Speculative Methodologies & Emergent Literacies: Walking

Speculative Methodologies & Emergent Literacies: Walking & Writing as Research-Creation

Sarah Elizabeth Truman

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Curriculum Studies & Teacher Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Book History & Print Culture, Massey College

University of Toronto

Speculative Methodologies & Emergent Literacies: Walking & Writing as Research-Creation

Sarah Elizabeth Truman

Doctor of Philosophy Curriculum Studies & Teacher Development, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Book History & Print Culture, Massey College

University of Toronto

2017

Abstract

My dissertation develops, extends, and experiments with theories of emergence to think ethico- politically about cultural productions, literacy practices, and pedagogies. Theoretically informed by process philosophy, new materialisms, and affect theories this dissertation focuses on three reading, writing, and walking research-creation events. The first research-creation event is a multi-participant marginalia project inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ (an ‘affirmation’ that emerged during a walk). The second research-creation event is an in-school project with high school English students that centers on emergent publics, literacies, and ethico-political matters of concern that arose through walking and writing. The third research-creation event is a long-distance walking- writing post-card project that queers the relationship between walking, chance encounters, and the politics of saying yes to whatever turns up. I employ a more-than-representational approach to writing as a further engagement with theories of emergence and their relevance to qualitative research methodologies in the field of education. &

Acknowledgments

Three significant people in my life died while I wrote this dissertation. My maternal grandmother, Anne Donnelly Brothers, my cat, Lonesome, and my best teacher and friend David H. Forsee. They supported my writing in the past. I miss them all.

Thank you to my colleagues and professors at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and at Massey College for thinking-with me these past four years. Thank you to my fellow co-editors of Pedagogical Matters (Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, and Zofia Zaliwska) for co-theorizing with me when we put the book together. Thank you also colleagues and friends affiliated with WalkingLab and Hamilton Perambulatory Unit – our itinerant walking and reading groups, bush salons, and various research events have all impacted my thinking and writing.

Thank you to the many participants who were part of the three research-creation events in this dissertation including the 30+ people who engaged with Intratextual Entanglements, and the 18 students at Llyn High School. And a particular thank you to David Shannon who walked St. Cuthbert’s Way with me and the various more-than-human strangers we encountered en route.

Thank you to the External Examiner Susan Searls Giroux, and the Internal Examiners Aparna Mishra Tarc and Kathy Bickmore, for all of your generous and provocative questions and comments.

Thank you Rob Simon for your patient and insightful comments throughout this dissertation project and beyond.

Thank you Peter Trifonas for your piercing and humourous propositions to always think-further with philosophy.

Thank you Stephanie Springgay, the dearest and most intelligent supervisor ever! You demonstrate what feminist collaboration in academe can be and continually inspire my scholarship. I look forward to walking-thinking-writing with you in the future.

iii

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Table of Contents ...... v

“And” ...... 1 Research Questions ...... 3

Chapter 1 ...... 4

Toward Theories of Emergence: A Literature Review ...... 4 What are the ‘New’ Materialisms? ...... 6 Emergent Bodying ...... 9 More-than-human ...... 13 Intra-action ...... 18 If everything is constantly emerging, how do we account for ethics? ...... 21 Stir the Virtual (Deleuze’s Difference, Actual & Virtual) ...... 26 How do you think in terms of problems? Lure Feeling. Propose...... 28 Affirm Chance (Nietzsche’s eternal return and difference) ...... 30

Chapter 2 ...... 33

Techniques for Emergent Methods ...... 33 Stir the Virtual ...... 38 Slow (Problematize. Agitate) ...... 39 Research-Creation ...... 40 Thinking-with rather than writing-up ...... 42 Attending to representational issues ...... 46 More-than-represent ...... 48 On Research-Events ...... 50 Overview of research-creation events ...... 51

Chapter 3 ...... 57

Take Thought for a walk - Intratextual Entanglements ...... 57 Specifics of the research-creation ...... 60 Text ...... 62 Public Pedagogy? ...... 64 The Materiality of Language ...... 67 v

A Backgrounder on Textual Marginalia ...... 69 Approaches to Group ‘Reading-Writing’ ...... 72 Ethico-political tendings, provoke how? ...... 76 Affirm Difference ...... 79 Affirmation and Movement ...... 81 Recursion and Materiality ...... 85 Intra-textual sounds ...... 90 & - Thoughts - & ...... 91

Chapter 4 ...... 93

In-School Research-Creation Events: Dérive through these charter’d Halls ...... 93 Curriculum Studies and & Pedagogy ...... 100 Emergent-public-pedagogies ...... 105 Space/Place ...... 107 Literacy-English Class-Classrooms ...... 110 The mechanics of an emergent ‘method’ and script ...... 119 In what ways do walking and writing contribute to understandings of the intersectionality of race, gender, and power? ...... 126 (trans)spatializing gender ...... 138 In what ways do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal understandings of place? ...... 145 Toward a transcorporeal understanding ...... 148 Matters that mattered and how they mattered ...... 152 Trans-bodied-events ...... 159 & - Thoughts - & ...... 161 What are the implications of this for how we understand movement-thought-writing? ...... 161 Speculating Cardiff ...... 162

Chapter 5 ...... 167

Research-Creation Event: Post Cards from Strangers (Make Strange the Long Walk) ...... 167 Epistolary Ontologies ...... 171 The Importance of Being Hospitable to Queer (Strange) (non)Arrivals ...... 176 The structure of a postcard ...... 181 Preparation for the walk ...... 183 More-than-representational Theories informing Research-Creation ...... 184 Regarding Pinholes Photographs on the Post Cards ...... 185 Landscapes Absence and Presence ...... 187 & - Thoughts - & ...... 196 vi

Chapter 6 ...... 200

& ...... 200 Walking& ...... 202 Literacy& ...... 204 Research-Creation&Methodology& ...... 205 Emergence& ...... 206

References ...... 208

vii 1

“And”

“That was how we came to know each other and we’ve remained friends ever since, Sister Evonne and me. And,” my grandmother says.

“And, what? You can’t finish a story and then say, ‘and,’ or it sounds like you’re not finished.”

“Perhaps not. That’s a good point. And,” she says.

“You just did it again. Are you trying to make me crazy?”

“Mind your tone, Sarah and…” She pokes my rib. Her pooly old eyes shimmer.

And. My late grandmother used to end most of her sentences, and all of her lengthy stories with

“and.”

And oozed out the end of every statement. Nothing she said was complete. It used to infuriate me.

Now I wonder whether she was casting a net with “and” to see what other idea came so she could continue on speaking. And.

Alfred North Whitehead (1968) calls “…the little word and a nest of ambiguity,” (p. 53 italics mine).

For Whitehead, conjunctions like and are, “death traps for accuracy of reasoning” (p. 53). Ambiguity isn’t typically regarded as a happy occurrence in educational research where we are encouraged to describe clear, consistent outcomes of research studies. But Whitehead doesn’t shy from ambiguity and asserts that through, “...process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite” whereby all “inconsistencies are burst” (p. 45).

And so how does and work? and operates as a conjunction and a Boolean operator in library searches and implies causation (when someone says “and so”) and implies progression (she went on and on about and) and implies supplementation (this and this equals that) and joins varied things together but also makes them appear isolated (the phrase “Grandma and

Whitehead both have a thing about and,” both links and marks a difference between Grandma and

Whitehead) and

And is a nest of ambiguity, and a link to what could be.

It holds things together-apart and propels them forward.

Many ands emerge in this dissertation.

Research Questions

Main:

1. How do theories of emergence matter to literacies, pedagogy, and ethico-politics in

educational research?

2. How do group practices of walking, reading, and writing highlight the primacy of ethico-

political concerns in pedagogical encounters?

Sub questions:

1. In what ways do meanings, literacies, and problems (rather than solutions) emerge through

interactions and create new potentialities for ethico-political thought in education?

2. How do theories of emergence further the ontological (or ontogenetic or viral turn) in

educational research?

3. How do emergent conceptualizations of qualitative research studies and their representation

advance the practice of research-creation in curriculum studies?

Chapter 1 Toward Theories of Emergence: A Literature Review

When things get together, there then arises something that was not there before, and that character is something that cannot be stated in terms of the elements which go to make up the combination. It remains to be seen in what sense we can now characterize that which has so emerged (Mead, 1938, p. 641).

My understanding of emergence draws from new materialisms, which in turn draw from process philosophy, affect theory, queer and feminist theories. The word emerge functions as a verb (these findings emerged), as an adverb (these new materialist theories operate emergently), and as an adjective (an emergent idea) within this thesis. I like how flexible the term is, and slippery. Events emerge. An emergence glides over a cusp between a potentiality and an actuality. An emergent can not be known in advance. Consequently, I view emergent processes as part of the ontological turn in the social sciences. Further to this, emergences are ontogenetic because whatever actualizes through emergence is ‘becoming’ as much as ‘being;’ perhaps it’s not even ontogenetic, rather viral! Whether ontological, ontogenetic, or viral, I argue that theories of emergence and emergences (events) are ethico-politically future oriented. Being ethico-politically future-oriented does not preclude a connection to the past.

!Emergence ó Emergency!

You may wonder why I’m using the term emergence rather than becoming. Admittedly, they are similar. An emergence is sometimes described as coming to light, something not known in advance, and invariably unpredictable and future oriented. However, in conceptualizing emergences as being ethico-politically attuned I recognize that ‘what comes to light’ is not only emergent, but an

5 emergency! As in requiring immediate attention, or responsibility. So that’s why I chose that term – to remind me that there are emergencies that matter.

!Emergence ó Emergency!

The structure of conventional qualitative research presumes to know in advance (St. Pierre,

2016). This is demonstrated through an approach to research design that states what we’re looking for, what it means, and what its outcomes might be before embarking on a study. I’m proposing an emergent approach that challenges this epistemological orientation and argues for the necessity of experimentation and not-knowing in advance, coupled with the ethico-political responsibility to engage affirmatively with what does emerge as an affective intensity, or what Stewart (2007) might call an ordinary affect. For Stewart, ordinary affect emerges “in the textured, roughened surface of the everyday. It permeates politics of all kinds with the demand that some kind of intimate public of onlookers recognize something in a space of shared impact” if only for an instant (p. 39).

In empirical science, emergence is often discussed as simple objects giving rise to novel collective effects, where emergent properties are formed through a particular process or interaction and then acquire “certain characteristics that are qualitatively different from those of the pre-existing conditions on the basis of which this interaction has taken place” (Chang, 2004, p. 413). Cultural theorists have different uptakes of the term emergence which include Williams’ (1977) description of an emergent culture as one where "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created" (p. 122) and interventions in a cultural realm arise from a dominant framework but operate autonomously from it.1 In this regard, the emergent

1 Williams discusses dominant, residual and emergent cultures: “The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the

6 only makes sense in relation to a dominant framework that it can be distinguished from. Reynolds

(2009) hybridizes the scientific notion of emergent properties and Williams’ notion of emergent culture, with what he calls “emergent activity.” For Reynolds (2009) emergent activity draws from both fields to “…propose critical enterprises simultaneously stemming from a subject of inquiry and distinctly redefining it” (p. 276). In order to further understand how I conceptualize emergence it is necessary to discuss Nietzsche’s becoming (eternal return, difference), Deleuze’s virtual, Whitehead’s process philosophy, Barad’s intra-activity and various other new materialist ideas that intersect with, rub frictionally against, and expand on these theories. I will attend to these in this chapter, and highlight how they inform research-creation and the methodological orientation of subsequent chapters.

What are the ‘New’ Materialisms?

…the primary ontological units are not “things” but phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations of the world (Barad, 2007, p. 141).

Reconsidering the field of curriculum and pedagogy, through theories of emergence positions this dissertation within what have been conceptualized as the ‘new’ materialisms in the humanities and social sciences. I put new in air (scare) quotations in that instance to acknowledge that much of what has been dubbed new materialist is not particularly new (Ahmed, 2008). However, how new materialisms have been taken up in curriculum and pedagogy, particularly in regard to research-

dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue - cultural as well as social - of some previous social and cultural institution or formation...By 'emergent' I mean, first, that new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are continually being created. But it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense 'species specific') and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel” (Williams, 1977, p. 122-123).

7 creation projects (Truman & Springgay, 2015; Springgay & Truman, 2018), research methodologies

(Springgay & Truman, 2016), spatial politics and race (Sonu and Snaza, 2016), and more-than-human movements, memory, and math (deFreitas & Ferrara, 2016), demonstrate new ways of thinking in the field of education.

New materialisms are vectors within post-humanist, feminist, and queer theories that are heavily influenced by advances in the physical and life sciences, speculative pragmatism, and process philosophy (Hayles, 1999; Jackson, 2015; Braidotti, 2013; Grusin, 2015; Åsberg, Thiele & van der

Tuin, 2015; Luciano and Chen, 2015, Massumi, 2015, Manning, 2016). New materialists (notably, some of which do not call themselves new materialists) posit matter as indeterminate, vital, and agential. This ongoing recognition of agency in matter “draws together what appears and makes the totality subject to mutation and emergence” (Sheldon, 2015, p. 196). Bennett (2010) introduces the notion of ‘thing-power’ as “…the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). In their introduction to New Materialisms, Coole and Frost (2010) write:

…new materialists are rediscovering a materiality that materializes, evincing immanent modes of self-transformation that compel us to think of causation in far more complex terms; to recognize that phenomena are caught in a multitude of interlocking systems and forces and to consider anew the location and nature of capacities for agency. (p. 9)

New materialisms propose questions and propositions around ideas of agential and affective- affecting matter – and how matter matters for both humans and more-than-humans when we begin to consider the world this way (Barad, 2007). Bennett (2010) states that a version of new materialism has “…found expression in childhood experiences of a world populated by animate things rather than passive objects” (p. vii). In this vital materialist world there is “no point of pure stillness, no indivisible atom that is not itself aquiver with virtual force” (p. 57). Seemingly immobile objects like

8 desks in a classroom are only inert when considered anthropocentrically because “their becoming proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment” (Bennett, 2010, p. 58).

New materialists think more-than-anthropocentrically and attend to scales – be they atomic, or extended temporalities – that can offer different perspectives on matter, materiality, and humans’ place in the world. It’s important to note that new materialism’s emphasis on the agency of matter has been critiqued by Indigenous scholars for its glaring omission of Indigenous epistemologies.

Specifically, Todd (2016) highlights how white scholars continue to celebrate other white euro- western thinkers for seemingly “discovering” what many Indigenous thinkers have known for millennia – that there’s agency or vitality in more-than-human matter. This feeds into another important critique of field from within the field: new materialism’s failure to account for the challenges “posed by the categories of race, colonialism, and slavery” (Jackson, 2013, p. 671). In my view, this is new materialism’s main aporia: to attempt to move away from human exceptionalism, but not erase difference in the process. Jackson (2013) warns that regardless of how subversive posthuman and new materialist thought begins, in many instances it remains “committed to a specific order of rationality, one rooted in the epistemological locus of the West, and more precisely that of Enlightenment man--Wynter's ‘Man.’” (p. 671-672). Sylvia Wynter’s ‘Man’ (2003) is the overrepresented, Euro-bourgeois, hetero Man, that stands for humanity itself.

Jackson (2013) discusses how scholars of race, and people of colour, have sometimes been theorized as not wanting (or not being able) to move away from the normative idea of the ‘human’ because they have never been included in the normative understanding of human. Jackson sees this as a misreading and argues instead that scholars of race have attempted to transform the category of the human from within. In this regard, the hope isn’t that people of colour would somehow “gain admittance into the fraternity of Man--the aim was to displace the order of Man altogether” (p. 672).

Such an aim, according to Jackson is not a politics of inclusion for those enslaved or colonized

9 under liberal humanist ideals, but a transformation of humanism. Similarly, Haritaworn, (2015) feels it is crucial to inject a “good dose of humanism” into their thinking and teaching practices, and place the “interhuman” alongside the human in the institutional context of academe (p. 211). In this dissertation, drawing on theories of emergence informed by new materialism, posthumanism, and affect, I feel it is important to recognize that there are humans in my study, and that the way forward for new materialism and post-humanity may not be to throw the human out, but rather re- conceptualize what humanism means.

Emergent Bodying

In recent years, feminist new materialist scholars have moved away from a humanist perspective of what bodies are, toward a more transcorporeal outlook. Hayles (1999) differentiates her notion of body from embodiment, which she describes as, “contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment…” (p. 196). For Hayles embodiment is “performed” and “enacted” and “tied to the circumstances of the occasion” (p. 198).

Hayles draws from Grosz’s statement that bodies “be represented or understood not as entities in themselves or on a linear continuum…but as a field, a two-dimensional continuum in which race

(and possibly even class, caste, or religion) form body specifications” (Grosz, 240, as cited in Hayles,

1999, p. 196). From an affective perspective, bodies emerge in conjunction with other bodies, objects, social conventions, artworks, texts and relations that are “…always in excess of a transpersonal capacity,” and experienced pre-personally (Thrift, 2004, as cited in Beyes & Steyaert,

2011, p. 52). Springgay (2011) takes up the idea that “affect precedes cognition” which draws from

Whitehead’s notion that we feel first and cognize afterwards, and that affects are contingent on a variety of human and non-human actors (Springgay, 2011, p. 636). In such a view, the ‘bodies’ of

10 students-teachers-researchers are not fixed, but partially materialized through environmental factors

– and also have the potential to affect their surrounding environment.

Weiss (1999) introduces the notion of intercorporality as “the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (p. 5). While Bennet (2010) outlines how flesh is populated by swarming masses of other bodies and bacteria that outnumber human genes more than 100 times: what we call the human body is actually “an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes” (p. 112-13). Feminist environmental scholar Alaimo (2010) uses the term transcorporeality to describe a more-than-human conceptualization of relationality, that includes

“material interchanges between human bodies, geographical places, and vast networks of power”

(Alaimo, 2010, p. 32). Transcorporeality posits humans and non-humans as enmeshed with each other in a messy, shifting ontology.

Manning (2012) refers to a body as a “field of relations,” a “force taking form rather than simply a form” (p. 31). Manning (2013) also describes a body as “an ecology of processes”, or “node of relational process, not a form per se” (p. 19). Young (2016) argues that conceptualizing bodies through performativity demonstrates the “quicksilver capacity/ies of bodies to always indicate a spatial, temporal, and semiotic world beyond themselves—to always move beyond their own boundaries”

(Young, 2016, p. 76). Seen this way, bodies are doings rather than beings. Gins and Arakawa (2002) use the term “organism that persons” to evoke the idea that bodies are intermittent and transitory products that emerge as subsets from other processes rather than cohesive entities (p. 2). In this regard, a body is a nexus of related forces that have different durations and rates of change.

According to Bradiotti (2002) bodies’ “common denominator is that they are intelligent matter, endowed with the capacity to affect and be affected, to interrelate” (p. 99). Here Braidotti differentiates between types of ‘matter’ deeming human bodies as ‘intelligent’ through their ability to

11 affect and be affected. Later, Braidotti (2013) conceptualizes ‘anti-humans’ as “complex relational” subjects “framed by embodiment [and] affectivity and empathy” as a move away from the unitary human subject of Humanism (p. 26). Colebrook (2014) pushes thought even further beyond humanist conceptualizations of embodiment to include ‘bodies’ that are in a “form of rampant and unbounded mutation” (136). For example she describes how a virus cannot be defined as embodied because it’s not a living system: it exists only as a parasite in a process of ongoing invasion.

de Freitas and Ferrara (2016) draw from Bergson’s (1988) radical conceptualization of a body (human or otherwise) as a “center of indeterminacy” assembled through a tangle of perceptions and affections (affections being merely “perceptions caught in loops”) (de Freitas and

Ferrara, 2016, p. 45). In this perspective all bodies are materially linked to each other through “with more or less tension due to varying proximity” (de Freitas and Ferrara, 2016, p. 45) but from this swirling nebulous state, a body eventually becomes individuated or even ‘privileged’ over others, though not through will or intentionality, rather through “affective states” (Bergson, 1988 p. 53, italics in original, cited in de Freitas and Ferrara, 2016, p. 45). In this way, affect plays a pre-personal role in the individuation of a body, but is not housed “in” a body, and affect’s effects are linked with a particular kind of habit-forming intelligence and agency.

If both human and non-human bodies are co-imbricated and in movement, as multiplicities that are constantly varying then they are always active, self-creating, productive, and intensive. This feeds into another element of how a body emerges through relationality and affect: how within a new materialist conceptualization bodies are never static even once they materialize, but ontogenetic.

This is significant for my research because the research-creation projects involved walking bodies. I do not view bodies as operating as fixed entities, moving between other fixed entities (as in walking from point A to point B). Following Tianinen and Parikka (2013), I view a body as movement in a

“ceaseless process of interactive metamorphosis: becoming” (p. 209). In this way, a body emerges

12 through its own transition toward a what else. And through its motion a body is, according to

Massumi (2002) “in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary”

(Massumi, 2002, p. 4). This relation is real, but abstract, as Deleuze (1994) might say in that it is full of potentials of what it could become but none of them is determined, yet. In this regard, a body is an

“an intercorporeal complex assemblage of virtualities” which “posits ontological priority of difference and self-transforming force” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 99). This monistic approach opens space to consider a non-dialectical politics, where nature and culture are not opposites, but simultaneous.

Bodies do not operate as fixed entities, moving between other fixed entities. According to Massumi

(2002) to think of the body in movement requires accepting a paradox: that there is an “incorporeal dimension of the body. Of it, but not it. Real, material, but incorporeal. Inseparable, coincident, but disjunct” (Massumi, 2002, p. 5). A body is always more than it is, in that there are things it could become, and at the same time it’s connected to other more-than-bodies.

The walking body enacts what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call a “zone of indiscernibility,” which Massumi refers to as the “included middle” (1987, p. 280; 2014, p. 6). The included middle packs two different logics into a given situation, and by bringing them together creates a third, which is productive: “There is one, and the other – and the included middle of their mutual influence. The zone of indiscernibility that is the included middle does not observe the sanctity of the separation of categories, nor respect the rigid segregation of arenas of activity” (p. 6). In recognizing the included middle, instead of reifying binaries, we begin to see how different gestures, or entities can paradoxically become performatively fused (in a zone of indiscernibility) while still retaining difference

(Massumi, 2014, p. 6). This process is productive of newness, emergent differentiation, and becoming.

For McCormack (2014) there is always more to the relations that bodies develop from and move through. This is a “relentless necessary excess” (p. 35) or as William James would say “the

13 word ‘and’ trails after every sentence” (as cited in McCormack, 2014, p. 35). Similar to bodies, so it is with places and spaces – they are also comprised of moving, emergent, relations. This has ramifications for walking research, and school based learning, if we consider the bodies, and spaces they move in relation to as not pre-determined, but rather always in excess of themselves, and full of virtual potential. I’m going to discuss virtuality below in reference to emergence but I can feel, as I write this, it pressing its way up the page.

More-than-human

Coole and Frost (2010) argue that the “dominant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy” (2010, p. 6). An attempt to attend to this world-view requires a re-orientation of how we think about agency, power, and matter.

In doing so, new materialists seek to undo the binaries that derive from European Humanist traditions that model ‘humans’ as stable, pre-formed beings that are endowed with the sovereign capacity to act on other bodies or inert matter. DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man could serve as an illustration of such a conceptualization in that he is perceived as proportionately ‘perfect,’ invariably able-bodied, white, and male (and certainly not queer). According to Wynter (2003) this “Western bourgeois” version of Man, “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (p. 260).

New materialist theories critique modes of thought that place individual, heteronormative, white-male-able bodies at the top of the animacy schema, and also the perpetuation of such schema as a measuring tool. For example, according to Chen (2012) the notion of animacy has been constructed using the logic of the human. Linguistically, animacy refers to the “quality of liveness,

14 sentience, or humanness of a noun or a noun phrase” (p. 24, italics mine). The less agency a body possesses, the less animate it is. Race and gender consistently fall at the lower end of this agency/animacy taxonomy. As such, this taxonomy, Chen (2012) argues, is a contributing factor in dehumanization, where qualities valued as “human” are removed when discussing some less-than- human bodies, such as women, children, and racialized Others. The senses are similarly connected to this animacy taxonomy: base senses like touch, taste, and smell have been historically understood as attached to certain bodies, particularly those which are deemed less-than-human (Springgay,

2008). The taxonomy of affect, or what Ahmed (2004) calls the “economies of affect” also work to regulate and dehumanize particular bodies. Dehumanization draws from logics where certain powers are granted the ability to assess and value life and include or exclude others from the realm of the human. For Seshadri (2012) this logic includes race, particularly in reference to the law where in many instances the line that divides those who are protected by the law and those who are casualties of the law is a racial line. These critiques have direct implication for curriculum and pedagogy in that schools, museums, parks, and other sites of education are specific material assemblages that identify and interpolate human subjects and where many of the world’s students “find themselves subjected to various tactics of dehumanization, objectification” (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, Zaliwska, 2016, p. xix).

I am interested in how new materialisms attend to ontology, epistemology, and ethico- politics as emergent – while maintaining an awareness of materially ‘human’ struggles around issues of race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability. Rather than viewing these categories as social constructions that must be critiqued and then solved by pedagogues, theories of emergence demonstrate that it is through specific processes of mattering that attributes such as race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability are recognized as natural attributes of bodies. And through specific processes of mattering attributes such as race, sexuality, gender, class, and ability are hierarchized and excluded from mattering. So before I go further discussing new materialisms and more-than-humans, I want

15 to state that although I agree with movements toward undoing age-old conceptualizations of who and what counts as matter, animate, and agentic, and how we need to get rid of taxonomies, I’m not pushing for a completely flattened ontology where teacups matter as much as human children as some Object Orientated Ontologists may argue (or be accused of arguing). Actually, they do matter as much as human children (in that they are all matter) but recognize that they matter differently.

Acknowledging the interconnections between all phenomena: human, and more-than-human, while working to undo the humanist inheritance that haunts Western thought, is an ongoing endeavor, particularly with regards to educational research.

While post-humanism has been applauded for moving beyond an anthropocentric

(specifically, white-hetero-male Vitruvian version of “humanity”) toward an emergent, relational subject, it has also been critiqued for dissolving race, gender, and sexual orientation markers among humans, or more radically, erasing difference between humans and non-humans. Luciano and Chen

(2015) critique how post-humanism often melts the boundaries between human and nonhuman as an easy flow. They posit the inhuman (in as both alien and intimate) as a method of thinking otherwise, of thinking about the tensions of human/nonhuman relations (Springgay & Truman,

2016). Rather than demanding that non-humans (and here they are not referring to nonhuman animals like bears, but racialized and sexualized others who have historically been deemed as in not- quite human) be assimilated into the category of the human, a practice that Luciano and Chen (2015) argue is a politics of rehabilitation and inclusion, queer scholars problematize the ways in which we consider inside and outside, and how when we create such distinctions something, or someone, is always left out. It’s a delicate balance, or rather a paradoxical mutual inclusion to hold Luciano &

Chen’s critiques along side a continued desire to maintain what Barad (2007) calls a posthuman

"ethics of worlding" (p. 392) which includes responsibility toward the more-than-human world. I seek to balance the ontology between humans and more-than-humans to show how all things matter

16 and have agency, yet still recognize that they matter differently. Simultaneously, I want to recognize that the taxonomies that proliferate the hierarchies that decide what matters continue to exist, yet I don’t want to fall into the habit of perpetuating hierarchies through trying to champion everyone and anthropomorphize everything into the top position (i.e. becoming human). As Livingstone and

Puar (2015) argue, although posthumanism seeks to “destabilize the centrality of human bodies and their purported organic boundedness,” not all posthuman scholarship attends to a posthuman politics in that they “unwittingly reinscribe the centrality of human subject formation and, thus, anthropomorphism” (p. 4). In my reading, new materialist scholars are not trying to erase difference between humans and non-humans, but to consider how under current systems of classification many (racialized, gendered, trans) bodies do not even get classified into the category of “Man”

(Wynter, 2003). Systems of classification operate similarly in education, where what counts as knowledge and who posses knowlege is also governed by hegemonic values associated with a

Humanist logic (Snaza & Weaver, 2014).

While the terms “post-human” and “anti-human” are relatively new in social science research, we have been moving toward new materialisms and post-human subjects for decades in

Continental philosophy, particularly in post-structuralist thought. As Braidotti (2013) states, for many thinkers in the past few decades, “Sexualized, racialized and naturalized differences, far from being the categorical boundary-keepers of the subject of Humanism, have evolved into fully fledged alternative models of the human subject” (p. 38). Similar to how post-structuralists, are not opposed to structuralism, rather in conversation and extension with it, most post-humanists are not opposed to humans, rather push away from universalism and human exceptionalism. In my reading, the critiques aimed at post-humanism and new materialisms are reminiscent of the critiques leveled at deconstruction, specifically Derrida’s use of deconstruction wherein he is often charged with relativism or having reduced everything to a matter of language forever deferring (Lather, 2003).

According to Trifonas (2000) deconstruction “liberate[s] the repressed contradictions always already present within the constitution” of texts (Trifonas, 2000, p. 274). Deconstruction happens. Derrida

(1990) made clear that calling deconstruction either an analysis or critique missed the point of deconstruction:

Deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth (Derrida, 1990, p. 85).

What both deconstruction and more-than-human approaches (which may indeed be deconstructive in the generative sense of the word) offer educational research is a refusal to settle on a fixed understanding of a “human” subject (or in deconstruction’s case a fixed understanding of any subject), while attending to openness, emergence, and future-oriented speculation. All of which necessitate an ethico-political awareness that recognizes how differences come to matter, a response- ability for how they continue to matter, and a refusal of essentialist ideals. As Trifonas (2000) states, deconstruction allows for “space within which we can discourse on the subject ethically without barriers or boundaries, though not without obligation and the danger of failure” (Trifonas, 2000, p.

279). The danger of failure would be to fail to acknowledge a response-ability for what comes out of a deconstructive process. This kind of thinking is what I consider an affirmative politics in the

Nietzschean sense, which will be discussed in more detail below, and expanded on throughout the dissertation. Braidotti (2014) outlines the desire to embrace an ethic of affirmation as borrowing energy from the future and using it to overturn present conditions. She calls us to picture what we don’t have yet, to speculate on what may be, and through desiring a different world extract positive relations and practices from the present.

Intra-action

My conceptualization of emergence is further informed by what Karen Barad (2007) would call

“intra” action. Barad’s (2007) neologism intra-action “signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies”

(p. 33, italics in original). She explains that rather than the term “interaction,” which suggests

“separate individual agencies that precede their interaction,” with intra-action agencies instead emerge from their co-minglings (p. 33). This may sound like an unnecessarily nebulous way of describing the idea that new things come about through processes of interconnectivity that can not be known in advance, but what I find important in Barad’s approach is that it moves away from a metaphysics of individualism that precede encounters. Rather she discusses networks and assemblages of humans and non-humans where agency is distributed across emergent bodies and not solely housed in particular (human) individuals (identities).

For Barad (2015), matter operates agentially, “where trans is not a matter of changing in time, from this to that, but an undoing of “this” and “that,” an ongoing reconfiguring of spacetimemattering” (p. 411). This differential movement (as opposed to causal movement) includes ongoing experiments with virtuality, and as such every entity is engaging with the virtual so that all things are possible (and impossible) at the same time! In other words, “explorations of possible trans*formations — are integral to each and every (ongoing) be(com)ing” of every particle of being (Barad,

2015, p. 410, italics in original). Barad (2015) drawing from her research in quantum field theory poses the idea of trans as a process of self-touching animacy, regeneration, and recreation. She deconstructs the reductionist ontology of classical physics and describes instead how indeterminancy is entangled through all being. In understanding how onto-ethico-epistomology emerges in situ in a given encounter, Barad (2003) describes her concept of the agential cut:

A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the ‘apparatus of observation’) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut

– an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy (p. 815).

This means that relata emerge through specific intra-actions, and agential cuts, rather than pre- existing them. Barad’s descriptions of ontological indeterminacy are fashioned after the wave- particle performances in physics slit experiments. In the experiments, what come to be called waves or particles appear differently based on how they are measured or “cut.” They are therefore in a state of indeterminacy until that time. Further to this, even the measuring apparatus in the experiment is part of the indeterminacy – and also does not pre-exit its relations and are therefore “perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings” (p. 817). In this regard apparatuses are the product of agential cuts themselves. A notable point before I go on, Barad’s notion of the cut isn’t solely a cutting away from, as in making a part separate from a pre-existing whole, but also a cutting together. For Barad (2007) “Cuts cut ‘things’ together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all” (Barad 2007, 179). Through demonstrating agential separability or what Barad (2003) calls the “the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena”

(p. 815) allows for a movement away from the classical ontological condition of exterority between what is observed and an observer and consequently queers traditional notions of causality.

Barad’s agential realism, and her uptake of diffraction have become popular ‘methods’ and

‘methodologies’ in educational research and across the humanities and social sciences. However, within applications of her theories, notions like agency are sometimes depoliticized, while the focus on matter shies away from intersectional discussions of race, gender, and class. These surface engagements with new materialisms trouble me, as it’s clear that Barad, like other third-wave feminists is attempting to link contemporary knowledges in the physical and life sciences with emancipatory politics. This means that those of us reading and using these theories need to be

20 accountable to what we deem to matter and what we exclude from mattering. As Barad (2015) says,

“Differentiating is not about othering/separating, but on the contrary about making connections and commitments” (p. 333).

Some of Barad’s thought has been critiqued for reducing all matter, including humans, to the effects of relations. Which could then lead into granting relations a preeminent status that is ontologically superior to the ‘things’ or ‘people’ or ‘texts’ or ‘pedagogical spaces’ they give rise to.

What if relations are not superior to things, but as James states, “… must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (as cited in Massumi, 2002, p. 16). In this case, relations are matter – although we can’t necessarily knock our fists against them. Granting relations material status is what

Massumi would call a radical empiricism, summed up as “the felt reality of relation” (Massumi, 2002, p.

16). And these felt relations do matter.

Although Barad’s theories are often based on quantum scales they can be generative in thinking about emergence on other scales that affect humans and our more-than-human relations.

As Barad (2007) states, “…[e]ntangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter: different intra-actions produce different phenomena”

(Barad, 2007, p. 58). Savransky (2016) argues that we do need to treat Barad’s concept that relations precede relata carefully “…resisting levelling it to an all-too-general proposition to which nothing can resist” (unpaged). Instead, he asks: “how, in the configuring of a specific situation, both relations and relata come to matter and affect each other”? (np).

Savransky’s approach is productive in that it doesn’t get bogged down in the idea of enduring, isolated things existing independent of relations, or conversely, a stance that reduces everything to its relations. In order to negotiate a way out of seemingly flattening all things to a tangle of relations where no thing (or person) endures, Savransky draws from Whitehead’s (1978)

21 idea of actual occasions and societies. For Whitehead (1978) actual occasions are the basic units of the universe that become themselves through an “instant of concrescence” (p. 211) of prehensions of other actual entities i.e. through relation. After actual occasions occur they “perish” (Whitehead,

1978, p. 35). While a society is a nexus of actual occasions that endure: for example, a person or another “ordinary physical object, which has temporal endurance, is a society" (Whitehead, 1978, p.

35). Whitehead’s process ontology takes up the complex relationship between thought, environmental forces, and causality. It also views being as emergent in that “[t]here is no subject separate from the event” (Massumi, 2011, p. 8, italics in original).

If everything is constantly emerging, how do we account for ethics?

If events, bodies, identity are emergent, that does not preclude the necessity to consider how things could become in the future. As Kirksey (2015) states an “emergent dynamic can destroy the existing order” (p. 1). If we consider an emergence not just the materialization of an object or subject also accompanied by an ethico-political tending, each moment becomes charged with the potentiality and necessity to respond to what matters. For Manning (2016) the political refers to “the movement activated, in the event by a difference in register that awakens new modes of encounter and creates new forms of life-living” (p. 8). Crucially, her understanding of life-living does not privilege only human lives and calls for an attention to the political ecology that operates emergently, “asking at every juncture what else life could be”? (p. 8). In this regard, the political, while being immanent to each event, is also speculative.

The generative movement between emergence and speculation functions as an important differential in new materialist thought, as well as process philosophy. Process philosophers view the

22 world as organic and in process and tend to focus on events rather than things. Although Deleuze may or may not have labelled himself a process philosopher, much of his writing supports a process- oriented stance. Deleuze states, “I have, it’s true, spent a lot of time writing about this notion of event: you see, I don’t believe in things” (as cited in Massumi, 2011, p. 6). Massumi (2011) argues that Deleuze’s notion of not believing in things, is to believe instead “that objects are derivatives of process and that their emergence is the passing result of specific modes of abstractive activity” (p. 6).

Thus, any object’s existence does not “exhaust the range of the real. The reality of the world exceeds that of objects, for the simple reason that where objects are, there has also been their becoming.

And where becoming has been, there is already more to come” (p. 6). So while we experience objects or human or beings, doing so momentarily abstracts them from their emergence and holds them in a still frame. Focusing on process allows us to recognize that along with being, all events are becoming.

