diverse spaces we find ourselves through the haptics of embodied labor. References Ahmed, S. (2004). Cultural politics of emotion. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. New York, NY: Routledge. Bailey, L. (2017, April). Methodological taxidermy: Working with/against the scholarship of Patti Lather. Presentation at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. Bailey, L. (2018). Feminist narrative in*her*itance: Revisiting, pondering, stretching a concept. Vitae Scholasticae, 35, 93–112. Bailey, L. (2019). Thinking critically about “social justice methods:” Methods as contingent foundations. In K. K. Strunk & L. A. Locke (Eds.), Research methods for social justice and equity in education (pp. 91–107). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Bailey, L., & Atkinson, B. (2018). Embodied reading practices as feminist resistance in post-truth time: Lessons from Ahmed. Paper presented and conference proceedings for Research on Women in Education annual conference, San Antonio, TX. Craven, C., & Davis, D. (2013). Feminist activist ethnography: Counterpoints to neoliberalism in North America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. di Leonardo, M. (1997). The female world of cards and holidays: Women, families, and the work of kinship. Signs, 12, 440–453. Dillard, C. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, & the sacred nature of research & teaching. New York, N.Y: Peter Lang. Elkins, J. (2006). Afterword: On beyond research and new knowledge. In K. Macleod & L. Holdridge (Eds.), Thinking through art: Reflections on art as research (pp. 241–247). New York, NY: Routledge.

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Evans, S. C., Amaro, C. M., Herbert, R., Blossom, J. B., & Roberts, M. C. (2018). “Are you gonna publish that?” Peer-reviewed publication outcomes of doctoral dissertations in psychology. PLoS ONE, 13(2), e0192210. Evans-Winters, V.  E. (2019). Black feminism in qualitative inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and ethics of knowing. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Gay, R. (2017). Hunger: a memoir of (my) body. New York, NY: HarperCollins Goodall, H.L. (2005). Narrative inheritance: A nuclear family with toxic secrets. Qualitative Inquiry, 11, 492–513. Hochschild, A.  R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press. Inckle, K. (2007). Writing on the body? Thinking through gendered embodiment and marked flesh. Newcastle, NE: Cambridge Scholars. Kang, M. (2010). The managed hand: Race, gender, and the body in beauty service work. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kelly, H. (2019). Toward a moratorium on publishing in the field of educational studies: Where is this train going? Educational Studies, 55, 1–11. Lather, P. (2006). Paradigm proliferation is a good thing to think with: Teaching research in education as wild profusion. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(1), 35–57. Lillis, T., & Curry, M. J. (2010). Academic writing in a global context: The politics and practices of publishing in English. New York, NY: Routledge. Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto for research-creation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Otto, S. (2018). “A few bad apples”: Patriarchy, misogyny, terrorism, and the persistent myth of aberration. Journal of Philosophy and History of Education, 68, vxviii. Thompson, B. W. (1992). A hunger so wide and so deep: A multiracial view of women’s eating problems. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Wright, E. (2017). Her place and what was learned there: Rubbings of inheritance, narratives of disinheritance. Vitae Scholasticae, 34(2), 43–61. Wright, E. (2019). Come to your senses, remember belongings: A pedagogy of making, memory and the haptics of home (Unpublished dissertation). York University, Toronto, Canada. Young, I. M. (1980). Throwing like a girl: A phenomenology of feminine body comportment motility and spatiality. Human Studies, 3, 137–156.

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Endnotes An early version of this paper was presented at ICQI in April 2019 as part of a panel focused on Sara Ahmed and feminist inquiry. 2 As one example, see Stacy Otto’s (2018) blistering critique of the claim that gender-based violence is an aberration. 3 Wright also produced an art installation made up of tracings of her family home that relates to the body of work discussed here. She analyzes this installation in rich detail (Wright, 2017) and later in her dissertation (Wright, 2019). I analyze elements of this work in Bailey (2018), “Feminist narrative in*her*itance: Revisiting, pondering, stretching a concept,” Vitae Scholasticae 35 (2), 93–112. There remains more to analyze in her arts-practice given its utter entanglement in issues of haptics, feminist inheritance, refusals, and embodied, sweaty labor that push back against institutional norms of legitimate research. 1

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Thinking About Theory and Practice in Nonoppositional Terms

chapter six

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Thinking About Theory and Practice in Non-Oppositional Terms SERGE F. HEIN

W

hen I think about social justice–oriented qualitative research, I certainly understand the importance and usefulness of the concept of resistance.1 I also understand the need to emphasize theory in qualitative inquiry. But as a poststructuralist—and I realize that most social justice-oriented qualitative researchers work within a different qualitative paradigm than I do—I view resistance as a holdover category of humanist, modernist thought. As Nealon (2003) notes, “After all, what is ‘humanism’ (what is ‘freedom’) if it’s not about resistance to domination?” (p. 165). And in the same way that I view resistance as a modernist concept, I think that theory is often understood in a modernist way in qualitative inquiry, as the binary opposite of practice. Binary or conceptual oppositions permeate our language and thought and encourage us to take sides, to choose one binary pole over the other. Another danger that is inherent in binary (i.e., polarized or oppositional) thinking is that binary opposites become naturalized over time: They are viewed as natural or self-evident and, hence, impose limits on our thinking. In this chapter, I begin by discussing the binary thinking that characterizes Western thought and how différance is the “source” of all binaries. I then examine deconstruction as a strategy for undoing binaries such as theory/practice and relate deconstruction to the Derridean concepts of contamination, doubling, supplementarity, and undecidability. Last, I discuss another prominent binary in qualitative inquiry, presence/absence, and emphasize how nonpresence is a blind spot

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within life itself, one that destabilizes all binaries, hierarchies, and limits. Along with thinking about theory as resistance, then, I suggest that, instead of thinking about the relationship between theory and practice in terms of opposition, that we do more to think about this relationship in terms of a nonoppositional difference. Binary Thinking, Différance, and Deconstruction Western thought since Plato has been mired in binary thinking, which has given us prominent dualisms such as mind/body, subject/object, objectivity/relativity, animate/inanimate, and identity/difference.2 Binary opposites are based on a fixed notion of difference (e.g., subject is different than object), and these absolutes are deeply held within modernist thought. Also, for Derrida (1972/1981a), modernist thought attempts, in some way, to play the poles of a binary against one another so that one of the concepts or terms in the binary is given preference (i.e., is privileged) over the other concept. As Derrida (1972/1981a) notes, one of the concepts “governs the other or has the upper hand” (p. 41). In privileging one of the concepts, it is necessary for modernist thought to assume that the concept is incapable of being contaminated by the other concept (i.e., the poles of a binary constitute two sides of an irreducible difference). In other words, the concepts in a binary presuppose a strict separation between “inside” and “outside.” It should be added here that the privileged concept is only capable of being thought in opposition to the other concept, and it therefore requires the other concept for its meaning. For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1973b, 1967/1976), différance puts difference into play and is the “source” of all binaries. It involves a difference that both defers (i.e., delay or temporal separation) and differs (i.e., discernibility or spatial separation), but it is also prior to the separation between both of these. Moreover, différance cannot be revealed because it outruns thought. Hence, it is unthinkable, but this unthought is not external to thought. It inhabits the very core of thought. Furthermore, because différance is not spatiotemporal, it cannot happen or arrive; it is always-already-there. Thus, we could think of différance as having meta-ontological status. It is neither

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a word nor a concept,3 and it cannot be named in any way. In other words, it has no essence or meaning, but it is the means by which concepts such as theory and practice appear as such, and more generally, it allows for the possibility of conceptuality and a conceptual system in general. Deconstruction is, arguably, the term that is most often associated with Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1978, 1972/1981a). As is well known, deconstruction focuses on the binary structure of Western thought and, more specifically, identifies and undoes binary oppositions. Like différance, deconstruction has no essence (i.e., it is not an identifiable entity), and so we should not view it as a procedure, technique, intellectual practice (e.g., critique), or philosophical method, if we understand these as involving a general set of rules or practices or a prescribed formula. Similarly, deconstruction should not be equated with theory. Instead, Derrida insists that deconstruction be viewed as a strategy, but it is important to avoid viewing this as something that is brought to a binary (or to a text that contains that binary). Deconstruction is always already inhabiting binaries and other structures and subverting them from within. During his career, Derrida made a number of revisions to his conception of deconstruction, but in what follows, I focus on its first, and most wellknown, formulation, which appears in the preface of Dissemination (Derrida, 1972/1981a). If we use the theory/practice binary to illustrate the activity of deconstruction (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1978, 1972/1981a), the first phase involves a reversal of the hierarchy discussed earlier. That is, the privileging of practice over theory, which we currently see in many parts of higher education, is reversed so that the suppressed or inferior term, theory, is now elevated or prioritized. By shifting attention from the privileged term to the suppressed term, we are able to see that the binary constitutes a false opposition that is working in the service of a particular set of interests. We can then use a variety of means to promote the importance of theory, but for Derrida, to stop at this point would be to remain mired in binary thinking. Instead, the second phase of deconstruction focuses on the issue of genesis and involves reinscribing (i.e., redefining or placing under erasure) the originally suppressed term so that it now indicates the “origin”

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(i.e., a nonsimple or nontraditional origin, one that calls into question the modernist logic of the origin) or “resource” (1972/1981a, p. 42) of the binary and the associated hierarchy. This process involves a destabilizing of the binary opposites and, more generally, a displacement of the entire system of binary thinking. The “origin” of the theory/practice binary is, of course, différance. For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1973b, 1967/1976), concepts such as theory and practice, like all binary pairs, are dependent on one another. As discussed earlier, the relationship between them is not oppositional but, rather, has its basis or “origin” in the fundamental, nonoppositional difference that is différance. This difference is nonempirical and takes place without synthesis or mediation. In other words, différance separates and joins both poles of the binary simultaneously (i.e., there is no separation between both poles, but there is also no coincidence). Both of these relationships need to be thought at the same time (e.g., Lawlor, 2003a). It should be added that différance is not some “thing” or identity that is “between” both poles (i.e., it is not a third thing); as margin, edge, or hinge, it has no independent status. Or, put another way, there is “an empty space between, a void between, . . . even an abyss that separates and joins” (Lawlor, 2003b, p. 57). This empty space or gap allows the poles of a binary to be related to each other without unifying them, but it cannot be identified with either pole. Thus, binary opposites are always already contaminating or “infecting” one another (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1973a, 1967/1976). Rather than a strict separation between “inside and “outside,” then, there is an irreducible (i.e., originary) contamination of “inside” and “outside,” which is, of course, another way to refer to différance. This originary contamination also means that there can be no “inside” without an “outside” and that the “inside” is always a doubling of the “outside” (i.e., there is a mutual implication of the inner and the outer).4 Thus, the concepts of theory and practice interpenetrate or inhabit one another, thereby undoing the theory/practice binary. In discussing the deconstruction of the theory/practice binary, we could also refer to the Derridean concept of supplementarity (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1976). More specifically, the supplement (i.e., différance) is that which always escapes any formal system and simultaneously inserts

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itself into the system to demonstrate the impossibility of that system (i.e., it is the condition of possibility of any system and simultaneously makes a system impossible as a system).5 There is a final Derridean concept that I would like to discuss in relation to the deconstruction of the theory/practice binary. Later in his career, Derrida (e.g., 1991/1995, 1994/1997) described the relationship between the poles of a binary as undecidable. More specifically, the empty space or gap that was referred to earlier, which is the nonfoundation (or abyssal foundation) that simultaneously separates and joins the poles of a binary, is also the moment of undecidability or aporia.6 In other words, the relationship between both poles of the theory/practice binary is undecidable and destabilizes the binary. We can therefore see that equivocation is inherent in deconstruction, but we can also say that deconstruction involves experiencing, in some way, the “origin” of a binary: “We are made to experience the essential connection—itself undecidable—between [the poles of a binary]” (Lawlor, 2006, pp. 6–7), one that is incapable of conforming to either pole. This undecidability means that any text, practice, or other entity that we might try to categorize as either theoretical or practical is, in fact, simultaneously theoretical and practical. In other words, any time that we try to label something as theoretical, there will always be a way to view it as practical and vice versa. The Blind Spot Within Life Itself Having discussed the theory/practice binary and its deconstruction in some detail, I would like to focus on another binary that exerts a great deal of influence over many parts of qualitative inquiry: presence/absence. Presence, as used here, is a philosophical term that can refer to a direct observation, sensation (i.e., perception), idea, concept, thought, or essence. Absence, on the other hand, is the opposite or counter-concept of presence and, hence, functions as the opposite pole in the binary. Almost all Western philosophical conceptions of truth have involved the knower being present in some way to the object of knowledge, and modern science and mainstream qualitative inquiry therefore construct knowledge on an unquestioned value: presence. Moreover, the form of any scientific

