The Possibilities for “Humanizing” Posthumanist Inquiries: An Intra-Active Conversation

Abstract

What are the ethical responsibilities of doing and teaching qualitative inquiry at a time when Black and Brown bodies are under assault, an expression of White supremacy that has become ever more visible in the wake of the election of Donald Trump? And how might scholars who “think with” posthumanist theories respond to the call for more “humanizing” methodologies being made by African American and Latinx researchers? This article responds to this moment by presenting a conversation among three literacy scholars about the ethical challenges they have encountered in their own engagements with posthumanist theories, and the implications this has for doing/teaching qualitative inquiry. We call for more openness about the limits as well as the possibilities of posthumanisms, and more attention to ethics for justice. The entanglements of human/nonhuman assemblages in these dangerous times call on us to act, not only think, with theory.

Keywords

ethics qualitative research posthumanism haunting(s)pedagogy

In the wake of the interpretive turn (Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979), which upended the belief that knowledge is a “mirror of nature” (Rorty, 1979), educational researchers looked to anthropology and sociology for methodologies that “refocused attention on the concrete varieties of cultural meaning, in their particularity and complex texture” (Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979, p. 4). Ethnography came to signify the break from positivism and especially the assumption of subject/object dualism, which had allowed researchers to believe they could remain neutral and dispatch their ethical obligations by adhering to the requirements of informed consent. Doing ethnography, in contrast, was a human practice that took the act of interpretation as both its object and its method, and entailed a radically different assumption about the relationship between the researcher and the researched.

Culture, the shared meanings, practices, and symbols that constitute the human world, does not present itself neutrally or with one voice. It is always multivocal . . . and both the observer and the observed are always enmeshed in it; that is our situation. (Rabinow & Sullivan, 1979, p. 6)

“Our situation” thus called for a new ethical imperative, yet with few exceptions (e.g., practitioner inquiry, collaborative inquiry, participatory action research), this imperative has been repeatedly breached in qualitative inquiries of education. Just as anthropologists confronted the field’s colonial past (Marcus & Fischer, 1986), educational ethnographers have acknowledged the irony of being spectators in a field defined by its commitment to change. In her 1982 presidential address to the Council of Educational Anthropology, Courtney Cazden (1983) related this story: “While teaching in Alaska last summer, I was told there’s a sign in the Alaskan Department of Education that says: We don’t need any more anthropological explanations of school failure” (p. 33). She could have easily substituted “ethnography” for “anthropological explanations” but the point is clear, and remains so today. Frederick Erickson (1979) was more explicit:

[T]he ethnography of Malinowski and most other classic ethnography—mere ethnography—does not address such questions as “How can we make this canoe better?” Thus classic ethnographers have been unable to learn what can only be learned when one gets involved in the action and picks up one’s own end of the log. (p. 186)

We cannot help but now wonder: What is “our situation” today, and how, in the wake of the election of Donald Trump—which made visible the White supremacy inscribed in U.S. laws and history—can we make it “better”? What are the ethical responsibilities of doing and teaching qualitative inquiry at a time when Black and Brown bodies are under assault, expressions of White supremacy have become widespread, and racist, xenophobic, (hetero)sexist, and homophobic rhetoric is “wrapped in the guise of ensuring national safety and preserving culture” (Strom & Martin, 2017, p. 5)? At the same time, we find ourselves grappling with what it might mean to think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories (writ large) at the very moment that African American and Latinx researchers are calling for more “humanizing” methodologies (Paris & Winn, 2013), and educational scholars are critiquing posthumanisms for not fully attending to social inequalities (Hackett, MacLure, & Pahl, 2018), markedly uneven distribution of agencies across humans and nonhumans (Nichols & Campano, 2017), and colonial violence (potentially) furthered by more-than-human relationalities (Bayley, 2018; Zembylas, 2018). Zembylas (2018) aptly captures our concern:

When certain people have never been treated as humans—as a result of ongoing colonial practices—posthuman approaches advocating a move away from humanism might be seen as an alibi for further denial of humanity to these same people. (p. 255)