Shaviro (2009) articulates Whitehead’s notion of “occasion” as “...the process by which anything becomes; while an “event” – applying to a nexus or a society – is an extensive set, or a temporal series, of such occasions” (Shaviro, 2007, p. 17). In this view, “no occasion is the same as any other; each occasion introduces something new into the world” (17). Whitehead’s notion of

“event” as an extensive set of “occasions” is reminiscent analogous to the Buddhist notion of karma

– meaning action, or a pattern of actions that appear “permanent” over time. It is through the pattern created by karma that things or people are perceived as enduring.

In bringing Whitehead, Deleuze, and Massumi into conversation with Barad I extend my thoughts on how humans are events, and “…emergent phenomena like all other physical systems”

(Barad, 2007, p. 338). And like other physical systems have different durations and the capacity to affect and be affected through their relations with other systems. Once this is understood, I can focus not on whether or not these theories can be reduced to a flattened process where only

23 relations and process endure, but instead focus on how although emergent, different relata and relations come to matter in different ways.

Barad (2007) uses the phrase onto-ethico-epistomology to articulate how being-ethics-knowledge emerge through relation and affect each other and the surrounding assemblage of material components of an event. In this view an ethic isn’t an essential ideal that is applied from the outside to a situation, but an ongoing endeavor entangled among knowledge and being. And I think it’s more of an orientation than a destination. But this orientation continually situates us in an ethical realm that needs to be negotiated with each intra-action.

Becoming responsive and accountable to the onto-ethico-epistemological concerns that arise in particular situations (of entangled agencies/processes) is in my opinion the most compelling aspect that theories of emergence can offer social science research because such a perspective operates within a state of openness and attention: we don’t know what is going to arrive, but we are attuned to recognizing and responding to it when it does. In qualitative research, such as the three research-creation projects discussed in this dissertation, allowing space for different matters of concern to arise in the study requires patience and receptiveness. And as Savransky (2016) states, involved “…the risk of having to invent a manner of attending to the obligations that the many relating entities—human and non-human—may pose to the on-going process of becoming” (np).

During the research-creation events many matters-of-concern emerged that I had not pre- emptively considered beforehand. As Massumi (2015) states: “Micropolitics, affective politics, seeks the degrees of openness in any situation, in hopes of priming an alter-accomplishment,” (p. 58) which activates a situation in a way that allows previously unfelt potentialities to arise is a political gesture. Here the use of ‘micro’ politics does not necessarily mean small, but refers to situational,

24 local modulations and a future-thinking in a given event that could begin small but have far reaching consequences. The ability to be affected, and to affect are the same event.

Similar to Braidotti (2013), I view the human ‘subject’ as situated within “…an eco- philosophy of multiple belongings…but still grounded and accountable” (p 49). This subject is partially accountable based in the fact of its membership within a relational collectivity. In this way, the more-than human subject is entangled in an emergent ethics. This trajectory from feminist poststructuralism through to new materialisms and can be encapsulated in Haraway’s (1991) statement that, “feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges (p. 188, italics in original). Following this trajectory of thought, ethics is not about the correct or right response “to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are part” (p. 393). This responsibility is enacted through intra-actions through which entities, subjects, and objects emerge as beings (Haraway, 2008).

For Barad (2007) embodiment is not a “matter of being specifically situated in the world, but rather of being of the world in its dynamic specificity” (p. 377, italics in original). This means that nothing (or no one) stands separately constituted as an external (or internal) observer of the world; what we perceive as parts or individuals become recognizable only through ongoing material re-configurings and agential separability. In this regard – agential separability does not separate things apart, but together. Even what is perceived of as “other” is part of us relationally and materially.

I see a new materialist informed ethics as a balance between acknowledging relationality and emergence, while following Stengers’ call to “cultivate risky attachments as a mode of attending”

(Instone & Taylor, 2015, p. 146) to differences that matter. Risk is a leap into possibility – an and – that allows thinking to “spill out beyond the safety of our pre-existing theories and questions”

(Instone & Taylor, 2015, p. 146). This kind of thinking is speculative and tied to a feminist desire to

25 recognize situated knowledges that attend to the social, material, cultural, and historical trajectories that combine to create an event while at the same time recognizing that relata do not proceed relations.

Such a stance is reminiscent of another of Haraway’s concepts – the sticky knot. Taylor (2013) discusses Haraway’s notions of sticky knots that “require continual grapplings without the promise of a resolution” (p. 83). This is where the new materialisms maintain their feminist tendings.

Åsberg, Thiele and van der Tuin (2015) ask new materialists to reconsider a feminist orientation through “feminist criticality and contextualized, embedded and embodied perspectives”

(p. 151). This contextualized and embodied perspective does not rule out the opportunity to speculate on how the future could be; feminist thought has always been speculative. But at the same time it is necessarily grounded in situated knowledges and contexts while projecting toward a different world through “becoming-with-context, situated knowledges and speculative alter- worlding” (Åsberg, Thiele & van der Tuin, 2015, p. 164). Through speculative alter-worlding, materialist feminisms “envision a different difference from within” an inherited context (Åsberg,

Thiele & van der Tuin, 2015, p. 160).

I see this speculative alter-worlding as an and. And I think that this and is where emergence meets emergency: what matters? What is excluded from mattering? How is it excluded? How do we affirm difference? How could the world be? Radically, these other worlds are relationally (materially) connected to this one. As Seghal (2014) argues, “Worlding in a feminist sense asks what kind of material-semiotic world-making practices are at stake and for whom would such a symbiosis of bodies and meanings matter [?]” (p. 165).

Asking for whom a symbiosis of bodies and meaning matter is in tune with Latour’s move away from matters of fact toward matters of concern. Matters of concern are “situated, specific, and interdependent” (Blaise, Hamm & Iorio, 2016, p. 3) and resonate with Haraway’s notion of

26 response-ability. Blaise, Hamm & Iorio (2016) describe Haraway’s notion of response-ability as

“always experienced in the company of significant others…and lies not within a set of universal principles, but in everyday practices and imaginative politics that rearticulate all kinds of relations”

(p. 2). Response-ability is not about “obligation” or “intentionality,” it is rather emergent and born within the event of coming together. A way to make room for responsibility and attending to matters of concern is to develop curiosity. For Haraway (2008) “Curiosity should nourish situated knowledges and their ramifying obligations” (p. 289). I see curiosity, a desire for experimentation, and speculative thought (feminist-worlding) as threads running through new materialisms. Deleuze’s notions of the virtual, actual, and difference inform these theoretical orientations.

Stir the Virtual (Deleuze’s Difference, Actual & Virtual)

Deleuze’s notion of difference supports a movement away from the metaphysics of individualism, and his development of the actual and virtual supports how I understand emergence.

Deleuze (1994) engages difference as the force behind the creative becoming of the world and he critiques how we normally recognize difference based on prior resemblance or identity that makes difference always appear as negative (as in different from). He spends much of his book Difference and

Repetition rallying against this conception of difference, which he claims plagues philosophy from

Plato on down to the current day. Instead, Deleuze begins with difference as primary, as being, rather than secondary. In this regard, Deleuze’s ontology is not concerned with what is (with discrete forms of identity as being) but as an approach to experimentation – a way of probing what might be. Deleuze’s might be exists virtually in all instances but as a virtuality cannot be known until after it emerges.

Deleuze (1994) discusses the process of difference emerging through two terms

(pronounced the same but with different spellings): differentiation and differenciation (1994). For

Deleuze (1994), the actualized expression of virtual intensities is differenciation (with a ‘c’) (1994, p.

209-212). I see differenciation as individuated difference – the process of materialization through which an event emerges. What’s important about Deleuze’s philosophy, however, is that the world’s becoming does not stop with actualization. For Deleuze, whatever emerges as an event in turn has the ability to modify virtual potentials: a process which he calls differentiation. So differenciation and differentiation operate simultaneously in all events, but only one is actual (although according to

Deleuze, both are ‘real’). For Deleuze, the virtual “possesses a full reality by itself” it is “real without being actual, differentiated without being differenciated, and complete without being entire” (p. 211; p. 214). Barad

(2015) exemplifies the dynamism between the virtual actual when it states, “virtuality is the materiality wandering/wonderings of nothingness; virtuality is the ongoing thought experiment that the world preforms with itself…” (p. 396). And Manning (2016) states, “[t]he virtual is never opposite to the actual – it is how the actual resonates beyond the limits of its actualization” (p. 29).

For Manning this operates as a “relational field of emergent experience” where there is no pre- established hierarchy and no preconstituted subject-positions, there are only “emergent relations” (p.

29). All relations, as and the events they constitute have virtual potential – what emerges in actuality stirs the virtual, and vice versa.

And this is where Deleuze’s thought can become practical and can be experimented with in educational research through a focus on experimenting with problems rather than seeking solutions.

Similarly, rather than political activism rectifying problems of the past, Grosz (2004) argues that it should be “augmented with those dreams of the future that make its projects endless, unattainable, ongoing experiments rather than solutions” (Grosz, 2004, p. 14). Experimentation rather than finding solutions is a theoretical orientation that informs much feminist new materialist scholarship.

May (2005) states, “Solutions present themselves as stable identities whereas problems (at least the worthwhile ones) present themselves as ‘open fields’ or ‘gaps’ or ‘ontological folds.’ Problems are inexhaustible, while solutions are a particular form of exhaustion” (p. 85). In that regard problems are always virtual while solutions actual in the Deleuzian sense. To think in terms of problems – to problematize – rather than find solutions is a method of experimentation that drives this dissertation.

How do you think in terms of problems? Lure Feeling. Propose.

Whitehead’s (1978) propositions inform my attempts to stir the virtual and lure feeling in this dissertation. According to Whitehead (1978), a proposition is a “…new kind of entity. Such entities are the tales that perhaps might be told about particular actualities” (p. 256). For Whitehead a proposition acts as a hybrid between potentiality and actuality – they are hints at what could be, and as Manning argues (2013) are always immanent to an event. As Whitehead outlines, propositions allow us to feel what may be, in that regard they are “lures for feeling” (p. 25). For Whitehead it is through ‘feeling’ that new potentialities emerge within inherited contexts so a proposition’s lure is an important component in guiding the “concrescence of feelings” (p. 185). In that regard, propositions describe how events emerge – it is through ‘feeling’ that new potentialities actualize and are recognized within an inherited context. I find Whitehead particularly interesting when he argues that even a non-conformal (untrue!) proposition’s “primary role” is to “pave the way along which the world advances into novelty” (p. 187). He states, “…it is more important for a proposition to be interesting than it to be true” (p. 259). Bennett (2010) explains, that Latour’s notion of a proposition,

“has no decisionistic power but is a lending of weight, an incentive toward, a pressure toward the direction of one trajectory rather than another” (p. 103). Like Whitehead, Latour (1999) does not use

29 the term proposition in an epistemological sense (as in deciding whether a statement is true or false) but rather in an ontological sense that considers “what an actor offers other actors” through events

(p. 309).

Manning (2008) uses Whitehead’s notion of propositions to discuss newness or novelty not as “…something never before invented, but a set of conditions that tweak experience in the making” (6). Further to this she argues that to “map thought in advance of its speculative propositions would diminish the force of study and reduce the operation to the status of the creation of false problems and badly stated questions” (Manning, 2016, p. 41). Each of these philosophers argue for an emergent approach where propositions act as a kind of bridge between pure potentiality and actuality (I see this as similar to Deleuze’s differentiation and differenciation).

Once these potentials are actualized (in an event) new propositions immediately emerge (creating a new hybrid between actual and speculative/virtual), and the pattern continues. As Whitehead (1978) states, “[e]vidently new propositions come into being with the creative advance of the world” (p.

259). Propositions follow propositions but not in a pre-determined way. For Massumi (2011) the method for productive speculative-pragmatic use of the virtual is to never separate the virtual from the “in-act” (p. 16). In this way, the virtual is always coincident with an event. Not as a dichotomy, but as a “creative differential” (p. 16). This is a kind of paradoxical thinking – but Massumi suggests not a paradox that needs to be resolved, rather affirmed.

In order to go further in discussing affirmation, I need to explain Nietzsche’s eternal return and affirmation of chance and how it figures into my understanding of emergence.

Affirm Chance (Nietzsche’s eternal return and difference)

To affirm is to experiment, without any assurances about the results of one’s experimenting. It is to explore the virtual, rather than to cling to the actual ~May, 2005, p. 65

In 1885, Nietzsche positied the notion of the eternal return,2 referred to in The Gay Science as the heaviest burden, wherein a demon posed the question to Zarathustra: (1999). The eternal return is sometimes conceptualized as sameness forever returning or interpreted as a deterministic view of life as ongoing drudgery. Conversely, Deleuze (1994; 2006) takes up Nietzsche’s eternal return, not as an endless repetition of sameness but as a “belief of the future, a belief in the future” (Deleuze, 1994, p.

90, italics mine). In this reading of Nietzsche, it is not sameness that returns, but difference, and it does so through affirmation.

Affirmation in this sense does not work in a predetermined way, nor it is an affirmation that says yes because it can’t say no. The ‘yes’ that can’t say no is the yes of the character of the donkey in

Thus Spake Zarathustra who bears burdens because it believes it has to: it is a reactive sort of affirmation, rather than an active affirmation. According to Deleuze (2006) the donkey’s affirmation is a caricature of affirming “precisely because it says yes to everything which is no;” the donkey puts up with nihilism and perpetuates the “the power of denying – which is like a demon whose every burden it carries” (p. 185). Conversely, for Deleuze, an affirmation that knows how to say no but still says yes has conquered nihilism. This kind of affirmation is creative. Following Deleuze, Manning

(2016) describes affirmation as a “the creative force of a reorientation of the event” (Manning, 2016, p. 201). Notably, this creative force isn’t attached to a human agent but emerges with the event. This

2 Nietzsche’s eternal return will be explored and affirmed at length in Chapter 3.

“[a]ffirmation creates the trajectory, and from there the potential of the what else emerges” (Manning,

2016, p. 203). In this way affirmation is future orientated, and speculative.

Affirmation cuts into becoming to create being. This being is always more-than. It is an emergent constellation before it is a form. The field does not begin and end in form: it erupts into form, and then dephases into new processes that create an opening for new deviations. Speciations abound and with them fugitive publics take form and then move along… emerge and disappear… (Manning, 2016, p. 229).

Manning’s allusion to speciation above refers to her notion that “species” means species of events

(2013). Through describing iterations of events as a species, Manning ruptures the humanist logics of categorization. For Manning, speciation is the vitality that emerges from the event of two or more individuals (human and/or non-human) coming together, it does not belong to any of the individuals but arrives through their ongoing intra-actions and in the difference produced through their coming together.

Nietzsche, according to Deleuze (2006), asserted that in order to acknowledge the differential potential within an event we should affirm chance: “To know how to affirm chance is to know how to play” (Nietzsche in Deleuze 2006, p. 26). Nietzsche conceives of this as the dice throw: throw and affirm chance, and whatever the combination of the landing, affirm what is actualized (Deleuze, 2006, p. 25-26). Affirming chance means recognizing and seizing the political potential that emerges from an event. For Massumi (2015) this is an enactment of as

“[m]icropolitics, affective politics, seeks the degrees of openness in of any situation, in hopes of priming an alter-accomplishment,” (Massumi, 2015, p. 58) in this regard activating a situation in a way that allows previously unfelt potentialities to arise is a political gesture. Here the use of micropolitics does not necessarily mean small, but refers to situational, local modulations, and a future- thinking in a given event that could begin small but have far reaching consequences.

Each moment is an event, a singularity full of other potentials. Each pedagogical encounter is an event, a singularity full of other potentials. Each data cut is an event, a singularity full of other potentials. Affirmation is a creative force that drives the political trajectory of an event. For Manning

(2016) “Affirmation is the push, the pull that keeps things unsettled, a push that ungrounds, unmoors, even as it propels” (p. 202). Affirmation is agitation. In this outlook to affirm is to unburden, to use excess to “invent new forms of life” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 185).

If we take seriously that at each moment new events are erupting then there is an ongoing political dimension to living. For Massumi (2015) differing bodies will respond differently to the same event. An event can not be predetermined. But what’s left is a “reservoir of political potential”

(Massumi, 2015, p. 57) emergent with each event. Quoting from Levinas, Barad (2007) states that if

“responsibility is not a commitment that a subject chooses but rather an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness, ‘an obligation which is anachronistically prior to every

3 engagement” (p. 392) then responsibility emerges within events . This ethics is not about responding

‘correctly’ in the face of an exteriorized ‘human’ other(s): it is an ongoing recognition of and

4 responsibility before the relationalities and events we emerge among. &

3 Barad (2007) argues that a humanist ethics “won’t suffice when the ‘face’ of the other that is looking ‘back’ at me is all eyes, or has no eyes, or is otherwise unrecognizable in human terms” (p. 392). 4 Bunch (2014) shows how Levinas’ response to “radical dehumanization” is an “ethical humanism of the other” (p. 34). But in my limited readings of Levinas, this ‘other’ appears to require a recognizable ‘face’ (e.g. Bobby the dog who Levinas encountered in a concentration camp.) This face maintains a humanist ethics where something – the non-faced – is always excluded.

Chapter 2

Techniques for Emergent Methods

Research methods choreograph reality in important ways—predetermining the scope of what can exist, dictating what can be discovered and how, and enlisting researchers in the reproduction of certain dominant ontological coordinates” (Reinart, 2016, p. 106)

Method is the means of that knowledge which regulates the collaboration of all the faculties. It is therefore the manifestation of a common sense…and presupposes a good will as though this were a ‘premeditated decision’ of the thinker (Deleuze, 1994, p. 165).

I consider methodologies to be the bodies of knowledge, theories, and frameworks that inform research methods, the practice of research, and the analysis and writing of research. In the three research-creation chapters that follow this one (Chapters 3, 4, and 5) I will foreground the specific

‘methods’ used in each chapter. Here, I will discuss how theories of emergence inform my orientation to methods, offer a literature review on other educational scholars who organized empirical studies based on new materialist theories, and address some more-than-representational concerns.

In the past decade, new materialist theories have begun to influence qualitative research in the social sciences and specifically education (Springgay & Truman, 2017; Snaza, Sonu, Truman &

Zaliwska, 2016; Springgay, 2016, Rotas & Springgay, 2015; Renold & Ringrose, 2011; Coleman &

Ringrose, 2013; Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; Lather, 2013 & St. Pierre, 2013a; MacLure, 2013a).

Springgay and Zaliwska (2016) ask how as educators “being attuned to the agency of all matter offers a way of looking at how pedagogy is constituted as material, affective, and in rhythm” (p. 4).

Springgay’s (2008) research into the potential of transmateriality and touch in arts education, Hickey-

Moody’s (2013) approaches to pedagogy that “mobilize a being [or bloc] of sensation to interrogate the affective forces produced by art,” and Ellsworth’s (2005) discussion of a “moment’s hinge” for transitioning between “movement/sensation and thought,” offer further examples of how the affective intensities in pedagogical encounters are complex, relational and “felt” before being cognized and named by a particular body (Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 92; Ellsworth, 2005, p. 8).

Education scholars have questioned whether we’ve entered a post-qualitative era where positivism is challenged, humanist representational logic is no longer esteemed, and research methods unfold in situ rather than being prescribed in advance (St. Pierre, 2016; Koro-Ljungberg &

MacLure, Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Springgay & Truman, 2017). Jackson and Mazzei (2013) argue that qualitative researchers need to put “philosophical concepts to work” by “thinking with theory” and showing how theory and practice “constitute or make one another” (p. 5). Jackson and Mazzei show how reading data instances through a specific theorist’s writings create “new knowledge” and reveal the “suppleness” of data, which in turn extends and affects the methodology, the method, and the data (p.5). Reading data through different apertures is akin to what Barad (2007) calls diffractive reading. According to Barad (2013) "...diffraction allows you to study both the nature of the apparatus and also the object,” or both the methodology and the “data” (p. 52). Seen in this light, a method is not a static framework applied to static data; both are mutable and affect each other.

These theories arrive in part as a response to the rise in positivism in recent years in education. St.

Pierre (2011) states, that in spite of positive orthodoxy in the field of education there should be a

“renewed commitment to a reimagination of social science inquiry enabled by postmodernism,” (p. 613).

However, she cautions that before a researcher puts a theory to work, they should of course study it.

More recently, St. Pierre (2016) has motioned for a moratorium on teaching research methods courses in graduate school and calls for us to instead prioritize a rigorous engagement with new materialist theories that wrestle with ontological and epistemological questions, and then attempt to apply them into research practices. I agree with St. Pierre and contend that the field of educational research can benefit from new materialisms and their critique of foundationalism and absolutism, as well as many new materialists’ and post-structuralists’ refusal to offer closed representations and readings on ‘data.’

I’ve written data in scare quotes because although I use the term throughout this dissertation

I’m not using it in a conventional sense. Regarding the post-qualitative or new materialist turn in research methods, St. Pierre (2013a) wonders if we might need to abandon ‘data’ altogether. If we do away with data as an idea or term we will probably end up with another one that holds the same authority. I continue to use the term data but want to dislodge it from being thought of as something that is intact waiting to be discovered. Instead of conceptualizing data as something that pre-exists the research process that can be collected and represented as an objective reality, or as

MacLure (2013a) aptly criticizes an “…inert and indifferent mass waiting to be in/formed and calibrated by our analytic acumen or our coding systems” (p. 660). I see research as a series of inventive practices that “intervene, disturb, intensify or provoke a heightened sense of the potentiality of the present” (Sheller, 2015, p. 134). I don’t rename or consider getting rid of empirical data. Rather, I want to think and do data differently. Most significantly, my dissertation contributes to this area of thought. While increasingly researchers have used diffraction and other new materialist theories to re-think data, much of this scholarship has been applied to data that was collected using conventional qualitative methods (Springgay & Truman, 2017). For example, using decades old interview scripts to read diffractively. My research proposes important ways to generate

(not collect) research-creation events that remain open to diffractive productions. As such images

36 that are entangled in the dissertation have no captions. They are not ‘data,’ but thought-experiments that mesh and felt with the writing produced here.

In the dissertation, I do not practice coding and categorization. Instead I think-with research-creation events and consider how they engender further thought. The research events and the (re)presentation of research events activate what MacLure (2013a) calls a “forward motion of becoming” where I can ‘surf’ on the intensity of the event “in order to arrive somewhere else” (p.

662). While new materialist informed qualitative inquiry is surging in educational research, many uptakes of new materialism consist in writing about new materialisms, or the using new materialisms to ‘analyze’ data that was previously collected using traditional qualitative means for example interviews. Before you say that a radical empiricist stance demonstrates that ‘theory’ and ‘empirical data’ are both material forces that can affect each other, or that through new materialisms data chunks are not static but constantly reformed through intra-active, ongoing boundary-making- drawing practices, and agential separabities (each of which are ideas that I agree with), I want to continue to repeat the nagging feeling I get from educational uptakes of new materialisms: we still tend to collect data using traditional qualitative means like interviews, observation, photography, and then use new materialist informed methods (schizoanalysis, diffraction, propositions, diagramming, ecologies) to analyze data. This is similar to when arts-based research in education uses traditional qualitative methods to collect data and then represents it using an ‘art’ form. The reason this nags at me is that it treats data, as I’ve said above, as if it were pre-formed and sitting waiting to be discovered and coded. Even if that coding-system is new materialist informed. The second nag, and more significant concern is that in much educational uptakes of new materialisms the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and class is often left out.

So in thinking with new materialisms and with method I asked myself: how do I activate an emergent research method that self-institutes itself to attend to differences that matter, and ethico- political concerns? How can I cultivate conditions for experimentation?

Recognizing differences that matter and ethico-political concerns

According to Manning (2016) when embarking on a research project, thought should not be mapped on to practices in advance. Rather, she states, thought is an “emergent, incipient tendency to be discovered in the field of activation of practices co-composing” (Manning, 2016, p. 41). This approach reminds me of Sedgwick’s notion of a weak theory in contrast to Tomkin’s description of a strong theory. Following Tomkins, a strong theory, as outlined by Sedgwick (2003), is not “how well it avoids negative affect or finds positive affect, but the size and topology of the domain that it organizes” (2003, p. 134). In this regard, a strong theory is ‘paranoid,’ seeks to avoid ‘surprise’ through aiming for consistency, recognisablity, and knowability. Conversely, Sedgwick’s weak theory, as understood by Stewart (2008) is “[t]heory that comes unstuck from its own line of thought to follow the objects it encounters, or becomes undone by its attention to things that just don’t add up but take on a life of their own as problems for thought” (p. 72). A weak theory is emergent, affective and affected, mutable. And in these characteristics it has a strength. I’m interested in things that don’t add up and take on a life of their own as problems of thought. This is articulated by Stengers

(2011) when she poses the question “Who is, or will be, affected, and how?” (p. 62). This question needs to be repeated throughout a research process and each time a new ‘reading’ is completed on

‘data.’

Stir the Virtual

Conventional educational research typically strives for certainty and pre-determined outcomes (St.

Pierre, 2016). My own method for overcoming the urge to not determine outcomes came through thinking with speculative pragmatism and research-creation. Manning (2016) argues that speculative pragmatism takes its starting point the “rigour of experimentation” (p. 63). Speculative pragmatism is speculative in that it is open and pragmatic in that it’s rooted in events. According to Manning speculative pragmatism “is interested in the anarchy in the heart of process,” is propositional, and is interested in what excess can do (p. 63). Manning discusses how the common academic mode of positioning ourselves as researchers, stops the process of research and too often becomes the

“death-knell” of creative acts (p. 63). She argues another kind of position needs to be taken, one that

“erupts from the midst, one that engages sympathetically with the unknowable at the heart of difference, one that heeds the uneasiness of an experience that cannot yet be categorized” (p. 64).

The middle is crucial, otherwise we return to the position of framing from the outside what we already know, aligning ourselves and our work with disciplinary methods and institutional powers.

These bold statements are followed by caveats: engaging directly in process is messy, directly felt, and risky. However, they will “create a process, and it is this process that will have made a difference, for it will have made felt the urge of appetition” (Manning, 2016, p. 64).

Appetition pops up in Manning’s writing, as well as Shaviro and of course Whitehead. I understand appetition as a yearning toward futurity – a hunger of sorts. In that way it’s related to the conjunction and (and other conjunctions if you like). But it’s important not to see the and and other conjunctions like plus or toward as functioning between two static objects. Instead, as James states,

“while we live in such conjunctions our state is one of transition in the most literal sense” (as cited in

Manning, 2016, p. 65). Along with allowing myself to experiment and explore how and operates, my

39 methods are also informed by an urge to slow down. Perhaps fittingly, each of the research-creation events in this dissertation use walking as an element in the research, and walking is often conceptualized as a slow practice.

Slow (Problematize. Agitate)

Stengers (2005) discusses Herman Melville’s character Bartleby in Bartleby, the Scrivner: A Story of Wall

Street as a character that induces slowness. Bartleby is a law copyist who behaves like a kind of idiot who infuriates all the other characters in the story by only stating, “I would prefer not to” when asked to complete any task. Bartleby performs frictional agitation that undermines the ways the other characters are used to moving, and are used to the world moving. Stengers, following Deleuze uses Bartleby to argue for a politics of slowness. For Stengers (2005) a politics of slowness “resist[s] the consensual way in which the situation is presented” (p. 994). Such a politics is a frictional politics

(Puar, 2007), and similar to Tuana’s (2008) viscous porosity, does not allow for an easy flow away from

“sites of resistance and opposition” (p. 194). A politics of slowness demands instead that decisions

“take place somehow in the presence of those who will bear their consequences” (Haraway, 2008, p.

83). This is the ethico-political cusp of research. To consider those who will bear the consequences even though they are undetermined as yet. Practicing slowness according to Haraway (2008) requires

“speculative invention, and ontological risks” (p. 83). And this practice is an emergent one in that no one can know how to enact these movements in “advance of coming together in composition”

(Haraway, 2008, p. 83). Hultman and Taguchi (2010) ask, “If we understand ourselves as emerging from our co-existence with the world, what implications does this bring to methodology?” (p. 534).

It requires us to problematize – question rather than find solutions, use the conjunctive and; slow down, and research-create.

Research-Creation

The following three chapters think-with three research-creation projects. Research-creation (written with a hyphen) draws attention to the conjunctive at work in its process. Instead of perpetuating an idea of art as separate from thinking, the hyphenation of research-creation engenders “concepts in- the-making” which is a process of “thinking-with and across techniques of creative practice”

(Manning and Massumi, 2014, p. 88-89). Research-creation can be thought of as “…the complex intersection of art, theory, and research” (Truman and Springgay, 2015, p. 152). The description I just gave of research-creation could be used to describe most forms of arts-based research.

However, unlike some arts-based approaches to research that use artistic media as ways of disseminating or representing qualitative research findings, research-creation is concerned with what

Manning and Massumi (2014) call a “…mutual interpenetration of processes rather than a communication of product” (p. 88-89, italics mine).

Typically, in educational research, research sites are approached as if there is something already happening that we want to investigate. Because of my emphasis on emergence, I didn’t seek out pre-existing data within pre-existing data sets, or data sites. Rather, I engaged with research- creation practices with three sets of participants in three different situations. In using research- creation, I take a new materialist view of creativity and agency, and recognize that they are as Karen

Barad (2007) states, “attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual”

(p. 23). Such a view is a departure from the anthropocentric approach prevalent in much educational research.

Parikka (2011) argues that along with recognizing theory as situated practice, we should consider, “…practice as theory. Practices are in themselves theoretical excavations into the world of

‘things,’ objects of (cultural) research conducted in a manner that makes the two inseparable” (p.

34). In research-creation, rather than representing research ‘data’ through art/writing, the process of art/writing (the research-event) is part of the research and theorizing. McCormack (2008) describes research-creation as involving “…an ethical commitment to learning to become affected…by the relational movement of bodies, and a political [commitment] borne of the claim that we can never determine in advance the kinds of relational matrices of which bodies are capable of becoming involved” (McCormack 2008, p. 9). As such, Manning and Massumi (2014) state that research- creation is an “experimental practice” that “embodies technique toward catalyzing an event of emergence” (p. 89) that cannot be predicted or determined in advance.

jagodzinski and Wallin (2013) ask researchers to consider the “task of arts research as a will-to- falseness” which would advocate a, “style of thinking oriented less to production than to a kind of vigorous experimentation through which new forms of inquiry and becoming might flow” (p. 166).

For jagodzinski and Wallin research is an invention rather than a discovery (of an already waiting truth). Through invention, or research-creation, something new is added to the world. This line of thinking argues that theory cannot be put into practice. Rather, theory is practice (jagodzinski and

Wallin, 2013 in passim.) Thus, practicing research-creation is a “[t]ransversal activation of the relational fields of thinking and doing” (Manning, 2015, p. 65).

In organizing the three research-creation projects for this dissertation I drew from Braidotti

(2013) who argues to “…experiment with new practices that allow for a multiplicity of possible instances – actualizations and counter actualizations – of different lines of becoming” (Braidotti,

2013, p. 140). In preparing for the research-creation events and thinking about how to cultivate conditions for experimentation I used “enabling constraints” (Davis, Sumara, & Luce-Kapler, 2008).

Enabling constraints refer to the act of viewing ‘constraining’ features of an event as productive rather than limiting. An enabling constraint could be something as simple as an instruction on the

42 location of a walk, the rhyme structure of a poem, or the requirement to work in a pair. But can also include things we can’t predict – for example the weather, getting lost on a trail, or deciding to be attentive to ethico-political concerns as they arrive. In this regard, enabling constraints although seemingly fixed at the beginning of a research-creation project are tweaked throughout the research- creation project as events emerge. As demonstrated in the descriptions of the projects in the following three chapters, initial enabling constraints were shared-discussed-proposed with participants during each research-creation project.

Thinking-with rather than writing-up

I did not want to fall back into traditional coding methods in ‘writing up’ the three projects in this dissertation. In order to continue to disrupt the logic of proceduralism in qualitative research I knew

I needed to consider how to continue to research-create in the dissemination of my research. This thinking-with event began in my home where I surrounded myself with loose leaf poems, maps, videos, post cards, marginalia, photographs and field notes from the three research-creation projects.

The materials were overwhelming in both their presence and absence: there was so much there, and also so much not visible.

I began to separate or ‘cut’ things together-apart (Barad, 2007) to see what emerged. (The idea of cutting together-apart was discussed in Chapter 1 where agential separability does not separate things apart, but together). Springgay and Zaliwska (2015) take up Barad’s notion of an agential cut as a way of approaching writing up research-creation projects. They state, “Cutting is a process of entering data to disrupt stratifying tendencies. Cutting does not merely separate data into parts that comprise a whole, rather cutting is a practice of interference” (p. 137). Cutting challenges

43 representational thought in that it’s clear that I as researcher am co-creating and entangled with this process.

But I was still stuck on how to move forward in writing-with (rather than merely about) the three research-creation projects. I knew that whatever I did was going to entangle me into the process, so inspired by my interest in propositions and the Fluxus Movement’s idea of an event score, I drafted Scripts to active my own thinking and encourage experimentation in thinking-with the projects and write-up dissertation.

The Fluxus Movement, an experimental performance art group in the 60’s produced event scores which were scripts that could be performed (like a music score). Phillips (2015) writes that

“scoring is a technique of eventing through lines of writing” (p. 133). A script does not have set order of activation, it begins in the middle and “is process-oriented, not thing-oriented” (Halprin, cited in Phillips, p. 133). A script in theatre is a series of actions listed out for actors to perform.

Scripts are embellished, often with marginalia or actors’/directors’ notes and mutable. O’Rourke

(2013) outlines several “Walking Protocols” from contemporary art which are similar to scripts or scores where a “protocol is a set of rules that an artist establishes to realize an artwork. It is a statement of intention and informs the viewer’s understanding of the results” (p.49). During my interactions with the data and the scripts various other questions and ethico-political concerns emerged. Each of the scripts that accompany the research-creation events will be discussed below.

And I also wrote one to address the write-up process itself:

Resist the temptation to measure and add things up.

Use deviant (frictive) theories.

Distance and proximity: Forgo universalism. Attend to particularism.

Experiment. Propose. &

As discussed in the previous chapter, propositions act as hybrids between potentiality and actuality – they propose what could be. Scripts function propositionally in that through operating they offer a

“…set of conditions that tweak experience in the making” (Manning, 2008, p. 6). Thinking with the scripts helped me during the write up so I didn’t fall into categorization and codification, but rather continued to think propositionally.

I view the Scripts as part of my apparatus of research production, which draws from Haraway’s discussions of an apparatus and Barad’s extension of her thinking into discussions of boundary drawing practices. Haraway’s notion of (1988) “apparatuses of bodily production” (p. 595) comes from her readings of King (1987) who coined the term “apparatus of literary production” (Haraway, 1988, p.

595). For King, an apparatus of literary production emerges in the intersection between art, business, and technology (Haraway, 1988). From this matrix literature is born in the form of poems or other bodies. Haraway extends this thinking to include the production and reproduction of other bodies

(acknowledging that biological ‘bodies’ may not be produced the same way poems are). Haraway introduces the term “material-semiotic actor” to conceptualize all objects of knowledge as active,

‘meaning-generating’ parts of the apparatus of bodily production. It should be understood that

Haraway’s designation of texts or biological bodies (or research events) as objects of knowledge does not imply that they are static or pre-exist the research event, rather “[t]heir boundaries materialize in social interaction” (p. 595, italics in original).

Haraway’s notion of apparatus features in Barad’s writings on diffraction and “boundary- drawing practices” or agential cuts (Barad, 2007, p. 140). And Barad has expanded these themes significantly through her use of quantum theories and her conceptualization of agential realism. For

Barad (2007) in her agentic realist view, the world’s basic ontological units are not bounded individual entities, but phenomena that imply “the ontological inseperability/entanglement of intra- acting agencies” (p. 139). As such, agential realism is not focused on interactions between pre-

45 existing bounded entities, rather it focuses on the boundary making practices that emerge within an event’s or phenomena’s ongoing and ever-changing intra-action. As such, boundaries themselves and the objects they demarcate do not wholly preexist the event. Boundaries are provisional, generative, and risky. In the research-creation projects, the Scripts operate as part of the apparatus of research production and enact boundaries. However, they do not draw boundaries in advance of but during the research event(s). The ethico-political matters of concern that arise in the projects are not data captures or cuts but phenemona – that in turn re-gig and re-draw the boundaries of what appears and matters.

As far as reading ‘data’ is concerned, my approach throughout this dissertation is what Barad

(2007) calls diffractive. I take up diffraction both theoretically and materially in chapter 3. But I will give a brief overview here. A diffractive reading is “syncretic” (Trifonas, 2011, p. 71). By that I mean it is an interdisciplinary approach to ‘reading’ across theories including feminism, post-structuralism, queer theory, critical race theory, and the life sciences. For Barad (and Haraway) diffraction is a critical response to the idea of reflection: diffraction challenges representationalism in that it doesn’t posit objects (or relata) as pre-existing their encounters – and as such they cannot be ‘mirrored’ or

‘represented’ through language. Diffraction attends to difference rather than sameness. Diffraction is a productivist reading rather than a critique that makes the “effects of different differences evident”

(Barad, 2007, p. 88). This feeds into Barad’s larger process of agential realism, where agency is distributed across relations and bodies and consequently not solely a human possession. Because in agential realism relata do not precede their relations but are produced through intra-actions it becomes a way of “understanding the world from within and as part of it” (Barad, 2007, p. 88).

