The Materiality of Language and Educational Practices for Justice in the Anthropocene

• In Event: 65.079 - Roundtable Session 23
  In Roundtable Session: 65.079-16 - Language and Semiotics Within "New Materialist" Research Methodologies

Abstract

Objectives
This paper constitutes a theoretical inquiry of how a New Materialisms (Dolphinj & van der Tuin 2012) theory of language can be used in thinking education towards justice for both human and nonhuman agents in what is more commonly known as the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene: that is, the present era where the human is understood as the prime agent of altering (and sustaining) the earth’s interacting psychical, chemical and biological life support systems.

Theoretical framework
In a ‘new materialist’ theorizing, language is understood to be non-representative and part of specific material arrangements that become co-productive of the phenomena that constitute reality (Barad 2007). This paper theorizes the possibility of making the materiality of language productive for educational practices towards justice, by putting to work what Claire Colebrook (2014) suggests as anthropocence thought experiments and the practicing of new materialist modes of ‘reading’ various kinds of ‘texts’, such as geological, ecological, neurological, musical, physiological, material ‘texts’. This is a practice of reading also in terms of ‘inhuman’ perceptions, and reading the variations and the multiplicities of cuts of a phenomenon of reality (Colebrook 2014).

Mode of inquiry
This inquiry of the potentials of a ‘new materialist’ thinking about language, theorizes by diffractively weaving various ‘texts’ “into each other” (Barad 2007) as well as into data in the form of photographic images taken from a study in early childhood education (Gustafsson 2014), in order to become productive of “differing” (Barad 2007); i.e., new ways of thinking and conceptualizing.

Materials
The theorizing makes productive already published photographs from video recordings collected during an ethnographic study of explorative dance-sessions in a preschool in Sweden (Gustafsson 2014).

Conclusion and significance
Language becomes a forceful material agent when intra-acting with other material agents in the practicing of anthropocene thought experiments involving teachers and children. This is a practice that experiments with controversy and the fact that “it could be otherwise” (Mol 2009). Apart from contributing to educational practices for a situated justice of both human and nonhuman agents, this practice, with its’ ‘new materialist’ modes of ‘reading’ various forms of ‘texts’ (Colebrook 2014), can also be transposed to implications for empirical ‘post-qualitative’ methodologies (MacLure 2013).

References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.
Colebrook, C. (2014) Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1. Open Humanities Press.
Dolphijn, R. and van der Tuin, I. (2012) New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies. University of Michigan Library: Open Humanities Press.
Gustafsson, L. (2014) Dans, kropp och experimenterande i förskolan. [Dance, Body and Experimentation in Preschool]. Educational doctorate thesis, Stockholm University.
MacLure, Maggie (2013) Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 26(6): 658–667.
Mol, A. (2009) “What methods do.” Alexander von Humboldt Lecture Series, 2008-2009 on "Reflexive Methodology: on doing qualitative, post-positivist research". February 5, 2009: University of Amsterdam. The Netherlands.

Author

• Hillevi Lenz Taguchi, Stockholm University