Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation

Writing Pedagogies and Intertextual Affects

Sarah E. Truman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000440355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Feminist Speculations and the Practice of Research-Creation provides a unique introduction to research-creation as a methodology, and a series of exemplifications of research-creation projects in practice with a range of participants including secondary school students, artists, and academics.

In conversation with leading scholars in the field, the book outlines research-creation as transdisciplinary praxis embedded in queer-feminist anti-racist politics. It provides a methodological overview of how the author approaches research-creation projects at the intersection of literary arts, textuality, artistic practice, and pedagogies of writing, drawing on concepts related to the feminist materialisms, including speculative thought, affect theories, queer theory, and process philosophy. Further, it troubles representationalism in qualitative research in the arts. The book demonstrates how research-creation operates through the making of or curating of art or cultural productions as an integral part of the research process. The exemplification chapters engage with the author's research-creation events with diverse participants all focused on text-based artistic projects including narratives, inter-textual marginalia art, postcards, songs, and computer-generated scripts.

The book is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers who mobilize the literary arts, theory, and research in transdisciplinary settings.

1

THEORETICAL PRECURSORS

Tracing my methodology for research-creation

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104889-1

As a transdisciplinary scholar, the concept ‘research-creation’ gave me the permission to draw on my background in English literature, cultural studies, and philosophy to inform how I conceptualize research in the social sciences. This chapter outlines my personal theoretical framework for how this process works methodologically, whereas the following several stand-alone chapters specifically focus on the enactment of research-creation projects using various methods. In this chapter, I set out how I think about research-creation methodologically.¹

¹ By ‘methodology’ I mean the logic, ethics, theories, and angle of approach that guide how I approach research and inform the various methods that I might use. This is me talking through the theories that inform how I think research-creation operates. Also, amor fati: some of these theories might not seem like they go together to you, but they definitely influence me. I invoke Nietzsche's (1960) amor fati to acknowledge that this is a situated historical and contemporary overview of scholars that have influenced how I think of research-creation. My background is English literature and philosophy, and some of these scholars, for better or worse, have been a part of my thinking since my undergraduate degree. In the following Interstice, I consider citational politics and whether it's possible to omit scholars as a method of attuning to different modes of thought. Surely that is possible, with appropriate study, and this methodology will likely change in the future. But this is a snapshot of it right now. ² This could also be written as feminist new materialisms, although I and plenty of people have pointed out that much of what is called ‘new’ materialisms is not new. That said, I believe the initial use of the word was to distinguish it from a Marxist mode and that has been forgotten in the critiques of the word ‘new.’ Also, the critique of the word ‘new’ in ‘new materialisms’ is itself not new (Ahmed, 2008; Snaza et al., 2016).

While there are likely as many ways of approaching research-creation as there are artist-researcher-scholars who might carry out a project, my own approach is aligned with many of my Canadian research-creation colleagues who think with the feminist materialisms (Truman, Loveless, Manning, Myers, & Springgay, 2020).² The feminist materialisms is an umbrella term that describes feminist scholarship that activates thought from diverse fields, including process philosophy, speculative pragmatism, the environmental humanities, queer and trans studies, vitalism, and affect theory. When activated in research practices, these theories disrupt common orientations to research methodology in a variety of ways, including: directly implicating researchers, artists, and theories in the event of research; prioritizing affect and relationality; re-thinking representationalism; and recognizing that thinking with theoretical concepts and making-doing art are also ‘empirical’ research.

When I’m asked to articulate a common thread across all these disparate theories and how they play out in research, I say: they unsettle humanism. This is usually followed by the question: what do you mean by ‘humanism’? In the next section, I’m going to unpack what I mean by humanism, and my method for complicating humanism through invoking the inhuman and the narrative human. Once that's established, I will discuss situated speculation, rigorous activation, emergence, affirmation (refusal), and more-than-representation as five movements for how I think about the process of research-creation.

What do I mean by ‘humanism?’

Literary theorist Sylvia Wynter has written extensively about how there are different genres of being human that are myriad and unfinished (Wynter, 1989; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). For this section, I am focusing on how Wynter has also theorized the production of a particular kind of human as a signifier for Eurowestern humanism. Wynter contends that who counts as this version of the human is tethered to white Eurowestern ideals: ideals that align with a particular set of aesthetics that are deemed desirable, and which operate through practices of exclusion or assimilation in a universalizing global order. Wynter calls this Eurowestern ideal of the human Man. Wynter's theory of Man expands on the work of early anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon (1963) who explicates a similar Eurowestern ideal of the human as produced through a ‘bourgeois ideology’ that “manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the sub-men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated in the Western bourgeoisie” (Fanon, 1963, p. 163). Wynter's (Wynter, 2001, 2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015) writings track the production of this version of the human—Man—through colonial capitalism, inextricably linked with transatlantic slavery, and back to the origins of the discipline of the humanities itself. This version of the human and humanism is implicated in the structure of the university, schooling, research methods, and aesthetic and literary traditions.³ The production of this particular kind of human and order of knowledge—who stands in for and represents all humanity or what counts as a ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated’ subject—is not merely biological but rather is a combination of what Wynter calls bios and mythoi (Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). However, Wynter emphasizes that this over-represented version of the human is only one genre, or way of being human: although, as the white, abled, cis-hetero, and male ideal, it's the version of humanity that is most frequently centered in art, history, music, literature etc. in the west. As a result, our institutions, our research practices in the social sciences, and our dominant theoretical frameworks tend to calibrate everything to Man. ⁴

