Space Place Body Research: Posthuman, Emergent, Intracorporeal Doctoral Writing

This symposium replicates a doctoral workshop held at The Centre for Educational Research at Western Sydney University, in April 2017 where Space Place Body doctoral group members each read out short excerpts of their writing. Considering each excerpt as an autoethnographic, posthumanly emergent piece, we asked each other, what happens when we write like this? Where did we begin? And where are we now? And we found ourselves embedded in the ethico-onto-epistemological forces (Barad, 2007) that are implicit and arising from our emergent writing selves. This symposium is offered as a performance part-prepared, part-improvisation, as we exhibit our writing and then invite the audience to collaborate and participate in a conversation about autoethnographic writing as emergent, multiple and intracorporeal (Davies, 2017).
The writerly materials we present are the research products of: postmodern emergence (Somerville 2007, 2013); interviews; walking; birthing; being with water; eels; and ochre, to name a few. Mindful of the politics of 'data' in education research (Koro-Ljungberg, M., MacLure, M. & Jasmine Ulmer, J., in press), we are playful with our writing as data, using postqualitative theoretical perspectives as we mess with grand-narratives (Honan 2007; Honan & Bright 2016); the vital materialisms of Bennett (2009, 2010); a posthumanist notion of being-with (Braidotti, 2010); Deleuze and Guattari's ontology of becoming (1994); and Grosz's notion of disrupted time (2005).
This is our attempt at 'data+performance intra-action' (Barad, 2007, in Koro-Ljungberg, et al. in press), where we are open to the idea of intimate and dynamic data, its agency and morphability.
As researchers we have allowed our attention to be redirected, to think through the idea of relational materialism (Hultman & Taguchi 2010) and the mutual relations of affect, things and people; spaces, bodies, places (see Davies 2017; Braidotti 2012; Grosz 1994, 2008; Spinoza, 1994 and Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Although the politics of our research practices is not our primary concern, yet politics is always implicated as we work to decolonise our methods and disrupt our dominant human positions.
Is a new materialist approach to research in education differently political? Our Discussant, Dr Eileen Honan, University of Queensland and ex-convenor of the AARE Poststructural Theory SIG) will respond to presentations by encouraging audience/panel discussion to draw out ways in which theory and data are encountered through autoethnography.
KEYWORDS: autoethnography, posthumanist, emergence, intracorporeal