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inquiry (i.e., “What is ___?”) predisposes the inquirer to focus exclusively on that which can be made present. In other words, questions make a demand for presence, for an essence. As a result, presence is privileged or valorized and is taken as a foundation. But, as May (2005) points out, “If we think of our lives solely in terms of what appears to us, and if we think of what appears to us as exhausting our possibilities, we are already hedged in, already committed to conformism” (p. 23). For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1972/1982), the privileging of presence is one of the most serious errors of Western philosophy, and pure (i.e., universal, ahistorical, clear, immediate) presence of the kind conceived by Western philosophy and modern science cannot be achieved. In Speech and Phenomena (Derrida, 1967/1973a), which was written before Derrida began to emphasize language, he undertakes a deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. In chapter 6 (“The Voice That Keeps Silence”), he examines the issue of voice (i.e., the phenomenon of private or silent speech) and “hearing oneself speak” (Derrida, 1967/1973a, p. 78). In this critique, Derrida is referring us to an experience, but what he is trying to bring to our attention can never be made present. More specifically, when I speak to myself silently (i.e., when no vocalization occurs), it must be the same me who is hearing as is speaking (this involves univocity). But my experience also reveals that it is not the same me who is doing the hearing when I am speaking and vice versa. So it is not the same me who is speaking as is hearing (this involves equivocity). Thus, when I silently hear myself speak, there must be a gap, a blind spot, that differentiates me into speaker and hearer yet allows me to be both of these. As a blind spot within life, this gap is a “dead zone” (Lawlor, 2006, p. 130) of sorts, a topic that I will return to later. It is also clear from the preceding discussion that hearing one’s own voice is fundamentally a temporal activity: The hearing repeats the speaking, which has by then passed away (Derrida, 1967/1973a). Thus, subjective presence is always already passing away. As McQuillan (2001) describes it: Consider, if I were to say “I exist here and now.” In uttering this linguistic statement I am proposing that I am a real person who

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exists in the present moment and articulate this present by affirming my existence here and now. However, due to the infinitesimally small split in time between my thinking or saying the words “here and now” and the actual moment to which they refer, the “here and now” of my statement is not identical with the one I refer to. The “here and now” I refer to is always already past by the time I think about it, but I retain it as a regulatory principle by which I understand my present existence. . . . For conceptual purposes, we assume that the two “presents” are indeed the same. This becomes a habitual mode of perception and we no longer give it a second thought. . . . The desire for presence is merely the understandable desire for stable and coherent origins. (p. 11)

Drawing on the earlier discussion of Speech and Phenomena (Derrida, 1967/1973a), it can be seen that, in the earlier quote, this other “me” (i.e., the actual moment of my existence that is being referred to by the statement “I exist here and now”) is always already nonpresent and therefore “dead” ontologically. It should be added that “dead,” as used here, does not refer to the death of a person: This dying “has no author” (Caputo, 1997, p. 83). Instead, death occurs in a different order, namely, the ontological death inherent in temporal delay. In terms of the presence/absence binary discussed earlier, rather than an irreducible difference between both poles, there is originary contamination (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1973a, 1967/1976), which undoes the binary. In other words, there is an irreducible contamination of “inside” (e.g., presence) and “outside” (e.g., absence), which involves doubling (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1976, 1972/1981b). Also, it should be emphasized that the nonpresence discussed earlier is not synonymous with absence (i.e., unlike absence, nonpresence is not in opposition to presence). Instead, nonpresence, which is yet another way to refer to différance, always inhabits, or is internal to, presence. Thus, nonpresence is always part of any thing’s identity (i.e., it is always part of what a thing “is”), doubling and dividing that identity. More generally, we could say that reality is always doubled between presence and nonpresence. Nonpresence or ontological death means that the subject is marked by a kind of radical blindness, passivity, or powerlessness. The power that we exercise in life, and that is manifested in lived

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experience, is founded on a type of blindness, and this blindness destabilizes all binaries, hierarchies, and limits. In terms of the undecidability (e.g., Derrida, 1991/1995, 1994/1997) discussed earlier, this blindness also destabilizes all decisions and evaluations. As Lawlor (2007) notes: In short, values cannot be properly posited or juxtaposed. Because of this fundamental blindness, one cannot determine whether what is looking at you is a remedy or a poison,7 a menace or a benefit, a human or an animal. There is only uncertainty, which tests one and makes one suffer. (p. 35)

We could extend the preceding quote by saying that we also cannot determine if what is looking at us is theoretical or practical. In other words, the concepts of theory and practice are no longer distinguishable (i.e., they have no essence). Fundamental blindness undermines our decision-making so that we suffer, but there is nothing that we can do to remedy this blindness. No matter what we do, we suffer. But an awareness of the blind spot in life itself, and the associated suffering, encourages a kind of constant self-monitoring or self-interrogation that is aimed at undoing various forms of binary thinking and their hierarchies. Moreover, in terms of the earlier deconstruction of the theory/practice binary, risking ourselves in the empty space or gap between binary poles also encourages an openness to new possibilities for inquiry. Or, as Lather (2007) puts it, a “post-Enlightenment undecidability becomes not the last word, but the first in making room for something else to come about” (p. 7). As discussed earlier, there is certainly social, political, ethical, and other value in thinking about theory as resistance, but in this chapter, I have tried to show that, at its center, theory is also practice (i.e., practical) and vice versa.8 Along with Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1973b, 1967/1976), I see it as important to view the relationship between binaries such as theory/practice not in terms of opposition but in terms of a nonoppositional difference, which is différance. In other words, instead of thinking of theory as separate and distinct from practice (i.e., as its binary opposite), we should think both of them together. And, more generally, we should try to live and think with as little dichotomy as possible.

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References Caputo, J. D. (1997). The prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, J. (1973a). Speech and phenomena. And other essays on Husserl’s theory of signs (D. B. Allison & N. Garver, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1967) Derrida, J. (1973b). Différance. In J. Derrida, Speech and phenomena. And other essays on Husserl’s theory of signs (D. B. Allison & N. Garver, Trans.; pp. 129–160). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1967) Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967) Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967) Derrida, J. (1981a). Dissemination (B. Johnson, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972) Derrida, J. (1981b). Positions (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972) Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy (A. Bass, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972) Derrida, J. (1995). The gift of death (D. Wills, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1991) Derrida, J. (1997). Politics of friendship (G. Collins, Trans.). New York, NY: Verso. (Original work published 1994) Derrida, J. (2000). Et Cetera (G. Bennington, Trans.). In N. Royle (Ed.), Deconstruction: A user’s guide (pp. 282–305). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. (Original work published 1999) Kamuf, P. (1991). Introduction: Reading between the blinds. In P. Kamuf (Ed.), A Derrida reader: Between the blinds (pp. xiii–xlii). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lawlor, L. (2003a). The beginnings of thought: The fundamental experience in Derrida and Deleuze. In P. Patton & J. Protevi (Eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida (pp. 67–83). London, England: Continuum. Lawlor, L. (2003b). Thinking through French philosophy: The Being of the question. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lawlor, L. (2006). The implications of immanence: Toward a new concept of life. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.

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Lawlor, L. (2007). This is not sufficient: An essay on animality and human nature in Derrida. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Malabou, C., & Derrida, J. (2004). Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (D. Wills, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. May, T. (2005). Gilles Deleuze: An introduction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. McQuillan, M. (2001). Introduction: Five strategies for deconstruction. In M. McQuillan (Ed.), Deconstruction: A reader (pp. 1–43). New York, NY: Routledge. Nealon, J. T. (2003). Beyond hermeneutics: Deleuze, Derrida and contemporary theory. In P. Patton & J. Protevi (Eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida (pp. 158–168). London, England: Continuum.

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A shorter version of this chapter was originally presented during an invited session titled “Theory as Resistance” at the Fifteenth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. It should be emphasized that non-Western cultures do not necessarily reduce life to more basic parts and irreconcilable opposites. Instead, some of these cultures emphasize wholeness and unity. The term différance is sometimes referred to as a semi- or quasi-concept, but it is more accurately viewed as a nonconcept. One way of articulating the reason for the latter status of the term is that it “cannot function as the name of anything that can be thought of as ever [being] simply present” (Kamuf, 1991, p. 5). Deconstruction also involves this double movement, situating itself both inside and outside of binary poles or categories. For this reason, Derrida (1999/2000) refers to deconstruction as the impossible condition of possibility of every opposition. Aporia refers to a blockage, impasse, dead end, or unresolvable paradox or dilemma that arises within modernist thought, and it requires one to decide between both poles of a binary. As Malabou and Derrida (2004) explain, “The aporia is not synonymous with unproductivity or acquiescence: indeed, it involves rather the matter of decision. To decide to take such and such a direction, in and toward the future, cannot by definition obey the certainty of a calculable program” (p. 251). An undecidable is something that is incapable of conforming to either pole of a binary/dichotomy. Pharmakon, understood as both cure and poison, is a famous undecidable that Derrida (e.g., 1972/1981a) discussed extensively during his career. I have referred here to theory rather than to the act of theorizing because there are practical aspects to all social activities, which include theorizing.

Missing Voices

chapter seven

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Missing Voices: A Documentary Practice About Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives in Inclusive Education HANNE VANDENBUSSCHE, ELISABETH DE SCHAUWER , ELLEN VERMEULEN, INGE VAN DE PUT TE, AND GEERT VAN HOVE

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The Voice of Parents and Children in Inclusive Education

n 2016, the first two authors started working with a filmmaker, the third author, to make a documentary about “Missing Voices” (Allan, 2008) in inclusive education. We wanted to reveal the voices of children with a disability and their parents from a disability studies perspective (e.g., Figure 1). Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, critically examining the dynamic interplays between disability and aspects of culture and society. It leans on scholarly approaches from the humanities, humanistic/post humanistic social sciences, and the arts (Gabel, 2005, p. 1). The choices that were made to film (with filming as an artistic practice), and to film in a specific way, are connected with the complexities that people with disabilities face in order to belong. It is also from this framework, the neglection of the voices of children and their parents in inclusive education are questioned, in practice as in research (Hodge & Runswick-Cole 2008). Several studies (Adams, Harris, & Jones, 2016; Grove & Fisher, 1999; Hornby & Witte, 2010) illustrate how important parental involvement is in

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inclusive education. Grove and Fisher (1999) studied how the discourse of inclusion meshes with parents’ goals for their children and the educational reality of the school setting. They offered a starting point for understanding inclusion as a cultural product that parents are not only introduced to but also wrestle with as they want to meet their children’s educational goals. Parents appear to play a central role in realizing inclusion for their children in the school (Grove & Fisher, 1999). Clavering, Goodley, and McLaughlin (2006) also stated that parents have sophisticated knowledge of their children that they have built from a wealth of different resources and experiences. According to Adams et al. (2016), teacher–parent collaboration leads to successful achievement of children in inclusive classrooms. They state that differences between the parents and the teachers can be helpful for setting common goals in education through a creative process. In addition to studies illustrating the importance

Figure 1. Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn.

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of parent involvement to create more inclusion, several studies look at the necessity to listen to the students themselves (e.g., Messiou, 2012; Messiou & Hope, 2015). We consider the voices of parents and children as indispensable in the daily classroom practice but as often neglected in the debates around inclusive education (Allan, 2008). Flemish Context on Inclusive Education In Flanders (Belgium), there is a challenge to create inclusive education that is related to a long history of segregation (Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education, 2012). Belgium ratified the UN Convention for People with Disabilities in 2009, as such agreeing with the right of children to be included in the regular school system at all levels (United Nations, 2006). The M-decree is aimed at creating a more inclusive system by keeping children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools. The idea of inclusion has accumulated diverse meanings, thus generating both narrow definitions (referring to the inclusion of disabled students) and broad ones (referring to high-quality education for all students; Armstrong, Armstrong, & Spandagou, 2011). In Flanders, a narrow definition focusing on children with SEN is being used. Although the purpose of the M-decree is to refer fewer children with SEN to special education, this does not happen. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) has, therefore, expressed its concerns about the slow and limited progress that Belgium has made regarding inclusive education. The inclusion of students with SEN is a particular concern because these students are often reported to experience difficulties in participating fully in regular education (Bossaert, Colpin, Pijl, & Petry, 2013). The legal position of parents is also insecure. De Schauwer, Van de Putte, and de Beco (2019) argue the involvement of families is superficial, as parents are considered as people who do not know about education and should simply be informed by schools. Parents always have to defend their choice for inclusive education, not only to teachers but also to several support workers.

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Potential—Power to Teach All! The film we discuss later in the chapter is embedded in a bigger project called Potential (The Power to Teach All!). Potential (n.d.) is an interuniversity research project in Flanders aiming to help teachers develop more competences to create inclusive learning environments. The focus in the project lies in realizing more connected collaboration in the school, on one hand, and recognizing and valuing diversity as an enrichment, on the other. A professional development program (PDP) to reach these competencies and objectives has been developed. In this PDP, eight sessions were organized in 2017–2018 in 18 primary schools and 10 secondary schools. In every school, teacher teams (4–10 teachers) are following the PDP in which they are supported by one or two coaches. Those coaches are special needs coordinators or pedagogical counselors with the assignment of supporting teachers in inclusive education. In the eight sessions, the teachers work with their own learning questions around diversity and collaborative practices in the school. From the beginning on, they formulate their learning questions; during and between the follow-up sessions, they experiment to learn and create more inclusive education. In the fourth session, the documentary on Missing Voices is shown to help the teachers to take the perspective of parents and children in inclusive education. Our aim in this fourth session is to gain insight into how teachers experience inclusive education while looking at a lived story in motion and how to work with parents and children in that process. After the film, the coaches (pedagogical counselors or special needs coordinators) supported the discussion of the teachers. The Documentary Inclusief (Inclusion) We chose for the medium film out of the conviction that an image can give the opportunity to look with different eyes. The aim of working with film was to take the voice of the children and their parents seriously and to understand the complexity of their lives. Moving images are able to break often fixed conceptions of complex process (Knowles & Cole, 2008).

