Agential Realism as a Form of Political Activism in De/colonizing Teacher Education: Are We Also Animals?

• In Event: The Viability of Change: Challenging Established Norms and Structures in Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
The objective of my presentation is to show the powerful de/colonising work of agential realism in teacher education. It gives a flavor of how students’ philosophical engagement with picturebook art generated the question Are we also animals? This question in turn inspired their visual essays and artwork when we rhizomatically took the concept ‘Animal’ on a fieldtrip to an abandoned zoo on colonized land. The students charcoal drawings do not represent, but express and touch the virtual animals that are there and not there at the very same time on the edge of being and no/thingness - drawn into non/existence through the methodology of temporal diffraction (Barad, 2017, 2018). Quantum theorist and critical posthumanist Karen Barad (2017, p.33) explains how “Jetztzeit is a crystallisation of times, of multiple temporalities, blasted out of the continuum of history: a superposition of times – moments from the past – existing in the thick-now of the present”. The objective is to show how infinite possibilities for curriculum enactment are/were contained in the ‘thick now-time’ with/in our ‘zoo’ quantum entanglement.

Theoretical Framework
I adopt Karen Barad’s agential realism as a ‘theory’ to de/colonise teacher education (Barad, 2007, 2014, 2017, 2018). The philosophy of agential realism troubles the very notion of ‘theorical framework’. Theorising involves literally being in touch with the world – teaching or researching is not something that is located in human agency. ‘Access’ to the world does not require mediation, whether by consciousness, experience or language (Barad, 2007, p.409 ftn9). All knowledge is constructed through “direct material engagement with the world” and not by “standing at a distance and representing” the world (Barad, 2007, p.49). Agential realism shifts representationalism to performativity, thereby diffracting through Foucault’s notion of the discursive. Discursive practices are intrinsically material and include the more-than-human (Barad, 2007, pp.147-148).

Modes of Inquiry
Inspired by Karen Barad’s writings on touching (2012) and temporal diffraction in particular (2007, 2018), I re-turn to (diffract through) data created with my students as part of a teacher education programme. This method is a kind of ‘slow’ pedagogy and scholarship, re-turning and re-turning again (and again) to the ‘same’ pedagogical documentation on Google drive data, creating ‘thicker’ understandings (a ‘worlding’ process; Haraway, 2016). Through Reggio Emilia-inspired practices (progettazione), a rhizomatic curriculum in higher education was enacted disrupting a metaphysics of presence, the temporality of progress and binary logic.

Scholarly Significance
Agential realism and the postqualitative methodology of diffraction (re-turning and intra-action) exemplify what makes posthuman scholarship distinct in its affirmative forward movement, its radical activism and the real difference it makes ontologically, epistemologically and ethically. My paper shows how agential realism invites us to sense the real force of imaginings as students are becoming more sensitised to human exceptionalism and anthropocentrism provoking them to reconfigure colonising relationships with other animals. Their diffractive artwork, essays and conversations show their disruption of the colonising nonfiction/fiction, culture/nature and science/art binaries and call us to think from animals (Despret, 2015), desperately needed in the Anthropocene

Author

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu