Lines of Research Sites: A Relational Worlding Practice in Environmental Education Research in South Africa

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 6
  In Roundtable Session: Spirituality, Playfulness, and Worlding in Qualitative Research

Abstract

The legacy of colonialism continues to influence researchers in post-Apartheid South Africa as dominant humanist concepts of research sites limits research possibilities through westernised understandings of place. As a response to the urgency for other ways of conceptualising place and decolonial thinking in childhood research, this paper reconfigures the concept of research sites as an iterative worlding practice. Adopting Donna Haraway’s concept of worlding and Karen Barad’s hauntology and methodology of temporal diffraction, this paper exposes the porous nature of place as unbounded and not fixed in space and time. As a be-coming researcher I engage with decolonising place through posthuman theories and concepts to investigate meshworks of relational lines of research sites rather than bounded lines.

Author

• Joanne Kelly Peers, University of Oulu