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The realization took two years. The filmmaker and the other authors worked together closely to find children and parents willing to participate. Four situations were carefully chosen based on a variety of stakeholders (child, parents, school, etc.), the practices of collaboration, and an intersectional approach of difference. The scenario was based on reading on the perspectives of children and parents and months of observations at home and in the classroom, close to the families of the disabled child. The filmmaker wrote intensely on the scenario, searching for important images to catch. In close dialogue with the other authors, the filmmaker (re)shaped the scenario in detail time and again. They often sat together to look at what was already in and what they felt was missing.

Figure 2. Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn.

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INT. BATHROOM. MORNING (Figure 2) Irakli lies in a big bathtub. Mother washes her son with tenderness. “Look at me, Irakli.” The boy looks in the camera and smiles. Mother washes his fingers. INT. CORRIDOR. MORNING Mother and father carry their son, with the help of an elevator, to his room to put on his clothes. Mother dries his hair. “First, I dry your hair,” she says. Mother makes up his bed while father handles the elevator. The filming took off with Irakli, a 14-year-old boy, following his inclusive education in a country town. He was in his sixth year of primary school. Irakli is following his individually adapted curriculum, which means that he has his own goals to accomplish concerning his learning and participation in school. His mother explains the difficulties they faced in finding a school willing to welcome him. A boy with his severe motor and communicative difficulties can easily be referred to a special school in the Flemish speaking part of Belgium. The concept of reasonable accommodations is used as a means to secure the rights of children with special needs in the regular schools1. The regular school has an obligation to inscribe, but it can also dismantle his access when the accommodations it has to make are considered disproportionate. Formal choices in the filming were made, like a dogma. These choices match and interact with the disability studies perspective of the authors seamlessly. •

Filming as inclusively as possible. Every image is a well-considered shot. The cameraman follows the movements of the child, the height of the camera is

1 In Article 2, the UNCRPD defines “Reasonable accommodation” as “means necessary and appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden, where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or exercise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and fundamental freedoms” (UN, 2006, retrieved from https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-ofpersons-with-disabilities/article-2-definitions.html)

Missing Voices

at eye level of the child, and the filmmaker is always aware of inclusion and exclusion processes. In Figure 3, we witness Irakli on his way to school, besides the soft roaring sound of the car, we hear the intense and almost lone silence. But once at school, the noise gets loud, and he is surrounded by his classmates who see him as an evident part of their classgroup. These movements of getting “in” and “being part” always go together with moments of difficult connection.

Figure 3. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn •

The film is shot in black-and-white to reduce the difference between the classmates and the characters in the different sequences. The attention on the screaming colors of the classrooms is reduced. There is no focus on labels; the central question is, who is the child?

•

The film works with detailed and soft lighting to emphasize the beauty of the children. Presuming competence and humanness is a central element in all the stories and a major concern of children and parents in inclusive education.

•

The filmmaker films, when possible, from the perspective of the children. The images show their

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point of view, and the spectator sees what they see. Frontal images are avoided; the children are not being observed. The camera follows their daily lived experiences through their eyes. •

It is shot on film because film is radical: limited and concentrated. The filmmaker is looking for little interactions and avoids explanations. How can spectators be brought to the position of “What is it to be this child in this situation?” Disability studies takes the insiders perspective central, listening to the voice of people whose life it is about, is crucial (Goodley, 2011, p. 55). The choice was made to move away from judging people’s choices. It is not about being “for” or “against” inclusion. The children do not want to explain what inclusive education is, but just bring to life how it works.

INT. LIVING ROOM. MORNING (Figure 4) We see the legs of the boy, strangely positioned. We hear the father’s voice. “Come on, Irakli, turn around.” He swipes his one leg over the other, with lots of effort. “How many times I have to turn around?” he asks. Father says he has to be silent and work. Irakli tries his best. A next exercise: “Good, Irakli; now some more, until seven.” Irakli says, “And now, stop.” His father holds him tightly and helps him to get up. “Good. Irakli.” His father walks him to the couch where Irakli can sit. Irakli is falling on his side. “Come on, Irakli, please!” Irakli: “Sorry.” Irakli’s voice: “My name means Heracles, but I know I will never be Heracles. My father wants me to practice a lot, but for me this is really hard.” (Figure 5) The story of Irakli was shot and edited in January 2018. This piece of documentary is used in the PDP of Potential to discuss how the teacher teams could look through the eyes of the child and his parents to realize more inclusive education.

Missing Voices

Figure 4. Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn

Figure 5. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn

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Aporia as a Theoretical Guide “The possibility of impossibility .  .  . It is about a strange logical figure of contradiction that would take the form of an antinomy or aporia, a problem of language or of a logic to be resolved” (Derrida, 1993, p. 72). As stated earlier, we heard the reactions of teacher teams from primary as well as secondary regular schools in Flanders. The concept of “aporia” from Derrida (1993) became a theoretical guide for listening to the discussions among the teachers and in the teacher teams. What is at stake in this concept is the “not knowing where to go” (Derrida, 1993, p. 12). Allan (2008) states that inclusive education is a domain with a lot of aporias. These double duties are generally experienced as absolute contradictions compromising the teachers. As Allan (2008) notes, the experience of the impossible is not just the opposite of the possible or something that is inaccessible; what Derrida (1993) is speaking about is rather a responsibility toward thinking where it is most inconceivable. This requires effort and giving attention to feelings and thoughts not easy to cope with. In what we say and what the teachers share, they seem to speak in a contradictory way. The so-called conflicting discourses are confusing. When following Derrida (1993), we could look at the plurality of the speaking here. Some words and language can “tremble in an unstable multiplicity as long as there is no context to stop us” (Derrida, 1993, p. 9). We hear teachers say, “This is unrealistic,” and “We cannot do this [anymore],” slipping into general statements and not giving full attention to the context and how this can work to open up new possibilities to realize more inclusion. What is it that does not work? What is it that makes including disabled children in regular education unrealistic? The contextual approach of the film of Irakli makes some teachers uncertain and confused. A lot of concerns, fears, and tensions that need attention are addressed in their responses. In what follows, we approach the discussions in an affirmative and constructive way by connecting the idea of a pedagogy of discomfort to aporias. Zembylas (2015) discusses a pedagogy of discomfort and its ethical implications. He argues a pedagogy of discomfort is grounded in the assumption “that discomforting feelings are

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important in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and normative practices that sustain social inequities” (Zembylas, 2015, p. 163). This creates openings for individual and social transformations. Zembylas draws on the ideas of Michel Foucault (1994), where he writes on an ethic of discomfort that Is never to consent to begin completely comfortable with one’s own presuppositions. .  .  . To be very mindful that everything one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of a ground that is always unexplored. (Foucault, cited in Zembylas, 2015, p. 4)

In the unsettling of what the teachers see and experience, shifts in conceptions, thinking, and acting can occur. We put the idea of aporia to work by exploring how the story of Irakli moved the teacher discussions. Focus on the Piece of the Documentary on Irakli – the Story of Him and His Family The story of Irakli opens with his hard work before he goes to school. We get to know his mother and his father, who are doing everything they can to make their boy as resilient as possible. The family came to Belgium from a former Soviet satellite state and moved to Belgium to get more appropriate support for their two disabled children. They want their sons to get all possible opportunities, according to their abilities. They show us where they live, a very modest, small house, with a lot of practice materials for Irakli. We see the concerned and loving looks of his mother; we hear her whispered praying; we hear the soft but persistent voice of his father—devotion to their boy. With his support worker and his father, the boy is brought to school. In the classroom, Irakli participates by using his computer. He cannot write with a pen, so he types everything (Figure 6). He gets full support from his support worker, who is sitting next to him in the classroom (Figure 7) and helps him with lunch, on the playground, and so on.

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Teacher: Next word: eigenaardig (extraordinary). Class: Eigenaardig. They write it down; Irakli is typing on his computer. Teacher: Next word: vijand (enemy). Class: Vijand. Again, the class is writing it down; Irakli is typing, very slowly; we see he is still writing the first dictated word. Teacher: And now a sentence: De operatie is geslaagd (The operation has succeeded). Irakli is doing as fast as he can, his one-finger typing of every letter of every word, the doubt: geslaagt or geslaagd. His support worker whispers, “Think hard.” He chooses the wrong one.

Figure 6

Figure 7

Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn

Irakli takes part in several courses. When school is out, the other pupils say goodbye. Irakli’s father is picking him up. While Irakli’s father is waiting for him, he talks about how he did an experiment the other day. He was hiding from Irakli to see how he would react if his father was not around as he normally would be. “Irakli showed me a strength I did not see before. He just went home on his own.” Back home, Irakli is working at the computer while standing up. His mother is on the phone in the same room. She’s calling a person, Elisabeth, who has been supporting them for a long time. His mother is expressing her concerns.

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Mother: Elisabeth, we will need your help again. We will need your guidance and other pedagogical support (Figure 8). Irakli is going to secondary school next year. I would really like him to stay in his class where he is well accepted. We want to keep him in the regular school as long as possible, of course. The head of the secondary school never had a child with a disability in his school before. You know it has been difficult before.

Figure 8. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn In this 20-minute sequence, we start to feel the longings and fears, the hard work, and the joyful moments that Irakli and his family are sharing. Bricolage as a Methodology of How Teachers Work With Irakli’s Story For this research, we work with schools participating in the research project Potential. In seven schools (two secondary and five primary schools), we recorded the fourth session when the documentary was shown, as such making it possible to learn how the film was received. We analyzed the fourth session of these seven teacher teams (each took approximately 2.5 hours) during which the documentary is debated with the teachers.

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To analyze the sessions of the seven schools, the first author started to transcribe them. After several readings by the first author and reflecting with the other authors, we came to some central recurring ideas and statements. We started bringing those together and pulling them apart. We confronted elements for the different teacher teams with each other. Which patterns kept returning? A process of bricolage commenced and endured through the practice of writing. Denzin and Lincoln (1998) define narrative bricolage as a method to do qualitative research: “a pieced together, closeknit set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a concrete situation” (p. 5). We draw on the methodological approach Metz (2018) and Kincheloe and Berry (2004) describe. Kincheloe and Berry (2004) pose that a bricolage is subversive, accepting that human experience is marked by uncertainties where order is not that easily established. We thus try to avoid a reductionist form of researching and not disconnect and fragment our view of the world and the social-historical-political processes going on. We put the concept of “aporia” to work by plugging it into the discussions (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). We draw on Julie Allan’s (2008) exploration of Derrida and his own work to make it vivid in this context of inclusive learning environments: parts of thinking with Derrida, parts of our practice and thinking around the Missing Voices of children and parents, parts of the documentary filmed by Ellen Vermeulen, our conversations together around the choices in film, the conversations of the teachers and their strong responses, and the writing together in which a filmish perspective was brought into contact with a disability studies perspective. These elements were woven into each other and clung together. This brought the authors to the analysis of the sessions with the teacher teams who watched the film from Irakli’s perspective and his family. This involves a great deal of self-reflexivity from the researchers where images, as well as words and thoughts to explore the problem, are stitched together (Metz, 2018). This also means that our own values and historiographical notions are entangled in the analysis that follows. As Metz (2018) states, while using this method, the researcher has to “do” something; this implies a beginning and a conversation. From our disability studies focus, we try to capture multiple layers of

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discourses, voices, and experiences, which we study more in-depth in the following. We share the constant search for inclusion and exclusion of the teachers and our noticing how teachers get trapped in conflicting discourses on normality and ethics. Discussion of the Teacher Teams— Figuring Out What We Can Learn In what follows, we want to look into the main discussion issues that were raised. We experience the difficulties of teachers doubting their capabilities to teach children with disabilities in their regular classrooms. Their capacities as teachers are deeply intertwined with doubting Irakli’s learning potential. Confronted with the vulnerability of his body, teachers think Irakli has no potential to learn. His severe physical and communicative needs are considered barriers to his learning. Some teachers also presume that he is lacking intellectual competencies. A lot of teachers question the presence of Irakli in the regular class, even though his longing to be there and to learn and participate is perceived as very authentic. Slowness and/in/of Speed

Figure 9. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn

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A first, often recurring comment in all the teacher teams, and thus, in several schools, concerns Irakli’s slowness. Irakli is typing on his computer, very conscientiously using one finger to go from this to that letter. The teacher at first forgets to consider that he has to wait for Irakli. When dictating the sentences, he pauses. The class waits. In this waiting, the teacher and the class are aware of Irakli’s needs and participation. While watching this scene, a certain uncomfortable feeling arises. This reminds the viewer of an ethics of discomfort (Foucault, cited in Zembylas, 2015). Irakli’s living through time appears to contradict the stress and hurry every teacher experiences in his or her job. Is it wasting time? Is it losing time? Is it playing in a creative sense with time? The teachers use time in many ways: giving time, needing time, asking time, wasting time, losing time, Irakli’s waiting, the father’s waiting, the class’s and teacher’s waiting. Irakli’s being “in time” has an impact on class management. Through the teachers’ discussions, a great need to get more time, not just for Irakli but also for themselves, is raised. The teachers are confronted with the way “ableist time” (Inspiration & Co., 2014) is dominating their way of working, and they feel like time is catching up on them. Titchkosky (2011) states that there are many senses of time. There are many ways to refer to time and many ways to “do time.” She argues for a more reflective conception of time. Irakli can teach the teacher teams encountering his lived experiences new ways of understanding. Thinking about his pace made teachers reflect about special moments where they created time for a child, with a child, and for themselves. A teacher said, “It was when I went to the swimming pool with one of the pupils I started to talk with the child and this was special. I feel like in these little moments there is really time to listen.” It is not just about “hearing.” The teachers are unfolding moments of emergent listening (Davies, 2014); time is then experienced in duration (Bergson, 1907); it opens a space where we listen with a fullness we tend to forget when haste is overwhelmingly blocking this attending. One of the teachers stated that there is a lot of capacity and capabilities to grow in teaching, but a lack of time withholds them from developing or exposing these capabilities.

