Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education

Carol Taylor, Gabrielle Ivinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317270560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education.

Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or 'unseen'.

This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in 'objective' humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender and Education.

A more ‘livable’ school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-/well-being with(in) school environments

Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Anna Palmer

Department of Child and Youth Studies, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

School girls in Sweden are reported to develop psychological (ill)health in relation to their school behaviour and over-achievements. The methods offered as prevention and treatments are aimed at the individual girl’s self-management of stress, health and psychological state, putting the responsibility on the girls themselves. This feminist agential realist study aims to explore how the material-discursive school environment, that is, the entanglement of architecture, materialities, bodies, discourses and discursive practices – including the discourses on girls’ health in research and media texts – are collectively responsible for, co-constitutive of and enacting female students’ ill- and well-being. Doing a diffractive analysis, we register how we as researchers are involved and co-productive of this complex apparatus of knowing of school-related ill-/well-being. A diffractive analysis aims to not only analyse how this apparatus is made and what it produces, but also how it can be productive of new possible realities that might produce more livable school environments.

Introduction

It has been argued that any production of knowledge is actually a production of reality with very specific material consequences for the agents involved in that particular reality (Barad 2007; Hekman 2010; Law 2004; Mol 2002). When, for example, the ‘boys’ problem’, that is, boys finding it unmanly and feminising to study, is blamed on over-achieving girls and the female teachers who privilege girls’ learning styles in research (Nyström 2012), this will inevitably produce one of multiple realities that will have material consequences for the agents involved (Hekman 2010). In the context of the extensive scientific reporting in media on young Swedish school girls’ increasing psychological (ill)health, and of the increasing amount of preventive programmes and self-treatments being implemented in schools around Sweden to enhance the individual girl’s self-management of stress and psychological problems, it is only fair to ask how such knowledge production becomes part of a larger and extended apparatus (Barad 2007) of producing school girls’ (multiple) realities and their enactments of ill- or well-being in those realities. The question is, in what ways do reported scientific findings (based on various psychological, psychoanalytical and neuro-cognitive theories) become co-constitutive agents in the production of the phenomenon of school girls’ ill- or well-being together with other performative agents? Such agents are here understood to be entanglements of discourses, places, materialities and embodied practices in or connected to the school environment. All of these involve socio-historical aspects of gender, ethnicity, class, age, etc. in various situated ways. Although this study focusses primarily on the materiality of language (MacLure 2013) as the strongest agent in these intra-active entanglements, our analysis also shows how various other material agents, such as the school building and architecture, which we usually take to be the fixed material backdrop of human agency, are themselves strong co-constitutive agents of school-related ill- or well-being.

From an agential realist (Barad 1999, 2007) stance, the aim of this paper is thus to explore how the material-discursive school environment, with all its various agents and the plurality and diverging character of practices (Stengers 2007), can be understood to be collectively responsible for, co-constitutive of and collaboratively enacting the phenomenon of Swedish female students’ ill-/well-being. These enactments are understood to emerge as effects of an open-ended material-discursive apparatus of knowing (Barad 2007, 149–150), in which we as researchers constitute significant performative agents as well. This means that we are not looking for answers located ‘inside’ of the pre-existing subject, as the psychological and neuro-cognitive epistemologies suggest. Instead we analyse events of encounters of multiple material-discursive agents and situated practices, and what emerges as differences in these events: that is, how matter matters in an ongoing process of material-discursive mattering (Barad 2007, 145–147). In terms of methodology, this can be understood to put to work what Barad (2007, 73–94) and Haraway (1997, 268–274) have called a diffractive analysis. For our analysis, we will make very specific agential and provisional cuts in the multiple realities produced by the apparatus that we understand to be productive of girls’ school-related ill-/well-being. These cuts and how they are diffractively produced in the research process will constitute our analysis in the core section of the paper called Enacting a diffractive analysis.

What a diffractive analysis might entail will be unfolded shortly. We wish, however, to point to the diffractive analysis as, what Stengers (2007) has called, an experimental achievement of ‘the power to wonder’ that can be celebrated as an event of knowing things differently (5). The ‘power of wonder’, says Stengers, is about constructing relevant problems that provide relevant other ways of knowing as well as new imaginings that can escape the knowledge economy that buys right into the state machine of managing public order (Stengers 2007, 6). In this case, such knowing might be able to interfere with the seemingly unanimous discourses and practices that put the cause and responsibility of ill-/well-being on the girls themselves. Hence, this is a methodology that experiments with controversy and the fact that ‘it could be otherwise’, as Mol suggests (2009).

Agential realism and how phenomena are produced by an apparatus of knowing

How will we, as two collaborating researchers, be able to identify ‘which specific material practices matter, and how they matter’ (Barad 2007, 168, italics added)? To do this we first need to know more about the wider, multiple and open-ended apparatus of knowing that we take to be productive of the phenomenon. It is in the events of encounter with the different agents of this apparatus – including the affective responses and memories of our own – that we can make intelligible how this phenomenon will come to matter as an effect of the material-discursive intra-activities taking place in this apparatus. Before showing how this specific apparatus is assembled and how it is possible to produce knowing together with and as constituted by this apparatus, we will discuss a couple of key concepts in Barad’s agential realism: phenomenon and apparatus.

