TEACHING ELSEWHERE: CURATING↔CALIBRATING POSTHUMANIST POSSIBILITIES by SARAH ALICE SHELTON DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Arlington August, 2018 Arlington, Texas Supervising Committee: Penelope Ingram, Supervising Professor Stacy Alaimo Estee Beck ii ABSTRACT Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities Sarah Alice Shelton, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2018 Supervising Professor: Penelope Ingram Following the material and ontological turns and working within the recent conversation applying posthumanist theory to education and educational research, this dissertation argues that professors can materialize immediate, critical differences for our students—open up different possibilities for their knowing-in-being than the ones imposed on us by a humanist education system—by “teaching elsewhere” even while staying within the college classroom spaces (designed to be “anywhere”) we’re assigned. Such a posthumanist praxis or pedagogy relies on Karen Barad’s agential realism to see “the classroom” as the entire spacetimemattering of a particular phenomenon brought together through a mixture of choices and impositions into intra- action. Diffracting Barad’s use of Niels Bohr’s light paradox through Donna Haraway’s concept of “elsewhere” as a speculative “absent, but perhaps possible, other present” (“Promises” 295), and through the humanist narratives (the fall, return, recuperation) that “back-to-basics” educational policies depend on, elsewhere becomes the classrooms (phenomena) we can create here and now, even among such policies (nowheres) and physical classrooms (anywheres). iii Developed by diffracting theory and fiction (particularly Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy) through the teaching of two sophomore level English literature courses, curation↔calibration is a way of creating the possibilities for and of observing such elsewheres. Through curating—texts, objects, people, places, concepts, experiences, activities, artifacts etc.—with the classroom (from the whole phenomenon) instead of pre-planning everything ourselves, we can calibrate for more posthumanist possibilities. This requires, however, intentional and sustained observation (similar to teacher inquiry but through a posthumanist framework) to notice the dynamic flows of agency throughout all actants in the classroom-as- phenomenon—human and nonhuman alike. Such teaching↔as↔inquiry—in this project through pedagogical documentation and diffraction—drives curation↔calibration as a continual doing (and a continual undoing of humanist habits and assumptions) that holds us responsible for and accountable to each unique, unrepeatable classroom we teach-with. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to thank UTA’s Office of Graduate Studies and the College of Liberal Arts for the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that allowed me the dedicated time to finish my dissertation this summer. A particular thanks to Dr. Raymond L. Jackson for his help and encouragement. There are so many people who’ve made my time with UTA’s English Department truly wonderful. I’ve grown so much as a teacher, scholar, and person because of the department we have and the opportunities it’s given me. I want to start by saying thank you to Dr. Peggy Kulesz not only for her incredible mentorship as Director of First Year Writing, but also for her support, generosity, and friendship. I was also lucky enough to get to work with Dr. Justin Lerberg as he stepped into the Directorship and am so grateful I had the opportunity to learn from him as well. Thank you to Drs. Amy Tigner, Neill Matheson, and Kathryn Warren for their work on our behalf as graduate advisors. Thank you as well to Yael Sasley and Margie Jackymack who are the reasons things get done around here and who’ve helped me countless times with things from organizing an EGSA trip to opening classrooms. Dr. Kevin Porter has also been an integral part of my growth as a scholar; his classes during coursework pushed me to think in ways I hadn’t before and I continue to wrestle with what “meaning” means. There are so many graduate students to thank. The original CARH 409 whirlwind, where I shared my first office with three other fantastic people: Stephanie Peebles Tavera, Rod Sachs, and Sean Farrell. My original cohort: Joul Smith, Miriam Rowntree, and Stephanie. I’ve gone through each step of the process with this group and can’t thank them enough for their time, support, encouragement, and friendship. My current officemate and twin, the ever magical Rachael Mariboho who knows. She and the always wonderful Sean Farrell have been so generous with their support and encouragement as I went through all the things. Thank you to v Jason Hogue and Jeffrey Marchand