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Another teacher argued that he does not see a big problem in the story of Irakli. According to him, Irakli’s teacher does not have a lot to change in how he organizes his teaching. Irakli looks very disabled, but he is supported intensely, and he is clever enough to follow the lessons. Giving time, in his account, does not seem intrusive for teaching. In contrast, others see Irakli’s slowness as “the impossibility.” It makes doing their work as a teacher impossible; too much care is involved, and they will not be able to give added value as his teacher. Irakli needs a teacher who is an expert in his problems and who can make time for him individually all the time. It makes us wonder: What is this possible impossibility (Derrida, 1993)? Could using time to feel and listen be a key for working in relationality, as such experiencing time differently? Maybe, lessons from slow movements can be learned to help teachers experiencing time in another way (Ulmer, 2017)? In parts of the teachers’ stories, we read a desire to control time, to suppress time, a desire to regulate and manage everything on our path: who is in your class and how, the events in teaching, while teaching, the speed of children, the colleagues, the class organization, and so on. They express a longing for predictability. By looking into working with slowness and drawing on philosophy, we want to shift away from this suffocating thinking. Opening/Closing Access

Figure 10. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn

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Teachers from every school discussed the legitimacy of Irakli’s presence in the regular school. Teachers think Irakli would be better off in special education. This belief that Irakli should be in special education troubles their minds and affects how they look at him. His deficits are dominant and receive master status in what Irakli needs in education. They question Irakli’s place in a regular school. “I think Irakli should go to special education. We would refer him to such a school.” “For the parents, it would be better if he would be in special education. Letting him attend a regular school is very demanding for them.” “I don’t know if he has ever been invited to a birthday party, but I can tell you, it will be zero.” “Sometimes we invest a lot in children; they ask us so much of our time, while they just don’t belong here.” The “not belonging” of some children in regular education is connected not only to the difference of the child, to the support needs, but also to the competencies the teachers address to their selves. Teachers talk repeatedly about “place.” What is the “right place” of a child? A lot of teachers put all their trust in special education and are convinced the expertise to “teach these children” is much higher there. How children with disabilities are and stay “essentially excludable” (Titchkosky, 2011) is striking. The teachers conceive many barriers to learning; a lot of teachers already defined striated conditions (e.g., being able to walk, to talk, to think, to work with your hands, to understand, to follow the pace, to be independent, etc.; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The teachers “know” who can be the “inhabitants” of regular classrooms; the teachers “know” they are “at home.” Irakli is a strange arrivant2 then, making his (teacher) host wonder whether that school could be his home. Derrida does not consider the arrivant as someone or something in particular. The arrivant does not have any identity yet; its place of arrival is deidentified (Derrida, 1993, p. 34). This is rather confusing for the people watching the film. The teachers are getting to know Irakli through following him with his parents, in his school, and together with his support worker. This is difficult; In Le Monde, Derrida explains what he means with the “arrivant,” a specific term he introduces: “Pure hospitality consists in welcoming the arrivant, the one who arrives, before laying down any conditions, before knowing or asking anything of him, whether this be a name or a piece of identification” (Derrida, 1997 in Naas, 2005, p. 8, italics in original). 2

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Irakli seems to be “at home” in his rural school in the countryside, but what does this mean in the schools of the teachers watching the film? This implies an introduction of a new border, a new stopping by the teachers. They build strong arguments about why it is not possible in their schools. One of the strongest arguments is physical accessibility: “Irakli cannot get in our school, the only place accessible is the playground.” “It is not possible to enter the school with a wheelchair.” The attitudinal and structural barriers behind this thinking are rarely attended to in the reflections of the teachers. Only some individual teachers go there and question their routine practices of excluding disabled children. (Non)Passing Borders Teachers see Irakli as in need of more care. Throughout the film, they recognize his capability of learning. This makes them doubt. Can Irakli access a regular school? Does he seem clever enough? He understands several languages, and the teachers recognize his spelling mistakes as appropriate for his level of schooling in the sixth grade of primary school. So what borders could be legitimizing his presence, or where do we go a bridge too far? The teachers could not always give him access in their minds with openness and fully believe in his abilities. “Irakli is living in an air bubble; it will explode and then he will see and know his inclusion in society is a dream.” “Irakli might be clever, but even if he would study law, he would still need so much care.” Some teachers judge Irakli’s capabilities while looking at his parents. The parents overestimate his capacities. Coming from abroad, they do not have enough information about what is the best solution for their son. The teachers state they were surprised to hear Irakli speak. His intelligence seems incompatible with his severely impaired body and difficult, comprehensible speech. The teachers keep disability as an individual matter; it is situated in Irakli’s body, and the teachers do not show insight into the social constructedness of disability/ normality. There is a need for teachers to connect more with role models, people with disabilities showing their ways of living in a society where accessibility is challenging in many ways.

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In Titchkosky (2011), we witness the processes of how some people are imagined as “in” and other people as “out.” It is troubling and confusing when we shake these fixed conceptions. Could it be that not recognizing this normalizing and hegemonic thinking is paralyzing teachers’ imaginations? Disability is more than an embodied individual issue; it is a complex set of meanings located in cultural processes, “a barrier to accessing a collective desire to form new relations between who people are and where they find themselves” (Titchkosky, 2011, p. 48). Inclusive education is about social justice (Allan, 2008). How difficult this is for some of the teachers discussing the film is striking. We only think of disability on a personal, individual level; we do not look at disability as a contextual arrangement among an individual, the material context, the other pupils, the teacher, the support workers, the material context, the curriculum, and reasonable accommodations to participate. We witness this complexity in Figures 9, 10, and 11 where we follow Irakli in school, but also at home, resting in cushions after a long day in his wheelchair, with his father handling the elevator for helping him to go to bed. Thinking in this multiconnected way opens possibilities instead of putting children with special educational needs in the corner of the extra burden and heavy workload. It forces us to think in terms of collective reassembling of what is happening in a classroom among all stakeholders instead of feeling individually responsible for the learning processes of the children as the class teacher. The judgments and dominant interpretations in a determined direction are powerful forces. It is not by watching the film one time and discussing it in group that all practices, thinking, and beliefs in how disabled children are treated in Flemish education will be transformed fundamentally. Some teachers do bring in other ways of looking at these children; some do see their shared responsibility in making the children feel belonging in the school and giving them opportunities to learn. Other teachers continue to search for which children inclusion should be an option and how to clearly demarcate the borders for others (children with intellectual disability, children with behavioral problems, etc.). Also here, we let Derrida (1993) guide us. He states:

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Endekhomāi means to take upon oneself, in oneself, at home, with oneself, to receive, welcome, accept, and admit something other than oneself, the other than oneself. . . . It is indeed a question of admitting, accepting, and inviting. But let us not forget that in the passive or impersonal sense (endekhetāi), the same verb names that which is acceptable, admissible, permitted, and, more generally, possible, the contrary of the “it is not permitted,” “it is not necessary to,” “it is necessary not to,” “it is not possible” (e.g., to cross the “limits of truth”). Endekhomenos means: “insofar as it is possible.” (Derrida, 1993, p. 11)

The phrase “insofar as it is possible” is exactly what the mother of Irakli says when phoning Elisabeth: “We want to keep him in regular education, as long as it is possible, of course . . .” But what does this mean? What would make him be there and learning with his peers impossible? So where is the “nonpassage”? One of the teachers interprets this sentence of the mother as “proof ” that the mother understands Irakli’s presence is unsure and that schools will have to say “stop” at a certain moment. The teachers question the position of the parents and the dependence of Irakli and his parents on the goodwill and power of the regular school deciding to welcome him or not. Some teachers think about the long negotiations between the parents and the school to get Irakli in. They imagine themselves in the shoes of the mother and father, searching and encountering a lot of the difficulties along the road. They also could see why Irakli and his parents wanted him to attend a regular school. “They want the best for their child.” The same teacher, however, says, “I don’t see how he could be here in our school; I would not dare to tell my colleagues he is coming.” And the same teacher utters, “We should stop to see this as an individual responsibility. Looking [at] how Irakli can participate in our school is a team matter.” Some teachers come closer to multiple perspectivism; others find reflecting less from their point of view as a teacher who knows best where children should be educated difficult.

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Status of Normality: Education to Becoming Human/Fitting the Norm The questions about belonging in regular education also open the discussion around the finality of education. Some teachers think of education as a place where people meet and become “human.” It is not all about learning mathematics and languages. So what does this mean for what is expected from teachers? Biesta refers to a composite answer when talking about “good education,” with a need to focus on three functions of education: qualification (knowledge, skills, and understanding, often dispositions and forms of judgments to “do” something), socialization (the many ways in which we become members of and part of particular social, cultural, and political orders), and subjectification (ways of being that hint at independence from the requirements following the socialization function) (Biesta, 2009). Also in this regard, Simons and Masschelein (2017) discuss several perspectives on education. In talking about the pupil as the Other, they consider the pedagogical relationship as always intersubjective or interpersonal. In this ethical-pedagogical perspective, they refer to the humanization of pupils and teachers where human responsibility, ethical doing, and relationality are central. Every teacher needs to address or be trained as a general and special educator. Every teacher needs some expertise on labels to be able to invest in more participation for each child and to take away barriers to his or her learning. This is not the same as handing children over to disability experts and therapists who are supposed to treat, resolve, and rehabilitate the differences for the teacher. In this theme of normalization and fitting and the idea of a “good” autonomous and independent citizen, we also want to give attention to the role of the support worker. The presence of this woman supporting Irakli on his way to school, in school, and bringing him back home scares a lot of teachers. On one hand, her presence is a stressor because there is an extra person in the class witnessing what the teacher is doing. On the other hand, she is named as a necessary condition for being able to work with a child such as Irakli. It would be impossible without her. Her presence also brings judgment about how she takes up her role. She is very

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close to Irakli; some teachers wonder: “Isn’t she interfering in the relationship between the teacher and Irakli?” “Why would he get support and not other children?” The shift in recognizing relationality and interdependency (Reindal, 1999; Van Hove & Roets, 2000, p. 46) in working in an inclusive learning environment is crucial to the change teachers need to handle. This is not evident for a lot of teachers, and it requires a big mind shift to imagine their classroom as a social and relational space with a multiplicity of connections, not only among education professionals but also among children. Several aporias came up: How can teachers experience “slow” educational practices and still have the feeling they get done what is expected from them? How can teachers adjust their pace to the ability of each child and still achieve appropriate standards for all children in their group? How can teachers be uncertain about their abilities to teach disabled children and still be open-minded enough to try to give each child a chance to develop his or her learning potential? How can teachers be challenged by Irakli’s story to think and transform their daily practices in the classroom and still realize how strongly the daily assumptions on segregation and deficit thinking around disability are ingrained in our education system? How can we let difference exist in all its complexity and still be focused on participation and belonging of all children in the classroom? How can the support worker be present and do his or her work and still have teachers feel in full control of the learning processes of every pupil in their class? How can we be uncertain about inclusion processes and still manage to proceed to build on inclusive education at all levels?

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Figure 11. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn (In)Conclusive Ideas In the discussions, teachers confront us with several double movements. In one movement, a lot of them question inclusive education, doubting the value it adds and doubting their own experiences and their capacities to teach children with a disability. In another movement, we hear a different discourse of transformation and change slipping in now and then. According to some teachers, the film is a beautiful example of how inclusion becomes possible, and it shows how unrealistic inclusion is. The possible and impossible go hand in hand; they are not opposites. “Aporias” (Derrida, 1993) help us to blur these binaries and polarities, to see the double movement of the possible and impossible as co-existing. It makes us think about how inclusion can be a process where a final and definite outcome is not possible. We will always continue to be confronted with new challenges in supporting the children we work with and in the learning environments we work in. These aporias do not need to be solved. In the aporias, we can find ways not only to work through inclusion by listening to the child and the other pupils, the parents, colleagues, the head of school, and pedagogical counselors but also to see the close

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connection with the environment, the class organization, the playground, the curriculum, and so forth. It is working in and through these meshworks that new oxygen is given, helping us stop excluding the excludable other. Hence, we are looking for a mastery of uncertainty no longer questioning Irakli’s “place” but are searching for ways to make him belong and participate fully (Vandenbussche & De Schauwer, 2018). In our aspiration, we hope to keep heading toward a shift from questioning inclusion as such to exploring and imagining how inclusion works in all its complexity and challenges. References Adams, D., Harris, A., & Jones, M. (2016). Teacher-parent collaboration for an inclusive classroom: Success for every child. Malaysian Online Journal of Educational Sciences, 4(3), 58–72. Allan, J. 2008, Rethinking inclusive education: The philosophers of difference in practice. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer. Armstrong, D., Armstrong, A. C., & Spandagou, I. (2011). Inclusion: By choice or by chance? International Journal of Inclusive Education, 15, 29–39. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2010.496192 Bergson, H. (2018 [1907]). De creatieve evolutie [The Creative Evolution]. Translated by Joke van Zijl. Original title: L’évolution créatrice: Paris: Félix Alcan. Biesta, G. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: On the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability ( formerly: Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education), 21(1), 33–46. Bossaert, G., Colpin, H., Pijl, S. J., & Petry, K. (2013). Truly included? A literature study focusing on the social dimension of inclusion in education. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17, 60–79. https:// dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2011.580464 Clavering, E., Goodley, D., & McLaughlin, J. (2006). ESRC parents, professionals and disabled babies: Identifying enabling care [Executive Summary]. Retrieved from https://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/ sites/40/library/goodley-parents-professionals-and-disabled-babies.pdf Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. London, England: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus, capitalism and schizophrenia. London, England: Continuum.

