Cultivating Activism in the Academy: A Deleuzoguattarian Exploration of Phenomenological Projects

Abstract

Phenomenology, as the study of the human experience of, with, and in the world, has long rejected causality in favor of the personal agency of intentionality. Our Collective began by trying to conduct phenomenological research in an era in which we have witnessed the normalization of oppression, marginalization, and social injustice. We question how we, the 1% to 2% who hold or seek doctorates, might interrogate the intolerance of alterity. To inform our collective inquiry, we have formed a Deleuzoguattarian “pack.” Using mixed metaphors, we argue for epistemo-ontological activisim through putting theory and philosophy to work in the world.

Keywords

phenomenology cross-disciplinary methodology methodologies new methods and methodologies collective unsettling

Introduction

A White woman, an African immigrant woman, a Jamaican immigrant woman, and two White, American men walk into a room . . .

The first White man says, “This is a White world we live in because no one ever questions my right to be somewhere.”

“—And I never have to wonder if my voice or my life matters,” adds the second.

“It’s a White, male world,” says the White woman, “because people think how I dress is just as important as what I say in my scholarship.”

“It’s a White, male, hetero-normed world,” says the Jamaican woman, “where the experience of women who love women is still Othered and unspoken.”

“But it’s not the whole world,” says the African woman, “and it doesn’t have to be . . . we are all made in God’s image, none should be ordered”

Our association began as two immigrant women—one of whom identifies as queer and the other who is a multilingual Black African—two White men—one of whom identifies as bisexual and the other who is multilingual—and one White woman—who identifies as cisgender—who walked into a room. We started as a group of students and former students at the University of Minnesota who were interested in using or “doing” post-intentional phenomenology. At the beginning, our interest was entirely pragmatic: We wanted to know how to convince a committee, answer a prelim question, craft a dissertation, and get published. Yet, we found ourselves trying to conduct “research as normal” in an era of political upheaval in which we have witnessed the normalization of oppression, marginalization, and social injustice. We became concerned that the various State apparatus might increasingly become insulated and polarized, retreating from interstitial spaces. Through embracing what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) termed a “milieu of interiority” (p. 394), they would regress from the long-established alliances of our common humanity, to politically and socially expedient filiation, and finally to a stagnant and entrenched isolation. The rise of right-wing authoritarianism worldwide, crystallized in the election of Donald Trump, had given us a kick in our complacency.

In this regressive order, how could we, as post-intentional phenomenologists, find ways to conduct research and cultivate activism in which we do not absent ourselves from the phenomena and the possible impacts of our efforts? Phenomenology, as the study of the human experience of, with, and in the world, has long rejected positivistic, linear models of causality in favor of the personal agency of intentionality and the synchronous abstemious reflectivity of epoché (Van Manen, 2014). Yet, it is important that we, the 1% who hold or seek doctorates, do not simply work in isolation, well-intentioned as that may be. We felt resonance with Deleuze and Guattari, seeming to find ourselves in times that epitomize both capitalism and schizophrenia. Some of us had already engaged with rhizomes and lines of flight, others had no experience with Deleuzoguattarian thought, but there was a sense that we were just dipping our toes into much deeper waters.

As we read and discussed—and sometimes collectively scratched our heads—the concept of who we were Becoming also changed. We began to interrogate the intolerance of alterity and our own continuing status as Anomalous, as Outsider. What if we were to put Deleuzoguattarian concepts to work in the world? What would it be to write that way, a continuous flow of dissonant ideas between and across individual projects? What about the potential of expanding the method of assemblage by tapping the various metaphors we use to understand the world to include the voices of more people across more disciplines in more ways? How might we become an assemblage even as we produced assemblages?

Assemblage requires rejecting the arboresque hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries by which the academy recapitulates the State in favor of rhizomatic lines of flight that disrupt the tripartite division between the fields of reality, representation, and subjectivity (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While still operating as individuals, each with our own areas of expertise and research trajectories, we are becoming a pack and position our efforts and subjectivity in relation to the pack, “how the subject joins or does not join the pack, how far away it stays, how it does or does not hold to the multiplicity” (p. 29). In becoming-activist, we are neither isolated individuals nor multiple but a multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari assert that “a multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. It is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature” (p. 249). Instead, we operate in an “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (p. 21). We are becoming the rhizome, the assemblage, and the pack. As we move into those becomings we also find epistemo-ontological activism in the metaphors that anchor our own liminal understandings: It is the interstices between the comal, a compass, a box of crayons, the mountains, and a knife.

