Counter-Archives of Feeling: In-School Speculations on Queer Pasts and Anticolonial Futures

• In Event: Unsettling the Future-Past: Methodologies for Haunting, Speculating, and Countering Archives in Curriculum Studies

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Drawing on Cvetkovich’s (2003) notion of queer archives of feeling, this paper discusses data from two in-school ‘speculative’ composition projects (prose, poems and songs) with K-12 students, and our own research-creation practice as artist-teachers to attend to feelings that ‘haunt’ (Derrida, 2005) the present and anticipate radically different future-pasts (Blackman, 2017).

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The archive, as conceptualised by Derrida (1995), is a repository of culture and knowledge. LGBTQI+ (Halberstam, 2002; Edelman, 2004), racialized (Pickens, 2019) and dis/abled (Kafer, 2013) people, their histories, and their futures are excluded from the archive. As Derrida (2002) notes, the archive is not merely a recording of the past, but is “shaped by the future” (p. 40). As an intervention into archival logic, Cvetkovich (2003) outlines how queer archives of feeling are “composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science” (p. 268). Following Cvetkovich, our paper discusses how speculative writing as an artistic and methodological worlding practice might rupture the logic of the archive through voicing different interpretations and propositions of the past, and future (Haraway, 2016).

Methods
We worked with participants in three different sites: a linguistically diverse but economically-deprived Kindergarten classroom; an inner-city grade 9 classroom; and together for the last five years as teacher-researchers. The compositions took the form of songs, poems, and prose that conceptualized different future-pasts. As queer artists, researchers, and educators, we embed our practice in literature focused on speculative archives as sites “for imagining other, possibly queerer, worlds” (Luciano and Chen, 2015, p. 188) and as qualitative researchers acknowledge that we have a “response-ability for the [speculative] world-making we participate in” (Truman, 2019. p. 32). Although the compositions are ‘speculative’ they are still ‘real’ and have material effects on both the authors and readers.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or material
Data sources include several speculative compositions by Grade 1 children, Grade 9 Literature students, and from our own creative practice.

Significance
Amidst a global rise in racist, ableist and queerphobic hate (e.g. Marsh et al., 2019), ‘queer’ speculative interventions in the form of creative writing and sonic composition offer students, teachers and researchers a conceptual output to propose a more just world. The findings of this paper will benefit teachers and researchers interested in speculative composition as both a research method, and research output, as well as the transformative dimensions of creative practice in curriculum research.

Authors

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne

• David Ben Shannon, Manchester Metropolitan University