Analytic Productions in Post-Intentional Phenomenological Research

Our Performative Engagement (Artistic Expression) Moment

In approaching our analysis with a sense of play, I (Colleen) am drawing on notions related to Richard Schechner’s (1988) work on performance theory and arts-based theater methodologies exemplified in the work of Johnny Saldaña (1999, 2008), Norman K. Denzin (2003), and others. First, I utilized these theories to dramatize the moment under analysis, meaning that I wrote a script of the empirical material being considered. Then I drew on these same theories, as well as on a discussion during a session at the 2015 International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) to illuminate elements of the analytic process from a post-intentional phenomenological approach.

While performance theory is in large part focused on theater and other formal performance genres, there is also significant thought given to performance as a part of everyday life. According to Erving Goffman (1959, p. 72), as quoted by Schechner (1988), “All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t aren’t easy to specify” (p. 257). Schechner goes on to note that this is because “everyday life is suffused with interactions that are rule-bound, conventions that are networks of reciprocal expectations and obligations” (p. 257). It is within this framework of everyday interaction as performance that allows for the playfulness of embodied analysis of empirical material in post-intentional phenomenology.

What would it look like if we approached Iris’s impassioned performance through the perspective of performance theory? One possibility is to treat this everyday performance as a more ritualized and formal performance for the purpose of playful analysis. The following is an example of what might be created utilizing such an approach:

(A YOUNG STUDENT, IRIS, stands in stillness in a school hallway, in a sea of young STUDENTS moving past her in both directions. IRIS is lit from below, the other STUDENTS moving in and out of her light.)

(Two adults, a MAN and a WOMAN, also in stillness, stand taking notes, a short distance away from IRIS. They are both in partial darkness, catching only some of the light being shed on IRIS.)

(On a wall in the background hang various pieces of different colored construction paper, all of a uniform size and rectangular shape, with a large photo affixed to the top portion and handwritten pages affixed in the lower portion. These are representations of a Random Act of Kindness (RAK) performed by each of the students in the class. The MAN and WOMAN are here to listen to IRIS tell her story of her RAK.)

(Other young children stream past and between IRIS, the MAN, and the WOMAN. Throughout the scene, the flow of other STUDENTS slows and eventually stops, until only IRIS, the MAN, and the WOMAN remain.)

(Lights up.)

(On a screen behind where the scene is being played, the words “TRACK MY RAK,” “CHAIN REACTION,” and “ATTITUDE OF GRATITUDE” appear amid images of rainbows, flowers, hearts, and vaguely religious symbols. These images fade into other images of formal curricula based on RAK. These images are meant to represent a discourse in popular culture related to “random acts of kindness” that has been codified in various ways.)

(Lights up on a TEACHER, working at a desk, STUDENTS gathered around her, some asking questions, some making noise, and some finding ways to go unseen. The TEACHER answers some questions, ignores others, and gets caught up with a small crisis among the noisy STUDENTS.)

(The WOMAN watches this action in silence for a moment.)

(Lights down on the TEACHER and STUDENTS.)

(The WOMAN turns to the screen, as phrases such as “social justice,” “class struggles,” and “racial inequality” replace the previous images.)

(The WOMAN turns as if to address audience, but is cut off by IRIS, who breaks away from silently talking with the MAN, in order to address the audience directly. As she speaks, the lights slowly fade, until IRIS stands alone in a pool of light.)

People could do more. They could throw them a party and help them. Help them pay for equipment to fight the fires.

(Lights up.)

(All three laugh. Lights out.)

Dramatizing the Empirical Material

The first step in the process of dramatization as analysis was to write the script. For this, I (Colleen) listened to the recorded interview of the moment in question and allowed my imagination free reign to begin to visualize what it might look like if this interaction were enacted as a moment in a play. It is important to note two things in this process. One, in so doing, I was drawing on my extensive background as a theater artist, which, for arts-based researchers, is vital to the practice of this type of inquiry, namely, to draw on artistic traditions with which one has significant history and experience. Second, the production of the script does not assume evidence of presence or givenness of a particular experience or meaning (as is often assumed in early, Husserlian phenomenology). Rather, the production of the script allows for the study of how the experience was constituted, performed, and enacted, and the ways in which we as researchers responded to that performance. As noted by Denzin (2003), “There is no essential self. . . . There are only different selves, different performances, different ways of being . . .” (p. 86). In addition to listening to the recorded interview, I allowed myself to visualize the moment as it unfolded, relying on the memory of that moment in whatever form it had taken in my mind. I also consciously conjured some of the thoughts I remember having had in the encounter with Iris, as well as some I have had since the moment in question. All of these elements were in the mix as I visualized our interaction. In other words, I gave myself license to engage creatively and without inhibition with the memory of that moment. This last point about creativity and artistic license is akin to the post-intentional phenomenological approach of delimiting ourselves as researchers as we interact with the phenomenon and allowing the empirical material to be something that is both lived through and with the participants and the researcher(s) (Vagle, 2014).