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Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). (1998). Strategies of qualitative inquiry. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Derrida, J. (1993). Aporias (T. Dutoit, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. De Schauwer, E., Van de Putte, I., & de Beco, G. (2019). Inclusive education in Flanders, Belgium: A country with a long history of segregation. In G. de Beco, S. Quinlivan, & J. E. Lord (Eds.), The Right to Inclusive education in international human rights law (vol. 5, pp. 514–529). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Gabel, S. (2005). Disability Studies in Education: Readings in Theory and Method. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishers. Goodley, D. (2011). Disability Studies. An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. Grove, K., & Fisher, D. (1999). Entrepreneurs of meaning, parents and the process of inclusive education. Remedial and Special Education, 20, 208–215. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/074193259902000404 Hodge, N., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2008). Problematising parent-professional partnerships in education. Disability & Society, 23, 637–649. https://dx. doi.org/10.1080/09687590802328543 Hornby, G., & Witte, C. (2010). Parent involvement in inclusive primary schools in New Zealand: Implications for improving practice and for teacher education. International Journal of Whole Schooling, 6(1), 27–38. Inspiration & Co. (2014, May 6). Inspiration & Co with Prof Dan Goodley: What it means to be human [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=jAjU2ypSmhI Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2013). Plugging one text into another thinking with theory in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 4, 261–271. https://dx.doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800412471510 Kincheloe, J., & Berry, K. (2004). Rigour and complexity in educational research: Conceptualizing the bricolage. New York, NY: Open University Press. Knowles, J. G. & Cole, A. L. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, examples and issues. California, C: Sage Publications, Inc. Messiou, K. (2012). Collaborating with children in exploring marginalization: An approach to inclusive education. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 16, 1311–1322. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/136031 16.2011.572188

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Messiou, K., & Hope, M. (2015). The danger of subverting students’ views in schools. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 19, 1009–1021. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1024763 Metz, J. M. (2018). Protect this belief. Teaching sport, media, and race during the Baltimore protests. International Review of Qualitative Research, 11, 231–250. Naas, M. (2005). “Alors, qui êtes-vous?” Jacques Derrida and the Question of Hospitality, Substance, 34, 6–17. Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education. (2012). Education and disability. Special needs policies and practices in education, training and employment for students with disabilities and special educational needs in the European Union. Retrieved from http://www.nesse.fr/ nesse/activities/reports/activities/reports/disability-special-needs-1 Potential. (n.d.). Research. Retrieved from http://www.potentialproject.be/ research Reindal, S. M. (1999). Independence, dependence, interdependence: Some reflections on the subject and personal autonomy. Disability & Society, 14, 353–367. Simons, M., & Masschelein, J. (2017). De leerling centraal in het onderwijs? Grenzen van personalisering [The pupil central in education? Borders of personalization]. Leuven, Belgium: Acco. Titchkosky, T. (2011). The question of access: Disability, space, meaning. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Ulmer, J. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 201–211. United Nations. (2006). Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/crpd/pages/ conventionrightspersonswithdisabilities.aspx Vandenbussche, H., & De Schauwer, E. (2018). The pursuit of belonging in inclusive education – insider perspectives on the meshwork of participation. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 22, 969–982. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2017.1413686 Van Hove, G., & Roets, G. (2000). Empowerment en volwassenen met een verstandelijke beperking [Empowerment and adults with an intellectual disability] Tijdschrift voor Orthopedagogiek, 39, 41–52. Zembylas, M. (2015). ‘Pedagogy of discomfort’ and its ethical implications: The tensions of ethical violence in social justice education. Ethics and Education, 10, 163–174. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2015.103 9274

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Lazy Pedagogy

chapter eight

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Lazy Pedagogy RYAN EVELY GILDERSLEEVE

T

ime and labor are two sides of the same coin in the neoliberal condition. Each promises and reneges emancipatory principles, and through such circuitry, fashions Homo economicus in servitude to the economy. Scholars in the neoliberal academy face the false promises of the time/labor circuit at increasingly stronger velocities of production. As academe’s knowledge imperative becomes ever more ensnared in the economic lines of flight produced through the neoliberal regime, pedagogy begins to mirror the time/labor circuit, normalizing the truncated notions of time that beget ever frenzied labor. Such a frenzy often allows for the radical instrumentation of pedagogy in the scholarship of research and teaching. Scholarship becomes a tool for efficiency and production in neoliberal academia, conflating economic measures of productivity with quality and generative potential. To combat the extraordinary yet seemingly ordinary efficiencies unfolding from the frenzied instrumentation of scholarship, I propose an ontological shift in academics’ relationship to them—one founded on laziness rather than work. I am trying to put laziness to work, ironically so, in the hope of generating a lazy pedagogy as resistance to our contemporary conditions of knowledge production in academia. As a departure point, I acknowledge the neoliberal condition of academe as the normative condition of academic practice, at least in North America. Analyzed through Thomas Nail’s (2018) ontology of motion, I put forward a reading of the contemporary knowledge imperative as it takes shape in the teaching and learning practices of scholarship and as embedded within the neoliberal condition of academe. I then review a few lazy postures toward the work imperative

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of scholarship and ultimately provide a framework for lazy pedagogy that might reorient scholarship toward life, living, and creating. On the Knowledge Imperative of Academe and Academic Work Put simply, the knowledge imperative of academe is the central and foundational role of the university as a social institution (Gildersleeve, 2016). It signifies our responsibility to produce, share, and engage academic knowledge for the benefit of society. This includes •

knowledge built from teaching and learning practice,

•

knowledge built from research and creative expression practice, and

•

knowledge built from service and outreach practice.

This knowledge imperative gave rise to knowledge workers as a socioeconomic regime—a class of labor—with the academic knowledge necessary to inform and reflexively engage with the everyday demands of becoming more fully human in a more-than-human environment. It is a massive responsibility. In the early part of the 20th century, scholars in the United States organized around a few key principles that should guide how knowledge workers, as a class of labor, should be regarded, as well as how the universities and colleges that employ them should protect their knowledge-building work. The notion of academic freedom and the concept of tenure were born of this movement with the establishment of the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP’s) statements on academic freedom in 1940. Under these statements, the pursuit of academic knowledge became work that was recognized and protected for its role in contemporary society. These early efforts by the AAUP were built on broader labor movements in the industrialized West that was wrestling with how to ensure that everyone who wanted to had a right to work.

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On Laziness and the Refusal of Work Capitalist critic and socialist revolutionary Paul Lefargue (1907/ 2013) wrote from Saint Pélagie Prison that “the Right to Work which is but the right to misery” (p. 56), contending that if we were only to work less and enjoy leisure more, “the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her” (p. 56). Lefargue’s 1883 essay, “The Right to be Lazy,” was a refutation of the right to work, arguing that centering labor reinscribed the cartographies of slavery and servitude from which previous revolutions sought to emancipate people. Labor did not create freedom but, rather, ensnared workers into the capitalist machine, subordinating them to the terms of production and consumption. Lefargue (2013) argued that laziness should be the centerpiece of revolution, not just in the sense of seeking leisure time for a more balanced life but, rather, that lazy activities also beget a higher quality of life for all. Lefargue (2013) recognized that the elite classes always centered laziness in their lives. Work for elites was optional, a hobby, or occupied so little time that it was inconsequential to their constitution as a subject. This last point is one that Lefargue took most seriously, pointing out that centering labor in emancipatory politics emplaced personhood within the terms of capital, whereas centering laziness emplaced personhood within the terms of leisure, including family, recreation, the arts, and the enjoyment of—perhaps even enjoinment with—nature. For Lefargue (2013), emancipation from serfdom, from slavery, from the overlords, needed to be focused on, expanding human potential to engage in lazy activity rather than a conscription to labor. Labor should only be engaged inasmuch as is necessary for humankind to enjoy becoming human in a dynamic assemblage with nature, the arts, recreation, family, and the ability to do nothing. Twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp avoided work as much as possible. He explored such a theme and other critiques of capitalism throughout his oeuvre but prominently through his works on the “readymades.” The readymades were items such as prefabricated shovels, brooms, dustpans, and so on. By submitting them as art, Duchamp demonstrated how all dimensions of life were becoming

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defined by work. For even the technological innovations meant to free time from overly time-consuming tasks (e.g., dusting) were useful only when the time saved allowed for more labor to be performed. There was no relation between freed time and leisure or pleasure. Effectively, time and work entrench within one another in producing a human subject unknowable through leisure or pleasure. In Duchamp’s studio, he arranged the readymades upside down, some literally hanging from the ceiling. According to Molesworth (1998), “the lack of a hard-and-fast divide between work and leisure is emphasized by these images of functional maintenance objects—objects designed to aid in the cleaning and tidying up of places and people—rendered deliberately dysfunctional” (p. 52). In a spit of irony, Duchamp draws attention to the dysfunction of technological innovation in relation to the quality of human life. The readymades did not engender a better quality of life but, rather, reenforced the commodification of life into economic portions of work. As an analysis of art itself, Molesworth (1998) shared that “arguably, the readymade has done more to reorganize aesthetic categories than any other twentieth-century art practice. One of its many ramifications was a disavowal of an ontological definition of art” (p. 51). Duchamp’s lazy aesthetic, nefariously rendered via the readymades, challenged the commodification of art and the enterprising artist. To confront the neoliberal condition of contemporary being, Maurizio Lazzarato (2015) argues for the refusal of work. In Lazzarato’s (2015) analysis, neoliberalism has exacerbated the equation that work equals life to such extremes that our only hope for dismantling the neoliberal regime lies in our refusal to accept (and enable) its terms of subjectivation. Those terms, according to Lazzarato (2015), rely on our indebtedness to the economy, an indebtedness that requires valorization for the modern state to secure itself as necessary and good. According to Lazzarato (2015), “We must recapture these conditions, arrest valorization, desert the flux of communication/consumption/production, and in this way recover equality, the basis of political organization” (p. 245). The refusal of work is a refutation of the neoliberal imperative to construct selves and others in strictly economic measures.

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Money is but one expression of economic measure. The lines counted on a curriculum vitae for promotion and tenure are another (see Gildersleeve, 2016). The rapid-fire and ever-accelerating pace of academic production (i.e., more journal articles, more grants, more technology-transfer initiatives) illustrates the stranglehold that neoliberalism has taken over researchers’ sense of time (see Ulmer, 2017). Lazzarato (2015) argues a counter posture, to be found in laziness: In order for subjectivation to emerge, we do not need to accelerate, but to slow down. We need “time,” but a time of rupture, a time that arrests the “general mobilization,” a time that suspends apparatuses of exploitation and domination—an “idle time.” (p. 246)

Here, Lazzarato’s refusal of work echoes some themes from the slow scholarship movement championed by Berg and Seeber (2016), as well as Ulmer (2017) and others, arguing that the compression of time needs to be reversed. Lazzarato’s “idle time” echoes with ways that slow scholars seek to enact timelessness. Yet most slow scholars are quick to point out that they are not lazy. Slow is a negotiation of time, a tactic for engaging the new normal (i.e., neoliberalism) of an academe focused on production. For slow scholars, lazy remains relegated to a moral undertaking. In slow terms, lazy is lethargy. However, against the normative and populist renderings of what it might mean to be lazy, as a refusal of work, laziness becomes generative in Lazzarato’s configuration. Across LeFargue, Duchamp, and Lazzarato, recognizing that lazy is not lethargy is important. Furthermore, lazy is not necessarily slow. Laziness is political (à la Lefargue) and aesthetic (à la Duchamp). Laziness is an ontological project, whereas slow is tactical and pragmatic, operating axiologically. To champion lazy pedagogy then is not simply to slow our teaching and learning processes. A lazy pedagogy is ontologically disruptive to how we understand the affect of pedagogy—that which our pedagogy ontologically produces—the realities made knowable through academe’s knowledge imperative. Speed really might have nothing to do with it. Laziness is the arresting of the materialist machine that produces scholars as workers. Laziness flips the right

