I’ve had a few people contact me asking how the trip went. Below is a snapshot of my bicycle PhD project, the context and what I did during my PhD fieldwork in Lunsar, Sierra Leone.
The amazing FNM SIG group: discussing readings and my bike fieldwork
My NM SIG discussion notes
Some of the realia I bought in from my fieldwork
Here’s some highlights of my fieldwork presentation (more details in slides below).
Opening: An Acknowledgement of Country, Diversity and Inclusion and that Matter Matters and thanks to the local Lunsar chiefs and the amazing people who have been instrumental in helping make this project happen.
Researcher positionality: Who am I and how did I come to this project
Research context background : 5 intersections of Girls unfreedoms
Girls Ed Lit Review: Current directions in NGO Literature on the topic
Establish Space: Key Project that opens up my research space – completed in 2010
Confirm & Extend: Follow up – a specific project on girls bicycle projects in Lunsar – completed 2016
Established gap leads into my research questions (no slide for this = top secret!)
My Study Design: Aims, Methodology and theoretical framing (NM)
Fieldwork details: Tech Matters and other research developments/considerations
Country context: Background to Sierra Leone (very general history & context)
Site Location: Background and context about Lunsar (my fieldwork location)
Research partnership case study: Intro to Village Bicycle Project (organization) Stylish (host/research participant/all-round incredible man!)
Fieldwork ‘Data’: list of all the research data/activities achieved (so busy!) and other events, opportunities and visits – so busy!
Present some ‘Data‘: I showed some fieldwork bike ride footage for discussion (no slide – top secret)
The return: Now I have returned, I outlined my next steps and questioned how/what to do to start ‘data analysis’
Q&A: Open discussion and suggestions on entry points for data analysis using NM approaches.
Aside from being able to share my fieldwork experiences with others, it was also great to get stuck into some rigorous academic discussions and come away with a number of productive and tangible ideas to apply for data analysis.
Most satisfying of all though, was seeing how interested people are in Sierra Leone and having the opportunity to promote and celebrate the beautiful people, places and experiences I had there.
Researcher positionality: Who am I and how did I come to this projectResearch context background : 5 intersections of Girls unfreedomsGirls Ed Lit Review: Current directions in NGO Literature on the topicEstablish Space: The Child Mobility Project – Key project that opens my research space. Completed 2010Confirm & Extend: Lauren’s Hof follow up: a specific project on girls bicycle projects in Lunsar. Completed 2016My Study Design: MethodologyFieldwork details: Tech MattersFieldwork details: Other research developments/considerationsCountry context: Background to Sierra Leone (very general history & context)Site Location: Background and context about Lunsar (my fieldwork location)Research partnership case study: Intro to Village Bicycle Project (organization) and Stylish (host/research participant/all-round incredible person!)Fieldwork ‘Data’: list of all the research data/activities achieved (so busy!) and other events, opportunities and visits – so busy!The return: Now I have returned, I outlined my next steps and questioned how/what to do to start ‘data analysis. Q&A: Open discussion and suggestions on entry points for data analysis using NM approaches
Hello, bike nuts! Thanks for dropping in. As you have noticed, it has been incredibly hectic since my return from Sierra Leone. Not only has it been a profound shift returning from my PhD fieldwork and all the emotions, work, people and activity that entailed, but COVID-19 has taken complete hold of the world to which I returned. Just like everyone else, for the last month, all my time and energy has been consumed with transferring to remote work. For me, that means all managing and adapting all my teaching, learning and classes to virtual spaces – as well as supporting my international and domestic students (116 in all) do the same. The COVID-shift, as I have come to call this phase, has taken precedence over updating this blog. Rest assured, I will be updating as I get the chance, but it might not be as regular as we are used to – but I will continue uploading content – after all, it seems more critical now more than ever to celebrate life and keep positive (on and off the bike!). NG.
Social Science Research in COVID-19
It’s a crazy time to be a (social) scientist – and an even crazier time for fieldwork.
In addition to my own direct experience of recently travelling and researching overseas, I have returned to a world that has significantly changed since I left.
COVID-19 was a threat as I left for my fieldwork in Africa – and it was a reality when I returned.
Everyone has had to make sacrifices, changes and adjustments for family, work and research.
These adjustments take weeks if not months and there is no avoiding it – but as Victor Frankl reminds us, we do have control over how we chose to face challenges.
I have been heartened to see some academic proactively moving to meet the challenge of researching during COVID-19.
For those researchers who need a little lift and motivation – this post is for you.
Here are 3 ways social scientists are productively responding to COVID-19.
Deborah Lupton This Sociological Life has posted some resources for social researchers working in a COVID society saying ‘I’ve put together a few open-access resources concerning what an initial agenda for COVID-related social research could be and research methods for conducting fieldwork in the COVID world’. Her post includes the links below:
This is an open-source global spreadsheet that collates COVID-19 research projects. This impressive repository includes large and small projects from some of the leading universities in the world and showcases the range and significance of COVID-19 impact. All hail GitHub! The organisers state: ‘Social scientists have an important role during a pandemic. We can do this much better through cooperation. This international list tracks new research about COVID 19, including published findings, pre-prints, projects underway, and projects at least at proposal stage.’ What a gift.
COVID-19 and my PhD research
Once my transition to full remote working and teaching has ‘settled down’ (whatever the hell that means?!), I’ll be making space to sit down and reflect.
I’ll be taking stock and considering how and where I’ll incorporate this unique encounter into my academic work, my dissertation and beyond.
AARE is Australia’s premier network for educational
researchers. A key aim for AARE is to inform and improve policy and practice in
education – and share these insights with other interested parties.
AARE blog is where experts share opinions, raise questions and explore education themes and issues.
The annual conference is the most popular AARE offering. Each year, local educational professionals from Australia and around the world come together to network, share ideas and hear about the latest educational research, projects and approaches. Here are some keynote presentations from past conferences and some past papers.
AARE 2019 Conference
The theme for this conference was ‘Education for a Socially Just World.
The sessions on offer are extensive (dare I say overwhelming?).
The truncated program of abstract titles only alone is 274 pages – click here.
The complete program (full abstracts) is a whopping 1162 pages – click here.
So many great sessions to choose from – and some very big names.
In order to save my sanity, time and effort I just decided to stick with seeing what the Post- Structural Theory SIG had on offer – and then go to any other sessions/speakers who caught my eye.
Here, in no particular order are some of my hot tips for AARE 2019 sessions:
Sarah Healy (Melbourne Uni), Alli Edwards (Monash Uni), Alicia Flynn (Melbourne Uni). Welcome to the Playtank! Re-_____ing research.
David Bright (Monash Uni). Qualitative inquiry and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: In which I consider verisimilitude as a criterion for judging the quality of qualitative writing with reference made to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5 albeit not really in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore. (I went to this session and it was amazing! It ended up winning the Best Session Award 2019 for the whole conference – and rightly so!).
Parlo Singh (Griffith Uni) and Gabrielle Ivinson (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Radical Inclusion Research in/with Schools Serving High Poverty Communities.
Sarah E. Truman (Melbourne Uni), David Ben Shannon (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Queer textualities and temporalities: speculating-with Alpha Centauri.
Lucinda McKnight (Deakin Uni), Melissa Wolfe (Monash Uni) and Bronwyn Davies (Independent scholar). Is new materialism incompatible with social justice? Panel Discussion with Professor Bronwyn Davies.
Maria Ejlertsen (Griffith Uni). “I don’t fit in, I fit out”: Enabling more-than inclusive spaces for student belonging and engagement with school through attention to more-than-human entanglements of spacetimematter.
I went for the full three days and to as many sessions as I could (these were just a few).
I also went to the below session which was the first in a series of AARE Post-Structuralist SIG Event Series feat. Professor Bronwyn Davies funded by AARE Poststructural Theory SIG Major Grant 2019. See abstract below.
Exploring the poetics and the ethics of new materialist inquiry: Professor Bronwyn Davies
As researchers, our task is to get inside the processes of those materialisations of the world that
we encounter (where encounter is not a collision but a mutual affecting and being affected); it is
to find or generate the concepts that will enable us to see those encounters not in normative,
already-known terms, but in ways that open up new possibilities for sensing and responding, for
becoming sense-able and response-able. That is the ethics of new materialism.
And what of the poetics? New materialist research is necessarily playful. It crosses disciplinary
boundaries, messing those boundaries up; it works with new and emergent philosophical
concepts, bringing them to life through art, poetry, literature; it enters into the very specificity of
sensual existence as it is caught in a moment of spacetime and simultaneously opens up, or finds
its way into life itself. Through such explorations it seeks to break loose from old dogmas, old
methods, old binaries—all the paraphernalia of a normalized set of thoughts and practices that
place the individual human above and separate from the world, and that constrain research
through the repetition of the already-known. It seeks to open up thought, giving space to
emergence of new ways of understanding, new ways of becoming, throwing off the shackles of
the clichéd conventions of rationality and order.
