Children from multilingual families often attend preschool programming that engages in school readiness including school-based language and literacy through play. This article problematizes the privileged position of school-based language and literacy. Proposing all literacies and languages are equally important, what is the relationality of multilingualism and multiple literacies in an assemblage with families engaged in minority education? Two 7-year-old girls, their mothers, and the researcher discuss literacies, multilingualism, and learning. The conceptual and analytical lenses of Multiple Literacies Theory and rhizoanalysis deterritorialize arborescent learning and reterritorialize learning rhizomatically. Through problematization, multilingualism, multiple literacies, and minority education conceptualize differently.
Blackgirls are an oft-disappeared population. Frequently, race or gender in popular and education discourse are foregrounded, leaving the Blackgirls fragmented. By contrast, one word, Blackgirl, rejects compartmentalizing Blackgirls’ lives, stories, and bodies and serves as a symbolic transgression to see them/us as complex and whole. Interlaced with the symbolic is the material needed to value the Black female body. To provide redress for the disregard of Blackgirl experience and posit the Black female body as a site of cultural memory and possibility, this article offers my body as a vessel through which transgression is incited. In particular, it discusses insights from an intergenerational project on Black girlhood and the vital impromptu transgressions/grooves I made during the reflexivity process of my performance. By sharing a Blackgirl’s truths and praxis that arose from yearnings, beauty, genius, and struggles of Black girlhood and being a Blackgirl advocate, this article expands the work of Black Girlhood Studies, interjects Blackgirls into the landscape of girlhood, and contributes to its reterritorialization.
The article examines impromptu video narratives produced by a Black 9-year-old girl Kiara during the video-making sessions at the shelter for homeless families in Columbia, South Carolina. I argue that these video narratives create a new discourse of girlhood that ruptures existing media, popular culture, and other societal scripts about girlhood and disenfranchised communities—a discourse of girlhood unscripted—which brings into play the complex intersections of class, ethnicity, race, and gender and produces a new realm of representation. Drawing on her daily experiences of poverty, hunger, violence, incarceration, and racism, Kiara’s narratives also pose a challenge to the field of girlhood studies which continues to focus on White, middle-class femininity thereby creating a scholarly trap of representation.
With an overview of the authors’ contributions, this introduction to the special issue on girls from outer space provides a conceptual framework for bringing counter-narratives of girls from the margins, where unheard voices and movements have emerged, developed, and expanded as a way of talking back to the dominant girlhood space and discourse as well as society. Moving away from both binary and canonical lenses of girlhood that center on White middle-class girlhood, this special issue focuses on lived experiences of girls of color who exist among socio-economically alienated spaces such as immigrant, homeless, queer, and domestically violent spaces, etc. Most of all, it delineates a conceptual revision of the notion of outsideness by shifting from simply victimized, within a deficit model, to a complex dimension of girl agency that demonstrates both limiting and expanding experiences of the girls. Drawing upon feminist insights, this conceptual work attempts to relocate outsideness in the center of girlhood studies, which pays attention to alternative methodological approaches that recover epistemological barriers of girlhood by addressing (dis)entanglement of the girl participants’ minds and actions in diverse research contexts, and by disclosing the dynamic, contradictory, and complicated ideas, voices, and values from the girls’ perspectives.
In this article, I analyze the processual aesthetic production of girl subjectivity in/with Hayao Miyazaki’s films through a feminist materialist perspective informed by the writings of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, and Affrica Taylor. I elaborate on feminist materialist concepts such as those of relational ontology, aesthetics of existence, worldmaking, mythopoesis, queer kin, and gender/sexual difference. With these concepts, I philosophically and ethnographically inquire in/with girl spectators who are interested in the experimentation with new modalities of existence that do not limit to those of success and alienation, but allow for creative possibilities of rupture, recomposition, and transversalization of girl subjectivities.
Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming alongside Massumi’s reading of A Thousand Plateaus (1992), I explore how Black girls become educated in the molar assemblage1 of schools: students, teachers, classrooms, bodies raced and gendered by the practices of White schooling. Through readings of narratives of Black girls, I examine how fixed notions of Blackness and girlhood are disrupted by girls becoming-molecular.2 Finally, I consider how Black girls are affected by White schooling spaces and how Black girls’ bodies shift and change schooling spaces by existing in them.
The subjective experience of each family member regarding his or her treatment by a mother or father is interesting to say the least. Each has their own story to tell, which has the power to, by turns, confirm and/or contradict one another’s experiences. This can create ripple effect among extended members of a family and influence the intergenerational impact. This article will attempt to explicate, using poetic inquiry, the subjective experiences that each member of a family has had with the father, a Sicilian immigrant, creating evidence of another side of a man for whom only once side of a story has ever been told. It is important to disrupt the prevailing (negative) narrative to show a dimensional and more fully lived experience of a man whose angry and abusive temperament is legend. Poetic Inquiry helps to explicate these narratives in ways that are both truthful and evocative, offering insight into how we evaluate ourselves against our family history and how it affects our relationships with one another and with our own families in the present.
This article examines the resistive actions and discourses that shape and reshape the hegemonic and resistant interplay between female youth with histories of domestic violence (HDVs) and educators. Taken out of a larger critical ethnographic study, discussion demonstrates how one urban middle school girl with an HDV is positioned as an object of "emotional and behavioral disorder" and how she responded to violating pedagogies through performances of cultural resistance built out of her social experience of domestic violence. The article draws upon theoretical and methodological insights, including Butler’s notion of performativity, Scott’s theory of resistance, Hill-Collins’s standpoint theory, as well as Scollon and Scollon’s mediated discourse analysis. Similar to the girls in this study, sharing an identity of being a survivor of domestic violence herself, the author discusses how she and female participants (re)worked and (re)wrote agentic social moments in the field. Telling girls’ stories through counter-narratives and participatory research practices helps to reposition the often deficit subjectivities ascribed to girls with HDV.
Anxieties associated with global conflict surround youth and ideological narratives mediating these conflicts can be seen in the popular media youth consume. This investigation uses contemporary cultural-theoretical conceptualizations of ideology to analyze several important popular screen-based cultural artifacts created for youth consumption to determine how young audiences are invited into the ideoscapes and discourses of global politics in the age of the "war on terror." The analysis shows that these youth-oriented media artifacts script fundamental understandings of conflict and provide schema in which young viewers can orient themselves in relation to global Others, while also setting the matrix of intelligibility within which global politics itself becomes coherent. In addition, these popular cultural texts undertake an innovation of familiar Orientalisms, inviting young people to identify with an aggressive defense of the West and serving as an ideological support for the United States in the context of ongoing global conflicts.
This article is about critical thinking and critique, ultimately quality. It is about becoming (educator) in the urgency of hesitancy and doubt, thus building in creative dense dynamics from the start possibilizing immanent critique practices. I call it material eco/edu/criticism. In our neoliberal rationalisms and times, I indirectly ask questions about the (social) status of hesitancy in both education and research introducing methodological and epistemological concerns into expectations of certainty and knowing hopefully toppling hierarchical expectations and dichotomous notions bringing forth complexity and ambiguousness as strength and a force in our practices: Quality qualia embodied research and teaching and/or body as profession. It is a move from language-based translation to not-only-language-based transduction perhaps and/or simultaneous language and matter assessment literacy. The way I see this—and my desire; this is all about how new materialist approaches can be applied to foster and build cultures of innovation.
University similar to church is one of the oldest institutions passing and preserving cultural heritage. In addition, universities are active societal contributors and influential communal contingences in our contemporary societies. However, recently increasing numbers of these traditional and historical functions of universities have become hijacked by neoliberal practices and values. Oftentimes, alternatives to the restructured and liberated universities are considered as unwanted exceptions. Potential higher education anomalies cannot be fully materialized or practiced due to the limited resources, paralyzing normative practices, market-driven beliefs, and capitalistic values of dominant higher education systems and structures. Rather than continuing these discourses, in this article, we will take a step forward, discuss, dream, and image diverse possibilities or universities to come. Thus, we will focus on imagining, pondering alternatives, and writing notes (to be read slowly) about fragile futures of liberated, open, and becoming universities.
In this autoethnographic cartography, I argue for the need for alternative embodied maps for academic life. Using my experiences as a budding pharologist (someone who studies lighthouses), I bear witness to my cultural experience of academia through a collaged autoethnography of mapping and composing space. I bring together autoethnography, theories of cartography, as well as my experiences researching lighthouses as sites of public memory performance, to demonstrate that there is a need in the culture of academia for real discussions about anxiety and similar issues—among faculty and students—and that autoethnography, cartography, and pharology provide an entry into such a discussion. In fragmented sections designed to highlight the ways experiences intertwine, I move through four phases of feeling "blue": the deep blue of confusing academic anxiety and depression; the search for a methodology to lead me to a brighter, more pleasant kind of blue; the research journey that moved me forward; and the "blue sky" blue it led me to. Through autoethnographic writing and stylistic experimentation, I map my experience of journeying through academic anxiety, providing an example of working toward alternative mappings, compositions, and visions of academic life.
This is an escape from individualism, competition, and transmissive education practices which are the norms within higher education conferences of the neoliberal university. It is built from the script of a video abstract submitted to a call for keynote presenters for an international congress. Using tricksters and poetic presentations, we offer an open work inviting readers to have fun and make meaning from our provocative attempts.