Constructionism and realism can be said to be brought together in agential realism as a relational ontology (Barad 2007, 332–336). This means that instead of thinking about a world of physical stable objects out there and language and concepts to represent the meaning of these bodies, it is phenomena, as an ongoing process of mutual intelligible-making of matter and meaning, that are constitutive of reality (139, 333). The phenomenon of, in this case, girls’ school-related ill- or well-being, is thus to be understood as material-discursive intra-active enactments. In this study we show how the materiality of, for example, a panicking girl-body is attached with a specific meaning of ill-being in a specific situated event of intra-activities in a wider apparatus of girls’ school-related ill-/well-being. Thus, the primary ontological unit (e.g. the body of the girl) is no longer an object with inherent boundaries and fixed properties, as in classical physics and philosophy. Rather, the ontological unit is understood as a phenomenon; defined as ‘the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-action “agencies”’ (Barad 2007, 139). In the example of the panicking girl-body, this can be understood as an event of an entanglement of multiple performative agencies: the agencies of discourses of schooling and ill- or well-being as well as the agency of the physical school building and practices of schooling. These are collectively intra-acting in situated events where the phenomenon of school-related ill-being is produced and subsequently reported on in media. Hence, phenomena are enacted (or produced) in specific agential intra-actions, where ‘the boundaries and properties of the components of phenomena become determinate’ as the particular concept that we attach to that phenomena becomes meaningful in the very same event (Barad 2007, 139). This is why Barad (2007, 334–335) suggests for us to talk of concepts not as linguistic entities but as ‘specific material arrangements’ and of ‘discursive practices’ that should not be confused with discursive speech acts, where discourse is merely a synonym for language. Hereby, writes Barad, material-discursive intra-activity will replace the dominant notion of language as representations of a reality separated from meaning-making Barad (2007, 141). Thus, in a Baradian agential realist account, matter and meaning are always already co-constituted:

Neither discursive practice nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other. Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated. (2007, 152)

If matter and meaning are seen as co-constitutive of each other, then so is being/becoming (ontology) and knowing (epistemology). This is how Barad’s agential realism can be understood in terms of an onto-epistem-ology (2007, 185).

‘What is an apparatus?’ Barad asks herself this question in the opening phrase of a central section of her book by putting it side by side with other more familiar concepts (2007, 141). If it is not a Kantian grid of intelligibility, or an Aristotelian schemata, and not the same as Althusserian apparatuses, or Foucault’s discursive practices or dispositive, then, what is it? Barad’s theory on apparatuses of knowing relies on Niels Bohr’s thinking from quantum physics. Apparatuses, writes Barad, are specific material-discursive practices that become productive of phenomena by ways of specific boundary-making cuts (2007, 333–224). ‘[A]pparatuses are macroscopic material arrangements through which particular concepts are given definition, to the exclusion of others, and through which particular phenomena with particular determinate physical properties are produced’ (Barad 2007, 142). As researchers, we make a cut in a world made up of phenomena that are not manifest in themselves but that become temporarily manifest through this practice of the scientific knowledge production (Barad 2007, 335–336). And this is what makes is possible to write scientific texts with provisional descriptions of the phenomenon.

A crucial part of understanding the apparatus as a material-discursive practice is that we as researchers (irrespective of research disciplines) inevitably become an entangled part of these apparatuses, as we set them up and become productive of the boundary-making agential cuts that will then be written up as scientific knowledge. Thus, we can no longer be seen simply as the agency of observation, observing an object at distance, distinctly (as well as ontologically) separated from us. The subject−object distinction is invalidated in Bohr’s and Barad’s thinking. The production of knowing is constituted by the process by which this larger material arrangement (of which we are an entangled part) produces differences and enacts specific cuts that are boundary-making and meaning-making; that is, that ‘determinate the boundaries and properties of objects and meanings of embodied concepts within a phenomenon’ (Barad 2007, 143, 143–147, 332–336). This will have consequences for how we understand ourselves as researchers, as we will expand on below and as previous material feminist studies have already shown (Lenz Taguchi 2012, 2013; Palmer 2011; Banerjee and Blaise 2013; MacLure 2013; Mazzei 2013).

Setting up the apparatus of knowing for a diffractive analysis

It was with an increased wish for a critical and innovative discussion about young school girls’ (ill)health in Sweden today that we set up this apparatus of knowing. During the last years, there has been an intensified media discussion with reference to various research studies in medicine, psychology and neuro-cognition that unanimously situate the cause of ill-being within the girls themselves or their families. For example, a newspaper interview, drawing on psychological studies, reports that young female students’ stress problems and ill-health refer almost exclusively to high-achieving girls with a ‘good-girl’ syndrome (Alfvén, Caverius, Karling, and Olsson 2010). Reports in me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Material feminisms: new directions for education
• 1. A more ‘livable’ school? A diffractive analysis of the performative enactments of girls’ ill-/well-being with(in) school environments
• 2. Objects, bodies and space: gender and embodied practices of mattering in the classroom
• 3. Valleys’ girls: re-theorising bodies and agency in a semi-rural post-industrial locale
• 4. The teacher–student writing conference reimaged: entangled becoming-writingconferencing
• 5. Theorising learning and nature: post-human possibilities and problems
• 6. Gendered subjectivities of spacetimematter
• 7. Making matter making us: thinking with Grosz to find freedom in new feminist materialisms
• 8. Materialist mappings of knowing in being: researchers constituted in the production of knowledge
• 9. Re-turning feminist methodologies: from a social to an ecological epistemology
• Index