In the workshop following this paper, I will present one or more of my own explorations that begin with where I am, or slip right into the middle, and then reflect on what was involved in going there. What re-conceptualising was involved? What new practices? What ethics? What poetics? I will then open up that exploration with the audience, inviting them to shift from being audience to becoming participants, giving them an opportunity to talk and write about something that matters to them in their encounters with more-than-human relationality, that called/calls on their sense-ability and response-ability.
For this last meeting we did things a little differently!
Instead of having a guest presenter, we invited everyone to present.
In the spirit of New Materialisms, we wanted to hear, seem think-with lots of different voices, perspectives, approaches and ‘data’.
So , we asked attendees to bring a piece of data that ‘glows’ and that they would like to re-turn-with other members of the SIG.
The idea here is that we are all working on different research projects, with different applications and with different data. As we break for the holidays for the end of the year, we thought it might be interesting for participants to share a part of their research with others as a way of mining alternative insights.
We asked participants to chose a data’ selection’ that was digestible in a short time frame (i.e. within 2 minutes to present to leave time for discussion).
An example of this might be 100 words of writing/transcription or an image or an object.
And we had a great time!
Participants shared all kinds of ‘data’ – photos, images, artwork, audio, moments of research(er)-becomings and other material. I won’t share people’s content here as the material is often confidential, part of resarch project (covered by Ethics) or personal – you had to be there!
It was lovely to have the time and space to share work and ideas and get some inspiration to tide us over the holiday – and to get some fresh eyes and ideas to look anew at the content and ideas we were working with.
What a way to end the year!
Below are some moments from the workshop – it was super fun and inspiring!
Image: Night Owl City
Reading material for this meeting
There are two readings for this SIG meeting were selected as they attempt to articulate the difference between fNM approaches and other (post)qualitative approaches.
Jackson, A. Y. (2013). Making matter making us: Thinking with grosz to find freedom in new feminist materialisms. Gender and Education, 25(6), 769-775. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.832014.
Hughes, C., & Lury, C. (2013). Re-turning feminist methodologies: From a social to an ecological epistemology. Gender and Education, 25(6), 786-799. doi:10.1080/09540253.2013.829910.
Included among the delegates attending are Australian and international
keynote speakers, advocacy groups, researchers, practitioners, businesses and
policymakers.
This conference includes research presentations, workshops, technical tours, poster presentations, networking opportunities and other social events.
The conference goes for 3 days and is jam-packed full of sessions.
The program also boasts a host of international guests, with delegates coming in from the Netherlands, New Zealand, Denmark, Japan, Norway, USA, Sweden, Canada and as the host country – Australia has a very strong representation from pretty much every University nationwide.
Presentation sessions are discussing ideas such as: obstacle avoidance manoeuvres, e-scooters/e-bikes, infrastructure challenges, rider/pedestrian conflicts, traffic control, crash data, bikeshare data and social media interfaces, and lane marking/intersection analysis, bicycle delivery modalities, and studies using agent-based modelling – and more!
I ‘m not attending this conference because I prefer to focus on the positive aspects of bicycle riding – which of course safety is part of…I just don’t want to be constantly working with ‘negatives’ such as crash figures, injuries and traffic hot zones and contestations – also crunching quantitative data is not my strongest research skill. But I appreciate that this is super interesting to many cycling researchers and policymakers. Such conversations and information sharing is critical to progressing more innovative solutions to cycling dilemmas and to increase the take up of biking universally.
Meet the posters authors event. Tuesday 19th Nov. ICSC 2019.
Daily synopsis
Monday is the first conference day. The day is split into four sessions under two main streams: Workshops and Technical Tours. The two workshops offered are: Low-cost infrastructure for low cycling countries and Using bikes for all kinds of deliveries. Concurrently there are 5 technical tours: Inner City (x 2), Riverside, Bicentennial Bikeway and Connecting the infrastructure. The evening is the Welcome Reception and Stakeholder Dinner.
Tuesday before morning tea is official registrations, Introduction and Opening Keynote Trends and innovation research in cycling safety by Prof Christopher Cheery (Uni of Tennessee, USA).
Then there
are 2 rooms running concurrent 20 min presentation sessions all the way up to afternoon
tea except for a Conference Plenary and another Keynote Cycling Infrastructure:
if you build it, will come? (and will they be safe?) by Dr Glen Koorey (ViaStrada,
NZ) after lunch.