The resulting artistic production of the dramatization was itself a text that is then open to analysis and interpretation, by myself as a researcher, as well as by the co-investigators of this project. In analyzing this text, certain elements in the moment began to stand out to me. I was able to see in the writing things that had been only on the edge of my consciousness, and of which I had only partial awareness prior to writing the dramatization. In addition, it illuminated particular aspects of post-intentional phenomenological practice in that I had tasked myself with illustrating a moment of a post-intentional phenomenological study.

Once I felt I had captured the elements of the moment as I saw them in my mind’s eye, I got up off my sofa and enacted the script in my living room, with only my dog as (highly uninterested) audience. This, too, illuminated specific details, such as my physical and intellectual orientation to the empirical material of the interview. The embodied act of my one-woman play of the dramatization forced me to inhabit the bodies of each person in the script, to see what they saw, say what they said, and feel what they felt (or at least, what I imagined they had felt). Noticing where and how the focus shifted in the script helped illuminate the ways in which the phenomena are making and unmaking themselves throughout the process of analysis.

Textual Analysis of Script

Approaching the text as a product of the analysis and as material to be further analyzed, I noticed a number of things. Among these observations were the following: I noticed that the dramatization was mainly focused on my own responses to the moment as a researcher; I noticed that certain things and people were being foregrounded and backgrounded in different moments of the script; I noticed the use of light to indicate focus; and I noticed that the screen was used to communicate things to the imagined audience that were not being overtly stated in the dialogue of the dramatization. Each of these observations produced a number of questions with which to approach the moment and provided insight into analysis that otherwise might not have been possible.

One example of opportunity for such insight offered by this playful, embodied analysis is in the tentative physical manifestations being produced in me, the researcher. Writing the “scene” of our interview allowed me to unearth some of the various tensions and concerns that I felt in my body with relation to some of the discordant elements of the project and its enactment that I found to be present in the experience of the interview. In the moment that we were conducting the interview, I was less aware of the ways in which the RAK discourse was (to my mind) interfering with the emphasis of social class sensitivity in the project; whereas in the dramatized scene of the interview, it became quite clear to me the multiple discourses that were clashing inside me as I listened to Iris’s retelling of the way in which the photo-storying project was enacted. This embodied analysis illuminated the foregrounding and backgrounding of various elements of the moment, as a part of the making and unmaking of the phenomenon.

Enacting and Embodying the Empirical Material

The next steps in the process for this project took place in different contexts, one with an audience and one being captured via video for the purpose of our own analysis. The first setting was at the 2015 ICQI and included only Colleen in the enactment of the dramatization (although Mark was present); and the second was a small, neighborhood theater, which included the three of us. Each setting offered insight into the analytic process, which I will attempt to illuminate further.

The session at ICQI was one in which we were presenting on the notion of playful analysis in post-intentional phenomenology during which I was to read the dramatization of the moment in the interview that we had chosen to highlight. We had discussed ahead of time the range of possibilities this reading might take, including reading a portion of the script or the entire script from a seated position, standing up and delivering either of the aforementioned options, or possibly even enacting a sort of one-woman mini-drama, although I personally doubted that this last possibility would come to fruition. In the end, we decided to “read the room” and make a judgment call in the moment about which option would be best.

Despite my initial doubt about the more full-blown presentation, given who was in the room at our session and the response to the work leading up to the dramatization, I decided to go for it. This is not to say that I performed to the same level I would in an actual theatrical production, but I did call on my tools of expression to raise the performance a bit above a typical conference presentation. I will talk more about the audience response in the next section of this article, but in addition to the feedback from discussing the dramatization with others in the room, this performance was another form of analytic production.

