Odd Experiment 1: Sensing the School

• In Event: 45.057 - Odd Encounters: Other-Than-Conventional Relations in School

Abstract

Purpose
Contributing to the Odd project, this paper is the earliest attempt to find a form of writing that transmits the experiences of a group of 9-year-old children, working with an artist to see, smell, taste, feel or hear ‘oddness’ in the school building. We document the curiosities evoked when an education researcher observes an emerging interrogation of the meniscus of bodies and the school becoming blurred; a process of incessant de/re/constructing skin and surface, insides and outsides, holes, rips, sinkings and punctures. Artist and education researcher are part of the odd encounters, inhabiting the incendiary space of their disciplinary difference(s), and its potential to explode and construct anew, understandings of data, findings, theory and knowledge.

Theoretical framework
Rooted in new materialisms (Haraway, 1988; Barad, 2007), the ‘instruments’ used to view events in school are deemed inseparable from emerging phenomena. Rather than a “conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988: 581), the mixtures at work in the production of events become intra-actions of life and non-life, nature and artifact. Brought to bear on this assemblage are new geographical methods of spatial analysis, e.g. McCormack’s “mingling of concepts, percepts and affects [that] afford opportunities for experimenting with relations across and between bodies in movement” (2013: 13).

Methods
Interdisciplinary ethnographic work with its odd tensions and infectious combinations enables diverse disciplines to live concurrently in school, whilst diverging and knotting to (re)configure ideas, practices directions. The artist’s practice unpacks the political construction of school, sensing the co-constitutive realm of individual, social and space. The children are invited to ‘find oddness’, constituting the phenomena as separate to them in space, but also locatable only through their own experiencing of it. As tour guides and researchers in the space they know, stethoscopes, endoscopes, prisms, magnifiying lenses, coloured gels, mirrors and tuning forks were used to put a process into motion, as is usual in most artistic practice-based research.

Data
Across six groups of children an extraordinary discourse grew and rolled into the next group. Places considered odd were consistent - often edgeland where the safe space of school broke down into disorder at the fence; spaces where access was usually denied, places where the past bled through, jumbled with the present. The most familiar item became odd through synaesthetic, ventriloquist approaches; sounds heard through tables, earth and trees morphed into speech and tears. Photographs of surfaces, including skin and tables were countered with myriad photos of holes and journeys into inaccessible spaces using the endoscope.

Results
Access to these particular simple investigative devices articulated the school space as a living organism. There was a kind of popular culture inflected living vitalism, with alive and dead mixed up. The school became a site of the zombie film, or the jinn narrative, where different forms of life existed with the everyday.

Significance
This process of interdisciplinary research is critical as it contributes theoretically, methodologically and empirically to an emerging field of work that attends to difference differently (Barad, 2014). The research team are committed to the creative potential and promise of innovation, strangeness, and aliveness.

Authors

• Becky Clair Shaw, Sheffield Hallam University

• Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University