Diffracting Socially Just Pedagogies Through Stained Glass

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-6 - Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn, and Socially Just Pedagogies and Curricula

Abstract

This paper was generated through our in/determinate relationships with Theo, a fellow colleague, a social and academic activist, a recovering addict and a PhD student, who left our living space during 2014 - an untimely and unexpected death, yet a consequence of an iterative desire to end a troubled/ing life. Theo was passionate about social justice. His absence/presence continues to connect us all. We wrote this paper collaboratively to consider how our inter-relationships with Theo and each other affected our notions of socially just pedagogies. In considering what socially just pedagogies mean from a posthuman perspective, this process has been beneficial in developing a better understanding of each other's’ experiences, power relations, and material realities, helping us develop a more 'compassionate and enlarged view of the world' (Bozalek 2011, 481). Thus the purpose of this paper is to examine how our entangled relationships with Theo mattered and continue to matter in relation to our becomings as academics from various higher education institutions who are committed to practicing socially just pedagogies.

The intensities arising from our connections with Theo continue to affect and move us all. While different relationships were formed as we socially interacted with him, we were and continue to be part of the intra-actions generated through the inter-relationships and ‘mutual intelligibility’ of ourselves with/in space, time, and matter - what Barad (2007) refers to as ‘spacetimematterings’ (182). By examining the entangled relationalities between ourselves and non-human forces through diffraction, it is possible to make connections between entities that do not appear to be proximate in space and time’ (Barad 2007, 74). Although Theo is no longer physically present with us, these intra-actions continue in ways that matter across space and time

Barad notes that ‘[d]iffractive readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements.’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 50). We would like to believe that this is the manner with which we engaged with Theo’s texts, transcriptions and communications.

This paper was inspired by artefacts and memories from Theo Combrinck, an educator who shone light and love onto and through us, a group of educators connected to him in different ways. Yet there was also a sense of brokenness, like the stained glass he patterned through different shapes and colour combinations as he worked through his addictions. In generating this paper, the assemblage of text-Theo-group moved through a period of several months to diffractively explore intra-actions from the past that remain with us and will continue into the future towards developing socially just pedagogies in different fields of education. As Bozalek (in press) points out 'what happens in a posthuman socially just pedagogy is often unexpected and acts as a catalyst for something new emerging'.

The generative process of our individual and collective becomings through Theo illustrate how the collaborative energy of co-constituted relationships contribute an affective response towards developing socially just pedagogies.

Author

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape