Decolonisation and emergent forms of knowledge production is an attempt to find ways of thinking that run counter to the great modernist narratives of colonial ‘progress’. As race, gender and sexuality form the bedrock condition of the colonial – and now capitalist – enterprise, any attempt to reconfigure positionality requires that we interrogate and change the ways in which these hierarchies have become stratified and continue to be reproduced (see Stoler 1985). However, as Frantz Fanon argues, the colonial system did not so much bring about the death of cultures as keep them in ‘a continued agony’. Thus, a ‘culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies against its members’ (Fanon 1967, 33–4). In thinking about knowledge production and decolonisation in higher education, we thus have to reach towards the possibility of non-Eurocentric modes of being and seeing without negating the complex co-imbrication of and contamination between indigeneity, coloniality and modernity. This stream raises questions such as:
The current influence of neoliberalism and the corporatisation of the university has had a major impact on the practices of academia and the lives of both students and academics. Slow scholarship provides escapes from relentless neoliberal imperatives of quantification by offering different ways of engaging in academic practices. Slow scholarship involves academic processes that are in-depth, careful, collaborative and pleasurable. Similarly, critics of neoliberalism argue that education systems have become Big Business, controlling large amounts of capital, run by administrative apparatuses of bureaucracy and tightly controlling discipline, achievement, pedagogy and time through seemingly endless hierarchies.
The relational nature of critical arts-based pedagogies and research afford opportunities to think-through and become-with aesthetic encounters in ways that bypass the limits and possibilities of normative, logocentric and dominant disciplines and discourses within institutions of higher education. This theme draws on Manning's suggestion that arts-based research "proposes concrete assemblages for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and in collective experimentation" (Manning, 2014:53). Similarly, it draws on Mazzei’s insights into how arts based-research might "diffuse data through theoretical insights in order to open up random unforeseen patterns that spread thought and meaning in unpredictable and productive emergences” contribute to the broad inquiry (Mazzei, 2014:742). Psychoanalytic theorist Bracha Ettinger's Matrixial model of trans-subjective co-emergence through aesthetic wit[h]nessing turns to arts-based practices as a potential space of compassionate, co-affective and co-emergent aesthetic encounter in which art functions a container of "historical memory for the injured other by creating a site for a novel trans-subjective and transhistorical process that is simultaneously witness and wit(h)ness" (Pollock, 2012).
Possible questions to explore in this stream include:
Higher education pedagogies, scholarship and policies have as their default subject a full-time white, middle class, neurotypical, unencumbered and rational individual. As Erin Manning (2018, 114[1]) says ‘Creating the conditions for neurodiversity in the university . . . is about attuning to the undercommon currents of creative dissonance and asymmetrical experience always already at work in, across and beyond the institution. It is about becoming attentive to the ways in which the production of knowledge in the register of the neurotypical has always been resisted and queered despite the fact that neurotypical forms of knowledge are rarely addressed or defined as such.’
Possible questions to explore in this theme are:
Educational scholarship is one of the areas in which new materialisms generate methodological innovation. Higher education systems and classroom praxes are per definition more messy than just hierarchically linear or humanist, which is why flatter ontologies and posthumanist epistemologies and methodologies thrive in these contexts. The stream ‘New Materialist Reconfigurings of Methodology in Higher Education’ wants to take stock of these innovations by exploring the new methodologies generated and by transposing them to other research contexts.
This stream will consider how the political ethics of care (Tronto, 1993, 2013) and new feminist materialist ethics (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway 2016) intersect with each other and how, in their intersections, they may have value for thinking about socially just pedagogies in higher education. The common ground of these two approaches is their critique of Enlightenment humanist assumptions, such as the notion of the independent rational human actor as the centre of morality, or the primacy of the human in moral thought. The political ethics of care and new materialism offer relational ways of understanding the world that regard agency as emanating from intra-actions (Barad, 2007) between entities, both human and non-human. Papers which engage with the following questions will be considered for this stream: