A Phenomenological Collective

• In Event: Unsettling Traditions: Reimagining the Craft of Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Inquiry

Abstract

Purposes:
Our collective formed as a group of students and former students at the University of Minnesota who were interested in using post-intentional phenomenology for typical academic pursuits: answering a preliminary examination question, crafting a dissertation design, and getting published. Yet, we found ourselves trying to do so in an era of global political upheaval. Having witnessed the normalization of oppression, marginalization, and social injustice, we became concerned that the various State apparatus were becoming increasingly insulated and polarized, regressing from the long-established alliances of our common humanity, to politically and socially expedient filiation, and finally to a stagnant and entrenched isolation. The rise of right-wing authoritarianism worldwide, crystallized in the election of Donald Trump, had given us a kick in our complacency.

Perspectives:
In response, we are convinced of the necessity of public education and dream of possibility. As individual scholars, we have each embraced the need for scholarship to forcefully advocate for social justice and to confront the interiority of our disciplines: humanizing mathematics, instigating student authorship in the arts, valuing immigrant knowledges that encounter intellectual borderlands, countering monolingualism, and queering identities and research.

Methods:
Within our individual projects, we have crafted research texts that utilize post-intentional phenomenology to varying degrees and place it in dialogue with other methodological, epistemological, and ontological traditions as assemblages. Mindful of the various unfolding crises outside of the academy, we crafted metaphors to distill the complexity of lived-experience of our phenomena, authoring them in literal conversation with each other and in a shared virtual space. We then collectively wrote in, with, and across our metaphors in order to analyze our original works as possible epiphenomena of our Becoming.

Empirical Materials:
We have embraced the challenge of working as an assemblage of scholars to create new assemblages as a post-intentional phenomenological method of exploring social apparatus. We therefore draw upon our explorations of the tentative manifestations of phenomena, grounded in lived experience and made vital through metaphor.

Conclusions:
Reading through and across our phenomenological explorations of social apparatus, we locate the metaphors that manifest in our several projects in a plane of consistency. While we remain bounded by the milieu in which we attempt to destratify, decode, and deterritorialize our individual liminal understandings, we are freed within that milieu to explore different lines of flight, to move between plateaus, to experience different intensities, and to experience Becoming through this new involution (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).

Significance:
Through this work, we embrace an ontology of conflict and disruption as temporary manifestations of seemingly disparate phenomena from unrelated disciplines which incessantly flow and are de-/re- territorialized in an always-becoming milieu of involution. The rich metaphors of Deleuzoguattarian thought have helped us to find ourselves in this
in-between/hybrid space— the epistemological/ontological borderlands— as we are Becoming a pack, a collective of scholars and scholarship that begins to realize the potential for epistemo-ontological activism to move us into a space where we are all unsettling, seeking fluidity, avoiding finality, and in so doing Becoming-human.

Authors

• Caleb Zilmer

• Timothy Babulski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Karen Colum, Minnesota State University - Mankato

• Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, Saint Paul College

• Charity Tatah Mentan, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities