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.

Doing Academia Differently: Creative Reading/Writing-With Posthuman Philosophers

This article considers how academic practices such as reading and writing might be reconfigured as creative processes through thinking-with posthuman philosophies and theorists, particularly, but not confined to the works of Karen Barad and Erin Manning. Both Erin Manning and Karen Barad are involved with creative philosophies and practices, albeit from different vantage points. Manning’s work engages with arts-based practices such as research-creation through process philosophies, whereas Barad reads queer theory through quantum physics to develop their agential realist framework and diffractive methodology. Although Manning and Barad never refer to each other’s work, this article proposes that thinking-with both of these feminist philosophers might be fruitful to consider how reading and writing as part of research projects and graduate supervision might be enacted creatively and differently.

Navigating the entanglements: Curriculum and assessment priorities in transitioning to school in Aotearoa-New Zealand

<p>This thesis critically examines the curriculum and assessment priorities children encounter as they transition from early childhood to school and the modes of being, doing, knowing, and relating these priorities promote or make difficult. An initial focus on children’s multimodal ways of operating shifted as this study progressed toward a more relational materialist conception of multimodality, drawing on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Karen Barad. A key focus became tracing the heterogeneous forces and entities that authorise and prioritise particular constructions of learning and learners. The thesis follows the curriculum and assessment priorities six focus children met with in their last six months at kindergarten and their first six months in a new entrant classroom, and explores how these priorities relate to those of the children and their families. Data drawn on include a range of policy and practice-related documentation, interviews, fieldnotes and video-recorded observations. Excerpts of video are incorporated into the thesis as ‘cases to think with’ about key dimensions of everyday pedagogical activity not well represented by words. While it may be a truism to say children navigate the move from early childhood to school differently, this thesis brings attention to the multiplicity of forces at play in how this move unfolds for particular children. It offers critical insights into the complex ways the global, local and ‘here and now’ specificities operate in entanglement to produce pedagogical priorities and learner-subjectivities. It highlights that the curriculum and assessment priorities for children in this study being/becoming new entrants strongly favoured children who were lingusitically adept, and willing and able to adjust to tightly prescribed classroom normativities, many of which centred around control of the body. This thesis challenges the ongoing privileging of the verbal, arguing for the importance of making space for children’s other modes of being, doing, knowing and relating. It questions the recent narrowing and intensifying emphasis on standards-based assessment and the strongly individualistic, regulatory discourse of self-managing learners. It foregrounds the ways in which transition to school agendas have escalated nationally and internationally and become part of day-to-day curriculum and assessment priorities. On the basis of these findings I call for greater ethical regard for the heterogeneity of children and the capacities they bring and are capable of, including the capacity to engage with ‘real world’ multiplicity and difference-making interconnectivities with human and more-than-human others.</p>

Navigating the entanglements: Curriculum and assessment priorities in transitioning to school in Aotearoa-New Zealand

<p>This thesis critically examines the curriculum and assessment priorities children encounter as they transition from early childhood to school and the modes of being, doing, knowing, and relating these priorities promote or make difficult. An initial focus on children’s multimodal ways of operating shifted as this study progressed toward a more relational materialist conception of multimodality, drawing on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Karen Barad. A key focus became tracing the heterogeneous forces and entities that authorise and prioritise particular constructions of learning and learners. The thesis follows the curriculum and assessment priorities six focus children met with in their last six months at kindergarten and their first six months in a new entrant classroom, and explores how these priorities relate to those of the children and their families. Data drawn on include a range of policy and practice-related documentation, interviews, fieldnotes and video-recorded observations. Excerpts of video are incorporated into the thesis as ‘cases to think with’ about key dimensions of everyday pedagogical activity not well represented by words. While it may be a truism to say children navigate the move from early childhood to school differently, this thesis brings attention to the multiplicity of forces at play in how this move unfolds for particular children. It offers critical insights into the complex ways the global, local and ‘here and now’ specificities operate in entanglement to produce pedagogical priorities and learner-subjectivities. It highlights that the curriculum and assessment priorities for children in this study being/becoming new entrants strongly favoured children who were lingusitically adept, and willing and able to adjust to tightly prescribed classroom normativities, many of which centred around control of the body. This thesis challenges the ongoing privileging of the verbal, arguing for the importance of making space for children’s other modes of being, doing, knowing and relating. It questions the recent narrowing and intensifying emphasis on standards-based assessment and the strongly individualistic, regulatory discourse of self-managing learners. It foregrounds the ways in which transition to school agendas have escalated nationally and internationally and become part of day-to-day curriculum and assessment priorities. On the basis of these findings I call for greater ethical regard for the heterogeneity of children and the capacities they bring and are capable of, including the capacity to engage with ‘real world’ multiplicity and difference-making interconnectivities with human and more-than-human others.</p>

