"I Am With You": What Do (K)Not Pedagogies Produce?

• In Event: What Pedagogies Produce: Teaching Responsible/Response(able) Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose: As qualitative pedagogues, we are often greeted by a chorus of nots that situate us in particular communities and shape our scholarship. As teachers and inquirers, the binary of not/is provides a type of comfortable stability. However, in this paper, we think nots as (k)nots. Knots are relational, entangling multispecies' bodies/stories; as Haraway (2016) argued, “it matters what knots knot knots” (p. 12). (K)nots shift from logics of either/ors to ands (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), (re)orienting not as an opening. A (k)not pedagogy resists closure, putting new things in relation, cultivating shimmers (Rose, 2017). With theory, pedagogy, and art, we wonder, how might we think not as a (k)not?

Theory: With Haraway (2016) we are intertwined in the string figures of our ecologies; our actions have implications. Thus, the relationality of knots provides the framework for our analysis. By noticing the strings that we pass back and forth, we are tuned towards a k(not) pedagogy of creation, connection, and inclusion: one that links the teacher to the student to the artist to the more-than human; one where all hands-hoofs-yarns-loops-tangles are necessary and response-able.

Modes of Inquiry and Data Sources: We take up Haraway’s (2016) methodology of drawing string figures, playing cat’s cradle. In cat’s cradle there is, “a sense of collective work, of one person not being able to make all the patterns alone” (Haraway, 1994, p. 69-70). We play cat’s cradle between qualitative pedagogy and the work of visual artists, Wendy Kawabata and Lisa Kokin, who use yarn, string, and weaving to evoke questions of response-ability and connectedness. String figures spark attunement to our kinships and collective storying. String figuring ensnares us in “webs that cannot be known in advance of venturing among their myriad threads” (Haraway, 2016, p. 132). Our “data” are created in “passing [of] patterns back and forth” (p. 120), the (k)nots of theory, bodies, response-ability, art, and kin-making. Thus, our data is immanent and our process resists method.

Results: About connectivity, Rose (2017) wrote, we “experience life's shimmer as it comes forth in our lives with all manner of tears, happiness, grief, commitment, love, exuberance, and celebration” (p. G60). (K)not pedagogy opens us to these shimmers of ongoing connection as we respond to and make-with our qualitative kin. (K)not pedagogy is mobile, a becoming-with that creates rather than resists complexities. Wendy Kawabata’s (2019) phrase “I am with you,” spelled in string knottings passes back to Haraway, (k)nots our pedagogies, and shimmers relationally in our string figure storying.

Significance: Haraway (2016) explained, living and learning well are relational pursuits: cats’ cradles knotting species and bodies, producing shimmering becomings. By keeping the game going -- by resisting the not/is binary which forestalls potential -- we make openings for new knottings of art and education, theory and practice. Adopting a (k)not pedagogy, means remaining playfully open to new traversals between subjects and bodies and ways of thinking-doing-becoming-with.

Authors

• Kelly Woodall Guyotte, The University of Alabama

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia

• Carlson Coogler, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa