We invite papers and panels in the following streams:

1. New Materialities, Decolonialities, Indigenous Knowledges

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:

• How do the new materialisms aid us in understanding, investigating and analysing the real relationship of forces, which resist easy understandings and applications of decoloniality and the incorporation of indigenous experience in higher education contexts?
• How can the new materialisms shape decolonised pedagogies and healing models that are culturally appropriate and socially relevant? And, the other way around, how can decolonised pedagogies and healing models impact the political impetus of both Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy and the new materialisms?
• What does it mean materially to decolonise desiring-production within systems of higher education?

2. Slow Scholarship

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.

• What can feminist new materialism offer for re/conceptualising a Slow scholarship? How can feminist new materialisms aid us in thinking about pleasure in pedagogical settings? (And why has pleasure been removed from academia?)
• How can southern theories contribute to Slow scholarship in the Academy?
• How would Slow scholarship affect how we do pedagogy, research, reading, writing, publishing and reviewing in higher education? What policies would need to be put in place to enable Slow scholarship in higher education?

3. Arts-Based Pedagogies/Research and Hauntology in Higher Education

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:

• What kinds of ethico-onto-epistemological effects are generated by the dynamic material exchange between makers, materials and processes?
• What a/effective and ethical possibilities do arts-based research and pedagogies offer scholarship and teaching/learning in Higher Education?
• How might critical arts-based pedagogical encounters encourage participants to begin “to forge new categories of thought, construction of new subjectivities and creation of new modes of being and becoming” (Dastile & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013)?
• How can critical arts-based pedagogies challenge both ‘dominant knowledge’ and the power relations that produce and benefit from it ?
• How might critical arts-based pedagogies encourage marginalised students to produce knowledges about their lives that redress issues of exclusion and assimilation?
• How can we pay attention to trauma and affect in arts-based pedagogies as generative rather than pathological?
• How might arts-based research and practices shape and craft a ‘critical approach to arts-based research or a critical framework for research-creation’ that attends to the in(tensions) of doing work in a southern context?

4. Neurotypicality, the Undercommons and Higher Education

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:

• How are those who fall outside of these normative expectations affected by and how do they affect practices in higher education?
• How might higher education be reconfigured through attentiveness to neuro a/typicality to affirm differences in learning?
• How might relational ontologies provide alternative ways of doing higher education which disrupt the neurotypical/atypical binaries?

5. New Materialist Reconfigurings of Methodology in HE and Beyond

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.

• What have the new materialisms brought to educational scholarship in general and to the reconfiguration of HE in particular? How has HE been fertile soil for new materialist methodological innovation?
• What do the methodologies of Lenz Taguchi, Mazzei, St. Pierre, Juelskjaer, Taylor, Bozalek, Ivinson, Renold, Youngblood Jackson, and their colleagues and students bring to both the study of education and to other practices, and how do we get to learn and transpose their lessons?
• How might new materialist transdisciplinary thinking transmute ‘traditional’ disciplinary knowledges?

6. Political Ethics of Care, New Materialism and Just Pedagogies

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:

• How could relational ethics such as the political ethics of care and feminist posthuman ethics be diffractively read through each other to make an input into practising just pedagogies in higher education?
• How might just pedagogies across different disciplinary and geopolitical locations in higher education be reconceptualised, enacted and disseminated using political ethics of care and/or new materialism?
• What are the ethical and political implications of these theoretical frameworks for just pedagogies in higher education?