18 November 2020
Posthumanist/feminist materialist encounters with objects, bodies and spaces.
Carol A Taylor, Professor of Higher Education and Gender, University of Bath, UK:
I鈥檝e been interested in the crossing of disciplines for many years. I鈥檝e always felt myself that I鈥檝e been either positioned on the edge of things or in the middle of things, where boundaries cross in all sorts of really interesting ways. In the last few years, I鈥檝e been thinking, working and writing about how walking helps me to do some of the transdisciplinarity work that I want to do, and how to connect that with posthumanist and feminist materialist ways of thinking and being and knowing. I鈥檝e got an abiding fascination with the choreographies of objects, bodies and spaces and how they 鈥榝it鈥 or don鈥檛 鈥榝it鈥 together.
I鈥檒l begin with some orientations: to what is going on in higher education at the moment; to theory; and to theory, practice and praxis. I see walking as creating possibilities for change. I propose the idea of walking as trans(disciplinary) mattering, and will illustrate this with a few examples.
Orientations 1
I want to use walking as a research approach to contest the neoliberal context of higher education in which everything we do is economised, financialised and then monetised in terms of market principles. The questions here are: How can walking contest the idea of the accelerated academy, an academy which has seen even greater work intensification and speeding up during the pandemic? How can we use walking to help us think outside those kinds of all-pervasive ideas of competition, performativity and individualisation?
Orientations 2
Feminism and feminist theory, politics and praxis. I don鈥檛 see walking as one of the 鈥榤aster鈥檚 tools鈥 (Audre Lorde). As feminists our job, I think, is to create other kinds of methodological tools to fight back against patriarchy, colonialism, racism. Feminism has always been an embodied ethic. The personal is political.
Orientations 3
Like feminism, feminist materialism and post-humanism are founded in an ethic of the collective. Who are the 鈥榳e鈥? What is a 鈥榗ollective鈥 and how is it constituted in different ways by those different ways of thinking? How can walking help us re-think this idea of the collective and who are the 鈥榳e鈥 and then what that 鈥榳e鈥 might be able to do and become? Alaimo and Hekman鈥檚 (2008) collection talks about the development of theories that bring the material back in to feminist theory and practice. Karen Barad (2007) is famous for saying we have to bring matter back in, that we have given too much credence to language and discourse and it鈥檚 time to think about the hyphenation of discursivity with materiality and that means to take matter seriously. That is, matter as the very stuff of bodies and nature.
I have found Karen Barad鈥檚 Agential Realism really generative in helping me to work this through in terms of educational research and practice. The things I see as important in Agential Realism are that it is:
- A way of working beyond binaries and towards constitutive relations 鈥 A commitment to realism 鈥 to the 鈥榥aturalcultural鈥 鈥 Has a posthumanist allegiance to matter, objects, things, bodies, spaces
- That it focuses on practices, doings and actions 鈥 That it attends to the practical, particular, and empirical 鈥 And that it offers new ontological, epistemological and ethical starting points.
鈥楶henomena are the ontological inseparability/ entanglement of intra-acting agencies鈥 (Barad, 2007: 39)
In Agential Realism, relations come to matter when they come together in a particular moment. Barad鈥檚 idea is that things are not separate, and there is nothing in nature which is separate, and the things themselves don鈥檛 exist prior to their coming together. So it鈥檚 in that moment of constitutive relation that mattering and what comes to matter actually happens.
I have been working with this theory to think about: how do we decentre the Man, capital M, of humanism? That 鈥楳an鈥 is not an individual person but a conceptpractice-structure-idea which has been located within bodies, and has been incredibly powerful in shaping societies and social structures and ways of being and ways of thinking (see Braidotti, 2013). This Man of humanism, this white, western, patriarchal, colonial, meat-eating, capitalist, rational, science-obsessed kind of construction 鈥 how do we de-centre 鈥榟im鈥 and his 鈥榙oings鈥, particularly in terms of research approaches? How do we re-think knowledge? This is what I鈥檓 trying to work through in lots of different kinds of theory-practice ways, and these edited books are some of the collaborative endeavours that have come out of these processes.
So why walking?