We have crafted metaphors of our individual practices and projects in dialogue with each other, as well as in dialogue with the projects and their phenomenological and philosophical roots themselves. While mixing metaphors is inherently jarring, and therefore so too should be your reading of this article, it is also productive, creating “modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 239). Embracing Deleuzoguattarian assemblage as method for post-intentional phenomenological amoebic intentionality (e.g., Vagle, 2014) allows us to seek out the in-between spaces in which mixed metaphors elicit friction. By seeking struggle through the multiplicities of inter-trans-multi-cross-disciplinary union, we have found becoming as “collective agents of enunciation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 37), and are not only personally enriched but embrace academic activism and unsettle the apolitical complacency of earlier forms of phenomenology.

The metaphors discussed more fully in the following overlap, complement, and contradict each other and the projects they represent in innumerable and varying ways. Mountain-climbing with the orienteering compass is common, but putting immigrant experience in dialogue with sexuality posits different allusions, that is, struggles against status quo norms and bigotry; promoting plurilingualism similarly resists the overwhelming inertia of monolingualism, and the comal can be linked to the emergent identities of immigrants, and future math teachers learning to value subaltern epistemologies; the knife, also a kitchen implement, may assist in cutting the labels off of crayons (and children in multiple contexts learn to reach beyond normative thought), but might be damaged by the comal—it may also do literal, physical violence in the hands of a bigot. These are but a few of the synchronic harmonies and dissonances we have encountered in metaphor and in practice, and doubtless, we will encounter more, and so, we are Becoming.

Mixed Metaphors as Metaphor for Unsettling

The Comal

The comal is a flat frying pan explicitly designed for warming tortillas, though it is also regularly used for other purposes. Its origins can be traced to pre-Hispanic indigenous peoples, who used it over a fire to cook maize. It is still in use today, though its shape and size have been somewhat adapted for the stove top, which is also often where it is “stored.” Thus, both sociohistorically and physically, it embodies convivencia: It is always present, a reminder of its existence and availability even when not in use, and it embodies the mestizo. When all four burners on the stove are being used by other cookware, the comal is frequently not removed; instead, another pan is placed on top of the comal, the comal acting as a conductor, just as the mestizo is a genetic and cultural amalgam of conquest and indigeneity. In a sense, the comal always collaborates in some capacity with every kitchen activity, even if only as a passive observer.

As with the comal, multiple linguistic repertoires (Pennycook, 2016) are always already present, and various elements of one linguistic system may participate in another in various ways (MacSwan, 2017; Selinker, 1972). As identities are spoken into existence and sedimented through language, knowing and using multiple language varieties and semiotic repertoires is inherently the simultaneous seeing through multiple perspectives, as identity is “multiple, changing, and a site of conflict” (Norton, 1995, p. 14). Thus, cultivation of a multiplicity of perspectives through multilingual development may be able to promote increased intercultural competence (Cronin, 2012; Kramsch, 2012).

Closely tied to multilingual identity development are matters of motivation, as learners speak into existence the social identities that they desire to live in the world (Dornyei & Ushioda, 2013). Motivation, emotion, and cognition (Dornyei, 2011) in second languages is a phenomenological lived experience (Dornyei & Ushioda, 2013) that is dialogically co-constructed with investment, which is at the nexus of ideology, identity, and capital (Darvin & Norton, 2015). As individuals negotiate in interaction the social identities they would like to express, they are simultaneously referencing ideological and sociocultural norms; micro-interactional identities and socio-cultural-ideological stabilities are mutually constituted (Collins, 2012; Douglas Fir Group, 2016). Agency is inherently implicated and dialogically negotiated (Ahearn, 2001), as individuals socially position themselves and others with identities—and are socially positioned by others with identities, sometimes not of their choosing—constructing their messages accordingly (Bakhtin, 1981; Tarone, 2010), using the full range of their semiotic repertoires.