Within our own field of literacy, we have seen this concern arise time and time again at conferences (e.g., Literacy Research Association; American Educational Research Association), where some literacy scholars (cf. Hackett et al., 2018) rightfully worry that the newfound attention to “things”—while broadening conceptions of children’s literacy practices—may obscure histories of colonialism and the ongoing deleterious effects of those histories (e.g., limited educational access, incarceration, death—Sharpe, 2016), not only within society writ large but also educational spaces (Zembylas, 2018). At the same time, there also seems to be a kind of anxiety related to the elusiveness of posthuman methodologies (for critiques see Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, & Ulmer, 2018), where some colleagues have noted that the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and procedures is “potentially dangerous” and, even, “unwelcome” (for critiques on affect theorizing in particular, see Seigworth, 2017). For the past few years, we have found ourselves reflecting a great deal on such matters, and yet our puzzlement over this ethical quandary still remains. On the one hand, we are drawn to what some posthumanisms make possible for research and pedagogy (see, for example, Coleman & Ringrose, 2013; Lather, 2016; Niccolini, Zarabadi, & Ringrose, 2018; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016; Strom, Ringrose, Osgood, & Renold, 2018), and yet we feel an urgency to engage with the argument for humanizing methodologies as it seeks to repair the history of dehumanizing relations between researchers and research participants from minoritized communities, and reclaim the history of qualitative inquiry, which too often tells a tale of White ethnographers inscribing the cultural practices of “the other,” ignoring the groundbreaking work of W. E. B. DuBois (Bogdan & Biklen, 1992).

In what follows, we engage in a conversation about the ethical responsibilities of doing and teaching qualitative inquiry through a posthumanist lens. Rather than challenging the ethics espoused by posthuman scholars (e.g., Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013), we are more interested in addressing the tensions we ourselves have experienced in understanding and putting these theories to work. Although we value these contributions and find them generative, we have struggled with the way their abstractness (see also, Zembylas, 2018) feels so distant from everyday injustices experienced by children in the segregated school systems that characterize education in the United States (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014). These feelings intensified after the election of Trump, perhaps because, as Ta-Nehisi Coates (2017) argues, Trump made the awful inheritance of White supremacy so explicit.

As White scholars who were just beginning to think with (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) posthumanist theories, we found ourselves struggling to reconcile the arguments about ethics that posthumanist scholars were making with our commitments to doing ethical research in school spaces. In the course of these wonderings, we have found helpful the work of Black scholars, such as Weheliye (2014), who draws on Wynter and Spillers, to ask how racism flows through each relational entanglement we find ourselves encountering, and Sharpe (2016) who brilliantly argues that we are living in a past not quite past. We are living in “the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation . . . always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery” (Sharpe, 2016, pp. 5, 8). To undo the “racial calculus” that has produced the ongoing subjection of Black subjects, Sharpe (2016) insists that we need new modes of reading/writing the social, or a “new analytic” (p. x). Taking up Sharpe’s call, we have begun to consider how posthumanism might be productively brought into relation with concepts such as racializing assemblages (Weheliye, 2014) and the wake (Sharpe, 2016)—and how these relationalities might forever haunt “our” knowing, being, and doing. We consider “our situation” in a conversation that, much like a rhizome itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), is not linear and does not claim to have reached any definitive conclusions—nor would we want it to. In this way, this piece is a qualitative inquiry itself, consisting of personal vignettes, as well as edited versions of academic discussions that took place over email, text, and phone. Gitlin, Siegel, and Boru (1989) capture our intentions well when they write, “we strive to put the political [read: ethical] moment back in the methodological debate” (p. 238), yet, at the same time, we are caught in our own vulnerabilities and our not-knowing (Duckworth, 2006).

But First, a Word on Posthumanism(s)

As there is no one theory of posthumanism, and we are far from discovering all the distinct theoretical variations (Snaza & Weaver, 2015), scholars have referred to these theories in a number of ways, for example, as feminist materialisms, new materialisms, political ecologies, animal studies, agential realism, actor networks, and affect studies (see Kuby & Rowsell, 2017). That said, what posthumanisms do share is a commitment to reconceptualizing human beings as “more-than-human” collectivities, thereby challenging those legacies of humanism that have sought to disavow the dynamic relations among humans, animals, machine, things, environments, and so forth (Snaza & Weaver, 2015). Decentering the human as an individual, however, does not imply a rejection of the human/humanity. Rather, posthumanisms highlight how human beings never act alone and are always entangled with/in their environments. The overall aim is to disrupt the White, western conception of Man (read: White, privileged male) as an autonomous subject with absolute agency—as a rational, thinking human who is superior to everyone (e.g., women, people of color) and everything (e.g., animals, objects). Yet, at the same time, many posthuman scholars—ourselves included—are not willing to distance themselves from the humanist project entirely, especially when it comes to embracing foundational humanist concepts such as rights, justice, equity, and freedom (e.g., Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Snaza & Weaver, 2015).

Within our conversations here, we draw from a wide variety of scholars in addressing theoretical, methodological, and ethical issues surrounding posthumanism. Some of these scholars have used the terms “posthuman” or “posthumanism” in reference to their work; others have used associated terms, and some may not associate with the term at all. It is not our intention to act as if there is unity in thinking across the wide terrain of fields with these terms. While much of the discussion of posthumanism has focused on “more-than-human” ontologies and distributed agencies across human and nonhuman actors, we are too reminded of the ways in which the humanist subject has been problematic for many reasons: its “eurocentrism” and “masculinism,” along with its “anthropocentrism” (Braidotti, 2013). It is our hope, then, that a wide range of scholarship, including critical race and postcolonial theories, contributes to understandings of posthumanisms, from those seeking to make “matter matter” to those seeking to “actively reconstruct what has long been a violently restrictive category: human” (Burton, 2017, p. 17).

* * *

Marjorie:

[As a professor who has taught qualitative research courses and sponsored more than 25 qualitative dissertations] I did not feel prepared for the challenge of supporting students who took up posthumanist theory, and who sometimes argued that sociocultural theory had failed to make a difference in the field that matters: schools. I had not thought of this felt uneasiness as related to ethics, yet as I reflect back on the experience of both guiding and learning from these emerging researchers, I have come to believe that ethics captures the experience. Something I’ve been asking my students who want to take up Deleuze and Guattari and other posthumanist theorists is this: What do concepts like assemblages, materiality, and networks afford for a new ethics of qualitative research? Having done so in your work, what would you say to them?

Bessie:

While there is no one way to conceptualize posthumanism, for me the “turn” to posthuman thought involves a simultaneous dissolving of traditional humanist boundaries—such as subject/object—and an embracing of bodies as porous and permeable human and non-human assemblages (Blackman, 2012). As a philosophical experiment, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) aim to radically refigure the human subject. Instead of seeing the human body as intact, as whole, they imagine the body as an intra-active (Barad, 2007) configuration of entities or forces. So, the self is thought to extend into an ever-changing assemblage of signs, objects, bodies, languages, discourses, etcetera, that influence and shape the human. The idea of distributive agency comes into play here (Bennett, 2010). Each entity within the assemblage acts on the subject—albeit not equally—and has some form of agency, which disrupts the humanist notion of individual free will. It is an ethical project in that Deleuze and Guattari invite us to rethink the dynamic relationship of the human body to its environment. In terms of educational research, I find these concepts helpful for troubling current meritocratic assumptions of educational success/failure—which all too often place personal responsibility and moral blame on individual students.

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), this kind of rhizomatic or decentered thinking is meant to introduce new possibilities that get us away from what they call “tree logic” or the humanist logic of representation, which assumes that subjects/objects are in binary opposition to one another, that is, hierarchically classified. While Deleuze and Guattari don’t give researchers a play by play of how to map out assemblages, they do introduce six principles of rhizomes (connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania) that I myself have used as a guide, at least within my dissertation research (for rhizoanalysis, see, for example, Hagood, 2004; Leander & Rowe, 2006).