Tuesday
afternoon session has two 1-hour Rapid Oral Presentation sessions followed by
Meet the Poster Author’s Function and then the official Conference Dinner.
Wednesday morning opens with a Conference Panel session entitled Arising trends & challenges: what, why & how. Then a full day of 1-hour and 20 min concurrent presentation sessions all the way up to 4.30pm… Phew – what a long day!
At 4.30 it is ICSC Awards and official conference close. The final official event is the Peoples’ Night from 5pm.
Then it’s party time!
Image: ICSC 2019
People’s Night
For the first time, the ICSC community is inviting the general public to attend the Cycling Conference free People’s Night.
I love the idea of a conference having a ‘People’s Night.’ Every conference should have one!
This is a unique opportunity to meet, discuss and network with conference delegates, check out the digital research poster, hear about some of the latest innovations, technology, infrastructure, developments, trends and findings in cycling safety research.
This event is offered in the spirit of the conference guiding principle to share cycling safety research with ALL stakeholders – which I think is a great move. Not everyone is interested or can afford the money or time to attend the whole conference, but to open up your doors and invite the local public an opportunity to interact with delegates is a very smart move – good for the conference, good for the locals!
I’ll be heading in
for this event, so if you are in Brisbane on Wednesday night, I might see you
there! If you would like to attend you can RSVP via the
ICSC FB page HERE. Details below.
Date: Wednesday 20
November Time: 5pm-6.30pm Venue: The Cube, P Block, QUT Gardens Point Campus, Brisbane Cost: Free Inclusions: Complimentary food and non-alcoholic beverages
If you are riding your bike in and around Brisbane this
week, check out the ICSC. Always good to get the latest intel of what is
happening in the cycling world!
Hopefully, the safer it is to ride a bike, the more people will
ride.
If that is the case, get ya conference on ICSC 2019!!
Lately, I’ve been craving extra time and space to explore New Materialist more generatively, At uni, the time is limited and often, more senior academics take-over theory session. .. and the HDRers still left with answers.
So instead of relying on supervisors, I decided to invite five trusted New Materialist and Posthumanist PhD friends for a day-long study group/workshop in my garden where we could all collaborate to create and share knowledge.
I planned the day so there was room for sharing, discussion, thinking, writing and activities -and also time to do some gardening! I had organized a full-day program (see below).
Each participant nominated an NM tropic to share/teach the group.
New Materialism is an umbrella term for a range of theoretical perspectives that share a re-turn focus on matter. Recently, feminist New Materialisms (fNM) has gained momentum due to a unique consideration for the agency of all matter. In fNM understandings, habitual human-centric ways of thinking, doing and being are disrupted as an ethico-onto-epistemological approach emerges.
FNM is exciting, complex and emerging – and a challenge for PGs. Because it is so difficult to understand, PGs often rely on supervisors and academics as ‘experts’ for ways to understand and apply fNM. This reliance bypasses autodidactic learning. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were disrupted and reframed? Inspired by the fNM central ethical tenet of flattening power hierarchies within and across the Academy, I am hostingThe New Materialist’s Garden.
This research session is an independent, one-day, fNM theory/methodology ‘study group’ held in my garden. The garden provides an alternative ‘learning context’ that deliberately disrupted and displaced traditional notions about academic knowledge, performances, educational spaces and who is ‘an expert’.
The aim of this day is to see what insights and ‘wonder’ (McLure, 2012) might emerge when HDRs collaborate to share and reframe experiences of ‘thinking-doing-being’ fNM research and what it is to be ‘experts-becoming’.
I hope this experience will help/encourage/inspire (post)grads to trouble the ways they are ‘thinking-doing-being’ theory and who are ‘research experts’.
Expert ‘queering’ is a significant shift for PG and emerging researchers to contend with, but even more so as they transition beyond candidature.
Hopefully, such reframings will not only aid in their current research, but also enable more (post)grads to view themselves as ‘experts/researchers-becoming’ rather than ‘student/candidate-unchanging’.
As regular readers of this blog know, I am undertaking my bicycle PhD with Griffith University, School of Professional Studies. I am using Feminist New Materialisms (FNM) to explore how bicycles enable or constrain rural African girls’ access to education. I need to better understand FNM (which is essentially Quantum Physics applied to Social Science/Education). To do this, I want to read, talk, process and write about FNM with others who know what the heck I’m on about as a way to bounce ideas around and learn more.
