Introduction
This chapter explores the following question: What happens to knowledge in feminist new material, posthumanist and postqualitative (FNMPHPQ) approaches? This ‘large’ question is addressed through five propositions which argue the case for the shifts which occur when FNMPHPHQ approaches are put to work in research and pedagogic practice. Drawing on specific examples from my own research and pedagogy, the chapter considers
How feminist new materialist, posthumanist and postqualitative approaches conceptualise knowledge, knowledge-making and the knowing subject;
Why these new conceptualisations of knowledge matter; and
How they make a difference to research and pedagogy.
The propositions, examples and discussion identify some of the key promises, practices and politics of knowledge-making common to FNMPHPQ approaches. The chapter provides an accessible introduction to, and road map for, some of the main contours of how knowledge practices shift when FNMPHPQ approaches are deployed. It indicates ways in which academics, students and researchers might ‘do knowledge differently’ and, thereby, work to reimagine research practice and pedagogy.
The chapter extends debates outlined in the Introduction regarding how FNMPHPQ approaches entail a thoroughgoing reconceptualisation of ontology, epistemology and ethics and the implications this has for re-tooling methodology, methods, research design and researcher positionality. The focus is in this chapter is on knowledge matters – how and why knowledge matters, what is at stake in the mattering of knowledge, and the potential for FNMPHPQ approaches to enable knowledge to come to matter differently. As many of the chapters in this book attest, FNMPHPQ approaches entail a renewed attention to the vitality of matter, to the importance of the other-than-human and the nonhuman, and to the role of affective attunements and sensory practices in research and pedagogy. FNMPHPQ are premised on a ‘decentering’ of the human – or, rather and to be more accurate, on the decentering of a very particular figure of the human as conceptualised in White, Western, classed-raced-gendered colonialist thinking (Braidotti, 2013; Lather, 2013; Taylor & Hughes, 2016). They begin with a different view – that of the human-in-relation as co-constituted by nonhuman materialities (brick, glass, stone, wood, paper, plastics, flour, sand, trash, for example) and earthly others (animals, plants, the sea, sky, wind, rain, trees, soil, insects, viruses, bacteria, for example) which materialise in assemblages which are continually shifting, mutating and changing. These human–nonhuman assemblages presume different understandings of what matters. By replacing the singular figure of humanism (‘Man’) by a more plural understanding centred on human–nonhuman relationality, FNMPHPQ approaches enact and make possible research and pedagogy endeavours which produce knowledge differently. These approaches offer ways of attending to the distributed, differential and changing ontological assemblages of mattering. This radical shift towards relational materialism opens up new and profound possibilities for reconceptualising what knowledge ‘is’, which and whose knowledge ‘counts’ and how we ‘make’ knowledge – which brings to the fore knowledge-making as a political, ethical and critical enactment, as I discuss in the following (and see Bozalek et al., 2018).
The next section indicates why knowledge matters and provides a brief introduction to how some key scholars have framed knowledge matters in FNMPHPQ research and pedagogy. It uses these to make the case for doing knowledge differently with FNMPHPQ. The main part of the article lays out the five propositions concerning the reconceptualisation of knowledge in FNMPHPQ approaches. Each proposition is accompanied by an identification of wh...