The second setting in which enacting and embodying the script took place was in a small, rented theater space in which the three of us took turns “acting out” the moment, playing with various moments in the script, and improvising scenes that were not part of the script based on what was written. This exercise, too, proved to be helpful in generating discussion and insight into the empirical material of the script—and exposes how difficult it is to imagine unearthing in other forms of analysis. For instance, in one improvisation based on the moment in the script when the teacher is working with students and the woman researcher is watching the action in silence, we were able to more deeply imagine and theorize the children’s responses to the work of the RAK, as well as the challenges posed to the teacher in implementing the project amid the other demands on her time and attention. Specifically, we enacted the assignment of the RAK to the students, once as we imagined it having happened, and once in what we hoped would be in keeping with social class–sensitive pedagogy. By embodying this moment, we were able to recognize the multiple demands on the teacher, and the many ways in which she may have felt answerable to opposing, or at least conflicting, forces. Enacting the phenomenon in this way opened up a capacity for compassion with our analysis and the humans whose contributions are a part of it, enabling us to resist dominant narratives of education in which teachers are often vilified. Although we all came to this work with prior commitments to disrupt these dominant narratives, this analysis allowed us even more visceral insight into this possibility.

“Audience” Feedback

As I mentioned above, the main “audience” for this work was at the 2015 ICQI presentation, in which Mark and Colleen presented during a session entitled, Playing With Embodied Data Analysis in Post-Intentional Phenomenology. The attendees for this session were from a variety of backgrounds, with a number of arts-based researchers present, as well as scholars interested in poststructural theory, and a few with interest in “working-class” ways of being. The feedback we received after the “performance” of the script was largely in relation to the way in which dramatizing the moment in question allowed for multiplicities of exploration and understanding to coexist in real time. The use of spoken words, body language, and projections on an imagined screen afforded the expression of sometimes contradictory ideas to be layered into the analysis. In addition, because theater is a form that requires an audience to view it, there was co-construction of meaning taking place as the performance unfolded. This co-construction of meaning was also present when we “performed” our analysis in the rented theater space (see “Final Production” section), without an audience; however, the additional meaning-making created by the audience at the conference is an example of the ways in which playing with our analysis as dramatization opened up the constitutive experience of the moment to multiplicities of analyses.

A Bit of Ontology

Although we cannot access all that has influenced where our analytic productions have gone, we do know that Bettie St. Pierre’s (2013) words below, when advocating a post-humanist qualitative inquiry, have served as a catalyst:

Importantly, this is an ethical charge. In this ontology, thinking and living are simultaneities, and we have to think possible worlds in which we might live. As long as we think the nature of being as subject/object, materiality does not matter, and we live in the world accordingly. Deeply embedded in the new ontology are ethical concerns that acknowledge the destruction of the world of humanism and what its science projects encourage with their man/nature, human/nonhuman binaries.

Refusing that binary logic which pervades our language and thus our living is a priority, because if we see ourselves as always already entangled with, not separate from or superior to matter, our responsibility to being becomes urgent and constant. About the refusal of binaries, Derrida (as cited in Caputo, 1993, p. 86) wrote simply that “deconstruction is justice.” Barad (2010), taking up his charge, wrote “only in this ongoing responsibility to the entangled other, without dismissal (without ‘enough already!’), is there the possibility of justice-to-come. Entanglements are not intertwinings of separate entities, but rather irreducible relations of responsibility.” (pp. 264-265, p. 655)

As we continue to work the posts in post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2010a, 2010b, 2014, 2015; Vagle & Hofsess, 2015), it has become clear that we need to not only pay attention to St. Pierre’s (2013) challenge here, but that we also need to pay particularly close attention to Barad’s (2010) caution regarding dismissiveness—especially with regard to the ontological assumption of a subject/object binary that treats subjects and objects as stable and fixed. This also means that, as post-intentional phenomenologists, we are not interested in reifying a binary between poststructuralist and phenomenological ontologies when engaging in the practice of “analysis.” That is, instead of orienting ourselves to the work of struggling toward a destination (e.g., finding phenomenological essences or themes), we use the animating, enlivening embodied entanglements to guide our analytic play (McLaren, 1999; Stucky & Wimmer, 2002). And this sort of play requires a re-imagining of how the phenomenon in phenomenology is conceived.

When re-imagining the conception of a phenomenon, we turn to the posts, first to St. Pierre (2013) for some help:

In simple terms, phenomenology is rooted in the idea of givenness (for critiques, see Bryant, 2008; Sellars, 1956/1997), the idea that there is a brute reality out there—present and fixed—with an essence that can be both immediately perceived (because it is self-evident) and brought to light and expressed in language. In this way, the phenomenological project leads to an empirical description of “actual,” primary experience and to a particular ontology that maintains a representational logic. (p. 651)

Drawing on some of Derrida’s critiques of Husserl, St. Pierre makes a compelling case for a refusal of phenomenology, to aid qualitative researchers in breaking from humanist ontologies. Given our obvious interest in phenomenology, we are sure it comes as no surprise that we are not all that interested in such a refusal, nor are we interested in lodging a full-fledged “defense” of phenomenology as this would likely lead us down a path to ontological binaries that almost certainly invokes a never-ending either-or debate. We would like to try to avoid this, and instead try to work through some of the ontological entanglements in Mark’s ongoing conception of post-intentional phenomenology.

We begin by joining St. Pierre in refusing some phenomenological concepts, but not phenomenology writ large. Like all ontological traditions, we do not read phenomenology as stable, singular, or fixed. Phenomenology itself is an entanglement of histories, desires, concepts, ideas, struggles, contexts, and so on. We think it needs to be clear that the phenomenology that Derrida critiqued was the early phenomenology of Husserl and not all the varied phenomenologies that have followed over the last century.

Although a comprehensive discussion of this point is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to very briefly note the following:

A Bit of Methodology

Although the methodological commitment in phenomenological research to the unit of analysis being the phenomenon (and not the participants’ subjective lived experiences) has the potential to turn analytic attention away from the notion of a “humanist, reasoning” self, this still leaves us with much to disrupt—as the notion of analysis seems to inevitably imply a humanistic logic, embedded and encoded within disciplined bodies of researchers.

As mentioned earlier in this article, we are playing analytically with empirical material that we have gathered in a study entitled, Social Class-Sensitive Photo Storying. One of the guiding commitments in social class–sensitive pedagogy (Jones & Vagle, 2013) is to learn to perceive classed bodies in moment-to-moment interactions. We have found that this same commitment is important when conducting our research—that we need to pay profound attention to how we experience and perceive our classed bodies as we analyze empirical material in our study.

In undertaking a close examination of embodiment in post-intentional phenomenology, we are trying to pay attention to ways that we as researchers have become positioned as docile bodies, and to disrupt the discipline imposed by the practice of academic research (Foucault, 2012). We would argue that this disciplining results in prohibiting access to certain experience and ways of knowing that may be of importance to the phenomenon under study. By turning our researchers’ eyes on our own embodied responses to the empirical material, we hope to gain access not only to a greater understanding of a meaningful element of what it means to engage in post-intentional phenomenology, we also hope to achieve a more deeply felt experience of the phenomenon being studied.

Amplifying this commitment to social class awareness in research is our belief that middle-class assumptions/beliefs/norms are implicitly and explicitly embedded within many research practices. We seek to explore these assumptions as we experience them moving through—and working on—us in our work. In addition, as capitalism is dependent upon the concealment of subjective labor through its production of things, ⁴ attempting to make our own labor explicit in this work aligns with our anti-classist commitments.

Guided by these concerns, in this article, we have played with the idea of embodied analysis in the social class–sensitive photo-storying study. In our productions, we explored one particular moment from the study. Although it is customary to introduce and contextualize empirical material, then perhaps include part of the direct transcript and “analyze it,” we have decided to turn this practice upside down. Instead, we started with our embodied and performed analysis and now share the empirical material we explored.

A fourth grade student, Iris (pseudonym), tells the story of a “random act of kindness” (RAK) performed and written about as a part of a teacher-directed assignment in honor of her father, who is a firefighter in her local community. She speaks about the importance and urgency of that work with emotive, embodied passion. During the interview/conversation, she variously embodies incredulity, clarity, somberness, and an almost welcoming or an embracing of talking about it. She seemed to seize upon the moment of having rapt listeners to allow her passion and concern to live and move in her body, transforming her from a young student intent on performing with precision and accuracy the role of disciplined student into a fuller, more alive and spontaneous young being, using her whole body to relate what she takes to be the underappreciated work being done by her father and his colleagues.