Daniel:

Although I haven’t used Deleuze and Guattari’s work, there seem to be many similarities between assemblages and actor networks (Latour, 2005) which I took up in my dissertation. Both emphasize a similarly dynamic materiality such that the two are often used interchangeably (see Müller & Schurr, 2016). But as you said, assemblage theory is more of a philosophical experiment while ANT (actor network theory) is usually described as more of an “empirical toolbox” (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010). I also do not think ANT articulates an ethical relation to the subject in the way that, say, Barad (2007) has expressed for posthumanist theory as a responsibility in “meeting the universe halfway.”

Bessie:

If researchers are willing to take up Deleuzoguattarian theories of the subject, then they have to keep in mind that we, as human/non-human assemblages, do not just think with language; we think with multiple semiotic codes that need to be mapped out along a variety of plateaus. [According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987), “a plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus . . . [or] a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (pp. 1-2).] They also write about rhizomes in relation to de/re/territorialization. In other words, rhizomes are always subject to processes of deterritorialization, or supple lines of flight that open us up to transformation, creativity, and newness, as well as re/territorialization, or rigid lines of segmentarity which bring us back to order, sameness, and normativity. So while Deleuze and Guattari don’t exactly map out how to use assemblage theory within post/qualitative research, they are specific about the properties of rhizomes and how rhizomes function, which can serve as a way to guide researchers’ actions, thoughts, and analyses.

Marjorie:

Right, so where are issues of power in assemblage theory? For instance, how do they address race and gender?

(Bessie)

As I left my introduction to qualitative inquiry course, a feeling of dread coursed throughout my entire body. Part one of my proposed mini-study was due in a few short weeks, and I didn’t have the slightest idea of where to begin. I was never one of those kids who liked to (or even could) color within the lines, so the idea of following a formal kind of methodology that embraced conventional research coding didn’t appeal to me. But since I didn’t really know what to do or who to turn to, I spent some time in methodological limbo: without any tools to help guide me on my way. My interest in posthumanism or post/qualitative inquiry wasn’t immediate, then. In fact, I hadn’t learned about posthumanist theories in the courses I was taking and didn’t know anyone in my graduate program who was thinking with them—at least initially.

When I thought about posthumanism (if I thought about it at all), I envisioned Gilles Deleuze and his later philosophical “experiments” with Felix Guattari. To be honest, I didn’t really want to take on Deleuze—as a college student, I did not have fond memories of his work. In many ways, his writing seemed a bit obtuse to me and somewhat inaccessible. But strangely enough, it was my informal observations that led me (back) to the Deleuzoguattarian theories I would later take up in my mini-study and dissertation research.

I conducted my initial observations within Ms. Lima’s second-grade classroom, which was part of a Title 1 public elementary school situated in an economically and culturally diverse neighborhood in Manhattan (NY). Although I wasn’t quite sure how to begin my mini-study, I did know that I was interested in the possible ways gender discourses shape literacy learning. While in Ms. Lima’s class, I had been noticing the ways that particular configurations of “bodies” in space—for example, a young African American boy who refused to read a “girl’s book” while sitting next to a group of other males—impacted the way that literacy learning unfolded and led to the un/re/making of students as un/successful readers, as well as gendered and racialized subjects. After observing these bodily and spatial configurations at work, I became fascinated with this idea of literacy as an affective entanglement of bodies, ideas, texts, thoughts, affects, and so forth. When I spoke to my dissertation sponsor about what I was noticing, she suggested I reread Deleuze, since I seemed to be talking about “assemblages.” Despite my earlier reluctance, I soon became inspired by his critique of representation and his move toward the logic of assemblage. He writes:

Representation fails to capture the affirmed world of difference. Representation has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false depth. It mediates everything, but mobilizes and moves nothing. Movement, for its part, implies a plurality of centres, a superposition of perspectives, a tangle of points of view, a coexistence of moments which essentially distort representation. (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 55-56)

In other words, by not privileging representation, Deleuze assumes the social world we live in, as an assemblage of objects, bodies, affects, utterances, and institutions, “is not held still and forever separate from the linguistic or category systems that ‘represent’ it” (MacLure, 2013, p. 165).

Although Deleuze would later come to trouble me again, I was initially drawn to this idea of “a plurality of centers”—perhaps because of my own experiences as a first-generation Greek American who learned at a very young age the way it feels to be on the wrong side of that representational binary. While I today identify as a White scholar (because of the fact that in America, European equates to White), I have not always been (and am still not always) read as White. In fact, as a child I was often taunted and even physically assaulted because of my perceived difference: my parents’ immigration to the states; my inability to speak English; the deep olive tone of my mother’s skin and the coarse texture of her thick, black hair that marked her—me—as “other”; and the intense frequency of our Hellenic (read: “un-American”) bodies that seemed to be strangely out of tune with the flat affect (Muñoz, 2000) of so many of our neighbors.|| When I was a young girl, I lived in the south side of Providence in a two-story home with my mother, father, sister, grandmother, grandfather, and uncle. My home was located in a predominantly working class neighborhood that, some Rhode Islanders might tell you, used to be a “good neighborhood” once upon a time. While they probably won’t tell you what they mean by good, as a child I came to understand that it meant neighborhoods that didn’t have people like me in them, e.g., immigrants, people of color, and other “undesirables.”

Looking back, it does now seem peculiar that what ultimately drew me to Deleuze (multiplicity, plurality) seems to be in tension with the way race and gender function within assemblage theory: that is, the fact that Deleuze and Guattari seem to reify race and gender as categories of difference (see Braidotti, 2003; Weheliye, 2014). Nevertheless, I somehow reasoned that I could still think with a theory of assemblage if I drew upon other critical theorists who explore gender and race in more nuanced ways. Couldn’t I?

Bessie:

This question about power goes back to what I was saying about territorialization. For example, oppressive gender discourses that position heterosexuality as the norm and homosexuality as an act of deviance would be one example of a territory at work. But, of course, Deleuze and Guattari are quick to note that territories are malleable (Message, 2010), meaning they are neither symbolic nor representational and always subject to processes of de/re/territorialization. So, they do account for power relations, but from my perspective, I don’t think their work has helped me to understand how and to what extent race, gender, and sexuality cut through all of our lives.

Daniel:

Latour (2005) has often written on power, but ANT has also been critiqued for lacking a politics vigilant in calling out racial/gender/class discrimination (see Braidotti, 2018; Skinner & Rosen, 2001; Winner, 1993). While Latour (2005) has responded that any political action would still require unveiling “black boxes” to expose the “circuits” and “conduits” of such structural inequalities, this still does little to address the overall absence in applications of ANT on issues of class and race, or as once phrased, the “white box” that covers much of this work (Skinner & Rosen, 2001).

Bessie:

One could argue, though, that both are acknowledging that race and gender, among other forces, flow through any given assemblage or network. That said, the few references that Deleuze and Guattari do make to race and gender feel problematic. Drawing upon the work of Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers, Alexander Weheliye (2014) offers a powerful critique of assemblage theory that has really got me thinking about why I have ignored this aspect of their work. He argues that by privileging racial hybridity and impurity [“A race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination. Bastard and mixed-blood are the true names of race” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 379—see Weheliye, 2014, p. 49, for critique)], Deleuze and Guattari ignore the complex ways that race, as a sociopolitical category, is both articulated (e.g., “what counts as racial hybridity and what does not,” p. 49) and used by “the powers that be” to hierarchically sort people. Sharpe’s work is also important to consider here. She argues that the institution of slavery violently laid the foundation for how many are able to see, hear, feel, and think the world (see also Stoever, 2016), namely, by conditioning Whites to view the sights, sounds, behaviors, and affects associated with “whiteness” as universal and normal, and those associated with “blackness” as “strange, inappropriate, [and] wrong” (Sharpe, 2012; Stoever, 2016). This conditioning is violent as it serves to re/produce White supremacy as an American cultural logic and, in turn, direct how many human beings “read the world,” largely in ways that are racialized (Sharpe, 2016; Stoever, 2016). While I don’t think Weheliye and Sharpe would refer to themselves as posthumanists, I do think they write about race/racism in more-than-human ways—as an ontological force, as opposed to a biological fact.

Marjorie:

Yes, exactly, think of the one-drop rule. It’s not biology; it’s politics. It’s not this mixed race kind of hybrid that should be our focus. It’s the politics of the body and the visual: how the flesh is coded and read, for example via skin color.

