Summer Institute in Qualitative Research:
Putting Theory to Work
Monday 6th – Friday 10th July 2015
Migration (detail) (Maskull Lasserre, maskulllasserre.com/)
Education and Social Research Institute
Manchester Metropolitan University UK
Programme
Venue: The Business School, All Saints Campus,
Oxford Road Manchester, M15 6BH
Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Birley Building, 53 Bonsall Street, M15 6GX, UK, tel
+44 (0)161 247 2100, email [email protected]
Summer Institute in Qualitative Research:
Putting Theory to Work
CONTENTS
page
Summer Institute in Qualitative Research
2
Keynote Speakers
3
Patricia Clough
Diane Reay
Elizabeth de Freitas
Patti Lather
Maggie MacLure
Yvette Solomon
Stephanie Springgay
Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt
Schedule
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Monday 6 July
Tuesday 7 July
Wednesday 8 July
Thursday 9 July
Friday 10 July
11
12
13
14
15
Delegate-led Sessions: Schedule and Abstracts
16
Workshops: Schedule and Abstracts
26
Provocation, Improvisation: Encounters between art, sciences &
qualitative research
32
Social Events
34
Plan of Business School
35
1
Summer Institute in Qualitative Research:
Putting Theory to Work
Welcome to the 4th international Summer Institute!
We are delighted to welcome you to this, our fourth event. The Summer Institute in
Qualitative Research is a special occasion. It offers a unique opportunity for researchers from
all over the world, and many disciplines to meet, learn and talk about ‘theory’ - with one
another, and with leading scholars and experienced researchers who use theory in their own
work.
It’s a full schedule. It’s demanding. And we know from experience that it will be tiring! But it
is also interactive, sociable, and full of occasions for mutual support. So we are confident that
it will be exciting and rewarding. And you may well make friends and meet like-minded
people that you will still be corresponding with in years to come. Have a great week!
Rachel Holmes
Summer Institute Curator
About the Summer Institute While courses on research methods abound, theory tends to
receive less attention. And yet, without an understanding of how theory informs what counts
as ‘data’, knowledge, identity, truth or action, our research may be driven by taken-for granted
assumptions. The Summer Institute allows participants to pursue questions such as:
• What are the current trends and the future directions in theoretical work?
• How does theory engage with policy and practice?
• How can I put theory to work in my own research?
Structure of the Summer Institute The Institute is organised around the keynote sessions.
Group discussions follow each keynote. A strand of workshops, 'Putting theory to work', runs
throughout the week, where researchers describe the influence of a key thinker on their own
research, and invite participants to pursue the implications for their own research. Some
delegates have also taken the opportunity to lead short presentations on their own research.
Keynotes and workshop leaders have been uploading data provocations to get conversations
going … visit our Museum of Qualitative Data (http://museumofqualitativedata.info)
The Summer Institute Team
Administration: Trish Gladdis and Barbara Ashcroft
SIQR Curator: Rachel Holmes
Provocations, Improvisations SIQR: Rebecca Hartley & Rachel Holmes
Virtual SIQR: James Duggan
Social SIQR: Harriet Rowley
Contact: [email protected]
2
Education and Social Research Institute www.esri.mmu.ac.uk
Keynote Speakers
Patricia Clough
City University of New York
Ecstatic Corona: From Ethnography to Art Documentation
For the past seven years, Patricia Clough has been returning to the place where she grew up in
Corona Queens, NY. Her visits to Corona have resulted in the creation of a performance group who
have created and perform a multimedia production called Ecstatic Corona. Focusing on the process of
creating Ecstatic Corona, Clough addresses her own development from ethnographic researcher to
critical theorist to co-producer of art documentation.
Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at the Graduate Center and
Queens College of the City University of New York. She also is in her third year of practicing as a
psychoanalyst in training in New York City. Clough is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious
Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic
Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is
editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007), with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond
Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011) and with Alan Frank and Steven
Seidman, editor of Intimacies, A New World of Relational Life (2013). Clough’s work has drawn on
theoretical traditions concerned with technology, affect, unconscious processes, timespace and
political economy. More recently she has been creating performance pieces bringing together sound
and images with theoretical and autobiographical discourses that also draw on ethnographic work in
Corona Queens. Her forthcoming book is The End(s) of Measure.
3
Diane Reay
University of Cambridge
Bridging Sociology and Psychoanalysis in Qualitative Analysis: Mixing Bourdieu
and Psychoanalytical Approaches
Sociology and psychoanalysis should unite their strengths (but to do so they would need to
overcome their prejudices against each other) to analyze the genesis of investment in a field
of social relations. (Bourdieu, 2000:pp 198-199).
It is this fusion of psychoanalytic insights with sociological understandings that I suggest has the
potential to be analytically generative. My own research focus is social inequalities, and in this
paper I attempt to bring together Bourdieu and a range of psychoanalytic approaches in order to
develop richer understandings of how, in particular, class inequalities are lived, felt, contested and
accepted in contemporary Britain.
The paper explores the potential of habitus to provide a window on the psychosocial. It works with
a notion of psychosocial study as inquiry into the mutual constitution of the individual and the
social relations within which they are enmeshed. At the same time it attempts to deepen and
enrich notions of habitus. Although the strong focus on agency and structure has overshadowed
the role of emotions and the emotional life of individuals within conceptualisations of habitus in
Bourdieu’s work, the paper argue that there are strong links between the psychosocial and
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. Drawing on empirical data on the affective aspects of living in an
unequal society, the paper seeks to develop a psychosocial understanding of habitus that allows for
a better and richer understanding of how the exterior – wider social structures – are experienced
and mediated by the interior, the psyche.
Diane Reay is a Professor of Education in the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge with
particular interests in social justice issues in education, Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory, and
cultural analyses of social class. For 25 years she has researched extensively in the areas of social
class, gender and ethnicity across primary, secondary and post-compulsory stages of education. Her
most recent book (with Gill Crozier and David James) is White Middle Class Identities and Urban
Schooling (2011) Palgrave Press.
4
Elizabeth de Freitas
Adelphi University
Number sense, calculating matter, and immanence
This presentation explores the implications of new materialist philosophies that re-assemble the
quantitative with the qualitative. I focus on how human and non-human matter are newly commingled
in current approaches to number sense. I discuss philosophies of immanence that decenter the
phenomenological subject and relate this to recent neurocognitive research on number sense. I draw
principally from the work of Gilles Deleuze, Claire Colebrook and Vicky Kirby. This paper asks: What
is the role of number and calculation in a philosophy of immanence? My aim is to imagine a
calculating matter and a non-human number sense, keeping in mind that this imaginary offers both an
image of dystopic societies of control, but also vitalist openings onto new recombinant mixtures of
number and matter.
Elizabeth de Freitas is an Associate Professor at Adelphi University in the Ruth S. Ammon school of
education, cross-appointed to the Adolescent Education Program and the Educational Technology
Program. Her research spans the field of education and social inquiry, with particular focus on the role
of theory and philosophy in research design and methodology. She has published extensively on
cultural studies of mathematics and mathematics education, with recent interest in new materialist
approaches to the study of teaching and learning. She is co-author of the book Mathematics and the
body: Material entanglements in the classroom (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor of
the book Opening the research text: Critical insights and in(ter)ventions into mathematics education
(Springer Verlag, 2008). She is an associate editor of the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics.
