Toward a Posthumanist Institutional Ethnography in Education: Viscous Matterings and Gendered Bodies

• In Event: 47.025 - Entangled Sensualities: Bodies, Arts, Aesthetics, and Beyond in Qualitative Methodologies

Abstract

This paper develops Posthuman Institutional Ethnography to analyse how gendering processes work through intra-actional practices distributed through and diffusively enacted in human and other-than-human institutional relations. We situate posthumanism’s decentring of the human and its radical reworking of agency in direct allegiance with the Annual Meeting’s themes. Thus, we reimagine ‘democratic research practices’ by including humans and nonhumans in a flatter ontology which offers a more inclusive and ecological perspective for education. Drawing on data from two projects, and putting Nancy Tuana’s (2008) concept of viscous porosity to work, we illuminate how Posthuman Institutional Ethnography provides (a) new theoretical purchase on the fluid materialisation of gendered institutional politics, and (b) new analytical insights from the close-up empirical investigations it requires.

Authors

• Nikki Fairchild, University of Chichester

• Carol A. Taylor, The University of Bath