"New" Research for New Collaborations in the 21st Century

• In Event: Educational Collaborations and the Ontological Turns

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper describes the urgency of research-based collaborations with all education and other stakeholders as we struggle to survive in the era of the Anthropocene, knowing that educational research and practice will be for naught if humans can no longer inhabit this Earth. Fear of the post human—an Earth with no humans—has sent researchers scouring through history to resurrect knowledge we’ve lost and also forward toward what “might be” to imagine a different future on this planet. This paper describes “new” educational research imaginaries that take very seriously what must be thought to survive and how we must help each other think differently across disciplinary and national boundaries.

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks: new materialism, new empiricism, posthumanism

Mode of inquiry: Methodological/theoretical.

Data sources, evidence, warrants: This paper is grounded in the new empirical, new material, affective, post human, and immanentist approaches to inquiry recently taken up by educational and social science researchers.

Results and significance: This paper explains how inquiry coming out of the new material, new empirical, affective, and posthuman turns which use different approaches to inquiry—e.g., post qualitative, thought-without-method, minor inquiry— enables different questions and collaborations with different stakeholders to invent a future and a people to come. One could argue that the onto-epistemological arrangements we inherited from the Enlightenment and have continued to use for centuries are simply inadequate for the work that must be done to save the planet. Within that old arrangement, only certain questions can be asked, methodologies be used, and answers produced. This work becomes repetitious and often uninteresting as researchers fill small “gaps” in knowledge rather than risk overturning old structures so that something entirely different can be thought and lived. Normalized ideas of what counts as collaboration may likewise limit our imaginations as we struggle with tired dilemmas and repeat exhausted arguments within and across the same groups. Some of the “new” work coming out of 21st century turns challenges us to do something different from the beginning, to NOT begin our thought and inquiry with the normal but to begin inquiry and collaboration by engaging different systems of thought that can re-orient our projects and invent new projects with new stakeholders. Educators have always been engaged with the public, but the 21st century demands we also connect and re-connect with the rich, diverse communities of academia where difference abounds. This means that educators can energetically engage the humanities, the natural sciences, philosophy, the arts, and disciplines other than the social sciences where we lately seem stuck. There is real urgency in imagining collaboration differently, but that work begins with different ways of thinking, which this paper describes.

Author

• Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, University of Georgia