She has published over 50 articles and chapters on a range of educational topics such as teacher
identity, narrative inquiry, classroom discourse, social semiotics, school architecture, critical pedagogy,
curriculum studies and research methods. Recent publications include How theories of perception
deploy the line: Reconfiguring students’ bodies through topo-philosophy (Educational Theory, 2014),
The mathematical event: Mapping the axiomatic and problematic in school mathematics (Studies in
Philosophy and Education, 2013), The classroom as!rhizome:!New!strategies!for!diagramming!
knotted!interactions!(Qualitative!Inquiry,!2012),!What!were!you!thinking?!A!Deleuzian/Guattarian!
analysis!of!communication!in!the!mathematics!classroom!(Educational!Philosophy!and!Theory,!
2012).!!
5
Patti Lather
Emeritus Professor, The Ohio State University
Against Proper Objects: Toward the Diversely Qualitative
This paper looks at the present conjuncture of qualitative research via a genealogy of how I have looked at it
over the years. It begins with a memoir of what ushered me into my own thinking, presents various mappings
of the field and concludes with a meditation on what the post-qualitative might be made to mean. Its
particular interests are to make intelligible our own framings, to challenge the idealizations of the
Enlightenment subject and to rethink praxis by unpacking the methodology of a variety of empirical projects.
Its goal is to do so in a way that foregrounds the proliferations, migrations, and circulations of what is always
on the move in a way that takes incommensurability seriously.
Emeritus Professor Patti Lather taught qualitative research, feminist methodology and gender and education at
Ohio State University from 1988-2014. She is the author of four books, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and
Pedagogy With/in the Postmodern (1991 Critics Choice Award), Troubling the Angels: Women Living with
HIV/AIDS, co-authored with Chris Smithies (1998 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title), Getting Lost:
Feminist Efforts Toward a Double(d) Science (2008 Critics Choice Award) and Engaging (Social) Science:
Policy from the Side of the Messy (2010, 2011 Critics Choice Award). Patti has lectured widely in
international and national contexts and held a number of distinguished visiting lectureships. Her work
examines various (post)critical, feminist, and poststructural theories, most recently with a focus on the
implications for qualitative inquiry of the call for scientifically-based research in education.
6
Maggie MacLure
Manchester Metropolitan University
Prodigious performances, posthuman subjectivities: viral videos of young children
imitating adult performers
I!explore!the!question!of!post8human!subjectivities!through!a!focus!on!viral!videos of young
children! imitating !popular musicians and singers.!The affective power of these child performances
is evident in both in their mass appeal, and in anxious responses that associate them with animals,
machines and monsters - parrots, puppets, automata. Such responses point to the more-than-human
affinities that precede and accompany the autonomous !human subject. The powerful body !of the
prodigious child (de Mink, 2011) challenges the binary architecture of humanist prerogative:
adult/child, nature/culture, imitation/creativity, fake/authentic, originality/reproduction,
innocence/corruption. I!ask!who/what!speaks!in!and!through!these!imitative!performances,!
and!suggest!that!they are not degraded, failed or empty !performance of the less-than-human, but
the expression of affective capacities that are always already more-than-human.
Maggie MacLure is Professor of Education in the Education and Social Research Institute (ESRI)
at MMU. She leads the Theory and Methodology Research Group in ESRI. Her most recent
research projects have centred on early childhood education, and the issue of 'behaviour' in school.
Maggie is the founder and director of the Summer Institute in Qualitative Research. Her book,
Discourse in Educational and Social Research, won the Critics' Choice Award from the American
Educational Studies Association.
7
Yvette Solomon
Manchester Metropolitan University
Storying the self in forbidden spaces: using Holland and Bakhtin to explore identity
and agency
Much of my research has focussed on understanding how the apparent ‘masculinity’ of mathematics
excludes women, and the ways in which some women nonetheless occupy this forbidden space. Some
have argued that they must do ‘identity work’ in order to achieve what is often an uneasy presence,
while others have commented on the protective function of invisibility. In this paper I discuss the
theoretical and methodological issues in exploring identity and agency within women’s narratives of
choosing and doing mathematics. Taking as my starting point Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on the
dialogic space between interlocutors, I will illustrate how an awareness of the addressivity and
otherness of utterances, and of the role of genre and heteroglossia in self-authoring, can be used in
interview analysis to gain insight into women’s narratives of self as mathematicians and mathematics
learners. Emphasising the production of identity in practice, I will draw on Dorothy Holland’s work on
hybridity and worldmaking to examine how we might then understand agency and challenge in the
established world of mathematics.
Yvette Solomon is Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has a background in
psychology and mathematics and a PhD in educational research. Previously Research Psychologist at the Trust
for the Study of Adolescence in Brighton, she was Reader in Educational Research at Lancaster University
before moving to her current post. She has a long-standing research profile focusing on the experience of
learning mathematics and the development of relationships with mathematics from primary schooling to
undergraduate study. Her work concerns access to mathematical literacy and participation in STEM education in
general, with a particular focus on theorising gender and identity in mathematics. Current projects include
research on the impact of Realistic Mathematics Education on post-16 GCSE re-sit students' achievement and
engagement, with colleagues in the Faculty of Education at MMU; and on the development of mathematics
teacher identities, with colleagues at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, where she
holds the position of Professor II.
8
Stephanie Springgay
University of Toronto
Propositions of Activation for Research in Education
Disciplinary models of research shape knowledge as static, fixed and organized according to pre-formed
categories, where the conditions of research are posited before the exploration or experimentation. This
results in “stultifying its potential and relegating it to that which already fits within pre-existing schemata
of knowledge” (Manning, 2014, p. 4). We must, Manning contends, find ways of activating thought that is
experienced rather than known, and where experience accounts for ‘more than human’ encounters. If
research is to loosen its ties to humanist orientations it needs to untether itself from pre-programmed
methods and consider techniques that are immanent to its own research design, disrupting the idea that the
human/self exists prior to the act of research. I borrow the concept of ‘techniques’ from Erin Manning who
describes techniques as a thinking-in-movement. Techniques are ways of engaging and expressing
activities, such as research. They are not tools or methods by which research is defined. Techniques are
processual; they are emergent and they constantly reinvent themselves. Entering into the diverse
conversation about new materialism, posthumanism and Deleuzian methodologies this paper will put forth
propositions of activation in order to bring matter to the forefront of educational research. In doing so I
will examine a multi-site school-based research project.
Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at
the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research focuses on the
intersections between contemporary art and pedagogy, with a particular interest in theories of matter,
movement and affect. Her most recent research-creation projects are documented at
www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com, www.walkinglab.org and www.artistsoupkitchen.com. She has
published widely in academic journals and is the co-editor of the book M/othering a Bodied Curriculum:
Emplacement, Desire, Affect University of Toronto Press, with Debra Freedman; co-editor of Curriculum
and the Cultural Body, Peter Lang with Debra Freedman; and author of Body Knowledge and Curriculum:
Pedagogies of Touch in Youth and Visual Culture, Peter Lang.
9
Jonathan Wyatt
University of Edinburgh
Ken Gale
Plymouth University
Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry
For ten years, both together and with others, we have been inquiring into, with and through collaborative
writing. From the outset we have been enchanted by Deleuze, drawn by the disruptive, creative,
revolutionary world he and his collaborators offer us; and in more recent years, we have been captivated by
posthumanism and its affirmation, echoing and extension of, Deleuzian theorizing as practice. We’ve
wondered, with Deleuze, Barad, St. Pierre, Jackson and Mazzei and many others: where can collaborative
writing take us? What will we find? What will we create? How does collaborative writing take us
somewhere different? How do we take collaborative writing differently? What do we mean by the terms
that trip so easily from our lips and fingers as we write, those easy, everyday signifiers such as ‘we’ and
‘I’? What do they mean to us? We wonder about the ‘we’ that purports to ask these questions. As an
approach to inquiry, collaborative writing is entangled, intertwined and enmeshed. In seeing it as
constantly processual, it is always changing, contested and open to problematisation within the context of
post-qualitative inquiry.
