Entangled Environments: Sensing the Material That Makes and Is Made

• In Event: Reconceptualizing Learning With New Qualitative Methods in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

As schools embrace gamification of learning (i.e. escape rooms) there is much to be revealed in the ways participants engage with such structures of play (Nicholson, 2015). In a microethnographic project considering the learning dimensions of an escape room, we wonder: How do materials and participants, traced through broader trajectories of action, accomplish joint intra-action?

This paper offers a theoretical invitation to bring together the work of new materialism with that of critical feminist and queer of color theories as ways to attune toward possibility. Through Barad’s (2003; 2007) theories of intra-action and entanglement, we think about the relations between people and materials, where human and non-human are co-produced through discourse-in-action in moments of joint action. For Ahmed (2006; 2010), people orient toward objects through relational alignment, where bodies arrive with objects and objects arrive with bodies. Hence, “We touch things, and are touched by things.” (Ahmed, 2010, p.245). Participants work with objects in ways that align with the ‘clues’ they are designed to offer and more. Ahmed’s ideas of orientation, and particularly of disorientation (when bodies and objects arrive in unintended or unfamiliar ways), help us think about participants’ relations with object/materials. We also move from thinking about objects and use to thinking about material potential and the process of becoming (Ingold, 2012).

Data for this study was generated by five undergraduate adults “learning to escape” three multi-linear escape rooms. The larger data corpus included observational notes, 1:1 participant pre-, mid- and post- interviews, GoPro recordings of activity and orientations from the live activity, and audio recordings. For this paper we focused on material-participant action in the video recording of one escape, The Storyteller’s Secret. Following Erickson’s (2006) whole-to-part analytic procedure, we viewed the escape room footage, creating time-stamped field notes about verbal and non-verbal phenomena. By thinking with the data and concepts brought by Ahmed and Barad, we traced the material sensemaking activity of the escape room as: the intra-action between the materiality of the environment and participants, or communicative materials; the ways participants took up those materials, as playful sensemaking; and the non-material matter that was critical to escape, or the materials of memory.

In considering the ways escape rooms and gaming more broadly are being taken up in classrooms, it is important to be vigilant to the logics they embody, and erase. Escape, not from the room, but through the routinized ways of orienting to objects, produces a specific sort of success, and a specific sort of person. The ideas and actions of those learning to escape become tracked in and directed by singularity, uncovering the room’s logics rather than following their own. The material is structured and acts on participants to get in line, or get stuck. Yet, within the singular structure, and in their attempts to learn the logics of the room, participant learners create their own actions and logics along the way. Learners in school, too, take many paths to which we might become more attuned.

Authors

• Ali Blake, Boston College

• Melita Morales, Boston College