Posthuman Methodology and Pedagogy: Uneasy Assemblages and Affective Choreographies

Abstract

Pedagogic posthuman assemblages are a generative means for exploring entanglements of affect that circulate through humans and non-humans. In this chapter, we include a poetic account of our posthuman pedagogic research practice that leverages our work as feminist scholars in the academy. Through the curation of an uneasy assemblage (Bone and Blaise in Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 16: 18-31, 2015), and its presentation as an affective choreography, we juxtapose the personal and political, the biographical, the technological and the sociological. The uneasy assemblage, comprising images, media articles and reported responses to scandals from the public, deterritorialises qualitative research practice, and allows for an interrogation of how affect mobilises in the form of gendered violence. This research work, generated through a feminist process of slow musings (Taylor in Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, 16: 201-212, 2016), underpinned a conference presentation that was conceptualised as an affective choreography. In taking up an imaginative posthuman approach, we rethink our embodiment in assemblages and entanglements across a range of spaces: higher education spaces; pedagogic spaces at conferences; cyber spaces; and schooling spaces. This pedagogic practice in higher education embraces vital materialism.