Bessie:

This idea of the politics of the body is also something many feminist scholars have brought up to critique Deleuze and Guattari (1987). For example, Braidotti (2003) talks about the ways the body has been a site of struggle for feminists in their attempts to redefine what it means to be “woman.” She goes on to describe the body as a field of material and symbolic force relations, where multiple codes of difference become inscribed. One of Braidotti’s main points is that, while Deleuze and Guattari assert that “becoming woman” is a transformative process [“it affirms positive forces and levels of nomadic, rhizomatic consciousness” (p. 49)], they do not seem to acknowledge the effects of [perceived] sexual differences or how power relations have positioned men and women in asymmetrical ways.

Daniel:

Reading Braidotti (2013) has also helped me to reconsider what has counted as posthumanist thinking by acknowledging the multiple critiques of the humanist subject—not just its privileging the human but also its silencing/erasure of feminist, queer, and non-White voices. She further notes that all critiques of the humanist subject ought to be heard in a posthumanist agenda looking forward, which forces me to think critically about moments of “not hearing” in texts I’ve read as well as my own work.

This point has resonated in a way not dissimilar from recurrent national conversations over the term White supremacy, not just as an extreme instance of racism [e.g., the resurgence of White nationalist marches, such as in Charlottesville; police shootings of Black and Brown bodies; the abandonment of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria] but also the systemic everyday silences that enable White supremacy (see, for example, Anderson, 2016; Leonardo, 2004; Ohito, 2017). As Martin Luther King Jr. argued, “the white moderate” [“who is more devoted to ‘order’ than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension” (King, 1992)] is too an enabler of injustice as the Klan member. If as researchers, however, our networks or assemblages dodge or overlook these systemic issues, what might we be enabling in our silence? I’ve worried about this with my own application of ANT, that I’ve forsaken systemic forces, and the potential de-humanizing effects, in attending to tracing specific sociomaterial networks.

So is there a posthumanist response, then, to White supremacy? If so, it requires a conversation across scholars, as you say, equally concerned with the perils of humanism but who may or may not refer to themselves as posthumanist.

Marjorie:

I’m worried, too, that if researchers are too interested in critiquing the perils or dehumanizing effects of humanism at the level of speciesism, for example, but not at the level of humanity (Zembylas, 2018), they may ignore race and how it intersects with gender, sexuality, ability, etcetera in potentially oppressive ways. What’s curious is the absence of any historical situating of Deleuze and Guattari’s work [within literacy studies] . . . it doesn’t attend at all to contemporary ways of talking about race (e.g., critical race theory, Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) . . . it can feel stuck, and this dehistoricising and decontextualizing feels troubling, especially in the current moment.

Bessie:

Well, while I have not always specifically critiqued Deleuze and Guattari in my work, I also have not taken up their theories in orthodox ways. When I write, I try—and not always successfully—to go beyond the limitations that exist within their discussions of race and gender. I try to consider Deleuzoguattarian theories in relation to other critically oriented theories, such as feminist poststructural, queer (e.g., Butler, 1990; Weedon, 1987) . . . and more recently to the kind of “humanizing” theories that Weheliye and Sharpe take up . . . those that cut across theoretical genres (e.g., feminist, postcolonial). For me, what makes their work humanizing is their attention to methods of analysis that invite us to consider not ways to humanize people—Black people in particular—but, rather, ways to “make manifest ‘humanity’ that we already know to be present” (Sharpe, 2016, pp. 115-116). They’re not interested in saving “us” from the category of “Man.” They’re interested in how we live on in productive ways that refuse Man—in ways to get us to recognize how the very concept threatens to obliterate everything and anything we can see/know (Sharpe, 2016). To me, it has been and continues to be a humbling experience because I can’t always be sure that what I see, hear, think is not influenced by that image. There is, despite my best efforts, always the danger of potentially reifying race and gender as (hierarchical) categories of difference.

Daniel: And further upholding White supremacy—whether we intend to or not . . .