Written from the perspectives of a tenured high school teacher/researcher, an out bisexual sophomore, and a transgender senior, this article discusses the challenges of being and becoming an out lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) student in a large, Midwestern high school. Through counternarratives, the authors explore what they call the school-to-coffin pipeline, a system that (un)intentionally positions LGBTQ teens in what has become a horrific, yet normalized, epidemic of queer youth suicide. The authors use the framework of this pipeline to examine what it means to live with/in the in-between of school rhetoric and a dearth of enacted school policy that could literally be life-saving for queer youth. Through an examination of the everyday challenges queer youth encounter, the authors argue that all adults involved in schooling—including teachers, teacher educators, administrators, counselors, and school psychologist—are necessarily (un)knowing participants in the school-to-coffin pipeline, contributing to institutional homophobia and, by extension, LGBTQ youth suicide. The authors argue that by attending to the school-to-coffin pipeline, those who contribute to it can begin to interrupt the current, and possibly continuing, cycle of self-inflicted violence on queer youth bodies.
Democracy’s distraction by the politics of accountability and the public’s disaffection in an ideologically bound culture of accountability further defines the work ahead for teacher educators in an era of neoliberalism. The author discusses the hegemony of neoliberalism and its political and economic threat to education and, more importantly, to the function of education in a democratic society. The author argues the need for teacher educators to advance a culture of democratic accountability in preparing future teachers. Further argued is that the current culture of technical-managerial accountability is counter intuitive to a democratic society and its educational system. The author examines the meaning of technical-managerial standards of accountability as a neoliberal agenda, presenting a counter narrative of standards of complexity as return to a culture of professional and democratic accountability.
This article considers the function of higher education in England in the responsibilization of young people as consumers of a higher education "product." The article elaborates a two-part theoretical framework that draws upon Gramsci and Foucault. This framework is then applied to analyze the 2011 White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System. This is examined as an example of technology of neoliberal governance that works at the creation and maintenance of a community of self-reliant consumer-citizens. Significant policy developments subsequent to the 2011 paper are also discussed. The article concludes with the discussion of three issues: I will reflect upon the value of the theoretical framework employed within the study; future policy directions in the higher education sector under the new Conservative administration of 2015 will be considered; I will consider the potential for productive spaces of resistance against the ever-tightening constrictions of educational commercialization and commoditization.
In this article, I conceptualize what I am calling "intellectual slut shaming" and illustrate how such an experience is a naturalized part of neoliberal subjectivity and knowledge production in academia. I will review how Cartesian and neoliberal subjects share several parallel structures, including mind–body dualism, and show how mind–body dualism is connected to the neoliberal experience of intellectual slut shaming. I then turn to one of Descartes’ critical contemporaries, Spinoza, for a powerful critique and expansion of the Cartesian subject. I explore Spinoza’s method of affirmation and how this might be used to ease intellectual slut shaming in the neoliberalist context. To engage in such an affirmative method, I turn to my own autoethnographic accounts in the neoliberal university classroom.
In light of limited attention to immigrant faculty (aka, international faculty) in the U.S. academy, we analyze interview discourses with 26 female immigrant faculty members from multiple disciplines working across U.S. colleges and universities. Collectively, the women’s voices converge around three primary themes pertaining to neoliberal restructuring of higher education: commodification of education, multicultural neoliberalism, and universal meritocracy. Furthermore, we explore the various ways in which cultural identities are (re)positioned by dominant ideologies of neoliberalism in the U.S. academy. Our findings develop an understanding of how neoliberal ideologies construct and reinforce marginalized identities and subjectivities at the intersection of gender, race, and immigration.
This reflexive non-fiction/autoethnographic account tells the story of the authors visit to Cheung Eeok Killing fields focusing on themes of peace, place, and the politics of cultural renewal in a country devastated by the Khmer Rouge. It offers a pedagogical vision of how such renewal is taking place through tourism (even of a dark kind) and the unsettling (but also inspirational) experience of walking through this liminal space of Cambodian history.
In this article, we complicate common critical narratives about the neoliberalization of higher education by situating more recent trends within the genealogy of a modern/colonial global imaginary. By linking current patterns of "accumulation by dispossession" with histories and enduring architectures of racialized expropriation and exploitation, we consider both the strategic possibilities and inherent limitations of enacting resistance from within this imaginary. In particular, we engage the imperative to contest new configurations of dispossession while grappling with the ways that violent social relations have always subsidized public higher education. We suggest that facing such paradoxes may be instructive and open up new possibilities, and at the same time, this requires examination of existing investments and attachments.
This article offers a new critical viewpoint of American gun culture through the use of political discourse theory. I argue that the historical evolvement and position of guns in the United States has coincided alongside a process of discursive sedimentation. The latter has fostered a contradictory antagonistic relationship which hitherto, has not been properly accounted for by scholars and activists. Specifically, this antagonism is indicative of a binary relationship that exists between a notion of socio-political freedom and its discursively relational opposites, slavery, anarchy, and tyranny. Concepts taken from discourse theory are applied to examine this antagonistic relationship. This is followed by a proposal to incorporate nonviolence into debates on gun reform.
In a crowded, competitive, research marketplace, association with the latest high-status brands and must-have products is crucial. Have we, and are we, adapting our qualitative inquiry to be associated with these leading brands and products? Addressing this requires adding some connections (+s) to our thinking about our qualitative inquiry and its interfaces with the research marketplace, such as those between funding, methods, publications, promotion, and tenure. Understanding the complexity of these connections enables us to decide which to ignore, negate, or embrace, and works against normalization of adaptive versions of qualitative inquiry shaped by the research marketplace.
Neo-liberalism has spread throughout the world in tandem with globalization. This article attempts to address the way in which neo-liberalism has operated in the Italian university system, an academic context that has its own history, values, and traditions. A brief overview of the consequences of neo-liberalism in Italy is followed by a description of the stages in the neo-liberal university reforms that have characterized the Italian academic world since the end of the 1980s. Finally, three forms of resistance that hinder the process of neo-liberalization and make it non-linear are examined in depth.
In this article, we explore commodities and consumption, two concepts that are central to critiques of the neoliberal university. By engaging with these concepts, we explore the limits of neoliberal logic. We ground this conceptual entanglement in Marxist and post-Marxist traditions given our understanding of neoliberalism both as an extension of and as a meaningfully different form of capitalism. As colleges and universities enact neoliberal economic assumptions by focusing on revenue generation, understanding students as customers, and construing their faculty as temporary service providers, the terms commodity and consumption have become commonplace in critical higher education literature. When critiques concerning the commodification and consumption of higher education are connected with these theoretical and conceptual foundations, they not only become more effective but also provide a more meaningful guide upon which current and future scholars can build.
In this article, the authors highlight numerous encounters with and critiques of academic life in the corporate university. From disagreements with colleagues and anxiousness over the job market to internal compromises over epistemological and ontological moorings and the overall messiness of the research act, they highlight the increasing market demands and orientations governing academic performance if not survival. They also self-reflexively engage in critique of their own location to and position within their current field(s) of inquiry, and how to chart a way forward toward a more egalitarian end.
Rapid transformation in the ecosystems of academic publication can be attributed not only to changing demands of the neoliberal university but also to factors in the broader economic, cultural, and technological world. The centralization of information flow has led to consolidation of academic publishing into fewer multinational media corporations who provide information to scholars in aggregated and disaggregated forms. Resistance by academics has focused on the availability of open access scholarship, but they have not solved how to make this system financially sustainable. This article reports on trends in this ever-more-unequal ecosystem, the challenges they raise, and options for scholars to solve them.
In the face of our current political and economic environment, particularly in the context of education, community, and arts, dark clouds on our horizon have fast become storms, storms raining down on us in the South Pacific with a force and subsequent devastation that is soul destroying. Some days I feel we might be in the eye of the storm and other days a glimmer of light sparkles off the rain from the aspirational agendas of UNESCO. But most days, it is dark clouds and storms. Thundering requests for more evidence, gales of economic cuts poorly disguised as enhancement projects, and rain that no arts educator can withstand alone. Where is the sheltering umbrella for an arts academic in the university? This article is a critical autoethnography of hope embodied, a practice of withdrawing to the shelter in my own skin to survive this storm. Or at least, this article is an attempt to find hope.1
Focusing on production and dissemination of academic knowledge, this article discusses the role of higher education as it serves the neoliberal imperative. Emphasis is given to two fundamental realities that are influencing higher education today: neoliberalism and the Anthropocene. These two realities shape the crisis of the Professoriate: differentiating faculty into the romantic individual while simultaneously forcing the production of human capital in the name of neoliberalism. The production and performance of the neoliberal knowledge imperative is illustrated through the faculty performance review system. To reclaim the knowledge imperative the article argues that the refusal of work must occur. The refusal of work generates a posthuman subject, the "lazy academic" that is able to reconceptualize how the faculty can confront the neoliberal university.
Guns are symbolic of many things in America, but a critical assessment of these semiotic narratives shows them to be seriously limited in understanding the nature of gun violence in the United States, which has killed 30,000 per year on average for over two decades, 75 times more than all military fatalities in America’s "longest war" (in Afghanistan). An additional 70,000 people on average are wounded per year, again for over two decades. Gun violence has been misinterpreted by mass media and many other sources; it should be redefined as the major public health problem it is. Gun violence should be distinguished from the Second Amendment and "gun rights." Politicians and partisans connect these issues for their own purposes, but they are distinct. Future constructive efforts should consciously disconnect these two issues.
Gun violence is a daily reality; mass shootings, from suburban enclaves to inner city parks, are commonplace. Yet, all violence, all death, all lives, and all gun shootings are not treated equal. This essay examines the ways that anti-Black racism and White privilege (White supremacy) infect discussions of gun violence. In examining a series of incidents, and the broader media/political discourse, this article concludes that race and space overdetermine who is afforded the rights of safety and security, and where violence is normalized, expected, and therefore nothing to worry about. Race, space, and class affect the legality and illegibility of gun violence.
The shooting at Sandy Hook elementary and other past and more recent acts of school violence involving guns in the United States have created considerable national dialogue about how we can prevent such horrific acts from happening in the future. In Texas, public conversation has ensued about the possibility of arming teachers, school staff, and administrators to "protect" and "defend" schools from similar attacks. Media discourses produced by the general public, right-wing political leaders, and organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA) have been instrumental in advocating for teachers and other school personnel to become armed protectors. As such, in this article, I describe the context of the debate to arm Texas teachers as portrayed by newspaper outlets across the state while problematizing the dominant discourses they produce.
