Crocheting Refusal: Rhizomatic Pedagogies, Assemblages and Autopoietic Overturns

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Method as Relational Disruption: Dialogue, Refusal, and Emergence in Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

In this piece, we braid our experiences as South Asian diasporic scholars living in the Silicon Valley; the global epicenter of high-tech neoliberal capitalism. Using the metaphor and embodied practice of crocheting as diasporic-worldmaking, we trace our colonial wounds, journeys into transdisciplinary methodologies and generative refusals that inform our provocations for dialogic inquiry in educational research. Drawing on rhizomatic assemblages, we center the relationality of tactile storytelling and creative expression in critically examining the dominance of representational logics in academic knowledge production, particularly in the field of education. We argue crocheting is an autopoietic overturn that invites us to pause, reflect, and weave an otherwise. Our co-constructed autoethnography troubles and pushes the boundaries of qualitative research through a critical lens.

Authors

• Mariam Parvez Sheikh, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Shruti Sheshadri, University of San Francisco