We
meet once a month and the time came around pretty quick for our September
meeting.
I
was delighted!
2nd Feminist New Materialisms Special interest Group (FNM SIG) Meeting
In keeping with the ethical intent of fNM, Sherilyn and I intend using our forum as a way of flattening power hierarchies within and across the Academy. (We are currently co-authoring a publication on this exact topic).
This means that, as our meetings progress, we will be showcasing research from experienced (academics) and emerging researchers (candidates). So we invite all the participants to let us know if they would like to present their research ideas/dilemmas to the group for some open and honest feedback, or as a way to process and work through areas of research ‘stickiness’.
At
this FNM SIG meeting, we have a guest presentation by Prof Simone Fullagar and
Dr Wendy O’Brien (and Dr Adele Pavlidis who unfortunately could not make it) whose
book, Feminism
and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery, has just been published.
See more about the book at the end of the post.
Congratulations!
Image: Palgrave
After their presentation, we had open question/discussion time before moving into a group activity in order to collate some key terms that have emerged thus far.
The stimulus materials (see 2 attachments) for this meeting were provided by Prof Fullagar. The materials are an extract from their new book (Introduction) and an article that is structured around an interview with Karen Barad – a much quicker way of accessing her ideas than reading Meeting the Universe Halfway.
In their informal presentation, Prof. Fullagar and Dr O’Brien shared insights about what it was like to conduct the research, how the process impacted them and some ‘moments of rupture’ they experienced.
The discussion was super interesting as different people were triggered by different aspects of what was shared. I am very keen to hear more about how people are actually applying FNM approaches in practice. This is one of the first opportunities I have had to read FNM work (readings) and then directly question the researchers who have undertaken a full-scale FNM framing. Insightful and inspiring!
We
all felt the time went too quickly – we could have talked another 2 hours at
least!
It
is an aim of mine as co-convenor of the SIG to have an activity that collaborately
produces some sort of output for each meeting. For this session it was a Wordle – Word Cloud.
We
wanted to capture some of the key terms or concepts that the participants are
aware of – or that came out of the readings. Here is what we created:
GU GIER: FNM SIG 2nd Meeting. Wordle
It was a very moving, inspirational and generative session.
Like many other who attended, I went back to my desk and made
copious notes about what had bubbled up for me and what aspects has resonance with
my own bicycle PhD research project.
Here is more info about their book: Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women’s recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression.
Rather than reducing experience to discrete biological, psychological or sociological categories, feminist thinking moves with the biopsychosocialities implicated in both distress and lively modes of becoming well. Using a post-qualitative approach, the book creatively re-presents how women ‘do’ recovery within and beyond the normalising imperatives of biomedical and psychotherapeutic practices.
By pursuing the affective movement of self through depression this inquiry goes beyond individualised models to explore the enactment of multiple self-world relations. Reconfiguring depression and recovery as bodymind matters opens up a relational ontology concerned with the entanglement of gender inequities and mental (ill) health.
My abstract for the upcoming Pedagogies in the Wild Conference has been accepted!
This is great news because I already have an abstract accepted for the international 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference(Dec 2-4th 2019) and this conference follows straight after (4-6th December) and is at the same place – the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa).
I am working towards a research trifecta: 2 conferences and fieldwork in the one trip.
This conference is being affectionately referred to ‘the D & G conference’.
That is because it focuses on integrating the work of two highly influential scholars whose work is transdisciplinary and has had ‘epic consequence’ in many fields – Deleuze and Guattari. Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher and Felix Guattari is a psychoanalyst. Some their most influential works are: Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus. They have written extensively together on an array of topics. In particular for my project, their work has been foundational in extending New Materialists understandings.
The Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019 is being run for the third time and is solely focused on unpacking, exploring and apply Deleuze-Guattarian thinking and approaches.
As many regular readers of this blog know, my research is complexified by interrogating various aspects of power relations – such as gender in/justice, post-colonialism, and what/who are academic/research/educational ‘experts’.
The session I will be presenting is based on a publication I currently writing with my amazingly brave PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon.
Title: Cycling-with-through-and-on the edge of the PhD supervisor-candidate relationship: A post-humanist bike ride to a different place.
Abstract: Traditionally, the PhD supervision relationship is predicated on a supervisor as expert – supervisee as learner/novice model of knowledge transmission. Most of the supervisory work is performed either on the university campus or via digital channels that allow the ‘expert’ to direct the conversation and establish the performance expectations for both candidate and supervisor. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were to be disrupted and reframed?
