Impersonal Intimacies: Rethinking Relationality in the Ontological Turn

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The session critically examines the status of relationality within contemporary methodologies that are influenced by the post-human, new materialist and ontological ‘turns’ in theory. This body of work has disparate theoretical influences, but shares an investment in process ontologies of becoming and more-than-human connectedness. It opposes the human exceptionalism that has perpetuated inequalities and poisoned planetary futures. The presentations share these commitments, but argue that new concepts of relationality are urgently needed if inquiry is genuinely to move beyond the legacies of colonialism and human prerogative that still inhabit its conceptual architecture and its practices. The session provides tentative insights into how altered relations and impersonal intimacies might conceptualised and mobilised in the doing of (post)qualitative inquiry.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Qualitative Research

Chair

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon

Papers

• Intimacy: The Radical Difference of New Encounters in the Classroom - Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University; Amanda Ravetz, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Exploring the Nearness and Farness of Intimacy: Being "In It Together" in the Sonic Radiator-Cathedral - Jo Ray, Manchester Metropolitan University; Becky Clair Shaw, Sheffield Hallam University

• "A Kind of Sea to Be in Together": Collective Correspondences in the Odd Lab - Jo Ray, Manchester Metropolitan University; Rachel Holmes, Manchester Metropolitan University

• "The Eye Jumps": On Seeing Without Reading - Maggie MacLure, Manchester Metropolitan University

Discussant

• Alecia Youngblood Jackson, Appalachian State University