IRIS TRANSCRIPTION

From the start of the research project, we have explicitly discussed how post-intentional phenomenological research is embodied for the researcher AND for the participant. So, we decided we would pay attention to our perceptions of bodies when gathering empirical material. But in our analytical “playings” with this moment, we also have been struck by the importance of treating the phenomenon as an embodied assemblage that is continually made and unmade. That is, we are coming to realize that what it was like for the students to experience using photo storying to create social class–sensitive elementary classrooms seems to centrally be about embodied intensities (Hofsess, 2013), as photographs are storied. Photographs are not merely selected, written about, and then shared—social class–sensitive photo stories are embodied by the author of those stories, by the analysts who attempt to learn more from the author about these stories, and by the concepts that make these embodiments thinkable.

In this way, our embodied analysis cannot be traced to a starting point, nor can it be conceived as something outside a myriad of entangled connections. One of the main purposes of this article was to invite you—the reader—into an entangled journey with us. We have tried to provide glimpses of important moments that have woven themselves so profoundly into our empirical material, analysis, and bodies that to speak of them as distinct or separate would dramatically diminish them and their relationship with one another. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) call “to move between things, establish a logic of the AND, overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (p. 25), we spend the last pages of the article AND-ing our embodied analysis, purposefully not offering a tidy closing that attempts to tie up loose ends. As we close this article, we invite you to further complicate this entanglement, attentive to your own and-ings, embodied literacies, creative impulses, and multiplicities of analysis.

Our And-ing Production at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference, 2015

Becoming Drawn to the Student and Her Story in a Completely Present Way. It is customary in phenomenological research to remain committed to the immediacy (e.g., Dahlberg et al., 2008) of empirical material as it is gathered and analyzed—to be as “fully present” as possible. In both the interview moment and in the collective listenings to the taped interview, we found ourselves drawn to the student’s embodied energy as she emphasized the importance of firefighting. We do not recall a methodological decision or moment to be immediate, it was as though the student drew our bodies to the importance that she embodied. In this respect, our bodies performed the role of disciplined student for a short time, as hers appeared to become a bit less docile. In addition, as her story moves from recounting the assignment given by the teacher to her own story, her voice becomes fuller and more resonant.

AND

A Collective Tension/Resistance/Discomfort swelled (Hofsess, 2013) when we found our bodies tense as we listened to Iris talk about the chain reaction her RAK had kick-started—not because we do not think it is important to be kind, or to have kindness paid forward, but because the language Iris used so carefully and closely mimicked her teacher’s. Angela recalled the launch of the RAK photo storying back in January—hearing the teacher discuss the potential power of their kindness as it is passed on. Now, the three of us felt our bodies back into seeing Iris’s embodied responses to our questions as pedagogically docile and disciplined, as less free, alive, and passionate—and, hence, we found our bodies the same. When Iris recounts the assignment and using the more instructive words of her teacher, Colleen feels a wincing inside accompanied by physically leaning away from the table where the interview is playing on a laptop, closing her eyes, and sighing deeply, beginning to doubt the words being spoken by the student, knowing they are the teacher’s and not her own; however, this also leads Colleen to reflect on the fact that none of our stories are completely our own and to be reminded of the danger of marginalizing students when they have others’ stories placed on their bodies.

AND

A Realization That Our Own Histories Are Shaping our Embodied Re-Listenings became clear as well. Mark felt a surge of pride and dignity when Iris, with big eyes, flushed face, and louder voice, stated, “People would die!” when asked what would happen if there were no firefighters. As academics from working-class upbringings, we experience embodied longings for working-class jobs to receive the sort of dignified, impassioned response that Iris provides here. In fact, dignifying all work and workers is a core commitment in this research project—so feeling Iris dignify her father’s firefighting work felt good. It felt like Iris’s experience photo storying in this regard validated the social class sensitivity we hoped to cultivate. Colleen feels an opening and expanding of her chest as Iris’s voice conveys pride in this work, which causes Colleen to experience a sense of hope—which is likely related to the working-class background of Colleen and her desire to see this work dignified in a public way.

AND

We Were Perplexed and Concerned by Thank You Not Being Enough when Iris said, “My dad saved their lives, and all they did is say thank you!” Our bodies tensed and recoiled as our ideas of gifts, kindness, and thanking came into conflict with “acts” of kindness centering on something more than saying thank you—that it was necessary to do more. We again experienced embodied tension between our concerns with the RAK activity and what we hoped Iris would glean about the importance of firefighting work. We wanted her passionate advocacy of firefighting; we did not want her worrying about RAK chain reactions and thank you(s) that did not seem like enough. Colleen’s posture collapses as she recognizes the moment in the recording of the interview when she realizes the RAK is part of an assigned task that has resulted in an almost rote response from the students, including Iris.