Through the multiplicity afforded by multilingual repertoires and consciousness-raising of monologic norms and dialogic identity negotiation, epistemo-ontological pluralization re-sediments (Harissi, Otsuji, & Pennycook, 2012) ideologies and sociocultural norms:

Underlining the necessity of the ontological dimension of conflict for the emergence of identity in the case of language, plurality involves accepting that there is no final, definitive reconciliation of opposites but that any arrangement is a provisional, unstable equilibrium which does not rule out further conflict in the future. (Cronin, 2012, p. 182)

The comal and the knife are implements within a literal cocina, and within an interior milieu in which linguistic repertoires influence each other, sometimes in unproductive ways. The knife acts at the center and the boundaries of that milieu, using its edge and creating edges that deterritorialize personal and cultural meanings that are simultaneously re-territorialized in involution of multilingual identities . . . As both anchor and distortion, a single peak rising above the plateaus, the comal is a thing that is used or forgotten, overlooked but never able to be ignored. The comal is both instrument and impediment, knife and mountain. It is that which always participates, even if only as a bystander.

A Box of Crayons

Thinking of a box of crayons is like capturing a moment of childhood. It is the smell of the wax, the feel of the tightly curled paper as you peel it away to reveal a stick of pure color, its solidity and surprising fragility. The sound a crayon makes gliding across the page is a whispered promise and the bloom of color that trails behind it is that promise fulfilled. Each one bears a label that, between wavy lines, gives each sensation a name: carnation pink, goldenrod, burnt sienna, brick red, sea green, and sky blue. Yet, the sky is not a single blue in our experience of it.

The pictures that children draw replete with hummocky hills and a blazing sun in a strip of perfect blue are not just milieus, but deterritorialized worlds (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). I introduced my students to this idea by asking them the color of things: the sun, the grass, the sky, a fire truck, a tree. My little ones answered back with the expected local colors: yellow, green, blue, red, and brown (and with green on top, my kindergartners were proud to know). Then we took our crayon bins and went outside. It was a beautiful autumn day, with just a hint of wind and only a few fleecy clouds dotting the otherwise pristine clarity of the mid-morning sky. As they dug through the crayons, they discovered that there was no single crayon that could match the brilliance above. They found pieces of the pale horizon in azure and baby, arching through cyan into navy and indigo. Some saw the sky as veering into violet and some as more teal. Some thought the color was vibrant, others dull. Deleuze and Guattari contend that “it is through color that you become imperceptible” (p. 187); you dismantle the world in the process of trying to recreate it. It is at this nexus between embodied experience of color and the liberation of color from the world that art creates the possibility of many becomings.

In this small—but immediate—way, students experience what Dewey termed the “turmoil [that] marks the place where inner impulse and contact with environment, in fact or in idea, meet and create a ferment” (Dewey, 1934/2005). They relate crayons to the sky post-reflexively, engaging in “a dogged questioning of [their] knowledge” (Vagle, 2014, p. 74). They are also intentionally “in the midst” of that experience; the blueness and the sky-ness of sky presents itself “partially, perspectivally, seen from this side or with that aspect” (Van Manen, 2014, p. 62). They begin to develop the “discernment” required for all critical thinking, learning a way of intending to the world and “. . . of approaching ideas that aims to understand core, underlying truths, not simply that superficial truth that may be most obviously visible” (hooks, 2010, p. 9). Art becomes “a tool for blazing life lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 187). In finding the blues of the sky in a box of crayons, students experience an “effectuation of the power of the pack” and “a fearsome involution calling [them] toward unheard-of becomings” (p. 240).

As the compass orients, the involution of choosing between crayons becomes a turning or returning to, a movement between that is experienced instantaneously as the recognition of self in the exterior milieu—even when the crayon’s labels have been torn off or cut away. Yet, it is not only the choosing between that compels involution; crayons are tools of decision and concision, cutting the world into discrete units that are inscribed upon the page. Unlike the knife, however, that moves with surgical precision from insertion to exit with an application of force, crayons do not only move in straight lines but glide across the page in waxen, cartographic arcs of color.