This session presents insights that emerged when a PhD candidate and her Supervisor shared a bayside bicycle ride in Brisbane, Australia, to see what would happen. While the candidate was an expert
bike rider, her Supervisor was far less experienced and somewhat anxious about
her (st)ability. The bicycle ride was viewed as a
way of deliberately disrupting and displacing traditional notions around
academic performances, spaces of learning and who gets to navigate.
What emerged was surprising,
revealing and uncomfortable.
The bicycle ride enabled
encounters with/in the world/self that worked to queer the way in which both
Supervisor and candidate understood their relationship. We contend that the
candidate/supervisor relationship is an iterative and dynamic entanglement of
forces wherein subjectivities, bodily performances, past experiences, fears,
technologies, planned and unplanned encounters are forever and always
entangled.
Influenced by Baradian philosophy,
this session focuses on the material-discursive-affective phenomena that
emerged as the experience of riding-with the candidate/supervisor. In this way “systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy” and “instigate codes of conduct and…exclusionary practices that can limit how academic knowledges…are produced” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 2) are able to be troubled, re-thought and re-balanced.
My PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon and I on our bike ride. Sat. 22nd June, 2019.
What is Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019?
Here is more about the conference: The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.
Similar movements have reverberated across the globe,
addressing issues of neoliberalism, for example in Canada, the UK, the
Netherlands and Chile; racism, as in Ghana and the US; and curfews on women
students in India.
This has raised important questions regarding knowledge
production; continuing structural racism, patriarchy, homophobia and
transphobia; the use and value of western theorists in research and curricula;
and who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.
On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures
between pedagogy, education studies and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
In particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal
theorising, rhizomatic learning and nomadic thought in socially just
pedagogical praxis.
These junctures and innovative genealogies and
methodologies can both address these issues and be further improved and made
more precise by engagements with what it means to transform and reconfigure
pedagogies and practices in higher education.
Image: Pedagogies in the Wild 2019
My Conference Stream – Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling
Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling: Places of/and/un/Learning in Higher Education
How can we challenge assumptions
such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of
materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
Expanded Conference Topic 2
Higher education spaces are usually considered in relation
to how they optimise student learning and, increasingly, how they optimise
marketing potential to attract new students.
In addition, meanings of ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘environment’ and
‘context’ are often elided, and it is taken for granted that learning happens
in classrooms, seminar rooms and lecture halls.
Such discourses take space for granted as a neutral background
on which human endeavour is located.
Unschooling (in a meta sense rather than the narrow sense of
homeschooling) resists this kind of pedagogy in favour of building real
communities and replacing dry, nationalist agendas with different kinds of training
programs, learning opportunities and methodologies, apprenticeships,
internships and mentorships.
Unschooling thus represents a material politics aimed at
genuine social freedom and enjoyable learning. Normative ways of understanding
space and schooling are challenged by Deleuze-Guattarian understandings which,
instead, conceptualise space as an entangled ‘constellation of human–nonhuman
agencies, forces and events’ (Taylor, 2013: 688) within which objects, bodies
and things do surprising and important if often unnoticed and mundane work as
material agents and actants.
Theoretically, such work draws on and takes forward the rich
traditions of feminist and postmodernist understandings of space developed by
Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of space and
striation.
This theme therefore wishes to open up debates about higher
education spaces by considering questions such as:
What is the role of architecture, design and infrastructure in higher education?
How might the materialities of higher education spaces and places be conceptualised via inter-, multi- and post-disciplinary frameworks?
How can we take account of the importance of places of informal learning?
How does the iterative materialisation of space-time-matter come to matter in higher education spaces?
How is higher education being spatially reconfigured in relation to global flows of bodies?
Which/ whose bodies matter in higher education spaces?
What new spatial imaginaries are needed for higher education to thrive?
How can feminist new materialisms in its overlaps and divergences with Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy aid us to produce new understandings of space-place-matter entanglements in higher education?
How can we challenge assumptions such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
What kinds of material and affective potential does unschooling offer us for thinking about curriculum development in Higher Education.
The theoretical framing I am using for my bicycle-education PhD is feminist New Materialisms (fNM). Actually, it is more than just a philosophical perspective and as a doctoral researcher, I have to understand this ethico-onto-epistemological approach super well in order to apply it to my PhD.
I am lucky that my supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon is already immersed in this field and has been an invaluable resource and guide in unpacking FNM complexities.
