Reconfiguring the Educator as Pregnant Stingray: Reading Three Images Diffractively Through One Another

• In Event: 69.049 - Critical Posthumanism and Diffractive Post-Qualitative Methodologies

Abstract

My paper argues for a reconfiguration of the educator by using the post-qualitative methodology of diffraction. Through a diffractive reading of three familiar figurations: the midwife, the stingray, and the pregnant body I create the ‘superposition’ (an image) of the pregnant stingray to provoke a reimagining of the identity of the educator.

The papers uses the posthuman methodology of diffraction, first developed by Donna Haraway (1988), and built on by Karen Barad through her interpretation of quantum physics (2003, 2007, 2012, 2014). Diffraction means “to break apart in different directions” (Barad, 2014, p.168). Diffraction patterns hold for water waves, as well as sound waves, or light waves. It is where they interfere or overlap that the waves change in themselves in intra-action and create a “superposition” (Barad, 2007, p.76). The diffractive activity of reading three images through one another is methodologically a ‘cutting together-apart’ as one move (Barad, 2014). The ideas remain entwined, nothing is ‘left behind’, because the difference does not exist within ‘itself’, but is exterior (Stengers, 2015). The quantum understanding of diffraction troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy (cutting into two). Differences are not found, but made and their production needs to be queered, that is, the ethicopolitical practice of radically questioning identity and binaries (Barad, 2012). Especially relevant for education this queering includes the disruption of the nature/culture binary, causality, matter, space, and time. Queering is an on-doing of identity.

The diffractive reading is materialised in the image of the pregnant stingray. This experimentation is not a cerebral engagement by the researcher at a distance reflecting on what is happening ‘in’ the world, but advances a performative understanding of technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices.

The new that is produced is the ‘superposition’ of the pregnant stingray – a reconfiguration of the educator that disrupts power producing binaries, such as child/adult, poor/rich, white/black, nature/culture. The figuration of the pregnant stingray makes us think differently about difference (Deleuze’s notion of positive difference), the knowing subject (as indeterminate and unbounded), and creates a more egalitarian and ontoepistemically just relationship ‘between’ learner and educator.


Although diffraction as postqualitative method is gaining traction, the practical implications of using a diffractive methodology for pedagogy and educational research have been explored only recently (see e.g. Lenz Taguchi, 2010; Palmer, 2011; Jackson and Mazzei, 2012; Murris, 2016). More than any other research methodology, diffraction moves beyond power producing binaries and what this means for the reconfiguration of the educator is explicitly explored in this paper.

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town