In my scholarship, I think with theorists and pedagogues who challenge the humanism derived from European Humanist traditions that model Man as endowed with the sovereign rights to act on or against other people and inanimate matter. Mel Chen (2012) outlines how the concept of animacy in Eurowestern traditions has been constructed using the logic of the human. Linguistically, animacy refers to the “quality of liveness, sentience, or humanness of a noun or a noun phrase” (p. 24, italics mine). The less agency a body possesses, the less animate it is considered to be, and the further from being ‘human.’ As such, this taxonomy, Chen (2012) argues, is a contributing factor in dehumanization, where qualities valued as ‘human’ are removed when discussing particular populations. The senses are similarly connected to this animacy taxonomy: perceived base senses like touch, taste, and smell have been historically understood as attached to certain bodies, particularly those which are deemed less-than-human (Springgay, 2008). The taxonomy of affect, or what Sara Ahmed (2004b) calls the “economies of affect,” also work to regulate and ‘dehumanize’ particular people. Dehumanization activates a logic where certain powers are granted the ability to assess and value life and include or exclude others from the realm of the human. This dehumanizing logic often follows racial hierarchies. For instance, Kalpana Seshadri (2012) argues that the line that divides those who are subject to the law from those who are protected by the law is a racializing line.⁵

³ Wynter tracks the production of Man through history: homo politicus (Man1) coincided with the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th century as a break away from medieval theocracy. Homo oeconomicus (Man2) coincided with the Darwinian influence of natural selection and rise of capitalism in the 19th century. Both of these versions are tethered to what might be called Man—and are reinforced through stories and institutions that uphold their worldview. But Wynter's genres of the human explain that there are myriad ways of being ‘human.’ ⁴ The proponents of whiteness may not question cis-white-able-Man's certainty as the representation of humanity because they perhaps don’t want to know that it's only a genre of being human. Those who have the most to gain from dominant ways of knowing, being, and storying within an inherited context are the least likely to question it. ⁵ Black scholars and activists have asserted this for a long time. In recent years, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought this to the attention to even mainstream media.

Humanism in its ongoing proliferations functions through both erasing difference and enforcing difference. In order to be deemed ‘human,’ non-humans must be assimilated into the category of the human, a practice that Luciano and Chen (2015) argue operates through logics of inclusion and rehabilitation: to be included is to be rehabilitated enough to become legible within the very system that then continues to exclude others. Julietta Singh (2018) raises similar concerns through her analysis of Eurowestern notions of mastery, where to be masterful is to wield power within the system that may have excluded that same person or group in the past. This ‘becoming masterful’ could take the form of understanding a language or a theory or some other kind of mastery. However, Singh highlights that through becoming masterful, those previously deemed in-human or un-human might inadvertently begin to reinforce the very logics they might wish to overthrow. This understanding of how humanism operates has direct implications for what is valued, what is considered legible, and what counts as ways of knowing in research projects. Similarly, these systems of classification operate in educational settings and practices like literacy and literary education: where what counts as knowledge and who can possess knowledge is also governed by hegemonic values associated with a humanist logic and institutional legibility (Snaza & Weaver, 2014; Snaza, 2019; Truman, 2019a) and where many of the world's students continually “find themselves subjected to various tactics of dehumanization, objectification” (Snaza, Sonu, Truman, & Zaliwska, 2016, p. xix).

As an educational researcher in English literature and the arts, I constantly struggle with this: being aware that concepts like literariness, literacy, art, and aesthetics all hail from this Eurowestern-humanist tradition, desiring for my students and colleagues (and myself) to refuse it, while recognizing that doing so may still mean being subject to the system through being excluded from it (and also believing that there is such a thing as ‘literariness’). Working to unsettle the humanist inheritance that haunts Western thought while not sidestepping very human...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Interstice I: And
• Preface: ‘What do Books have to do with Education?’
• 1 Theoretical precursors: Tracing my methodology for research-creation
• 2 Minor interferences: Marginalia as research-creation
• Interstice II: Citations
• 3 Affective public pedagogies: Youth writing the intersections of race-gender-power
• 4 More-than-linguistic rhetorics: Writing (speculative) mappings of place
• 5 Postcards from strangers: Queer-non-arrivals on a long-distance walk along St. Cuthbert’s Way
• Interstice III: Oblique Curiosities
• 6 Tweets & critiques from @postqual diffractor bot
• 7 Undisciplined: Reaffirming transdisciplinarity in social science and humanities research
• Interstice IV: Hyphen
• Index