AND

We Found Our Bodies Needing/Wanting to Perform, act, move, enact, and imagine. We really did not want to think, cognate, discuss these empirical material in a traditional sense any more. We wanted to explore how we might perform our analysis, how we might communicate our embodied analysis a bit. We decided that we would turn to embodied performances that we each were presently enacting, or had at some point in our lives routinely enacted. For Mark, it meant drawing on his work coaching youth football—a football pedagogy; for Colleen, it meant drawing on her many years as a theater artist; and for Angela, it meant drawing on her work as a yoga instructor.

Postlude: Analytic Reflections From AERA

At our round-table discussion at AERA, during which we shared some of the ways that attentiveness to bodies were helping us think about post-intentional analysis, an interested and engaged researcher posed the question: “In your work, how do you differentiate between physicality and embodiment?” We’ve returned to this question again and again, because the dichotomy it presented was so vivid and alluring. “We don’t” was our shorthand response. That refusal has helped us deepen into the entanglement we are cultivating with our empirical material.

Part of the tension in our response can be understood in relation to our interest in avoiding a mind-body binary that the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty also troubles. The question from the researcher outlined above can be read as presupposing a distinction between physicalizing a phenomenon and embodying a phenomenon. In drawing on Colleen’s background in theater and performance, part of our process was to seek to make the invisible visible in our analysis. This is, indeed, accomplished in part through the physicalization of a moment, and the act of physicalization is itself an act of embodiment. Merleau-Ponty “rejected mind-body dualism, and (re)claimed the centrality of the body and embodied experience as the locus for ‘experience as it is lived in a deepening awareness’” (Zarrilli, 2004, p. 655).

Our Collective Artistic Engagements With the Dramatized Analysis

Today, we are sitting in a circle in a small neighborhood theater. Mark is performing the role of the teacher, seated on the edge of a chair; Colleen and Angela are seated on the floor, performing fourth-grade students. The teacher speaks to the students in a deliberately expressive way as they fidget and listen and become the students they’ve been talking about for the past year.

We are not simply performing monolithic representations of characters. There is an element of the students and teacher we are studying that is living inside of each of us, and as we access those parts of ourselves—attuning ourselves to intensities that arise—unmaking and remaking the stories in ways that radically implicate ourselves and each other, our analysis becomes a new thing. Something new is being created, and all our conversations and writings and theory and empirical material are wrapped up inside of it.

We are experiencing—in/through/with our bodies—the stories we’re seeking to learn from. It feels dangerous and new and exciting. It feels like creation and memory. We are sitting here together, in a circle.

Also present in the ways we work to make the invisible visible through the process of embodiment is our own implicatedness as researchers in a historical tradition that reifies hierarchies of knowledge production in problematic ways. In addition to analyzing the empirical material through embodied practices, we are also interested in making certain invisible elements of research and knowledge production visible, as a way of disrupting hierarchies and troubling traditions that contain historical violence. By accessing and embodying others’ stories that live inside of us, we opened ourselves to experiencing the empirical material from multiple perspectives, not just intellectually. By engaging our bodies, we came into deeper contact with the phenomenon as a result of breaking down the mind/body binary.

In post-intentional phenomenological analysis, a phenomenon is explored to see what it might become—not analyzed to describe its essence. Oftentimes, we cannot plan out these becomings ahead of time. We had no way of knowing, in our mind-bodies, that we would make our way to dramatizations and poetry. In fact, when we sat down at Mark’s table in his messy office to begin to analyze our empirical material, we had planned to do some “textual” analysis—to make some sense of how our interaction with Iris might give us access to the phenomenon of social class–sensitive photo storying. However, our bodies would not allow us to do this. Our bodies knew things that we could not put into language at that point in time. We needed to perform, act, write poetry, present publicly, talk more, puzzle more, feel more, and think more to explore the unmaking and making of our assembled phenomenon.

And so we stopped (for now) at a small theater, trying to play roles as teacher and students—in ways that we found concerning and ways that we would hope would take place in social class–sensitive schools and classrooms, all of which continually make and unmake this assemblage.