A Compass

A compass orientates, positions, and aligns. It is a tool that is used to give direction. Sexual orientation is a compass that gives direction to a person’s sexual preference. The compass of a woman-who-loves-women turns toward other women, which orients her to someone of the same sex. Being in alignment with someone of the same sex is perceived as “off” by some people, “off” the natural course, going in the wrong direction, and in need of re-orientation. One who is attracted to someone of the same sex often hears invisible GPS whispers, “rerouting, make a U-turn at the next street.” Other times, the GPS is visible, and it yells, “people like you are not welcome here.” Many people position women-who-love-women as having a queer orientation.

A compass shows direction via coordinates using a variation of north, south, east, and west configurations. Queer orientation on a compass uses the same coordinates, for example, north, north or south, south. I use the philosophical idea of queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) to research the lived experiences of women-who-love-women, who are living each moment of their lives queerly. Queer moments happen when “the world no longer appears the right way up” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 65). At these moments, objects seem off-line or slanted. When people do not see straight, they tend to re-orient their relation to straight spaces. Ahmed sees this reorientation as the point of “becoming vertical.” Heterosexuality is a “straightening” device. It is used to bring queer orientation into “right” alignment.

Straightness is perceived as neutral; a compass with its cardinal points 90 degrees from each other. Straightness does not have an orientation; it is unmarked, natural. When one has an orientation one is perceived as queer; queer is marked. Queer people do not follow a straight line. Having a sexual orientation only refers to queer people, who deviate from the neutral, natural, the straight line. These lines carry more than a sexual connotation. More importantly, moral values are embedded in each line (Ahmed, 2006). If one’s orientation is “off,” this gets attached to undesirable societal values, which may lead queer people to live in shame. Whereas, straightness gets attached to highly moral societal values such as honest, decent, good, and productive.

In my personal and professional life, I want to make a map not a tracing. “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 12). Meaningfulness in my work is deeply connected to the ways in which my research is an extension of who I am in the world. Whereas the compass of the traditional academy is “neutral” and requires scholars to write about research participants from a subject–object point of view, using queer phenomenology by Ahmed opened the space for me to turn the coordinates of the compass, to study and write about my lived-experiences with a collective of women-who-love-women. Engaging in post-intentional phenomenological research allowed me to queer the research process from singularity to multiplicities: working with a collective of women-who-love-women to study, write, and facilitate social change. My work disrupts the dominant narrative of research design and practice, which is individualistic, stable, and Other-ing to work toward a social justice activism research, which is collaborative, unstable, queer, and participatory by design and in practice.

Using the compass in a queered research process, the boundary between reflection and lived-experience becomes a movement between the interior and exterior milieus, between cartography (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 13) and topography. The compass implicates the mountains. Where cartographic lines indicate the contour and gradient of terrain, however, the compass orients the self to lines that cross the mountain’s contours, pulling the self along this line to exteriorize the interior, even as the mountains are pulled inexorably into a milieu of interiority. Unlike a box of crayons, though, the compass is not a tool to make a mark upon the world but for exploring how the world is already marked by our passage.

Mountains

Immigrant adjustment in the United States could be likened to climbing a mountain because of the complexity of immigration, immigrant struggles, and the tedium of the process of adjustment. Dr. Lesley, a participant in my study of the lived experiences of immigrant medical doctors (IMD) finding work and working in the United States referred to the physician licensure process as “mountains.” The multilayered examinations required for IMDs to get into licensure are seen as mountains and unjust. This has triggered new theorizing in my scholarship. There are a variety of mountains in the adjustment of some immigrants in other professions. These mountains are embedded in various systems and contexts. The personhood of immigrants has been challenged in various spaces: political cultural and educational.