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to work on its head and instead insists on the right to be lazy—a right to leisure, a right to live, to life, to zoe. An Ontology of Motion and the Kinopolitics of Academe As mentioned earlier, I take the neoliberal condition of contemporary academia as a departure point for thinking-doing lazy pedagogy as resistance. But the tired wailings of academics belying the contemporary condition is insufficient for building a lazy pedagogy that might somehow resist the trappings of neoliberal higher education. Put plainly, plenty of other scholars have documented the characteristics of neoliberal higher education (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Shumar, 1997). Plenty more have illustrated how these characteristics might imperil the knowledge imperative of academe (Kuntz, 2015; Metcalfe, 2010; Saunders, 2014). Suffice it to say, neoliberal higher education is the normative condition of contemporary academe. And that condition is generally considered to be dangerous for the pursuit of knowledge. Rather than rehash these arguments, I hope it will be more fruitful to explain the affective consequences of neoliberal higher education in the knowledge imperative, with a focus on teaching and learning processes. I draw from Thomas Nail’s (2018) philosophy of movement and ontology of motion to provide such an explanation. Such a framework provides an opportunity for intervention absent the traditional critical examinations of neoliberal higher education. For building tools of resistance, à la the thematics of this edited volume, I find Nail’s philosophy especially fruitful. To put movement and motion into the broadest context, I think recognizing that we have more migrants on the planet today than at any other time in human history is important. We transport more things longer distances with greater multitude of technologies than ever before. The movement of people and things has become so important to our historical reality today that we wage wars—wars over the movement of things (e.g., trade wars) as well as wars over the movement of people (e.g., the Syrian refugee crisis). We are part of a historical era in which motion, movement, and mobility increasingly define human activity. The kinetic nature of contemporary

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events therefore requires a historical ontology that recognizes the primacy of motion (Nail, 2018). Movement is not reducible to space and time. The new mobilities turning in the social sciences, championed by Sheller and Urry (2006), recognize that there is nothing that is not or has not been in motion. Nail’s (2018) ontology of motion builds on historical precursors of Lucretius, Marx, and Bergson and works to demonstrate the affective consequences of motion in the more-than-human condition. Although an ontology of motion shares influences from process ontologies in that each emphasizes flux and becoming, an ontology of motion is strictly interested in the flux of matter, not space, force, or time. In a movement-centered ontology, force, space, and time do not transcend matter in motion. They are dimensions of reality but irreducibly material kinetic dimensions. To further differentiate the ontology of motion from the increasingly popular process ontologies and ontologies of becoming, Nail (2018) provides a critique of Whitehead and Deleuze via motion, matter, and history. Ultimately, he claims that process ontology and becoming fit very much in an Einsteinian paradigm where the universe is absolutely static but internally and spatiotemporally dynamic: immobile but creative and becoming—a motionless voyage. Our contemporary condition simply does not allow that. Thus, an ontology of motion is a complete inversion of an ontology of becoming, wherein: All becoming is rendered fully material. Stasis becomes an eddy or vortex of flows. Thought becomes a coordinated rhythm of selfaffective matters immanent to the bodies, brains, tools, and so on that compose them. Ontology becomes historical, grounded in the material conditions of its time. (Nail, 2018, p. 67)

The methodological primacy of motion therefore is a historical ontological claim about becoming qua history. Nail earlier demonstrated his ontology of motion as he was developing it from his thesis of kinopolitics—the politics of movement— through which he examined migration and borders. In his books Figure of the Migrant (2015) and Theory of the Border (2016), Nail details various historical political developments

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by documenting ways that Western societies emerged over time via regimes of expansion by expulsion. Expansion by expulsion is a process of strengthening political power by expelling those deemed unwanted from the body politic. At different times in history, this expansion was characterized by inward movement, outward movement, tensional movement, and elastic movement. Nail (2015) calls these regimes kinetic forces, each of which positioned the migrant into a particular figuring, for example, the vagabond who is a migrant who cannot seem to fit anywhere due to the tensions of prevailing juridical regimes that make one illegal in competing contexts. The figuring of the migrant—the undesired— also was accompanied by a prevailing bordering technology, for example, the cell, which is a border used primarily to entrap people into predictably economized scales of human activity. Nail’s (2015) kinopolitical project maps these movements onto kinetic forces and then along with various migrant figurations, border technologies, and pedetic (2015) (i.e., of the foot) strategies of resistance. Recognizing that within a broader philosophy of motion, borders are recognized as always in motion, never static, never fixed, and never quite knowable is important. Nail (2016) comprehensively illustrates this in Theory of the Border, but such a comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say, borders are a process. They are in motion. The acts of bordering are used to control movement and constrain human activity. In cultivating and illustrating how a lazy pedagogy can engage resistance in an effort to strengthen and perhaps redirect the knowledge imperative toward life or zoe, I use Nail’s (2015, 2016, 2018) concepts of tensional force, the border technology of the time cell, and suggest a pedetic strategy of rebellion for actualizing a lazy pedagogy. Kinetic Force of Tensional Power Expansion by expulsion using juridical domination creates a social juggernaut through contradictory sets of laws or rules and expectations. These contradictions can seem like a maze one needs to navigate and negotiate and are hallmarks of academic institutions. For example, consider the contradictory yet fully forcible rules

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of free speech, academic freedom, hate speech, and the zeitgeist that require us to make sure no one is ever offended on campus. Many campuses wrestle with progressive values around inclusion and liberal values of free speech, generating challenges for administrators and oftentimes constraining academics in how they engage difficult and controversial topics in research, teaching, and outreach. Rules designate certain areas of campus as “free speech zones,” and professors are asked to include “trigger warnings” in the syllabus or classroom instruction, yet academic freedom suggests that regulating how a faculty member builds knowledge is just as dangerous as regulating what knowledge can be built. Students are “protected” from offensive material yet not from everyday prejudicial abuses. For example, campuses might choose to celebrate Native American awareness events yet fail to replace a racist mascot that regularly attends athletic events. Tensional kinetic force uses juridical domination to expand social power by expelling those who cannot navigate this contradictory and complex overlay of rules. As the rules keep changing, the desired academic (and academic knowledge) keeps getting refined, and the undesirable is expelled. Consider the adjunct faculty member expected to be an expert instructor but cannot access basic resources, such as an office to hold office hours. She might be expected to use state-of-theart instructional technology but cannot access the faculty reading room in the university library. She is only included inasmuch as she performs an economic function—instruction. She, as a knowledge worker, is expelled, juridically and tensionally, from participating in the knowledge-building regime of the university. Bordering Technology of the Time Cell The timetable controls movement by time. Time cells “bind and direct movements through a system of cellular linkages; they function to bind cellular mobility into a border-time matrix that orchestrates the tempo and rhythm of social circulation across and through the borders of” teaching and learning (Nail, 2016, p. 200). Time itself becomes a boundary. Examples of timetables in academia include the following:

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•

The credit hour, which might be operationalized as 1:1 in class and 1:3 out of class, with a 10-minute exception for travel time between classes

•

The faculty member’s position responsibility statement, which might be operationalized as 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service, with no exceptions for travel time

•

The effort certification (aka the course buyout) for external funding, which might be operationalized any number of ways to manipulate the position responsibility statement and realign the faculty member’s timetable. Effort certification also does not allow any exceptions for travel time.

These time cells constrain the knowledge-generating process and enable an economic imperative to take hold of knowledge. One can only produce knowledge through teaching in certain credit-bearing increments, yet one must also cover the expected material in a given course. A faculty member must generate knowledge across three broad venues of knowledge production but only in certain (i.e., 40/40/20) proportions, regardless of the time it might take for certain knowledges to come into being. Thus, faculty must economize their pedagogical engagements within proportional allotments, serving the work of the university, first, and the imperative for knowledge, second. The contemporary context of U.S. higher education requires that course work contribute to useful skills and knowledge for careers. Colleges and universities are expected to produce a population of career-ready graduates, prepped and primed for the U.S economy. So not only does the time cell function as a boundary marker of pedagogical knowledge production, but it also bounds the knowledge into that which can be made useful for a career—it orients pedagogical activity as work for work. Pedetic Force of Rebellion As a resistance strategy, to rebel is to lay claim in the face of expulsion. It is an outright refusal of the state’s bordering technology and kinetic force of tensional power through juridical domination.

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What can an academic refuse? If, as I theorize, the contemporary condition of academia exerts tensional force through juridical domination and uses, among others, bordering technologies such as the timetable to fashion our pedagogical knowledge production into work for work, then the answer is simple. We must engage in the refusal of work, as a pedetic force of rebellion. We must enact a lazy pedagogy. Lazy Pedagogy as Rebellion Contemporary academe constrains the movement of knowledge building, in part, via the bordering technology of the time cell, operationalized in academic timetables, such as the credit hour, the position responsibility statement, and the course buyout (or effort certification), all of which operate as timetables’ descendent of the right to work and the subsequent labor movements’ legal (juridical) advances in protecting capitalist workers. Academic timetables establish space-time borders that then come to define academic social activities of teaching and learning and research and creative expression, as well as service and outreach. Academic timetables produce circuit junctions that we recognize as the space/time of knowledge building. These become the only moments wherein we can engage in our knowledge-building practices, regardless of whatever space/time the social circulation of learning might actually command. These moments become the economy of our pedagogical opportunities. Academic timetables produce an inescapable economic pedagogy, one that redirects all knowledge production toward the object of work (juxtaposed to leisure, or life, or zoe). The credit hour, the position responsibility statement, and the course buyout all function to direct knowledge in terms of work, career, and labor. The timetable, in part, directs the motion of the knowledge imperative to valorize knowledge production as work and toward work. Rebellious pedagogies, then, must ontologically operate via motion. To resist the reality of the timetable, we need a pedetic pedagogy that redirects the knowledge imperative junction, challenging the borders of knowledge production instantiated by the timetable that ultimately always direct our pedagogies toward the object of work. We need a rebellious pedagogy that directs us

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toward life, zoe, leisure (understood as the act of living). Rather, we need a lazy pedagogy. I dare not prescribe lazy practices in recommending a lazy pedagogy. Rather, having outlined the principles that underlie laziness— (in)action directed toward life, zoe, leisure—I prefer to simply offer some guiding questions for those who might want to engage laziness in their pedagogy. These questions are meant to be particularly rebellious in their refusal of the timetable and their refusal of work in pedagogical undertaking. What might lazy pedagogy look like if knowledge production via teaching and learning practice was built from leisure, nature, the arts, and families? What might lazy pedagogy look like if advising graduate students emerged from shared leisure practices of reading and writing rather than timed comprehensive examinations? What might lazy pedagogy look like in (post)qualitative engagements not tied to effort certification or course buyouts but, rather, tied to the enjoyment of learning culturally within more-than-human environments rather than about them? How rebellious could that be? What kind of knowledge might be produced through such a lazy pedagogy? What kind of lives could we lead by engaging such zoe-infused knowledge? What kind of academe could we move through?

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References American Association of University Professors. (1940). The 1940 statement on principles of academic freedom and tenure. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities. Berg, M., & Seeber, B.K. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press. Gildersleeve, R.E. (2016). The neoliberal academy of the Anthropocene and the retaliation of the lazy academic. Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, 17, 286–293. Kuntz, A.K. (2015). The responsible methodologist: Inquiry, Truth-telling, and social justice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Lefargue, P. (2013). The right to be lazy, and other studies. Miami, FL: Hardpress.net. (Original work published 1907) Metcalfe, A. (2010). Revisiting academic capitalism in Canada: No longer the exception. Journal of Higher Education, 81(4): 489–514. Molesworth, H. (1998). Work avoidance: the everyday life of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades. Art Journal, 57(4), 50–61. Nail, T. (2015). The figure of the migrant. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nail, T. (2016). Theory of the border. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nail, T. (2018). The ontology of motion. Quie Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 27(1), 47–76. Saunders, D.B. (2014). Exploring a customer orientation: Free-market logic and college students. Review of Higher Education, 37(2): 197-219. Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A, 38, 207–226. Shumar, W. (1997). College for sale: A critique of the commodification of higher education. New York. Routledge. Slaughter, S. & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Slaughter, S. & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ulmer, J. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 201–211.

