Descriptive and Enactive Posthumanist Inquiry: A Continuum, not a Contradiction

• In Event: Posthumanist Philosophy and Educational Research: A Review of Analytic and Axiological Features

Abstract

Objective. The posthumanist research practices reviewed in the first two papers, although used in distinct ways, do not always have clear definitional boundaries. For example, Roussell (2021) refers to his analysis of art installations as an “immersive cartography” and refers to some of the installations as creating “a diffraction effect” (p. 585). Nxumalo’s (2021) uses cartographic analysis to study place-based knowledge construction in early childhood education. Examples of such theoretic syncretism are so common as to almost be the norm (see also Franklin-Phips, 2017; Higgins, 2016; Mazzei & Jackson, 2017; Motala & Bozalek, 2022; Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Snaza, & Mishra Tarc, 2019)
Rather than try to artificially project overly rigid boundaries between these terms and categories, this paper takes a step back and observes that the literature falls on a continuum from what we will call descriptive to enactive modes of posthumanist research.

Theoretical framework: The primary frame for this study is metatheoretic—an examination of patterns within the emerging posthumanist educational research literature. Descriptive posthumanist analyses describe the ontologically protean nature of objects of analysis and the ontologically generative effects of others’ knowledge practices. This renders a study’s unit of analysis fluid and puts it into metaphysical motion (Dixon-Román, 2017, Malone, 2016; Murris, 2020; Nxumalo, 2021; Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Ibrahim, 2014; de Freitas, Sinclair, et al., 2022; Wozolek, 2018, 2021). The implied audience in these posthuman studies is a familiar spectator subject that can view the fluid movement of other subject-object relations from a critical distance and work out its implications for policy, practice, and future inquiry.

Enactive analysis refers to inquiry that intentionally seeks to participate in this ontologically generative activity. Such studies enact novel subject/agency effects, affective relations, connections to place, or other transformations of the relation between the reader/viewer/consumer and the focus of a study. Diffractive scholarship (Murris & Bozalek, 2019; Lenz Taguchi & Palmer, 2013; Warren, 2021), performative accounts (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022), felt studies (Springgay, 2022), and many explicitly arts-based forms of scholarship (e.g. de Freitas, Trafí-Prats et al., 2022; Roussell, 2021; Sweet, Nurminen, & Koro-Ljungberg, 2020) often fit this description.

Data Sources and Evidence: As this paper is a literature review, published empirical studies of educational processes that use posthumanist analytic techniques will be its data. Examples of studies that involve descriptive elements, enactive elements, or both will be provided to illustrate the general thesis.

Substantiated Conclusions: There is a tension being worked out in the posthumanist literature between an inclination to document the limits and effects of representational processes and a desire to performatively move beyond those limits by doing something other than documentation/description (MaClure, 2013; Wolgemuth et al., 2022). Empirically, both types of scholarship are present in the educational research literature and they appear to support one another.

Scholarly Significance: This paper offers a way to acknowledge and accommodate the contradictory imperatives shaping contemporary posthumanist inquiry: the need to describe the limits of representationalism and to move beyond representationalism as the ideal objective for ethically responsible research.

Author

• Kevin Donley, Georgetown University