In this keynote address we wish, through collaborative writing as inquiry, to push at collaborative writing,
to take it to task, to hold it up for examination, and to wonder. Yes, we will wonder, with each other, with
Deleuze, and with our use of multiple forms of posthumanist theorising in mind: what is im/possible?
Jonathan Wyatt is Senior Lecturer and Director of
Counselling & Psychotherapy at The University of
Edinburgh. His research examines the entanglement of
self and other within and beyond the therapeutic
encounter; and it troubles what we mean by ‘self’ and
‘other’. He undertakes this research through
autoethnography (or, better, 'assemblage/ethnography'),
collaborative writing as inquiry and, latterly, through
bringing these together with dance/movement,
performance and film.
Ken Gale works in the Institute of Education at
Plymouth University, has published widely and
presented at a number of international conferences on
the philosophy of education and in particular, with a
focus upon posthuman and poststructural approaches to
education practices. With Jonathan Wyatt, he has
recently edited journal Special Editions on
collaborative writing for the International Review of
Qualitative Research and on collaborative writing as a
method of inquiry for Cultural Studies=Critical
Methodologies.
10
Monday 6 July
11.00
Registration, Exhibition Atrium, Business School
Tea and coffee
Exhibition Atrium
12.45
Welcome to the Summer Institute
Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University
Lecture Theatre G36
1.00
Plenary Keynote 1
Lecture Theatre G36
Patti Lather Emeritus Professor, The Ohio State University
"Against Proper Objects: Toward the Diversely Qualitative”
2.00
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
3.00
Tea and coffee break
3.30
Plenary Keynote 2
Lecture Theatre G36
Ken Gale Plymouth University and Jonathan Wyatt University of Edinburgh
"Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry"
4.30
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
5.30
Wine Reception until 7pm
The School of Art, 4th Floor
11
Tuesday 7 July
9.00
Plenary Keynote 3
Lecture Theatre G36
Diane Reay University of Cambridge
"Bridging Sociology and Psychoanalysis in Qualitative Analysis: Mixing
Bourdieu and Psychoanalytical Approaches"
10.00
11.00
11.30
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
Tea and coffee break
Parallel sessions (breakout rooms)
Putting Theory to Work Workshops (Numbers restricted to 20, by sign-up sheet)
Putting ghosts to work: Attuning to social hauntings
4.03
Geoff Bright, MMU
The psychoanalytic object
4.04
Karen Charman, Victoria Univeristy
Deleuze & Guattari at work
4.05
Ken Gale (Plymouth University), Jonathan Wyatt (The University of
Edinburgh), Josie Gabi (MMU), Linda Knight (Queensland University of
Technology), Eileen Honan (University of Queensland), Mary Dixon (Deakin
University) and Susanne Ganon (University of Western Syndney)
Delegate-led sessions (see session schedule p 16 for details)
12.30
1.30
Lunch, Exhibition Atrium
Plenary Keynote 4
Lecture Theatre G36
Yvette Solomon Manchester Metropolitan University
“Storying the self in forbidden spaces: using Holland and Bakhtin to
explore identity and agency"
2.30
3.30
4.00
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
Tea and coffee break
Parallel sessions (breakout rooms)
Putting Theory to Work Workshops (Numbers restricted to 20, by sign-up sheet)
From Lacan to Barad: the body and material entanglements
Margaret Somerville (University of Western Sydney) & Sue Collins
(Monash University)
Posthuman Research: Novel configurations, new performativities, and
the posthuman shimmer
Ruth Hubbard, MMU
5.00
Delegate-led sessions (see session schedule p 16 for details)
End of day - Please refer to social events calendar (page 34)
12
4.03
4.04
Wednesday 8 July
9.00
Plenary Keynote 5
Lecture Theatre G36
Patricia Clough City University of New York
"Ecstatic Corona: From Ethnography to Art Documentation"
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
Tea and coffee break
10.00
11.00
Provocations, Improvisations: Encounters between Art, Sciences & Qualitative
Research (See page 32 for full details of the provocation, improvisation events)
Lecture
Theatre
The Pregnant
Box (talk)
11:30 - 12:15
7.00
Far end
Atrium
Middle
Seminar Room 1
Under stairs
qu/al/ant/ify
12:45 - 13:30
Lunch
Venue !
Time "
11:30
11:45
12:00
12:15
12:30
12:45
13:00
13:15
13:30
13:45
14:00
14:15
14:30
14:45
15:00
15:15
15:30
15:45
16:00
16:15
16:30
16:45
17:00
17:15
17:30
17:45
18:00
18:15
The Graphic Novel
12:30 - 13:30
The
Pop
Pregnant
Make
Research
Box
Space/Create
Methodology (screens) Moving with
14:30 - 15:30
All day
Affective
All day Methodologies
14:00 - 17:00
Mixed
Cultures
16:00 - 17:30
Staging Your
Research
16:00 - 17:30
Alchemy /
Schmalchemy
17:30 - 18:30
End of day – Please refer to social events calendar (page 34)
13
Thursday 9 July
9.00
Plenary Keynote 6
Stephanie Springgay University of Toronto
"Propositions of Activation for Research in Education"
Lecture Theatre G36
10.00
11.00
11.30
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
Tea and coffee break
Parallel sessions (breakout rooms)
Putting Theory to Work Workshops (Numbers restricted to 20, by sign-up sheet)
Listening theories, listening practices
4.03
Michael Gallagher, MMU
Putting Barad to Work: entanglements with data
4.04
Mary Dixon, Deakin University
A voice that skins the body: Lacan and the misdemeanours of language
4.05
Alexandre Pais, MMU
Delegate-led sessions (see session schedule p 16 for details)
12.30
Lunch, Exhibition Atrium
1.30
Plenary Keynote 7
Lecture Theatre G36
Elizabeth de Freitas Adelphi University
"Alternative ontologies of number and measure in qualitative research"
2.30
3.30
4.00
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups (breakout rooms)
Tea and coffee break
Parallel sessions (breakout rooms)
Putting Theory to Work Workshops (Numbers restricted to 20, by sign-up sheet)
Putting Bakhtin to work: insights from a focus on voice
4.03
Yvette Solomon, MMU
Foucault Foucault Foucault
4.04
Patti Lather, The Ohio State University
Utopia: Social Theory and Design Fictions in Everyday Communities
4.05
James Duggan, MMU
Delegate-led session (see session schedule p 16 for details)
5.00
End of day – Please refer to social events calendar (page 34)
14
Friday 10 July
9.00
Plenary Keynote 8
Lecture Theatre G36
Maggie MacLure Manchester Metropolitan University
"Prodigious performances, posthuman subjectivities: viral videos of young
children imitating adult performers"
10.00
Follow-up response/provocation in small groups
11.00
Tea and coffee break
11.30
Closing plenary
Lecture Theatre G36
Followed by review and evaluation of the Summer Institute 2015
12.30
Close
15
Delegate-led Sessions: Schedule
Tuesday 7th July (11.30-12.30)
Room 4.06
An Operatic Voice
Catherine Conlon/Patti Lather/Tanya Long, Trinity College Dublin
It looks like my gran’s house: an exploration of ‘thing power’
Helen Bowstead and Christie Pritchard, Plymouth University
Nietzschean Entanglements
Sarah E. Truman, University of Toronto
Tuesday 7th July (11.30-12.30)
Room 4.07
How do young people make meaning of their experiences before, during and after
a short-term international volunteer excursion in Sub-Saharan Africa? A
Dramaturgical Perspective
Kaylan Schwarz, University of Cambridge
Acting out: rhizovocality in post-graduate supervision practices; An ethno-drama in 3 parts
Amanda French and Alex Kendall, Birmingham City University
Experimenting with Data and Analysis in Researching the Writing
Practices of Student Teachers
Michaela Jane Harrison, MMU
Tuesday 7th July (4.00-5.00)
Room 4.06
On Language and its Meaning: Indian Theories
Ashima Shrawan, Gurukul Kangri University
The Public Perception of Reassurance Policing. A Critical Narrative Analysis of
Individual’s Experiences with the Police
George Peat, University of Huddersfield
Constructing a dialogic teacher's identity: a case study exploring the impact of
community of practice
Mansour Alanazi, University of Manchester
Tuesday 7th July (4.00-5.00)
Room 4.07
Taking Movement, Connectivity and Change Seriously: Thinking through
Rhizoanalyses
Carina Hermansson, Umeå University
Symbolic Violence, Gift and Habitus in adult literacy work in Guatemala
Marta Paluch
The Public Perception of Reassurance Policing. A Critical Narrative
Analysis of Individual’s Experiences with the Police
George Peat, University of Huddersfield, UK
16
Thursday 9th July (11.30-12.30)
Room 4.06
Aesthetic Reflexivities: The Politics of Transforming Epistemologies in
Creative Research and Arts Practices
Alice Feldman, University College Dublin
The (Re)presentation and Extension of Art as Research through Metaphor
Poster presentation
John Rae, Charles Sturt University
Considering qualitative research in the contemporary visual arts environment:
ethnography, case study, and grounded theory
Rebecca Hartley, MIRIAD, MMU
Thursday 9th July (11.30-12.30)
Room 4.07
Participatory processes with young people: exploring sexual consent
Elsie Whittington, University of Sussex
Participatory research with young people as ethico-aesthetic experimentation
Eve Mayes, University of Sydney
Data as constant becomings: Performance that constructs territories of and/or
for early childhood leadership?