Most immigrants in the United States live in fear no matter their legal status because of the new political era, its uncertainties, and wanton inhuman utterances. The new political era endangers immigrant adjustment. There is violence against immigrants because of their “immigrantness” and “foreignness.” Speaking English with a foreign accent, for example, is a mountain that engenders violence. Such violence is unveiled as a discriminatory practice (Nguyen, 1993) in the workforce. Some employers use accent reduction as a yardstick for recruitment. Telephone interviews for employment that expose foreign accents could lead to the prescription of an accent-reduction training for some skilled immigrants. In case of resistance, the result could be unemployment and brain waste (Batolava, Fix, & Creticos, 2008; Sumption, 2013).

Violence against immigrants represent mountains that render their adjustment a perpetual temporality. Employment discrimination because of the age of arrival and foreignness (Milkman, 2011) is an injustice and a mountain. Foreignness is the fact of being foreign or regarded as alien. Furthermore, discrimination has been referred to in the literature by some scholars as racial projects. Racial projects could be macro or micro (Omi & Winant, 2015) leading to systemic racism that has institutionalized racial oppression (Feagin & Elias, 2013) creating education and employment disparities. Macro-racial projects in this context refer to policies toward immigrants that make them appear as second-class citizens and dehumanized.

Also, immigrants have inalienable rights and responsibilities to be great additions to the economy of the nation. In contrast, these rights are at times ignored and often violated. For example, violence against immigrants is perpetrated in a plethora of borderlands—spiritual, psychological, physical, sexual (Anzaldúa, 1987)—and I have expanded these borderlands to intellectual and academic borderlands from my research with foreign-trained medical doctors (Funfe Tatah Mentan, 2016). Although accent does not stand in the way of knowledge, accent is another mountain that is difficult for some immigrants to surmount (Chang, 2004).

Preconceived notions of constructing the identity of immigrants as being inferior (Fanon, 1967) to the dominant culture propagates racial oppression and marginalization. Such identity construction renders immigrants powerless, a “Body Without Organs” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Some immigrants are powerless because they are constantly under surveillance by the authorities in various social contexts. Also, most immigrants suffer from tainted bias and racial aggression. Immigrants are presumed to have lower academic capability. In contrast, some immigrants are hardworking, resilient, and patient (Chang, 2004). They look for the cracks in the system by pursuing lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and working survival or necessity jobs while hoping to get to their preferred position someday. Immigrant adjustment could be termed as being rhizomatic (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

The phenomena of immigrantness and foreignness are exclusionary and need to be debunked. Debunking meritocracy of the dominant culture through various opportunities that utilize the talents that immigrants bring would lead to building an inclusive society, where capability is acknowledged. This move could be a line of flight that could contribute positively to the national/global economy. Enacting a pedagogy of possibilities could add value to our collective good. President Mandala enacted Ubuntu, “I am because we are,” in 2005 in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to bring peace. Ubuntu enjoins humaneness because my humanity is intrinsically embedded in yours.

The mountains are obstacles, yet like the comal are also representative of common cultural experience and our shared humanity. The comal and the mountains function both as a pair and in relative opposition as aspects of polis and nomos (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While they both exist on a plane of consistency of politics and policy—which is of or from the city—they manifest as vectors that move against migrants and nomads, who are perceived in the aggregate as not of the city. Unlike the compass, however, which exteriorizes the interior, the mountains are imposed from without, and the struggle to find and celebrate Ubuntu—an African philosophy of education that originated from the Zulu tradition in South Africa—blurs foreignness, immigrantness, and becoming. It can disrupt the mountains.

A Knife

The knife is a tool with a blade that is primarily used for cutting things—dissecting something into separate parts. Also, it can be used as a weapon to commit an act of violence by inflicting harm on creatures. It is the action of the knife, that is the cutting, which is of particular interest to my work. French philosopher Michel Foucault draws on the action of the knife to theorize knowledge. Foucault (1984) posits, “knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting” (p. 88). Knowledge is not a moment of finality that when we obtain it we come to some sort of end or ultimate truth. Rather, knowledge is for dismantling singular truths and what is considered “status quo” by creating multiplicity with each cut of the knife. It is meant to introduce discontinuity into our ways of being and knowing.

