Writing — Through, Over, With — Making Kin in Textual Productions and Pedagogy

• In Event: What Pedagogies Produce: Teaching Responsible/Response(able) Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose
In this paper, we return to the comprehensive exam process and response and consider the texts that were produced both formally and informally. Comprehensive exams, as they are commonly administered in departments and universities, draw on humanist notions of stability, predictability, linearity, and progress. In response, our objective is to account for the messy shifting specific material arrangements (Barad, 2007) of comprehensive exam and academic subjectivity. We continue to contemplate how various and conflicting texts are pedagogical apparatus within comprehensive exam production, and academic writing more broadly.

Theories and Modes of inquiry
Text is material and has material consequences. We are made through our reading/writing
(Guttorm, 2012, 2016; MacLure, 2011; Mazzei, 2013; Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). In this rendering, we consider how texts are also pedagogical: pointing, compelling, nudging researcher/research/manuscript in particular and conflicting directions. In line with Haraway’s (2016) call that we “learn to live and die together well” in a multi species becoming we attend more carefully to the more than human co-authors and spectral texts (Nordstrom, 2013) that haunted the exam/manuscript/process of academic/textual becomings. We create and recreate string figures connecting co-writings with committee members, special issue calls, program handbooks, mentor texts, disciplines, and fields.We attend to and trace the specific material arrangements of the exam/manuscript as a knowledge making practice (Barad, 2007) through diffractive methodology to highlight “‘knowledgeing’ as a messy multiplicity” (Taylor, 2013, p. 697). We present and justify diffractive writing experimentations drawn from diffractive reading practices that were enacted to question academic reading and writing pedagogies. We diffract feminst writings across (otherly) discipling texts in the field to see what difference differences make.

Objects and materials
Our data include the guidelines and structures around comprehensive exams that are the generative documents (Prior, 2003) in intra-action with new materialist theories/texts/musings. We draw on co-authored manuscripts, palimsistemc texts produced in meetings, emails, maps, portraits, and handbooks.

Insights from Analysis & Significance
All writings are co-constituted in the field in concert with other and various pedagogical texts and fields. Pedagogical texts co-constitute academic subjects. Academics turn and co-constitute fields. By looking closely at the specific material arrangements of these knowledge making apparatus, we undo the binary of neutral/material texts and instead ask what do texts do? What cuts do they make? How do they privilege or foreclose particular becomings or textual productions? In this case, one call for a special issue provoked a disruption in the pedagogy of comprehensive exam.

Authors

• Susan Ophelia Cannon, Mercer University

• Stephanie Behm Cross, Georgia State University

• Sarah Bridges-Rhoads, Georgia State University