As rhetorical scholars adopt field methods to complement traditional text-based criticism, it is necessary to reflect on the ethical standards that guide our practice of rhetorical criticism and analysis. In this essay, we highlight five points of ethical tension provoked when doing research that moves between texts and fields: responsibility, truth, power, relationships, and representation. Each section illustrates an ethical dilemma from the authors’ individual research projects that illustrates one of these tensions, and is followed by a response that explicates the questions of power and ethics. While the ethics of any research practice are often tied to a specific project, many of the issues we discuss apply widely to the practice of fieldwork and rhetorical criticism in general, and many of the questions we raise also resonate with one another. As such, the dialogic quality of the essay is meant to serve as its content as well as its form. We suggest that rhetorical discussions of power help all qualitative researchers better understand what is at stake when we move between text and field in our research practice.
This article reflects on how the ingression of computation in culture has not only transformed media into algorithmic devices but has also, more importantly, led to the automation of the most precious faculty of the human, namely, reasoning. This article problematizes the tout court refusal of algorithmic thinking as thinking and suggests that we are witnessing the advance of a dynamic form of automated reasoning, exposing the limits of the critical approach toward the calculative. The article points out that the alliance between algorithmic automation and the digital infrastructure of neoliberalism is not without significance, but attention must be paid to the specific posthuman form of cognitive capitalism.
Airport security procedures enact a performative repertoire of security policies and procedures that govern airport security. Using my own body to register the affective modes of airport security, I engage participatory critical rhetoric as a method to assess airport security’s repertoire of rhetorical performances. Affect is a particularly valuable concept for understanding the ways travelers are conditioned to comply with Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) directives as they move through security checkpoints. The screening processes perform acts of security that stand in tension with the resistive politics they enable. In this essay, I argue that security and resistance are performative modes (security performative and resistance performative) enacted in TSA’s airport security checkpoints. These modes produce a secured airport and a defiant public. Bodies that TSA "secures" enact affective states of security (and anxiety).
This article interrogates the relationship between temporality, memory, and reason in cybernetic models of mind to excavate a historical shift in knowledge and governmentality with direct implications for knowledge production in the social sciences. Cyberneticians reformulated ideas of reason to re-imagine both minds and machines as logical circuits. In doing so, early pioneers in neural nets and computing, such as Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and John von Neumann, also created the epistemological conditions that underpin contemporary concerns with data visualization, big data, and ubiquitous computing.
This article arose from our interest in investigating our own teaching practices at three universities in Northern Chile. The aim was to generate a deeper understanding of our roles as models for our students, and by using the methodology of the heart, we have joined our three voices of Latin American women researchers to describe the interpretative autoethnography and performative text as ways of researching in education, health, and psychology and its power as a tool for breaking the traditional academic discourse to connect with international audiences from our own biographies. We seek to show how social transformation can occur from the classroom and at the same time challenge the public higher education system that follows free market policies in this neoliberal world. Why use autoethnography? Because reflecting on our own practices through autoethnography allows us to get to know ourselves and at the same time appreciate our voices. Trends in educational research in Latin America have been strongly marked by colonization and dramatically influenced by the knowledge developed in the global north. We propose to put the south in our research by exploring our realities told through social stories of the heart.
This essay concludes the special issue on the intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry by responding to each of the essays. We highlight the productive tensions between rhetorical and qualitative inquiry, examine the benefits that qualitative inquiry brings to rhetorical fieldwork while also revealing how rhetorical inquiry can contribute to qualitative inquiry. We ultimately argue that rhetorical fieldwork is form of transdisciplinary research that resists replicating rhetorical and qualitative research by subsuming one approach under the other and instead creates a new form of hybrid research that adopts and adapts both research lineages.
Focusing on "new regimes of calculation" and the limits and possibilities of mobilizing critical theory to make sense of such shifts, the author uses Roderick Ferguson’s Foucauldian call for a reordering of things to rethink of quantitative inquiry. The author is especially interested in race and the twists and turns of how the institutionalizing of the interdisciplines of area studies in higher education functioned to manage difference. The author pays particular attention to parallels between the institutionalization of the interdisciplines of area studies with the emerging interdisciplines– those forming between the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences and the mathematical sciences, computer sciences, digital studies, and the natural sciences. By elaborating both sociological and media studies disciplinary perspectives, something "beyond biopolitics and neoliberalism" becomes thinkable.
Re-emphasizing our agenda for this special issue as marking the shift from epistemological to ontological concerns in social science inquiry, Patti Lather locates it in challenging the orthodoxies of both positivist and critical approaches to the calculative, computational thinking and the limits of reason. With a focus on an escape from psychometrics in education research, she grounds her remarks in the context of the wider terrain of the possibilities of quantification for cultural studies and (post)critical inquiry.
This article examines how computerized adaptive testing functions in relation to learning in control societies. We first document the transition from static and discrete forms of statistical work that characterized Foucault’s disciplinary societies into the continuous, predictive analytics that have emerged as the powerful form of statistical work in Deleuze’s control societies. We then explore the function of information science ontologies in adaptive testing and learning applications from the perspective of Deleuze’s philosophical ontology. Working between these two conceptions of ontology enables us to open a critical space in which to posit the need for an alternative ontology of number in education. Focusing on the case of Pearson, the world’s largest edu-business, we consider how the "datafication" of education is presenting opportunities to exploit information assemblages for profit. The primary focus of analysis is Pearson’s Next Generation Assessment agenda, which focuses on the development and implementation of computerized adaptive testing within a broader digital learning environment. Next Generation Assessment is theorized as an information assemblage that functions according to an axiomatic modeling of numerical data enabling the production and communication of information throughout proliferating data infrastructures in education. We argue that the shift from "becoming a statistic" in disciplinary society to "the becoming-statistic" in control society is facilitating the development of digital learning platforms that risk limiting the conditions for learning in the creative sense of this term.
What happens when more-than-human digital acts tell us something about ourselves? This article examines the ways in which the algorithms of data analytics function in relation to other ontologies and assemblages and how they are shaping and forming our lives. Beginning by critically questioning the ontology of data, data are argued to be an assemblage that is materially and discursively produced from a multiplicity of apparatuses including sociopolitical relations of power and "difference." The concept of algo-ritmo—that is, the repetition of data with alterity—is introduced as a way of understanding how the performative acts of the "soft(ware) thinking" of algorithms function. As the Spanish word for algorithm, algo-ritmo also situates the performative acts of algorithms as part of the relational and connected sociopolitical relations of racializing assemblages. Concluding remarks discuss both ethical implications and considerations for digital social inquiry.
Issues of bullying, suicide, self-expression, self-acceptance, self-harm, among others, within the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, ally, and others (GLBTQQA+) culture are explored through ethnodrama. I show the suffering, the silenced voices, and the pain endured by GLBTQQA+ college students in rural Wyoming. I act as a story-reteller, where I creatively and strategically edit the interview transcripts to maintain the narrative. The result is an ethnodrama.
This special issue examines intersections between qualitative and rhetorical inquiry through (re)introducing rhetorical fieldwork. We define rhetorical fieldwork as a set of approaches that integrate rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field. This set of approaches falls within the participatory turn in rhetorical studies, in which rhetorical scholars increasingly turn to fieldwork, interviews, and other forms of participatory research to augment conventional methodological practices. The special issue highlights four original articles that employ, exemplify, and reflect on the value of rhetorical fieldwork as a form of critical/cultural inquiry. In this introduction, we not only introduce the key themes and articles in the special issue but also compile our take on the state of the art of rhetorical fieldwork in an effort to introduce this form of research practice to those who have not encountered it before.
This article offers a critical examination of contemporary graph databases, such as Google’s Knowledge Graph, from the perspective of media theory, philosophy of difference, and epistemology. It argues that the fundamental data structure of the "triple," in essence a subject-predicate-object statement, constitutes a problem immanent to the database itself. The article begins with a brief meditation on numerical mediation before examining the emergence of the Knowledge Graph through Google’s research publications. It then moves on to demonstrate that a logic of representation underlies all graph databases, and that this logic of representation operates similarly to Aristotle’s theory of perception and categorization. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s criticism of Aristotle, this article argues that graph databases fall into similar traps of identity and representation and are unable to understand difference in itself. In closing, it offers an initial diagnosis of the limitations of graph databases, and more specifically how Google’s graph database’s inability to interrogate difference in itself leaves the Knowledge Graph unable to represent, let alone participate in, the discovery and invention of the new.
Because different mathematical practices are aligned with different ontologies, it matters what kind of mathematics we bring to bear in social theory. This article explores the open and urgent question as to whether and how calculation becomes an inventive practice that doesn’t simply serve the control society. In search of a non-axiomatic mathematical problematic, I examine the infinitesimal for its enigmatic role in calculation and show how Deleuze and Guattari use the infinitesimal to (a) rethink the relationship between matter and meaning, and (b) describe a recombinant fractal subject well suited to our digital times. The infinitesimal is a sort of changeling number with one foot in the virtual and one foot in the actual, and thus pivotal to considerations of vitalist new mixtures of number and matter.
The following analysis approaches the 9/11 Memorial through the lens of a moving methodology, which is grounded in the intersections of critical rhetorical theory and visual ethnography. An intersectional methodological approach takes seriously movement, affect, and aesthetics as primary modes of understanding in situ communication and reveals that the National 9/11 Memorial works affectively and viscerally to constitute the surveilling flâneur, a security-conscious consumer subjectivity who is mobilized through the temporal, horizontal, and vertical vectors of the site. Ultimately, I suggest that the Memorial’s affective dimensions position the habitus of the surveilling flâneur as reflective of larger discourses about freedom in a post-9/11 culture.