What this means for research is that the researcher is part of the apparatus that produces the phenomena or event. With this comes a responsibility for the researcher to acknowledge, “which

46 differences matter, how they matter, and for whom” (2007, p. 90). This is the ethico-political thrust of Barad’s theory and diffractive reading-writing. That we are part of the research events we create.

Attending to representational issues

The walking practices, writings, and research-creation projects considered in this dissertation could be difficult to re-present here due to their performative nature and refusal to conform to object oriented data collection, archival and representational procedures. Walking as an action is difficult to

“capture.” Schneider’s (2011) discussion of the performative arts challenges the Western logic of documentation and asks researchers to investigate how performances or embodied experiences although vanishing in some ways also “remain differently,” perhaps corporeally or affectively in

“body-to-body transmission” (Schneider 2011, p. 98-99). Schneider questions several of the predominant tenants of qualitative research into movement and performance studies and critiques the “phallocentric insistence…” that if performed practices such as walking are “…not visible, given to documentation or sonic recording, or otherwise housable within an archive,” they are lost (2011, p.101). Schneider ponders whether our understanding of the uncapturability of events is

“predetermined by our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive?” (p. 98, italics mine).

Derrida (1995) explicates how the term archive derives from arkheion: “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded” (p. 2). While an archive represents a physical (or virtual) space that houses ‘objective’ documentation of past

‘events,’ it also has inherent within the name the notion of authority regarding who can archive, who has access to the archive, and who can interpret the archive. Much qualitative research remains framed within our cultural habituation to the logic of the archive, yet as Derrida shows, there are

47 aporias in archival logic, the first being as Derrida states “…what is archivable – that is, the content of what has to be archived is changed by the technology,” (Derrida, 2002, p. 46) and “archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Derrida, 1995, p. 17). In Archive Fever (1995), Derrida highlights the aporetic process of documentation by describing how through using archival procedures we seek to preserve an object or experience by removing it from circulation, seek to legitimize an event by naming and recording it, seek to forget an event through remembering it in another form, and seek to seal the meaning of something that can never be closed (Derrida, 1995, p.

40). Similar to his readings of linguistic or cultural texts, Derrida shows that although a version of archival logic is predominant in our culture, its own logic is flawed: “…The archivist always produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out to the future…” instead of sealing meaning archival procedures produce more meanings (1995, p. 45).

Derrida revises the “conventional idea which insists that writing is a representation of speech, reality or lived experience” (Norris, 1997, p. 121). While Derrida’s (1974) notion of archi-writing confounds logocentrisim, and the common division between writing and speech – where speech is seen as more ‘authentic’ and writing only a supplement or poor afterthought of representation. For

Derrida, archi-writing is the ‘language’ that writing/speech emerge from, but it’s not fixed or formed and not necessarily word-based. The insights gained from Derrida’s theorizing, are not restricted to human orality, or writing, but also hint at how all inscriptive, or meaning-making practices – including walking-sensing-writing – have within them the impossibility of reaching back to an originary sign (a sign that refers to nothing other than itself). As such, Derrida (1974) critiques what he calls the “metaphysics of presence” (p. 49). The metaphysics of presence presumes that a transcendental signified exists, and that those signifiers that are closest to it are more authentic. Rather than the belief in a transcendental signified which approaches a “theological situation,” Derrida purports that the sign is a structure of difference rather than sameness, and absence rather than

48 presence (Spivak, 1974, p. xvi). For Derrida, signs don’t ‘represent’ life – life is suffused with signs.

We don’t add signs to represent it. Reality is not prior to signification (Culler, 2007), or what Derrida infamously said, and is famously misconstrued on there is no outside of text. This doesn’t mean everything is reduced to being texts. It means there is no transcendental signified. And, if the word is always in process, and in deferral, but seemingly fixed in place by some meaning-making practices, what does that say about other seemingly fixed forms like identity, knowledge, being, and the ongoing return to a metaphysics of presence?

Once we cease viewing walkers, writers, and readers as pre-formed subjects with distinct authorial intentions represented in unambiguous texts, a new materialist informed conception of writing and representation also allows us to consider the emergent qualities of language expression.

As Hayles (2012) states, “[m]ateriality is unlike physicality in being an emergent property. It cannot be specified in advance, as though it existed ontologically as a discrete entity” (p. 91). In this view, language and language-use become part of a horizontal ontology emerging alongside other social- material forces, instead of merely a medium for representing them.

More-than-represent

According to Deleuze (1994), representation “…mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing” (p. 55-56). With the write up of this thesis I encounter another issue present in new materialist approaches to research: a questioning of representational practices. MacLure (2013a) argues that “[r]epresentational thinking still regulates much of what would be considered qualitative research methodology” (p. 658). She discusses how coding and categorizing of data reveal patterns and regularities,” through retroactively making things “stand still” (p. 662). She states:

Representation serves the ‘dogmatic image of thought’ as that which categorizes and judges the world through the administration of good sense and common sense, dispensed by the autonomous, rational and well-intentioned individual, according to principles of truth and error (Maclure, 2013a, p. 659).

Throughout the dissertation, I experiment with more-than-representational approaches to

‘representation,’ both within the enactment of the research-events and this dissemination-event called a dissertation. According to Vannini (2015) more-than-representational (also called non- representational) approaches attempt to, “…enliven rather than report, to render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate, to rupture and reimagine rather than faithfully describe, to generate possibilities of encounter rather than construct representative ideal types” (p. 15). Thrift

(2007) outlines a variety of commonalities in more-than-representational writing including the importance of attending to bodies and affects, a move toward aliveness that hints at excess in everyday life, and an urge toward the experimental. This kind of thinking allows for “the emergence and development of minor paths in thinking, speaking and acting” (Lawlor & Wiame, 2016, p. 3).

This is similar to what Massey (2005) describes when she says that a representation is no longer a fixing in place, but is instead a “continuous production,” “…[n]ot representation but experimentation;” as researchers we don’t represent ethnographic truths, we produce them (Massey

2005, p. 28). In this way writing about research projects is always more than (and less than) the events that occurred. But more importantly, writing is an event itself. Instead of this recognition causing a crisis of representation, I view it as an opening to re-evaluate the methods I used to think- with my research on the affective potential of walking, writing, and reading. I further consider the anarchival (Murphie, 2016) procedures of documentation and representation. Anarchival procedures, rather than offer closure serve “…as a further point in the inquiry process” (O’Donoghue 2010, p.

410). In this regard, the layout of the following chapters highlight features such as scripts and writing

50 styles such as postcards, following Derrida (1987) and Jagger (2014), to experiment with how texts are sent and received as well as with representation.

More-than-representational approaches perform ways of “working (with) worldly relations – relations in which thinking is already entangled – in order to transform or recompose these relations anew” (McCormack, 2015, p. 92). More-than-representational theory has a different approach to the temporality of knowledge than most theories used in educational research. Its theorists are less interested in representing empirical or essential realities that occur before the act of representation than, “…enacting multiple and diverse potentials of what knowledge can become afterwards”

(Vannini, 2015, p. 12). Thus, a more than representational approach to research focuses on animation rather than representation, creation rather than reports, and privileges relations, the sociality of things, ecologies, and constellations. Each re-presentation is a differential cut that creates a new singularity, full of future potentials. As McCormack (2015) states, “thinking…is already empirical” (p. 95). In the dissertation, instead of representing the texts and ‘data’ I view the chapters as new events. Such a view demonstrates how, “[e]xperimenting and theorizing are both dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning” (Barad, 2007, p. 56). Of course, deliberately re-thinking research (re)presentation and having a fixed idea what such an endeavour looks like may produce a new orthodoxy, so I wrote the script (above) to prevent myself from doing that.

On Research-Events

I call the research-creation projects ‘events’ as a way of highlighting how the research unfolded in practice. I conceptualize an event as a multitude of forces interacting. In this interaction the event

51 occurs, rather than an event being described as something that happened to things like people, texts, or animals. As Shaviro (2009) explains, “events do not ‘happen to’ things: rather, events themselves are the only things. An event is not ‘one of [the thing’s] predicates,’ but the very thing itself”

(Shaviro, 2009, p. 25). Similarly, Latour (1999) draws from Whitehead’s understanding of an event to replace the notion of “discovery and its very implausible philosophy of history (in which the object remains immobile while the human historicity of the discoverers receives all the attention)” (p. 306).

For Latour, defining an experiment as an event takes into account the historicity of more-than- human components and circumstances of the encounter. Whitehead expands on this notion at great length with his concept concrescence wherein an event’s concrescence does not occur through an outside human observer’s recognition and attribution of human categories to inanimate matter, but wherein all components at play in an event (including the human) concretize and become recognizable as a singular event (Whitehead, 1978).

Overview of research-creation events

Research-Creation-Event One: Take Thought for a walk - Intratextual Entanglements

Script

Intra-act with a text about walking.

Entangle with an entanglement of a text.

Consider how ideation is related to more-than-individual movement(s).

Attend to differences that matter (attend to margins)

Affirm

Take Thought for a walk - Intratextual Entanglements is a collaborative marginalia project between 33 adult participants orchestrated during 2014-2015. The participants are colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine within the academy or arts community.

In the first phase of the project I mailed each participant a copy of the same text to annotate in the margins or ‘intra-textually entangle’ with using whatever media they chose. Participants then returned the texts to me by post, or in some cases email if the texts had become digital audio and visual files. I made copies of the first round of textual responses, and then sent those texts out again for a second round wherein each participant received a text from someone else in the project to further engage with and then return to me. The organization of who received which text in the second phase was not a pre-planned arrangement. I sent the texts out for the second round based on when they first arrived to me (time-ordered) and based on the convenience of transport (large heavy objects were easier to deliver rather than mail, and digital files were easier to email longer physical distances).

The beginning ‘inter-text’ for this project was assembled from snippets pulled from two separate books by Friedrich Nietszche, translated from German by two separate translators at two separate times (The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common, 1979; and Ecce Homo, translated by

Walter Kaufmann, 1989). The Ecce Homo portion of the assembled text discusses Nietzsche’s walking practice and how he believes walking aids creativity in thinking and writing. The Joyful

Wisdom (Gay Science) is a description of a thought that Nietszche claims came to him during a walk and is one of his more significant philosophical notions—the eternal return.

The research-creation shows the mutability and materiality of texts (and opinions), the ongoing productive potential of texts and group reading-writing practices, as well as the emergent quality of pedagogy produced through the material encounters with intra-acting elements. This does

53 not mean that pedagogy lacks an ethical imperative, but rather the ethics of what becomes pedagogical is emergent in each encounter with a text.

Research-Creation-Event Two: Dérive through these charter’d Halls5

Script

Defamiliarize walking, reading, and writing with students.

Consider movement(s) and pedagogical spaces.

Attend to what’s excluded from mattering.

Attend to what matters.

Respond in movement and text.

Dérive through these charter’d Halls a 4 month in-school research-creation project with eighteen grade 9

English students in Wales, UK. The research-creation project explores how walking as a pedagogical practice affects high school students’ expressive writing and concept creation, how walking and writing can be a way to think through transcorporeal relations to place and ecology, and how walking and writing activate ways to think about the intersectionality of race-gender-power.

During the research-creation project, I met with the students twice a week for lessons in an

‘outdoor classroom’ that we commandeered. Our outdoor classroom was a set of picnic tables beneath umbrellas (the actual ‘outdoor classroom’ was in lecture format and didn’t suit our needs).

5 This title refers to the Situationist International practice of dérive, and a line from Blake’s London that discusses how ‘charted’ and regulated the city and its inhabitants are. The students and I experimented with both the structure of a dérive, and Blake’s poem during the research-creation event.

During the research-creation project, the students and I read poems, maps, and fiction by authors and theorists who conceptualized their work around walking and place. These included:

Harryette Mullen an African-American poet whose year-long walking and writing practice produced the book Urban Tumbleweed (2013); poets Basho, Li Bai, Baudelaire, and Blake; Virginia Woolf’s Street

Haunting; video poems; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. In addition, we invented techniques inspired by The Situationist International’s notion of a psychogeographic dérive (drift) as a method to explore and defamiliarize affects of walking within the school.

The English subject area tasks of reading, writing, while walking in the outdoor classroom attended to many curricular aims that are desirable in schools including – practice of orality and reading aloud, writing techniques, and awareness of form. Ethnographically, the students immediately reported how much they enjoyed walking as part of reading-writing, how the fresh air helped them think, how the freedom to move and the sun on their faces made them feel more creative. All of these elements were important. However, by attending to what ‘mattered’ and was

‘excluded’ from mattering while we completed these tasks new ethico-political questions emerged and provoked new research questions and concerns. These are taken up as the chapter unfolds.

Research-Creation-Event Three: Post cards from Strangers (Make-Strange the long walk)

Script

Go to the land of my ancestors and walk a great distance.

Queer the long walk. Queer landscape.

Post-postcards. More-than-represent.

Attend to absence, presence, inheritance.

Create instead of take.

Post cards from Strangers (Make Strange the long walk) is a research-creation project that took place along

St. Cuthbert’s Way on the border of England and Scotland. St. Cuthbert’s Way is a public walk that runs from Melrose, Scotland to Lindisfarne, England along the border, and across gently rolling mountains, through tiny villages, and through the top end of the windswept Pennines. It tracks the path of 7th century monk, St. Cuthbert. I chose St. Cuthbert’s Way as a site to conduct my research because my family is from that region of Northern England and I have an interest in St. Cuthbert’s

Gospel which is the oldest Western Codex (book) form of the Gospels. The walk is 100kms long and the final 5 kms can only be completed at low tide over the ocean floor causeway to Holy Island’s

Lindisfarne. Hundreds of seals live near the island and bark a magnificent haunting wail that carries over the landscape where pilgrims have sludged through the mud since the 7th century.

This research-creation experimented with the intersections of thinking-making-doing as research creation. The walking, thinking-talking, and writings I completed on the trail were all part of the research-creation. Part of this experiment included leaving postcards in the tradition of

Letterboxing from the 19th Century. Letterboxing was a precursor to geocaching and originally took the form of people leaving writings, addressed to themselves in hidden places on specific walks in

Dartmoor. Other walkers would find the postcards and hopefully post them back to the people who wrote them and left them on the moor, hence the name Letterboxing. Modifying the tradition of

Letterboxing, I travelled along St. Cuthbert’s Way and pinned plastic bags containing blank postcards, postage-paid, and addressed to myself in Canada on wooden posts along the trail. I left a note inside the bag requesting those who found the postcards to write to me, tell me about an event on their own walk along the trail, and post the postcards to my letterbox in Canada. I also penned a series of post-cards to myself that are accompanied by pinhole photographs I took along the walk.

The idea to pen postcards back to myself was based on Derrida’s envois that invoke an ontology of

56 non-arrival. The notion of non-arrival helped me queer my understanding of walking and writing traditions as well as the long walk’s troubled relationship with romanticized landscapes. And the idea of penning postcards to myself as a stranger played on the notion of queer as ‘making-strange’ as well as Derrida’s notion of the arrivant stranger. Could I be hospitable to whatever strange thoughts

‘arrived’ through walking and writing? All of these movements and gestures were part of the research-creation event. &

Chapter 3 Take Thought for a walk - Intratextual Entanglements

…reading a text is not a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather it is a productive use of the literary machine, a montage of desiring machines, a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004, p. 116).

Before reading this chapter, please access the URL: http://sarahetruman.com/dissertation-online- component-for-intratextual-entanglements/. The format of this dissertation does allow not certain forms of ‘text’ (animated gifs, audio, visual) to be embedded within in this document. Intra-action with proliferating forms of texts is an integral part of the ongoing research-creation events discussed in the next three chapters.

Script

Intra-act with a text about walking.

Entangle with an entanglement of a text.

Consider how ideation is related to more-than-individual movement(s).

Attend to differences that matter (attend to margins)

Affirm

This chapter begins with a walk in Switzerland beside Lake Silvaplana. It’s a speculative walk for me in that I was not there. But the walk has been reported on by different scholars in different disciplines for more than a century, in part because the man who took the walk wrote about it, but

58 more importantly because of a specific thought he had during the walk (Gros, 2014; Solnit, 2001).

The man is Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous philosopher. In his book, Ecce Homo (1989) Nietzsche recounts how during a walk along Lake Silvaplana he first conceived his idea of the eternal return:

The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, “6000 feet beyond man and time.” That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me” (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 295).

There is a long history of walking as a method of gathering inspiration for philosophy, art, and writing practices in western Europe. The Peripatetic school meandering beneath the columns

(peripatoi meaning colonnades – or covered walkways) to learn philosophy under the tutelage of

Aristotle; Jean Jacques Rousseau’s writings about walking in Confessions and Reveries of a Solitary

Walker; Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles; the poets Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud and even the piano player Erik Satie were all ‘flâneurs’ of sorts and known for their walking practices

(Gros, 2014). Benjamin (2002) writes, “Basic to flâneire, among other things, is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour” which might sound like a preposterously entitled comment to make (Benjamin, 453). And the list goes on, as Solnit (2001) highlights, the association between walking and philosophizing is also reflected in the names of places such as the Philosophenweg in Heidelberg, where Hegel strolled; the Philosophendamm in

Königsberg, where Kant ambled daily; and and the Philosopher’s Way Kierkegaard referred to.

Heidegger was known for his walks in the Black Forest, and also used walking as a narrative device to structure his Country Path Conversations (2016) wherein a scholar, a scientist and a guide amble along a path and converse about philosophy and the mood of their previous walks on the same path where the “autumnal atmosphere of the path” brought forth a “pensiveness” (p. 2).

The two research-creation chapters following this one take up and critique, the very white male ableist history of walking and its relationship to thought and writing in the west. As such, this chapter does something different. Rather than focusing on walking per se, this chapter thinks-with

Nietzsche’s writings about walking, and a particular thought that emerged from a walk. In thinking and walking with Nietzsche, the participants and I demonstrate cultural productions— artistic, linguistic and philosophical—as material rather than representational practices and explore the productive potential of texts.

The chapter focuses on a multi-participant and multi-media art and philosophy research- creation entitled Intratextual Entanglements. Although philosophy is historically viewed as a linguistic and discursive discipline, the research-creation project began with three propositions:

1. To explore the felt materiality of the various intra-acting elements in the research-creation

(including theories, concepts, people, texts, and artwork)

2. To explore the emergent pedagogy of collaborative reading and writing practices i.e. the

generative nature of (philosophical) texts.

3. To think further with the ethico-political, theoretical, and artistic concerns that emerged

through the intra-actions (Barad, 2007).

Following an overview of the specifics of the Intratextual Entanglement research-creation and an introduction to the new materialist methodology I use to contextualize it, this chapter highlights some of the long history of marginalia in printed texts, and argues for increased attention to its pedagogical significance. After considering the pedagogical importance of traditional forms of annotation, and more traditional approaches to qualitative research, this chapter then explores how group annotation practices, or more radical ‘reading-writing’ practices, affect individuals’ engagements with text. Finally, I discuss my struggle with representational models of research dissemination, while exploring the generative potential of several texts produced within the research-

60 creation. Because the project is based around Nietzsche’s text on the importance walking and movement, they of course feature in the chapter indirectly.

Specifics of the research-creation

Intratextual Entanglements is a collaborative marginalia research-creation event between 33 adult participants orchestrated during 2014-2015. The participants are colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of mine within the academy or arts community and they have consented to have their names are printed as part of the research-creation. In the first phase of the research-creation project

I mailed each participant a copy of the same text to annotate in the margins or ‘intra-textually entangle’ with using whatever media they chose. Participants then returned the texts to me by post, or in some cases email if the texts had become digital audio and visual files. I made copies of the first round of textual responses, and then sent those texts out again for a second round wherein each participant received a text from someone else in the research-creation to further engage with and then return to me. The organization of who received which text in the second phase was not a pre- planned arrangement. I sent the texts out for the second round based on when they first arrived to me (time-ordered) and based on the convenience of transport (large heavy objects were easier to deliver rather than mail, and digital files were easier to email longer physical distances). At the time of writing, I have 60 responses to the research-creation event with six outstanding.

The beginning ‘inter-text’ for this research-creation was assembled from snippets pulled from two separate books by Friedrich Nietszche, translated from German by two separate translators at two separate times (The Joyful Wisdom, translated by Thomas Common, 1979; and Ecce

Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann, 1989). I also took the liberty of moving the titles to the margins. I cut out parts of Nietzsche’s work and made a new ‘text’ physically and conceptually. I

61 consider the assembled inter-text writerly in Roland Barthes’s (1974) sense of the word. A writerly text destabilizes a reader’s expectations and requires them to ‘write’ the text while ‘reading’ it. According to Barthes, “…the writerly text is ourselves writing before the infinite game of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system” (Barthes, 1974, p.

5). Writerly texts’ narrative structure may be disjointed or non-linear and give rise to myriad meanings.

The research-creation’s Nietzschean excerpts are writerly in that the passages are disjointed, intertextual assemblages of what I consider fluctuating as both minor and major concepts in the

Deleuzoguattarian sense drawn from their book Kafka

(1986). According to Brian Massumi (2015), “Analysis of the minor concept and its textual weave offers a singular angle of approach to the text as a whole, from which new thoughts are more apt to emerge” (p. 62).

Massumi suggest that major concepts, “carry dead weight. They are laden with baggage that exerts an inertial resistance against effective variation. Minor concepts, once noticed, are self-levitating” (p.

63).

The Ecce Homo portion of the assembled text discusses Nietzsche’s walking practice and how he believes walking aids creativity. In that section, he also explains how during a walk in Switzerland an important idea or “affirmation” came to him as he passed a large pyramidal rock. I view the attention to walking section as a minor concept in Nietszche’s philosophy. The notion of affirmation could be both a major or minor concept depending on a reader’s familiarity with Nietzsche’s writings. I pulled the bottom part of the text from The Joyful Wisdom (Gay Science) which is a

62 description of the ‘affirmation’ Nietszche claims came to him during a walk and is one of his more significant philosophical notions—the eternal return. The eternal return is a philosophical puzzle that presents the reader with a scenario:

The Heaviest Burden. What if a demon crept after thee into thy loneliest loneliness some day or night, and said to thee: “This life, as thou livest it at present, and hast lived it, thou must live it once more, and also innumerable times; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh, and all the unspeakably small and great in thy life must come to thee again, and all in the same series and sequence – and similarly this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and similarly this moment, and I myself. The eternal sand-glass of existence will ever be turned once more, and thou with it, thou speck of dust!” (Nietzsche, 1960, p. 270-271).

It could be seen as a more major concept in which participants of the research-creation event may have arrived at the text with a decided understanding of what eternal return means to them – although each of the intratexts, as you’ll see, does something new with this concept regardless of what pre-conceived ‘major’ concepts the participants may have arrived with. Within both the walking text and the eternal return text are various other themes or concepts participants took up and interfered with including several focusing on Nietzsche’s statement, “All prejudices come from the intestine,” as a productive minor concept (Nietzsche, 1989, p. 240).

Text

It is not that texts refer to other texts, or coexist with them—rather, texts are other texts: texting is the differential process by which and as which texts exist as such, as strangers to themselves (Morton, 2010a, p. 2).

Derrida (2002) describes the authority of a text as “provisional” and its origin a “trace” (Spivak,

63 xviii). As such, a text could be described as the meaning generated in the relation between the semiotic or material configurations of a piece of writing (or other kind of object) and the reader who activates it by viewing-reading it; texts function “textually” through the activation of “reading”

(Martusewicz, 2001). Jameson (1987) describes textuality as, “…a methodological hypothesis whereby the objects of study of the human sciences are considered to constitute so many texts that we decipher and interpret, as distinguished from older views of these objects as realities or existents or substances that we in one way or another attempt to know” (p. 8). The notion of textuality along with many insights gained during the linguistic turn has had significant influence in social science research by challenging the idea that data are separate from theory and interpretation, thereby requiring researchers to situate themselves before interpreting a text (be it a painting, linguistic, or some other form of text). Further, intertextuality, as Kristeva (1986) outlines it is the acknowledgement that,

“…any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (p. 37).

Barthes (1977) discusses that although a text is made of multiplicities in dialogue (and contestation) the meaning made is through the reader (rather than the author). He states, “[t]he reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination (1977, p. 148). While I support these positions on textuality (including Barthes’ writerly texts) they do privilege pre-existing coherent humans as the main active agents and interpreters of the textual transformations. They also privilege a representational approach to language. Of course, you can say that humans are the interpreters of texts – and that may be true. But it is also true that other material influences, what Grigley (1995) calls continuous transience (accretion or dissolution over time, or due to context) and discontinuous transience (a rupture or deliberate interference with the text) along with various other non-human factors can alter a text’s meaning and productive force. This is similar to how deconstruction

64 operates through “liberat[ing] the repressed contradictions always already present within the constitution of the texts…” (Trifonas, 2000, p. 274). Allen (2000) demonstrates the radical nature of

Kristeva’s description of intertextuality which, “…encompasses that aspect of literary or other kinds of texts which struggles against and subverts reason, the belief in unity of meaning or of the human subject, which is therefore subversive to all ideas of the logical and the unquestionable” (p. 45, italics mine). This view allows for mutability of the “human” actors who encounter a text and approaches why Barad’s (2007) term “intra” rather than “inter” textual is a suitable name for the research- creation.

Barad’s (2007) neologism intra-action, “…signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (33, italics in original). She explains that rather than the term “interaction” which suggests “separate individual agencies that precede their interaction,” intra-action suggests that rather than distinct agencies (texts, humans etc.) preceding intra-action, they instead emerge through their interaction; as

Barad states, “…agencies are only distinct in relation to their mutual entanglement; they don't exist as individual elements” (p. 33, italics in original). As Morton argues, textuality is “shot through with otherness—and every text, at the very same time, is utterly unique, a unicity that transcends independent singular isolation” (2010a, p. 7). In such a view, reading begins to move away from interpretation towards a cutting together-apart or an emergent assemblage of meaning.

Public Pedagogy?

The term ‘public pedagogy’ can be used to describe myriad processes and spaces of education outside of the formal school environment including experiences as diverse as media, spectacles, architecture or books that are not within the established school curriculum, but may well be part of a

65 larger social curriculum (Giroux, 2009). Critical public pedagogy could be described as interventions that rupture the affects and effects ‘public pedagogies’ through employing non-canonical knowledge, de-familiarization, artistic interventions, and perhaps marginalia or additions to an existing text on a page (Burdick, Sandlin & O’Malley, 2013). I posit that interactions wherein participants are encouraged to comment on, critique and subvert an existing text could be considered an enactment of critical public pedagogy.

Gaztambide-Fernández and Matute (2013) argue that if curriculum scholars are to continue using the term public pedagogy, we need to highlight precisely what is “pedagogical about public pedagogy” (p. 54). Gaztambide-Fernández and Matute (2013) conceive of pedagogy as a discussion of how we “intentionally enter into relations premised on the ethical imperative of the encounter”

(p. 54). An ethical imperative implies an ethos, and arguably a pedagogue (or researcher) who intentionally enters into relation with others and influences them according to this ethos. Below, the traditional approaches to marginalia and marginalia research I cite, fall into this understanding of a pedagogical encounter. However, instead of viewing pedagogy as an intentional engagement based on a pre-existing set of known agents, each with its own ethos, the Intratextual Entanglement research- creation exemplifies how an ethical imperative arises during interactions with others rather than pre- existing them.

In retrospect, I view the public pedagogy of the Intratextual Entanglement research-creation event as an example of emergent and generative public pedagogy. Pedagogy is emergent because it does not pre-exist the material encounter of those involved. Pedagogy is generative, or what Massumi

(2002) might call productivist, because it has an inventive rather than pre-determined outcome.

According to Massumi, a “productivist approach” accepts that “activities dedicated to thought and writing are inventive” (p. 12). In such a view, Massumi outlines, the techniques of critical thinking, and attempts to debunk existing claims (often prized pursuits in the social sciences and humanities)

66 as limited, and even counterproductive. Massumi allows that of course there are times when critique is necessary, but should be used “sparingly” (p 13). Similarly, Barad (2011) discusses how critique is over-rated and over-utilized, and is “…all too often not a deconstructive practice, that is, a practice of reading for the constitutive exclusions of those ideas we cannot do without, but a destructive practice meant to dismiss, to turn aside, to put someone or something down… (p. 49, italics mine).

The participants’ entanglements show the generative potential of different material interventions with a text that give rise to varied pedagogical outcomes and varied publics.

Bennett (2010), drawing from Dewey states, “A public is a contingent and temporary formation existing alongside of many other publics, protopublics, and residual or postpublics” (p.

100). In this view, “at any given moment many different publics are in the process of crystalizing and dissolving” around a problem, or in this case a text (p. 100). For Dewey, “conjoint actions” give rise to “multitudinous consequences,” which in turn may recombine with others and coalesce around further problems which gives rise to another public or as Dewey states, “group of persons especially affected” (as cited in Bennett, 2010, p. 101). Moving away from an anthropocentric perspective, Bennett outlines how these publics are not purely human domains but rather “…sets of bodies affected by a common problem generated by a pulsing swarm of activities” (p. 101). For both

Dewey and Bennett, members of a public are defined in terms of their “affective capacity” (p. 101).

The Materiality of Language

To help think-with the research-creation projects, I use Barad’s (2007, 2011) theory of entanglement.

In doing so, I position the various participants’ material engagements with the texts as “apparatuses” through which a new text is “diffractively” produced (Barad, 2007, 2003). This is form of working with text that is quite different from interpretation, where interpretation assumes latent meanings lying dormant in texts, to be revealed by researchers. Instead of using criticism as a modus operandi,

Barad takes up Donna Haraway’s suggestion of diffraction as a way of engaging with difference affirmatively. Where a reflective approach is representational and mirrors the ‘same,’ diffraction attends to difference. For Barad, in reading we look “…for patterns of differences that make a difference…in the sense of being suggestive, creative and visionary” (p. 49-50).

Diffraction, for Barad

(2007) “is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear” (p. 300).

Diffraction is what happens to waves when they pass through an aperture: they bend, intra- act with other waves, create troughs where they cancel each other out, and peaks where they amplify each other and that’s what generates a diffractive pattern. Importantly, in diffraction, not everything

68 makes it through to mattering. And Barad calls attention to the need to attend to both what matters and what is excluded from mattering. I use the term diffraction with regard to both material and semiotic figurations of what has happened and continues to happen in the research-creation event.

And I’d like to extend the thought to this chapter: it also conducts a diffractive approach in that I’m reading insights from different areas of study through one another, and a trans-disciplinary approach, where resonances and differences between varying theories (materials) are articulated and affect what is produced (Barad, 2007).

The second term I’m implementing is apparatus, which is also from empirical science.

Apparatuses are assemblages, rather than measuring devices, which according to Barad (2007) enact agential cuts (both ontic and semantic) and produce boundaries that give way to properties/objects/subjects.

In the case of the Nietzschean marginalia research-creation project, the apparatus would include the base Nietzsche text and the situations from which it emerged (including Nietzsche’s famous walk in Switzerland when he came up with the idea of the eternal return), the materials of the 1st and 2nd entanglements, the social-material constraints mailing and organizing the research- creation, and me theorizing it. From a Baradian (2011) perspective none of these members of the apparatus are ontologically pre-existent, but are produced through the intra-action. Apparatuses are part of the intra-action; an apparatus does not preexist an experiment but rather emerges from it.

This has ramifications for educational research if I consider the “readers” (including myself as researcher) who encounter a text as not entirely pre-existing that encounter, in the same way a text, or to use another Baradian (2007) term, the phenomena does not pre-exist its being “read,” or

“written” in the writerly sense. For Barad, phenomena are “specific material performances of the world” (p. 335) that demonstrate the ontological inseparability (entanglements) of all intra-acting

‘agencies’ in a given situation.

As such, writing operates spatially and co-extensively with the environment, as well as figuratively. For Morton (2010a) all writings are “environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read—blank space around and between words, silence within the sound”

(p. 11). Significantly, I don’t have to leave linguistic theorizing out of the materiality of research- creation by designating language as a non-material entity. Including the apparatus in a diffractive reading based around a linguistic text necessarily includes language as a material element, but doesn’t give it more credence than other material components of the phenomena. My survey of the history of marginal annotation, evidences that language is material and has material affects. Scribbles in the margins of pieces of paper have material affects. So, while I agree with many new materialists’ ongoing critiques of the linguistic turn, and believe it’s time language was relieved from what

MacLure (2013a) calls its “imperial position as mediator of the world,” in this chapter I do not exclude language, or linguistic theorizing from the materiality of my research practice (p. 663). I maintain that “language is a material force and material event, but remember that it is not superior to other material forces or events, and is subject to the same emergent properties” (Truman, 2016a, p.

137).

A Backgrounder on Textual Marginalia

“Reading the margin shows that the page can be seen as a territory of contestation upon which issues of political, religious, social and literary authority are fought” ~Tribble, 1993, p. 2

An overview of the material history of marginalia shows that the earliest humanistic pedagogues –

Erasmus and Mignault – created annotated versions of textbooks to direct student learning (Grafton

& Jardine, 1986). Teachers and students have annotated and written in the margins of texts since before the age of print. Jackson (2001) glosses the centuries-old history of marginalia, its potential to

influence readers’ responses to texts as well as

‘disturb’ authors—for example Virginia Woolf who

had an intense dislike of marginalia as an ‘assault’

on books (p. 238-240). Jackson draws from her

research into Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a prolific

annotator. Coleridge coined the phrase marginalia

and often wrote intentionally instructive marginalia

in his friends’ books and annotated important

sections of a book “…so that the friend would feel

as though he or she were reading the book in his

company” (Jackson 2005, p. 139). Historically marginalia were not the secret notes commonly used today but semi-public documents orientated toward others. And people feel very strongly toward marginalia. As Golick (2004) states, the

“…lowly cookbook without its marginalia is missing its soul” (p.113).

Considering the persuasive potential of marginal comments, Slights (1997) states, “[M]arginal annotation, whether printed or handwritten can radically alter a reader’s interpretation of the centered text” (p. 201). Some marginal comments may even attempt to, “…control the very genealogy of the text” (Slights, 1997, p. 201). Irwin and O’Donoghue (2012) investigated the pedagogical affects of artistic marginal intervention on student teachers and noted some found it

“disruptive” while others thought it “stimulating” (p. 227). Further, Jackson (2001) states that marginal notation can, “…introduce other facts and contradictory opinions, the facts and opinions themselves being less significant than the demonstrated possibility of alternatives and opinions”

(2001, p. 241, italics mine).

The awareness of the mutability of a text is a radical thought, as is the awareness of the capacity for readers-writers to exert the right to alter a text. Such awareness highlights both the material differential inherent in an existing text (and person intra-acting with a text) as well as the virtual potential of an existing text (and person intra-acting with a text). Similarly, in artist books,

Drucker argues that all of these “practices of working onto or into an existing text are interventions into the social order, and the text of the world as it is already written” (Drucker, 2004, p. 109).

In terms of the Intratextual Entanglement research-creation event the various apparatuses that combine to generate a new text demonstrate how art and marginalia affect ‘readers’ differently depending on what they bring to or exclude from an encounter. As Barad states, “Given a particular measuring apparatus, certain properties become determinate” (Barad, 2007, p. 19). And the affect/effect of a text goes beyond human readers too, as Snaza (2015) states, “…marginalia can be made in ink, pencil that necessarily affect the paper…a coffee spill in a library book might make the paper more susceptible to rot…” (un paged, marginal comment in a draft of this chapter).

Marginalia historians Jackson and Slights focus on how readers annotate books and make statements about how such annotations affect readers. Although these claims may be anecdotal, they point to an under researched area in pedagogy: the importance of marginalia. The affect of intertextual writing or teacher’s comments, and in the instance of online commentaries or art books, the input of complete strangers may significantly alter a reader’s encounter with a text, even if the text is deliberately writerly, and the reader is emergent. In a standards-driven school system, many students and teachers still approach reading-response exercises with the intention of replicating the

‘correct’ interpretation of a text. Marginalia in this environment could become a sinister practice, as

Virginia Woolf warned, for steering reading habits. It is important that students and educators begin to understand the complexity and possible persuasiveness of marginal discourse as well as the generative potential of group reading practices. And while there is plentiful anecdotal evidence that

72 marginal comments or commentaries affect future readers, until recently few studies have been conducted to confirm this long held belief.

Approaches to Group ‘Reading-Writing’

I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 159).

Hayles (2012) states that in the traditional humanities readings of texts “…connotes sophisticated interpretations achieved through long years of scholarly study and immersion in primary texts” (p.

29). Conversely, Morretti’s (2013) distant reading, or machine reading replaces the human as starting point with algorithms. Distance rather than closeness is a different condition of knowledge that allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes - or genres and systems” (p. 57). Spivak (2003) discusses how reading is an uncertain process that must be affirmed. She says, “let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so” (p. 26). Spivak goes further to describe reading as a “transgression of the text” (2003, p. 55) where we don’t think in terms of interpretations or getting meaning right but rather focus on how it generates what Snaza calls “affects and effects”

(np.) Massumi (2015) states we should consider how a text means, rather than what it means, to help

“disable the default positions of comparison and critique” (p. 64). This approach, Massumi claims, might help lessen the silencing effect that can take over in dominant approaches to reading practices.