Walking offers a way of being in the world 鈥 moving in the world 鈥 which is affective, embodied, sensory, visual and relational. The idea is that moving and sensing bodies can produce new and different forms of knowledge, which then raises the question of 鈥榃hat do we mean by knowledge anyway?鈥 Walking is about the intangible, the affective, atmospheric. But it鈥檚 also momentary. It鈥檚 not an 鈥榚xperience鈥 you can easily 鈥榗apture鈥. What is 鈥榙ata鈥 when walking?
I have been inspired by Sarah Pink鈥檚 (2009) work which sees walking as a form of engagement, integral to our perception of an environment, although Sara Pink retains an anthropocentric view. I have also been inspired by Springgay and Truman鈥檚 (2019) work. They talk about walking as a transmaterial practice to displace humanist and human-centric histories of walking.
So, taking forward some of these ideas, I theorise walking as transdisciplinary mattering and use transdisciplinary in Stella Sandford鈥檚 (2015) sense of theory and concepts that are not necessarily identifiable with any specific disciplinary fields, either in their origin or their application. I鈥檓 also interested in theorising walking as a kind of feminist indiscipline, going back to the earlier feminists, which situates us within a feminist politics which contests the disciplinary requirement for boundaries, cuts and exclusions in the first place. Pulling through posthumanist and agential realist thinking helps me consider walking as assemblage, movement, intensity, and immanence.
The walking practices I now talk through put these theories to work in various different ways to understand different aspects of complex problems and to consider what walking as research practice enables.
Example 1: Mundane matterings in Covid-19 times
Most of my working life these days is spent doing what I鈥檓 doing now, which is sitting at my computer, on the chair, looking at the screen. Often talking to people in all sorts of different but highly mediated ways. Lockdown. Physically separate from everybody, but looking at people. Intimacy of connection 鈥 of being in the room with people 鈥 has completely disappeared and there is a tremendous sense of loss and sadness and separateness and isolation in our lives at the moment.
Example 2: Rethinking the university 鈥 city relation
Taylor, C. A. and Ulmer, J. (2020). Post-industrial methodologies for post-industrial cities. Somatechnics. 10 (1): 7鈥34.
Example 3: Whiteness, history, memory
How can walking unsettle racism, colonialism and disciplinary thinking? How can walking move philosophical critique into politically inflected praxis?
C. A. Taylor Walking as Trans(disciplinary)mattering: A Speculative Musing on Acts of Feminist Indiscipline.
Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., and Hughes, C. (Eds.) (2020) Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. London: Routledge.
Walking: What matters?
Barad says 鈥榚very intra-action matters鈥 which means you鈥檝e got to attend to every single thing because every single thing is an ethical intra-action. Ethically, that is really useful. Epistemologically, it is also useful, because it helps me contest macro-sociological accounts of the world (generalities) by privileging the micro, the details, and the specificities.
Mirka Koro-Ljungberg (2016) talks about experimentation in research as a willingness or a desire to become comfortable with uncertainty, and partly unfinished thought and practice. This approach resonates with my notion of 鈥榚du-crafting鈥 as a sort of research DIY, a practice of the plunge in which everything is always in process, emergent, happening (Taylor, 2016). Working in these posthumanist, feminist materialist, post-qualitative ways means that walking as experimental practice is challenging but also creative and exciting. It has helped me to think with Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and the 鈥榓nd and and鈥 and the middle, and with Isabelle Stengers (2018) and slow science. If we do, then walking as a research methodology can be about making us capable of resisting what is destroying us, of recuperating, and unlearning.
References/ Reading
Alaimo, S. and Hekman, S. (Eds.) (2008). Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. London: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Translated and a foreword by B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury.
Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies without Methodology. London: Sage.
Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Sandford, S. (2015). Contradiction of terms: Feminist theory, philosophy and transdisciplinarity. Theory, Culture & Society, 32(5鈥6), 159鈥182.
Springgay. S. and Truman, S. (2019). Walking Methodologies in a More-than-human World. London: Routledge.
Stengers, I. (2018). Another Science is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge: Polity.
Taylor, C. A. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthuman research practices for education. In C. A. Taylor and C. Hughes (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 7鈥36.
Taylor, C. A. (2020). Walking as trans(disciplinary)mattering: A speculative musing on acts of feminist indiscipline. In Taylor, C. A., Ulmer, J., and Hughes, C. (Eds.) (2020) Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. London: Routledge. pp. 4鈥15.
Taylor, C. A. and Ulmer, J. (2020). Post-industrial methodologies for post-industrial cities. Somatechnics. 10 (1): 7鈥34.