In a recent meeting, I said to Sherilyn that I wanted/needed more time to process and experiment with fNM approaches. I asked her if there was any academic Special Interest Groups (SIG) she knew that I could join. She had been part of an informal fNM SIG previously, but it had disbanded due to lack of official support. So, the opportunity and need was there to establish an official fNM reading/discussion group at Griffith Uni.
Success! We now have an official FNM SIG at Griffith!
We plan to start
with a monthly reading and discussion group and then see what organically
happens as opportunities present and requests are made.
Our first meeting was on Thursday 1st August 2019 and we had 12 attendees.
The first meeting
was semi-structured with the discussion focus being: The emergence of feminist
New Materialisms.
The two stimulus resources
were:
Reading: Pierre, E. S. (2014). A brief and personal history of post qualitative research: Toward “post inquiry”. Journal of curriculum theorizing, 30(2).
We started with a welcome and an introduction of attendees: name, connection to Uni and how we plugged into fNM – and an acknowledgment that ‘matter matters’ to set the scene.
We wanted to keep the discussion open to whatever came up, so we had three questions (traffic light ) for people to think about and write their answers down on coloured post-its. Teachers call this a ‘think, pair, share’ activity, which is great because everyone contributes individual ideas to the collective discussion.
Here are our traffic (green = enabling, yellow= interesting, red =constraining) light questions and responses.
Red responses
Orange responses
Green responses
‘Traffic light’ questions
Then we formed smaller groups to share and discuss
our answers – and whatever else bubbled up.
Each group discussed different aspects and ideas.
We put all the stick notes on the wall to create
a gallery walk so we could pass by and read other people’s thoughts and ideas.
It was a way to see what other groups discussed and it was super interesting to
see what other people were wrestling with.
Sherilyn pulled one idea off the wall for the whole group to discuss in more detail.
Dr Sherilyn Lennon
The time went so quick!
Sherilyn and I wanted the meeting to honour central fNM tenets – like being open to change and what emerges in a moment. I also really like the idea of not just discussing ideas, but also actively and collaboratively producing something original (gallery wall) that did not exist before.
It is very FNM to recognise and (re)produce matter that can only be created in that very particular ‘entangled’ moment made up of the room, ideas, bodies, histories, location, identities, artefacts, concepts and all the other processes and practices that made the meeting what it was.
The meeting was a great start and we got very positive feedback.
It will take a few meetings to get into the
groove, but I like having a semi-structured activity (with an collective production)
that can then opened up and modified as the groups see fit.
We will be having one meeting each month for the rest of 2019 and I am very much looking forward to it!
A massive big thank you to all the participants and to GIER for their support.
Over the past 20 years, New Materialism has become an umbrella term used to represent a range of theoretical perspectives that share the re-turn to a focus on matter. It is an emerging theoretical field that encompasses four main streams: Speculative Realism, Object-oriented ontology (OOO), Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and feminist New Materialisms (fNM).
In the last 15 years in particular, fNM have gained considerable attention as a consequence of a unique approach to considering the agency of all matter. In using such understandings habitual human-centric ways of thinking, doing and being are disrupted as an ethico-onto-epistemological approach emerges. This approach is capable of bringing together multiple disciplines as it redistributes agency through material, discursive and affective forces.
European Universities (in particular Utrecht Uni which has a New Materialism Research Centre) have enthusiastically adopted fNM and are currently the most active researchers in the field. While Australia has a growing pool of fNM scholars, a similar uptake is yet to be seen here. This is surprising considering that the movement has been primarily driven by a number of internationally-celebrated Australian feminist scholars including Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Claire Colebrook, Vicki Kirby, Bronwyn Davies and Jane Kenway.
As an emerging methodology, fNM is being taken prominently in the field of educational research. Those working in this field are contributing significant insights while laying the foundations for a profound shift in the way we come to understand educational issues, teacher education, and professional and educational practice-based learning.
At Griffith, we have a number of academics working with ANT, but few engaging with fNM. My supervisor, Dr Sherilyn Lennon, is publishing in this space and I am using feminist New Materialist thinking in my PhD. Given the excitement and emerging nature of this way of thinking, a fNM SIG at Griffith University provides an opportunity to directly engage in the discussion and lead a feminist New Materialist Research Group that will brings together PhD Candidates, academics from Griffith and other institutions, scholars and interested parties to more deeply, critically, creatively and actively engage with fNM. The field of FNM is still being chartered. This makes it an emergent and dynamic space in which to be researching.