Most studies of media focus on production, representation, or audience. Using rhetorical analysis and ethnographic field methods, my article offers one way to study media production contexts, representations, and audience interactions in relation to one another. For this project, I conducted a narrative rhetorical analysis of the reality docu-series Cathouse that takes place in a legal brothel in Nevada, the Moonlite Bunny Ranch. In addition, I visited the brothel and used ethnographic field methods of participant observation and interviewing to investigate the lived experiences of the women working at the Ranch. My analysis revealed a web of intertextual discourses of prostitution that I could not have accessed had I not used these methods in conjunction with one another. By bringing perspectives from rhetorical inquiry, cultural and media studies, and ethnography into conversation with one another, I provide a framework for analyzing production, representation, and audience for the Cathouse series, while attending to both the content of the women’s stories and how these participants rhetorically constructed and performed their identities. Finally, my analysis offers insights into ethnographic and textual "crises of representation" in relation to the concept of "rhetorical authenticity" in media representations, the relationships between audience members, production, and representation in reality television, and material impacts for the women who work at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch that I could not have accessed without using these methods together.
In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit (N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive "fault lines" and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in "creative cities" such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.
In this editorial, we consider what is at work in a turn toward analyzing settler colonialism, and what this turn makes available in cultural studies and discussions of cultural production. Recent theorizations of settler colonialism reveal how cultural productions remain complicit with ongoing settlement, both in everyday practices and intellectual projects like queer studies, feminist studies, and critical race studies. This special issue considers the political stakes of the complicity of cultural studies in settler colonialism, Indigenous erasure, and anti-Blackness, and expands, revises, and repurposes the scope of the field’s inquiry, politics, and archive.
Not long ago, clutched in colonial laws deployed to regulate dissident genders, the Hong Kong courts had never recognized the transgender person as a legitimate legal personality. Alongside powerful cultural transphobia that casts doubts on the corporeal authenticity of gender in post-operative transgender subjects, the laws held desperately onto the anachronistic and heterosexualized matrimonial framework that denies transgender subjects of their marriage rights—via the vastly productive hegemonic Judeo–Christian dogma of "one man and one woman" in marriage laws. All this was about to change because the disruptive pulse of cosmopolitan marriage laws began to vibrate in various national jurisdictions, causing ripples that spread through the legal disputes of rights first in non-procreative marriage and divorce rights, and subsequently in gay and transgender marriage legal challenges. Using the groundbreaking case of W v. Registrar of Marriages heard in Hong Kong’s various courts (2010-2013), this article attempts to work through the conceptual possibilities offered by a postcolonial legal approach to understand the contingent but real legal possibilities to advance an immanent politics of transgender justice in the 20th century.
In this article, I analyze a painting by Modoc/Klamath artist Peggy Ball through a Native feminist reading methodology. The painting, Vanport, is named after a city that disappeared in a flood in 1948. The artist survived that flood, and displacement as did thousands of others. The painting is a rememory map of dislocations and hauntings and disappearances. The painting remaps gentrified dislocations, telling stories that focus on the relationship of the present to the past and the past to the future. The painting itself is a Native feminist practice. The travel to places gone, to places that will reappear again; by people gone as well as by people presently alive; into times that existed, that never existed, that will exist again; to times made contemporaneous by time traveling dogs; with people co-present through desire—at the heart of all this time travel is recognition and survivance.
This essay argues that the biopolitical logics of settler colonialism function according to a naturalization in Western thought of politics as a project of hierarchically ordering life in relation to the sphere of politics. Significantly, such a mode of thinking discredits socio-political orders that operate on the basis of a non-hierarchical place-based relationality of all life forms including the land. Through a reading of Foucault and Agamben in their use of Aristotle, I want to show how hierarchy as a principle of the political is already implemented in the premise they draw upon for analyzing the biopolitical. In the same way it remains unrecognized in their analysis of biopolitics, this principle also becomes operative within settler colonial logics of life and land. Recently, however, Indigenous scholars and writers have mobilized relationality in its formative characteristic for Indigenous polities and politics as strategy to disrupt biopolitical logics and denaturalize settler colonial rule, which I want to show through engaging Daniel Heath Justice’s Indigenous fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles as a site of disruptive relationality and political knowledge production.
This article discusses the persistence of figuring Canadian multiculturalism as a success story, in the face of growing international attention to the degradation of Indigenous life and sovereignty in Canada. It examines three issues: nationalist investments in and scholarly/activist critiques of multiculturalism; dehumanizing bodily and discursive violence directed at Indigenous women by way of government policies, interpersonal violence, and media narratives; and recent activist expressions of anti-settler colonial politics diffused through social media. Gender is central to the interrogation of difference-making in Canada; it is conspicuously absent in mainstream formulations of multiculturalism, grievously present in gender-based violence, and a key basis for resistance to settler colonialism. The article’s aim is to complement the growing body of writing that connects multiculturalism and the politics of recognition to dismissals of Indigenous claims to political sovereignty, cultural self-determination, and freedom from bodily harm. The connection is not paradoxical—It is correlational.
This essay investigates the mounting U.S. vision of gender violence since the 1990s as a global phenomenon. Focusing on U.S. legal, political, and media discourse about female circumcision in particular, and gender violence more broadly, this essay examines what U.S. imaginaries about global gender violence enable as warrants for neocolonial consolidations of U.S. power in the 21st century through international projects and programs of defense, development, and diplomacy. The essay first addresses the way female circumcision becomes recognized in the United States imaginary as a gendered violence that is distant from the United States and essential to the African continent and African women’s bodies. It then questions what the recognition of gender violence as a global phenomenon does for U.S. neocolonial projects of defense, development, and diplomacy. It is the flexibility of gender violence as a rhetoric—its ability to be both specific and general—that makes it most potent in the service of U.S. neocolonial practices and projects around the world.
In this article, we explore through a series of productions our analytic relationships with an interview with Iris—a fourth-grade student who participated in a post-intentional phenomenological study focusing on how social class–sensitive photo storying took shape in a high-poverty elementary school. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s configuration of assemblage as a constant process of making and unmaking, we have plugged into our assemblage (Jackson and Mazzei) some poetry and a dramatization, as well as some of the expected productions of academic writing such as theory, citations, and methodology. In this way, we reconceive the phenomenon as an assemblage that produces, rather than means.
In 2014, Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson connected #BlackLivesMatter and #MMIWG2S by highlighting their existence in "a similar place." Here, I interpret this as a space of shared emotion and geography, emphasizing the land on which anti-Black and colonial violences occur. I argue that this provides a methodology for the study of multiethnic literature in a way that reckons with the interrelatedness of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism without conflating them under the auspices of "multiculturalism." I read memoirs by Deborah Miranda and Jesmyn Ward to explore how they articulate the relationship between personal and spatial history.
In South Park’s "Going Native," the white character Butters becomes inexplicably angry only to uncover that his family contends the anger is "biologically" caused by their "ancestral" belonging to Hawai‘i. He then travels to Kaua‘i to resolve this anger by connecting with his "native" home. To parody the materiality of white settlers playing and going native, Butters is represented as "native Hawaiian." This parody functions as a satire to ridicule and criticize settler colonialism in Hawai‘i. Yet, it does so by distorting, dismembering, and erasing Hawaiian Indigeneity. By deploying an Indigenous-centered approach to critical theory, I analyze South Park’s "Going Native" as a popular culture satire to make three arguments. First, "Going Native" produces Indigeneity in racialized, gendered, and sexualized (mis)representations. The representations of "native Hawaiians" recapitulate marginalizing misrepresentations of Native Hawaiians, which inverts the parody. Second, as the parody breaks down, "native Hawaiians" reify settler colonialism. South Park’s satire fails and becomes haunted by specters of settlement that call into question its critique. When the "native Hawaiians" eventually liberate themselves from encroaching tourists and U.S. military forces, an impasse emerges. Rather than signifying Native Hawaiians with agency, only "native Hawaiians" demonstrate the possibilities of self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization, which exempt white settlers from enacting colonization and produce a discursive impossibility for Native Hawaiians. Third, I suggest cultural studies reimagine its scholarship to exercise an alliance politics that interrupts knowledge produced by popular culture satire attempting critiques of settler colonialism that simultaneously naturalize the dispossession and elimination of Indigenous peoples.
Hoover Dam is a settler-colonial project, requiring Indigenous land and waterways while producing energy that enables further non-Indigenous settlement. In addition to the Dam’s engineering feats, its cultural production—art, pageantry, commemoration, and media—helped to buttress these claims to land. In this article, I offer the concept of dam/ning: how tactics used to preserve White settler memory, history, and claims to land and water seemingly appear to affirm Black and Indigenous lives but in fact veil violence. Also embedded in the term is damning: the strategies used to resist settler-colonial violence, dehumanization, displacement, and land theft. Dam/ning analyzes whose land these actions take place on, who claims this land and how, and what techniques people have used to resist. I draw from a tripartite archive: personal letters from Hoover Dam’s official artist (1920s-1940s), the Bureau of Reclamation’s magazine (1930s), and the town site’s local newspaper (1979). This article begins by establishing the practices of damming—the physical and cultural practices that enabled White settlement, which denigrated Indigenous and Black peoples while requiring their knowledge, art, and bodies; the second half of the article establishes the practices of damning, exposing ways Indigenous and Black communities fought these settler-colonial practices throughout the 20th century.
This essay critically examines naming and knowing in relation to African women as subjects in a global 21st century. Proceeding from the premise that naming is an epistemological act, it critically examines the relation between naming and knowledge production about African women who move across boundaries as transnational subjects. It considers the constraints placed by such naming and knowledge production on African women’s subjectivity. Finally, it considers the ways that African women challenge and contradict the politics of naming, and the possibilities those contradictions offer for forging new epistemologies of gender and Africa in the 21st century.