Louise Thomas, Australian Catholic University
Thursday 9th July (4.00-5.00)
Room 4.06
‘Thinking With’ Vulnerability and Resistance As A Dynamic of the
Research/Researcher Process
Rebecca Webb and colleagues, University of Sussex
Thursday 9th July (4.00-5.00)
Room 4.07
The human and the non-human classroom observer entangled:
Thinking with 360°-negative ethnographic agencies post-qualitatively
Päivi Jokinen, University of Oulu
Working with the concept of assemblage as the basis for (re) thinking
pedagogical approaches in the professional formation of youth and
community workers as informal educators
Christine Smith, University of St Mark & St John
How are you? - Lingering in the spontaneous narration with children - poster
Susanna Kinnunen, University of Oulu
17
Delegate-led Sessions: Abstracts
Catherine Conlon/Patti Lather/Tanya Long
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
An Operatic Voice
Lather argues that the “post” move entails a shift from an epistemology of human
consciousness to a focus on the limits of our knowing and asks what voice looks like
under these conditions. Conlon’s research with women concealing pregnancy positions
voice as one constituent in a co-constitutive intra-actionist ontology placing voice
between ‘in trouble’ and ‘of use’. Engaging with Creative Arts Practice Conlon’s
collaboration with composer Dr Evangelia Rigaki (Trinity College Dublin) and poet Prof
Herbert (Newcastle University) to translate women’s concealing pregnancy narratives
into miniature Opera’s performed in a confession box develops this critique. Tanya Long
(Texas State University) as Opera practitioner considers how as narrative moves toward
performance, the singer is positioned in the space between – the space where past and
“post” co-exist. In this session Lather, Conlon and Long will discuss Opera as a medium
through which to consider the place of ‘voice’ in qualitative research.
Helen Bowstead and Christie Pritchard
Plymouth University, UK
It looks like my gran’s house: an exploration of ‘thing power’
The political project of the Writing Café is to create a communal space where staff and
students can talk and write together, thereby helping to challenge notions of ‘novice’ and
‘expert’ and to re-frame what it means to ‘write in the disciplines’. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s
notion of ‘thing power’, this session will explore the potential for alternative learning spaces
to “encourage a more intelligent and sustainable engagement with vibrant matter and lively
things” (Bennett, 2010:viii). We will show how interacting with the ‘nostalgic’ artefacts that
have (mysteriously) found their way into the Writing Café has fostered critical dialogue
around the processes of knowledge production, and delegates will be asked to consider the
ways in which the ‘post-human’ can encourage an engagement with collaborative writing
pedagogies and reframe ‘traditional’ (academic) writing practices “in terms of change, flows,
mobilities, multiplicities, assemblages, materialities and processes” (Taylor and Ivinson, 2013:
667).
Sarah E. Truman
University of Toronto, Canada
Nietzschean Entanglements
Intratextual Entanglements is a collaborative text/art book/philosophy “research-creation”
project I co-ordinated between 33 artists and theorists in 2014-2015 (Manning and Massumi,
2014). The ‘base text’ of the project was assembled from two of Friedrich Nietzsche’s books:
Ecce Homo, and The Joyful Wisdom (Gay Science). The text was sent to each of the
participants to entangle with using whichever manner, form, or ‘material’ they chose. The
entangled texts were then sent on to other participants for further artistic and marginal
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entanglements.
The aim of my project was to explore, from a new materialist perspective, how diffractive and
material readings/writings not only affect a text’s meaning but produce new meanings and a
new ‘text’ with each encounter. The texts began as words printed on pieces of paper, yet many
of them have transformed into different media. My challenge currently is how not to fall back
into symptomatic reading, analysis and coding of the various texts; I’m considering whether a
non-representational approach is a suitable way forward with this project.
Kaylan Schwarz
University of Cambridge, UK
How do young people make meaning of their experiences before, during and after a
short-term international volunteer excursion in Sub-Saharan Africa? A Dramaturgical
Perspective
My thesis explores how undergraduate students in the United Kingdom make meaning of their
experiences before, during and after a short-term volunteer excursion in Kenya. Through an
analysis of verbal and visual text (semi-structured interviews and photographic content posted
to Facebook), I seek to understand how participants ‘story’ this unique life episode over time,
as well as what types of identities they labour to uphold and outwardly project. Specifically, I
investigate the performative function of narrative, under the assumption that individuals use
story to envision themselves as particular sorts of people, and to communicate (selfenhancing) impressions to others. This aspect of my work is informed by the dramaturgical
lens proposed by American sociologist Erving Goffman (1959). In this framework, social
interactions are likened to stage productions, wherein individuals (viewed as actors) strive to
create certain appearances for others (the audience), in line with what might be expected of
their ‘character.’
Amanda French and Alex Kendall
Birmingham City University, UK
Acting out: rhizovocality in post-graduate supervision practices; An ethno-drama in 3
parts
This joint paper explores how our attempts at post graduate supervision practices and postqualitative pedagogies encouraged us to use new forms of subjectivity and nonrepresentational methodologies, which may pose a risk as they challenge dominant research
discourses in the academy. We suggest moreover that doctoral supervision should enable and
encourage students and supervisors to shapeshift and cross disciplinary boundaries, moreover
we explore the idea that the different writing and professional selves produced through the
supervision process are not always what anyone could anticipate.
As supervisor and supervisee we perform our experiences of doctoral work in personal and
emotional terms interwoven with some recorded extracts from an academic paper we have
written about the performance. This reworking of the original ethno-drama material offers
another voice on the subject, still our own but remade and re-presented for a different
audience.
