Abstract:
Space and place are increasingly recognized as pertinent concepts for inclusive and socially just education research, policy and practice. This paper engages with the concept of space as entangled with material and temporal dimensions that are relational and mutually constitutive, i.e. ‘spacetimematter’ (Barad, 2007), to challenge notions of inclusive education that are centred in individual students. Drawing on a semi-ethnographic research project with a school for 8-15-year-old marginalized boys, I explore how attention to spacetimematter and the more-than-human allows for a reframing of student belonging and engagement with school. From a lens of more-than-human entangled emergence (Barad, 2007) and response-able reciprocal relations (Barad, 2012; Kimmerer, 2014; Kuokkanen, 2007), I argue that the emergent human and other-than human manifestations of spacetimematter, including students as (not) belonging and (dis-)engaged, productively can be seen as always multiple and always in ongoing constitutive conversation. How we chose to be in relation, listen and speak with the human and other-than human world we are off, determines what can be known, seen and heard. I apply a methodology of affective response-ability to explore how different human and other-than human ‘material-discursive’ arrangements (Barad, 2007) produce, and are produced by, different spatialities and temporalities. This entails be-ing attentive to the embodied affective (dis)comforts experienced during my time with the school and engaging in affective conversation with the more-than-human manifestations of spacetimematter in these encounters. Specifically, I analyse how attuning to the emergences of different more-than-human spacetimematter within and outside the classroom allow for different student identities to emerge, and how certain material-discursive processes allow some identities to come to matter over others. This includes analysis of how accommodating the students’ need for physical and virtual spaces away from other humans paradoxically supports students’ experiences of belonging and engagement with school. I argue that this is enabled through allowing a letting go of the ‘self’ and providing ontological space for students to ‘be student’ otherwise. Thus, by reframing conceptualisations of student belonging and engagement from being centred in individual students (as separate from school spaces) to being attentive to the possibilities for ‘be-ing student’ allowed by the more-than-human spacetimematter entanglements of schools (including the role we play as educational researchers, policy makers and practitioners), schools can be responsive and responsible spaces that are more-than inclusive.