Insect-Thinking and Interspecies Transcorporeality: Re-Turning Revulsion and Irritation in Education's Human Exceptionalism

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Research After the "Animal Turn": Speculative and World-Making Multispecies Encounters

Abstract

In this paper we probe how transcorporeality between insects and humans affects how we can think about research methodology. The animal turn has been described as the realization of how there is an animal looking back at us, wherever we stand in our own disciplines (Pedersen 2013; Fudge 2009). We ask how thinking with mosquitoes and cockroaches might mobilise educational thought. How does the transcorporeal relation between species interfere with notions of time, space and place and the assumed borders and boundaries between humans and their others – notions that have enabled the fixing of the subjects and objects of educational research?
The objective of the study is to theorise events and engagements between humans and insects as transcorporeal (Alaimo, 2016) and to discuss the consequences of these for education and post-qualitative research methodology. The paper uses autobiographical narration and actualizes Karan Barad’s concept of re-turning (Barad, 2012; Malone, 2019) to analyse encounters with unloved animals diffractively with conceptions of childhood, education and qualitative research and to discuss questions of human exceptionalism, separateness and mastery.
The theoretical framework combines post-qualitative methodology with feminist materialist transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2016; Neimanis, 2012) and multispecies inquiry (Ogden et al., 2013) to examine life “as it unfolds at the intersections of multiple organisms and things” (p. 10). The empirical materials draw from the authors’ early experiences, but the inquiry extends to cover a mixture of memories, photographs and internet sources. The analysis thus expands and contracts convulsively, jumping between the intense, affective intimacies of individual lives marked by insect encounters, and human-insect encounters at larger scales implicating class, health, displacement, imagination and planetary futures.
The research produces insights and interruptions to anthropocentric notions of place, time, borders and boundaries. Such interruptions are already a feature of post-qualitative methodologies (Lather, 2016; St. Pierre, 2011). However, the focus on human-insect connectivity - the shared and permeable existence of beings involving flesh and blood, strange affects, place, disease and death - sharpens these interruptions. Our research attempts to attune to beings as transcorporeal co-becomings across species, places and times and shared histories of co-evolving. To acknowledge how beings create and destroy each other in queer and obscure mutually interdependent relations. As interdependent and permeable we are not only organisms in our environments but rather emerging of environments or as environments. The inherent transcorporeal entanglement of place, time and interspecies existence gestures towards methodologies that emphasise exposure, porosity, uncertainty, and unthinking (e.g. Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2019).
Human exceptionalism and mastery are not easy to unthink. We do not propose instead an all-encompassing, interspecies connectedness that masks the continuation of colonial and species privilege (Colebrook, 2019). Insect thinking is productive precisely for its capacity to provoke alien affects and disclose realities that may be both shared and incommensurable. The scholarly significance of the study lies in how a transcorporeal approach to interspecies existence and informs, sharpens and enriches existing methodologies and notions of education and childhood.

Authors

• Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki

• Maggie MacLure, Manchester Metropolitan University