After teaching math methods in a teacher preparation program for some time, I discovered that most preservice teachers enter the university classroom with fixed notions of what it means to know and do mathematics. Preservice teachers often describe math as black and white saying there is “one right way” to get an answer or all you have to do is “follow the steps” the teacher demonstrates. They tell tales of speed and correct answers dominating their math schooling experiences. Many express fear and dislike for this subject called mathematics. While others express their love for mathematics, proclaiming that it is a “universal language” that “transcends all cultures,” a constant in the midst of uncertainty and complexity that can be found when learning to read and write.

I describe preservice teachers notions of teaching mathematics as narrow and rigid. These notions dehumanize, depersonalize, and decontextualize the teaching and learning of math. They work to create a knowledge system that produces the illusion of singular meanings. My work, as instructor to preservice teachers, is to take up the knife and cut away—dissecting and dismantling “regimes of truths” (Foucault, 1977) about mathematics teaching and learning. It is to cause discontinuity between neutrality notions of math, that math is “culture-free” or a “universal language,” and the rich multicultural heritage of mathematics and multiple ways of knowing and doing math. It is to arm preservice teachers with the knowledge of equity and social justice—the ways in which race, culture, language, gender, and social class intersect with the teaching and learning of mathematics. This cutting helps them develop new regimes, regimes that are based on creating multiplicities.

My work also entails helping preservice teachers to take up their own knives. To cut through singular productions that might inadvertently cause violence to the future children they will teach. One preservice teacher engages in the act of cutting, as she reflects on her actions during a field experience. She explains, “I was more focused on me doing the right thing, rather than like really getting to know . . . like I got to know a lot about students, you know like their level in math, but really getting . . . well . . . and just being a human, you know, just being a person with them.” These words, from the preservice teacher, depicts her engagement in “cutting edges of deterritorialization” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987). Her words, just being a human, cut through the singular notions of knowing children through their levels in mathematics and embrace a different kind of knowledge—one that holds the potential to create a different space in the math classroom, a space that values the humanity of children. A space that is concerned with intentionally connecting with children and listening deeply, not just intellectually, but to uncover their ways of knowing and thinking about math—a space that privileges multiplicity, personalization, and contextualization.

As tools for exploring multiplicity, we might follow a line of flight from the knife to the box of crayons. We might also explore the ways that the knife de- and re-territorializes the comal or how it is drawn into relation with the mountains. To resist creating “arborescent pseudomultiplicities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 8), however, we reject the comfort of being certain. Instead, we invite you to assemble your work and identities with ours, perhaps through metaphor, and join us in Becoming-human.

Discussion

The metaphors that we have each chosen to represent our work here—as well as our individual projects, divested from their metaphors—elicit numerous “‘discursive multiplicities’ of expression” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). They allow us to explore different lines of flight, to move between plateaus, experience different intensities, and encounter Becoming as a Body Without Organs (pp. 153-159). Yet the Body Without Organs is not without limits; even as metaphor complicates our understanding, it also constrains our imagination, stratifying hierarchies, halting movement, and deadening experience within the very territory that metaphor opens up. In creating our work as an assemblage of assemblages—“‘nondiscursive multiplicities’ of content” (p. 167) drawn from multiple disciplines—we seek to locate our metaphors, our projects, and ourselves in a plane of consistency bounded only by milieu in which we attempt to destratify, decode, and deterritorialize our individual liminal understandings. An ontology of disruption, unsettling, and problematizing—and a commitment to an epistemology of in-betweenness and always-becoming—effervesces when metaphors are considered collectively.

The comal, which is always present in the culinary process (and sometimes gets in the way) accompanies the knife in helping the box of crayons in its project of removing its labels, its names, so that it may be more connected with the world, valuing the Human and the Real. The queer compass joins them, pointing in different directions from that which is generally accepted, that which the mountains declare to be monolithic, guiding the knife in pluralizing cuts. The singularity of being is reoriented and cut into multiplicity, lines of flight crossing through and between the mountains, bridging distant plateaus within the immanence of Becoming. Just as the mountain is not a thing to be conquered or owned through the isolated triumph of a few, the comal, a compass, a box of crayons, and a knife are not merely tools of understanding but embody our commitment to this Becoming. By Being-in-the-World (Heidegger, 1996), we are Becoming: “Becoming produces nothing other than itself” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 238).