Several studies have attempted to evaluate how annotations enhance study skills and textual recall on multiple-choice tests as well as codify annotative practices (Heath 1982; Fowler & Barker

1974; Donohue & Feito, 2008). Wolfe’s (2002) research with undergraduate English students

73 demonstrates that marginal comments influence students’ perceptions of the source text; passages with evaluative annotations are more effective than underlining in boosting student recall while interestingly, the perceived position of an annotator has the ability to shape readers’ response to the text. For example, annotations by a professor, teacher, or person the student believes is an authority affect the way the text is received, accordingly, many students were “swayed in the direction of the gloss’s valence (i.e., positive evaluations uplifted students’ ratings of source arguments, and negative evaluations depressed their ratings)” (2002, p. 319). Wolfe’s study confirms what many educators— from Erasmus to the current day—have known about the power of marginal commentaries to affect the reception and interpretation of a text. The ability of ‘negative’ comments to affect how a reader relates to a source has pedagogical implications for writing practices as well as reading practices. For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative, at the beginning the student may disengage from the comments (Truman, 2016b).

In their development of a taxonomy of annotative reading practices, literary theorist

Donohue, and psychologist Feito (2008) discuss Wolfgang Iser’s notion of ‘repertoire’ as an element that develops through the reading process. According to Iser, the text, as well as the reader, has a repertoire of, firstly, “familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary themes, together with allusions to familiar social and historical contexts,” and, secondly, a repertoire that includes, “techniques or strategies used to set the familiar against the unfamiliar” (1972, p. 293). A reader will relate to the text and the texts’ ‘gaps’ differently, depending on the ‘repertoire’ they possess before encountering the text. And the reader’s repertoire will be affected by the texts they read, causing them to change as a reader through experience (Iser, 1972, p. 285; Feito & Donohue 2008, p. 300). Although the above viewpoints are arguably anthropocentric they illustrate how reading and meaning-making are collaborative exercises: linguistic markings are not merely transparent media for representing human meaning, and marks, ruptures, or comments on a text produce a new text.

There’s a long history of reading traditions that I could gloss including Hermeneutics with its interest in the meaning of a text and how to best obtain that meaning; Russian formalism with its emphasis on the nuts and bolts of the text and how the structure of language can get in the way of finding meaning; deconstruction with its slippery side step of differential meaning; psychoanalytic criticism with its focus on the unconscious desires of the author and what that means; queer, feminist, postcolonial, sociological, cultural studies readings and all of their attendant orientations that affect meaning. In truth, probably all of these methods are at work in both the diffractive entanglements with Nietzsche’s base text, and my reading-writing of those texts in this chapter. That is the point of a diffractive reading-writing – to productively or generatively use transdisciplinary approaches of engagement and attend to what matters and what is excluded from mattering. In this regard, all the readers are authors of sorts through their engagements they circulate new meanings and matterings.

Creative Vectors

In his chapter, The End of the Book and the beginning of Writing, Derrida (2002) highlights how we write with more than pens, or computers, or words. Instead, ‘writing’ is everything that gives rise to inscription, “whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice: cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’.

One might also speak of athletic writing…of military or political writing…” (p. 9). Derrida also troubles the idea of written inscription as being definite, specific, or occupying a particular state of

‘being’ (like a book which is often viewed as discrete self-contained object). For Derrida, written inscriptions are open ended and in a state of constant becoming. I see the Intratextual Entanglements in this research-creation similarly.

Massumi (2015) outlines how a text is open to its outside and “welcomes inflections…[i]t is hospitable to new thought. This puts its meaning always in-the-making, making the meaning inexhaustible. A generative text is never done” (p. 61-62). While Deleuze and Guattari (2004) state that reading is a “productive use of the literary machine…a schizoid exercise that extracts from the text its revolutionary force” (2004, p. 116). The following section will think-further-with some of the

Intratextual Entanglement texts and show how by viewing them with different apparatuses (which include the linguistic ‘vectors’ used to organize them below) different ethico-political, artistic, theoretical responses emerge.

In writing up this chapter I am cognizant of not wanting to now pin the texts down and label them like specimens and state what they mean as it would undermine the whole research- creation – instead I think-with the intra-texts as provocations and attend to the cultural, linguistic, artistic, ethico-political concerns that arise from intra-acting with them. As such, rather than coding

76 the intra-texts by what they are/mean my approach requires a consideration of how they do/provoke.

This process brings thought into the apparatus of conducting research around reading and writing and walking and texts as another material element and shows how research methods are ongoing and emergent. Thinking through, theorizing, and writing up this chapter are now parts of an

‘apparatus’ that will produce a new text-phenomenon-event. The texts continue to proliferate.

Ethico-political tendings, provoke how?

Barad’s (2007) notion of agency posits that changing possibilities for (intra-)acting exist at every moment, and such possibilities entail an “…ethical obligation to intra-act responsibly in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (Barad, 2007, p.

178, italics mine). Several entanglements took up a critical, yet generative response to Nietzsche as a philosopher and the ‘content’ of the intra-text.

A thread I want to consider is the thread of the overman, or the superman (ubermench) – which appeared or was alluded to in different marginalia in the research-creation. Joe Ollmann’s cartoon marginalia both critiques the Nazis for their uptake of the ubermench, while in the next cartoon also states “But the Superman posit is pretty ELITIST.” Nietzsche’s overman (whether or not Nietzsche meant he was literally male is irrelevant – he’s always referred to as a he) is a contested and divisive idea that has been taken up (perhaps unfairly) by some unsavoury regimes in history like the Third Reich. The overman is supposed to be beyond mankind – superior of mind and strength and not tethered to the same values or principals as average humans (Nietzsche, 1999, p. 205). You can see how such a theory in the wrong hands could be taken in objectionable directions, for example it has been affiliated with eugenics (Bialias, 2015). And with most concepts that imply a superiority – when the notion of something being “Man” or beyond “Man” is accepted, the polarized notion of sub-man or under-man creeped in to conceptualize non-Aryans, differently abled persons, gays, and women (Friedlander, 1997). I don’t think this was necessarily Nietzsche’s intention with the invention of the overman. But words have a way of getting away.

William Goodall completed a pointillist drawing of a woman of colour (as stated in his personal correspondence) on top of the ‘dead white male’ philosopher’s text and used red wine in a kind of Dionysian revelry to add colour to the illumination. The marginally superimposed resulting image intertextually queers elements of Nietszche’s philosophy for those familiar with the trajectory of the eternal return. Although the text is first mentioned in the Gay Science, it was made popular in

Thus Spake Zarathustra. And it was Zarathustra (the character) who proposed the notion of the overman. In the diffractive reading of this intra-text that is attendant to what’s excluded from mattering, Goodall’s drawing while intratextually engaging with the idea of the ‘over’ as in literally

78 being over the text, also reminds me of how women, people of colour, and differently abled persons rather than achieving the status of overmen, are not included in the status of what Wynter (2003) calls “Man,” (p, 263). Wynter’s description of “Man” refers to the oversubscribed white, able, wealthy, male European who who Gaztambide-Fernández (2012) argues continues to reinstate coloniality through his ongoing appearance and reproduction, and who remains as Snaza

(forthcoming) argues “violently and institutionally held up as the only recognized form of the human” (Snaza, nd). The marginalia provoked me to reconsider the eternal return, and Nietzsche’s philosophy in Zarathustra. If the ‘overman’ were a woman of colour would that ideal work toward ending the ongoing practices of dehumanization practiced by imperialist, colonial, and male supremacist societies? Nietzsche’s overman is supposed to be beyond morality, inspire new values, signify the death of god (the Christian god), and move toward a more egalitarian state.

As the second Intratextual entanglement with this text, I sent Goodall’s drawing to Rosina

Kazi. Kazi cut up and pasted Goodall’s pointillist over-woman-of-colour onto a broken mirror.

When I gaze at the mirror, rather than it reflecting ‘sameness,’ – it reflects fragmentary bits of me intersected with the woman of colour and Nietzsche’s writing. When it arrived in the mail I was reminded of Minh-ha’s “mirror-writing-box’ (1989). Here Minh-ha notes that women of colour can write as themselves without loosing their subjectivity or being pigeonholed into a specific subjectivity in a “play of mirrors which defers to infinity the real subject and subverts the notion of an original “I”” (p. 22). In the physical performance of this particular Intratextual entanglement we’re not dealing with a box of mirrors reflect back and forth until infinity. I as reader become entangled in the reflection: by ‘reading’ Kazi’s intertextual entanglement with Nietzsche and

Goodall’s woman of colour shattered across the mirror and I too am reflected/shattered in the

‘text.’ Which is of course, how reading operates. But that doesn’t preclude the content and the form of the text affecting how I perceive myself, nor how I perceive the text. This cutting continues to

79 remind me how reading-writing can operate as a “multipolar reflecting reflection that remains free from the conditions of subjectivity and objectivity yet reveals them both” (Minh-ha, 1989, p. 22).

Barad, following Haraway’s conception of diffraction was initiated as a way of complicating

‘reflective’ practices (where reflective approaches are representational and mirror sameness, diffraction attends to difference). Kazi’s mirror diffracts as much as it reflects through Nietzsche’s words, the image of the woman of colour, and my broken reflection. In this way, it embodies

Deleuze’s (1994) reading of Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return when he states, “[t]he eternal return is a force of affirmation, but it affirms everything of the multiple, everything of the different, everything of chance…” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 115). What would it mean to affirm difference?

In the final paragraph of the inter-text the excerpt from The Joyful Wisdom introduces a kernel of Nietzsche’s thought that developed into the eternal return. The eternal return has been taken up by many philosophers, notably Deleuze (2006) to explicate affirmation, multiplicity and difference as opposed to the common interpretation of it as a nihilistic stance of sameness forever repeating.

Deleuze considers Nietzsche’s eternal return an autotelic, creative process of becoming. This includes the ethical imperative toward the future when it asks readers to consider ‘to will’ in such a way that you “will its eternal return” (p. 68). Deleuze (1994) explores these ideas further when he describes difference as the creative becoming of the world. For Deleuze difference does not arise from negation (as in different from) but from affirmation!

Affirm Difference

The way forward is never clear, but the ethical task does not reside in evaluating a research-creationed scenario in

advance, but in taking the risk that the processes will continue to affirm differences and maximize our diverse

potentialities (Shildrick, 2015, p. 25).

Critical disability scholar Shildrick (2015) discusses the need to affirm difference as a way of thinking that ruptures the conventional logics of inclusion with regard to people with disabilities. One of the marginalia that returned to me during the Intratextextual Entanglement research-creation was a drawing by Dan Barney. Barney marginally disrupted Nietzsche’s statement “sit as little as possible” by drawing a wheelchair beside the statement. I found this critical marginal image provocative in that it troubled the ableist premise that bipedal ‘walking’ is causally linked to the generation of great ideas – a position there’s no shortage of anecdotes to support from theorists and philosophers across the ages (Solnit, 2001). And made me consider how normative and naturalized walking appears across cultural studies, education, and the arts.

Gros (2014) extols the joy of walking where “pavements no longer guide your steps” and you discover the “vertiginous freedom” (p. 6). Of course, in these moments Gros discusses how we loose ourselves and discover creativity (like the Beat Poets whom he discusses in his book A

Philosophy of Walking). In the history of walking and creativity many bodies have been excluded – women’s, people of colour, and people with disabilities. My initial impulse to this fact is to fight for inclusion – but taking a new materialist and more-than-human perspective I recognize that I do not want to fight to include people into a logic that makes them change in order to be included. Shildrick

(2015) argues that for many disabled people, “rehabilition to normative practice or normative appearance is no longer the point” rather, the lived experience of being differently abled “with its embodied absences, displacements, and prosthetic additions – generates, at the very least, its own specific possibilities that both limit and extend the performativity of the self” (Shildrick, 2015, p. 14).

Rather than think of the disabled body as less-than-perfect and needing revisions in order to perform within a particular logic, what if I take seriously the call to affirm difference? I feel an aporia creeping in: I want to affirm difference but also make it so that people with differences can be included – not by changing them, but by building a world where they are no longer excluded (Does this

81 mean they’re no longer ‘different’ and difference is conflated into sameness? No. It affirms difference rather than excludes difference. Taylor (2008; 2010) who navigates the city in an automatic wheelchair due to a disability went on a walk with Judith Butler through San Francisco’s Mission

District and had a conversation about accessibility. Taylor (2008) uses the term walking to describe her mobility in a wheelchair. She states: “I use that word even though I can’t physically walk. I mean.

To me, I think the experience of going for a walk is probably very similar to anybody else’s: it’s a clearing of the mind, it’s enjoying whatever I’m walking past. And my body is very involved even though I’m physically not walking” (p. 186). Taylor (2010) accentuates how through practices of accessibility that are at work in San Francisco more people with disabilities are visible on the street, and in her view because they’re more visible they’ve begun to be viewed as part of the social fabric.

In her words, “physical access leads to social access” (2010, np). But that doesn’t mean everyone is the same, rather when difference is affirmed and as Mohanty (2003) describes, “diversity and difference are central values” not only is walking reconceptualised, but we participate in the creative becoming of the world (p. 7).

Affirmation and Movement

“Movement for its part, implies a plurality of centers, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coextend of moments which essentially distort representation” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 56).

The following entanglements took up Nietzsche’s call to movement, and the importance of going for walks while challenging representational approaches to language through poetic, imperative, and more-than-linguistic responses. As explained in Chapter 1 Manning takes up Whitehead’s notion of a proposition to describe thinking in movement, and she included propositions as her submission to

82 the Intratextual Entanglement research-creation. Manning writes in imperative voice, as Nietzsche did, and activated movement and affirmation:

Propositions for An Entanglement

1. Believe not in thoughts that stem from the desk, but in thoughts born outdoors.

2. A thought always comes in from the outside.

3. Take the outside for what it is: don’t try to digest it. All prejudices come from the intestines.

4. Take the thought for a walk 6000 feet beyond man and time.

5. But don’t wear yourself out. I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me.

6. Let thought move you.

7. Live it, spirally. Interminably.

Propositions are not tools or methods by which research is defined; they are processual, emergent, and immanent “challenge the idea that what is not known as such is not knowable, emphasizing that knowability may take us off the path of the methodological disciplinary account of experience, propelling us into the midst” (Manning, 2013, p. 6). A proposition’s emphasis on unknowability means that conventional understandings of method need to be experimented with. To exact this undoing, Manning (2013) asks how techniques become propositional (as opposed to instructional).

For example, a walk “becomes a proposition when it begins to exceed the technical, making operable a kind of bodying that is unforeseen (unpracticed) but available from within the register of the movement that will have preceded and followed it” (p. 78). A walk becomes a proposition when it proposes toward potentiality. The potentialities that are incarnated in the proposition are as

Shaviro (2009) calls the “bait” that lures or draws us toward that potentiality – which might come to be felt (p. 54-55).

I sent Manning’s Propositions for an Entanglement to Christine Brault and she engaged with them

6 and composed a poem as her response. october 14 i walk, concrete, asphalt, fallen maple leaves crackle under my feet i walk, gravel, fallen leaves crackle under my steps i walk, une ombre m’accompagne, leads my path i walk, a warm breeze caresses my left cheek i walk, des criquets chantent avant de disparaître i walk, grass, fallen leaves under the soles of my sandals i walk, a falling maple leaf whips my right cheek i walk the star, j’entends le son de l’eau springing from the fountain i walk back, avec mes pensées.

April Russell moved off the page completely and danced her entanglement with Nietzsche’s inter- text. After marking the page and feeling limited by the confines of textual space she proposed to instead meet fellow participant Carl Leggo in Vancouver and ‘dance’ her marginalia. I was informed of the arrangement but was not present, nor was the research-event video-recorded. Several weeks later I received the following intratextual ekphrastic poem in the mail from Leggo:

6 I also used Manning’s proposition “take thought for a walk” in my in-school study (as discussed in Chapter 4).

It could be argued that Leggo, writing about his experience dancing with Russell has now jammed it into representational ‘language.’ But I view his text as more-than-representational. According to

Vannini, (2015), the more-than-representational answer to the crisis of representation “…lies in a variety of research styles and techniques that do not concern themselves so much with representing life-worlds as with issuing forth novel reverberations” (p. 14). Leggo’s poem enlivens rather than reports; it leaves evocative gaps and brings up questions about the relationship between movement

(dance), affect and writing. The success of these written intra-textual entanglements that took up

Nietzsche’s call to movement emboldened me to complete the in-school research-creation (Chapter

4).

Recursion and Materiality

Many participants in the Intratextual

Entanglement research-creation

experimented with the materiality of

both form and concepts of the text,

which was pushed further by the

next participant’s engagement in the

research-creation. Recursion is the

act of turning a text’s logic back on itself. Recursion occurs on various material levels: linguistically,

through illustration, through multi-media arts. In the case of these entanglements the form greatly

affects by the content, you might even say that the form is the content in instances like Christine

Brault & Kent den Heyer’s

entangled circular nest of text

and a haiku; Taien Ng-Chan’s &

Kwoi Gin’s photocopied texts

folded into origami where there

is no ‘original,’ text only

proliferating copies.

Julian McCauley’s clock polaroid text takes photos on the quarter of the hour, often of the

reader as they crouch in front of it trying to decipher meaning. McCauley cut up Nietzsche’s

writings and stuck them onto the dials and implements of the wind-up clock (which incidentally he

got from my grandmother’s estate when she died). The clock played both temporally (literally) and

spatially with the text’s concepts. It ticks and

clangs and measures time while the Polaroid

photographs re-presented snapshots of the

reading space. Unfortunately, it got broken

and in transit and when it arrived at Shannon

Gerrard’s house the Polaroids began to spit

out blanks.

Drucker (2004) states that many book

artist’s engagements with texts include

“insertion or defacement, obliteration or

erasure on the surface of a page which is

already articulated or spoken for” (p. 109).

Unlike a palimpsest (where some of the original bleeds through), artist interventions with texts exhibit an ‘aggressiveness’ or ‘violation’ toward the original which becomes fragmented, modified, or lost like Frankenstein’s Monster.

Svava Thordis Juliusson’s entanglement destroyed the text by setting fire to it deliberately.

She writes, “In its effacement, of which burning is merely the coarsest example the Talmud acquires meaning” a quotation from Kanofsky’s (1997) review of Marc-Alain Ouaknis’s The Burnt Book:

Reading the Talmud (1995) that discusses Jewish ways of reading as ‘atopic’ – as in taking place nowhere – where meaning is never where it is given.

Juliusson burned Nietzsche’s

text, along with some bank

statements and said, “It was

consumed. The meaning was

consumed,” and then alludes to

Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a

further intra-text along with

writing how therapeutic burning is. Like many of the Intratextual Entanglements in the research-creation project, Juliusson’s engagement with the text provokes further questions about the nature of texts: can they be consumed/digested?

Are they ever purely denotative? Are they ever present? Can they be sent from ‘home,’ as she writes?

Some of these questions are explored in Chapter 6 when I engage with Derrida’s post card ontology

(1987). I fittingly no longer have Juliusson’s entanglement. I mailed it to VK Preston in Montreal and she has never returned it to me. It is presently absent.

John Weaver’s initial response to the project was an academic paper on the eternal return. I sent it to Stephanie

Springgay who then boiled for 2 days into a broth. The Nihilist Broth hints at notions of digesting a text, and Nietzsche’s statement that “all prejudices begin in the intestine.” The act of combing ‘text’ with ‘food’ or ‘eating’ is found in many other art examples, including Dieter Roth’s Literature Sausage (wherein Roth made a series of sausages stuffed inside real animal intestines but used ground up texts as the ‘meat’). Springgay, in a later correspondence, stated

88 that she was interested in bodily acts of engaging with the text. As opposed to a visual reading of the paper, Springgay’s intertextual entanglement pushed the materiality of pulp and ink further, as the broth was intended to be served to Weaver at the annual Bergamo conference, where an earlier version of this chapter was presented. In the act of boiling and making broth, the text is ‘reduced,’ or re-shaped into another form, that can be consumed and read in a different corporeal manner.

Narrative is often viewed in its role as the being the primary mode of explication in English. And through this mode narrative constructs casual tales. Many of the texts in this research-creation project disrupt how narrative operates such as Yam Lau & Dan

Barney’s diffracted sprouting ‘living’ text; and Audrey Hudson and Donna Akrey’s ‘block text.’

New Media and proliferating texts

Participants in the research-creation project used a variety of ‘new’ media forms to entangle with the text including: GPS, hypertexts, and animated gifs. While these forms may appear to be ‘less’ material than a piece of paper or a sculptural object they still operate materially although on different scales and in different modes. For Hayles (2012) materiality is not “a pre-given entity but rather a dynamic process that changes as the focus of attention shifts” (p. 14).

Please visit: (http://sarahetruman.com/dissertation-online-component-for-intratextual- entanglements/)to see Ian Cant’s & Carl Leggo’s animated gif poem, which operates as a nod to computational poetics.

GPS which was used in one entanglement, distributes attention differently but no less

‘materially’ than other forms of text. According to de Souza e Silva (2012), location aware mobile technologies and GPS “…enable users to inscribe locations with digital information, such as texts, images, and videos, and find other people in their vicinity…they play an important role in helping people imbue locations with new dynamic meanings and construct new types of urban mobilities and narratives” (de Souza e Silva, 2013, p.

33). For de Souza e Silva, these new technologies create a palimpsest where intertextual digital narratives combine to make new meaning. Kai Woolner-Pratt took Hazel Meyer’s block out poem of

Nietzsche’s text All prejudices come from the intestine and mapped 4 days of his eating and walking as a

‘flâneur’ in Paris for a day using Google Maps’ GPS.

The flâneur has been portrayed as a disinterested, leisurely observer of the urban scene, taking pleasure in losing himself in the crowd and becoming a spectator (Tester, 1987). Woolner-Pratt’s

GPS map troubles the notion of the flâneur through not only making him visible (GPS is after all a technology developed by the navy for military purposes of making the geolocation of anything on

90 earth visible and trackable from space) but also through the narrative map of what’s in Woolner-

Pratt’s intestines. So much for being a detached observer lost in the crowd. On another level

Woolner-Pratt’s maps draw attention to how common Google Maps have become. We’re living in an era where a Google map is often construed as ‘the’ map of a place.

Intra-textual sounds7

Please visit (http://sarahetruman.com/dissertation-online-component-for-intratextual- entanglements/)to hear: David Shannon and Yam Lau’s Intertextual Entanglement. This piece of music made from two songs circles and cycles and doesn’t ‘end’ at the same time. The piece added by

David Shannon rolls repetition on top of repetition. The piece added by Yam Lau is reminiscent of

Erik Satie’s Gymnopedie. Erik Satie is famous for his walking practice. He used to walk into Paris from the suburbs regularly to play music all evening and then walk back in the early hours of the following day (That intertextual tidbit weaves Nietzsche’s walking discussion back into the text with a twist).

7 There are several more sound files posted on the page but I only discuss a few here.

Please visit (http://sarahetruman.com/dissertation-online-component-for-intratextual- entanglements/) to watch: Nirmal Vadgama cuts a series of guitar pick shapes (presumably with a guitar pick cutting device) out of the entanglement that Kwoi Gin sent him. Vadgama then uses the pick to play a song on his guitar. Nietzsche’s text and Gin’s text are used to produce a screaming guitar riff.

Please visit (https://vimeo.com/114177748) to watch/hear: Taien Ng-Chan’s entanglement with

Peter Trifonas’ song is a series of open source animated gifs. Trifonas’ song has intra-textual audio references to Bowie and Eno. These entanglements demonstrate on a different register how texts are changing assemblages rather than static entities.

& - Thoughts - &

The research-creation event shows the mutability and materiality of texts (and opinions), the ongoing productive potential of texts and group reading-writing practices, as well as the emergent quality of pedagogy – the how and what is learned – produced through the material encounters with intra-acting elements. This does not mean that pedagogy lacks an ethical imperative, but rather the ethics of what becomes pedagogical is emergent in each encounter.

It could be argued that the publics, and the pedagogies, that emerged from this research- creation events were not ‘public pedagogies’ in the common usage of the term public pedagogy

(where public pedagogy is regulatory and critical public pedagogy seeks to disturb or emancipate subjects from this regulation). I take up public pedagogy and critical public pedagogy in detail in the following chapter, but for now I want to re-assert how during the research-creation project a series of publics (material, semiotic, human publics) did emerge. And within those emergences different

92 pedagogical imperatives arose. The intra-texts circulated both in small publics (between participants), and in larger publics (such as when I presented them at conferences such as AERA, or on my

8 website).

As such, engaging with the proliferating texts and proliferating publics in this research- creation event demonstrates how reading-writing can be an affirming, more-than-human, and more- than-textual proposition. As researcher, I am very much fabricated and pulled apart in this process: specifically, the various intra-actions with the text have made me reconsider my own “major” reading of the eternal return, a version of it I’d asserted since my undergraduate degree, and recognize that reading is not the act of a “subject” but something that emerges from within a complex entanglement. Texts are material – in their linguistic expression, written or oral form – texts can mutate and form publics with and through humans. In this view, texts are more like “technical individuals enmeshed in networks of social, economic, and technological relations, some of which are human, some nonhuman” (Hayles, 2012, p. 13). These individuals, or what Deleuze and Guattari

(1987) might call haecceities pose new problems, or propositions through their emergence. Texts matter, how we engage with them matter. What’s written in the margins matters. Minor movements matter. Matter matters. &

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

Chapter 4

In-School Research-Creation Events: Dérive through these charter’d Halls

Script

Defamiliarize walking, reading, and writing with students.

Consider movement(s) and pedagogical spaces.

Consider emergences-emergencies.

Attend to what’s excluded from mattering. Attend to what matters.

Respond in movement and text.

This chapter investigates a four month in-school research-creation event with grade 9 English students in Cardiff Wales, UK at LLyn High School9. Llyn High School is situated in a leafy upper- middleclass neighbourhood but draws from a large catchment area in the urban centre. The focus of the project was to explore the relationship between walking (or a thinking-in-movement,) writing, and youth cultural productions as emergent literacy practices. Using various pedagogical prompts to defamiliarize walking, reading, and writing practices, the students and I explore ‘emergences- emergencies’ that materialized during our movements beyond the traditional indoor classroom and through different publics. In the opening section, I demonstrate how thinking experimentally and emergently within the study brought new questions to the work. In the main body of the chapter, I

9 Both the name of the school and all of the student names are pseudonyms, chosen by the students and me.

94 think-with tasks from the study that activated ‘emergences-emergencies’ and drew attention to what mattered and was excluded from mattering for the students and me.

Questions: How can walking be engage in practices of de-familiarization and creative production in writing? What matters of concern (pedagogically) arise in walking and writing? What publics are created through walking-writing?

Social scientists have begun to research walking as an aesthetic practice, a method for inciting creativity, and form of social engagement or public pedagogy (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014;

Phillips & Hickey, 2013; Springgay & Freedman, 2012). In this section of the chapter: I conduct a literature review of writers’ approaches to walking throughout history; discuss educational research on urban walking, art creation, and social critique; explore the potential of walking as a method of de-familiarization and social critique through lenses of critical public pedagogy, situated learning, and new materialisms.

For centuries poets and thinkers highlighted the relationship between walking and writing, used walking as a narrative device, literary theme, or as a method for generating content. Li Bai and

Du Fu wandered the countryside in 8th century China composing poetry, while Ikkyu wandered

Japan in the 15th century. William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s perambulations in 18th century

Britain inspired their writings, while Nietzsche composed much of Zarathustra while hiking miles daily through the Swiss Alps (Nietzsche, 1989). More recently, American poet and professor

Harryette Mullen published Urban Tumbleweed (2013) wherein her 366 Tanka poems represent “a year and a day of walking and writing” in Los Angeles (Mullen, 2013, p. viii).

Ingold (2007) compares reading and storytelling to wayfaring. And Ingold (2008) invokes the metaphor entanglement to describe how by moving through the world people are part of the world’s ongoing production and that the boundaries between people and the environment are shifting, contingent, and illusionary. de Certeau (1984) describes urban walking as a productive, enunciative act, which employs a rhetoric of sorts. According to de Certeau, walkers use “turns of phrase,” and

“write” the city, through their “…itinerant, progressive” movements (1984, p. 134). While walking through the landscape, pedestrians (and other cultural consumers) function as bricoleurs, phrasing and rephrasing space. The layout of any given city or town organizes an “ensemble of possibilities,” and the walker “actualizes some of these possibilities,” and makes them “exist” or “emerge” through his or her movements (p. 98). Certeau (1984), a city’s walkers form a “swarming mass,” or

“…innumerable collection of singularities. Their entwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together…” De Certeau seems to be saying that pedestrians give shape to the city through movement, and create a new reading or writing of the city in the same way that a reader may read a text, or in Barthes’ writerly sense, the same way that a reader may “write” a “text”

(Barthes, 1974). Sinclair (2003), “walking is the best way to explore the city…the changes, shirts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself” (p. 4, italics mine). While Sinclair is not known as a feminist, the spirit of his approach to the fiction of the city or other social constructs is reminiscent of feminist post-structural approaches to writing in that the use of fiction paradoxically has the capacity to both “…make visible and also eclipse the certainties of dominant discourses” (Davies, 2000, p. 130).

In the 50s and 60s, Debord and the Situationist International (SI) created various propositions, for example the dérive, for re-writing or subverting established cartographies of urban space through walks, and then created alternative maps of the city. Another French contribution to

96 critiquing and drawing inspiration from urban space through walking is flâneire. Flâneurs have often played subversive and pedagogical roles in the history of writing and art, and marked the changes of their cityscapes through publications, and critiqued through their walking practice, hegemonic/capitalist ‘structures’ and other social norms within urban settings (Benjamin, 2002).

However, both the idea of going for a flâneire or a dérive can be critiqued for being the purview of predominantly white male, middle class citizens, who have the social and physical mobility to stroll through the city in ways that many women, or people of colour could/cannot. (Hammergren, 1996).

Such discussions show how walking is potentially a political act for marginalized groups such as females, trans people, people of colour, and differently abled people who are often regulated in how they move through space.

In each of the previous instances, the walker (or writer-reader) is an active participant in meaning making; and the ‘text’ of the city is not fixed. I would venture also to say that the walker or writer-reader is also not fixed, but rather emerges through movement. Ethnographers and cultural geographers across the disciplines have highlighted how “the movement of walking is itself a way of knowing” (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008, p. 87). Although the humanist ideal views human subjectivity and bodies as ontologically distinct and fixed, several theorists of walking and other forms of movement discuss how subjectivity, (and the ‘body’) is produced through movement. Philosopher

Gros (2014) states, the walking body is “an eddy in the stream of immemorial life…a moving two- legged beast, just a pure force…” (p. 7). Similarly, Manning (2012) views the body: as “…a field of relations rather than a stability, a force taking-form rather than simply a form” (Manning, 2012, p.

31). Truman and Springgay (2015) explicate Manning’s view of the body as “…created through movement, differentiating endlessly. This movement is intensive, flowing, and affective” (Truman and Springgay, 2015, p. 151).

More-than-human and new materialist perspectives on the production of the body through movement can be accused of dissolving difference and therefore be incompatible with feminism and other critical theories. Although the body, and subjectivity are events created through movement and interactions with other bodies, I contend that it is still possible for bodies to disrupt and re- envision alternatives to the prevailing social-material-discourse through movement. De Certeau says,

“The long poem of walking manipulates spatial organizations, no matter how panoptic they may be…” (1984, p. 101). Everyday acts like walking can be “tactical” in nature; through walking the pedestrian both affirms the limits of space inscribed through geographic, economic, societal features, but also “suspects, tries out, transgresses…the trajectories it ‘speaks’” (de Certeau, 1984, p.

99). Suspecting, trying out, and transgressing the trajectories we speak through walking, are what I view as acts of de-familiarization: deliberately making un-familiar everyday realities that we take for granted, be they spatial, social, or linguistic. Through defamiliarization a potential for critique and possible futurities emerge.

According to philosopher Braidotti (2013) de-familiarization or dis-identification

“…involves the loss of familiar habits of thought and representation in order to pave the way for creative alternatives” (p. 88-89), or what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would call

“deterritorialization” (p. 356). This is also reminiscent of Foucault's call to “…re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities [and]…re-evaluate rules and institutions,” (Foucault, 1989, p. 462). In literary theory, de- familiarization is the act of presenting common or familiar tropes in new or unfamiliar ways in order to broaden a reader’s perspective. Brecht used a form of de-familiarization (enstrangement) in his plays (Brecht, 1964). The notion of pedagogy is implicit in de-familiarization in that there is an active effort to change a perspective, usually incited by a theoretical ideal. An ideal can be as basic as wanting to enhance perception of a familiar situation – for example mindfulness approaches to

98 walking wherein participants slow down their movements in order to perceive daily events in new ways (Miller, 2007). Or ideals can have more radical aims; many social movements based around walking, such as the Slut Walk, have used de-familiarization to destablize both walkers’ and onlookers’ perspectives and draw attention to social injustices that have been normalized by prevailing social discourses. Halberstam’s (2011) work on failure and refusal is another way to think about defamiliarization beyond simply moving outside of conditioned habits. Defamiliarization as a refusal entails a form of performative disengagement. By disengagement we don’t mean the typical use of the term in education, whereby students become disinterested or lack attention. Rather, as a practice of failure, disengagement is an act of unwillingness or a willfulness to refuse the choice between refusal and affirmation (Ahmed, 2014). In the Slut Walk example, intra-active difference shifts our understanding of the walk as that which celebrates, reclaims and embraces ‘slut,’ and

“threatens the male viewer with the horrifying spectacle of the “uncastrated” woman and challenges the straight female viewer because she refuses to participate in the conventional masquerade of hetero-femininity as weak, unskilled, and unthreatening” (Halberstam, 2011, pp. 95-96). While there is an ethos guiding pedagogical attempts at de-familiarization, in the spirit of deconstruction and emergence it is not possible to predict what the outcome of de-familiarization will be, other than proposing that eventually what is de-familiarized will too become “familiar,” and perhaps also require de-familiarizing interventions (Ahmed, 2006, p. 7).

Solnit (2001) when discussing political marches, and protests states that sometimes “walking becomes testifying” (p. 216). For example, the Women’s March on Versailles in 1789 in protest of rations and cost of bread – an event that was a forerunner to the French Revolution; Mahatma

Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930 in protest of the colonial British salt monopoly and taxation system;

Martin Luther King Jr.’s march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in protest of unjust voting laws (Manning, 2012). The list continues today where walking is used as a method to critique

99 social space, protest political injustices as evidenced in the Nishiyuu Walkers’ 1600km trek to

Ottawa, the Occupy, and Standing Rock movements and the Women’s March on Washington in

2017.

Walking like writing or speaking may be touted as everyone’s ‘right,’ however the dominant culture usually decides whose voices are heard, just as the dominant culture of the city influences which “type” of person can walk where and when. For example, educational researchers Phillips and

Hickey (2013) discuss walking as an expression of civic engagement, children’s agency, and knowledge building through their research of The Walking Neighbourhood project. Phillips and Hickey

(2013) state, “The intent of the Walking Neighbourhood was to provoke social change to counter the meta-narrative of risk adverse childhood(s) and to cultivate civic learning for both children and adults through co-negotiation of public spaces” (p. 243-244). The Walking Neighbourhood responds to the growing concerns for children’s safety in public spaces and irrational fears of abductions that in many communities now mean that children are rarely permitted to be alone. In The Walking

Neighbourhood children have the opportunity to map their own spaces of significance within a community, develop their own tours and then speak with adult ‘strangers’ while functioning as tour guides. In an inversion of usual power dynamics, in The Walking Neighbourhood children are leaders, and adults have the opportunity to experience their familiar landscapes in unfamiliar ways which allows for a different narrative of urban space to emerge through the “lived experience of un/expected encounters between bodies” (Phillips & Hickey, 2013, p. 244).

Springgay (2013) discusses a Toronto based art collective Mamallian Diving Reflex’s social art project Nightwalks with Teenagers as an example of a walking-based artistic intervention whose conceptual premise “…lies loosely in the idea that people are afraid of the dark and strange places, and people are afraid of large groups of strange teens particularly when they happen upon them in the dark” (Springgay, 2013, p. 138). Nightwalks With Teenagers has had several iterations where groups

100 of teens and unknown adults walk together in the dark exploring landscapes, de-familiarizing conventions. Springgay does not make conclusions about the inherent pedagogy or transformative nature of the walks, rather she probes the potential and problems, which she calls a “double ontology,” of coupling “critical pedagogy” with “art” in the public sphere, particularly when the art is curated by a professional who then exhibits traces or representations of the walking events for arts audiences (p. 144).

Curriculum Studies and & Pedagogy

Pedagogies inspired by posthumanist and new materialist ontologies are situational encounters made up of entanglements and interweavings, conjoint actions and political ecologies, entanglements that are alive, vibrant, and powerful (Sonu & Snaza, 2015, p. 274).