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Global Hegemony

chapter nine

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Global Hegemony: Unraveling Colonized Minds and Indigenous Healing TINA BLY

When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will the white man realize that one cannot eat money. —Native American proverb Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World. —Black Elk

When I was a very little girl, I would watch my grandmother braid her hair. I would sit across from her, and Grandmother would sit on the side of her bed. She would part her hair down the middle in the back and then pull each half of her hair over each shoulder; I was in awe of how her hair was so long, that it flowed down over the side of the bed. Grandmother would brush her hair and visit with me, sharing stories. All the while, I sat mystified. First, she would brush her long strands of silver, and without a mirror, she would then braid each half of her hair along the side of her face and then complete the long braid to the end. Because of the length of her hair, it took considerable time, and this meant more time for stories. In all its simplicity, there was something deeply spiritual there, and I never missed a chance to be with Grandmother when she tended her hair. Having observed my grandmother in this way countless times, I would often sit on a quilt under a big oak tree with my friends as

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we took turns braiding one another’s long dark hair. As the wind gently whispered sweet summer musings through the leaves, we would share stories in the shade and giggle, making memories never to be forgotten. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer (2013) describes a precious vision of little girls taking turns holding up the sections of sweetgrass for the other so each may braid the glistening strands of green blades. I mention Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013) because this reading brings healing so that I may go back to the old ways, seeing all the gifts the earth springs forth for us, gifts such as a lush, green summer garden; a tinkling brook; walking upon a patch of beautiful wildflowers; or taking in the Indian colors painting the sky at sunset. In this chapter, I consider some of the central tenets and local use of postcolonial theory and how these tenets are a response to global hegemony in academic institutional experiences. In particular, in briefly addressing research methodologies and ways of engaging in dialogue, I explain how some Indigenous responses in situations of domination align with postcolonial theory and represent the actionable pieces supported in Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education, authored by Vanessa Andreotti (2011). I shall also make visible some of the Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing and how these ways align with postcolonial theory. Because of recent intellectual interactions of ambivalence, I could not help but hear Andreotti speaking to these circumstances, and I make known how postcolonial theory applies there. Last, as the chapter progresses, a healing is located that I had not anticipated, and that healing is represented from the beginning sentence, culminating in the last. The terms Native American and Indian are used interchangeably. I had a long conversation with my daughter, Celeste, today as we discussed some of these matters and how the idea of a civilized society was so vastly different to Native American people as opposed to the colonizers. What we discovered in our exchange of ideas was based on the foundation that after coming here, systematically carrying out genocide, and destroying our ways of doing, knowing, and being, the colonizers then went about the process of putting in place

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a system of domination that we all contend with daily. This domination included the destruction of a collective way of life where greed, individualism, profit, and money became more important than relationships or gifts from the earth. Now, in 2019, Western civilization could do with taking in the lessons from the first colonizers to arrive here who only survived because Indians were generous in sharing their ways of being, living off the land. Along these lines, our conversation turned to Greta Thunberg, and we support her. But Greta is not saying anything that Indigenous people have not been saying for generations. Standing Rock is only one recent example where none of the powers that be could seem to hear Indigenous voices. How is it that when a little White girl comes along, suddenly everything makes sense, but when Indigenous people cried out at Standing Rock, they were put in dog cages? We would never go against Greta, but these questions remain. These kinds of questions disrupt the dominant narrative and align with postcolonial theory. As we learn from Andreotti (2011), this colonized system is massive and has been created to psychologically manipulate, control, and perpetuate the production of hegemonic knowledge. And so it is with research in academic institutions, as well as for new scholars pursuing advanced degrees, who are continually offered traditional research methods courses (Smith, 2012). Many of these methodologies perpetuate the erasure of history and identities, leaving no space for lived experiences, stories, music, poetry, or art. A rigid curriculum that denies histories, people, and identities is written to serve those who wrote it, destroys creativity, and destroys the possibilities for the freedom of authentic intellectual exploration and discovery. Western superiority creates a gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and we must have access to research methodologies that allow us to disrupt this Western superiority (Smith, 2012). When considering four of the main paradigms, positivism, postpositivism, constructivism, and critical theory, they all hold in common the idea that knowledge is seen as being individual in nature (S. Wilson, 2008, p. 38). “This is vastly different from an Indigenous paradigm, where knowledge is seen belonging to the cosmos of which we are a part and where researchers are only the interpreters of this knowledge,” and “this distinction in the ownership of

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knowledge is one major difference between” Indigenous paradigms as compared to the dominant (S. Wilson, 2008, p. 38). And so, on my path I presently look to Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013) for Indigenous wisdom and healing. I am also presently exploring Indigenous ways of being and knowing and the methods to inform a healing process from historical trauma. Because of some of my recent intellectual interactions of ambivalence, I look to Andreotti (2011) because she so eloquently points out that Spivak (1988) questions how uncontaminated some marginalized groups can be, including academic elites claiming authenticity, and she argues that this may lead to ethnocentrism, fabricated solidarity (that ignores problematic power relations within), reverse racism, and censorship of the subaltern becomes untenable. What Andreotti (2011) is speaking of is a hierarchy of power within marginalized groups where one becomes censored and dominated by those who have taken on the mechanisms of ethnocentrism so that they are operating with the use of dominating mechanisms themselves. When I contemplate this phenomenon, I understand that Andreotti (2011) responds to this, stating that: Pedagogically speaking, the bottom line is that pain and anger cannot be the foundation of a pedagogical or political project that aims to not reproduce the violences of colonialism: arrogance, coercion, manipulation, conceit, and subjugation should not be viable pedagogical options. (p. 176)

And so when I am faced with imperialist embedded ideologies where I am subjected to a triple dose of colonialism and domination, both historically and in present interactions, I find tremendous peace in Indigenous ways of knowing and being. For example, the time spent with my daughter was basically a talking circle, also known as a focus group discussion. The talking circle may be used for a community in the exchange of ideas and would have presented the healing warranted in some of my recent interactions. Also, talking circles are considered to be an Indigenous research method, in which each person has an opportunity of uninterrupted time in discussing a topic (S. Wilson, 2008). There is a deep respect for each individual having an opportunity to speak and

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to be heard (S. Wilson, 2008). Wilson and Wilson (2000) describe the talking circle as follows: Typically, group members sit in a circle that represents the holism of Mother Earth and the equality of all members. In some circles, an eagle feather or other sacred object is passed around, following the direction of the sun. In other groups, a stone is passed from speaker to speaker, symbolizing the connection among group members and to the guiding spirit. The holder of the object speaks “from the heart” and the group listens silently and non-judgmentally until the speaker has finished. Each member is given a chance to speak. A common rule of circle work is that members must not speak out of turn. In most instances, a complete talking circle comprises four rounds, although time restraints, rules, and norms vary with each group. Most important is that group members feel ownership of these rules (p. 11).

Research must be a part of a community based on relationships to be counted as Indigenous (Cardinal, 2001; Steinhauer, 2001a, 2001b; Weber-Philwax, 2001; J. Wilson, 2000; S. Wilson, 2008). Indigenous epistemology rests in ideas developed through the formation of relationships (S. Wilson, 2008). To understand my research, you must know my stories and know who I am (S. Wilson, 2008). Andreotti (2011) also acknowledges this viewpoint as she writes, “My experiences as a granddaughter, daughter, sister, friend, and mother in the specific contexts where I was born and where I have lived cannot not shape the focus and questions that I ask as an educator” (p. 176). This very concept of the significance of experiences in postcolonial theory pointed out by Andreotti is foundational to Indigenous ways of being and knowing. My writing and research process is a chronological depiction of my relationships, lived experiences, and stories, “so in addition to putting forward ideas, they also represent a chronology of my maturation as a writer and Indigenous researcher” (S. Wilson, 2008, p. 9). So any time I am subjected to a way of engaging where the respect that is so crucial in the talking circle is not present; any time I am in a space where no one is allowed nor encouraged to share who they are, what their story is, what they believe in, what they stand against;

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and when I am silenced, I know that I am in an imperialist site of colonized domination. And so I find peace in a talking circle, even when it is just me and my daughter, Celeste. I find peace in the reading of Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013), in writing stories, poetry, songs; creating art; or touching the earth when planting seeds for vegetables or flowers. I find peace in learning and sharing Indigenous ways of being and knowing. Every single shred of Indigenous knowledge shared here is an example of postcolonial theory in action. When I share my teaching experiences in urban areas where I have taught students of color, when I explain how I avoid hegemonic textbook-generated worksheets, how I provide experiences for my students, creating spaces for them to learn their histories and identities, creating spaces so that they may engage in creative exploration and exchange dialogue, I am teaching critical thinking skills, and all these methods are examples of postcolonial theory in action. Yet I have struggled in my interactions here with one small group who had no knowledge of postcolonial theory and have attempted repeatedly to criticize that which they had not yet comprehended. Their parochial criticisms have been shared with my department, and I have been silenced. This group, who is also marginalized, has fallen victim to hegemonic institutionalization to a degree that through (Andreotti, 2011) coercion, manipulation, arrogance, and subjugation, they perpetuate hegemony themselves. Spivak was correct. Yet I shall not return these ethnocentric mechanisms. I shall respond with tenderness and caring and understanding. On the other hand, I am blessed at my present institution as I have had the opportunity to study postcolonial theory deeper and learn of these ways to conceptualize my experiences. I am blessed that I have one professor who supports arts-based methodologies and other alternative methodologies that make space for disrupting the dominant narrative. This very professor shared with me Kimmerer’s (2013) book, Braiding Sweetgrass. And I am deeply thankful. Through postcolonial theory, I have conceptualized my confusing experiences so that I may understand my circumstances, making sense of these painful interactions, and that has enabled me to respond

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with kindness and caring. I have greatly advanced my knowledge, and I am left with an unforgettable experience. All these combined, including the refusal of the powers that be to hear Indigenous voices at Standing Rock, the destruction of our environment, the silencing of Indigenous voices on college campuses and in the political sphere, and the lack of knowledge surrounding Indigenous ways, are the components of an imperialist machine of domination. So colonization is not something from the past. Colonization is happening here and now. Celeste and I discussed all these matters. Last, I reviewed with Celeste, so that she may never forget the concept of seeing with two eyes, recognizing that there are multiple knowledge systems. My daughter shared that some folks are only looking through a tiny peephole. And still others cannot even see the peephole in the door. Some cannot even find the door; they are as if in a dark room fumbling, trying to find their way. So I explained to my daughter that it is up to us. We must find the way and then blaze a path so that others may follow. As the talking circle with Celeste came to an end, I said, “You know, I read something the other day that said trees communicate with one another.” Celeste became nostalgic, saying, “The trees send out messages, for long distances . . . and when one tree is dying . . . right before it dies . . . it sends out all of its nutrients to all the other trees, so that the rest may survive and live on.” When I heard my daughter share all this through her misty hazel eyes, I was very proud of her. I realized that this is a metaphor for precisely what I have accomplished in raising my children. Her brother, Michael, is deeply fond of all matters ancient; he and Celeste are both intelligent, spiritual beings. The ultimate postcolonial action in response to global hegemony that I can gift to the world is my children, whom I have deeply loved and cared for, cooking for them, teaching them, and embracing them in songs and stories and prayer. My children are the richest of nutrients that I have nurtured and sent out into society before I complete my circle in this world. And like the ethereal wisdom of a thousand ancient trees, my children are a sight to behold.

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References Andreotti, V. (2011). Postcolonial studies in education. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Cardinal, L. 2001. “What is an Indigenous perspective?” Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25, 180–183. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London, England: Zed Books. Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? Philpapers, 14(27), 42–58. Steinhauer, P. (2001a). Situating myself in research. Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25, 183–187. Steinhauer, P. (2001b). Kihkapiw: Sitting within the sacred circle of the Cree way (Unpublished doctoral candidacy proposal). University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Weber-Philwax, C. (2001). What is Indigenous research? Canadian Journal of Native Education, 25, 166–174. Wilson, J. (2000). King trapper of the North: An ethnographic life history of a traditional Aboriginal sporting king (Unpublished master’s thesis). University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony. Black Point, Nova Scotia, Canada: Fernwood Publishing. Wilson, S. and Wilson, P. (2000). “Circles in the classroom.” Canadian Social Studies, 32(2).

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Author Bios

About the Authors Becky Atkinson is an associate professor in the College of Education at the University of Alabama. She teaches courses in cultural and social foundations and qualitative research. Her interests pragmatic semiotics, feminist

materialism, and critical theory guide her current research, which ranges from feminist theory to connections between pragmatist articulations of

relationship of ontology and semiotics in feminist materialism. Atkinson has a particular fascination with Jane Addams’ philosophy and methodology, reflected in her recent work.

Lucy E. Bailey is a faculty member in Social Foundations and Qualitative

Inquiry and director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Oklahoma State

University. She is interested in a variety of trajectories in qualitative inquiry and diversity studies in educational research and practice.

Tina Bly is Cherokee and Choctaw from southeastern Oklahoma in the United States. Working toward a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont,

she promotes social justice, stories as knowledge, and Indigenous healing. Bly is a bohemian, an explorer, artist, writer, musician, a seeker of ancestral wisdom, and protector of Mother Earth. The love she holds for her children, Celeste and Michael, is greater than all the heavens in all the worlds.

Sara M. Childers is the Director of Strategic Diversity Planning, Training, and Assessment for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Ohio State

University and associated faculty for the College of Education and Human Ecology, where she teaches courses in qualitative inquiry.

Rebecca C. Christ, PhD is an assistant professor of Social Studies Education

in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Florida International

University in Miami, Florida. She received her PhD in Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum, with an emphasis in Social Studies Education and a graduate certificate in Qualitative Research, from the University of Missouri in

Columbia, Missouri. While at the University of Missouri, she taught social studies methods, education foundations, and qualitative inquiry, and prior to her graduate degrees, she taught at the secondary level in a public school in Missouri.

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Ryan Evely Gildersleeve is professor of higher education at the University of Denver. His scholarship uses transdisciplinary methods to investigate educational opportunity and the role of postsecondary education in contemporary democracy.

Serge F. Hein, PhD, is an associate professor in the Educational Research

and Evaluation Program at Virginia Tech. His areas of specialization are qualitative methodology and the social psychology of education, and his

research interests include poststructural theory, the implications of poststructural theory for qualitative inquiry, and social psychological processes in education settings.

Candace R. Kuby, PhD is Associate Professor of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Missouri, serving as the Department Chair

and the Director of Qualitative Inquiry. She received her PhD in literacy, cul-

ture, and language education from Indiana University. Dr. Kuby previously

taught primary grades in public U.S. schools and preschoolers in Japan. She currently teaches courses on early childhood literacy, approaches to

qualitative inquiry, and philosophical perspectives in educational research. Elisabeth De Schauwer has a background in Educational Studies. She is working as a guest professor at the Department of Special Needs Education

(Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences) at Ghent University. As a researcher, her field of interest is situated in disability studies and inclusive

education. She is intrigued by the role of difference/disability in (pedagogical) relations.

Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is a professor of Critical Studies in the Edu-

cational Theory and Practice Department and Affiliated Professor of both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Institute of Women’s

Studies at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on theories of language and human being from critical and poststructural theories in what she has

called post qualitative inquiry—what might come after conventional humanist qualitative inquiry.

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Ellen Vermeulen is a professional filmmaker. She made a documentary 9999 about internment in the prison of Merksplas, Belgium. She also created Catch-19to25 (‘8) about refugees brought together on a boat in Flanders,

Belgium. The documentary Inclusief was in premiere in November 2018. She works as a researcher and guest lecturer at RITCS in Brussels.

Hanne Vandenbussche is connected to the field of disability studies at Ghent University. She has a specific interest in the relationship between disability studies and philosophy. In her research, she focusses on belonging

and inclusive citizenship. Hereto she cooperates with parents, children, and young adults following inclusive trajectories.

Inge Van de Putte supports children, parents, and schools in the processes

of inclusive education. Support of teachers and the position of special needs

coordinators were the topics in her PhD research project in the field of disability studies at Ghent University. In her research and publications, she finds the transfer to practice very important.

Geert Van Hove is a full professor at the Department of Special Needs

Education at Ghent University in Belgium. His field of research is disabiity studies and inclusive education.

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131

Index

Index A ableist time, 92 absence, 73 academic freedom, 106 academic timetables, 113–14, 115 Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education, 120 Adams, D., 77, 78 Addams, J., 41, 42–43, 44 Ahmed, S., 29, 30, 37, 39, 41, 43, 46, 51, 62 companionable in*her*itances, 60–63 disorientation and, 35 feminist haptics of “homework,” 56–59 feminist life and, 48 feminist tool kit, 51–52 inclusion efforts, 55 motherscholar and, 32 politics of emotion, 51 racism in institutional life, 51 teaching feminist inquiry, 52–56 theory and, 45, 63 universal diversity, 55 Allen, J., 78, 86, 90 Amaro, C.M., 62 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 106 Andreotti, V., 120, 122, 123, 124 Angelou, M., 44 Anzaldúa, G.E., 25, 41 aporia, 86–87, 99, 100 Armstrong, A.C., 79 Armstrong, D., 78 arrivant, 94 Arts Practice Research, 57 Atkinson, B., 44, 62 B bad feminist, 39, 46 Bad Feminist, 39 Bailey, L., 44, 53, 60, 62 Bandura, A., 17 Barad, K., 5, 31, 33 Berg, M., 109 Bergson, H., 92 Berry, K., 90

Beista, G., 98 Biklen, S., 41 binary thinking, 67, 70–71 Blossom, J.B., 62 body comportment, 53 borders, 112 Bossaert, G., 79 Bozalek, V., 14, 16 Braiding Sweetgrass, 120, 122, 124 Braidotti, R., 1, 3, 5, 6 Bricolage, 89–91 Brilliant Imperfection, 62 Butler, J., ix, 6, 41 C Caputo, J.D., 73 Cardinal, L., 123 Childers, S.M., 29, 31, 32, 34, 35 Christ, R.C., 12, 22 Cixous, H., 15 Claire, E., 62 Clavering, E., 78 Coatlicue, 25 Cole, A.L., 80 Colebrook, C., 2 Collins, S., 46 colonial mastery, 15 Colpin, H., 79 Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), 79, 82 companionable in*her*itances, 60–63 conflicting discourses, 86 constructivism, 121 Coole, D., 33, 35 counterfeit mother, 30 Craven, C., 54 critical materialism, 31, 32–35 critical racism, 40 critical sexism, 40 critical theory, 121 critique, 6 Cultural Politics of Emotion, 42 Curry, M.J., 60 D Dalton, M., 41 Davies, B., 14, 15, 16, 41, 92 Davis, D., 54 de Beauvoir, S., 41

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de Beco, G., 79 decolonization, 15 deconstruction, 67, 69 Dehumanist solidarity, 15 Deleuze, G., 94 Delpit, L., 30 Denzin, N., 90 Derrida, J., 68, 72, 73, 74, 90, 93, 94 aporias and, 100 deconstruction and, 69 endekhetāi and, 96–97 theory and practice, 70 Descartes, R., 8 De Schauwer, E., 79, 101 Deleuze, G., 1, 4, 5, 6 thinking and, 12 di Leonardo, M., 61 différance, 67, 68–69 Dillard, C., 54, 55 disability studies, 77 disciplinary fatalism, 53 disorientation, 29–31, 35, 37 Dissemination, 69 “do time,” 92 double movements, 100 Duchamp, M., 107, 108, 109 E Elkins, J., 57 emergent listening, 15, 16 endekhetāi, 96–97 endekhomenos, 97 Enlightenment binaries, 5 Epistemic justice, 60 essential feminism, 47 ethnocentrism, 122 Evans, S.C., 62 Evans-Winters, V.E., 54 expansion by expulsion, 112 F feminism, 39 essential, 47 flawedness of, 40 as a fragile archive, 48 national magazines’ depictions of, 47 reorienting, 40–41, 41–45 resistance and, 44, 45–49

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sensational quality of, 41 slow argument and, 40, 43, 47, 48 taxidermy and, 53 feminist activist ethnography, 54 feminist new materialism, 31–35, 36, 37 feminist snap, 48 Fifty Shades of Grey, 46 Figure of the Migrant, 111 Fisher, D., 77, 78 Fonow, M.M., 54 Foucault, M., 4, 5, 6–7, 17, 87, 92 Frankfurt School, 1 free speech zones, 113 Fricker, M., 60 Frost, S., 33, 35 G Gabel, S., 77 Gay, R., 39, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 62 Gender Trouble, ix genesis, 69 gestate, 25–26 Gildersleeve, R.E., 106, 109 global hegemony, 120 good education, 98 good feminist, 39 Goodall, B., 60 Goodley, D., 78, 84 Grove, K., 77, 78 Grumet, M., 41 Guattari, F., 94 H haptic homework. See Ahmed, S. haptics of institutional engagement, 52 Harris, A., 77 Hekman, S., 32 Heidegger, M., 31 Herbert, R., 62 here and now, 73 Hochschild, A.R., 61 Hodge, N., 77 hooks, b., 41, 62 Hope, M., 78 Hornby, G., 77 human being, death of, 4 humanism, 67 Hunger, 62 Hunger Games, The, 46

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Index

Hurston, Z.N., 44 Husserl, E., 31 Husserlian phenomenology, 72

Kuhn, T., 7 Kuntz, A.K., 110 Kushner, T., 5

I Inckle, K., 54 Inclusief, 80 inclusion efforts, 55, 78 inclusive education, 77, 91–95, 95–97 aporia and, 86–87, 99 barriers to learning and, 94 bricolage and, 89–91 double movements and, 100 filmmaking and, 80–85, 87–89 Flemish content on, 79, 80–85, 86–87, 95–97 normality and, 98–99 parental involvement in, 77–79 social justice and, 96 time and, 92–93 indigenous epistemology, 123 indigenous ways of being and knowing, 122 Inspiration & Co., 92 interdependency, 99 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, 11, 29, 53 intra-action, 33, 34, 36

L language, 32 Lather, P., 5, 8, 25, 41, 53, 54, 74 Law, J., 7 Lawler, L., 70, 71, 72, 74 laziness, 107–10 lazy pedagogy, 105–6, 109–10, 115–16 Lazzarato, M., 108, 109 Lean In, 40 Lecercle, J.-J., 6 LeFargue, P., 1090 legitimate rape, 46 Leslie, L., 110 Lillis, T., 60 Lincoln, Y., 90 lived experience, 31, 35 Living a Feminist Life, 29, 39, 42, 44, 51, 57 logical positivism, 7 Lomawaima, T, 54 Lorde, A., 41, 44, 54, 62 Loveless, N., 57

J Jackson, A.Y., 8, 32 James, E.L., 46 Jones, M., 77 K Kang, M., 54 Kelly, H., 61 killjoy, 41, 48 Kimmerer, R., 120, 122, 124 Kincheloe, J., 90 kinetic forces, 112 kinopolitics, 111–12 knowledge workers, 106 knowledge imperative of academe, 105, 106 Knowles, J.G., 80 Kuar, V., 27 Kuby, C.R., 12, 22

M Masschelein, J., 98 May, T., 72 Mazzei, L.A., 8, 32 McLaughlin, J., 78 McQuillan, M., 72 M-decree, 79 Messiou, K., 79 Metcalfe, A., 110 methodological taxidermy, 53 Metz, J.M., 90 Meyer, S., 46 Miller, J., 54 mind/body binary, 8 misrecognition, 31–35 Missing Voices, 77, 80, 90 momentum, 53 Morrison, T., 44 motherhood, 35 motherscholar, 29, 32, 33–34, 37

134

N Nail, T., 105, 110, 111, 112, 113 narrative bricolage, 90 narrative inheritance, 60 Nealon, J.T., 67 neoliberal higher education, 110 Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education, 78 new critical studies, 5 new feminist materialism, 36, 37 new materialism, 31 nonpresence, 73 non-stupid optimism, 5 normality, 98–99 O ontological death, 73 ontologies of becoming, 111 ontology of motion, 105, 110–12 optimism, 5 P Patel, L., 14, 16, 22, 26 pedagogue, 22 pedagogy, 21 pedagogy of discomfort, 86 pedagogy of pausing, 16, 17–20, 22–25 pedetic force, 114–15 perplexity, 42 pessimistic activism, 5 Petry, K., 79 phenomenology, 31, 35 philosophers of immanence, 3–4 philosophy of movement, 110–12 Pijl, S.J., 79 Pillow, W., 54 Plath, S., 44 positivism, 121 postcolonial theory, 120, 124 postpositivism, 121 poststructuralism, 1 Potential, 80, 84, 89 Power to Teach All, 80 presence/absence, 67, 71–74 process ontologies, 111 professional development program (PDP), 80, 84

Theory as Resistance

Q qualification, 98 qualified researcher, 20 qualitative inquiry narrative bricolage and, 90 pedagogies of, 15, 16 presence/absence and, 71–74 social-justice oriented, 67 Queer Phenomenology, 30 R re-, 20–21 readymades, 107, 108 reasonable accommodations, 82 rebellion, 112 (re)birthing, 26 refusal to work, 108–10 Reindal, S.M., 99 relationality, 99 resist, 14 resistance, 6, 11, 12 definition of, 12–13 feminism and, 44 lazy pedagogy as, 110 pedagogy as, 26 pedagogy of, 14 power structures and, 27 theory as, 1–8, 74 reverse-cover, 30 Rhoades, G., 110 Rich, A., 54 Right to be Lazy, The, 107 rigorous confusion, 8 Roberts, M.C., 62 Roets, G., 99 Rorty, R., 3 Rosaldo, R., 62 Runswick-Cole, K., 77 S Sandberg, S., 40 Saunders, D.B., 110 Scott, J.W., 31 Seeber, B.K., 109 Sheller, M., 111 Shumar, W., 110 Simons, M., 98 Singh, J., 14, 15 Slaughter, S., 110

135

Index

slow argument and, 40, 43, 47 Slow ontological practices, 16 Slow scholarship, 16, 109 Smith, D.W., 4, 12 Smith, L., 121 social science research methodology, 7 socialization, 98 Spandagou, I., 79 special educational needs (SEN), 78 speculative philosophers, 3 Speech and Phenomenon, 72, 73 Standing Rock, 121, 125 Steinhauer, P., 123 Steinmetz, G., 7 St. Pierre, E.A., 7, 25, 29 subject, death of, 4 subjectification, 98 sweaty concepts, 41, 43, 45 sympathetic understanding, 43 Syrian refugee crisis, 110 T talking circle, 122, 124 taxidermy, 53 Teacher, Mother, Scholar, 29 tensional forces, 112 theory, 2, 35–37 qualitative inquiry and, 67 return of, 3 writing and, 36 Theory of the Border, 111, 112 theory/practice binary, 69, 71 thinking, 12 Thompson, B.W., 54 Thunberg, G., 121 time cell, 112, 113–14 Titchkosky, T., 92, 94, 96 trade wars, 110 trigger warnings, 113 Tuck, E., 16 Twilight, 46 U Ulmer, J., 14, 16, 93, 109 UN Convention for People with Disabilities, 78 United Nations, 78 universal diversity, 55

Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, 14 Urry, J., 111 V Vandenbussche, H., 101 Van de Putte, I., 79 Van Hove, G., 99 Vermeulen, E., 90 Vygotsky, L., 17 W Wannyn, J., 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 100 Watch Night speech, 27 Weber-Philwax, C., 123 Weedon, C., 41 West, C., 5 Whiteness, 40 willfulness, 41, 48 Wilson, J., 123 Wilson, P., 123 Wilson, S., 121, 122, 123 Witte, C., 77 wombing, 26 women’s fiction, 46, 47 Woolf, V., 41 Wright, E., 57, 58, 59, 62 Wurtzel, E., 47 Y York University, 57 Yoshino, K., 30 Young, I.M., 29, 52 Z Zami, 44 Zembylas, M., 86, 87, 92