Spacetimemattering Transdisciplinary Workshop: Using Slow Writing to Think With Emotional and Sensual Data in Research

• In Event: Cultivating Transdisciplinary Educational Research Through Dialogic Reflexivity: Facets of Theory and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
This paper discusses how data sticks emotionally and sensually with space and time during and after the transdisciplinary workshop. Specifically, I continue thinking how to problematize data and its meaning (St. Pierre, 1997) in the production of (re)creating knowledge. Specifically, emotional data constitute data that “resist the process of coding, categorizing, and analysis... to begin theorizing themselves” whereas sensual data “bring materiality and physical locality into play ... [to] question the relationship between, and effects of, theoretical and physical sites of knowing” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018, p. 467). This paper explores how a self might engage, emerge, and theorize from emotional and sensual data from a transdisciplinary workshop. This workshop is a manifestation of spacetimemattering, in which space (the location), time (the duration), and matters (affects, bodies, and conversations) come together intra-actively. A guiding question is, What are the possibilities of self’s transformation from a transdisciplinary workshop?

Theoretical framework
This paper borrows the concept of re-turning, “as in turning it over and over again—iteratively intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). This concept allows self to re-turn to a thick moment of spacetimemattering (Barad, 2014) to explore how the entanglement of self and materials could be iteratively reconfigured and open possibilities of understanding multidimensional and transdisciplinary ontology and epistemology.

Methods
This paper adopts Writing Slow Ontology (Ulmer, 2017), which “crafts locally sourced research” to reconnect with nature through writing and considers time, spaces, and materials to “rethink how and what they write” (p. 203). This paper writes and thinks with sensory images woven with theories (i.e., new materialism, queerness, and affect) (Barad, 2007; Ahmed, 2014) as modes of inquiry.

Materials
Sensual data are images taken at the workshop blended with emotional data that stick with “the text, smells, sensations, disgust, theories, notes, memories, and visual stimuli” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018, p. 474). These data come together, sit, and stay still in the slow writing process for self to re-turn the thick moments of the workshop.

Discussion
This paper furthers a discussion of what could happen when human and non-human inter- and intra-act in the becoming-with research practices (Banerjee & Blaise, 2013). Data is not dead in a neoliberal world (Denzin, 2019), but lives, stays, and sticks within spacetimemattering manifested in this transdisciplinary workshop, where collective becoming-with research practices emerge and lead the way for critical inquiry in educational research methodology.

Scholarly significance
This paper does not try to go beyond and offer the newness of methodology, since nothing is new, nothing is not new (Barad, 2014). Instead, “matter is a sedimented intra-acting, an open field” (Barad, 2014, p. 168). The openness of re-turning to a thick moment offers slow ontological writing to inquire how spacetimemattering matters methodologically, dialogically, pedagogically, and relationally. This paper interrogates and advances methods, mechanisms and practices that name injustice and co-construct opportunities for just educational processes and systems.

Author

• Ethan Trinh, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author