Curriculum Studies has drawn from and applied theories from disciplines as diverse as constructivism, process models of development, and social theory. Despite the influence of postmodernism, critical and cultural theory on education and reforms during the “reconceptualization”

(Pinar, 1978), a scientific rationale and other prescriptive assessment methods emphasizing measurability, and standardized approaches to teaching and learning remain prevalent in the field and in English teaching. I contextualize my interest in the de-familiarizing and affective potential of walking within more-than-human, critical, and deconstructive approaches to education, specifically educational processes that happen outside of formal school classrooms physically, sometimes called public pedagogy, Although the fact that in this particular study I’m working with students inside and outside of their school, it could be argued that what we’re doing is not ‘public pedagogy’ because it involves a school and students.

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Public pedagogy is used to describe myriad processes as diverse as dominant discourses such as neo-liberalism (Giroux, 2004), corporate branding (Kincheloe, 2002), digital literacy and gaming

(Trifonas, 2010), and movement in public spaces such as streets (Hickey, 2010) and how some bodies find particular locations in the city either “enabling or confining” (McLeod & Dillabough,

2007, p. 4) A review of existent literature reveals that the term public pedagogy is flexible, perhaps too flexible and like a floating signifier it can and has been applied to almost anything that has some measure of educative value, a concern that has been discussed by many educational theorists including Savage (2010), jagodzinzki (2013), and Springgay & Freedman (2012). Much public pedagogy literature is influenced by critical pedagogy, which in turn was influenced by Marxism, critical theory and cultural studies. Critical pedagogues examine social structures, power relations and cultural norms (like standardized tests) that position students as empty vessels waiting to be filled.

Marx’s (1978) concept praxis refers to preforming actions that can change the world rather than merely represent it influences much critical pedagogy. In such a viewpoint literacy as the ability to read and make sense of the world is not enough – the next step would be to enact emancipatory change. Freire (1970) believed that education should incite conscientização (conscientization), a critical awareness provoked through consciousness-raising questioning. Once conscientization occurs, members of society no longer take master narratives for granted. More recently, Kincheloe (2008) discusses the necessity for critical pedagogues to identify and understand how hegemony operates in society and schools. Citing, Gramsci, Kincheloe (2008) states that hegemony is the process that dominant powers use to maintain power – including manipulating public opinion so that “dominant ways of seeing the world” are believed to be “common sense” (2008, p. 65). Drawing from this tradition, Giroux (2004) states public pedagogy can be both regulatory or emancipatory and refers to:

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…the diverse ways in which culture functions as a contested sphere over the production, distribution, and regulation of power, and how and where it operates both symbolically and institutionally as an educational, political, and economic force” (p.62).

Savage (2010) critiques the binary between regulatory and emancipatory narratives of public pedagogy, where public pedagogy is conceived as “…a force of domination exercised upon us which we must wage resistance against” through critical means, usually lead by an emancipated intellectual or pedagogue (p. 110). Savage argues instead that public pedagogies – be they dominant discourses or critiques brought forward by public intellectuals trying to subvert such discourses – are “dynamic, dialectical, political, and bound up with power in chaotic ways” (p. 113). This implies that critical pedagogues or public intellectuals are also embedded in power discourses. Similarly, Ellsworth

(1989) has argued against critical pedagogues’ impulse to position themselves as the liberators of students and states that critical pedagogues are “implicated in the very structures they are trying to change” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 310).

Feminist scholars have critiqued critical pedagogy for reinforcing rather than dismantling hierarchies and power structures (Lather, 2001, Ellsworth, 1989). Critical feminist scholarship draws from Foucault’s (1978) conceptualization of power as immanent and relational. Foucault (1978) describes power as “the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization” (p. 92). These force relations are not ‘exterior’ to other kinds of relationships (for example teacher-student relationships, economic relationships, or sexual relationships) but emerge from within them. For Foucault “power is not something that is acquired, seized or shared…power is exercised from innumerable points” (p. 94). Although Foucault states that no power is exercised without a series of aims and objectives, it does not result from “the choice or decision of an individual subject…” (p. 95).

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Within the field of curriculum studies power is not an attribute held by particular members of a group over others to be dispensed or instilled. Rather power is produced, circulated, and modified within each emerging situation. The recognition that public intellectuals or pedagogues are not exempt from power discourses is an important one and has been raised in the past by other social theorists. According to literacy curriculum scholar Brass (2013), Foucault critiqued the

“…dream of leading social intellectuals who centred educational reforms on their own theory and praxis” (p. 97). Positioning public intellectuals as saviours and somehow exempt from power discourses perpetuates the power structure that the pubic intellectual is conceivably trying to subvert

– the belief that there is a universal truth and master narrative. Which may be why Deleuze (1996) views the whole notion of reforms as flawed. For Deleuze, either a reform comes from some external power who speaks for those requiring reformation, or the “reform” comes from within the system and is consequently no longer a reform – but what he terms a “revolution” (p. 76). Deleuze argues that only those ‘directly concerned’ with a matter can speak in a ‘practical way’ on their own behalf otherwise we are enacting what he calls the ‘indignity of speaking for others’ as social theorists or educational reformers (p. 76). Peters (1987) further explains that it is not the intellectual’s discourse that matters, “nor the ability of the intellectual to articular or totalize a world view for the oppressed,” rather what matters is the discourse against power that’s developed by the oppressed (p. 57). Said (1996) attempts to mitigate this paradox by introducing the term “amateur intellectual” who questions power relations and master narratives while working within a system

(Kanu & Glor, 2006).

While I agree that pedagogues cannot operate outside of power hierarchies, I also acknowledge critical pedagogues’ aims to help incite change within power hierarchies. This is attempted through critiquing institutional or hegemonic narratives, challenging false consciousness and ideologies, and reconsidering privilege within educational settings through the practices of

104 deconstruction, de-familiarization, and constant questioning with the understanding, as Tuck and

McKenzie (2014) state, “that researchers probe how we are in relation to the context we study and with our informants, understanding that we are all multiple in those relations” (p. 163). Feminism tells us that power structures in schools are contingent and provisional. The past does not have to become the future.

An ethos guides my interest into the affective and creative potential of walking. And an ethos guides my directives as pedagogue when I propose ‘de-familiarizing’ walks. This hierarchy is perhaps more explicit when I am in the role of a high school teacher, but is nonetheless present when I lead walks with adults in public spaces. This feeds into a critique Gaztambide-Fernandez and

Matute (2013) pose regarding public pedagogy research wherein they highlight the often-held assumption among researchers that public space is somehow not “institutionalized” space (p. 55).

They argue that all pedagogy, even public pedagogies which occur outdoors necessarily involve some forms of institutionalization in the form of relational “power hierarchies” (p. 55). Accordingly, jagodzinzki’s (2013) warning that a researcher’s own “institutional position [must be] problematized”

(p. 65) resonates for me in that on reflection I recognize that I approach ‘public pedagogy’ with a complex mixture of ethical imperatives guiding me; despite my critical, emergent, and post-structural leanings, as a researcher at a university, and a teacher in public schools, I have a variety of ethos(s) influencing my pedagogy(s)

While public pedagogy can be said to refer to the educational, cultural and social affects and effects of prevailing culture, Sandlin, Burdick and O’Malley (2011) use the term critical public pedagogy to describe the ways popular and everyday culture(s) can be used to “…decode and interrupt dominant ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, militarism, and neo-liberalism (p. 347).

Critical public pedagogy is an apt term to describe the interventions or tactics that seek to rupture the affects and effects of hegemonic ‘public pedagogies’ through employing non-canonical

105 knowledge, de-familiarization, artistic interventions and everyday actions – like walking within public space. Within a critical paradigm it is still clear that “…pedagogy is always intentional and goal directed,” and I contend that that “goal” is not necessarily fixed (Gaztambide-Fernandez and

Matute, 2013, p. 56). Simon (1992) offers an open-ended approach to intentionality and goals by stating that critical approaches to pedagogy should attempt “...to take people beyond the world they already know but in a way that does not insist on a fixed set of altered meanings” (Simon, 1992, p.

47). While Patel (2016) offers a more cautionary projection through stating, “the personal is not always political, nor is its politicization automatically a move toward equity” (p. 82).

Emergent-public-pedagogies

Each of the three research-creation events in this dissertation involved emergent publics, and emergent pedagogies. At the proposal stage of my dissertation I was considering them all as ‘public pedagogies,’ as a way of exploring and pushing the conventional understanding of both what publics are and how public pedagogy operates (as a regulatory function imposed from without onto subjects). A majority of public pedagogy scholarship situates it as occurring outside of school in

‘public’ space. But as evidenced from the in-school research-creation project following this section,

‘public’ spaces outdoors – for example the telephone poles that students published their writings on

– are institutional spaces. Just as many ‘public’ squares like Dundas Square in Toronto are owned by institutions. This has left me wondering why we continue with a binary between in-school pedagogies and public pedagogies? Where does public begin and end? What is public about public education? What is public about institutional space? New materialist understandings of how publics form and the social-material agents active in creating different kinds of publics breaks down this false binary of how and where pedagogy occurs.

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Enacting these three research-creation projects has also caused me to reconsider the false binary between public and private correspondences (pedagogies) as well. For example, as will be demonstrated later, post cards in the Postcards from Strangers chapter (including the ones I wrote to myself), and the texts in the Intratextual Entanglement project circulate as public documents. And in the increasingly institutionalized (also ironically called privatized) world of mailing, emailing, digital repository sharing such as Dropbox, little remains of private correspondence. Humans might not be reading these texts, but they are being read. The same goes for bodies. Springgay and Freedman

(2012) discuss how breasts during breastfeeding (and women’s breasts in general) blur the boundaries between private and public spaces. A similar logic operates with regards to women’s clothes, as evidenced by Abida’s experiences described later in this chapter. Private-public- institutionalized spaces meet and mix with each other in a messy, shifting ontology, and the give rise to myriad pedagogies. So perhaps I should use the term emergent-public-pedagogies when discussing how both publics and pedagogies continually occur regardless of where and how we walk-read-write.

As stated in Chapter 1, my approach to research-creation and pedagogy is critical, emergent, and deconstructive. I contend that deconstruction is compatible with critical pedagogies although difference between the two might be that deconstruction cannot presume an outcome of its deconstruction other than to show the “undecidability” of meaning within a system (Trifonas, 2004, p.1). What deconstruction offers critical approaches to education is that it works away at the logic of a text or system, shows where it contradicts itself, investigates how things are codified, and allows for multiplicity of meaning (Derrida, 1997; Irwin, 2013). Through procedures of de-familiarization walking has the potential to challenge the geographical make-up of the city or school and usual ways of moving through it. This can be as simple as taking a new route, or finding a new mode of walking, or as explained above, through exploring a larger intervention or critique in ‘public’ space.

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Similarly, through de-familiarization writers and artists test out new approaches to language and art- making. In this pedagogical approach the outcome is not pre-determined: there will be a change in perspective for participants, but it is not possible to predict in advance what the end result will be.

This is because as an emergent force deconstruction “works against the critical righteousness of ideology critique where ‘the materialist critic has an educative role that involves the propagandistic task of eliciting correct consciousness’ (Leslie, 2000, p. 33, as cited in Lather, 2003, p. 260). For me pedagogy is more an ongoing attunement and re-cuing. As Massumi (2015) states, “There are potential alter-politics at the collectively embraced heart of every situation, even the most successfully conformist in its mode of attunement. You can return to that reservoir of real but unexpressed potential, and re-cue it. This would be a politics of microperception: a micropolitics”

(p. 57-58).

Space/Place

Lefebvre (1991) discusses the seemingly strange notion of producing space: “To speak of ‘producing space’ sounds bizarre, so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it” (p. 15). Which is similar to Foucault (1986) who says we do not “live inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we live in a set of relations” (p. 23). Discussions of walking as a transcorporeal understanding of place necessarily involve discussions of space, including who is given space to move-speak, spaces of learning within and without institutional settings, how bodies are produced in space, and the affective potential of embodied learning. As early as Dewey (1988) educational theorists recognized the affect of environmental factors and previous lived experience on a person’s learning and argued for a more situated approach to pedagogy.

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Situated pedagogy acknowledges the everyday lives of students and the environs students interact with outside of school hours, and through activities other than desk-centered learning such as the walk to and from school, and movement in public spaces, and civic engagement (Hickey-

Moody, 2013). Dewey (1988) contends that it is the interaction between concrete surroundings and internal responses in a person that give rise to what he calls a “situation” of educative experience (p.

39). For Dewey, living in the world means living in a “series of situations” which are constantly changing as a person and his/her environment interact (p. 41). Kitchens (2009) asserts that situated pedagogy “…attends to place, not only as the focus of student inquiry or academic study, but as the spaces for performative action, intervention, and perhaps transformation” (p. 240). I appreciate

Kitchen’s use of the term “perhaps transformation,” in that he does not imply that “transformation” will necessarily occur – or perhaps, more aptly he cannot predict what form transformation will take.

Ellsworth (2005) states that pedagogy is felt viscerally and that educators should recognize,

“Bodies have affective somatic responses as they inhabit a pedagogy’s time and space” (p. 4).

Gruenewald (2003) argues for what he calls, “ecological place-based education” which takes interest in the daily, lived environments of students. Such a view contrasts much current in-school curriculum design that seeks to “…standardize the experience of students from diverse geographical and cultural places so that they may compete in the global economy,” (p. 7). Gruenewald contends that place-based education shares commonalities with the Freirean tradition of critical pedagogy in that both traditions recognize the importance of spatial aspects of social experience. Kennelly &

Dillabough (2008) draws on William’s (1977) idea of ‘structures of feeling’ as a classification of youths’ previous experiences in a city where these embodied understandings play out through

“unconscious, cultural, and symbolic responses to a perceived sense of belonging and security within the cultural hierarchy of the city” (p. 495).

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Gruenewald and Smith (2008) argue that place-conscious education can be key in challenging conventional understandings of diversity in education where critical issues such as race, class and gender can slide into abstractions unless “grounded in concrete experience” that always

“takes place somewhere” (p. xxi). In a North American context, it is important to recognize how even well-meaning place based approaches that attend to social constructions of critical issues simultaneously continue to erase ongoing settler colonialism:

A core strategy of emplacement is the discursive and literal replacement of the Native by the settler, evident in laws and policies such as eminent domain (and similar constructs), manifest destiny, property rights, and removals, but also in boarding schools, sustained and broken treaties, adoptions and resulting ‘apologies’ (McCoy, Tuck & McKenzie, 2016, p. 15)

Similarly, in her investigations of the embodied affects of colonization, Ng (2012) states that hierarchical control does not only manifest “…in the form of intellectual encounters. Most intellectual encounters entail a confrontation of bodies…Power plays are both enacted and absorbed by people physically…” (p. 346). Ng’s attention to embodied experience echoes bell hooks’ (1994) critique of the Cartesian split and call to recognize “…the body in relation to teaching,” as well as other feminist scholars’ discussions of the relationship between embodiment and different ways of knowing (hooks, 1994, p. 191).

New-materialist and affective approaches to education have expanded phenomenological discussions of space, place and bodied experiences to recognize each as interdependent and in flux.

According to Somerville (2007) bodies are formed through, “a reciprocal relationship with objects and landscapes, weather, rocks and trees, sand, mud and water, animals and plants, an ontology founded in the bodies of things” (p. 234). In this ontological view, the bodies of things are dynamic and relational, and through their intra-actions subjectivities and subjects are “formed and

110 transformed” (p. 234). According to Massey (2008), place is contingent, “the product of interrelations,” and is “always under construction” (p. 9). Massey states, the event of place is “…the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing” (p.

141). Space is produced in conjunction with other bodies, animate and inanimate objects, social conventions and relations. Or as Arakawa and Gins (2002) state: "You are not given a finished house but instead form it through your movements and through those of whoever else is in there with you" (p. 28). Accordingly, de Freitas (2012) states, “Even inanimate objects are seen as active mediators in a social material network” (p. 593). I take de Freitas’ statement to mean that space is inherently political and that the physical objects, as well as other social-cultural constructs all influence the environment and how bodies are created and perform within that environment be it a classroom or a city street. This is similar to curriculum theorist, Aoki’s (2005) term ‘attunement’ which highlights the importance and bodily potential of learning relationally with environments.

Tuck & McKenzie (2015) argue for a responsible re-thinking of place that accounts for

Indigenous understandings of Land. They state, “places are not always named, and are not always justly named. They do not always appear on maps; they do not have agreed-upon boundaries” (p.

14). While new materialist theories have been helpful in de-centering the human and attending to networks that make up place, Indigenous ontologies have often been left out of the discourse.

Indigenous ontologies of place consider the land itself – and its “nonhuman inhabitants and characteristics” as important agents in the manifestation of place (p. 40).

Literacy-English Class-Classrooms

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This research-creation informed dissertation was not a study in literacies per se, but because I’m researching the affect and effects of writing practices, and in this particular chapter operating as an

English teacher in a school, I feel compelled to discuss literacy and the disciplinary space of the

English curriculum. However, I do so from within two specific fields in educational research: critical curriculum studies and new materialist research methodologies. While I am aware of the field conventionally described as ‘literacy scholarship,’ my research is more closely informed by curriculum scholars.

There is a desire when conducting research-creation events within the English curriculum to frame the work as ‘literacy’ because of its cache as something measurable and indicative of success.

At the same time, the taxonomy within literacy studies, regardless of how many types of literacy are touted, still falls back into conventional hierarchies that privilege certain literacies over others. Llyn

High School, where I conducted this research-creation has a reputation for excellence in literacy.

While there’s a proliferation of kinds of literacies – literacy is now used across the disciplines for example, math literacy, eco-literacy, or computer literacy10 – particular literacies continue to ‘count’ more than others.

Literacy can be conceptualized through various intersecting and frictive theoretical frameworks and ‘hermeneutic’ approaches (Simon & Campano, 2015) including: ecologies of new literacy (Gee, 2000; Tusting, 2008), multimodality (Iyer & Luke, 2009), comparative and hyper- textual media (Hayles & Pressman, 2013; Hayles, 2012), distant reading (Moretti, 2013), critical literacies (Low, 2011; Janks, 2013; Lankshear & McClaren, 1993), critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008;

Lather, 2001; Ellsworth, 1989); post-composition (Dobrin, 2011; Kolodny, 2005), and deconstruction (Trifonas, 2000).

10 I heard a joke once that discussed the importance of ‘literacy literacy.’

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I understand literacy as an emergent practice affected by factors such as sexuality, culture, race, and class. I view all discussions of literacy as multiple although similar to Simon (2011), I don’t normally use the term ‘multiliteracies’. I view literacy as an ever-shifting horizon that must be continually re-considered within Canada’s diverse cultural, linguistic, and racial landscape, and proliferating forms of communication. This conceptualization of literacy informs my research into reading and writing practices as well as my understanding of the politics of pedagogical spaces – both within school and out.

New materialist contributions to literacy include Brandt & Clinton (2002), who take up

Latour’s notion of ‘actants,’ and Pahl and Rowsell (2010) who discuss ‘artifactual literacies.’ Such scholars engage with more-than-human theories to prioritize agency that is both independent and inextricably linked with human meaning-making and literacies. While Haraway’s (1988) material- semiotic hyphenation hints at the importance of materiality in meaning making and disturbs human- non-human and nature-culture binaries in the social sciences. Similarly, De Freitas and Curinga

(2015) take up the materiality of language in their considerations of post-human subjectivities in educational research. Leander and Boldt (2013) draw on theories of affect through Deleuze to map an 11-year-old’s literacy practices around manga. Here they focus on the “sensations and movements of the body in the moment-by-moment unfolding or emergence of activity” (p. 22).

Their engagement with the emergence of feeling shifts literacy from its concern about particular

‘coded’ meanings toward “affective intensities and their effects produced across texts, bodies, and interactions” (Leander & Boldt, 2013, p. 38).

In addition to new materialist contributions by curriculum scholars to literacy studies, my research is informed by critical curriculum studies/cultural studies. This branch of theorizing helps me problematize issues of cultural diversity and social justice in schools (Phelps, 2010; Singer, 2006), the rise of digital technologies and social media in learning environments (Alvermann, 2011; boyd &

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Ellison, 2007), youth cultural productions (Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008; Low & Hoechsmann,

2016), as well as discussions of identity and power relations (Sonu & Benson, 2016). Further to this,

I argue that literacy practices in ‘post’ Truth and Reconciliation Canada need to be re-examined for their contribution to ongoing settler colonialism, recognize the prevailing idea of a universal ‘literacy’ as a colonizing project, and that the proliferation of different kinds of ‘literacies’ that profess to attend to varied ways of reading-writing-knowing the world don’t necessarily undo the basic notion of a literacy built around a supremacist-monoculture (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2013). This, has far reaching globalized effects for understanding literacy, including the work I did in Cardiff.

Curriculum scholar Mishra Tarc (2015) argues for a re-reading of what it means to be

‘literate,’ and states that while we cannot abandon all aspects of institutionalized literacy we also cannot “continue to practice literacy without thinking about the dominant forms of life it produces”

(p 130). Simon (2011) argues that ‘literacy legislation continues to restrict rather than invite children’s full literate lives into classrooms” (p. 362) and that “[n]arrowing what counts as real literacy in schools has consequences for students as well as urban teacher and teacher education” (p.

238, italic in original). Simon (2015) critiques reports by The National Endowment for the Arts that focus on a decline of ‘literary reading’ while “neglecting to include many literacy practices that adolescents embrace – including reading and writing online, blogging, gaming, and texting” (p. 238). In this regard, we have to be very careful when we push new kinds of literacy, if at the core they still operate based on bringing ‘outsiders’ into a particular world-view rather than expanding what counts as ‘legitimate’ ways of knowing and being and representing the world. Otherwise literacy in its multiplicities continues to function within a hierarchy where some kinds of literacies matter more and are superior to others.

English is often framed as the school subject that teaches literacy through its emphasis on reading, writing, and orality in language. Mishra Tarc (2015), following Derrida, warns that the

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“generative possibilities of language can be diminished by an overreliance on instrumental, systematic, and classifying practices of literacy” (p. 4). However, since the 1990s, English as a secondary school subject has been steered by top down educational reforms influenced by neoliberal ideals (Brass, 2015). The idea of English as the development of ‘key skills’ now dominates secondary

English education, particularly in the United Kingdom where I conducted this in-school research- creation. Davidson (2000) argues that at the heart of skills based approaches to English is directly linked to the demands of industry, commerce and the workplace or what he calls a “functionally literate workforce of active consumers” (Davidson, 2000 p. 249, italics mine). And Somerville (2013) attests, literacy is a “primary” site of the operation of standardization practices “because of the perceived relationship between literacy and economic competitiveness” (p. 12).

Alexander (2007) states that a predominantly skills-based outlook at English offers a mechanistic view of the subject; English teachers are so busy fulfilling requirements for standardized tests that they lose the opportunity to be creative in their subject area:

It is as though the information society has combined with control-freakery to delude people into thinking that the whole of reality can be captured on a page, preferably a grid or in bullet points…English is commodified and classified so that it is amendable to tick boxes. (Alexander, 2007 p. 106).

Through a skill-based outlook, proficiency in English and literacy consist in the accretion of discrete skills that are then improved through exercises and tasks that can be measured and evaluated.

Arguably, there are identifiable skills-based ‘literacies’ (although that’s a broad term and arguably inherently colonial) that can and should be taught within school. However, my research- creation project does not focus on the development of English as skills in the functionally-literate- workforce sense of the term. Instead, I’m interested in English as a subject that pushes toward more emergent, affective, ethico-political orientations to language, pedagogy, and literacy that challenge

115 how school curricula generally reflects and reproduces the “texts, world views, values, and communicative norms of socially dominant groups” (Brass, 2015, p. 4). If we continue teaching and assessing English following norms of literacy, some students will invariably appear more successful than others, because the school-based practices taught to them mirror (and reproduce) the ways of communicating they arrive at school with while continuing to alienate others. As such, literacies research should attend to concerns of linguistic diversity, maintain an ethico-political orientation to issues of diversity including the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class, and remain critical of how taxonomies of what counts as literacy are embedded and invested in Western hierarchies.

Along with teaching critical reading strategies we should also teach ‘reparative’ reading.

Mishra Tarc (2011) discusses how reparative approaches to reading fiction can help develop and sustain empathy. I also think we should practice reparative writing. While much of the English curriculum revolves around literacy practices and meaning-making through reading, speaking, and of course writing, I argue that students should write more. With my study, I’ve laid the groundwork to allow myself to experiment with walking, reading, and writing practices. In that regard, I view walking as perhaps another literacy, or multimodal way of making sense of the world through movement.11

There has been research into the relationship between linguistic diversity and movement.

Research from Stanford University (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014) shows how walking affects linguistic creativity. In Oppezzo and Schwartz’s study the control group who walked a short length of time rather than sat, significantly increased their “creative output” on average by about 60

11 Such a statement, when viewed through a critical perspective demonstrates how even the word walking presumes that the students arrive at school with a “skill set” which already puts students that are differently abled at a disadvantage if we assume that walking means a particular way of moving.

116 percent, particularly creative output related to novel ideas and word usages (Oppezzo & Schwartz,

2014, p. 3). Working within a positivist paradigm, Lindgren and Johnson-Glenberg’s (2013) research on embodiment in conjunction with immersive digital environments, or “mixed realities” approaches to learning – particularly interfaces that accept physical movement as cues for computer engagement – highlight increasing evidence that gestures and other forms of bodily movement can function as “cross-modal prime” which “facilitates the retrieval of [specific] mental or lexical items”

(Hostetter & Alibali, 2008 as cited in Lindgren & Johnson-Glenberg, 2013, p. 446). They assert that if “…physical movement primes mental constructs, such as language, then it may be that increasing an individual’s repertoire of conceptually grounded physical movement will provide fertile areas from which new knowledge structures can be developed” (p. 446). They also assert that for embodied learning to be useful at imparting specific knowledge, “activities must be designed such that they engineer the desired instances of understanding” (p. 448, italics in original). The preoccupation of imparting “specific” knowledge is reminiscent of standards-based rote models of teaching and learning, yet Lindgren and Johnson-Glenberg’s work does show how everyday actions relate to abstract and linguistic knowledge and how both can be modified, ruptured and augmented through other forms of movement-thought, such as walking.

Tomlinson (2005) argues against the conception of writing practice that only “privileges the moment of transcription, as if it were a synecdoche of writing” (Tomlinson 2005, p. 52). By this she means that a host of other variables come to matter in writing practice along with the moment the pen scratches the paper, or fingers hit the keys. Although this chapter focuses on the relationship between walking and writing with high school students, it does not focus on composition theory in the usual sense. I do not believe it is possible to codify, standardize, and construct a writing framework, or theory of writing that is repeatable, and works for all students-writers. These leanings may position me as a “post-process/composition theorist” (Dobrin, 2011). To be clear, I think that

117 many process-based approaches to composition – free writing, mapping, peer editing, process over product, and heuristics – are useful in learning to write effectively. While traditional methods of rhetoric, textual analysis, and invention, are useful in learning to write effectively, process-based approaches to composition and traditional approaches to composition can be understood as extensions of the same pedagogical process in that they:

…maintain the modernist composting subject [student]…who is sufficiently discrete from the composing context to stand apart from it…this subject is able to inspect the contents of the mind and report them to a reader without distortion, using language that fully represents a well-formed composing intention (Crowley, 1998, p. 213).

With this chapter, rather than reinforcing the “modernist” view of a composing subject

(either myself or the students), I am interested in highlighting the more-than-human, or productive potentials of combining walking, or other forms of movement, with textual communication.

Hoechsmann and Low’s (2009) “reading youth writing” refers to the interpretation of youth behaviour, recognizing young people as cultural producers, and thinking critically about what youth say (p. 21).

I situate my research-creation projects within this cultural studies lens, which Hoechsmann and Low view, as a flexible tool for engaging with the interaction between “writing, text, reception, and cultural context” (p. 21-22). Cultural studies attends to the lived experience of students and conceptualizes culture as something produced rather than merely inherited. It allows for myriad cultures to develop, flourish, and grow (kind of like Petrie dish bacterial cultures!) rather than one over-arching determined culture. Cultural Studies draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks or concepts that are then critically brought to bear on cultural productions and practices. New materialism can lend itself to Cultural Studies readings of youth reading, walking, and writing practices by attending to more-than-human and affective entanglements.

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According to Massumi (2002) affects differ from emotions and are pre-linguistic. He states,

“the skin is faster than the word,” yet also discusses how language can amplify or dampen the intensity of an affect through articulation or writing (p. 25). Such a viewpoint does not reduce linguistic communication to a representation of affective experiences, but allows words into the affective encounter as another part of the event across bodies from which material experience arises.

My interest in walking as an aesthetic practice, as a method for inciting creativity, and as a tool for defamiliarization is grounded in my experience as a walker who writes, and my experience as a high school English teacher. I am therefore particularly interested in how walking and writing can mutually affect/effect each other as affective pedagogical event that prompt further questions rather than necessarily offer solutions. According to Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) many advocates for the arts, and arts researchers, are trapped within the successionist logic of what he calls the a “rhetoric of effects” (p. 215). A ‘rhetoric of effects’ view of arts education focuses on demonstrating the positive or transformative effects the arts have on students. Gaztambide-Fernández argues that this trend is pervasive likely because the “…prevailing teleological view of education and schooling requires prediction and the ability to demonstrate the effects of what we do on some desired outcome” (p. 215). In such a view, the arts are always instrumentalist – as in they promote academic achievement, or intrinsic in that they are geared at developing aesthetic perception. Further to this, even reconceptualist notions of the arts often mobilize what Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) describes as “…a romanticized conception of the arts as having the power to transform consciousness and turn students into political agents” (216). These research-creation projects do not

‘turn’ students into political agents, but recognize the ethico-political matters that arise through their movements, discussions, and writings.

Because much of what I engage with in this chapter, focuses on pieces that students wrote, I want to discuss, briefly how the research-creation projects take up student writing. When critiquing

119 how teachers respond to student writing, Ellsworth (1996) engages with Rooney’s (1989) argument that there is no such thing as ‘innocent reading.’ Ellsworth states, “we can read only through our vested interests, our own and others' rhetorics of opinion and argument, and our desires to persuade. All readings—even the ones we think we are making simply to understand—are "tainted" by purposes other than understanding” (p. 138). Further to this, Simon (2013) discusses how responses to student writing always function “in the service of something (or someone)” (p. 116).

Within the assessment framework of literacy practices in schools where rubrics for marking are the norm, reading often takes the form of looking for “deficiencies” (Simon, 2013) in student writing.

To disrupt this common narrative, Simon (2013) asks, what happens when teachers “shift their responses from fidelity to assessment instruments toward increased attentiveness and responsibility to student writers?” (p. 117). Simon’s question is pertinent to my research-creation project wherein the students and I engaged in reading and writing practices that account for and are responsible to ethico-political concerns that arose. As stated later in this chapter, I recognize that I was in a unique position as a researcher in not having to fulfill specific curricular requirements for reading and writing with my students and had the time and space to explore other affective, ethico-political, and theoretical issues that emerged.12

The mechanics of an emergent ‘method’ and script

During the research event, on days that it wasn’t raining, the students and I used the ‘walking- classroom.’ The walking classroom, as we called it, was not the designated outdoor classroom at the

12 Although I saw my research as research-creation. I was likely seen by many staff and perhaps the students as a ‘teacher,’ and it was through my credentials as a certified high school English teacher, and my ‘innovative’ approaches to teaching that would benefit literacy in the school that I was allowed to be in Llyn High School to conduct my research-creation.

120 school, but was still outdoors (the designed outdoor classroom was setup in lecture format and because we were working collaboratively and emergently it didn’t make sense for me to be sitting at the front of the group giving a lecture). Because I’ve been touting the necessity to attend to emergences that arise while experimenting with educational research, I will (re)present one research event here, first to demonstrate the mechanics of thinking emergently as a researcher, and second to highlight how attending to what matters (and what’s excluded from mattering) brought new questions into the research-creation events. To do so I will discuss an event that occurred based around Haryette Mullen’s Tanka poems Urban Tumbleweed (2013). Mullen describes Urban Tumbleweed as a “record of meditations and migrations” of her walks over a year in diverse terrains including urban malls, the seaside, the desert and Los Angeles’ streets (p. viii). As part of a walking-reading- writing event, the students and I circumambulated the outdoor walking-classroom’s 4 picnic tables beneath umbrellas and read Harryette Mullen’s Tanka poems aloud.

A Tanka is a thirty-one-syllable poem, traditionally written in a single unbroken line, and means ‘short song.’ We took turns reading aloud as we walked. And although reading while in motion isn’t the easiest task, the Tanka format lends itself to the practice because of its brevity. The rhythm of our movements complicated the rhythm of the poems. We discussed the poems between readings as the book was passed on to the next reader. I scribbled notes about our discussions as I walked. Although we read many poems aloud (at least eighteen) two poems in particular provoked discussions that highlighted the emergence of ongoing matters of emergence-emergency for the students. The poems in question are reproduced below, and our walking-conversation notes follow below them. In framing the walking-conversation notes as Tankas they are not direct quotations entirely, but the thrust of our conversations in Tanka form.

Visiting with us in Los Angeles, our friend

121 went out for a sunny walk, returned with wrists bound, misapprehended by cops (Mullen, 2013, p. 94).

What is misapprehended? They arrested the wrong bloke.

How do you know it was a bloke?

Is this about racism? I think so.

Just because she’s black doesn’t mean it’s about race,

nor that her friend is black.

I still think it’s about race and police violence though.

Whether or not Mullen’s poem was specifically about a racialized encounter with the police, we may never know. The students’ quickness to comment on race demonstrated an urgency to recognize how racialized bodies intersect with, and are produced through walking. As Cadogan (2016) argues,

“Walking while black restricts the experience of walking, renders inaccessible the classic Romantic experience of walking alone” (Cadogan, 2016, np).

“No thanks,” she said when he offered a sip from his flask. “You’d look good in a bikini,” he told her as she waited for the bus (Mullen, 2013, p. 28).

That’s happened to me. Not a bikini comment

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but random men telling me things.

I stroll along and they say to smile or cat call.

I would like to walk in the park, through the trees

Alone but I can’t

If I do and something happens to me it’s my fault not theirs.

Our perambulation ceased. The students exploded in a torrent of affirmation and critique. I scribbled: walking, race, gender.

Although one of the initial propositions of the ‘lesson’ was to demonstrate how Tanka form lent itself for accentuating (rather than capturing) the ephemera of daily life: something in the mixture of the movement, the reading, the passing of the book between us, the wind and the student bodies forced us to focus on those two poems. Those poems lingered in the air and resonated differently – they had a different affective force and mattered differently. And they mattered differently in conjunction with all the other forces of the day.

I then set the students a task to write their own Tanka about an ephemeral event while walking in the city. Unprompted, the students mainly focused on more-than-human relations in their walks and the ecologies they live within. For example:

It innocently limps across the raging road cleaning its dull grey feathers then flattened by a crimson red bus.

(Sikeena)

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Seagulls are surprisingly friendly they're hated for their methods of survival and I hope to feed them mango again soon.

(Rowan)

Surrounded by murky water,

Choked by human litter the island bursts out a fountain tangled plants and animals, alive

(Jeremy)

Engel-Di Mauro and Carroll (2014) discuss how “environmental education in cities is often defined as one of inadequate access to nature, as though cities were not ecosystems” (p. 73). The students were not under the illusion that nature is elsewhere, although they were concerned with how poorly many humans interacted with more-than-human animals and plants.

The next lesson, we walked in the outdoor classroom, read the poems aloud and discussed them. I scribbled: more-than-human ecologies, transcorporeal-relations, place. These themes shared characteristics of many of Mullen’s poems that we had read. However, we hadn’t discussed them in detail. Instead we had discussed gender and race and walking. Yet none of the students wrote about either. I asked them why?

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I wanted to write about animals.

I don’t like how we treat nature and wanted to write about its beauty

And sorrow.

(Jagdev)

Engel-Di Mauro and Carroll (2014) argue that when we begin with the “presupposition that people are apart from nature,” and that environmental destruction is elsewhere, through that bifurcation we also cease to see how colonial histories are relevant to learning about nature (p. 73).

The division of “Man” (Wynter) from “nature” is how the slippery slope of ongoing environmental degradation, racism, and sexism, and colonization continue. For “Man” these problems happen elsewhere – not in everyday intra-actions.

MacLure (2013a) discusses how during what she calls the ‘pedestrian process’ of thinking and writing about research, something “not-yet-articulated” can take over and effect a “kind of quantum leap that moves the writing-writer to somewhere unpredictable. On those occasions, agency feels distributed and undecidable, as if we have chosen something that has chosen us” (p.

660-661). MacLure calls this an encounter kind of encounter with ‘data’ that glows. To me it feels more like emergences that ooze, as I don’t view my walks-talks writings with students as ‘data’ so much as emerging research. There are the words, the walking, the discussions, and then there’s this affective oozing – excesses that kept drawing my attention during the study and draw my attention now as I re-articulate it. There were many aspects of the walking, writing, discussing that I could focus on, but as Ahmed (2008) states, “And yet, there is a politics to how we distribute our attention”

(p. 30, italics added). I see this as a way of saying we need to attend to what matters and what’s excluded from mattering through how we distribute our attention.

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The English lesson tasks of reading, writing, while walking in the outdoor classroom attended to many curricular aims that are desirable in schools including – practice of orality and reading aloud, writing techniques, and awareness of form. Ethnographically, the students immediately reported how much they enjoyed walking as part of reading-writing, how the fresh air helped them think, how the freedom to move and the sun on their faces made them feel more creative. All of these elements were important. However, by attending to what ‘mattered’ and was

‘excluded’ from mattering while we completed these tasks new ethico-political questions emerged.

Rather than my study focusing on English language skills and creativity through movement-writing.

Micro-political gestures and affects made the research change shape and provoked new research questions/concerns. Moreover, I was not interested in a phenomenological account of student experiences. I did not conduct detailed interviews. Rather, the research-creation events are the research I cut with and through.

New questions inspired by concerns that emerged during the Tanka exercise and repeated throughout the study:

1. In what ways do walking and writing contribute to understandings of the intersectionality of

race, gender, and power?

2. In what ways do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal-relational understandings

of place?

3. What are the implications of this for how we understand movement-thought-writing?

These were not the questions that I began my study with, nor the questions that I wrote in my thesis proposal – these questions emerged from the research. The students and I continued to walk, write, read, and experiment together for two months. The following section cuts in descriptions of some in

126 school tasks, the students’ own writings, and various theories to help think-in-movement with these questions.

In what ways do walking and writing contribute to understandings of the intersectionality of race, gender, and power?

Hall (1990) states,

Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But… far from being eternally fixed in some essentialist past, they are subject to the continual ‘play’ of history, culture and power… identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (p. 225)

An emergent conceptualization of race, gender, and class would view them as events – born of relations – rather than as pre-existing subject positions. As Puar (2012) states, “Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it” (p. 52). From this perspective, the intersection of forces or folds emerging at certain moments co-constitute how/who/what is produced although the complexity of these processes are often

“mistaken for a resultant product” (Puar, 2012, p. 52). Each person is a complex interplay of differing environments – family background, intellect, financial status, political affiliations, colour, race, religion, aesthetic impulses. This interplay occurs ‘intra-sectionally’ – a new materialist extension of intersectionality that posits how different identity markers do not pre-exist but are produced through their relations and eventing.

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Intersectionality is an analytical approach used in feminist thought that conceptualizes race, gender and class as intersecting markers that reinforce marginalization of certain subjects, while simultaneously critiquing how that plays out socially, politically, and representationally (Crenshaw,

1991). Thinking intersectionality requires us to attend to the ‘intra-actions’ of markers such as race, gender or ability in order to develop more nuanced understandings of power and oppression; however, intersectionality has been problematized for falling back into an anthropocentric model.

According to Gaard (2015) few “scholars have critiqued the humanism of intersectionality, or proposed examining the exclusions of species and ecosystems from intersectional identities” (Gaard,

2015, p. 30). Further to this, Puar (2015) argues how a method intersectionality is now often used to qualify the “‘specific difference’ of ‘women of color’” (p. 51). In so doing, Puar argues the category

‘women of colour’ has been “simultaneously emptied of specific meaning in its ubiquitous application and yet overdetermined in its deployment” (p. 51). In this view, intersectionality begins to operate against its own premise: rather than a subject emerging through the intra-section of a multitude of factors, markers are determined beforehand (such as race and gender) and consequently some subjects (women of colour) are seen as already given. This constantly produces “Others” and views difference as already different from.

How can one think-with theories of emergence and a script that ‘responds to what matters’ and ‘what’s excluded from mattering’ and also account for intersectional identity markers that appear to pre-exist for the students in their walking-writing exercises? Emergence recognizes that new things arise from pre-existing conditions, but in ways that are not always predictable. Noting the importance of intersectionality but also its limitations, Puar (2015) continues to work with the concept but holds it in ‘friction’ with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage to see how they can work together to produce new understandings. According to Jackson and Mazzei (2012) an assemblage “isn’t a thing it’s the process of making-unmaking a thing (p. 1). In that regard an

128 assemblage occurs and its meaning is made through the mutual interaction of things rather than privileging disparate and cohesive parts separately. For Deleuze and Guattari assemblages are constantly forming and re-forming. Territorializing and Deterritorializing on a multitude of levels:

On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions, an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another; on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 88).

The components of an assemblage don’t arrive with prior ‘meanings,’ and through thinking with assemblage theory Puar challenges how brown bodies can be coded as pre-given in some uptakes of intersectionality. As the students and I walked, read, and wrote together, I tried to think-with both intersectionality and theories informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblage as the students wrote and spoke about the “lived cartographies of power” that affected their walks to and from school (Dillabough & Kennelly, 2010, p. 136).

Everyday we are treading on eggshells

Being outrageous raises alarm bells

Simply wearing hijab is suspicious

Can’t we express ourselves, and can you stop being so vicious?

(Abida)

The stanza above is the beginning of a poem written by Abida, one of the students in the project, which discusses the politics of surveillance she experiences on a daily basis. The poem was

‘modelled’ in form and content after William Blake’s London which describes a walk a Blake’s

129 character takes through London critiquing its many social injustices and how controlled or ‘chart’d’ the streets are. Abida’s, like all the other students’ poems was eventually pinned to a pole as a way of

‘publishing’ an answer back to the city.

Abida’s poem emerged out of the entanglement of many forces. A few that I will discuss are: a series of walks she and the other students conducted through Cardiff while thinking about how the act of walking contributes to social (mis)understandings; Cardiff’s tendency toward whiteness and masculinity as experienced through bodily movements in the city; the (im)possibility of writing about race; and the affective hunger during daylight hours of Ramadan.

Abida did not write her poem the same way the other students did. Abida did not write her poem in the outdoor walking classroom during class hours. She began, struck out words. Began again, struck out words again.

One day the opening line: White people think that… marked her page. Then she tore it up. She said, I want to write about race but don’t want to write about race. She smiled. Okay, we can wait, I said.

13 Read intersectionally, I was a white teacher trying to support Abida writing about race without pushing her to, and she a brown student in hijab asserting her right to write on her own terms, or refuse to write on her own terms (Tuck & Yang, 2014).14 We kept arriving at frictive and affective impasses and I was grateful that there wasn’t a curricular obligation forcing her to write or forcing me to require her to write. This allowed us both time and space to keep experimenting with walking and writing and to think-in-movement with various other mini research-creation projects.

13 In Canada I identify as a white settler. 14 Tuck & Yang draw from Simpson (2007) and critique the preponderance of narratives in the social sciences that highlight pain in marginalized groups. They discuss how all social science research is settler colonial research and posit ‘refusal’ as a generative mode that tells researchers what is off-limits. Both the researcher and the researched can refuse. I chose to refuse along with Abida.

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Ramadan began. Abida observed the fasting and did not consume food or drink between dawn and sunset.

The following lesson we went for a walk and took photographs for a video poem and then returned to the outdoor classroom. Students worked on various tasks as we had several small projects on the go. Abida had finished all of the other tasks and said she’d like to work on her Blake- style poem. She worked for a while and then announced that was too hungry to concentrate on the poem. She wrote about food instead. She handed me a long list of what she’d like to eat: chips and a falafel wrap, I crave a potato salad with a chicken breast along side and beetroot, cucumber, carrot, sweet corn and a nice cold juice. And I want to lay somewhere with a bit more wind where water – a stream or the ocean passes by.

I became less interested in what Abida would write about in her poem and more interested in her refusal. I was in a position as a researcher who had time and space to not force Abida to complete her poem out of curricular requirements or the necessity to reach specific ‘targets.’

I paused with Abida and was intrigued by the affect of her fasting and her refusal to write coupled with her ongoing engagement with the research-creation project. Guattari (2013) views affect as a “hyper-complex object, rich with all the fields of potentiality that it can open up…loaded with the unknown worlds at the crossroads of which it places us” (186). For Guattari (2013), rather than affect being a raw feeling; it is a kind of hyperlink to new possibilities and always already in excess of personal capacity. Gregg and Seigworth (2010) define affect as:

forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability. (p. 1)

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The event of Abida’s fast became an agent in her writing trajectory, and an affective intensity among the whole group of student walkers.

The following lesson we walked out the back field and practiced taking ‘a thought for a walk’ as an activity before attending to the poems in progress. The sun poured. The afternoon buzzed in the muggy heat. Abida was thirsty. We returned to the outdoor classroom’s shade. Sticky students slid onto the benches beneath the square umbrella shadows and began to free-write. The fast’s presence was palpable. It was not only housed in Abida’s body or speech but trickled onto other students’ notepads: anxious for Abida…feeling thirsty for Abida…could she get sun stroke…?

If this were a regular class, in a regular classroom, I don’t know what the response would be.

The school does re-assign exams during Ramadan for fasting students, but has little time for students who flat out refuse to do their tasks. A neo-liberal, top-down, colonial approach to teaching and learning doesn’t have too much room for students who are seen as ‘distracted,’ or ‘unable to focus,’ particularly when it’s ‘self-imposed.’ Although attempts are made in ‘multi-cultural’ approaches to teaching and learning to be responsive to racial and cultural politics of schooling as

Snaza and Sonu (2016) argue, the “organization of classrooms and the behavioral habits expected

(and enforced!) within those classrooms are not neutral with respect to class or race” (pp. 34-35).

Abida’s fast could be seen as an impediment to completing tasks and academic performance15 (van der Klauuw & Oosterbeek, 2013). But I’ve come to think of Abida’s fasting as an affirmative, productive force in drawing out ethico-political concerns in our walking and writing exercises, and for her as an individual asserting her right to observe her faith.

15 Klauuw & Oosterbeek’s (2013) article outlines how Muslim student’s performances deteriorate during fasting; and conversely, Yasin, Khattak, Mamat & Bakar’s (2013) study discusses how fasting does not affect cognitive performance.

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Abida told me continually that she simply could not (would not) write the poem. There were too many forces preventing it. Yet she continued to participate in our walking and writing research although it was not a curricular requirement. She came to every class I held. She completed other walking and writing tasks that I set. She sought me in the hallway to tell me she was planning on writing her poem for sure in the next walking and writing lesson. During each meeting she would participate in whatever walking-writing exercise we were completing. But in the sessions that we returned to the task of completing the Blake-inspired poem she couldn’t (wouldn’t) write.

One class we walked in the courtyard beneath the awning because it was raining. At this point all of the other students had completed their poems in rough and planned to peer-edit each other’s drafts. I walked beside Abida who had still not put a single word on paper – or had torn up any words she had written. I’m too hungry, too thirsty, not ready right now. I don’t want to write here in school.

What time of day are you not hungry or thirsty? Where do you like to write? 4am, right after eating. I like to write at home. I’m not making this homework but do you want to write your poem at 4am, at home? I’ll try.

Even in the 21st century, laws are exceptional to some

Discrimination takes place on a daily basis

Racial – verbal and physical abuses and nothing is ever done

(Abida)

In the dark hours between sunset and sunrise, when Abida woke early to eat and drink for the day, she sat at her kitchen table with her sister and composed her poem. Abida presented her poem to me and the other students as we walked outside in the shade of the school. Abida’s poem speaks to

133 the quotidian pervasiveness of racism, sexism, and Islamophobia in Cardiff. Her stanzas move seamlessly from describing Islam, to race, to women and demonstrate how all three are co- implicated and intersect with the physicality of walking on the street. And her mention of laws being exceptional to some reminiscent of Seshadri (2012) argument that race is often a dividing line within the the law: a line that decides who will be protected by the law or be a casualty of the law.

According to Abo-Zena, Sahli and Tobias-Nahi (2009) the style of Islamic dress that Abida chooses as an “outward display of an internal faith decision” is often “misinterpreted by the West as a sign of oppression and generally perceived as something foreign and undesirable” (p. 15). Abida spoke directly to this – and perhaps to liberal white feminists as well when she said, Can’t we express ourselves and can you stop being so vicious?

Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) demonstrates how some spaces or places, such as the city street are barred from the experience of certain bodies, even as those spaces co-produce such bodies, particularly racialized bodies. She states, “[t]he “matter” of race is very much about embodied reality; seeing oneself or being seen as white [or brown] or black or mixed does effect what one “can do,” or even where one can go, which can be re-described in terms of what is and is not within reach” (p. 112). Fear of violence through walking on the street is both gendered and racial for

Abida and highlights how globalization increases threats to cultural difference despite the high mobility rates of minority populations around the world (Appadurai, 2006).

Abida’s first line, Everyday we are treading on eggshells could be read as a trite or cliché metaphor.

However, she did activate her verb – she wrote tread, rather than walk – and we had practiced verb activation in our walking classroom exercises. And the image of eggshells is a delicate yet potent one to consider in regard to the task the students were completing, which was to describe walking in the city. Abida’s not literally treading on eggshells, but as her poem goes on to describe, she is figuratively

134 treading on eggshells despite living in the United Kingdom and attending a school in a ‘safe’ upper- middleclass neighbourhood.

There is a political urgency in Abida’s writing. Her own local experience walking while wearing hijab is networked and connected to others around the globe as evidenced by ongoing media discussions of racialized violence in the global north. Searls Giroux (2010) discusses how in our post-9/11 world, Muslims in the US have found themselves “added to the list of populations slated for ‘containerization’” with dizzying numbers of those polled stating that they support aggressive profiling of Muslims and even detainment of Muslims (p. 4). Abida’s prescient lines address views similar views expressed in right wing media in the UK during months running up to

Brexit when I conducted the research-creation project in Llyn High School. And speak globally to the ongoing sentiment that fueled Trump’s demagogue-esque rise to power in the United States

(which just happened in North America as I type these lines). It’s as though Abida spoke directly to

Trump, UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), and white-nationalistic bigotry with this

16 line:

We are a group of people trying to undergo a transformation

But not for the reasons of altering a nation.

(Abida)

Critical Race Theorists Delgado and Stefancic (2012) argue that the social world and its rules and intersections of power are not fixed, rather they are constructed with words, “stories and

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

135 silence. But we need not acquiesce in arrangements that are unfair and one-sided. By writing and speaking against them, we may hope to contribute to a better, fairer world” (p. 3). Abida’s writing did this. And the act of pinning her poem onto a pole to ‘publish’ it meant a lot to her. Abida wanted to publish her name along with the poem but the ethics protocol requirement of my study prevented it, and I also didn’t think it was necessarily a good idea for her name to be literally ‘public’ given the climate of the city’s streets. Which makes me return to the notion of ‘stories and silence’ with regards to race. As our research-creation projects revealed, it can be difficult to talk and write about race. And the people who have a difficult time talking about race are not people of colour, but white people.

I have thought a lot about whether it was okay for the students to put their writings out in public in case they were vandalized, particularly Abida’s. I’ve also questioned who it served. Will those who encounter it stop and read it and think about it? I don’t know.

Patel (2016) critiques the irrationality and flawed logic of antiracism workshops that presume that through reading narratives or descriptive details of the pain experienced by people of colour, white people will somehow develop empathy and ‘check’ our positions of supremacy.17 Patel goes on to argue, following Wynter:

…the creation and consumption of Black suffering is as old as the project of racism, and coloniality has relied heavily on visible suffering and its consumption to deepen the strata between man and human (Patel, 2016, p. 82).

From this perspective, highlighting the suffering of others can re-inscribe rather than deconstruct and shift the social order. Although I’m cognizant of Patel’s critique, I don’t see Abida’s writing, and

17 This critique is builds on what Simpson (2007) and Tuck & Yang (2014) said above about the structure of social science research and the humanities as a colonial project and the importance of ‘refusal.’

136 the class (public’s) reading of her poem, necessarily a consumption, but at the same time I do not want to add to the colonial narrative that uses the suffering of marginalized voices to somehow maintain the colonial status quo. Foucault (1978) states, “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (p. 95). For Foucault, we are always inside of power, and cannot escape it. However,

Foucault argues, power relationships depend on points of resistance. Points of resistance play the role of “adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations” (p. 95). In this view, there is no single point of refusal to power relations but pluralities of resistance that sometimes coalesce and make revolution or social change possible.

There was something about Abida’s experience writing, not writing, fasting, not fasting, and publication of her piece that ran transversal to all of these theoretical conceptualizations. An affective thrust that pushed the group toward new possibilities. Brennan’s (2004) notion of the transmission of affect inverts the prevailing social-biological view that biology determines social behaviour, and posits instead that social behaviours can “shape biology” (p. 74). This inversion moves away from an individualistic model that puts biological subjects first. So rather than a

“generational line of inheritance (the vertical line of history), the transmission of affect, conceptually, presupposes a horizontal line of transmission: the line of the heart” (p. 75). As part of this horizontal line of transmission I include the affects/effects of walking, language use, and other forms of trans-personal interaction. In a relational ontology we are all implicated. The event gave a clue about how discomfort/defamiliarization might be useful for productive understanding of literacy as an affective force where our ‘felt response’ to others can alter dominant uses of writing, walking, and language (Mishra Tarc, 2015).

Mishra Tarc (2013) argues that although the material effects and discursive construction of race can be examined empirically, the affective and psychsocial effects of race on both individuals

137 and groups remain both “intangible and persistent” (p. 370). As I stated above, reading new materialist theories such as affect in conjunction with intersectionality can be frictive in that new materialism would conceptualize identity markers such as race and gender as emergent events rather than pre-existing subject positions (Puar, 2015). Subsequently, as Ahmed (2004) notes, although affects arise emergently they are still “mediated by ideas that are already implicated in the very impressions we make of others and the ways those impressions surface as bodies” (p. 83). A such, as

Probyn (2010) warns, that a “general gesture to Affect,” is not enough; in order to interrogate concepts we need to examine what different affects do on different levels because different affects make us feel differently (p. 74). The affect that resonates with me still from this research-creation event was the force of Abida’s fasting, across bodies. Where a phenomenological approach to research might seek to describe in rich detail the lived experience of the fasting. I’m interested in the pre-cognitive pre-personal affect of the fasting. As Massumi (2015) states, affects are “basically ways of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger than ourselves.” (p. 6). The affective potential of the fasting continues to ‘glow’ (MacLure,

2013b). For Deleuze and Guattari (1988) eating reveals “a precise state of intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations and expansions that affect bodies of all kinds in the relations with one another” (p. 90). Although we may be disturbed by what some people eat – the choice to not eat brings also has an affective differential on a group of bodies. Springgay (2011) argues that affect is not innate, or pre-given, but “co-produced through proximinal encounters” and intensities that exceed individual bodies (p. 79).

Abida’s fasting operated affectively across numerous bodies in the classroom and both strengthened and diminished those bodies’ ability to act. For Abida’s body the affective hunger and a thirst paradoxically appeared to limit her ability to write and then provided her a unique space to

138 write from. The fasting became an agent in her writing. The fasting had force. The fasting bodied.

New materialist theories while foregrounding matter sometimes, ironically, forget about bodies.

(trans)spatializing gender

Dillabough and Kennelly (2010) discuss how the neighbourhood is a “powerful metaphor and practical site for the organization of youth practices” that highlight the connections between place and the “affective attachments” of those who inhabit them” (p. 135). Brennan (2004) describes walking into a space and feeling its ‘atmosphere.’ She says, “The transmission of affect, if only for an instant, alters the biochemistry and neurology of the subject. The “atmosphere” or the environment literally gets into the individual” (p. 1) In addition to Abida’s poem, several other students discussed the intersections of the atmosphere of urban spaces, how gender is produced, and how it limits them while walking to and from school. When we discuss the angle of a students’ arrival to class, this is rarely taken into consideration.

Feminist walking scholars have investigated the politics of location and the ideologies and practices that govern and limit gendered bodies in movement (Heddon & Turner, 2012). They note, that there isn’t just a genealogy of walking research but it is also a ‘fraternity’ that tends “towards an implicitly masculinist ideology. This frequently frames and valorizes walking as individualist, heroic, epic and transgressive” (p. 224). The legacy of the flâneur, the Romantic poets like Wordsworth, and naturalists were founded on the ideas of adventure, danger, newness and transgression. To walk was to “release oneself from the relations of everyday life” (p. 226). In much walking literature and literature about walking the the walker is presumed to be “uninflected” by gender and thus male

(and likely white). Heddon and Turner (2012) that much walking research, particularly

139 psychogeography, has extoled detachment “without much concern for the specificity of one’s own body and cultural position” (p. 227). Liberal humanism presumes that psychogeography is an activity of paying attention to the corporeality of walking in space, casting off usual relations, in order to become more ‘enlivened’ by walking and place. But race, gender, sexuality, and ability are not corporeal skins that are attuned into only at particular moments, nor can they be flung aside innocently.

I roam through the sexist streets

Where the cat calling is non-stop

Too many people I meet

Will tell me to smile and take off my top

Every time I strut through the lane

I grab my keys just in case

I hold them so tight, it causes me pain

I have them for protection, they make me feel safe.

(Maggie)

I appreciate Maggie’s use of strut and roam instead of walk as they are two verbs that could be affiliated with women who are ‘looking for trouble’ on the streets.

The affective dimensions of public space impact students differently. Some students discuss walking in groups and forming a collective. Many of the girls discussed how when walking alone

140 although they want to feel autonomous, too often end up feeling scared. Walking and writing proliferate in their contributions to understanding the production and intersectionality of race, gender, and power. However, in paying attention to identity politics the female bodies and racialized bodies appear to arrive as pre-given subjects, which is the critique Puar (2012) has with intersectionality. If we follow the logic of intersectionality a kind of domino effect of causality appears: because particular bodies appear to be pre-given, habitual ways of moving and responding – such as the clutching of keys, restrictions on who can walk where and when – appear as necessary

‘habits’ for survival. If we’re going to consider gender, race and class not as pre-given, but produced through social and relational ties, does movement have anything to do with it or is it just another force? There must be some form of inheritance or residue affecting the bodily production in a given event such as walking. 14 or 15-year-old girls know in advance where how they can and cannot walk, even while walking to and from school. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boys in the class, particularly the white boys, were astonished that their female classmates don’t consider walking through the woods near the school alone. It hadn’t crossed their mind that it would be unsafe. In all likelihood, it’s not unsafe and that’s the sad part. I know that probably I’d be fine but it’s not worth the risk walking alone.

Koskela & Pain (2000) describe how fear is the guiding affective marker in women’s experiences of walking in urban areas.

Ahmed (2006) writes, “The habitual can be thought of as a bodily and spatial form of inheritance” (p. 129). Particular bodies do appear to inherit habitual ways of responding – or particular bodies have ways of responding thrust upon them. Although affects and modes of being arise emergently, they are still “mediated by ideas that are already implicated in the very impressions we make of others and the ways those impressions surface as bodies” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 83).

Critical scholars have argued that theorists need to deepen both individual and social models of embodiment to account for more politically emplaced, spatially distributed understandings of

141 bodies and space (Stephens, Ruddick and McKeever, 2015). Tuck and McKenzie (2015) further note that particular accounts of embodiment are too often expanded on to make universal claims about the emplaced subject and continue to neglect “the situated realities of historical and spatial sedimentations of power” (p. 36). Discussions of inheritance and what a body can do need to take into account the more-than-human intra-actions of which we are part. Alaimo (2016) discusses an ethics of inhabitation that calls attention to these issues. An ethics of inhabitation accentuates the situatedness of corporeal knowledge, the movement of walking, and their relations to the global realm of white supremacy, nationalisms, and ongoing gendered violence. Movement on the street is scaled at both the minute and personal and the global and impersonal at the same time.

A little girl is warned by her dad

Not to wear that skirt

Because she will get caught by someone bad!

Apparently it’s her fault

If someone does attack her

Because she isn’t locked up in a vault!

A feminist is told that her struggle is old

And asked why she hates men

And she needs to explain what the term means again

(Sikeena)

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Sikeena read her poem while we walked in the courtyard. Several female students discussed how the term feminist is often used toward them in a derogatory way – as if an insult. Words, through usage become invested with certain meanings for a time and although various social groups often use the same words, they are not used in the same way. Through repetition and usage words generate affective tones and demonstrate how language maintains a material force in social and political struggles that students are inducted into.

Addressing the relationship between language, power, and colonization, Kolodny (2005) states that etymologically the verb to name means “…to know and to own at the same time” (p. 10).

According to Kolodny, the dual concept operates under the presumption that if we know we have the right to name and in some way own. And vice versa, because we own we have the right to name or declare meaning for others. Subdominant groups or minority groups such as women, people of colour or ethnic minorities, according to Kolodny use “oppositional or subversive discourses” for their survival (Kolodny, 2005, p. 16). Over time, the dominant group often co-opts this style, and the subdominant group will have to invent a new “oppositional discourse” to undermine the dominant/homogenizing culture.

Race and gender inspired oppositional discourses from several students. While others wrote on behalf of non-human entities including birds:

They dampen the notes of every bird’s twitter,

Tighten the clamp on any ill-born critter,

Pump them, dump them, turn their rumps into fritters

And we’re surprised to realize their taste is bitter.

(Dewy)

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Some of the students’ poems evoke how Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of ‘minor’ literature.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1988) “The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (p. 18). The minor seen in this way, is varied, open to flux, and indeterminate and always political. Manning (2016) outlines minor as the “gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation” (p. 1). Similar to a minor key in music that is interconnected with a major key, neither of which are “fixed in advance” (p. 1). While the ‘major’ tends to organize itself according to predetermined understandings of ‘value,’ the minor is a “force that courses through it, unmooring its structural integrity, problematizing its normative standards” (p. 1). For

Dewy, a student in the project, killing, frying, and eating birds is an unconscionable ‘norm’ in

Cardiff. I began to see elements of students’ poems as minor gestures in how they invoke new ways of thinking about how the city operates, and how ethico-political concerns arise through walking.

Further to this, the act of posting the writings on poles also have micro-political potential as minor gestures or détournement (the appropriation of existing social-cultural material and space to critical ends). Rogers (2015) outlines how arts-based youth cultural productions, such as posters or zines, when displayed in public space can function both as a form of participation in the life of a community as well as “help shape the community’s future” (p. 270). Such interventions re-insert youths’ “contesting narratives of citizenship” back into the city (Kennelly & Dillabough, 2008, p.

(pp. 493-4).

I didn’t try to ‘measure’ what effect the action of posting the writings onto poles throughout the city had on other pedestrians. I presume they were read. Several passers-by paused while the

144 poems were tacked onto the poles.18 In that regard they generated what Hickey-Moody (2013) would call ‘little-publics’ – or social commentaries on everyday life where arts shift “young people’s understandings of themselves and public understandings of youth’’ (p. 127). The gesture of walking through the city with the task of populating poles with poems affected students because it was an act of speaking back, through movement and writing, to the city’s inhabitants and operating as if “part of a critical community” (Low, 2011, p. 70).

As the students’ poems demonstrate, their affective responses to public spaces were already laden with intersectional understandings that were, following Williams (1977), dominant, residual, and emergent. This was clear before our discussions or my theoretical prompting. The students’ poems engender assemblage theory, affect, and intersectionality in their messy uptake of gender, race, class, and the more-than-human. Berlant (2010) asserts that “…shifts in affective atmosphere are not equal to changing the world” (p. 116). However, when I think-with the student’s poems, and their gestures of publishing them on poles, I am heartened by the moments of affect surfacing between the bodies of students, the streets, and writing.

18 As well as humans reading and interpreting the poems, non-human animals may have used them – perhaps the magpies for nest building.

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In what ways do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal understandings of place?

Walking is often characterized as a method for exploring place: place as storied, place as determined from outside, place as process, place as a site of belonging/not belonging. According to Cresswell

(2015) “…place is not simply something to be observed, researched, and written about but its itself part of the way we see, research, and write” (p. 24). While Massey (2005) views place as an event thrown together through relations; in the “event of place” there is “the coming together of the previously unrelated, a constellation of processes rather than a thing. This place as open as internally multiple” (p. 141). Scholars Pink (2009/2015) and Ingold (2000) discuss the notion of emplacement that includes the sensing and perceiving body, and place. Emplacement extends theories of embodiment to include how bodies and spaces are co-produced with space, or as Howes (2005) states emplacement “suggests the sensuous interrelationship of body-mind-environment” (p. 7).

Emplacement, according to Pink (2011) enables a fuller interpretation of place-event as an ecology that allows “us to see it as an organism in relation to other organisms and its representations in relation to other representations. It should recognize both the specificity and intensity of the place event and its contingencies, but also the historicity of processes and their entanglements” (p. 354).

In this view, the school is not a pre-existing place but an assemblage of heterogeneous elements and interrelated processes. There are many disparate ideas on what makes place, place. It could be argued that place necessarily pre-exists human relations, or conversely that it’s through humans that place takes on meaning. And from a critical social geography perspective we could argue that we need to attend to gender, class, and race as complicating factors in the relationship between place and power as the student’s writing in the other section running parallel to this one demonstrates. For Somerville

(2012) our relationship to place is constituted through relations and storytelling. And through

146 accessing alternative “storylines,” opposed to the dominant narrative of a place, new understandings are revealed of how place is made and matters (Somerville, 2012, p. 10).

Relationality is often used by walking researchers when considering how walking participants make sense of the embodied sociality of walking. For example, some scholars argue that walking with others creates a relational and embodied understanding of place (Pink, Hubbard, O’Neill &

Radley, 2010). Relationality challenges theories of embodiment that are embedded in individual subjectivity to think about networks or webs of dynamic intersections. Tuck and McKenzie (2015) problematize Western conceptualizations that reduce place to social constructions. Arguing for critical place inquiry, they insist that embodiment and emplacement are neither universal nor neutral and emphasize the need for a renewed attention to land and nonhuman in habitants and that researchers must “go beyond collecting data from and with human research participants on and in place, to also examining place itself in its social and material manifestations” and how they influence the kinds of knowledge produced from the research encounter (Tuck and McKenzie, 2015, p. 40).

In order to think further with the emergent research question: In what ways do walking and writing contribute to transcorporeal-relational understandings of place? The students and I conducted a walking dérive (drift) as a way of walking-thinking-mapping the relations that make up the place they call

‘school.’ O’Rourke (2013) outlines mapping as:

…a process that takes place every time a map of any kind is created—a drawing scribbled on the back of an envelope, a sequence of places or events etched in one’s memory, an itinerary generated on the fly by an online route-finding service, or a projection prepared by a team of professional cartographers (O’ Rourke, p. viii).

I view the students’ mapping practices as multi-faceted. By this I mean, the walking-corporeal aspect of our research was a form of mapping in the way that Springgay (2008) thinks of mapping as

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“engagements that are enfleshed in intercorporeal becomings” (p. 82). According to Firth (2014) map-making is a useful pedagogical practice because it can help learners understand spatially “how power claims can be asserted as truth and the effects that this has on everyday lives,” empower learners to “spatially illustrate their own struggles and desires” as well as “build collectivity between participants” (p. 157). Trell and Van Hoven (2010) use map making and walking with young people as a way of revealing different ‘layers’ of place and ‘empowering’ youth.

Because the students at Llyn High School and I were operating as an “English” class within curricular scope of the department of English language and literature, the students also created narrative-linguistic ‘maps’ of place that emerged through the walk. They used a series of literary devices such as listing, hyperbole, alliteration, rhyme, and synesthesia to create narrative cartographies of the school. These more-than-representational maps visually and linguistically attempt to re-present ‘places’ in the school as well as posit consist of alternative versions/names of places.

As a prompt for the project, the students and I walked with Heddon and Turner’s (2010) notion of Toponarratives, which they describe as a “collaborative, partial story of place constructed by at least two walkers” (p. 2010, p. 15). We also discussed the psychogeographic dérive (drift) and its relationship to Situationist International’s psychogeography. Psychogeography is the study of specific effects in geographical environments on the feelings and behaviour of individuals (Debord,

1955). While a dérive is a Situationist technique of walking that involves playful-constructive awareness of the psychogeographical effects that are encountered through movement. Corner (1999) states, drifting allows for “mapping alternative itineraries and subverting dominant readings and authoritarian regimes” (p. 231). Many walking scholars and artists have used versions of the dérive to map space including Richardson (2014) who discusses how she and student psychogeographers at the University of Leeds “emotionally” mapped their campus (p. 151).

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Many scholars have critiqued the Situationists and their tactics as the prevue of males in pursuit of ‘laddish thrills’ (Massey, 2005, p. 47). It’s important to note that the ideal male (white male) walkers with their ability to casually transgress societal norms still haunts the field of psychogeography. As Rose (2015) states, “An uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny and neocolonialism lurks within much psychogeography and has since its inception” (p. 150). The students and I discussed these issues as well as the merits of enacting a ‘drift.’ The students were intrigued by the notion that within a dérive, the idea is to drop usual ‘relations’ and set out to explore ‘appealing’ and ‘repelling’ places as well as ‘switching stations’ where there is an urge to change direction. They were eager to try this out in school although the places of repulsion may outweigh the places of attraction, as one student noted. And although several students noted that conducting a ‘drift’ in school may be possible – deliberately walking in out of bounds places in the city may be dangerous particularly for racialized bodies.

Rose (2015) states, the dérive should be used as a “tool for questioning, for opening dialogue, for exploring space: a tactic, not a solution…” (p. 151-152). For the dérive no one student (nor I) chose our directions. We moved as a relational mass and attended to the how of place through movement. As Springgay (2008) proposes, drifting provokes an intimacy where knowledge of place is not something grasped from a distance but emerges through a proximity facilitated by walking.

Toward a transcorporeal understanding

Intercorporeality, an approach explored by Weiss (1999) emphasizes “that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies” (p. 5). For me, these non-human bodies include words.

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Alaimo (2010) introduces the term transcorporeality to describe a more-than-human conceptualization of relationality which includes “material interchanges between human bodies, geographical places, and vast networks of power” (p. 17). Thinking and walking transcorporeally underlines the ways in which humans are “always intermeshed with the more-than-human world,” and “ultimately inseparable from “the environment”” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 2).

In a movement toward a transcorporeal understanding of bodies and place, Barad (2007)’s theories of intra-action push me to think about relationality differently. Barad’s thesis stresses the

“ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components,” (p. 33) where phenomena do not exist as individual elements. Following this way of thinking would not be about what the students know or experience through their place-making practices, but how the stairs, dusty shelves, human angry teacher voice, stale smells, and soft breezes come to matter affectively, literally, and more-than- representationally. For Barad (2007) we cannot separate epistemology from ontology or ethics. Her ethico-onto-epistemology is world-making.

Place: The cleanest air ever breathed flows in currents carried by the turquoise tapping on the keyboard. The dustless musk of perfect white spray-tanned on every wall.

A trans-sensorial aspect that the students experimented with while walking and writing their narrative cartographies was synesthesia. Synesthesia is a literary device wherein the writer uses words associated with one sense to describe another. The students’ synesthesia dérive was a minor practice of de-territorialization of both language and place; the deliberate mixing of sensory descriptions disrupted the habitual use of language to describe smell, taste, touch, sight and sound and conveyed the affective responses of the students in complex ways.

Place: Salted sweat grunted out of limbs.

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The word synesthesia usually refers to a psychological or neurological issue in which sensory stimulus from one sense is mixed up with another sense. This can include seeing a particular colour associated with a number, or a sound associated with a visual representation.

Place: The booming laughter glimmers with mockery.

In creative writing synesthesia refers specifically to figurative language that includes a mixing of senses. Synesthesia is a common poetic technique, but people often do not recognize it as a specific technique.

Place: The grit buzzes off the painted walls.

Some famous examples of synesthesia in literature come from well-known writers who also walked as part of their practice. Basho (the wandering Japanese poet), and Baudelaire (also known for his contributions to the notion of the flâneur).

Place: The air takes on a different taste, sweet and hazy. Splinters of the soft brown shades linger humid on my eyelids.

Although trans-sensorial affects may have been felt that were then codified and represented in the above writings, they remain anchored to human bodies as the active agents in the linguistic mapping process. And it’s true, the representation of place through words were scribbled by human hands just like all of this writing is being read by another human (presumably you are a human). But to re-iterate discussions from chapter two – language is also a transcorporeal-material practice and communication through language or a ‘map’ can evoke an affective experience of place for listeners- readers-viewers. Now this can get tricky, because as Massumi states, affects are pre-linguistic and not housed in a particular body. Affect is an intensity between and in excess of individuated ‘bodies’ that highlights how desire moves among and has effective change on assemblages that include people, non-human animals, texts, and the environment. Affect is pre-personal whereas things that are

151 categorized as being ‘sensed’ are already coded. We then often further codify those senses into the specific western hierarchy of the 5-sensorium which the premise of multi-modality is built around

(the belief that there are 5 different senses operating in tandem housed within a specific body). But what I like about the students’ synesthesia maps is that they acknowledge, as feminist researchers have in the past, that we can’t foreground the visual at the top of the sensory hierarchy (Springgay,

2008). Thinking with affect moves away from this and challenges the notion of individual bodily sensations and individual senses.

Making do with more-than-linguistic rhetorics

Ongoing intra-actions between humans and more-than-human things influence how place is produced and emerges as ‘school.’ For Bennett (2010) ‘thing-power’ is “…the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). Bennett also re- introduces Latour’s (2004) term “actant” as a “…source of action that can be either human or non- human; it is that which has the efficacy, can do things, has sufficient coherence to make a difference, produce effects, alter the course of events” (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). The notion of an actant allows room for a more evenly distributed agency or level ontology where humans and human agency are not viewed as superior to other actants. Latour (1999) notes that collectives, unlike societies, refer to the associations between humans and nonhumans and move away from the nature-society binary.

He states,

“…most of the features of what we mean by social order – scale, asymmetry, durability, power, hierarchy, the distribution of roles – are impossible even to define without recruiting socialized nonhumans. Yes, society is constructed, but not socially constructed. Humans, for millions of years, have extended their social

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relations to other actants with which, with whom, they have swapped many properties, and with which, with whom, they form collectives” (1999, p. 198).

