Wayward academia—Wild, Connected, and Solitary Diffractions in Everyday Praxis

Abstract

In this article, I study the everyday conduct of pedagogies in the wild in contemporary academia by means of an analysis of modes of attention in random “thicker ‘moments’of spacetimemattering” (Barad, 2014, p. 169). These modes are discussed with the help of the notion of diffraction. I identify three modes of attention—the solitary, the connected, and the wild—that manifest themselves mainly as tensions between several modes. The study leads me to suggest that critical feminist scholarship explicitly aiming to disrupt and trouble normative academia often reproduces competitive, nervous practices, linear onto-epistemologies, and the commodification of both scholars and scholarship. These scholarly practices occur among students and supervisors alike, often in the name of necessity and even survival. Yet, despite the anxiety-inducing aspects of contemporary academia, diffractive moments have a powerful presence, too. In such moments, a wild and responsible otherwise is imagined and diffracted.

Transformation toward sustainability in Finnish teacher education policy: Promises and shortcomings

“…Current new materialist thinking brings also these multiple strands together in discourses that adopt a multi-disciplinary approach. For instance, Burns' (2018) consideration on transformation as a relational process is in alignment with the need stressed by new materialist thinkers (e.g., Barad, 2007;Geerts and Carstens, 2019;Oinas, 2021) for education grounded upon a relational ontology. A relational ontological orientation seeks ethical responses to bodily entanglements and material assemblages and is based on the principle that these are co-constituted in relation to multiple others, human and more-thanhuman.…”

Diffracting Structure/Agency Dichotomies, Wave/Particle Dualities, and the Citational Politics of Settler Colonial Scholars Engaging Indigenous Studies Literature

“…Scholars of the social have applied diffractive analysis to a wide variety of topics, from computation (Østerlund et al, 2020), literature review (Murris & Bozalek, 2019), interview analysis (Taguchi, 2012), scholarly writing (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017); ethnographic research (Gullion, 2018; Schneider, 2002), sociology (Doucet, 2018), quantification in social analysis (Dixon-Román, 2016), mixed methods research (Fox & Alldred, 2015; Uprichard & Dawney, 2019), and narrative methods of inquiry (Coulter, 2020; Gough, 1994), to institutionalized racism (Motala & Stewart, 2021; Rosiek, 2019), gender (Mazzei, 2014; Taguchi & Palmer, 2013), curriculum (Pratt, 2021); mathematics education (Palmer, 2011), anti-oppressive education (Huddleston, 2022; Mattar, 2021), religious education (Du Preez & Simmonds, 2021), early childhood education (Davies, 2014; Warren, 2020), higher education (Bozalek et al, 2016; Hickey-Moody et al, 2016; Oinas, 2021), and others. The forms taken by these applications of diffractive analysis have varied almost as widely as the topics to which they have been applied.…”