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Michaela Jane Harrison
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Experimenting with Data and Analysis in Researching the Writing Practices of Student
Teachers
Drawing on data generated as part of a wider study examining the potential of writing as a tool
for learning for undergraduate student teachers, I will present ‘research outcomes’ in ways that
challenge and disrupt commonplace notions of both data and analysis. In an attempt to write
against the grain of normalised qualitative research practice and to experiment with alternative
encounters with data/analysis, I have created “data” (Koro-Ljungberg and MacLure, 2013) in
the form of a play script. The play script writes into being two key Deleuzo-Guattarian
principles - the critique of the self-conscious “I” and desire. In doing so, I contemplate the
process of writing for student teachers; its potential as well as in what, who and where it might
be constituted. The “data” constitutes a reimagining of the relationship, and the distinction
between, data and analysis.
Ashima Shrawan
Gurukul Kangri University, India
On Language and its Meaning: Indian Theories
In the recent decades, there has been a marked awareness about the language of literature and
its meaning in modern literary theories like Formalism, New criticism, Structuralism and Post
Structuralism. It is remarkable to note that Indian (Sanskrit) poetics (2nd century B.C. to 15th
century) is also one continued attempt to examine the language of literature and its meaning
directly / indirectly from the standpoints of rasa (aesthetic pleasure), alaṁkāra (poetic figure),
rīti (phrasal organization), dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) and aucitya
(propriety). Here Dhvani (suggestion), vakrokti (oblique expression) are two important theories
which directly and exclusively deal with the language of literature and its meaning. The
present study seeks to explore how Anandavardhana’s theory of dhvani (9th century) and
Kuntaka’s theory of vakrokti (10th century) deal with the language of literature and its meaning
and how they can be put to work.
Mansour Alanazi
University of Manchester, UK
Constructing a dialogic teacher's identity: a case study exploring the impact of
community of practice
Drawing on recent developments in dialogic approaches to learning and teaching mathematics,
My PhD study investigates how Saudi mathematics teachers develop their understanding of
classroom dialogue through a professional development process in mathematics teaching. The
nature of this study is qualitative. It involved an embedded case study focusing on a teacher
development programme (TDP) for three Saudi primary mathematics teachers in relation to
their use of dialogic teaching. This research draws upon the community of practice theory
(Wenger 1998). The analysis of data shows how the three math teachers’ identities have been
developed through their participations within the emergent community of practice. This paper
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will show evidence of the emergence of new professional identities for two teachers as a
certain kind of reflective practitioners in relation to dialogic teaching.
Carina Hermansson
Umeå University, Sweden
Taking Movement, Connectivity and Change Seriously: Thinking through Rhizoanalyses
This presentation explores and discusses the reporting of data when taking movement,
connectivity and change seriously. Empirically, the presentation takes its point of departure in
a study on children’s text-making practices in two Swedish early childhood classrooms.
Theoretically, the research takes its starting point in the assumption that processes of writing
are a result of in which ways various elements, where the young writer is only one part of
many human and non-human matters that make way for multiple becomings of writing and
writers. Taking a focus on how processes of writing are constituted in the writing event and
what writings offers potentials for, I explore methodology differently by thinking through
rhizoanalysis. Following from doing rhizoanalysis, I introduce the concept of Nomadic
Writing by exploring how forces, flows and fluxes are actualized in a specific space and time.
At the core of a discussion about implications is a wish for new thinking in reporting
qualitative research by taking movement, connectivity and change seriously.
Marta Paluch
University of Sussex, UK
Exploring Professional Development with Adult Literacy Facilitators in Guatemala
I have been working intermittently with a municipal adult literacy programme in the Western
Highlands of Guatemala since 2011. Formal research for my PhD started in 2013. The
research methodology is based on an ongoing collaboration and dialogue with adult literacy
facilitators (ALFs) working for the municipal programme. The proposed presentation reports
on work over two years with “Elisa”, one of the ALFs. I have used Bourdieu’s conceptual
tools of habitus and symbolic violence and Allan Luke’s interpretation of Bourdieu’s work on
gift to make sense of this experience. I have recently shared this interpretation with Elisa. I
would welcome critical feedback on my work and the chance to explore other possible ways
of theorising my data.
George Peat
University of Huddersfield, UK
The Public Perception of Reassurance Policing. A Critical Narrative Analysis of
Individual’s Experiences with the Police
The topic explores the way that an individual’s experiences throughout their lifelong narrative
influence the opinions and thoughts they have in relation to policing, and how such opinions
and thoughts change throughout time. Furthermore, it considers how legislative and
governmental changes throughout time relating to policing have possibly influenced the
experiences of individuals and therefore the thoughts and opinions they present. In addition,
sociological and psychological theory is also explored within the topic with the work of those
such as Bandura highlighted and discussed with relevance. Finally, the topic is supported
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through a Critical Narrative Analysis methodology that allows for the illumination of
individuals stories and narratives relating to policing, and in doing so places the methodology
in a field of study that it had not been used in before.
Alice Feldman
University College Dublin, Ireland
Aesthetic Reflexivities: The Politics of Transforming Epistemologies in Creative Research
and Arts Practices
The cross-fertilisation of arts and research practices is advancing praxes of creative expression
and sentient engagement to subvert and transform formations of othering, marginalisation and
oppression through the galvanisation of imagination and diversality. Yet these confluences
deepen rather than ‘resolve’ such longstanding dilemmas as: the politics of voice, translation,
interpretation, and representation; of positionalities, author-ity and ownership; and of tensions
between process and product. Art critics argue that such ‘ethical’ considerations constrain the
autonomy of the artist, sacrificing aesthetics at the altar of ‘the community’. In the explosion
of arts-based/informed research, there is a sense that, for many, this is more about
circumventing epistemological politics, rather than transforming knowledge production. To
begin mapping the critical coordinates of this dialogue, I reflect on the ‘ethical encounters’
(Ahmed 2000) arising in Placing Voices, Voicing Places, an interdisciplinary project on
diverse, subaltern ‘heritages’ involving commissioned artists, socially engaged artspractitioners, and arts-based research.
John Rae
Charles Sturt University, Australia
The (Re)presentation and Extension of Art as Research through Metaphor
This poster will illustrate how art and metaphor can be used together as a useful device for
thinking differently and generating new understandings in research. Drawing on my doctoral
work on ‘creativity’, I will illuminate the links between an initial painting called ‘Sea of
Creativity’, a metaphor that emerged from my reflection on that artwork, and what eventually
turned out to be a novel conceptualisation of organisational creativity. The poster will connect
this experience – or research method − with Margaret Somerville’s (2007) notion of
‘postmodern emergence’ and Paul Carter’s (2004) work on ‘material thinking’.
Rebecca Hartley,
MIRIAD, MMU, UK
Considering qualitative research in the contemporary visual arts environment:
ethnography, case study, and grounded theory
This doctoral research is a partnership between Manchester School of ART (MIRIAD) and
Castlefield Gallery. Industry-based, it blends ethnography, case study, and grounded theory in
order to contribute to the understanding of what it is that small contemporary visual arts
organisations practice and contribute. . In particular, it notes the ill-fitting use of metrics such
as audience numbers and revenue from ticket and/or café sales (Thelwall, 2011).
Contextualised by loaded terminology such as ‘arts ecology’ and ‘public investment’, the
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current environment of evaluation for small contemporary visual arts organisations lends itself
to reflecting only part of the work they do. This research aims to contribute to the recent
discussion around the way contemporary visual arts organisations are evaluated by generating
a wealth of qualitative insights. Insights that highlight some of the unquantifiable work a small
contemporary visual arts organisation, Castlefield Gallery, practices, and the ways in which
they add value.
Elsie Whittington
University of Sussex, UK
Participatory processes with young people: exploring sexual consent
My research aims to develop and broader understanding of sexual consent, specifically how
young people think about, navigate and enact consent in their everyday sexual lives.
I am partnered with Brook, the Uk’s largest sexual health charity, and am exploring how their
structures for youth participation enable young people to critically engage with the quality and
content of the services and education provided, through the topic of consent.
Combining my youth work experience and participatory research principles this research aims
to co-produce an account of sexual consent and negotiation that is rooted in young people’s
experiences and understandings. I am currently developing visual and creative methods for
recognising the body, and articulating embodied experiences of consent in participatory work
with young people.
Eve Mayes
University of Sydney, Australia
Participatory research with young people as ethico-aesthetic experimentation
Participatory research with young people might be re-conceptualised as ethico-aesthetic
experimentation (Guattari, 1995). Such an approach unthreads the discursive and affective
constraints, contradictions and pressures of voice (cf. Jackson, 2003; MacLure, 2009), as well
as the creation of new collective subjectivities in participatory research. This presentation will
briefly review poststructural critiques of voice, power/ knowledge and subjectivication in
participatory research, before considering how the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari might
shift the questions asked by participatory researchers about particular methodological
impasses. Examining particular participatory research encounters when there were blockages,
leaks and tears in co-theorising ‘student voice’ in a low socioeconomic school reform process,
connections are made to other economic, historical, political and social forces and struggles
(Albrecht-Crane & Slack, 2007; Mulcahy, 2012). This process of transversal connection is a
“political and social psychoanalysis” that explores “unconscious libidinal investment[s] of
sociohistorical production” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 98).
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Louise Thomas
Australian Catholic University, Australia
Data as constant becomings: Performance that constructs territories of and/or for early
childhood leadership?
First there were data and then there was what I was able to do/think because of (or despite) my
interactions with data, and then there was my thinking/writing from data because of others’
thinking about (and challenging) concepts of data and what can be done with and to data (or
not). So are data constant becomings – continual thinking/unthinking and continual
doing/undoing? – a ‘present’ always already absent? (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012).
Does thinking with ‘always already absent data’ create new data?
What is it that my thinking/unthinking with data creates?
Points of discussion from my constantly becoming data:
• ways that early childhood (ec) educators work to construct identities – identities as leader,
• ways they are worked on to construct such identities,
• the expectation that this construction is done,
• that ‘the doing’ (or the performance) – constructs particular territories of and for ec
leadership, and
• that ec leadership identity is constructed through particular territories.
Rebecca Webb and colleagues
University of Sussex, UK
‘Thinking With’ Vulnerability and Resistance As A Dynamic of the
Research/Researcher Process
As are a group of five delegates from the Centre for Childhood and Youth Studies (CIRCY) in
Education and Social Work (ESW) at the University of Sussex (UK).
We would wish to frame our session by working/playing with the dual concepts of
‘vulnerability’ and ‘resistance’ taken from recent work of Judith Butler (2014), which we have
enjoyed reading and discussing together. We would do this as a way of inviting in broader
discussion from colleagues.
We would think with vulnerability and resistance as performative in three ways: first, in
relation to our own individual areas of research interest; second, as facets of our hybrid
subjectivities as early career researchers; and third, as part of our perceived need to actively
assert feminist thought/action to challenge contemporary, political discourse of the new
paternalist, hard-nosed ‘normal’.
Päivi Jokinen
University of Oulu, Finland
The human and the non-human classroom observer entangled: Thinking with 360°negative ethnographic agencies post-qualitatively
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In a certain classroom ethnography project, two researchers were set to work together. The
human observer would be interested in Deleuze-Guattarian lines of flight, multiplicities and
constant becoming in literacy assemblages, embedded in non-representational ontoepistemology (Barad 2007), whereas the non-human observer would be interested in 360degree video and multiple microphone audio recordings “in real life situations” and was
promised to “capture everything”. Consequently, it was as though the multimodal observation
and analysis system MORE had started producing a negative image in the eyes of the postqualitatively oriented doctoral student.
Instead of seeing either the human or the nonhuman ethnographer as superior to the other, the
study explores the shared agency of this cyborgian ethnographic arrangement. What follows
when both ethnographers are seen as equal participants in the classroom assemblage,
practicing their own entangled agencies? What does this cooperation produce in terms of how
literacies are conceptualized?
Christine Smith
University of St Mark & St John, UK
Working with the concept of assemblage as the basis for (re) thinking pedagogical
approaches in the professional formation of youth and community workers as informal
educators
This workshop invites participants to explore the assertion made by Jeffs and Spence (2008)
that higher education offered to youth and community workers lacks cultural and intellectual
breadth required to negotiate and navigate the complex arena in which practice is evolving.
More broadly Braidotti (2013:12) theorises such a concern in relation to what she calls the
post human challenge in a global era. She considers the role of the University in ‘empowering
new generations as knowing subjects who can actively pursue alternative schemes of thought,
knowledge and self- representation’ in ways that are attuned to the principles of social justice
and orientated to the radical pursuit of freedom.
Postgraduate education has been described as the ‘new frontier of widening participation’
(Hubble and Foster 2015:4) but what of its role in the professional formation of social
professionals and in relation to this workshop more specifically youth and community workers
as informal educators?
Susanna Kinnunen
University of Oulu, Finland
This poster presents my Ph.D. study in which I explored the spontaneous narrative in-between
spaces in and between the young children’s everyday life contexts. I considered how these
spaces accommodated children’s being in relations in the light of holistic well-being. I applied
the artistic, narrative and childhood research fields as a basis of my theoretical and
methodological choices. I intersected the mesh of these three layers from my own children’s
first calls to look at their “song of drawing” up to the writing process. While lingering in the
narrative in-between spaces with children, their parents and teachers, and wondering with the
material for years, I experienced many touching situations which directed to look at and
continue the process forward differently. At the moment, I perceive the spontaneous narrative
in-between spaces as enabling the aesthetic sensitivity, caring curiosity, multimodal conarration and the growth of confidence in multiple children’s multiple relationships.
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Putting Theory to Work: Workshop Schedule
Tuesday 7th July (11.30-12.30)
Putting ghosts to work: Attuning to social hauntings
Geoff Bright, ESRI, MMU
The psychoanalytic object
Karen Charman, Victoria Univeristy
Deleuze & Guattari at work
Ken Gale, Plymouth University
Jonathan Wyatt, The University of Edinburgh
Josie Gabi, MMU
Linda Knight, Queensland University of Technology
Eileen Honan, University of Queensland
Mary Dixon, Deakin University
Susanne Ganon, University of Western Syndney
Tuesday 7th July (4.00-5.00)
From Lacan to Barad: the body and material entanglements
Margaret Somerville, University of Western Syndney
Sue Collins, Monash University
Posthuman Research: Novel configurations, new performativities, and the posthuman
shimmer
Ruth Hubbard, MMU
Thursday 9th July (11.30-12.30)
Rethinking listening: experimental music, Foucault, affect and the post-human
Michael Gallagher, ESRI, MMU
Putting Barad to Work: entanglements with data
Mary Dixon, Deakin University
A voice that skins the body: Lacan and the misdemeanours of language
Alexandre Pais, ESRI, MMU
Thursday 9th July (4-5pm)
Putting Bakhtin to work: insights from a focus on voice
Yvette Solomon, ESRI, MMU
Foucault Foucault Foucault
Patti Lather, The Ohio State University
Utopia: Social Theory and Design Fictions in Everyday Communities
James Duggan, ESRI, MMU
Joseph Lindley, Lancaster University
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Putting Theory to Work: Workshop Abstracts
Tuesday 7th July 2015
Putting ghosts to work: Attuning to social hauntings
Geoff Bright, ESRI, MMU, UK
In this session, Dr Geoff Bright will take up questions raised by his own ethnographic work
and performance practice in deindustrialised and heritage communities. That work has given
attention to how contested pasts remain present as ghosted, affective knowledges that are
apprehended and transmitted through something “like a sixth sense” (Stewart, 2010). Drawing
on his own work in the UK coalfields Geoff will discuss the work of three scholars - Avery
Gordon, Kathleen Stewart and Raymond Williams - who have influenced the approach he is
taking in two current UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects. There will
be a specific focus on Gordon’s remarkable 1997 Ghostly matters: Haunting and the
sociological imagination. University of California-based Gordon has described how a social
haunting is a socio-political-psychological state that “registers the harm inflicted or the loss
sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present” and is “one prevalent way in
which modern systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday
life”.
