Activity Theory Meets New Materialist Philosophy (2015) (original) (raw)
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In January 2017, six doctoral students and an assistant professor came together under the guise of a “Readings in Educational Research” course that was created on the topic of post-qualitative inquiry. Using St. Pierre’s descriptor of the “posts,” the course involved engagements with poststructural, posthuman, and new materialist philosophies. Inspired by the concept of the meanwhile, this article pulses with the question: What do intra-active qualitative inquiry pedagogies produce? In this inquiry, we (teacher and students) consider meanwhile as entangled, layered, and complex pedagogical events/enactments produced in the post-qualitative readings course, crossing with/through time, place, space, and bodies.
Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines
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Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines is an accessible introductory guide to theories, paradigm shifts and key concepts in postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist research. Supported by its own website, this first book in a larger series is an essential companion to the primary texts and original sources of the theorists discussed in this and other books in the series. Disrupting the theory/practice divide, the book offers a postqualitative reimagining of traditional research processes. In doing so, it guides readers through the contestation of binaries, innovative concepts and the practical provocations that make up the postqualitative terrain. It orients the researcher in the ontological return also by considering Indigenous knowledges, African, Eastern and young children's philosophies. The style itself is postqualitative through diffractive engagements by the authors and the website includes some examples of the practical provocations described in the book that give an imaginary of how postqualitative research can be taught and enacted. This book is an essential resource for novice as well as experienced researchers working both within and across disciplines in higher education.
Beyond Anthropocentric Humanism. The Potentialities of the Posthuman in Educational Studies
2016
Pedagogia e orizzonte post-umanista is both an insightful and a critical work. It has the merit of bringing to the forefront a theme that received much attention in the late 1980s but then slipped into the background of the Italian philosophical and pedagogical debate. Namely, the question of how to think education, and therefore pedagogy, in light of the profound changes marking our contemporary era. Ferrante asks how we may think education in all of its complexity and, above all, how we may think it today. He radically poses the question of the "order of discourse" required to formulate a thought that is appropriate for contemporary educational experience. Throughout the entire book, the author presents and discusses a hypothesis in two parts: first, that the contemporary era is characterised by a radical shift in the forms of experience daily engaged in by humans and nonhumans; the second, that this change is mainly due to the exponential increase and diffusion of technology, whose presence and use has transformed all life contexts. Echoing Galimberti, Ferrante claims that "the relationship between the human being and technology has changed both quantitatively and qualitatively with respect to the past" (14); most importantly, this transformation has modified the way in which human beings relate to themselves, to others and to the world. It is particularly crucial to acknowledge and understand this difference vis-à-vis the past when we come to conceptualizing education, the specific form of experience through which beings-human and non, as Ferrante suggests-construct their own form, discover and embody their possibility of being what it is possible for them to be on the basis of what they currently are, give rise to their becoming, and attribute meaning to themselves and that which surrounds them.
Ethos, 2015
How Things Shape the Mind is a rich, thought-provoking and ambitious book. Leading on from and interacting with the work of pioneer of cognitive archaeology, Colin Renfrew, archaeologist Lambros Malafouris has worked on developing 'Material Engagement Theory' for more than a decade. With this book, for the first time, Malafouris lays out the full grounding, argumentation and implications of this theory. According to Malafouris (p. 13), we are at a historical juncture where archaeology has an overall responsibility and role to play in spearheading current efforts to integrate the studies of material culture and of mind. Malafouris' book is a bold and serious attempt to take on that task and its theme is one that should be of great interest to psychological anthropologists.
Silvia Gherardi SOCIOMATERIALITY IN POSTHUMAN PRACTICE THEORY
A posthumanist practice theory – which grants equal status to humans and non-humans – provides the context for a discussion of the concept of sociomaterial practices. The constitutive entanglement of the social and the material within a practice is illustrated in three different contexts. I start by focusing on the sociomateriality of bodies in the social practice of fathering. I then consider a working practice and its technological change in the case of artificial nutrition. In the last case, I discuss the disruption of social practices that Hurricane Katrina brought about and how it made visible the interconnection between past and present practices. In all the three cases, the materialities of bodies, technologies, discourses could not be separated from the society that formed them, and vice versa the social cannot be considered external or separate from materialities.
Parsing and re-constituting human practice as mind-in-activity
Collection: "Practice theory and education", 2017
There are two main premises that will likely have to be granted for the argument about the value of exploring human practices in the way I recommend below to carry any weight. As we will see, the first premise revolves around dialectics. Specifically, the idea that reality really does depend – ontologically and epistemologically – on the inter-penetrating connections of parts and whole summarized by such notions as a philosophy of internal relations (e.g., Ollman 1993). The second premise involves granting the existence of the thinking, feeling, knowing, choice-making and acting subject who can and does play a role – within and beyond itself vis-à-vis a philosophy of internal relations – in change. Praxis, in any formulation one could imagine, could not be meaningfully entertained otherwise. And, it is in this way that we are faced with the choice of whether or not to take the expanded notions of mind and learning seriously in our concern for human practice. Taken together, I argue these two main premises suggest the need for a theory of mind-in-activity; a substantive, systematic-categorial series of concepts reconstructed from empirical reality with a concern for understanding the practices of human development under the auspices of dialectical methodologies.
The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Ethics, 2018
Against a background of renewed interest in materiality in the social sciences, this chapter considers what this ‘material turn’ might entail for qualitative research and its ethical practice. The chapter is organized in the following way. I begin by discussing some of the ways in which the material turn is inspiring new ways of conceptualizing and conducting research in the social sciences by highlighting two bodies of work in particular: ‘post-qualitative inquiry’ (Lather, 2015; St Pierre, 2011) and ‘the social life of methods’ (Law, 2004; Savage, 2013). While these studies draw on diverse notions of materiality, they share an interest in the ways in which attention to the material dimensions of research gives rise to new methods and objects of inquiry. This materiality may take the form of the embodied experiences of researchers and research participants, the material artifacts used by participants, the physical settings of investigations, and the tools and devices used in social inquiries. In the second section of the chapter, I discuss in more detail different theoretical conceptualizations of materiality. To Reckwitz’s (2002) three notions – materi- ality as ‘social structures’, ‘symbolic objects’ and ‘material artifacts’ – I add a fourth new materialist understanding of materiality as ‘materialization’. I discuss Barad’s specific conceptualization of materiality as ontologi- cal processes of materialization, and the non- essentialist ontology that this entails. In the third section, I explore Barad’s agential realist metaphysical framework that she elaborates on the basis of her concept of materiality and non-essentialist ontology. I consider how it opens up new and distinctive possibilities for social inquiry and its ethical practice, includ- ing how it makes way for what Barad calls a ‘posthumanist ethics of mattering’. In the fourth section of the chapter, I explore how Barad’s posthumanist ethics can be put into practice through what she calls diffractive practices, and I propose two such practices: ‘diffractive genealogies’ and ‘metaphysi- cal practices’. In the fifth section, I illustrate a posthumanist ethical practice of qualitative research using the Listening Guide feminist method of narrative analysis, a method I have been engaged with for twenty-five years.