Re/turning as Slow Onto-Methodology: Affective Reading and Writing Together/Apart in the Turbulent South

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Slow Curricula for Transformative Higher Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
As higher educators based at different institutions, we have found ourselves pulled together/apart with concerns around issues of social justice and the public good in our teaching, learning and research practices in times of contestation in South African universities over the last five years. We are all affected in different ways by issues of continuing inequality and discrimination in our contexts, reflecting wider societal challenges.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Our re/turning encounters have helped us think and work through/with our challenges using a Slow onto-methodology, where our connections re/turn with/in the porous boundaries of work/public/private dis/comforting coffee shop spaces, where we talk, listen, engage, read, share and write about issues that affect us. In its in/determinacy, our writing surfaces our shared vulnerabilities. Curiosity shapes our relations rather than critique, rendering us capable through attentiveness and openness in togetherness, learning with/through our difference(s).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
A relational ontology underpins movements, thoughts and writing enacted over spacetimemattering. Relationality is a key conduit for these affective encounters in and beyond coffee shops that together constitute space/time borderlands. The embodied entanglements / intra-actions / conversations generate ideas and provocations through varying tempos. The same issues re/turn over and over again - challenging, frustrating and affirming us as we grapple with the ambiguous complexities of our situations.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials
This presentation enacts a spatial-temporal diffraction that includes a montage of film, images, text and voice that document of the Slow onto-methodological process that expresses these turbulent affective flows. The presenters will augment the digital presentation by providing some context to the process.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view
In the quest for a different onto-methodological intra-action that responds to the immanence of the events themselves new concepts, knowledges, and practices of relating emerge, which generate propositions for engaging in a Slow onto-methodological encounter.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work
Contrary to the critique that doing "Slow" is a privilege for the already established researcher (Edwards 2018), we propose a Slow methodology that moves away from neoliberal higher education systems that valorise and prioritise measured outcomes and outputs. We therefore make a conscious effort to disrupt the hegemony of market-driven academia and rather attune our bodyminds to the affective spacetimemattering as an essential move to re-establish pleasure in our work. We propose that this approach might provide fruitful provocations for engaging with social justice and public good issues in other HE contexts.

Authors

• Nike Irene Romano, Cape Peninsula University of Technology

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Veronica Ann Mitchell, University of the Western Cape

• Abdullah Bayat, University of the Western Cape

• Daniela Gachago, Cape Peninsula University of Technology