Wearable Technologies: Becoming-Machinic in Urban Schools

• In Event: 52.026 - Research Methodologies and Attunement to the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

Recent developments in social science research and particularly in curriculum scholarship have put into question research, data, and knowledge production. St. Pierre (2013), for example, questions data and the methodological tools that capture or confine it. This paper responds to the posthumanist and/or new materialist call to disrupt and dismantle disciplinarity and the methodological practices that are in place.

Inquiring into new methodological landscapes through deleuze|guattarian (1986; 1977; 1987) philosophy, affect theory, and Braidotti’s (2002; 2013) nomadic theories, this paper examines the practice of group running as a method that creates in excess of the running-body as form/data.
In social science research the running body has been theorized in relation to many fields of study, including physical education (Larsson and Quennerstedt, 2012) and media and gender studies (Ringrose and Renold, 2013). In curriculum research, running has been explored as a pedagogical practice through co-constructed running-body narratives, which served to document the relational process of research (Sanders-Bustle & Oliver, 2001). The running body, however, has not been theorized through audio-visual technologies and in particular wearable technologies, such as the GoPro. Indeed a great deal of research has been produced on the relationship between technology and the body (Braidotti, 2002; Hayles, 2012, Weaver, 2010). Particularly in feminist research, Haraway’s (1991) pioneering work has certainly altered academic landscapes in ways that question, not only the capacity of technologies but the companionship of nonhuman species (see Haraway, 2008). Bearing traces of Haraway’s work, Braidotti (2013) in her recent book, The Posthuman, argues that scholarship must move away from knowledge entrenched in human reason. As a result of advancements in technologies and the expansion of global economies, she contends that the human-centred way of life is not so clear-cut. Such fuzziness and/or blurring of human-animal-technological-geographic boundaries qualitatively shifts thinking “about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet” (p. 2).

Using the GoPro (a ‘wearable’ camera that produces video and photographic images) as a methodological tool that captures ‘data,’ I argue that wearable technologies also attend to the complexity and capacity of technologically mediated environments in movement. This understanding suggests that the GoPro is implicated in a generative movement, a “plugging-in” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) that works to compose and re-compose human, animal, and thing bodies in an “ecology of operations” (Manning, 2013) that absorbs territorially bounded relations, but also entertains becoming movements that are in emergent relation with the world.

Drawing on a research study conducted in an urban public school, the running group is composed of 10-15 elementary school students and 3-4 teachers who run twice a week in the surrounding community. Through group running and with the use of the GoPro (worn by the researcher and participants), this paper will layout a methodology that resists interpretations of what data ‘is.’ Post-anthropocentric theorizing requires a methodology that is not tied to the human. This methodological move is significant because it recognizes research as the creation of more than the human’s perception and her practices.

Author

• Nikki Rotas, OISE/University of Toronto