PhEmaterialism Methodologies/Pedagogies: Gender Jars and String Figure Kin-shipping

• In Event: PhEmaterializing Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper outlines PhEmaterialism research methodologies, pedagogies and curricular inventions in both secondary school and university classrooms in the UK. PhEmaterialism broken down combines posthumanism (Ph) and the new materialisms (materialism) but specifically focuses on understanding the FEMINIST (PhEm) implications of these strands currently flourishing in educational research (Authors, 2015; Taylor and Hughes, 2016). We demonstrate PhEmaterialism is best conceived as intra-activist research assemblages that traverse the threshold of teaching, research, engagement and activism, foregrounding ethical response-ability in research methodology and teaching relations.

PhEmaterialism is informed by Feminist philosophy and science including Rosi Braidotti (2013), Karen Barad (2007) and Donna Haraway (2008; 2016). In this paper, we show how key concepts from these scholars including figurations, string figures, intra-action and response-ability break apart old binaries between theory and methodology and research and teaching. Phematerialism enlivens onto-epistemelogical blurrings, where objectivity and positivisms (and attendant psychosocial distancing techniques) are rendered un-ethically disengaged by failing to understand researcher and teacher becomings and effects/affects.
PhEmaterialism methodologies prioritize materiality and more than human affect in order to generate new becomings in our classrooms and research. We explore two examples of PhEmateriaism in practice: gender jarring amongst secondary school students; and string figuring pedagogies in the university classroom. The gender jars enabled a more activist and arts based space for young people to generate their own data and messages of social change through drawing on the jar, in the jar, and using words, pictures, and symbols. Through participating in the ‘Affect Yarn Workshop’ in an MA gender class, students threaded meaningful objects to one another creating a collective string figuration charting relations and finding ‘kin’ amidst the student body.

The gender jar methodology and pedagogy generated attunement to the affective qualities of what Jane Bennet (2010) calls ‘thing power’. We experimented with the discursive-materialisation of jar: jar as a verb (e.g. unsettling, destabilising, vibrating, jolting) and the physical object jar (e.g. as a vessel, a container). We explored how the messages in the jars offered profound insights into young people’s complex desires for gender change. The images and reflections from the kin-shipping practices in the yarn workshop mobilised a re-configuring of the bodies and materialities in and beyond the learning in the classroom space. New relays and returns, giving and receiving, mixed-up times and affective response-abilities traversed across the assembled sets of hands, bodies, memories, materialities, and movements.

Both the gender jarring and string figuring pedagogies have been formalised as curricular interventions in various educational spaces - via a national youth activist resource for secondary schools and in higher education BA and MA courses. However, we emphasize that PhEmaterialism intra-activist research assemblages and pedagogies are re-enlivening the relations of curriculum, teaching, research, ethics and impact far beyond the traditional boundaries of academic engagements.

Authors

• Jessica Lenore Ringrose, Institute of Education - London

• Emma Renold, Cardiff University