"A Kind of Sea to Be in Together": Collective Correspondences in the Odd Lab

• In Event: Impersonal Intimacies: Rethinking Relationality in the Ontological Turn

Abstract

Objectives
The ‘Odd Lab’, is an emergent space and time for correspondences between researchers, data, and the multiple sites and conditions addressed in a multi-disciplinary project, ‘Odd: Feeling different in the world of Education’. The lab is considered as a constellation of methods for ‘correspondence’ (Ingold, 2017) and ‘re-turning’ research material (Barad, 2014). Articulating the particular processes, times and spaces generated by a series of ‘Odd Labs’, we discuss the lab’s potential as a diffractive method, a space of collaborative thinking through practice, and the possibilities and challenges of the research collective.

Theoretical framework
Drawing on a New Materialist understanding of ‘intra–active’ agents (Barad 2003), the labs generate points of visibility (Harrington, 2015), in a process of ongoing correspondence ‘with…with …with’ materials, data, the space and community of the school, and each-other (Ingold 2016). As prospecting, non-yet-knowing, the political potential of the lab could be considered akin that of the Minor Gesture (Manning, 2016).

Techniques and mode of inquiry
Odd Labs encompass project discussions, art experiments and workshops relating to the project’s emergent interdisciplinary ethnography. This space brings the interplay of forces that emerge from lines of anthropological, artistic and educational inquiry together with project partners to discuss and actively work with research questions, odd activities, processes and events.

Materials
The labs have generated artefacts, temporary installations, micro-performances. Reflections from the labs exist as audio files, partial transcriptions, field notes, drawings and photographs of remnants of encounters. Data is ‘remixed’ (Claisse & Sun, 2015) or even regurgitated, and becomes something else…in which our subjectivities are fully acknowledged as folding into the situations of the project.

Conclusions
This experimental space enabled the interrogation of interweaving disciplinary lines, trails of thinking, practices and movement producing patterns of interference, and making a difference to understandings of odd-ness. A pastry cutter pierced the skin of a gigantified hand written journal entry, mouth-sounds were generated from a re-reading of the cut out fragments of words. Images were revealed as a way of thinking through, contingent material rather than a fixed ‘picturing’ or account. Discussions about disciplinary ways of seeing generated unsettling understandings of data.

Significance
In the Lab the contributing disciplines of art, anthropology and education live concurrently, whilst also traversing methods and activities to (re)configure ideas, practices directions. The shared commitment of the research collective to 'feeling different in the world of education' has generated opportunities to grapple with delicate methodological tensions, infectious mixtures and complex interwoven entanglements. The Lab has offered alternative ways to consider data as unfixed, as a live material.

Discussing modes of escape from the regimented time of the institution, Jill Stoner lists ‘tapping, scratching, reading, writing, gazing and pacing’ (Stoner, 2012). These exploratory, improvisory and open-ended tendencies that arise out of pleasure, curiosity, conversation or rest. The ‘worrying’ of research matter with brain and body in the lab, generates a space of intimate research that brings us close to the experience of others through practice.

Authors

• Jo Ray, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University