Crafting assemblage produces (is always producing) a commitment to crossing borders, to in-betweenness and indeterminacy, and to the multiplicities born thereof. Through the blurring of lines that obscure where one color begins and another ends, the authority and stasis of the naming of colors is unsettled, and in so doing, children learn that they may author themselves and the world, by Becoming in it. In queering the academy’s scholarship of individuality, collectivist research interrogates “normal” and stable. Promoting multilingualism engenders multiple identities and a simultaneity of perspectives in conflict, out of which is always-already being born a newness of Being. Leading preservice teachers to discover multiplicity and humanity in mathematics fosters connections with their future students even as it cuts through what they once held as singularly “true.” By embracing Ubuntu, intellectual and academic borderlands are not projects of distance and seclusion but, through an inclusive Becoming, are part of a vast chorus whose voice can fracture monoliths that would otherwise deny the humanity of the unheard, unheeded, and unsung Other.

Conclusion

As activist academics, our activism engages in epistemo-ontological disruption. As the multiple apparatus of the State evolve toward a milieu of interiority—of isolationism and homogeneity that denies all exteriority and alterity—we can no longer afford to call ourselves academics, to separate ourselves from the world in our own milieu of interiority. Furthermore, our work has brought us to question what our place in this world is, as academics, particularly in the current political climate. What does it mean to consider ourselves as the public? Public-academics? And the public as academic (or the academic public?)? What might a more engaged scholarship that embraces an onto-epistemology of conflict, in-betweenness, and Becoming look like and lead to? Our status as the intellectual 1% to 2% demands a responsible engagement, and a commitment to considering ourselves not as apart, but as involved. Involution (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) is active, multiplying, pluralizing. And it is humanizing.

This current project is an intensity of this conviction. By authoring as A Phenomenology Collective (there may be others), we seek to disrupt the status quo of status that comes with being a first or second author—while still achieving authorship. Indeed, even our process epitomizes Becoming, as we have each contributed parts individually, but so involved ourselves in each other’s writing and editing that much of what we have both individually and collectively written has become inextricably Ours.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

The members of “A Phenomenology Collective” who contributed to this piece are the following, in alphabetical order by last name: Dr. Timothy Babulski, Dr. Karen Colum, Dr. Charity Funfe Tatah Mentan, Dr. Keitha-Gail Martin Kerr, and Caleb Zilmer.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Dr. Timothy Babulski is a Lecturer in Arts in Education at the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities where he earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction. He is an arts-based researcher and phenomenologist interested in how the lived experiences of students and teachers might inform the development of anti-oppressive pedagogies, impel expression, and manifest as inclusive practices in a variety of educational contexts.

Dr. Karen R. Colum is the Department Chair and Associate Professor in the Elementary and Literacy Education department at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her scholarly endeavors include examining cultivating preservice teachers’ equity-mindedness for the teaching and learning of elementary mathematics from a phenomenological perspective.

Charity Funfe Tatah Mentan, PhD, is a Research Associate with the Institute on Community Integration (ICI), National Center for Education Outcomes (NCEO). University of Minnesota. Dr. Tatah Mentan, Holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, a Master’s degree in Adult Education, another Master’s in Education Policy and Administration, and an Executive Master of Public Affairs from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are immigrant education and employment, parental involvement, community integration, service learning, shared leadership, community-engaged research, communal good, intercultural communication, and peacebuilding.

Dr. Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr is the Associate Dean of Faculty and Staff Development at St. Paul College, MN where she provides vision and leadership for a comprehensive model of faculty, staff, and organizational development with a central focus on equity-mindedness and inclusive practices. She is a phenomenologist who researches the literacy practices of students from same-sex families living in a hyper-homonegative society.

Caleb Zilmer is a doctoral candidate in Second Languages and Cultures at the University of Minnesota and adjunct faculty at Western Washington University in language teacher training. His research seeks to promote multilingualism, focusing on combined social and cognitive factors in second language acquisition, and associated communicative language teaching methodologies.

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