According to Gordon, social ghosts are “haunting reminders of lingering trouble” and
notifications “that what’s been concealed is very much alive and present … and that
something different from before, seems like it must be done” Evidence of their existence is,
however, “often barely visible or highly symbolised”. In an explicit reference to Raymond
Williams’ notion of a “structure of feeling” Gordon notes how a haunting is “a practical
consciousness that is always more than a handling of fixed forms and units’ [and] describes
just those “experiences to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which…they do not
recognise”. A social haunting therefore constitutes the limit case for social inquiry as
conventionally conceived. As such, it requires a new approach to the social: one that is as
much attuned to the felt as to the known. Gordon herself harnesses literature, history, social
theory, visual art and psychoanalysis to develop a hybrid inter-disciplinary inquiry directed
toward the “blind field” of social inquiry. Kathleen Stewart’s recent ficto-critical work on
‘ordinary affects’ and ‘atmospheric attunements’ (Stewart, 2007 and 2010) will also be
discussed as a related and productive departure.
References and suggested re-readings
Gordon, A. 1997 (2008 ed), Ghostly matters: haunting and the sociological imagination,
University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota (Readings: Introduction to new edition, and Section
5: There are crossroads)
Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary affects. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press.
Stewart, K. 2010. Atmospheric attunements. In Rubric. 1-14.
(Readings anything from the above and /or Stewart, K. 2005. Cultural poesis: The generativity
of emergent things. In Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (eds) 2005. The Sage handbook of
qualitative research: Third edition. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. 1027-1042; Stewart K.
2010. Worlding refrains. In Seigworth, Gregory.J. and Gregg, Melissa (eds) 2010. The affect
theory reader. Durham NC and London: Duke University Press. 339-353).
Williams, R. 1977. Structures of feeling. In Marxism and Literature. Oxford: OUP 128-135
27
The psychoanalytic object
Karen Charman, Victoria University, Australia
This session will put psychoanalysis to work. What does psychoanalysis bring to our reading
of pedagogical moments in and beyond formal educational settings? Drawing on the work of
two psychoanalytic thinkers, Melanie Klein and Deborah Britzman, I will present on
classroom based object work I have undertaken with secondary school and university students
(see Charman: 2013 Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies 13(4) 252–256). I will offer an
analysis of what these objects represent for students. Further I will present on curatorial work
using other objects undertaken by students. Curatorial agency allows students the possibility
of intervening and resisting what a given curriculum is demanding of them. Participants are
encouraged to bring an object that has educational meaning for them.
Rhizomatic Methodologies: Deleuze & Guattari at work
Josie Gabi, MMU, UK
Linda Knight, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Eileen Honan, University of Queensland, Australia
Mary Dixon, Deakin University, Australia
Susanne Ganon, University of Western Syndney, Australia
Ken Gale, Plymouth University, UK
Jonathan Wyatt, The University of Edinburgh, UK
Through round table discussion and examples of research studies, panel members will explore
how the theories and concepts of Deleuze, and Deleuze & Guattari are put to work in their art,
education and other research practices.
From Lacan to Barad: the body and material entanglements
Margaret Somerville, University of Western Syndney, Australia
Sue Collins, Monash University, Australia
In this workshop we explore the theoretical trajectory from Freud and Lacanian
psychoanalytic theory through feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, to the new materialisms
emerging from philosopher of physics, Karen Barad. Grosz’s theorizing of the relationship
between the body and language culminates in Chaos Territory Art (Grosz, 2008), closely
aligned with new materialism. The new materialist turn, however, has drawn heavily on
Barad’s ‘entanglement’ of bodies and matter in Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad, 2007).
We explore the application of these ideas in dialogue, initially with each other and then with
the participants. Margaret follows her research trajectory from her early writing in
Body/landscape journals to recent explorations of material entanglements in young children’s
intra-actions with the more-than-human world. Sue begins with the proposition that if familial
relations provide the basis for the theorisation and practice of psychoanalytic theory, then
materiality also provides the substance. We consider the implications of these theoretical
trajectories for the relations between bodies, language, and materialities in an open dialogue
with participants, proposing that generating new knowledge involves a creative process of
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renewal between theorist and researcher, drawing on our own experience of working together
as writer and editor, supervisor and doctoral student.
Suggested Readings
Barad, K. (2003). ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of
How Matter Comes to Matter’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Vol. 28(3), pp 801 –
831.
Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. Routledge: London (pages 30 – 41).
Posthuman Research: Novel configurations, new performativities,
and the posthuman Shimmer
Ruth Hubbard, MMU, UK
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be
like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die
of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of
us walk round well wadded with stupidity.
(George Eliot, Middlemarch, cited in Braidotti, 2013, p.56)
Posthumanism is not a perspective, it simply shifts the territory from which ‘research’
emerges, and for what it does. In this workshop, we will examine the significance of Spinozan
monism as productive for posthuman research practices. I will talk through methodological
aspects of my own research about education/welfare professionals in England and
policy/practice responses to child protection. These occur in a configuration that involves
profound prescription and (re)inscription of humanist-bound selves in neo-liberalism. A
posthuman orientation involves looking and feeling beyond Cartesian certainties to a
posthuman ‘shimmer’ (which can also become George Eliot’s ‘roar’). This makes available
new ‘bodies’ to become-an-experiment in managing relations in novel assemblage. I want to
suggest that posthumanism has a powerful capacity for new meaning-making about what is
going on, and what can become.
Thursday 9th July 2015
Rethinking listening: experimental music, Foucault, affect and the
post-human
Michael Gallagher, MMU, UK
The aim of the session is to challenge the notion, predominant in the social sciences, that
listening is primarily about apprehending meaning. The workshop will begin with a simple
listening exercise, using practices from environmental sound art. We will reflect on this
experience as a group. Theories of listening will be introduced, drawing on experimental
music, film theory and post-structuralism. I will suggest that listening is not only beneficent
but also a means of exercising power, including in relation to children; that listening is not
only hermeneutic but also affective, bodies being moved by vibration; that listening affords
particular spatial sensibilities; and that listening is not only human, but can encompass the
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responsiveness of any kind of body encountering sound. We will consider the some of the
methodological possibilities opened up by this expanded conception of listening.
Putting Barad to Work: entanglements with data
Mary Dixon, Deakin University, Australia
For Barad (2007) matter is a substance in its intra active becoming…not a thing but a doing, a
congealing of agency. This session will use Barad’s conceptualizations of intra-actions and
entanglements in engaging with objects of schooling. I will draw on a recent research project
located in a university teacher education course in which over 800 students were asked to
assemble objects from their schooling lives to communicate their understanding of their own
learning history. When thousands of learning objects were ‘collected’ researchers and students
gingerly stepped between them. The students interrupted the objects with signs, words and
arrows. The researchers and the students installed themselves in the ‘data’. The ‘data set’
merged, toppled, faltered. The objects, spaces, students, researchers, pasts and presents
performed a learning history beyond the collected objects. My focus will be on how the
entangled intra action of bodies and objects constitute an ongoing remaking of the world.
