Pedagogy in the Context of Postfoundational Inquiry: Reading-Writing-Thinking-Making Together

• In Event: Postfoundational Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives
This paper considers how involving postfoundational inquiry in both the process and the content of pedagogies creates opportunities for all to think and be(come) otherwise. We focus on the question: Who and what forces us to think (and teach) otherwise? We share various pedagogical projects and practices that we have been involved with together as higher education teachers, which have had as their focus post-philosophies and the doing of inquiry.

Modes of Inquiry & Data
Through the collaborative partnership of our universities, one in the US (University of Missouri) and one in South Africa (University of the Western Cape) we have, in several different face-to-face and online pedagogical sessions, involved graduate students as well as academics and practitioners interested in using postfoundational philosophies in their work. These sessions have involved collaborative interviews on postqualitative inquiry, collaborative reading and writing texts, multimodal pedagogies with artistic and embodied pedagogical and inquiry processes. In this presentation, we think with several pedagogical examples to expand on the five points listed in the section below.

Insights & Scholarly Significance
Firstly, engagement with and responses to philosophical ideas is collaborative and democratic with all participating, rather than the binary of the teachers suggesting and the students carrying out the work. This addresses concerns which Thompson and Harney (2018) have about capitalist practices in the academy where reading is absent in the classroom and students are sent off to read on their own.

Secondly, reading-writing-thinking-making together as supervisors and students provides opportunities for being together in common, where a disposition of curiosity, trying to make sense of difficult philosophical ideas, imbues the way in which the participants, the text and the discussions are entangled and intra-act with each other. The teaching/learning happens processually rather than as individually consumed, finished products.

Thirdly, reading-writing-thinking-making with philosophical concepts and texts provides ways to overturn ideas that research methodologies need to be foregrounded upfront. This often leads to co-writing and co-publishing texts or other audio-visual presentations together, rendering each other capable (Despret, 2013), a process where all are coming into learning together – there are no pre-existing subjects who know or who don’t know or individual producers of knowledge.

Fourthly, the presentation addresses how reading-writing-thinking-making are undeniably political processes, where knowing is situated, incomplete and partial and where geopolitical contexts and transdisciplinary endeavours all contribute to the materialisation of ideas. This creates opportunities for escaping the narrow boundaries of our disciplinary training in research methods.

Finally, we discuss pedagogical objects and ontological force. We attend to how humans and more-than-humans (e.g., paint/brushes, printed quotes from readings, a conference room, a Zoom room) produce a lively world of relationships and learning. It is an a/effectual relationship between ourselves-student(s)-materials-and so forth that demand to be the ‘object’ of/with inquiry or objects become doings with ontological force. This affectual knowing-with pedagogies becomes the thread or catalyst for inquiry and inquiry practices to unfold.

Authors

• Candace R. Kuby, University of Missouri
  Presenting Author

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape
  Presenting Author