Following Bennett and Latour, the students and I practiced paying attention to non-human actants during the dérive, and what I began to call more-than-linguistic rhetorics. Rhetoric generally refers to oral or written skills of persuasion. Within this conceptualization, there is generally an agent

(human speaker or writer) who deploys rhetoric convincingly, while the media activated (the rhetoric) is inert until invigorated by a speaker and impressed upon a listener-reader. A new materialist account of rhetoric would consider not just the agency of the speaker-writer – and the agency of the listener-speaker based around a linguistic code, but also the emergence of persuasive

‘rhetoric(s)’ in other forms of matter. And we experienced these throughout our walks. The rotten banana covered in dust on the window ledge in the stairwell, the angle of light and insect chatter in the walking classroom, the oozing toilets in the boys’ bathroom, and the mirrored windows into the examination hall all enacted an affective agency that was persuasive in the place-making process and our understanding of school as place. The research-creation enacted what Latour (1999) calls fait-faire or making-do. Making-do is “accomplished along with others in an event, with the specific opportunities provided by the circumstances. These others are not ideas, or things, but nonhuman entities…propositions, which have their own ontological gradients…” (p. 288). In such a world many actants assert a rhetorical persuasion on the emergence of place.

Matters that mattered and how they mattered

The disjointed wandering of many bodies (human and non), abrupt pauses to take notes, and the more-than-representational ‘maps’ - that employed varied literary devices, visual representations, and

153 humour - troubled our understanding of place and place-making practices. I will discuss a few that drew my attention when looking at the maps. The (re)presentations of place here in this dissertation use linguistic and visual forms – different rhetorics, different agencies, different enmeshments with place.

Memory matters: A peculiar (re)presentation that occurred on 4 of the students’ maps was an elephant (close up drawing by Emma and Jagdev). Apparently an elephant painting used to hang in a particular stairwell that we passed through, but it was removed several years earlier. The elephant, moving from physical form, to memory, to speech, to drawing enacts how place emerges through a relation of various actants. The specific circumstances of the walk (the fact of a past presence of elephant remembered by certain individuals and described then (re)presented by others) shows the ontological gradient of things and their relations in how place is produced transverally.

Literary devices matter: The use of listing as a literary device (Alex and Angharad’s map) links seemingly disparate agents into a tense unity. Bogost (2012) states listing as a form of,

“ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropological narrative coherence in favour of worldly detail” (p. 41-42). For Bogost, lists promise disjunction instead of flow, although they often flow linguistically. Bogost argues that this disjointedness is a remedy for “Deleuzian becoming”

(p. 40). I disagree, because although lists act using

154 asyndeton (the removal of ands) an invisible and also haunts them. And links them. The rhymes and meter in this list-poem also evoke a feeling of how a trip up those particular stairs at LLyn High

School feels.

Personification, alliteration, hyperbole, re-naming, metaphor, sarcasm, rhythm, rhyme, images, and spacing all matter. The students narrate space using various linguistic devices.

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Critique Matters: As demonstrated in the full maps presented above, the students’ writings were evocative and affective. And after we completed the walk and began to map it linguistically I noticed another aspect of mapping emerge: the students’ narrative cartographies complicated

(critiqued) and reified the prevailing school imaginary. By school imaginary I mean the prevailing image or narrative of school as a place for students to develop into a well-rounded, productive members of society, where education is viewed a kind of ‘becoming cultured,’ and cultural reproduction is based on shared values that generate cultural capital.

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Subverting this view, many students renamed places in the school (office is called ‘swivel chair blues’ and the cafeteria is called ‘the gorge’ in Dylan and Dewy’s map above). Several took opportunities to critique aspects of the school imaginary Max and Sandip’s snippet discusses the

‘Blue Place for lonely people’ where the ‘clogs of Brains Working hard’ was later changed to “Brains

Washing hard.”

Massumi (1992) poses the question

What goes into school? (p. 24). And then muses

that a school consists of humans of certain

ages or certain levels of ability which sounds

like a reasonable description of school. But

Massumi wants to be more specific and

states that more precisely what goes into a

school is the “human potential of those

beings…the most final formulation of school content would be: a selected set of humanoid bodies grasped as biophysical matter to be molded” (p. 25).

Many of the students appear to feel similarly. In this regard their maps, following Jameson’s

(1991) discussion of ‘cognitive mapping’ can be seen to “endow the individual subject[s] with some new heightened sense of [their] place in the global system” (p. 54). Rhian and Sikeena’s map highlights the examination room and the bodies within it as “Data Source” where the invigilator resembles a judge with a gavel and there’s no entry (or no exit!) permitted to/from the room.

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Massumi (1992) proposes that his readers ask any politician what school is for and the answer that returns will be something like: “To build good citizens” which Massumi asserts actually means “to- make-young-body-docile” which is future oriented toward to make a “docile worker.” (p.

25). The students had similar misgivings about the function of school. But as Rachel states, it’s preferred over the option of keeping her from “growing up and making [her] own decisions.”

The transcorporeal-spectres matter

Not all the maps re-wrote nor critiqued the imaginary of school as place. Most significantly,

Rhian and Sikeena’s map begins as a critique and culminates in an embrace of seemingly neoliberal language and ideologies regarding school as a place for achieving goals. And perhaps it exemplifies how well the place of school operates as a finely tuned engine for making young bodies (minds) docile. Their map moves from the dystopic ‘Data Source’ image to the ‘Embracing of Madness’ (see monkey-person image on monkey bars) through a series of stations in school where inspirational rhetoric flows (see words like ‘inspiration,’ ‘motivation,’ ‘innovation,’ ‘learning is a lifestyle,’ and second person pronouns addressed to the reader which we all know is a way of getting readers on side, don’t you agree?) to the peak – literally the back hill behind the school where they felt

‘invincible.’

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However, Rhian and Sikeena don’t appear to be describing the physical places we walked through and in that regard their map functions transversally or ideationally: rather than being ‘true’ to the physical locations of the school as place, they hint at what place evokes (or is supposed to evoke). Which was after all what we were exploring with the research-creation project. They exemplify Trifonas’ (2000) assertion that education operates in such a way that the forces that wield

“the power of “investment” – not necessarily monetary – are always wanting to control the mechanisms of creative production to commodify knowledge” (Trifonas, 2000, p. 116). Rhian and

Sikeena describe school as a place that helps you achieve particular goals and become successful if you try hard and are ‘innovative,’ and ‘inspired.’ That sounds reasonable. Why as an educator am I so wary of their map?

Their map confounds me and reminds me that the rhetorics of place are present at different time scales: perceptible and remembered in different ways. There’s a trans-temporal aspect to their map in that it discusses the past, present, and future of particular subjects moving through the school as place-event. But what I didn’t see coming was a map that takes up and utilizes the neoliberal language of striving-to-overcome so effectively. Their map shows the ‘route’ toward becoming

‘invincible.’ Sorry Deleuze and Guattari, it says invincible not imperceptible! The school imaginary they map is aligned with liberal, capitalist, democratic system that perpetuates the idea of: ‘educate yourself, get a degree, be successful, gain social-cultural-economic capital!’ The over-arching narrative is how to self-actualize within this system that also fosters the narrative that if you don’t

‘make it,’ you (ideal subject projected into the ideal future) are to blame.

If the Situationists intentionally set out to think space and place differently through the dérive, and break the habit of representation in their maps, was Rhian and Sikeena’s map a failure? I don’t think so. But it caused me to pause and continues to cause me to pause – like an emergency that oozes. The script I wrote asks me to respond to what matters and their map matters differently.

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Deleuze (1994) states, “Something in the world forces us to think… a fundamental encounter... grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering” (p. 451). Rather than mapping place as immediate, Rhian and Sikeena’s map operates at a different scale: it is transcorporeal, trans-temporal and relationally engaged with neoliberal rhetorics (both linguistic and spatial) that many of us chose to ignore, didn’t recognize, or wanted to map out of the place of school. Historically, the Situationists’ maps re-jigged and re-worked the city as a form of critique and deterritorialization. But do such maps have any long-term effects? Perhaps Rhian and Sikeena’s map has a different kind of efficacy. The language of striving to overcome and other characteristics of their map intrigue me even as they appear to (particularly because they continue to) reify the image of school as a map narrative story of becoming invincible. Seen in conjunction with the other students’ maps demonstrates how complex, entangled, relational and transversal a stroll through school and mapping place can be.

Trans-bodied-events

In reviewing both my notes on the walks and the students’ (re)presentational maps of the school, I began to think of the non-human bodies (like words, odors, and memories of elephants in stairwells,) and the relations between such bodies, as events. I recognize the effect that such events have on a transcorporeal production of place. This radical-materialist thinking of bodies and the relations between them as events accentuates how a variety of transcorporeal influences entangle to produce the image of school as place. In this regard, however and wherever and whenever Rhian and Sikeena conceptualized their image of school –perhaps during the walk, or during some other point in their education, or most likely a tangle of various events remembered or dreamed up – their map functions transcorporeally across various spaces and times. And their map continues to event

160 relationally with those who encounter it. The making of ‘place’ is complex, unfinished, and transcorporeal.

Further to this, the walking dérive mapping exercise revealed how peculiar publics, or collectives of events combine to make school as place. Recognizing these forces as transcorporeal causes different ethical questions to emerge as transcorporeality insists on recognizing our continual interactions other humans and things (both of which I’m now conceptualizing as both events and bodies). Alaimo (2010) writes that the ethics that emerge from transcorporeal relations are

“uncomfortable and perplexing” (p. 17). The seemingly simple task of strolling through the school and mapping it is entangled with innumerable forces vying for significance including and linguistic and more-than-linguistic rhetorics (events) that actively persuade how place is produced. As noted, these include everything from memories of physical attributes of place that have disappeared, prevailing educational discourses, as well as myriad sensory experiences student bodies encounter through movement.

De Certeau states, “Stories about places are makeshift things. They are composed with the world's debris” (de Certeau, 1984, p. 107). For de Certeau (1984) the ‘materials’ that make up a story including rhetorical devices, and previous forms and content get arranged into constructed frameworks but are always shot through with ellipses, drifts, more-thans, less-thans or what he calls a “sieve-order” (p. 107). The students’ maps (re)present this sieve-order in action as well as displaying the excess that oozes through the gaps. Through walking as a group and paying attention to affective experiences and then ‘representing’ those experiences through various language devices the students challenged occularcentrism as well as the notion that the senses are internal to individual bodies, while contributing to discussions on how place is produced transcorporeally. And there’s a further transcorporeality to such mapping practices as here you are, somehow touched across time and space by traces, images, and descriptions of these places.

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& - Thoughts - &

What are the implications of this for how we understand movement- thought-writing?

Having the students write about experiences entangled with other objects, places, spaces by first describing what is and then describing what can be done shows a progression - a public, civic progression that is not determined by humans alone. Words and the tags created are contributions to this but not the only actors in it. In that regard, the two emergent research events and students’ writings-mappings that I’ve discussed in this chapter forced me to reconsider how movement and writing co-produce place transcorporeally. Additionally, the work highlights how movement and writing can both reify and trouble the intersections of race, gender, and power relations (human and more-than-human). As an & - conclusion - & to this chapter, I discuss another walking-writing project the students and I conducted that pushes my thinking further and posits how both walking and writing are gestures that can produce speculative-ontologies.

Speculative thought fuels creative writing as much as sensorial descriptions do. Most students of literature know this. Many of us learn early on about Keats’ notion of negative capability, an idea that came to Keats during a walk and that he wrote about only once in a letter to his brother.

Negative capability for Keats meant the ability to remain in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats cited in Hebron, nd, np). Negative capability does not refer to ‘negative’ as a pejorative term, rather refers to an inclination to passivity and not-quite-knowing as skills or potentials of poets and philosophers19. As a Romantic poet (and

19 These are ‘negative’ skills or potentials in the sense of not being present – therefore perhaps similar to the virtual in the Deleuze’s sense, or a negative prehension in Whitehead’s sense.

162 avid walker!) Keats seemed to thrive in the realm of negative capability. I see it as a call to the necessity of both openness and speculation in writing.

The students and I discussed this notion as we walked. I asked whether ideas ever came to them whilst walking – seemingly out of nowhere (as Nietzsche’s eternal return did and was discussed in Chapter 2). Their staccato “yes, yes, yes-yes, yes, yes” punctured the walk. Several students articulated how strange thoughts and funny ideas come to them while walking, or how they dream up devices to build as engineers. Our chat got me thinking about the mechanics of thought in movement and the relationship between walking in a city and speculative writing about a city which made me return to Italo Calvino’s writings in Invisible Cities (1978) as a proposition for our next lesson.

I brought Calvino’s book to our next class and had the students read aloud some of the inspired descriptions of speculative, yet beguiling cities in the collection. In the book the character of

Marco Polo sits with the Tartar Emperor Kublai Khan and intrigues him with tales about 55 different cities Polo has visited throughout the empire. As soon as the descriptions begin it is clear that the cities are not actual, in the concrete sense, but cities of the imagination, cities of ideas. And perhaps they describe one particular city through various angles. It’s all unclear. What is clear is how evocative and intriguing Calvino’s writing is. The students agreed. Our next task was to walk through Cardiff, and speculate a version of the Welsh capital inspired by our movements.

Speculating Cardiff

Speculative literature has championed and critiqued advances in science, technology, recognition of gender fluidity, and animal rights long before they occurred, marked the ‘more-than-human turn’

163 across the disciplines, and heralded the ‘post-human’ in its varied manifestations – cultural, biological, and technological. According to Milburn (2014) speculative fiction can offer “provocative divergences from the norms of human biology, the conventions of human society, and the limitations of human thought” (p. 525). Each of the students’ writings focused on something fantastical about a speculative Cardiff, including Dewy’s description of a city of paradoxes, where

“Cardiff is growing smaller and shrinking larger…Every person has a pointless job that is of great importance…The society is mostly built on individualism but with a sense of community…” Dewy’s account reads almost like a critique of globalized late capitalism. While Angharad proposes a city made up of floors: “There are hundreds of floors and each floor is the size of a large city. The higher you go the more spectacular the floors. Only one man got to the highest floor because his grandmother and then his mother rode the elevators their entire lives.” Angharad’s version of the city reads both like a speculative allegory of neoliberal ideals and a testament to a mother’s and grandmother’s devotion to making things ‘better’ for their children.

Technologically, speculative fiction is a kind of world-building practice that can include the creation of hypothetical worlds with different physical laws, to the invention of new technologies.

Along with technological innovations, sub-genres in speculative fiction, such as Cyberpunk (which includes Manga and anime) often focus on social revolutions wherein the government is depicted as flawed, or non-effective, and through considering alternative futures inspire readers to reflect on what needs to be done in the present to arrive at an alternative future.

Although the speculative pieces were only a few hundred words long, many of the students proposed versions of Cardiff that could be seen as improvements on its current social and political tendings. For example, Rachel describes observing Cardiff from above while walking on tightropes that connect the city from end to end and where people appear as “petals in a rose garden” that wind and weave on their way through the day. Rachel posits that viewing Cardiff from above makes

164 judgement difficult because from a height “Dresses and jewelry or a pretty face means nothing” and hopes that “maybe ground level will be like this one day.” Abida’s rendition of Cardiff has a socialist bent where “you work purely out of goodness, all injustice in the world can finally be faced hand in hand…and poverty will be eliminated.” Georgia pushes egalitarian aspirations beyond the human realm and proclaims that in Cardiff “every single animal and person has equal rights.”

I view the students’ writings as speculative-ontologies. The ‘bodies’ or events activated in speculative writing are ‘real’ as linguistic marks on the page, and the worlds they discuss are also

‘real’ although speculative.

New materialist informed thought conceptualizes how agency flows through relational networks and is mobilized through non-human artifacts, including stories. Hayles (2012) uses the term ‘technogenesis’ to support the notion that humans and technics have evolved together.

Technics, in this account, can be anything from stone tools to modern computing. Within the notion of technogenesis, I include certain technologies of thought and writing: for example, the ability to conceptualize a different future (or past, or present) and write about it creatively.

Speculative writing can be conceptualized as a kind of ‘technology,’ a ‘worlding.’ In this regard, teaching and practicing speculative writing could be conceived as a radical pedagogical act wherein students practice world-building through identifying absent but potential presents and futures.

Haraway’s influential Cyborg Manifesto is an example of such a work that crosses the boundaries of political, creative, and scientific writing. Goodeve (2000) notes that theorizing itself can be a form of speculative writing where a writer does not merely conduct analysis or critique of existing relationships but becomes “involved in building alternative ontologies, especially via the use of the imaginative” hence “[speculative] fiction is political theory” (p. 120). While Grebowicz and Merrick

(2013) state that theory making that results from imaginative re-thinking of the world posits

165 speculative fiction “as both methodological tool and a source of creative inspiration” across the disciplines (p. 112).

Not all of the students’ writings inspired toward a better world. Many posited dystopic musings of a stroll through the city as a post-apocalyptic site. For example, Jagdev describes the traces of a nuclear powerplant explosion where “shadows can be seen where something or someone got in the way of the immense heat that vaporized half the city.” Other students offered descriptions of wandering through the remains of human-made climate, industrial, or war disasters, and Owain describes the city as “crypt” where yellow eyed humanoids “generally crawl on their hands and feet,” as if in some kind of reverse evolution.

Because the idea of reading and writing speculative fiction emerged from within the in- school research-creation event, it was the last activity the students and I undertook. In retrospect, I wish we had devoted more time to exploring the relationship between speculative alter-worlding and walking and writing in the city. However, what the activity showed me was that movements, like walking, and writing are speculative acts that tend toward a variety of different transcorporeal assemblages, futures, and meanings. In this regard both walking and writing are minor gestures. The minor functions speculatively, and can reorient the direction of experience as it is through ongoing minor punctuations that new things emerge (as an aside this small event that emerged in the thesis compelled me to write a SSHRC postdoctoral application, which I have been awarded!)

Although it’s not the focus of this dissertation to go into detailed analysis of Invisible Cities, I want to talk about how one city in the book evokes the relation between movement-thought and representation, while another depicts the fallibility of calculations: both areas of interest to someone writing a dissertation. First there’s Valdrada – the city above a lake where all actions are mirrored simultaneously to the occupants. However, these actions don’t matter as much as the images which

166 possess a “special dignity” the awareness of the images prevents the city’s inhabitants from

“succumbing for a single moment to chance and forgetfulness” (p. 53). It’s representation working seamlessly with the event – except it’s backwards and slightly out of sync as all actions are in a mirror. Reading about Valdrada makes me feel like I’m in a hall of mirrors where events are represented immediately yet also feel infinitely deferred and remind me of the difficulty of attempting to conduct a research event while ‘documenting’ it.

Also, Perinthia – the city built by astronomers to reveal the order of the gods on earth and the harmony of the firmament. But which after several generations is peopled with all manner of unseemly creatures including “children with three heads or six legs” (p. 144). The astronomers who calculated the city are now faced with a difficult choice: they must admit that their calculations were wrong or recognize that the order of the gods is “reflected exactly in the city of monsters.” (p. 145).

Perinthia can be seen as an allegory for how cruel the firmament (and ‘gods’) can be, but it also makes me consider how research projects work: does a research project begin with assertions toward a specific outcome? What happens when the outcome doesn’t fit the initial questions? I hope that in the future we can continue to work with indeterminacy. &

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Chapter 5

Research-Creation Event: Post Cards from Strangers (Make Strange the Long Walk)

A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 380).

To post is to send by “counting” with a halt, a relay, or a suspensive delay, the place of a mailman, the possibility of going astray and of forgetting… (Derrida, 1987, p. 65).

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Script

Go to the land of my ancestors and walk a great distance.

Queer the long walk. Queer landscape.

Post-postcards. More-than-represent.

Attend to absence, presence, inheritance.

Create instead of take.

This chapter thinks with queer theory, hospitality, inheritance and (non)arrival by considering musings, meetings, and ethico-political concerns that arose during a long walk in the British countryside, and in the process of sending-receiving (post)cards both from strangers and strange versions of myself. In using queer theory, I am not focusing on the sexual preferences of the humans in the study, although it also applies in that regard. I’m using queer as an orientation that allows for the “unpredictability of opening…to possibility” (Instone & Taylor, 2015, p. 146). The chapter draws from Derrida’s (1987) postcard ontology and theory of non-arrival, coupled with an attention to what does arrive (as in ethico-political concerns) that compel me to respond to questions of inheritance (Haraway, 2008). In the walk, and this chapter, opening to possibility and the arrival of strangers highlights how the events of walking, inscribing, photographing, and then (re)reading the postcards different relations, ethics and politics arise and the response(ability) and comes with such recognition. The process of thinking-in-movement invoke what Whatmore (2002) calls

“attending simultaneously to the inter-corporeal conduct of human knowing and doing and to the affects of a multitude of other ‘message-bearers’ that make their presence felt in the fabric of social life” (Whatmore, 2002, p. 3). These seemingly mundane interactions perform what Stewart (2007) calls ordinary affects. An ordinary affect is a “surging, a rubbing, a connection of some kind” that impacts other bodies be they human, non-human or texts (p. 128).

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Walking-making-strange

In summer 2015, I traveled along St. Cuthbert’s Way, with a friend, and used research-creation practices of walking, post card writing, thinking, getting lost, and pinhole photography as ‘more- than-representational’ methods to activate the 5-day trek. According to Vannini (2015) the, “…non- representational answer to the crisis of representation lies in a variety of research styles and techniques that do not concern themselves so much with representing life-worlds as with issuing forth novel reverberations” (p. 12). I took a cue from the Letterboxing tradition of 19th Century

England as a proposition for the walk. Letterboxing was a precursor to geocaching and originally took the form of people leaving writings, addressed to themselves in hidden places on specific walks in Dartmoor. Strangers who encountered the postcards would hopefully post them back to the people who wrote them and left them on the moor, hence the name Letterboxing. Modifying the tradition of Letterboxing in two ways, I travelled along St. Cuthbert’s Way and pinned 30 blank postcards, postage-paid, and addressed to myself on wooden posts along the trail in plastic. I left a note inside a requesting those strangers who find the postcards to write to me, tell me about an event on their own walk along the trail, and post the postcards to my letterbox. Secondly, I penned 30 post-cards to my-self during the walk. But I couldn’t post them using the mail because I needed

170 access to a printer to print off the picture side of each postcard. For the picture side of my postcard

I took photographs using a makeshift pinhole aperture on my DSLR of 30 spots along the walk. In that regard, the post-cards were created during the walk, but assembled post-walk. The words and images offer queer versions of the landscape, my own thoughts about encounters along the way, and touch on some ethico-political concerns that arose during the walk.20

St. Cuthbert’s Way is a recently designated foot path (1997) although it was created along a route that has been used in part as a Christian pilgrimage site for over 1000 years. St. Cuthbert’s Way is not as well known as the Camino or other pilgrims’ paths through mainland Europe. However, several people who discovered the postcards I left on posts did respond that the significance of the path as a pilgrimage route affected their walk. According to Gros (2014) the faithful might use pilgrimage as an act of trying to obtain intersession, or to give thanks to God for granting a favour, for example, “Descartes, having been enlightened with his method, made a pilgrimage to the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in Paris” (p. 113). I did not choose St. Cuthbert’s for its religious affiliation. I chose it because it’s near Durham, where my Irish Catholic family settled and where my mother was born – and I knew my Catholic grandmother might have liked and possibly also been miffed that I was walking along a footpath affiliated with St. Cuthbert. Although St. Cuthbert was from the Celtic tradition (and consequently predates the division of Catholics and the Church of

England by 800 years or so) he is now considered the Patron Saint of Northern England. My grandmother would not have liked the notion of queering any kind of pilgrims’ path.

20 My co-traveler, David Shannon and I also wrote songs as we walked – recording found sounds, melodies we came up with, rhythms brought on by movement. Each night as we drank ale in pubs we would pour over our notes, recordings, and the lyrics I’d written and transpose them into Cubase recording program. Shannon (Shanny) and I have made songs in the past as well. In the end I have not included them in the dissertation but we will likely write a journal article about that aspect of the research-creation.

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On my website (http://sarahetruman.com/postcards-from-strangers/) the 30 postcards

(narrative side and pin hole side) are (re)presented as an exploration of more-than-representational approach to a research-creation on a long walk. Please read them along with this chapter. In this chapter, I entangle Derrida’s postcard ontology (and perhaps aporetically his theory of hospitality,) with queer theory as important inspirations for thinking-with the research-creation project. In the final section I attend to some of the matters of concern (or ‘manners of concern’ as I say in one postcard) that arrived during the long walk, or were written on some of the postcards from strangers. In so doing, I think-further with some of the ethico-political and creative concerns emerged through the research-creation event.

Epistolary Ontologies

The guardians of tradition, the professors academics, and librarians, the doctors and authors of theses are terribly curious about correspondences (what else can one be curious about at bottom?), about p.c., private or public correspondences…curious about texts addressed, destined, dedicated by a determinable signer to a particular receiver (Derrida, 1987, p. 62).

In The Post Card (1978) Derrida states, “a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity to not arrive torments it with an internal drifting” (p. 489).

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Derrida discusses the ongoing and inherent “divisibility” of a letter and consequently its signifiers, addressee, and author all of whom undergo divisibility between the moment of inscription and

(non)arrival (p. 489).

This chapter was inspired by Derrida’s enactment of the epistolary genre – as in letter writing

- and his theorization of a ‘post-card ontology’ around sending and receiving letters and the inherent difficulties of communicating in written and oral forms (p. 22). This ontology is not an ontology of fixed identities (sender/author) and (receiver/reader) but an ontology in movement. As Mitchell (2006) states, Derrida’s ontology thinks of everything as “sent,” and operates “as an examination of the effect of distance upon presence” (p. 59). No form of communication can be ‘received’ unless it has been ‘sent,’ thus all communication is perpetually ‘sent,’ but never arriving. The post card is “lost for the addressee at the very second when it is inscribed, its destination is immediately multiple, anonymous…” (Derrida, 1987, p.

79).

An ontology of movement begins in the middle, it has no essential sender and receiver, and thus “unsettles beings from their supposedly fixed position of pure presence and self-containment and sets them into motion” (Mitchell, 2006, p. 59). In this view there’s no fixed sender of anything. Nor is the addressee an “identifiable and self-present subject” (Derrida,

1987, p. 63). Not arriving is a possibility inherent in all sending, of all writing, and hence all communication.

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Knowing how to play well with the post restante…The post is always en reste, and always restante. It always awaits the addressee who might always, by chance, not arrive (Derrida, 1987, p. 191).

Much of Derrida’s writing

critiques or deconstructs

the binary set up between

speech and writing in

Western traditions.

Particularly how speech is

always privileged over

writing as if it were more

authentic, primal, or closer to ‘truth.’ Even the structure of a dissertation – I am compelled to write a chapter, yet I will also have to go to the University of Toronto and defend it – my presence is required. The materiality of the text isn’t material enough: this cycles back into the false binary of writing/speech and into the prevailing thought that oral forms of communication are inherently closer to truth than written forms because of the written word’s tendency to drift. Derrida’s use of deconstruction unveils the hidden binaries in texts and emphasizes how truth is indeterminate and unstable. Derrida’s point is not to have all meaning slide into contingency, but rather to demonstrate how transcendental truths do not exist, demonstrate how binaries are human-made, and offer a way of undoing certainties

(particularly in long standing institutions) that have become so common sense they are no longer noticed or questioned.

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Derrida’s The Post Card plays with two systems – the law (where things are delivered) and another wherein “a fabulous realm of messages and meanings…circulate beyond any assurance of control” (Norris, 1997, p. 116). For Derrida, “something must always escape in the reading of a text, no matter how subtle or resourceful that reading” (Norris, 1997, p. 116). Derrida’s epistolary writings touch on questions of intimacy and strangeness, closeness and distance, situatedness and transience, and the potential of non-arrival in all forms communication. I used his theories as cue for the long-distance walking and postcard project I enacted along St. Cuthbert’s Way, which in turn investigated the emergent pedagogy of chance encounters and the ethico-political concerns that arose through the walking-writing-sending. The radical openness of Derrida’s conceptualization of futurity enacted through his texts catalyzes my thinking on how chance works as a differential in the forming of publics and the emergent pedagogies that such thinking allows for. The possibility of an always-arriving (non arrival) necessitates an orientation toward the future that promises to “say yes to who or what turns up without any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification…” Derrida, 2000, p. 77). This plays into Derrida’s notion of hospitality, or the strange stranger arrivant – the idea of being open to what arises – which I see linked to an ethico-political stance of paying attention to matters of concerns that arrive during research.

Arguably, I’m setting up an aporetic dilemma by discussing non-arrival and arrival of matters of concern in the same breath. But the tension between these seemingly paradoxical states creates a deviant and productive friction in my thinking. Derrida (2000) outlines the Law of hospitality as an unconditional welcome of strangers’ arrival:

Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine

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creature, a living or dead thing, male or female (Derrida, 2000, p. 77, italic in original).

For Derrida, the Law of hospitality is different than the “laws” of hospitality. Because laws (lower case) are determined by social groups, governments based on what is acceptable to accept. And such laws will necessarily limit the Law of Hospitality. I had thought of this when considering saying ‘yes’ to whatever appeared on the walk along St. Cuthbert’s, and saying ‘yes’ to attending to the ethico- political concerns that arose. But following the Law of Hospitality, would mean not only accepting pleasant or even challenging strangers that work toward a better world – following the Law of

Hospitality would mean accepting everything. And who wants to do that? Or there has to be a movement after acceptance. That’s why Derrida says “before any determination, before an anticipation, before any identification…” because it acknowledges that we can’t know before arrival, but we should attend to what/who does arrive. This ‘stranger’ is the ethico-political impulse in all events.

Derrida’s approach to hospitality has been taken up by various scholars, including Gilbert

(2006) who uses the Law of Hospitality to think about the ‘welcome’ queer youth receive in schools.

I hold Derrida’s notion of hospitality in tension with the theory of non-arrival (how could we be hospitable if there’s no sender or receiver, no pre-existing subject to arrive? Or an ontology of non- arrival) as well as in conjunction with my ongoing concern about theories of emergence and the material necessity to attend to ethico-political matters when they arrive regardless of whether they are, as Derrida asserts, a human, animal, divine creature, living or dead things, male or female. This is a queer orientation in that what these ethico-political concerns are can’t be categorized into binaries. This walking-writing-reading practice reconsiders what queer might do for thinking otherwise about strange, but intimate (non)arrivals.

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The Importance of Being Hospitable to Queer (Strange) (non)Arrivals

Trifonas (2011) reminds us that deconstruction is “above all affirmation. It’s ‘yes, yes,’ ‘come, come’ is a confirmation of its unconditional acceptance of the Other” (p. 86). In the same way that deconstruction immanently works away at what is taken for granted in a given text or situation, queer theory problematizes normativity, and challenges certainties and stabilities in social, political, and sexual lives. And its movement doesn’t rest. Because of that, it’s unwise to attempt to pin down what queer or queering means, rather it’s better to allow it to proliferate, queerly. Clare (2001) uses the term queer in its “general sense, as odd, quirky, not belonging; and in its specific sense, as referring to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender identity” (p. 361). Queer has been used to denote practices and theories that unsettle norms, and to call attention to how sexuality, gender, and race are constituted and regulated by hierarchies of humanness (Giffney & Hird, 2008). According to

Browne and Nash (2010), queer research can be “any form of research positioned within conceptual frameworks that highlight the instability of taken-for-granted meanings and resulting power relations” (Browne and Nash, 2010, p. 4). Sedgwick (1993) discusses how it appears “there are important senses in which "queer" can signify only when attached to the first person. One possible corollary: that what it takes--all it takes--to make the description "queer" a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person” (p. 8). Conversely, Edelman (2004) argues that queerness can not define an identity but only disturb one. Sedgwick allows that an individualistic, subject centered enactment of the word queer has been challenged (must be challenged) by theorists who use queer to highlight

“the fractal intricacies of language, skin, migration, state” (1993, p. 9). In this view, the meaning of queer or ‘to queer’ continues to move, probe, and shift beyond individual gender or sexual orientation markers and toward a more complex understanding of queer that doesn’t only represent particular kinds of queer bodies.

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For Halberstam (2005) self-identification as ‘queer’ has a place in queer theory, but thinking beyond subject identification and with a queer relationality opens up new possibilities for understanding space and time beyond “opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction . . . according to other logics of location, movement, and identification’ (p. 1).

Understanding queer as non-normative logic of space-time, Halberstam outlines ‘queer time’ as time outside normative temporal frames of inheritance and reproduction, and ‘queer space’ as new understandings of space enabled by the “production of queer counter- publics” (p. 6). Britzman discusses how ‘queer theory can signify both “improper subjects and improper theories, even as it questions the very grounds of identity and theory (Britzman, 1995, p. 153). As such, queer can tend in a multitude of directions, for example Sedgwick (2003) uses the idea of ‘queer performativity’ as a production of meaning making, specifically related to shame, while Haraway states, “Queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting operation” (Haraway, 2008, p. xxiv). Taylor and Blaise (2016) state, that the task of re-thinking normal categories will necessarily displace “the autonomous free and agentic individual gendered and sexual subject of liberal humanism” (np). Similarly, Edelman (2004) critiques how queering often takes up heteronormative “reproductive futurism” that centers on childhood innocence as the embodiment of the world to come (p. 2). For Edelman queerness enables reproductive futurism when in attempting to produce a more just world it “remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child” (p. 2–3, italics in original). As such, Edelman argues that queerness must operate outside of politics as we now know it.

The idea of queering is often used to “mark slippage in the logic of textual systems”

(Griffiths, 2015, p. 299). Cobb (2011) describes how queer scholarship developed a “language to think about the relative closeness and distance between bodies…and brought the controversies of

178 intimacy into close view” (Cobb, 2011, p. 218). Although Cobb is talking about intimacy between humans, queer scholarship has also developed a language to discuss other kinds of intimacy. For example, queer ecocriticism has been used to challenge the nature/culture binary, and to think queer as complex system between humans and more-than-humans that attends to what Taylor and Blaise

(2016) call “the queerness of human-nonhuman relations,” which consequently queers what ‘human’ means (np.) Luciano and Chen (2015) state that “the figure of the queer/trans body does not merely unsettle the human as norm; it generates other possibilities – multiple, cyborgian, spectral, transcorporeal, transmaterial – for living” (p. 187). They also warn against reducing queerness to solely a “movement of thought, or of affirmation or negation” in that it can slide into a kind of queer exceptionalism that resonates too easily with Western notions of progress or modernity

(Luciano & Chen, 2015, p. 95). For example, Morton (2010b) speculates how a queer understandings of ecology could adopt the notion of a “strange stranger,” which is Morton’s translation of Derrida’s arrivant. He writes: “[t]o us other life-forms are strangers whose strangeness is irreducible: arrivants, whose arrival cannot be predicted or accounted for” but with whom we are queerly intimate both now and in futurity (p. 277, italics in original). Morton’s queer ecology postulates how evolution occurs through entering into intimate relations with ‘strangers’ in order to undergo a transformation and become something new (and of course the identity that enters the strange relations is not fixed). Queer ecologies are always future oriented in that regard, although the future is, as Barad (2007) would say, ‘indeterminate,’ (rather than uncertain). This kind of speculative thought is generative, but I want to at the same time remember that there are “located histories of precarity” that the term queer should not be divorced from (Luciano & Chen, 2015, p. 94). While many qualitative researchers in the social sciences and humanities often take up the word queer to describe letting go of traditional research boundaries such as data and theory, or researcher/researched, and utilize ‘queer’ as methodology that does not only refer to transgressive subjectivities, we need to account for the subjectivities that don’t enjoy the benefit of sliding in and

179 out of being conveniently-queer.

Sandilands and Erickson (2010) argue that there’s a “strong relationship between the oppression of queers and the domination of nature” (p. 29). And I would argue that such a statement could also be applied to the relationship between the domination of nature and people of colour through ongoing colonization that queer theory does not seem to always address.

Importantly, Munoz (2010) calls attention to ‘whiteness’ in queer research where “‘[q]ueer’ sensibilities are theorized and understood through lenses that are largely academic, western, white, and privileged” (p. 57). Further to this, McCready (2004) critiques the racial segregation and

“normalization of Whiteness” that compound marginalization of queer youth of colour (p. 37).

As such, theorists have argued against homonormativity where affluent, white, gay men are in the foreground while queer women, and trans, racialized, or disabled bodies become marginalized.

For example, Puar (2007) critiques how queerness can be conceptualized as a “modality through which ‘freedom from norms’ becomes a regulatory queer ideal that demarcates the ideal queer” (p.

22). Drawing from Ahmed, Puar goes on to argue that idealization depends on the “exclusion of others who are already positioned as not free in the same way” (as cited in Puar, p. 22). In this regard queerness is linked to social capital, colour, and class, where the ability to queer and access to is contingent on “regimes of mobility” (Puar, 2007, p. 22). When viewed through this framework the queer identity and the ability to queer is tied to western rational individualism and the liberal humanist subject who can afford to be queer and to queer. This is also consequently tied to the liberal humanist subject who asserts his or her agency to queer or be queer. Puar (2007) states that queer as a form of transgression often “relies on a normative notion of deviance, always defined in relation to normativity, often universalizing” (p. 23). Similarly, Povenelli (2007) questions how

‘liberal’ recognition often seems to “reproduce rather than disrupt networks of power” that negatively affect marginalized communities (p. 565).