A voice that skins the body: Lacan and the misdemeanours of
language
Alexandre Pais, ESRI, MMU, UK
Lacan’s work has become a sine qua non in the theoretical humanities, but it also has a
reputation for being among the most challenging. Some of this challenge has to do with the
fact that Lacan’s thought developed over time, and he never wrote a magnum opus that
contained the summation of his views. Instead, we are left with the transcriptions of Lacan’s
seminars, which were conducted between the 1950s and 1970s, to witness the vitality of his
thought first-hand. This workshop will explore some of the main concepts developed by Lacan
throughout his career as a psychoanalyst, and the relevance of his theorisations to social and
educational analysis. It will be organised around the discussion of examples from
contemporary society (from cinema, arts and politics), and will provide participants with a
glimpse of why and how Lacan’s theorisations might inform methodological approaches for
today’s social and educational research.
Putting Bakhtin to work: insights from a focus on voice
Yvette Solomon, ESRI, MMU, UK
“An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone,
its addressivity. …the utterance has both an author…and an addressee. This addressee can be
an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue…. And it can also be an
indefinite, unconcretized other.... Both the composition and, particularly, the style of the
utterance depend on those to whom the utterance is addressed, how the speaker (or writer)
senses and imagines his addressees, and the force of their effect on the utterance.” (Bakhtin,
Speech genres and other late essays, 1986, p. 95)
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For me, Bakhtin offers tools for analysis, which emphasise the interviewee as in dialogue with
the interviewer, and indeed with absent others from the past, present and future. I find these
tools particularly useful in understanding the contradictions of the self, and its potential for
agency. In this workshop I will look closely at the ways in which the essential addressivity of
our lives makes room for agency, resistance and change. I will present some of my own data
but participants are invited to bring their own and explore how a focus on voice provides new
insights into identity in practice.
Discussion around the use of theory in academic research particularly in terms of how
theoretical elements of research can be shared with research participants and the challenges
involved in this.
Foucault Foucault Foucault
Patti Lather, The Ohio State University
This session includes 1) student generated listing of key terms and questions in study of
Foucault, 2) instructor guided discussion of those terms and questions, 3) discussion of what
all of this might mean in terms of the uses (and abuses) of Foucault, 4) the collective
generation of reading resources for further understanding. The goal is a highly interactive
session that is useful for putting Foucault to work across various kinds of social science
projects. To prepare, students might google Foucault Studies websites and cruise them a bit to
get a feel for issues and resources.
Utopia: Social Theory and Design Fictions in Everyday
Communities
James Duggan, ESRI, MMU, UK
Joseph Lindley, Lancaster University, UK
The workshop explores the practices, processes etc through which everyday utopian
communities (Cooper 2014) can collectively conceptually and practically maintain, renew and
develop. The specific case is the Brixton Pound (B£) local currency. Local currencies are
based on the idea that money is socially constructed and so it is possible to create non-national,
local currencies. We see this as a utopian project. Working from a utopian perspective we will
explore how design fictions, speculative near future scenarios, can help the community
explore potential futures and work towards realising them. The workshop considers whether
the approach of co-producing design fictions is a generalisable set of practices with
applications in a variety of public sector and community settings.
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Summer Institute in Qualitative Research: Putting Theory to Work
Social Events
Tuesday 7th July
**The radical political history of Manchester: Socialism, Anarchy, Fascism, Women's Suffrage, Communism, the making of
Democracy, Utopias and Political deceit, are all on the streets of Manchester. Experience and learn about Manchester's
exciting past on a guided walk with John Alker. Cost - £5-7. http://www.walkmanchester.com/
The walk will be followed by dinner and drinks at a local restaurant. If you are unable to take part in the walk we will
publicise the details of the meal so you can meet us there.
To book your place on the walk please request a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-radical-political-history-ofmanchester-walk-tickets-17276658952
Wednesday 8th July
** 'Perambulatory Pedagogy Pop Pilgrimage' – led by Sarah Truman, Research Fellow at WalkingLab and The Pedagogical
Impulse and a Founding Member of Hamilton Perambulatory Unit. We will take a post-industrial walk through Manchester to
visit The Salford Lads Club. In 1984 the photograph of The Smiths’ iconographic The Queen is Dead album sleeve was taken
at the club. In recent years, the Salford Lads Club has devoted a room to The Smiths while many fans of the band continue to
travel to the club to re-enact the famous photograph.
After visiting The Smiths room and re-enacting/disrupting the famous photographs we will enjoy some real ale at a pub, and
discuss the pedagogical potential of pop music and post-representational approaches to research documentation. Cost – Free.
http://salfordladsclub.org.uk/
To book your place on the walk please request a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/perambulatory-pedagogy-poppilgrimage-tickets-17277258746
OR
**Matt and Phreds, Northern Quarter, Manchester. 9:00pm - 12:00am / Free entry. Enjoy a drink and a delicious pizza whilst
listening to Jazz. On Wednesday ‘Three Step Manoeuvre’ will be playing, they are a new organ trio of young musicians
specialising in hard-grooving funk music. They came together through a shared love of artists such as funk pioneers like
James Brown and The Meters, jazz legends such as Jimmy Smith and John Scofield, and modern groups including Lettuce
and Soulive. http://www.mattandphreds.com/diary/three-step-manoeuvre-0
To reserve some tables, please register your interest here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/three-step-manoeuvre-tickets17277306890
Thursday 9th July
** The Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, Manchester 6.00 pm – 9.00pm. Newly refurbished and nominated as Museum
of the Year, we will visit The Whitworth for Thursday late night opening of the gallery. Tonight will also be the opening of
Manchester International Festival; a suite of four new works by Richter, Ashes (2015) and his Doppelgrau (2014) will be
presented with Pärt’s Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fátima in the newly renovated landscape gallery of the Whitworth.
http://www.mif.co.uk/event/richter-part.
After visiting the gallery we will go to a nearby restaurant for dinner.
To register your interest please reserve a ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/thursday-night-late-gallery-openingtickets-17277755231
OR
** Manchester International Festival. Tree of Codes - a contemporary ballet at Manchester Opera House. MIF is bringing
together the choreographer Wayne McGregor, visual artist Olafur Eliasson and Mercury Prize-winning producer/composer
Jamie xx to create a contemporary ballet inspired by the book Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Pre-book tickets individually or in groups with colleagues, limited available - book asap. Tickets between £19.50-£46.25,
http://www.mif.co.uk/
Please note that if you require more information or have mobility issues we can help you to arrange transport so please
contact Dr Harriet Rowley- [email protected].
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Lecture Theatre G.36
(250)
Lecture Theatre G.35
(120)
Lecture Theatre G.34
(120)
Lecture Theatre G.33
(120)
WC
DWC
Stairs
WC
DWC
Stairs
Lift
Access
to Sandra
Burslem
Building
Vending
Exhibition Atrium
700 sqm
Stairs
Lift
Lecture Theatre G.27
(250)
WC
DWC
Stairs
Lift
Reception
Area
Dining Atrium
(250)
Lift
Main Entrance
Stairs
Lecture Theatre G.26
(250)
WC
DWC
Stairs
Express
Café
Café
Business School
Ground Floor
M/F/D
WC
Stairs
Stairs
M/F/D
WC
4.44
Cabaret
(60)
4.09
Cabaret
(12)
North Atrium
Stairs
Stairs
4.03
Cabaret
(60)
4.04
Cabaret
(60)
4.05
Fixed LT
(60)
4.07
Fixed LT
(60)
4.06
Cabaret
(60)
Lifts
M/F/D
WC
Stairs
4.08
Fixed LT
(44)
South Atrium
Lifts
Stairs
Stairs
Business School Level 4
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