for many a good conversation and much laughter. To Vince Sosko, Laruen Phelps, Christina Montgomery, and Connor Stratman for your support and inspiration. And to Bethany Shaffer for her optimism, dance moves down the hall, and just general awesomeness. Thank you to Miriam Rowntree for the texts, the anthems, the unwavering belief and optimism, the trips, the dreamings and talking-out-louds. We’ve come a long way from Porter’s class that first semester. We might never know what meaning means, but your friendship throughout this journey has meant more than I can say. Thank you to my committee for all their work with me on this project. Thank you to Dr. Tim Morris for serving on my Comprehensive Exams committee. To Dr. Estee Beck for serving on the Dissertation Committee and for pushing me to include other voices and fields. To Dr. Stacy Alaimo who started me on this posthumanist path with her wonderful class on Posthumanism and Science Fiction in the Anthropocene. The texts, both theory and fiction, from that class altered my scholarly trajectory, and her suggestion of reading Lenz Taguchi when I told her about my project led me back to Barad which helped me find my voice and a way to articulate what I wanted to say about education. Finally, but never least, none of this would have been possible without Dr. Penelope Ingram. From her advice when I sat on her couch when she was our graduate adviser and I was deciding to apply to the program, to her teaching and her fantastic classes on postcolonialism and feminism, to her taking on the EGSA, to agreeing to be my Chair and helping me navigate this process, to making the call at the end of June that changed everything and made me dig deep in a way I didn’t know I could. She is a model of the kind of invested, passionate, and resolute (in all the right ways) scholar, teacher, mentor, feminist, and person I aspire to be. Thank you, Penny, vi for believing I could do this, for holding me accountable to my own potential, and for always having my back. vii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my family who, in a million ways that mattered, made this document possible. I can’t begin to thank them or to fully explain what their love and support meant and did for me on this journey. For: Mom and Dad Kate and Codi Eleanor and Shepard Neville and Theadora I wouldn’t have “got ‘er done” without y’all. K&L viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ……………………………………………………………………………………ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ……………………………………………………………………iv DEDICATION………………………………………………………………………………...vii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………....1 CHAPTER I: WORKING THE RUINS ………………………………………………………..9 CHAPTER II: MAPPING THE CACOPHANY ……………………………………………...65 CHAPTER III: SPECULATING THE PRAXIS ………………………………………….…128 CHAPTER IV: CURATING↔CALIBRATING THE CLASSROOM …………………..…196 DIFFRACTION #1: RESPONSIBILITY…………………………………………………….251 DIFFRACTION #2: ACCOUNTABILITY…………………………………………………..270 CONCLUSION: TEACHING ELSEWHERE ……………………………………………….284 WORKS CITED ……………………………………………………………………………...309 1 “Like everything at Martha Graham it had utilitarian aims. Our Students Graduate with Employable Skills, ran the motto underneath the original Latin motto, which was Ars Longa Vita Brevis.” —Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake (220) “Imagine a cacophony of ideas swirling as we think about our topics with all we can muster—with words from theorists, participants, conference audiences, friends and lovers, ghosts who haunt our studies, characters in fiction and film and dreams—and with our bodies and all the other bodies and the earth and all the things and objects in our lives—the entire assemblage that is a life thinking and, and, and….All those data are set to work in our thinking, and we think, and we work our way somewhere in thinking. My advice is to read, and analysis, whatever it is, will follow […] In the end, it is impossible to disentangle data, data collection, and data analysis. Those individuations no longer make sense. We could just give them up […] I believe inquiry should be provocative, risky, stunning, astounding. It should take our breath away with its daring. It should challenge our foundational assumptions and transform the world. We must, even so, be vigilant in analyzing the consequences of human invention and the structures it endlessly creates. Humanism’s projects created spectacular failures that the ‘turns’ identified half a century ago. Why not try something different?” —Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre “Post Qualitative Research” (622-633)(emphasis original) “We know this story well, it’s written into our bones, in many ways we inhabit it and it inhabits us.” —Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (233)