Multimodality and New Materialism in Science Learning: Exploring Insights from an Introductory Physics Lesson

Science disciplines are inherently multimodal, involving written and spoken language, bodily gestures, symbols, diagrams, sketches, simulation and mathematical formalism. Studies have shown that explicit multimodal teaching approaches foster enhanced access to science disciplines. We examine multimodal classroom practices in a physics extended curriculum programme (ECP) through the lens of new materialism. As De Freitas and Sinclair note in their book, Mathematics and the Body, there is growing research interest in embodiment in mathematics (and science) education—that is, the role played by students’ bodies, in terms of gestures, verbalisation, diagrams and their relation to the physical objects with which they interact. Embodiment can be viewed from a range of theoretical perspectives (for example, cognitive, phenomemological, or social semiotic). However, they argue that their new materialist approach, which they term “inclusive materialism”, has the potential for framing more socially just pedagogies. In this article, we discuss a multimodal and new materialist analysis of a lesson vignette from a first-year extended curriculum physics course. The analysis illuminates how an assemblage of bodily-paced steps-gestures-diagrams becomes entangled with mathematical concepts. Here, concepts arise through the interplay of modes of diagrams, gestures and bodily movements. The article explores how multimodal and new materialist perspectives might contribute to reconfiguring pedagogical practices in extended curriculum programmes in physics and mathematics.

Slow Scholarship: Propositions for the Extended Curriculum Programme

Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education is problematic. The article explores what the Slow movement has to offer ECP in terms of scholarship. It seeks to answer the question: How might ECP be reconfigured using Slow imaginaries? Various academic disciplines and practices have incorporated Slow philosophy to develop alternative ways of doing academia; however, it has hitherto not been considered for programmes such as ECP. This article approaches Slow pedagogy for ECP using posthuman and feminist new materialist sensibilities that are predicated on a relational ontology. The article puts forward the following 10 propositions for a Slow scholarship in ECP using ideas from posthumanism and feminist new materialism: practice attentiveness through noticing, engage in responsible relations, diffract rather than reflect (thinking together affirmatively), render each other capable, enable collective responsiveness, explore creatively, making thoughts and feelings possible, enact curiosity, ask the right questions politely, foreground process rather than product, and create conditions for trust by wit(h)nessing. It is argued that by practising Slow scholarship with these propositions, ECPs might resist market-driven imperatives that characterise contemporary academia.

Approaching the Invisible

In modern times, Western philosophy eschews any metaphysical or occult references to invisible reality as being culturally obsolete. Modern culture now privileges language that reflects our unshakeable allegiance to materialism in which the things of the world no longer have any depth of meaning. This chapter compares two modern cultural approaches to invisible reality emerging in the late 20th century in response to the growing world-wide crisis of meaninglessness. The first approach gathers many different methodologies under the umbrella term The New Materialism. The second approach focusses on initiatory experiences once known as Spiritual Emergency. Both approaches are moving us towards a new understanding of matter, based on the reality of the invisible. Throughout the chapter, the author will italicise words such as “invisible,” “life,” “alive,” “alien,” “ether,” “spatial,” “virtual,” “fluid,” and “absence” in order to refer to a new kind of fluid, living, invisible matter that we are bringing to language in modern times.

Validity and Rigour in Soma Design-Sketching with the Soma

We report on the design processes of two ongoing soma design projects: the Pelvic Chair and the Breathing Wings. These projects take a first-person, soma design approach, grounded in a holistic perspective of the mind and body (the soma). We contribute a reflective account of our soma design processes that deepens the field’s understanding of how soma design is achieved through first-person approaches. We show how we use our somas, our first-person experiences, to stimulate a design process, to prototype through and to use as a way of critiquing emerging designs. Grounding our analysis in new materialism, we show how our designs are in essence, “performative intra-actions”. Using our own somas, our designs open up for experiences within certain constraints, allowing for a material-discursive agency of sorts. Many different somas may be intra-acted through our designs, even if it was our somas who started them.

Rethinking the Politics of Creativity: Posthumanism, Indigeneity, and Creativity Beyond the Western Anthropocene

With the emergence of Western posthuman understandings, new materialism, artificial intelligence (AI), and the growing acknowledgment of Indigenous epistemologies, an ongoing rethinking of existing assumptions and meanings about creativity is needed. The intersection of new technologies and philosophical stances that upend human-centered views of reality suggests that creativity is not an exclusively “human” activity. This opens new possibilities and assemblages for conceiving of creativity, but not without tensions. In this article, we connect multiple threads, to reimagine creativity in light of posthuman understandings and the possibilities for creative emergence beyond the Anthropocene. Creativity is implicated as emerging beyond non-human spaces, such as through digitality and AI or sources in the natural world. This unseats many understandings of creativity as positioned in Euro-Western literature. We offer four areas of concern for interrogating tensions in this area, aiming to open new possibilities for practice, research, and (re)conceptualization beyond Western understandings.

Quantum Creativity: Afracting New Materialism in the Anthropocene

This essay engages the vicissitudes of new materialism at the quantum level, attempting to differentiate what I take to be fundamental differences in the theoretical positions of vitalist theories as developed by Karen Barad and Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the Anthropocene. I treat matter at the quantum level to differentiate conceptions of apparatus and assemblage. It is argued that one should not treat them under the same signifiers. There is the question of creativity that runs through the essay which also raises questions concerning an “affirmative” Deleuze, the dominant position when it comes to the arts, humanities, and pedagogy. Against these particular developments, anorganic life as in|different comes to fore where issues of creative destruction must be faced.

Miten analysoida sitä, mistä ei voi kertoa? – Käsikirja humanistiseen traumatutkimukseen

Colin Davis & Hanna Meretoja (eds): Routlegde Companion to Literature and Trauma. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2020, 496 pages. English summary of the review The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja, introduces the reader thoroughly to the history and philosophies of trauma, theory and concepts of the field, and offers a variety of analyses of literary texts from the point of view of trauma. The introduction of the handbook is thought-provoking, cohesive, and summarizes well a broad field of studies and its history. One of its strengths is including the main critiques of the field, too. The chapters of the handbook offer ways to use concepts, such as perpetrator trauma and intersectionality, in analysis and suggest ways to develop them further. A section on future directions of the field includes viewpoints on postcolonialism, critical posthumanism and new materialism. As trauma studies has been criticized for its Eurocentric bias and failure to recognise the suffering of non-Western others, perhaps some silences of marginalized people in the analysed texts or their contexts could have been brought forward even more explicitly in the handbook.

Drone affective politics against state impunity: The case of 43 disappeared students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico

This article analyzes some implications of new drone aesthetics involved in affective politics against state impunity in social conflicts. Whereas the literature on media, war and conflict has been centered around the war aesthetics of military drones, the author argues that civilian drones can mobilize affective politics – expressed, for example, in the aestheticization of shame, rage and the subversion of fear – as a means of political communication with and against the state. Further, she proposes that the present focus on drone aesthetics should be expanded to also account for the political affects that aesthetic sensory perceptions mobilize. Drawing on actor-network theory and new materialism, the article takes the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa (Mexico) as an exemplary case of state impunity in the context of the war against drugs and social conflict. By means of a digital ethnography of the social collective project Rexiste, the author analyzes its public interventions deploying a civil drone named ‘Droncita’, which sought to generate an aesthetics of affect against state impunity. The article contributes toward expanding investigation of (civilian) drone aesthetics and the mobilization of affective politics in the literature on war and social conflicts and collective action.