The aim of this fNM SIG is to:
To build a vibrant and productive community of FNM researchers and professionals who cross-pollinate ideas while growing new research projects
To participate and contribute in this emergent theoretical field
To bring together researchers with trans-disciplinary and cross-institutional knowledge as a means of creating hybrid rigour
To support GU HDR candidates who are using FNM thinking
To grow research, researchers and research practices and networks
Establish Griffith/GIER as active in the FNM space
Leverage and extend Australian feminist scholarship
I am delighted to share this story. As well as being an incredibly inspirational story and testament to Dinesh Palipana’s unique fortitude and character, this story showcases some of the pioneering work that my university is doing. …And it is totally bike related! I’ve been working at Griffith for over 5 years now. I am continually impressed with the reach, impact and significant contributions Griffith makes to improve society. Last year, I posted about Griffith design graduate and PhD candidateJames Novak’s global award-winning world’s first 3D printed bicycle – also unreal!! This story is about how Dinesh and his team turned an accident he had during his PhD into a scientific-bike research breakthrough. This article was originally published by Griffith News earlier this year. Here it is in full. Enjoy! NG.
Griffith medical graduate and Gold
Coast University Hospital junior doctor Dinesh Palipana thinks about
walking a lot, since a car accident left him a quadriplegic part-way through
his medicine degree.
Now he’s thinking about pushing the pedals of a
specially-adapted recline bike, and thanks to electronic muscle stimulation,
he’s actually moving, in what is the first step towards a world-first
integrated neuro-musculoskeletal rehabilitation program, being developed at the
Gold
Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct (GCHKP).
Griffith biomechanical scientists and engineers Professor
David Lloyd, Dr Claudio Pizzolato and his team, together with Dinesh as
both researcher and patient, are aiming to use their ground-breaking 3D
computer-simulated biomechanical model, connected to an electroencephalogram
(EEG) to capture Dinesh’s brainwaves, to stimulate movement, and eventually
recovery.
Thinking about riding a bike
“The idea is that a spinal injury or neurological patient
can think about riding the bike. This generates neural patterns, and the
biomechanical model sits in the middle to generate control of the patient’s
personalised muscle activation patterns. These are then personalised to the
patient, so that they can then electrically stimulate the muscles to make the
patient and bike move,” says Professor Lloyd who is also from Griffith’s Menzies
Health Institute Queensland.
“It’s all in real-time, with the model adjusting the amount
of stimulation required as the patient starts to recover.
“We’re in the early stages of research and we’re having to
improvise with our equipment, however we know we have shown our real-time
personalised model works, basically like a digital twin of the patient.”
Dr
Palipana is excited to be part of such novel research in his own backyard.
“I
have a selfish and vested interest in spinal cord injury research and I’m
completely happy to be the guinea pig,” Dr Palipana says.
“We’ve
had equipment for many years where people passively exercise using stationary
bikes, and stationary methods where people get on and the equipment moves their
legs for them. The problem is you really need some stimulation from the brain.
“As
the years go by we’re starting to realise that the whole nervous system is very
plastic and it has to be trained, so actually thinking about moving the bike or
doing an activity stimulates the spinal cord from the top down and that creates
change.”
This
top down, bottom up approach is novel, with the model effectively providing a
substitute connection between the limbs and the brain where it was previously
broken when the spinal cord was injured.
The
neuro-rehabilitation research will dovetail with exciting research by Griffith
biomedical scientist, Associate Professor James St John, who has had promising
results for his biological treatment using olfactory (nasal) cells, to create
nerve bridges to regenerate damaged spinal cords.
Establishing new neural pathways
“You use the modelling to recreate the connection, and over
time, with the science of Associate Professor James St John, you establish new
neural pathways. So over time patients will be less dependent on the model to
control the bike movement and it will move back to their own control, with
their regenerating spinal cord and their reprogrammed neural pathways,” says
Professor Lloyd.
Associate Professor James St John hopes to move into human
clinical trials in the GCHKP within the next 2-3 years, and in parallel
Professor Lloyd and his team hope to refine their rehab testing with Dinesh,
and develop the technology with leading global companies in exoskeleton design.
These companies, could in turn, be attracted into the 200-hectare GCHKP.
“In ten years we want to be a one-stop shop for spinal cord
injury and complex neurological patients,” Professor Lloyd says.
“I’m just really lucky to be well-positioned here where
it’s all happening and I want to be involved as much as possible as a doctor
and a potential scientist,” says Dr Palipana.
“It’s my university, my hospital, my city – it’s just
really nice to be a part of that.”