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If cosmopolitan, western educated, liberal queer subjects almost ‘pass’ as acceptable while new immigrants, or differently abled bodies do not – queerness is not finished. It can’t be finished.

Queering is not an individual humanist act. And it should not rest. Following Puar (2007) I assert the need to think beyond a queer humanist binary of assimilation and transgression. It’s not enough to ‘queer’ the long walk. We have to queer walking, and in doing so, consider the part we play in the ongoing normalizing violence done to brown, Indigenous, and differently abled bodies, and more- than-human bodies through clinging to Western notions of who and what matters. This means a different orientation to queerness. Munoz (2009) states, that queerness is what “lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing,” as such, queerness operates speculatively, in the “insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (p. 1). For Munoz, “we are not yet queer,” queerness has not yet arrived (perhaps never can arrive) (p. 1).

Morton (2010b) discusses how ‘life-forms’ could include viruses (even computer viruses!)

Following that kind of thought, I include the event of our long walk, the postcards I wrote, and strangers wrote, and the relations between them as life-forms. These life-forms or strange strangers create queer ecologies and queer communications through which matters of concern emerge.

Derrida’s post card ontology thinks of everything as sent. No form of communication can be received unless it has been sent, thus all communication is perpetually sent, but with a possibility of never arriving. This movement begins in the middle, it has no essential sender and receiver – they are unsettled from their supposedly known positions and in that regard function indeterminately, or queerly. Similarly, Barad (2015) discusses lightening as a queer communication system in that through non-local relating there’s no ‘sender’ or ‘recipient’ until the transmission has already occurred!

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The structure of a postcard

Along with theorizing epistles, Derrida performs the epistolary genre in the Envios chapter of the book The Post Card (1987). Envios is printed as a series of snippets, dated as if transcribed from previous postcards, and addressed to a singular “you,” presumably a lover who is never identified, or perhaps to Derrida himself. Postcards apostrophize: they speak to someone. To you, but this is an indeterminate you in the Baradian (2007) sense – or an indeterminate me in how I wrote my postcards for the research-creation event along St. Cuthbert’s Way (I addressed them ‘Dear Me’). And although a postcard is a seemingly private message addressed to someone particular, the structure of a postcard (without an envelope) and how it circulates, makes it a ‘public’ document – the postal workers, and any number of other people may sneak a peek at the message. In Derrida’s case, in

Envois, the postcards have now been ‘republished’ in book form, similar to this dissertation. But this new format continues to leave the author of a note open to being read, and (mis)understood by readers – the author’s meaning does not necessarily arrive. And Derrida’s own writing in Envios enacts this non-arrival with lacuna both in and between the letters.

The postcards that Derrida supposedly wrote on initially (before they are reproduced in book form and consequently no longer postcards) are identical versions of an image of Plato and

21 Socrates that Derrida claims to have discovered at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. But this is likely just another element in the structure of the epistolary genre he’s emulating. As a reader, I am never sure

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

182 if Derrida actually did find any postcards at Bodleian and purchased the lot, or whether he pretends to have the postcards in recreating them in book form. I’m also uncertain if “Derrida” is even the author of the postcards; he signs his initials at the end of only the first postcard and then in a footnote states he does not blame the reader for not trusting the initials! Accordingly, literary theorist, McQuillan (1999) argues that we should read Derrida’s Envois as if they were a ‘short story,’ or fiction. And perhaps all writing is. All of these nebulous variables inherent in the epistolary structure of Derrida’s text bring up questions of how writing works, questions of deferral and delay of an author’s thoughts, questions concerning how the addressee of a piece of writing affects its meaning, and questions of public-private forms of writing that postcards necessarily balance. The content of Envois also demonstrates the practice of writing whilst travelling as Derrida (or the narrator of the letters) describes his own travels in the postcards – everything about the post card practice is in motion. However, this is not a movement that is fixed or linear between two pre-existing subjects.

Derrida’s notion of an ontology of postcards as movement and non-arrival, combined with their apostrophizing nature (which can be both intimate and estranged), inspired me to conduct my own postcard project as a further inquiry into walking and writing. I wanted to see what kind of publics emerged through a long-distance walk and letter writing with strangers and strange (future- past) versions of myself. Questions I asked were: What kinds of ethico-political concerns would arise from the walking-writing-reading? Could ‘I’ remain open to who or whatever arrived? Would ‘I’ be hospitable to the strange (queer) arrivants?

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According to Deleuze, Nietzsche asserted that in order to acknowledge the differential potential within an event we should affirm chance: “To know how to affirm chance is to know how to play” (Nietzsche in

Deleuze 1993: 26).

Affirming chance means remaining open to what comes next, to see what emerges in the next encounter. Manning,

(2008) following

Nietzsche says, “chance functions as the differential. Chance beckons necessity…” (np). Non-arrival of specific forms of meaning produces an openness toward the future. Embracing this allows for an ethico-political sphere that allows me to think in terms of the remaining open to whatever or whomever might arrive. This helped me continue with research-creation, where I don’t try to fix specific meaning to my ‘data,’ but rather see what kind of ethico-political concerns arise through the material conditions of walking-meeting-writing-posting-reading.

Preparation for the walk

Shanny and I were both prepared and unprepared for this walk. We had sneakers, hats for the sun, cameras, audio recorders, notebooks, postcards, and a bowtie and a dress in case we wanted to dress up. We had a van transporting our bags from guest house to guest house so we could walk lightly.

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But we had no map, no compass, no rain gear, and no warm clothes. We hoped the weather was clement, there were lots of towns to stop in, and good signage!

More-than-representational Theories informing Research-Creation

In this research-creation project I was interested in how landscape is produced, transcorporeally with other actants, including the movement of walking and queer more-than-human intimacies – and the matters of concern that emerge through these interactions. ‘Queering’ the long walk as a research- creation event, while using postcards and taking pin holes, evokes an affective register that prompts further thought rather than attempting to represent particular lived experiences sufficiently.

The research-creation event was co-composed through walking to exhaustion, inscribing post cards, leaving post cards on poles, taking pin hole shots, pausing in different ecosystems, and getting lost. Each of these things happened throughout the research-creation event but not in a sequential way. The postcards are queer objects. Perpetually sent, private and public, snippets, written on the go. The photos and images participants drew are multiple, myriad, blurry, poetic, soft, confusing, affective. The strange(r) is emergent, relational, and speculative. Morton (2010a) states, that writing “when it gets going, includes everything around it” (p. 9). This is true in the case of the long-distance walk and penning postcards en route that draw from the felt materiality of the walk, as well as radical empiricist ideas that understands thoughts and the relation between thoughts and things as material. The postcards function similar to De Certeau’s (1984) rhetoric of walking based on Augoyard’s uptake of synecdoche and asyndeton as stylistic features of written texts. Synecdoche is the act of using a word or phrase that refers to part of something rather than a whole such as saying ‘I have wheels’ to mean that ‘I have a car.’ Asyndeton is the elision of conjunctions or other linking

185 words in a sentence such as saying ‘she lived a brief, cruel, mean life.’ De Certeau’s pedestrian rhetoric uses both elements. While synecdoche expands conceptualizations of space to show how a piece of something refers to a more-than (a tuft of heather refers to the moor) asyndeton elides and creates gaps where “every walk constantly leaps, or skips like a child, hopping on one foot” (p. 101).

(Post)cards operate with synecdoche and asyndeton in both the linguistic side of the postcard and the visual side in intra-action with the landscape. As Morton (2010a) argues, all writing and texts are

“environmental, because they include the spaces in which they are written and read—blank space around and between words, silence within the sound” (p. 11). The postcards written by my (strange) self and strangers are entwined with the landscape we walked among.

Regarding Pinholes Photographs on the Post Cards

Because they typically

require long exposure

times, pinhole cameras are

usually mounted in one

place for the duration of the

shot. Moving the camera

during the exposure time

can produce ghostly

gestures; a palpable affect of rhythm and light. Pinhole photography is not a likely candidate to take on a long walk unless you have breaks to stand around waiting for the long exposures. The pinhole cameras I normally use are built out of a shoebox or coffee tins, where the image is burned into photopaper and needs to be

186 developed (Springgay & Truman, 2017). Not practical on a long walk. On the long walk I brought my DSLR, and a pinhole ‘lens’ that screw mounts onto the camera (although pin holes are actually lens-less) and took pinhole photos of the landscape and then later took pinhole photos of my pinhole photos and videos on my laptop. The pinhole lens that mounts on my camera is not as small as a regular pinhole so doesn’t require terribly long exposure times, but still produces ghostly, restless images that remind me of palimpsests of the landscape(s).

Pinhole photography demonstrates how expression is different from content. And that an image, rather than being a representation is a process of making. Wearing or holding the camera as I walked, the walking pinhole images disorient perception of space and time. As Ahmed (2006) states,

“[m]oments of disorientation are vital” (p. 157). For Ahmed, queer politics might require disorientation in order to become re-orientated toward new potentialities.

The pinhole photographs evoke, what Stewart (2007) calls ordinary affects through their quivering surfaces. Ordinary affects, she states, “provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something thrown itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation; a something both animated and inhabitable” (p. 1). The images, which undulate and animate assemblages of human and nonhuman encounters do not represent the walk along St.

Cuthbert’s Way but incite new modes of thought and different practices of relating and disorientation. As a method, the pinholes set the event of thinking-making-doing in motion. They are a thinking-with practice: a way of performing method as an affective, relational ecology.

The postcard photos I took and the writings coincide in that they are all related to the walk and places, feelings, thoughts on the walk but they are not meant to necessarily reinforce each other literally. Like any postcard, you don’t only write about the image. And you don’t only image about the writing.

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Landscapes Absence and Presence

Something huge and impersonal runs through things, but it’s also mysteriously intimate and close at hand. At once abstract and concrete, it’s both a distant, untouchable order of things and a claustrophobically close presence… (Stewart, 2007, p. 87).

A variety of current urban geographers, as well as poets and performance artists have conducted research that attends to the sensorial and embodied complexity of walking and movement including

Myers (2011), Wylie (2005) and Hall & Smith (2014). MacPherson’s (2009) work with visually impaired walkers and their ‘sighted’ guides through rough terrain shows how optics are

“intercorporeal,” in that they occur “through the interaction of human and nonhuman bodies” (p.

1047). MacPherson also draws from feminist and post-structural research to discuss how “…the sight of landscape may depend on our age, race, class, gender, and socioeconomic positioning” as well as sense of “sight”

(p. 1042). Middleton (2010) discusses the “social technical assemblage” comprised of “shoes, clothing and luggage, within the embodied, spatial and temporal rhythms of pedestrian movement” to show how seemingly mundane material objects can affect and co-create people’s experience of the urban environment (p. 577).

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Land and landscape are concepts often entwined in walking literature and the act of walking.

And Britain’s walking heritage is rich and includes many ancient trackways, green lanes, and footpaths such as the Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester and Canterbury that walkers and pilgrims continue to use. In the 1960s land artists such as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton employed walking techniques that trace bodies’ paths through nature. Heddon and Turner (2012) discuss how there isn’t merely a long genealogy of walking research but it is also a ‘fraternity’ in that it tends

“towards an implicitly masculinist ideology. This frequently frames and valorizes walking as individualist, heroic, epic and transgressive” (p. 224). They note that the legacy of the flâneur (as discussed in Chapter 3), the Romantic poets, and naturalists were founded on the ideas of adventure, danger, and the new. To walk was to “release oneself from the relations of everyday life” (p. 226).

They take up how Henry Thoreau (1862) described a walker as a ‘crusader’ and ‘errant’ knight, traversing the wild in his essay Walking. In this view, walking becomes inscribed in ideologies of the human walker conquering nature, where landscape is merely a backdrop – somehow distinct from the humans who walk in it and the practice of “[w]alking is conceptualised as a way of doing nature”

(Waitt, Gill, and Head p. 43). Many of the postcards that strangers penned to me took up this narrative and espouses the importance of ‘getting back to nature,’ of feats of endurance and recreation, while the land and more-than- human others become aesthetic settings for human to learn more about themselves. Following this tradition, Waitt, Gill, and Head (2009) highlight how walking is not only a place-making practice but it sustains “a sense of self-discovery” (p. 44).

In many narratives of walkers alone in ‘nature’ the walker is presumed to be uninflected by gender and thus male, reinforcing the position of the autonomous male walker who leaves behind everything in order to tap into the wild. Walking conceptualized in this way is often presented as an accessible and privileged practice where walkers set out and do what they please “without much concern for the specificity of one’s own body and cultural position” (p. 227). Attending to the

189 differentiation between the epic and the heroic through an analysis of walking projects by women engaged in durational walks Heddon and Turner (2012) argue that their projects challenge notions of the heroic walker because of the ways the walks attend to issues of gender, age, sexuality, and ability through thinking about walking as intersectional.

There’s a preponderance of literature about walking in the UK: including books and articles about actual walks, the lost art of walking, and literature that features characters walking in the landscape or through cities (Ingold & Vergunst, 2008; Ashley and Kenyon, 2010; Heddon & Turner,

2012; MacFarlane, 2013; Armitage; 2014; Murphy, 2013, Woolf, 2015, Austen, 2012). For example,

In The Rings of Saturn Sebald (1999) spins a story that draws from memories of a walking tour of the

Suffolk coast where the physicality the main character’s own walk serves as the structure of the narrative that is then entangled in history and other curious memories that arise. He walks and walks. Events occur and new thoughts emerge from the occurrence as if the movement of the footsteps help thought flow. Some scholars posit walking as a method of witnessing and discuss how walking in groups is a form of social interaction wherein differences of pace affect both the walkers and the environment (Vergunst and Ingold, 2006).

According to Wylie (2005) a walk in the English countryside “involves at least some attunement with the various sensibilities still distilling from sublime and romantic figurations of the self, travel, landscape and nature” (p. 235). These romantic geographies are re-affirmed in much contemporary walking literature, through many of the postcards that strangers penned to me about their walks, and through poems of the UK’s great poets that remain part of the cannon. As a British-

Canadian with a background in English literature, most trips I take into the British countryside are layered with memories of literature I’ve read as if the landscapes themselves are co-extensive and have evolved with the literature rather than preceding it. I pass a sign to Canterbury and I think of

The Canterbury Tales and Bath’s wife pausing on her travels and spinning stories in a country Inn;

190 drive on the motorway and see a sign to Tintern Abbey and I think of waters rolling from their mountain springs and seclusion; and the mention of Derbyshire and I envision Elizabeth Bennet gazing across the lofty Peak District. This material entanglement of words, bodies, and vistas affects the land and landscape (and notably, two, if not all three of those pieces of writing are fictions!) I have similar experiences in cites with regard to pop bands and literature, and as seen in the postcards, learning that Virginia and Leonard Woolf stayed in Wooler, a town along St. Cuthbert’s

Way somehow made the place seem welcoming. This affinity between narrative, literary figures, and land allows for a relational landscape entwined in stories to appear pre-given. And without an understanding of how imperial power relations pervade the English canon, the assumed social, cultural, sexual (hetero) and racial attunement (whiteness) of literature can also appear co-extensive with the landscape.

Semiotic-material-ecological entanglements: Britain’s romantic literary identity helps produce contemporary nationalist and preservationist logics. Williams (1975) critiques the propensity of books about the countryside to bemoan the loss of rural life and its concomitant culture. One of which Williams quotes (but doesn’t cite) says, “A way of life that has come down to us from the days of Virgil has suddenly ended” (as cited in Williams, p. 18). Such a sentiment is frighteningly reminiscent of slogans from current nationalist movements around the world: the sentiment that the

‘good old days’ are gone (not that contemporary nationalists would cite Virgil!)

It becomes apparent that something as quotidian as walking in rural settings can lend itself to nationalist sentiments. The other walker we met in Wooler, the woman outside the shop reported to

Shanny how pleased she was that there are no people of colour or immigrants in her town (or walking the trail). Something about Shanny and me engendered a trust in her. Perhaps our able white walking bodies in combination with the rural setting? Couldn’t she tell we were queer? Maybe that didn’t matter to her. Maybe it didn’t matter at all. Her comments “glow” (Maclure, 2013b). In the

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English countryside, white bodies are what Ahmed (2006) calls “somatic norms” that make brown or black bodies strange, or out of place (p. 133). And queer as a subject marker does not queer the pervasive shadows of whiteness and nationalism in the countryside. And able white queer bodies hiking in the landscape may perform a “homonationalism” (Puar, 2007). Our presence was entwined-with and co-implicated in white exceptionalism, entrenched racism, and their affective stink).22

Ahmed (2006) describes how whiteness is a “social inheritance; in receiving whiteness as a gift, white bodies – or bodies that can be recognized as white bodies – come to “possess” whiteness as if it were a shared attribute (p. 125). Whiteness circulates as an inherited bodily and historical currency. Suchet (2007) states:

Whiteness dominates through normalizing itself and constantly mutates while always maintaining supremacy. There are enormous variations of power among white people related to class, gender, sexuality, and other factors, and many ways to be white. Nonetheless, white power reproduces itself and can never be separated from privilege (p. 869).

Knowles (2008) outlines how white ‘racialness’ is made through ordinary interactions and flesh tone is only one of its manifestations. Rather than an intrinsic property whiteness is “dynamic, acquired and performed” a “multi-faceted fabrication in motion…in dialogue with the (uneven) opportunities to which it lays claim. Whiteness is produced through differential access and social advantage/disadvantage, accumulated and transmitted intergenerationally” (Knowles, 2008, p. 169).

Knowles (2008) goes on to discuss how whiteness is produced and flourishes in rural Britain and bolstered by histories (and the ongoing presence) of colonialism and slavery. For Knowles, the

British “countryside stands for more than it is: it produces, embodies and sustains whiteness on

22 This is not to preclude racism in urban settings.

192 behalf of the nation” and maintains a position as the core of British identity (p. 170). Rural settings must not be seen as superficial backdrops but rather material-relational-agents in the proliferation of whiteness and ‘Britishness.’ It’s important to remember how the depredations of other lands, genocide, and slavery were key practices in generating the money that boosted Great Britain to become ‘great’ leading up to and through the industrial revolution. While the bodies of those whose lands were stolen, and those bodies were enslaved, the kin of those who were killed are still not welcome in this landscape. It’s not responsible to merely flutter in the countryside and think about how romantic poets or artists or endurance walker have described its sublime majesty.

Ingrid Pollard a black British photographer (1988) created a series of photographs of people of colour in rural settings entitled Pastoral Interlude. The photographs disrupt common-sense ideas of rural city landscapes binaries by placing racialized bodies in pastoral scenery. Inscribed beneath the photographs are phrases that articulate the reality of Britain’s imperial history and the affective experiences of racialized bodies out for a stroll in the countryside.

Beneath one photograph of a black woman sitting in the Lake District are these words: “I thought I liked the Lake District; where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease; dread” (np).

Wandered lonely as a cloud is

Wordsworth’s poem, also known as Daffodils, but the person in Pollard’s photograph does not wander in the Lake

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District whimsically as Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy encountering a host of daffodils 200 years ago. Instead she feels dread. While another, featuring a brown man in a country stream holding a net, states “a lot of what MADE ENGLAND GREAT is founded on the blood of slavery.” The colonial history of Britain is not only historical. And its these historical effects “though silent and silenced, reverberate and inflict new forms of enduring racism, nationalism, scapegoating and exclusions on unsuspecting collectives” (Mishra Tarc, 2013, p. 380).

Pollard also created a ‘postcard,’ that was presented as billboards entitled Wordsworth’s Heritage

(1998). Describing the project, Pollard (2004) discusses how she’s visited the Lake District many times throughout the years, “deliberately searching out England’s timeworn countryside ‘the way it’s always been” and how she would look through postcard stands in search of one that shows a “sunny upland scene with a black person standing, looking over the hills” and how she fantasizes about finding it (as cited in Finney, 2014, p. 44). One of her postcards features a drawing of Wordsworth and four pictures of an all black group of walkers pondering “matters of History and Heritage.”

According to Derrida (2004), inheritance and responsibility are inextricably (and aporetically) linked:

The concept of responsibility has no sense at all outside of an experience of inheritance. Even before saying that one is responsible for a particular inheritance, it is necessary to know that responsibility in general (‘‘answering for,’’ ‘‘answering to,’’ ‘‘answering in one’s name’’) is first assigned to us, and that it is assigned to us through and through, as an inheritance. (Derrida & Roudinesco 2004, p. 5).

This tension between inheritance and responsibility is aporetic in that we cannot choose what we’ve inherited, yet are deemed subjectively responsible for it as if we can stand outside of inheritance and critique and assume responsibility for what we’ve inherited. Derrida posits an interesting way out of this dilemma by invoking “finitude” (p. 5). Only something finite inherits what is “larger and older

194 and more powerful and more durable” than him or herself, however that same finitude “obliges one to choose, to prefer, to sacrifice, to exclude, to let go and leave behind” (Derrida & Roudinesco

2004, p. 5). In that regard, there is something unique in finitude and in the finite actions we make within inherited contexts that have the power to modify both the inheritance and the future. This finite situatedness is similar to Haraway’s (1991) paradoxical situated knowledges of feminist objectivity where instead of standing outside of an event objectively assessing it, understanding comes from within the inherited context. Consequently, it also engenders response(ability) for the future while understanding that such a position is not fixed. Barad (2008) asserts, “We” are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (p. 828, italics in original). We are responsible for taking part in transforming the, “ill-founded belief that safety and security are predicated on the homogeneity, purity and boundedness of racial identity” (Searls Giroux, 2010, p. 25).

Instone and Taylor (2015), following Latour, discuss the importance of thinking in the presence of others as a way of “learning to be affected” that moves us toward a “modest apprehension of the “how” of inheritance” (p. 140). These “others” are not just human others, but can be anything including animals, cultural texts, and weather. Influenced by Haraway’s discussions of inheritance, Instone and Taylor (2015) outline how inheritance always poses a question of accountability as “we are deeply implicated in the conditions of our common inheritance in personal, political and intellectual ways” (Instone and Taylor, 2015, p. 140). All of this said, it is important to stress that although we need to be open to whomever or whatever might arrive, we don’t have to then say “yes,” once it has. In one of the songs we wrote on St. Cuthbert’s the lyrics go, “It’s okay to say no to what isn’t working out.” And it is. You can refuse. And that’s important.

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Our material inheritance of

landscape is heavy with colonial

histories (and futures). This

‘coloniality’ (Mingnolo, 2011) is

inextricably linked to our

European narratives of modernity

in that “there is no modernity

without coloniality” (p. 40). When we discuss the modern world we’re also discussing the colonialism spawned and spurred it, and the culture of coloniality we’ve inherited with it. This is where the Postcards from Strangers project is not just a research-creation project based around walking in the British countryside but is also entangled transcorporeally with a politics of place in Canada. Todd (2016) a Canadian Indigenous scholar and anthropologist who studied in the UK, argues how each of us is co-imbricated in systems that continue to exploit and dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land, even those of us who do not live on Turtle Island. She states, that for the majority of Britons, their “responsibility for, and implication in, colonialism in North America ended with the War of Independence (in America) or the repatriation of the Canadian constitution (1982)” (p. 15). I walked in the British countryside, and penned postcards to myself to read once I returned to Canada, and asked strangers to also post postcards from the United Kingdom, back to Canada. But, as Simpson (2014) articulates, all

Canadian cities exist on Indigenous lands, and “Indigenous presence is attacked in all geographies”

(p. 23). The violence of settler colonialism is not contained in the arrival of settlers, but is

“reasserted each day of occupation” of which these postcards become reminders as I sit in my home in Hamilton, Ontario re-reading them (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p. 5).

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Waitt, Gill and

Head’s (2009) discuss how walking is a practice of territorializing and boundary making related to not only who walks, but where they walk. They trouble how bushwalking in Australia, “remains informed by the colonial logic of terra nullius and wilderness values. On other words, how most visitors walk through this place is informed by the assumption they have the right to go anywhere, ignoring the traditional owner’s (Bininj/Munnguy) requests” (p.

45). In this view, every step is a political move and rather than being a benign activity, walking can and does perpetuate forms of European settlerism. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project.

Constantly arriving. Ever on the horizon and “invested in settler futurity” (Tuck & Gaztambide-

Fernandez, 2013, p. 16).

& - Thoughts - &

Coupling a long walk with a writing project that experimented with speed and length highlighted how in new materialist understandings of matter, queer doesn’t stand in for epistemological uncertainty, but rather ontological indeterminacy (Barad, 2007). Walking can be political gesture that through pedestrian-scale queers understandings of space and time. Or as Spinoza says, we don’t know what a body (as in human, text, or weather bodies etc.) can do. We don’t know how or what it

197 can affect. The Postcards from Strangers project highlighted how novel reverberations, oblique movements, snippets, vignettes of thought-in-movement, in conjunction with walking and land allow different ethico-political concerns to arise. The whole entangled process allowed me to think of research as a strange ecology.

This ecology as a tangled association of humans, nonhumans and movement that demonstrates a move away from the nature/society binary. Extending from this, the multiple variants, humans, texts, weather patterns, the postal system operate as active ‘participants’ in the emergent public and emergent pedagogy of this project. For example, one of the post cards was left on a post in the middle of the causeway, about a mile off shore, at low tide. I crossed this stretch of water at low tide, but as the water levels shifted and changed, the water itself became entangled in a pedagogy of non-arrival, and strange arrivals. And the postcards I wrote for myself were all nearly lost when Shanny and I left my bag in the train station in Durham! We were already on the train when we realized that neither of us had the bag. I ran back into the station. Shanny held the train doors open. We were reprimanded by the conductor but I got back on board in time! The

(non)arrival of the postcards at my home in Canada brought up considerations of settler colonialism, as did thoughts I had whilst walking past Cessford Castle. These ecologies of movement and thought demonstrate how seemingly unconnected events and places relationally affect each other.

Thoughts are material. Relations are material. Or, the as William James states, the “relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations, and any kind of relation must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (as cited in Massumi, 2002, p. 16). There’s a relational, lively ecology across all matter.

198

Pedagogy also occurs across relational networks. Rather than viewing pedagogy as an intentional engagement based on a pre-existing set of known agents the Postcards from Strangers project exemplifies how ethico-political concerns arise during interactions rather than pre-existing them, as well as troubling the notion of self-contained and intentioned senders and receivers. The project has pushed me, as a researcher to think about how I receive texts, how I read, what I am open to or hospitable toward – even if it was “I” who penned the original postcard. Further to this,

the recognition of emergence,

deferral, and non-arrival

challenges my long-standing

notions of epistemology. In

preoccupation with an author’s

(stranger’s) thoughts being

“sent” to a reader (me), I could

presume that “knowledge” or

“knowing” pre-exists being written or spoken as if it is something an author possesses and then dispenses through writing to the reader – or by “me” speaking to “you.” However, if the subject is not fixed and predetermined, I cannot then presume that fixity should be required for “knowledge” to occur: knowledge is also emergent in an encounter rather than pre-existing it and emanating from a particular source. Perhaps knowledge, like being, is dynamic, unfinished. In that case, the writing subject (author) does not ‘possess’ knowledge that he or she inscribes through writing (or speaking) for others to gobble up, knowledge emerges through relation. Taylor and Blaise (2016) assert the need for queer theory to decentre the human subject and “reposition queer scholarship as a more- than-human worldly ethico-political project” (np). Such queering queers the nature/culture binary and calls for an attention to the transversal entanglements that make knowledge possible.

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Postal stamps

When choosing the stamps for this research-creation I

was excited to find 150th anniversary stamps from Lewis

Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Pinning postcards to poles

with little images of Alice, the Mad Hatter, and Cheshire

Cat pleased me in an intertextual, nonsensical, affective way by the strange public it formed. As all stamps in the UK, the queen’s silhouette creeps in the corner, while her Machin series head is the main subject of the other stamps on the post card. The common reading of Carroll’s work now is that it predicted our postmodern era (of non-sense and paradox). The images add another intertextual layer to the notion of queering walking, writing, and posting. &

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Chapter 6

23 The Dixie Primer (Moore, 1863, p. 5).

My grandmother was not the first person to end something using and. As demonstrated in the image from The Dixie Primer (Moore, 1863), historically it was common practice for children reciting the

Alphabet to end on ‘And.’ However, presumably it sounded strange to say “X, Y, Z, And” aloud, so

23 © This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Reprinted with permission. http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/moore/moore.html

201 children were taught to say “X, Y, Z, and per se and” meaning ‘and by itself’ in Latin. The ampersand, as we now call it, is a Mondegreen of the phrase and per se and.

The logogram of the ampersand (&) pre-dates its name by almost two-thousand years. Its form comes from a ligature made from two letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ or ‘et’ meaning and. According to

Garfield (2011) its first use can be credited to Marcus Tiro’s shorthand writing method in 63 BC.

Ampersands have mutated in shape and been influenced by the age of print, the invention of typefaces, and of course modern computing.24 Tschichold’s (1953) book The ampersand: its origin and development traces hundreds of versions of the ampersand throughout the ages and includes a version of the ligature based on graffiti that was preserved when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79AD.

To think in terms of problems – to problematize – rather than find solutions was the method of experimentation that drove this dissertation. In the spirit of And, and ampersand, in this concluding chapter I will think-with the further implications and ethico-political-responsibilities And brings to: walking research, ‘literacy’ research in schools, new materialist methodologies and research-creation, and theories of emergence. I’ve already made specific claims about these topics throughout this dissertation, so now I speculate on what’s next, which means thinking both before and after this project.

To begin to end, I returned to the Research Ethics Board Protocol I wrote to conduct my three research-creation events. Probyn (2000) states that if “‘ethics’ cannot be reified as an object, but always consists of practices that foreground how we relate to ourselves and to others, then the task of thinking ethics will necessarily be a doubled one” (p. 64). Ethics are always relational and relationality, like affect, always goes in more than one direction. Because these research-creation projects centered on walking and writing, much of my ethics review included accounting for how

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

202 the humans in the projects would be safe when walking as well as privacy and psychological concerns regarding the writings or ‘texts’ they completed.25

Walking&

Walking always takes place somewhere. But, ironically, as often as we talk about place in walking research, it’s still not attended to. According to Tuck and McKenzie (2014) “Ethical practices must be place-specific, place-responsive, place-resonant” (p. 161). Tuck and McKenzie highlight this to counter universal ethical guidelines which come from the global north. When I wrote the Ethics

Protocol for the three research-creation projects there was no discussion of place, or land or implications for walking on land. In revisiting this I know now that the land that I and the participants walked on should have been included in the ethics statement, and the land (Canada) that the postcards were addressed to should also have been included. Although two out of three of these projects took place in the UK, my position as a white Canadian settler should have been attended to.

What I am still not clear on is how to obtain consent from land.

Dietrich (2016) argues that in the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism geos and bios are divorced and land is not considered “a living thing, is not animate, is not a form of life” (p. 1). This hierarchical thinking can be linked back to Aristotle’s taxonomy of living things (Springgay &

Truman, 2016) that ultimately places the ‘human’ at the apex (white, able, hetero, European male) and all other forms of life (female, racialized, disabled, land) lower on the scale of animacy. This biopolitical hierarchy has become normalized in western civilizations.

25 In the Intratextual Entanglement research-creation project, and the Postcards from Strangers research-creation project because the participants were adults, academics and/or artists their identities were allowed be published.

203

Simpson (2014) outlines:

…by far the largest attack on Indigenous Knowledge systems right now is land dispossession, and the people that are actively protecting Nishnaabewin are not those at academic conferences advocating for its use in research and course work but those that are currently putting their bodies on the land (p. 21).

Simpson’s quotation is particularly potent today in that as I write this Donald Trump has just signed an order reviving the Dakota Access Pipeline that Indigenous people have been protesting against, on the land, for 9 months. Arguably they have been protesting on the land since European imperialists first arrived (although their/our arrival is still in process).

There is an ongoing need to consider how walking-writing practices on land operate in relation with Indigenous ontologies. As Simpson (2014) warns, we cannot just “write or imagine our way to a decolonized future. Answers on how to re-build and how to resurge are therefore derived from a web of consensual relationships that is infused with movement (kinetic) through lived experience and embodiment” (p. 16). For Simpson, this requires all kinds of knowledge including intellectual, spiritual, and emotional in communal and emergent interactions.

Stewart (2007) discusses affect as prepersonal, or transpersonal in that it’s not about an individual person’s feelings becoming another person’s but about bodies affecting each other and

“generating intensities: human bodies, discursive bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of water” (p.

128). In this regard affect is always affecting-affected. Hyphenated.

In a postcard in Chapter 5, I discuss hyphens and whether they’re pretentious. I’ve decided that they are not. They’re about relationality and mutual implication. Jones and Jenkins (2008) highlight importance of the hyphens. In discussing “colonizer-indigene,” as a hyphenated term they recognize that in that any kind of research involving settler colonialism “necessarily reaches back to our shared past” in a mutual implication (as cited in Tuck and McKenzie, 2015, p. 163). A

204 hyphenated mutual implication functions much like and.

Proposition for walking research: Attend to hyphens.

Literacy&

We never know in advance how someone will learn: by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin, what encounters make them a philosopher, or in what dictionaries they learn to think

~Deleuze, 1994, p. 165

When I wrote my Research Ethics Board Protocol for the in-school research-creation project, I projected that walking as a kind of defamiliarization would ‘benefit’ students’ writing and that attention to the public pedagogies or literacies students encounter whilst moving through the city would ‘benefit’ curriculum scholars. It did. Because each of my research-creation projects and scripts were focused on attending to what emerged within the events, different matters of concern emerged and stuck to me (and continue to stick).

Haraway (2008) asks us to become responsible through creating and ‘sticky-knots’ that bind

“intra-acting critters, including people, together in the kinds of response and regard that change the subject – and the object” (p. 287). Such encounters she asserts will engender a change in us because once we know we will no longer be able to not know. For Haraway, this is how “responsibility grows”

(p. 287). Responsibility is a hyphenated word presenting itself as unhyphenated. Let’s look at it with a hyphen: response-able. The responsible thing for me to say here is that literacy as a concept – even in its most creative, inclusive and forward looking sense – is still embedded and invested in Western hierarchies and capitalism. While many critical literacy scholars and curriculum theorists have

205 challenged how literacy can operate as a ‘humanizing,’ colonial26 practice that humanizes others into, or excludes ‘inhuman/illiterate’ others out of, the category of the “human,” (Weheliye, 2014), we still have work to do. Instead of literacy operating under a logic of rehabilitation and inclusion, we need to continue to queer the ways that literacy operates though inside and outside where those who are

‘inhuman’ are always left out. English as a subject area must continue to push toward more emergent, affective, ethico-political orientations that challenge how school curricula privilege and reproduce socially dominant world views until what counts as knowledge is no longer governed by hegemonic values associated with a hu“Man”ist logic (Wynter, 2003).

Proposition for literacy research: In-humanize literacy.

Research-Creation&Methodology&

The multi-participant projects in Chapters 3, 4, 5 and the process of my re-engaging with them through Scripts were all research-creation events. Research-creation is not something that ends up as an ‘artwork,’ but an ongoing experiment with questions of how felt difference and ethico-political concerns propel us to new futures and such felt difference and ethico-political concerns emerge in the middle of events (Springgay & Truman, 2017). As Manning (2016) states, research “must be reinvented at every turn and thought must always leap” (p. 45). Research-creation (and qualitative research in general!) must continue to invite experimentation, speculation, and propositions, and resist codification, standardization, and generalization. And remember that thought, language, and

26 Literacy has been and continues to be a driving force in colonization.

206 gestures all have material affects. As Haraway (2016) states, “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stores with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts…” (p. 12). This applies to the (re)presentation of research- creation events wherein affirmative readings-writings of frictive theories intersect with emergent ethico-political and consider who will be affected and how? “If we see ourselves as always already entangled with, not separate from or superior to matter,” our “responsibility to being becomes urgent and constant” (St. Pierre, 2013b, p. 655). Extra-discursive: there’s differences everywhere, no one denies it – the systems we use matter. What we bring to differences and how we codify them matters. The 3 research-creation events used emergence in conjunction with other theories. These theories, words, gestures, texts are all material-relations. In radical empiricist thought even thoughts have a materiality.

Proposition for Research-Creation: Begin in the middle.

Proposition for Methodology: Affirm difference.

Emergence&

To speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative instance with regard to the thing created, inflection of the state of things, bifurcation beyond pre-established schemas, once again taking into account alterity in its extreme modalities (Guattari, 1995, p. 107).

Myriad thoughts, words, feelings, relationships, concerns, insights, banalities and affects emerge in the midst of a research-creation. As a final un-ending of this dissertation I want to focus again on the emergence of affect as the pre-cognitive capacity to affect and be affected. Bertelsen & Murphie

(2010) state that affect re-configures ethics as “as a creative responsibility for modes of living as they

207 come into being” (141, italics in original). This inserts response-ability into each affective emergence.

Remembering to allow for emergences (emergencies) is a way to cue into the moments when affect bodies, and the micro-political potential of each emergent bodying. &

208

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