Entangled Yoga Bodies

In this article, we draw upon the work of leading new materialist Karen Barad to explore the possibilities for knowing women's yoga bodies differently. Engaging insights gathered from an embodied ethnography on contemporary Yoga in dialogue with Barad's concept of entanglement, we contemplate the complexity of a lived experience in a Yoga body. Engaging the voices and movement experiences of 19 committed women yoga practitioners, we explain ‘Yogic union’ as states of absorption facilitating an awareness of an existence that is complex, interconnected and involving both human and non-human materiality. Specifically, we work within and between the embodied experiences of the researcher and her participants, feminist new materialist theory, and creative writing to present Yoga bodies as phenomena that are always entangled.

“What kind of cop are you?”: Disco Elysium’s Technologies of the Self within the Posthuman Multiverse

I suggest in this article, drawing upon Francesca Ferrando, Karen Barad and N Katherine Hayles, that Disco Elysium illustrates the human through the mode of a ‘posthuman multiverse’. Per Ferrando, humans and other beings act as nodes in a material multiverse while what we think, eat, our behaviours and relations, create part of a rhizomatic ecology that can be understood as who and what we are. This, I illustrate, overcomes a complicated tension in existing posthuman theory, particularly as it relates to game studies. Although theorists have detailed the entanglement of players and machines, and the new materialist nature of becoming, it is unclear to what extent human-machine assemblages can be said to be a singular ‘thing’. This is tackled in Disco Elysium as the seemingly mundane and often invisible actions the player takes, all play a role in constructing Harry Dubois and the world that is also endlessly producing him. Game actions, therefore, can be viewed as ‘technologies of the multiverse’, the ontological functions through which beings come to exist in a dimension. The game positions the player in a ‘relational intra-activity’ not only with the actions and outcomes of play, as discussed in previous scholarship, but also with the hypothetical outcomes of choices they have not made. When read through the lens of Ferrando’s philosophical posthuman multiverse, Disco Elysium represents a valuable resource for bridging gaps in contemporary posthuman scholarship.

Thinking with the world – to explore the becoming of phenomena

This article discusses how it is possible to think with the world in educational research. How can this thinking with the world generate knowledge about the becoming of phenomena? To answer this question this paper undertakes a diffractive reading of selected texts from Niels Bohr, Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, and Michel Serres. This diffractive reading reveals that the world becomes with itself contributing to an internal principle or an inner self-differentiation. This means that all phenomena can be understood as related to the world in one way or another. This paper contends that the researcher body is important to investigations of the becoming of phenomena with the world, therefore a haptic sensorium is developed as a means to visualize bodily affects and to recognize limit values to the world, for example, background noise. The article concludes with a discussion about creating knowledge of this process as a rhizome. The article attempts to illustrate that thinking with the world can generate new knowledge to understand the becoming of phenomena, which can contribute to the development of educational research.

A tale of grappling: Performative duoethnography as expanded methodological thinking

This article is a tale of two researchers, teachers, and artists grappling and playing with duoethnography. By expanding the methodology, we aim to bridge duoethnography into pedagogy. Grappling with the methodological to pedagogical bridge, we found that intertwined performative aspects of doing a duoethnography could challenge our knowledge production and roles as researchers and the current and more dominant practices that we operate within. We engage with a performative paradigm (Bolt, 2016) and lean on relevant theories from new materialist feminist thinkers such as Karen Barad (2003, 2007), Lenz Taguchi (2009, 2012) and Tami Spry (2011, 2016), while dialoguing with Joe Norris and Richard D. Sawyer’s (2012) tenets of duoethnography. Our embodiment of these tenets, intertwined with our theoretical positioning, allows our investigation to expand into a performative duoethnography. As an end, we propose duoethnography as a critical performative pedagogy (Pineau, 2002) and offer this article as a playful impulse connecting methodological considerations with pedagogy.

Of surviving humans and apocalyptic machines

The article aims to critically examine the roles of humanity and posthumanity in Alastair Reynolds’s post-apocalyptic space opera Inhibitor Phase (2021). The study endeavours to show how in this post-apocalyptic and posthuman space opera, humanity emerges as the key player in determining the fate of the galaxy or even universe at large. In Reynolds’s masterfully crafted post-apocalyptic universe, is it not pure technological advancement sans human concern but basic human bonding that appears to be the determining factor when it comes to saving the final remains of the human or posthuman civilizations from the clutches of the nightmarish machines. It is by reassembling and regrouping the fragmented and isolated communities of survivors that mankind seeks to defeat a virtually unconquerable foe. In the process, the article also strives to show how the novel expands and extends the very scope of humanity and its definition and how through a fusion of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism the agency and animacy of non-human entities also get redefined and redistributed. For the purpose of a theoretically enriched textual analysis, the author has adopted some important theoretical viewpoints from such thinkers as Rosi Braidotti, Deleuze and Guattari, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad and Gordon Coonfield.

Tachyons, tactility, drawing and withdrawing: cinema at the speed of darkness

Longitudinal, quantitative analyses of cinema have established how Hollywood is getting ‘quicker, faster, darker’. While in some senses the ‘intensified continuity’ of contemporary Hollywood narration is a given, the increased darkness of contemporary mainstream cinema remains unexplored – especially with regard to how its speed and its darkness might be inter-related. If to darken the majority of the screen during a film helps to draw our attention to the salient aspects of the image that are better illuminated, then of course this also allows for a faster cutting rate: in principle, there is ‘less’ information for the viewer to have to take in during each shot, meaning that the film can then cut to subsequent images more rapidly. However, there are other ways in which we can interpret this ‘darkening’ of contemporary film narration. For example, it perhaps ties in with a widespread sense of disorientation with regard to the increasingly globalized and connected world that digitization has helped to bring about, and which is equally reflected in the rise of the contemporary ‘mind-game’ or ‘puzzle’ film that is a staple of contemporary Hollywood. The darkness in such films thus gives expression to uncertainty and disorientation. More than this, though, we might use physics to understand the darkness of contemporary cinema in a more ‘meta-physical’ fashion. While it is accepted that light is the ‘fastest’ phenomenon in the known universe, there nonetheless remain unilluminated aspects of the physical universe that defy light as the limit of speed – and which convey the interconnected nature of matter in the contemporary universe. For example, polarized particles have been proven simultaneously to respond to stimuli – at a speed faster than it would take light to travel from one particle to the other, a phenomenon that baffled Albert Einstein, who referred to this process as ‘spooky action at a distance’. Not only does this process suggest what Karen Barad might refer to as the entangled nature of all matter, but it also suggests speeds beyond, or at least different, to that of light. In this essay, then, I shall theorise a ‘speed of darkness’ that can help us to understand how the darkening of contemporary cinema ties in with the interconnected, invisible (‘spooky’) and ultra-rapid nature of the digital world. Perhaps it is not in the light but in the darkness that we can identify the key to understanding contemporary mainstream cinema and the globalized, digital world that produces it.