Rethinking Investigations of Research Use in Education Through Queer Assemblages

• In Event: Methods Matter: New Directions in Interrogating the Social Contexts of Education

Abstract

This paper explores the affordances of the ‘queer assemblage’ for investigating complex phenomena in educational practice. I argue that these affordances are: i) methodological, in positioning inquiry as knowledge generation through engagement in the phenomenon of study; and ii) theoretical, in conceptualizing the arrangement of relations that produce such phenomena. My argument draws on data generated during 16 educators’ efforts to support queer students through engaging with research. I illustrate how the queer assemblage allowed me to conceive of research use as an event produced by material-discursive forces, and queerness as a more-than-social transformation of bodies during these events. In so doing, I seek to highlight the possibilities of the queer assemblage for inquiries in the social context of education.

Author

• Blake Cutler, Monash University