This essay explores the rather neglected case of Italian colonialism, and in particular, the ways in which colonial traces still linger on in Italian contemporary representations, reconfirming or transforming stereotypes and prejudices regarding issues of otherness, ethnicity, and sexuality, which are specific to the Italian case. Although Italian colonialism is subject to denial and oblivion, it is important to account for a growing postcolonial awareness, both in the scholarly field and in the wider cultural context, to better understand current issues of migration that are affecting Europe and challenging its global role as a democratic institution. The focus of the essay is on colonial photography and contemporary visual culture, pertaining to the fields of media, art, and politics. The goal is to detect the specificities of the Italian colonial legacy in contemporary culture, analyzing contemporary art production as well as figures such as football star Mario Balotelli and Italy’s first Black minister Cécile Kyenge, while also accounting for the larger European dimension, connecting and drawing parallels with transnational debates on postcolonial representations of gender and race.
We are getting faster, or so we have been led to believe. Planes, trains, and automobiles—alongside the substrates of online modernity—have seemed to suggest to us that the world is a place we are constantly in need of catching up with. In turn, partially in response to institutional demands on productivity, some academics have suggested slow methods in research.1 Yet, what if we were never fast in the first place? What if the things and atmospheres of Western industrial modernity actually produce slow ontologies of feeling as we traverse space and place? Straddling history, literature, and (auto)ethnographic attunements to emotions and society, this article attempts to suggest there is a modernity which is slow—an "endless mastication"—in which we, as both subject and subjects, are chewed-up and spat out amid the endlessly deferring signs of the presence and absence of meaning in social space.
This article theorizes the fugitive futurities of decolonization, seeking futures beyond colonial constructions of the possible and the sensible. To do this, I engage with a close reading of Palestinian writer Amir Nizar Zuabi’s short story, "The Underground City of Gaza," as an example of a fugitive trajectory that refuses inclusion into the colonial state through recognition, instead, re-centering modes of fugitive flight within the land itself—highlighting the necessary interplay between the re-routing and re-rooting of decolonization. In doing so, Zuabi demonstrates how decolonial futures evacuate colonial definitions of humanity, as well as colonial relationships with land and body that are based on property ownership. Working from Indigenous and radical Black theorization of land and fugitivity, my theorizing of fugitive futurity learns from Zuabi’s centering of land in imagining routes of flight, demonstrating how epistemologies of land both challenge colonial relations and also resurge alternative futures; re-rooting decolonial struggle in the land is also an act of re-routing toward decolonial futures.
In this article, I identify and look critically at the ideological themes that form the foundation of the dissenting opinions in Obergefell et al. v. Hodges. I contend that these themes speak to much larger issues surrounding the nature of our democracy and why accommodating different ways of being continues to face daunting legal, social, and political hurdles.
Many Aboriginal peoples belong to stateless nations within the White Canadian nation-state. Their claims to sovereignty are predicated on a timeless, immemorial existence that predates White settlement. Yet, the very reproduction of the nation is a gendered and raced project, centering some bodies while marginalizing others. In tracing the ways in which Aboriginal women have been projected on the canvass of the nation’s memorials—in obituaries—this article interrogates the visibility/invisibility of Aboriginal women and sheds light on the changing racial logic that underpins the articulation of race and gender in the twenty-first century.
This special issue explores 21st-century articulations of gender, nation, and colonialism.
Historically, studies of Indigenous menstrual practices were mired in assumptions that these practices were oppressive toward women. The high regard for menstruation as demonstrated through Indigenous women’s coming of age ceremonies and the continuing rituals of menstruation among Indigenous peoples has not been critically engaged with, and is often relegated to dismissive and oversimplified statements. The Western menstrual taboo not only influences theories of Indigenous menstrual customs but also relies on settler colonial rhetoric to help support a continuing politics of taboo. Although there have been numerous cultural studies of modern menstrual discourse focused on how contemporary Western menstrual practices are rooted in patriarchal bias, even self-declared feminist literature treats the menstrual taboo as nearly universal to Indigenous menstrual practices. This article provides an Indigenous feminist critique of contemporary menstrual discourse. I begin with a short history of settler colonialism and menstrual discourse and then analyze contemporary popular menstrual discourse. The final part of this article is an intervention on the assumed Indigenous menstrual taboo by looking at menstrual practices of the Hoopa Valley Tribe, located in Northern California, to demonstrate that for this culture and society, there is no menstrual taboo. It is through this in-depth analysis of Hupa menstrual practices that we see how Indigenous feminisms challenge settler colonialism and provide a decolonizing lens to contemporary scholarship that not only imagines alternative analyses but also acknowledges that these alternatives did, have always, and will always exist.
This article introduces a method for analyzing Indigenous erasure in popular film that focuses not on the representations (or lack thereof) of Indigenous peoples but on representations of settlement. Whereas much of the scholarship on Native representations in film has been concerned with Hollywood’s promulgation of the "mythical Indian," I argue that a focus on settlement—rather than on bodies—is significant in the context of the ongoing, unfinished processes of colonialism, which continue to structure life in white settler states. Cultural representations that reconfigure colonial-occupied life as settled life naturalize settler colonialism while erasing and displacing Indigenous claims to land. I illuminate this method by analyzing how the 1974 "blaxploitation Western" Thomasine and Bushrod imagines settlement. The film features a pair of lovers who are on the run from the law in America’s Southwest from 1911 to 1915. Because it is a film that speaks back to historical constructions of Blackness and Indigeneity, Thomasine and Bushrod productively illuminates how representations of Indigenous erasure work in often uneven and contradictory ways.
This article argues that the gun industry, as part of the broader military industrial complex, serves a specific function of both producing and securing capital interests, U.S. imperialism, and racism and that these work together to support the capital accumulation of the transnational capitalist class. The U.S.–Mexican border and the War on Drugs are discussed as a case in point in which Mexican communities are made expendable in the service of capital. A revolutionary critical pedagogy is advanced to support the mass mobilization of a people worldwide who are fed up with having our labor and our dignity extorted and who are ready to imagine and create a socialist alternative.
This essay offers a counter-reading of Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a controversial video game about the infamous school shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 in which players adopt the roles of the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebod. Focusing on the game’s unique procedural rhetoric, we argue that SCMRPG! juxtaposes interactive, non-realistic violence–reflected in a campy nineties video game aesthetic–with photographic evidence, extant dialogue, and a detailed narrative of the tragic events at Columbine to promote critical thought about gun violence generally and school shootings in particular. The essay concludes with a brief reflection of the vital that role video games can play in critical pedagogy.
The relationship between the online and offline self is one of the most interesting questions faced by new media researchers. This article argues that James Carey’s ritual view of communication can be of immense value in analyzing this complex phenomenon. The article revisits Carey’s famous "ritual view"—that saw mass communication and mass media as the primary ground for modern society—to elucidate how the notion of ritual can function as a theoretical category that is very useful for social and cultural analysis in the contemporary epoch. By discussing the nature of contemporary information processing, the article demonstrates how digital protocols and practices function in a highly ritualistic manner, thereby functioning as tools for the construction of individual and social reality. By applying Carey’s seminal insights to the "world" constructed by computer-mediated communication and social media, the article demonstrates how everyday digital rituals enable the modern subject to emerge in a paradoxical form—extensively networked and connected, yet deeply self-directed and solitary.
How Is Home,1 a Performance Autoethnography in Four Parts,2 is a contemplative, interpretive, account on the nature of home. It is a multiple-voiced work. The nature of the empiricism used in this piece works to connect ethnographic detail in a meaningful way, toward the end of a telling of the production of emotions, symbol, and affect combined to display a sense of the way a life is built and undertaken through subjectivity. This work enables a glance at how notions of identity are formed and encountered, then rewoven through understanding, toward a libratory end. This story is my own, extended through imagination, a story of understanding my own identity as an Iraqi–Iranian–Jewish–American woman in post 9/11 United States. Ideas of Gaston Bachelard, Gloria Anzaldua, and Homi Bhabha are used to enrich and prop up my notion of home in this piece, which is always shifting, and momentary. Disciplinary oppression occurs in many ways in the present day United States, infused by the wily discourses produced through neoliberal global corporate machinations, tinged by its large events’ (wars, economic depressions, bank bailouts, austerity measures, etc.) impact on our systems of affect. In certain ways, the languages and actions in this new/old world can leave people with very little. This work works, through meaningful interventions in autoethnography, to correct that, as the meanings of our everyday lives, whether in the present moment or of memory is where much can be mended. I welcome you, dear reader, to join me, in my place, at home.
This piece sails in time and space, collecting memories in an effort to show instead of tell how masculinity is inculcated in children by parents. I use autoethnography to present scenes collected from three different moments of my life. I reflect on gender norms reproduced as complementary/opposite meanings, in which hierarchy remains, placing men above women.
In the wake of recent, high profile mass shootings, the "deranged mind" has become a common discursive ground for policy makers, pundits, gun enthusiasts, and gun control advocates alike. Interested parties on both sides of the gun control/rights debate have agreed that laws restricting gun ownership should be assessed according to their ability to protect the innocent citizen from the unpredictable criminal violence of the insane (despite the fact that mass shootings account for only one tenth of 1% of all homicides committed with a gun). Contextualizing this development within both distant and recent U.S. history, we argue that policy proposals that tie contemporary gun violence prevention to mental health care can be seen as part of a confluence of technologies of social governance that includes: a turn from therapeutic to risk-management approaches to mental health care; a turn from retrospective/forensic to prospective/preventative approaches to criminal justice; and, a broader turn toward a "criminological" view of civic identity. Furthermore, by shifting the locus of violence from the gun to the interior world of the potential violent criminal, the "mental health" turn dematerializes the gun at the very moments when its "thingliness" is most vivid.
The early modern theatrical practice of cue script acting provided an actor with his character’s part—a long strip of paper wound in a roll on a baton—that consisted only of his character’s lines plus a one- to three-word cue before each speech. In solitude, each actor would read and learn his lines and cues in sequence having never seen the entire script or knowing what occurred in between his actor’s lines until performed in front of the audience opening night. When using cue script acting as a performance-based method of teaching Shakespeare, students delve into a character’s part while engaging with others’, collaboratively making improvised, interpretive decisions; some fluid, some contradictory. This article explores cue script acting and collaborative writing as a collective method of engaging with Shakespeare by examining the similarities between these two practices. In addition, the article investigates the Deleuzoguattarian concept of the nomad and St. Pierre’s concept of nomadic inquiry to make connections between these two methods, arguing that cue script acting is a form of collaborative writing as inquiry.
The possibilities for developing the poet Douglas Dunn’s archive (which includes the drafts and manuscripts for his collection Elegies, dealing with the terminal illness and death of the poet’s wife from cancer) for therapeutic benefit are explored by an English lecturer (C.J.) and a palliative care practitioner (C.M.). This has led us to explore the potential benefit of this resource for health practitioners working with those affected by cancer and other life-limiting conditions. This article offers a "written conversation" (an acknowledged oxymoron of genre) about working with the themes of death and loss: a conversation which includes Douglas Dunn, who was not actually there. We reflect on the value of this "confabulation" as methodological inquiry, and its potential influence on practice. Thus, an example of "creative writing" (the confabulation) becomes a piece of research into methodology regarding the use of "creative writing" resources (the poetry archive) in palliative health care.
Although usually marketed as single-authored, interviews with the authors of military memoirs indicated the significance of collaboration with others throughout their writing and publication process. This paper describes the nature of these collaborations. We go on to suggest that collaborative practices were not seen by the authors as diminishing to the centrality of the named author or the reliability of their narratives. That while the collaborative roles of editors, writing coaches, and agents were evident, professional (military) colleagues and friends, family members, and military institutions played a significant role in determining memoir structures, formats, styles, and contents. We also draw attention to the research interview as itself a time and space for the collaborative co-construction by researcher and author of conceptual understanding of the memoir. We argue that understanding these collaborative practices adds to, rather than detract from, our understanding and appreciation of this genre.
In this article, the authors respond to Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An Immanent Plane of Composition. The book’s authors (Jonathan, Ken, Susanne, and Bronwyn) and two discussants (Elizabeth St. Pierre and Norman Denzin) consider questions such as the following: What does this book open up? How might it help us to think differently (e.g. about inquiry, about collaboration, about the ethics of reading and writing in such an assemblage)? And how does it contribute to the growing literature on collaborative writing as method of inquiry?
Based in an analysis of a writing workshop which explored students’ transition to higher education, this article puts to work theorizations of space by Massey, materiality by Barad, narrative by Cavarero, and ethics by Arendt to propose an innovative conceptualization of collaborative writing practices. The article proposes an understanding of the space of collaborative writing as a multiplicity of relations, negotiations, and practices; it considers what is to be gained from considering collaborative writing in relation to posthumanist concerns about the mattering of matter; and it illuminates how collaborative writing, when understood as the emergence of narratable selves, is a profoundly ethical practice.
I have a problem with collaborative writing; the words themselves put me on edge. This piece follows the line of that affect down and through identity, agency, power, intimacy, responsibility, representation, and the creative process. It leaves a trail of words like breadcrumbs. From outer space, perhaps they trace the shape of the other, my lover, my imaginary friend, a cipher saying something about someone I might be.
Through collaborative writing, the authors reflect on ethnographic engagement and critique "research tourism," that is, drop-in, quick-fix "fieldwork" in developing countries. We position ourselves not as researchers vis-à-vis researched, but as two scholars set between researchers and researched, sometimes in the role of researcher but also stepping inside the binary to limn the gap. Through a dialogue across disciplines and a co-labor of writing, we inquire into the negotiation of research relationships in local contexts and how those relationships are conveyed in the academy. Using collaborative writing as our method of inquiry, we gather insights about our own roles and the unspoken relationships and expectations of researchers and researched in countries such as India. This allows us to introduce a multi-dimensional perspective on experiences that are usually represented from the single point of view of the researcher. This article begins in the middle of things because that is where we are.
In 2009, Toyosaki, Pensoneau-Conway, Wendt, and Leathers developed a collaborative writing method called community autoethnography (CAE). Participants dialogically collaborate through writing in order to "resituate identified social/cultural and sensitive issues" with the explicit goals of community-building and "cultural and social intervention." In this article, we use CAE to explore and interrogate the politics, ethics, and boundaries of our collaborations and relationships. As individuals entering this collaborative engagement, we occupy various positions in relation to each other—stranger, best friend, student-turned-colleague/friend, student-friend, sibling, and so on. Each of these positions is subsequently complicated by social positions and relational politics that necessarily inform the process of collaborative writing. We write vulnerabilities across boundaries and between relationships, and in the process, with careful purpose, we write the becoming of new relationships, the becoming of community.
In this article, I take a philosophical and literary approach to collaborative writing as inquiry, examining the intersubjective ethics of dialogue involved in narrative collaboration. I argue that autobiography and cultural studies have not delved deeply enough into the ethical implications of dialogue in collaborative life writing, which has resulted in an impoverished sense of responsibility in practices of writing with vulnerable subjects who have experienced trauma, marginalization, or oppression. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s description of dialogue as a process of verbal interaction and an expression of ethical intersubjectivity, I develop two critical aspects of dialogue—the hospitality of reception and the reciprocity of response—to show how both are necessary for collaborative partnerships to flourish and for vulnerable subjects to reconstitute themselves beyond their victimhood. I then examine how these ethical aspects work themselves out in practice through a study of the narrative collaboration, Stolen Life, by Rudy Wiebe and Yvonne Johnson.
The larger social turn enabled writing process theory in composition and legitimated collaborative writing practices among conscious, present individual authors who exist ahead of the text they write and so collaborate in a certain way. In this article, the author describes a different collaboration enabled by a different ontology in post-humanism when writers are neither authors, nor individual, nor present but always already entangled in an assemblage of reading, writing, and the world.
Through three stories, we hope to reveal how sometimes contradictory or unrecognizable aspects of our lives, selves, and stories can create tensions in the collaborative writing endeavor. We begin with a story that illuminates some of the narrative tensions that surface during a decade of writing collaboratively. In an effort to navigate these tensions, we explore two further stories in dialogue as a way to reveal how dominant narratives shape our lives and the stories we might tell. One aim of sharing these stories is to reveal how problematic ways of being are often inseparable from one’s cultural legacy. Making previously obscured narratives visible paves the way for imaginary leaps that are necessary for change. We hope these insights are useful for other writers and collaborators and those who seek caring, responsive, and nurturing writing relationships yet realize this journey can be problematic.
In this performance-theoretical text, we attempt to advance collaborative writing as decolonizing inquiry. Western inquiry has been dominated by the solitary writing of lone rangers of expertise, who are granted disproportionate narrative space to discourse about the Other. We think this exclusionary way of knowing keeps historically marginalized peoples from occupying Western academia as knowledge makers. Building on our collaborative writing experiences, Paulo Freire’s dialogical philosophy, and Della Pollock’s performative writing, we discuss how our collaborations with students and ethnographic partners have allowed us to break away from the expert isolationist writing standpoint and expand our own imaginations of and possibilities for inquiry—one that is more concerned with advancing collaborative ways of knowing and representation than with individual expertise and recognition, with advancing a more serious invitation for those with visceral experience of oppression to collaborate with the learned and cultured in the creation of knowledge that heals.
The Fire This Time (TFTT), a Black writers’ collaboration which uses multiple genres of writing as our method is grounded in what Don Cornelius used to call Love, Peace, and Soul. Love, because our love for writing and the complexities and challenges of the Black experience, coupled with a passion for connecting with other Black scholars in ways that have the potential for making a difference in the world, is at the heart of this work. Peace, because through collaborative engagement with our experiences, we are reaching a deeper spiritual understanding of ourselves leading to a greater sense of inner peace, as well as how sharing our critical reflections, poems, and stories will help others make meaning out of the importance of peace in their own lives. Soul, because our souls bear witness to what it means to Black, and alive in a racist, sexist, homophobic society, from lenses informed by our race as well as our different genders, ages, and sexual orientations. This article will share the origin of TFTT, and excerpts we will construct from the larger body of work to give the reader a sense of what happens when Black scholars write to and with each other on a monthly basis.
This article describes a collaborative writing strategy when you are alone. It is the story of how I came to bring Phineas, the protagonist in A. S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, into my writing process as a third voice in my dialogue with my data. It is a self-reflective text that shows how co-writers are always present, even when you might feel that you are writing all alone. In The Biographer’s Tale, the academic Phineas renounces his post-structural dissertation project in literature to search for "things" and "facts." He decides to write a biography. However, Phineas discovers that "facts" are slippery and not easily "pieced together." Phineas writes about his struggles, and so do I. Through co-writing with Phineas, I gradually found a voice of experience, which helped me to transforming my ethnographic data into research texts.
Higher education around the world is currently undergoing a neo-liberal administrative takeover. The drive to reduce costs and increased bureaucratization do not serve any other purpose than increasing the power of the universities’ administration. The reasons for allowing this situation to happen are related to scholars’ inertia and subscribing to a belief that academia can and should be impractical. As a result, the emerging corporate university, McDonaldized model relies increasingly on contingent and deskilled faculty, effectively eliminating the traditional academic freedoms. We conclude with suggestions for possible courses of action to make a constructive counter-movement to the radical changes taking place. We propose that we can begin addressing the predicaments of higher education through re-discovering our role in the society, by re-conceptualizing the disciplinary boundaries of academic fields, by forcing the de-bunkerization of academic career and work, and by starting up multi-disciplinary learning communities at universities. We argue that collective action is needed immediately, if any positive change is possible at all before more of higher education is more deeply degraded.
In this article, we follow the recent calls of "sport and physical cultural studies" scholars to revisit the significance of the embodied research process and, in particular, the lived social body of the qualitative researcher. Between 2011 and 2013, we conducted a critical ethnography of the experiences of less affluent (and often homeless) young men at publicly subsidized weekly floor hockey games in the basement of a psychiatric hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. Our analysis focuses on three vignettes drawn from detailed field notes and ongoing interviews to reveal the researchers’ embodied investments in race, gender, and class politics; our coming to terms with these investments as they intersected, and clashed, with the bodies and agendas of the city’s "urban outcasts"; and, finally, the importance of interpreting these experiences with sensitivity to the context and community within which we, as critical ethnographers, coexist and, through our words and actions, help to (re)create.
In this article, I present an autoethnographic reflection on a subject I have studied for several years. It concerns the relationship that people have with certain rules, especially traffic laws. Through the study of a specific case in Argentina, I relate some personal experiences and feelings associated with them. I also reflect on my position as a researcher as well as on my mistakes and assumptions. In addition, the voices of some participants in the study are brought to the text.
In this article, I reflect on the importance of critically analyzing the cultural products aimed at children. To achieve this kind of analysis, my students and I have developed a performative exercise in which we have co-created a theatrical piece. A fragment of the script appears below where we appropriate and reconstruct the contents of children’s films from a critical point of view. For those who participated, this performance produced a transformation in our representations. The performative exercise highlights how, through critical analysis and performance, we are able to reconstruct those characters we have known and loved since childhood.
The following poems are both ethnographic and artistic in both scope and intention. I use poetic inquiry to explicate an experience in time, hoping to challenge the way in which we think of what we hear, daily, in the media about immigration and migration, and to put a human face on the phenomenon.
The "war on women" has been a socio-political issue and an arena for feminist scholars’ social critiques. The phrase gained media attention with "legitimate rape" remarks within the 2012 election. This piece looks at how this neo-liberal commentary has affected my personal agency through legislating my womb without permission, thus, rhetorically oppressing my personal agency through legal precedent.
Using a case study of a social circus program developed for Inuit youth in Northern Quebec, this research analyzes how social service programs developed for indigenous youth must be understood and designed in relation to colonial history. Focusing on the program’s contradictory and complex role in assimilation, acculturation, and cultural preservation, we analyze how colonial dynamics can be recapitulated despite best intentions. Youths’ acts of resistance to the program are analyzed as microinteractional efforts toward decolonization rather than instances of "maladaptive" behavior. We discuss how such programs can foster decolonization and the implications of such an approach for program evaluation.
Collective biographical memory work attends to embodied experiences in relation to selected concepts. This article considers the concept of "the emerging teacher" to explore the relevance of collective biographical memory work for education practitioners. Six memories, written and shared in a series of writing workshops, collectively reveal that memories of emerging as a teacher are soaked in contradictions within vulnerability, chaos and order, and that, importantly, creativity emerges from the spaces in between. In reflecting on our work, we suggest that the approach offers emerging teachers an important liminal space and commonplace for exploring contradictions and allowing creativity.
Communication scholars hold special knowledge and occupy positions of power. This article examines the question of whether communication scholars have particular responsibilities to assist in the propagation of truth, enhance the debate on ideas, provide insight into the universe of media technology, and engage in public citizenship. Drawing on philosophical and political economy texts, the author brings the political economy tradition into Denzin’s "critical pedagogy" project. Political economy’s challenge is to expand its contribution to educational reform and deepen its commitment beyond class to race, gender, and ethnicity.
In this autoethnography, I provide a firsthand account of living with severe chronic pain in an effort to begin to fill an absence in the scholarly literature. I intend to demonstrate how the performative nature of pain and the way in which people in pain are treated can contribute to the slow and steady erasure of their credibility and sense of effectiveness in the wider world. In this way, I underscore the "public issues" inherent in the chronic pain experience, something that is traditionally seen as the most private of "personal troubles." I conclude that qualitative health research would benefit if more "insiders" were to give expression to some of the devastating social effects of living with chronic pain. Pain sufferers need a common language through which they can begin to resist shame, reclaim a sense of agency, and raise their voices as part of an empowered collective.
This article explores the difficulties I have experienced moving from Mexico City, the largest metropolitan area in Mexico, to a provincial capital in the center part of the country, the city of Aguascalientes. In order to do that, I present a short narrative of certain incidents that show how I have sorted out the journey in a search of developing a sense of belonging. This is an autoethnography exercise where I follow what Ellis (2004) calls narrative analysis, which "assumes that a good story itself is theoretical. . . . When people tell their stories, they employ analytic techniques to interpret their worlds" (pp. 195-196). I have also realized that, like Richardson and St. Pierre argue (2005), writing is a way of knowing because it was due to the introspection process I experienced as I was writing that I came to understand how much my story was mostly related to gender issues.
In a temporal and spatial configuration dominated by the hyper-fast transmission of visual information by way of new technologies, methodologies must compete to hold our and the public’s attention. The traditional role of critique continues to be important, but acknowledging new and faster approaches that bypass critique, and which have in fact been in practice already is necessary. This article explores three new ways of thinking about methods: the use of "the example" and its distinction from the case study, the importance of affirmative methods as a counter to "critical" methods, and the fruitfulness of engaging the indeterminacies that come with making connections in research. It argues that these approaches are in keeping with an "ethico-politics" suitable for societies characterized by technological intensification.
This article stems from a desire to move data across theories, methodologies, fields, and disciplines. We argue that despite our best efforts to tame, contain and control data, no thing has escaped. So, while indiscernible the no thing is the potentiality of something more, something uncontrollable, indescribable, in excess . . . This article intends to open up that no thing by providing a physical and conceptual space that moves beyond a general concern with interpretation, representation, and identity to an engagement with interdisciplinary decomposition of data.
DATA analysis remains never securely legible in any (stable) present, but coexists as a repetition that finds ways to endlessly redistribute and reinvest itself in new and different forms of the data’s flows and vibrations.
In this paper we explore how reanimating a video data sequence with editing and creative software provided an opportunity for the data to speak and to demand new and surprising responses from us. Our data-ing brought new lines and spaces to the fore, through a process of refraction and re-animation which forced a focus on embodied inter-relationships and impeded precipitous analytical thought on the part of the researcher. We note how the aesthetic of the new images evoked awareness of our own part in the production of the object of our research. In particular, our own collegial interchange, punctuated by time and distance due to our respective locations on oppositesides of the globe, opened up a space for data-lingering in the intervening silences and pauses. Our choice of images engenders and reflects our sense of movement between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’ in their depiction of students’ learning about space.
In cowriting this article, we set out to (re)vision qualitative research data. From the domain of "traditional" methods of interviewing, we attempted to slip—differently and productively—away from data conceptualized as stable, knowable, and collectible. Our revisionary approach was to view data as words at play in theory. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) logic of the AND encouraged our experimentation, and so paired with their concept of the rhizome, we began to think and do data differently, by mapping connections, movements, and flows of data/words across a visual script: situating data in a dynamic space of multiplicity, unsettling constraints within the discourse of scholarship. We conceptualized ho/rhizoanalysis, rendering the joyful currents of connection and expression that data invites. What can become on the written page is a structure that is both bounded, yet in which, we can still play.
Qualitative research data comes in a myriad of forms and permutations. This spectrum of inquiry spans differing assemblages of sensation, creation, and well-being. While affording methodological moments their place, it is suggested that understanding sensation as "affect" and creation as "performativity" can provoke new qualitative research lines to unfold, alongside the politics of well-being. The intent of this article is to explore how continuing to transverse material, social, and temporal practices can spark new disruptions and notions of data. It is argued that further innovating data involves becoming more attuned to the lines and layers of our material, social, and temporal practices. Opening ourselves up to the interplay of sensation, creation, and well-being provides a rich optic for future qualitative methodologies—enabling us to reconfigure the territories of response and responsibility.
In this article, we offer dialogue as a means to avoid the objectification of data and the procedurization of analysis that so permeates traditional visions of educational inquiry. For our work, dialogue operates simultaneously as a means of inquiry, an engaging form of data, and an entwined means of analysis that disrupts normative formations of research as progressively linear. In this way, dialogue brings about the productive death of data-as-object for analysis. Functionally, our article is a dialogue, one that serves as a requiem for conceptions of analysis as outside data while simultaneously foregrounding data as dialogue. We present our dialogue asynchronously so as to exacerbate our resistance to synthesis and our commitment to a constant rebuilding of understanding. Our asynchronous representation underscores our commitment to dialogic contact, wherein texts live in contact with other texts, joining these texts to our dialogue.
In this article, we reconfigure the notion of writing with theory to include a troubling of theory as data that is always already coded by our citational practices. However, the reduction of the "cacophony of ideas swirling as we think about our topics with all we can muster" to a singular citation, while necessary if we want to bear the burden of our interpretations, is also dangerous because the more mechanistic data analysis becomes, the less situated it is. We demonstrate here how we rupture this mechanistic bent by using the space of the page both to inhabit and halt aporias, producing aporetic data. When we write and reread our claims to those theorists through citation, aporetic data highlights our inability to do those theorists justice and produces additional uncertainty about the possibility of justice for any data. To that end, we provide a theoretical conversation that has been interrupted and revisited multiple times as we think and rethink the many Derridas produced through our readings. This work highlights the possibilities enabled by calling upon one another to keep data in motion by truncating, diverting, or extending aporias rather than treating data as passive objects.
This article engages with air from a posthuman performative perspective to prompt new thinking about postcolonial Hong Kong. Drawing from a small experiential study of Hong Kong air, this article shows how three becoming-with research practices; sensing air, tracing childhood memories, and cominglings were enacted to engage with data differently. Becoming-with Hong Kong air illuminates how new connections are made with data through inter- and intra-actions between human, nonhuman, and the material and discursive. This article argues that becoming-with practices are productive and necessary to rethink postcoloniality in Hong Kong.
This article examines the theoretical, methodological, and practical possibilities of sound for qualitative research. Moving from an understanding that sounds are a form of vibrational affect, the author argues that sound can be articulated as resonance and knowledge in ways that are significant to human experiences of sensation and signification. These conceptualizations of sound are then used to articulate processes of data collection, analysis, and representation for a sounded methodological practice called sonic ethnography. In keeping with the tone and tenor of this special issue and the developing field of sound studies, the third section considers whether sounds need to be categorized as "data" to be of value to qualitative researchers. A final brief section describes the construction and sounds presented in the accompanying sound/work that serves as a performative example of how sounded representations of sonic ethnography can function in practice. The associated sound/work can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/vibrationalaffect/gershon.
This is about data dreaming the promise of dialogue in education with Pinter: The dreams and aspirations of the absent. It is a reality check and wishful thinking and about living in the world as if it was a better place. Ruin is a blessing. It always finds ways to rebuild itself. This is a move toward data driven pedagogies and research and away from traditional hypothesis driven activities and ideals. Dreaming with Pinter opens up Deleuzian "aionic" productive intensities/spaces/sensations, possibilizing and/or evoking teachers’ and children’s becomings alike; uncontrollable, indefinable endless. My Ego and My Own . . . counting as data setting things in motion: Data what you make of it (not) ultimately valuation of knowledges processes. My will. Anne and Ann Merete’s becomings with data from own "theorypraxises": Anne’s research project with High School teachers and Ann Merete’s project in this huge kindergarten; both projects in Norway and about inclusive pedagogies and reform. The text is crafted as a play to honor—as in mourning, come Derrida, Pinter.
Through a performance piece, an ethnographic drama, the article explores what might be called academic category boundary work, around the use of nonmainstream forms of data (autoethnography)—or this is at least one possible reading of the drama. In general, the ethnographic drama is an interesting form of postfoundational scholarship in that it is both (or neither) data and analysis; it troubles the desires for transparency and real-reality that come with the usual manner of presenting the data and analysis as separate and separable. In its data+analysis simultaneity the ethnographic drama insists on being "creata," and on offering significant insight into various cultural practices, yet by explicitly and unapologetically drawing on a literary genre, it also never lets the reader/audience forget their part and responsibility as reader/audience. As a funny twist, due to this specific ethnographic drama’s subject matter and its likely audience, any thoughts, sensations, conversations, or emotions invoked by performing/reading it will constitute a new round of data+analysis and form the beginnings of yet-to-be-written fourth acts.
In traditional qualitative research, data is conceived as an object on which the researcher acts. Whether that object fits into a traditional category—an interview transcript, field notes—or a transgressive category—a dream or memory—data are still nouns, things to be apprehended by the senses. In my postqualitative work, data are not entities, not nouns subject to process. Instead a process—writing—is the data. I write autoethnographic stories that are not based on discrete data sources. Rather, the data are the stories themselves. They come to be through the process of writing. In this article, I theorize data as a verb. What can data do when it is no longer tied to a material existence as object? When it is no longer a thing, but an action? To address these questions, as all of my questions, I write. In this case, my writing stems from a recent journey East during which I couldn’t stop doing data.
The reader is asked to imagine a world without data, a world without method, a world without a hegemonic politics of evidence., a world where no one counts, a world without end.
I produce data. You produce data. She produces data. We produce data. They produce data.
Data is being produced. Data produces us.
Data. Data. Data. ... But only illusions of "data."
Copies of "data."
As qualitative researchers, we often wrestle with the intricacies of ontological and epistemological frameworks, the complexities of collection and analysis methods, and the difficulties associated with the dissemination cycle. Positing direct challenges to the paradigms underlying the practice of our craft is something we do rather rarely, but it is something we must do nonetheless in order to advance our field in a fundamental fashion. In this article, we argue for an expanded understanding of what constitute data, posit the need to shift away from examining the "found" world exclusively, and assert that researchers not only create their reality, but their data as well. We illustrate our point by presenting our arguments in alternatively rhyming iambic pentameter, which—as poetry is itself intrinsically a creative enterprise—reflexively positions both our text and ourselves as data to be examined, analyzed, and understood.
This article draws on psychoanalysis to theorize artifacts as data in a postsecondary classroom setting. Psychoanalytic theory offers nuanced frames through which to interpret this data. What psychoanalysis alerts us to are the multiple and as such irreducible meanings of experience. Importantly psychoanalysis allows reading of this data for its affective moments. What does it mean for students to bring personal artifacts into a classroom? What sorts of meanings are ascribed to artifacts? What are the layers of narratives that are revealed when students speak to memories of photographs and objects? How might artifact work permit the outside self to be present inside an educational setting and generate a sense of reciprocity?
The article considers the productive capacity for wonder that resides and radiates in data, or rather in the entangled relation of data-and-researcher. Wonder is not necessarily a safe, comforting, or uncomplicatedly positive affect. It shades into curiosity, horror, fascination, disgust, and monstrosity. But the price paid for the ruin caused—to epistemic certainty or the comforts of a well-wrought coding scheme—is, after Massumi (2002, p. 19), the privilege of a headache. Not the answer to a question, but the astute crafting of a problem and a challenge: what next?
This paper explores conditions that allow data to appear, to come into being, in both conventional and more radical approaches in empirical social science research. Conventional qualitative inquiry that uses a positivist ontology—even when it claims to be interpretive—treats qualitative data, words, as brute, existing independent of an interpretive frame, waiting to be "collected" by a human. However, a Deleuzo-Guattarian ontology that does not assume the subject/object binary might not think the concept data at all. The author resists recuperating data in the collapse of the old empiricism and is content to pause in the curious possibilities of a normative ontology that imagines a superior, affirmative, and experimental empiricism in which all concepts, including data, must be re-thought.
Academics have a hard time talking about the place of "love" in social research, and the lack of a working definition for its meaning only partly explains our difficulty. The more substantial barrier is our tendency to think about "research" not as a careful exploration of specific social, intellectual, or methodological problems that bear on the everyday circumstances of real people, but as the product of observable and replicable processes, of science. Love, many would argue, has got nothing to do with this. In this article, I offer a radical counter narrative of the possibilities that a broadened view might enable. Using my own research experiences, I sketch the beginnings of an "intimate" approach to qualitative inquiry that is grounded in feminist theory, governed by an "ethic of love," and expressed in data as "love acts" for the individuals whose lives our work aims to shape.
In this performative play without speech, the author demonstrates the various acrobatic negotiations she makes in her everyday life as a transnational feminist educational researcher who was born in India, raised in Canada, and educated and employed in higher education in the U.S. The author uses silence as a space of reflection, resistance, adaptation, retreat, and freedom in order to challenge the duality of silence and voice where silence is seen as the absence of voice. The author presents her negotiations in academia as a set of acrobatic moves in response to her everyday circumstances. She also demonstrates that for her home is always a shifting concept that continues to force her to shuttle between multiple national identities. The author uses the works of Kamala Visweswaran and Inderpal Grewal to theorize nomadic, diasporic, and transnational subject positions and ways in which silence and voice function. Using the form of silence as a performance, the author invites readers to find their own entry points of identification, resistance, and points that transcend both identification with and resistance to the scenes with which she works, works out, and plays.
In some autobiographical narratives, transsexual has been narrated outside the gender binary. These narratives have the propensity to reconceptualize multiplicity of genders. However, the re/production of transsexual appears not only to be a function of how the subject position is represented but also a function of the structure of narrative. If this is so, then the following questions arise: What is the relation between the representation of a subject position in a narrative and the structure of narrative? and how does this relation function in the re/production of transsexual and gender multiplicity? In an analysis of one autobiographical interview, the author reads male-to-female transsexual as a subject position grounded in dichotomous gender that was disrupted only where ambiguity is allowed in the narrative structure, and this disruption was foreclosed through how the subject was represented and/or the structure of the narrative.
Set in the criminalized, racialized, and sexualized streets of Salvador da Bahia, this article presents experimental ethnographic glimpses of the deeply transnational aspects of desire, suffering, and violence in the disintegrating public spaces of a Northeastern Brazilian city famous for its global tourism fuelled by transnational desire for and consumption of Afro-Brazilian culture and bodies. The author reflects on the possibility of critical engagement between academic ethnographers from the North and the sex workers, street kids, crack users, and other marginalized social actors who make a living in the street. Refraining from facile, depoliticized celebrations of grassroots "critical" anthropology and other fantasies about empowering the subaltern, the author depicts the terror-as-usual at Bahian-street livelihoods from the necessarily exploitative position of a gringo ethnographer who is also making a living and a career from writing about the suffering of others. While this article, like all of Veissière’s work, is ultimately committed to a search for postcolonial social justice and critical dialogues between intellectuals and the subaltern, it also contemplates the horror of being an academic pimp who sustains a livelihood from exploiting human suffering and violence.
In some autobiographical narratives, transsexual has been narrated outside the gender binary. These narratives have the propensity to reconceptualize multiplicity of genders. However, the re/production of transsexual appears not only to be a function of how the position is represented but also a function of the structure of narrative. If this is so, then the following questions arise: What is the relation between the representation of a subject position in a narrative and the structure of narrative? How does this relation function in the re/production of transsexual and gender multiplicity? In an analysis of one autobiographical interview, I read male-to-female transsexual as a subject position grounded in dichotomous gender was disrupted only where ambiguity is allowed in the narrative structure, and this disruption was foreclosed through how the subject was represented and/or the structure of the narrative.