Diffractive pedagogies: dancing across new materialist imaginaries

Abstract

Women, as a class, have provided thought for far too long with images or metaphors for whatever vice or virtue. (Gatens, 1996: 135) Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. (Barad, 2012: 16) These quotes identify two issues central to our argument. Firstly: that what is uncomfortable, unthought, indeterminate, is unconsciously feminized. Secondly: this process of feminizing the new, puts finite boundaries on what might be made to matter. We reflect on our experiences of some of the political and pedagogical problems encountered when the university curriculum is opened up to arts practice based learning. We consider ways that bodies involved in such generative processes of mattering can become controlled by fear and what is made to matter is thus policed. Drawing on the design and delivery of a university level practice based arts subject, we argue that embodied creative processes employed in pedagogical contexts can challenge and extend those who learn from reproducing stereotypical constructions of their identity, or being reproduced in line with dominant tropes of representation. For example, many of our students are Muslim women. These students made dance films in which their identities were constructed and performed in relation to landscape ('Urban Dreams') or power relationships ('Puppet Dance'). The presentations of British Islamic femininity these dance films offer are critical, aesthetic engagements with lived contexts and the power relationships embedded in everyday life. Both stand against the perception of the silenced or subservient woman, and were produced after initial anxiety about whether or not contemporary movement practice could be seen as congruent with a religious identity. Not only did the contemporary movement practice end up sitting with our students' articulations of femininity, it provided a means of critically reflecting on, and developing religious identity. Yet in order to arrive at this point, the students had to embrace the unknown and sit with the discomfort that the unknown can bring.We write with the conviction that creative practices can remake reductive, historically determined and governed images, figures or metaphors assigned to differently gendered, differently abled, diversely classed and raced bodies. Building on a feminist investment in the agency of materiality, we think through the problem of the body as a site of learning in the university. As Elspeth Probyn writes in her article "Teaching Bodies", We may often teach potentially 'messy' topics like embodiment or sexual identity. At the same time the zone of contact between student and teacher is heavily policed by ourselves and our institutions. So while we offer material that potentially sets off lines of flight, we then have to continually re-territorialize the very bodies that have been set in motion through our teaching. It's a situation that is bound to veer towards abstraction, and at times a lifeless rendition of hot subjects. (Probyn 2004: ...

Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery

“…Vital feminist knowledges escape capture in biopolitical formations, their visceral, affective qualities disturb normalised masculine ordering to produce diffractive patterns that are necessary to think otherwise (Anderson, 2012; Barad, 2007;Bennett, 2010). Material feminisms have conceived the political in multiple ways across theoretical, empirical, activist and pedagogical work to mobilise different desires for moving-thinking-feeling our way through and against pathologised formulations of mental health (within and beyond the academy) (Braidotti, 2013;Colebrook, 2008;Grosz, 2013;Hickey-Moody, Palmer, & Sayers, 2016;Johnson, 2015;Norman & Moola, 2017;Washick, Wingrove, Ferguson, & Bennett, 2015).…”

“…There is much to learn from women's subjugated knowledges of recovery that can trouble the micropolitical assemblages that perpetuate distress, as well as producing other ways to feel-move-think our way through more vital relations. In the traditions of critical, post/decolonial and feminist pedagogies, learning and recovery also involve the practices of unlearning master narratives and normative framings of issues, identities and solutions (Cvetkovich, 2012;Hickey-Moody et al, 2016;Mills, 2014).…”

Theoretical and Methodological Trends in Environmental Education Research

“…Think of Barad's (2007) concept of intra-action, Grosz's (2010) concept of freedom and Kirby's (2011) concept of earth's grammar, to construct diffractive strategies of reading data with each of these theoretical concepts. Think of diffractive analysis that attends to complexities of, for example, researching "dance" as agential and relational (Hickey-Moody, Palmer & Sayers, 2016).…”

Editorial

“…At this event, PhEmaterialisms formed an affective assemblage, cut through with relational forces that increase or diminish the capacity to act, thereby redefining what agency is and how it works (Bennett, 2010;Jackson, 2017) (PhEmatrialism I Philm). Likewise, we tapped into the praxis of scholarship, showing how all pedagogical processes are affective and considering how these affective forces can be engaged to move education toward new forms of politicized public pedagogies, socialisation and consciousness (Hickey-Moody, 2013;Hickey-Moody et al, 2016;Ringrose, 2018). For instance, Anna Hickey-Moody delivered a dance workshop designed to help us think-feel how bodily forces flow in relation to music, intensities and group processes affect (see Figure 3 below).…”