Heterogeneous Collectives: A Posthumanist Rethinking of Collaboration

• In Event: Educational Collaborations and the Ontological Turns

Abstract

Objectives: Education research is an untidy endeavor and recently, this untidiness has proliferated at warp speeds. This is evidenced as research practices respond to the undermining of traditional disciplines via “crossover problems and networking structures [in a context where] stable, coherent areas of knowledge production are rare” (Dyrssen, 2011, p. 234). Concurrently, some theorists are grappling with questions situated in the posthuman turn (Braidotti, 2013) as they struggle to understand a world where “less than human” inhabitants continue to be asymmetrically impacted by a resurgence of global fascism, global capitalism, and threats of global extinction due to renewed nuclear proliferation and climate change.
In this context, this paper offers a posthumanist rethinking of collaboration by engaging with posthuman theories of non-individuated subjectivity. This move is directed toward troubling collaboratives perceived as clearly defined participant groups bound by insides and outsides that can be expanded through rationales of pluralism. While these rationales call for more and more groups to be included, they fail to adequately attend to the entanglement of matter, meaning, the human, and non-human in our contemporary world. By rethinking collaboration through Deleuze’s concept of heterogeneity and Braidotti’s related notions of “heteronomy and multi-faceted relationality” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 145), this paper explores the way reconceptualizing collaboration might help us engage in new modes of ethical behavior that are better suited for the urgency of our times (Braidotti, 2006, 236).
Theoretical Framework: Feminist New Materialisms, Critical Posthumanism
Mode of inquiry: Theoretical
Data: This paper will explore heterogeneity and multi-faceted relationality through the lens of post qualitative research (Lenz-Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017). Research conceived through this lens troubles taken for granted “beliefs about the nature of reality and knowledge-and the appropriate methods to employ given those beliefs” (McCoy, 2012, p. 762) and emphasizes the disconnect between traditional research practices and the posthumanist theories. From this perspective, data is not collected, but is going into many directions at once is no longer in one place (Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013, p. 222). Specifically, “data” takes the form of a 1955 Jet magazine photograph, protruding layers of paint, a leaky pipe, a middle school artist residency, an art museum, a school leader, a doctoral student, and a discursive field saturated with the material collisions surrounding “Black Lives Matter,” pink pussy hats, a women’s march and the Common Core State Standards. Thinking of data in this way, I engage with “techniques of deliberate imprecision” as I explore posthuman collectives constituted through complex, material discursive entanglements and intra-actions that cannot be textualized and coded for interpretive use (Law, 2004, p. 3).

Results and Significance: By engaging with the ‘posthuman turn,’ we are encouraged to build on the generative potential of the critiques of humanism developed by radical epistemologies that aim at a more inclusive practice of becoming human” (Bignall and Braidotti, 2019, p. 1). Inclusion conceived in this way rejects the dichotomies of communities with insides and outsides, and instead, seeks to engage with “complexity and relationality, [in ways that] facilitate cross-border connections and alliances among differently located constituencies” (Braidotti, 2006, p. 67).

Author

• Mary Newbery, Quinnipiac University