(Daniel)

My interest in materiality came after considering how a teacher’s closet would make an interesting research site. During a mini-study of two teachers’ experiences implementing new ELA curriculum, I found myself in one teacher’s closet helping to sort materials before the end of the year. It took me back to when I was a new teacher trying to organize my own closet packed with old curricular materials, some that went as far back as when I was in kindergarten.

One unexpected finding, at the absolute bottom of a pile in the back of the closet, was boxes, a treasure trove of children’s books, which the teacher later incorporated into a classroom library. Another finding was, in total, remnants of four different scripted reading programs that had been adopted by the school in the last five years. It felt like an archeological dig into a classroom’s layered curricular history and convinced me that “stuff” could be the subject of my dissertation, with materialist theories offering a way to do so.

In viewing boxes of newly purchased school materials, the space they occupy, and what materials are then displaced, one can see the complex networks of actors that become implicated within any classroom event. Materiality seemed to offer a fresh approach to the question that had been on my mind since my first classroom, “what is all of this stuff doing in here?” as well as “why were four different reading programs bought for one classroom, and how did picture books end up at the bottom of the closet”? It forced me to see within encounters of materials and humans, the networks of relations that constitute a lesson, a class, or even a school.

By May of 2016, I had presented the idea to Clare, the focal teacher of my study, and we planned to do material inventories of her room and closet before school started. Then I would document her process in organizing materials for the first day, then several days of instruction throughout the year. We were both excited about what would be found in the coming school year, and how it may change the way we think about curriculum and schooling.

And then in June, I saw the New York Times Magazine cover story by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2016), who has written extensively on school desegregation and resegregation. Titled “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” the cover image is a single child with no background, and the only material present is a school uniform. I read the article as a stark reminder that there too are networks that mobilize the bodies of children into unequal school spaces, and realized I hadn’t put enough thought into how I would address the entanglements of shifting school zones, gentrification, and greater parental choice for school admissions in also constructing the school as network. I neglected that “in the US, it is just not possible to fully understand [education] without weaving a tale inclusive of how segregation, race and economics have combined to become the story of public education in America” (Rooks, 2017). And of all places, New York City, the most segregated school system in the nation (Kucsera & Orfield, 2014) this seemed a grave omission.

While I still felt that the closet “mattered,” and exploring its networks contributed to the field, I expanded my focus to include how the mobilization of materials was connected to the mobilization of bodies, and how both circulations were constituted in the production of curriculum, and the enduring network of school segregation. Given that school funding is tied to student enrollment, which at this school was low but steadily increasing since they adopted a “progressive education philosophy,” tracing how both materials and students’ bodies were mobilized through one classroom offered a completely different perspective on curriculum as a network effect. Yet, how easy it would have been to privilege one network and render another invisible. Was ANT letting me off the hook, or rather, had I let myself off the hook by following ANT?

Marjorie:

Given the renewed discussion of ethics within posthumanist research in the field of literacy specifically (see, for example, Hackett et al., 2018), I’m wondering why the distance (from such critically oriented theories)? What makes posthumanist ethics new or different?

Bessie:

I wouldn’t say it’s new, per se. For me, when educational researchers turn to affect it doesn’t imply a turning away from the insights of other theoretical perspectives, such as poststructuralism, postcolonial, queer theory, and critical race theory. Rather, it signals a re/turning to, building upon, and complicating of such theoretical accomplishments and analyses (see Dernikos, Lesko, McCall, & Niccolini, 2020).

Daniel:

There is, though, a sense that the emphasis on ethics is different, or that the conversation is more pronounced. Barad (2007) is often the one cited on ethics for describing her posthumanist theories as “onto-ethico-epistemological,” which may imply to some that the ethics are inseparable from being and understanding. Lenz-Taguchi (2011), for instance, who draws heavily from Barad, describes an “ethics of immanence and potentiality” that is at its core, “a constant and mutual state of responsibility for what happens in the multiple intra-actions emerging” (p. 199). Lenz-Taguchi and Barad both espouse an openness to the potentials for learning and doing through intra-action, and in narrowly prescribed schooling environments, this is certainly important. But I wonder, what if the openness researchers invite also opens up possibilities for inequity or discrimination? Is the openness of the researcher necessarily always more ethical for all, and are we (White scholars) fully acknowledging that being open to the “possibilities of becoming” (Barad, 2007) is to be in a “state of responsibility” for a lot of injustice and violence, to fully withdraw privilege and lay bare our entanglements with White supremacy?

There’s also the issue of “cuts” in the network or entanglements, which ultimately privileges some possibilities over others. That’s the ethical choice, then, according to Hollin, Forsyth, Giraud, and Potts (2017) “that the ‘radical potential’ of [Barad’s] agential realism is in drawing attention to what is excluded from particular entanglements” (p. 932). So if our ethical responsibility as researchers is, as Barad says, to “meet the universe halfway” then we must fully claim responsibility too for the exclusions made in who and what we research.

Marjorie:

But are all researchers fully claiming responsibility for those exclusions? There is something about even juxtaposing race and assemblages the way Weheylie does that feels different, more productive. I also appreciate the way he privileges Black feminist writers, such as Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter, and brings in Stuart Hall (1997).

Bessie:

Yes, his critique of assemblages and his honoring of scholars of color has made me rethink my own writing and research. I’ve begun to question this idea of “thinking with theories” and the ways that taking up particular philosophical traditions might—if we’re not careful—very well be reinforcing White supremacy—albeit unintentionally. We seem to lose the humanity of these theorists when we don’t acknowledge their social locations, the fact that they (Deleuze and Guattari) are White males, for instance. It’s as if theory is disembodied, “a view from above, from nowhere,” as Donna Haraway would say. In some ways, it reminds me of being an English major and discussions around the “canon” [of cultural literacy]. Why is it that I have read Deleuze and not, say, Hortense Spillers’ work (as a grad student)? When I recently reread Weheylie I came across this quotation, which I have found vital to consider in terms of how we may unknowingly be enacting symbolic violence on ourselves and others by blindly adhering to Theory (capital T):

If I didn’t know any better, I would suppose that scholars not working in minority discourse seem thrilled that they no longer have to consult the scholarship of nonwhite thinkers now that European master subjects have deigned to weigh in on these topics. As Junot Díaz remarks: “Women-of-color writers were raising questions about the world, about power, about philosophy, about politics, about history, about white supremacy, because of their raced, gendered, sexualized bodies; they were wielding a genius that had been cultivated out of their raced, gendered, sexualized subjectivities . . . That these women are being forgotten, and their historical importance elided, says a lot about our particular moment and how real a threat these foundational sisters posed to the order of things.” (pp. 6-7)

Marjorie:

Indeed, the personal is political, and Weheylie and Díaz point to this in calling out the absence of women of color’s writing as an erasure of their bodies and subjectivities. If privileging White scholars and the individual/personal are a defacto humanist endeavor, and humanism—at least its pitfalls—is something posthumanists are striving to move beyond, then we need to think more about how the researcher fits in here. “Racializing assemblages” (Weheliye, 2014) and this idea of living in the wake of slavery (Sharpe, 2016) may help us confront “our situation,” including our positionality and the way it impacts our research.

Bessie:

Who you are helps construct the knowledge of what you’re seeing . . . it’s not as if you are outside of these assemblages. I don’t think post/qualitative scholars like Patti Lather (2016) would argue we are “beyond” humanism. With any post-, we are always somehow moving beside (Sedgwick, 2003), and in many ways I find that more productive. How can we do a better job of explaining our current situation if we are removed from it? Back to Daniel’s point, perhaps what could be a more ethically oriented way to think with posthumanism is to examine the choices we make as researchers within the assemblages we find ourselves in. For example, even thinking about who we cite and don’t cite . . . whose work we recognize and whose work we marginalize, or even erase altogether.

Daniel:

Ultimately researchers are choosing what to include, and what paths to trace, which, for a theory of endless networks, always leaves absences. As Fenwick and Edwards (2010) note of ANT methods, “wherever one puts boundaries around a particular phenomenon to trace its network relations, there is a danger of both privileging that network and rendering invisible its multiple supports and enactments” (p. xiv). We can’t choose everything, and what we do becomes a representation. How can we see beyond our own conceptions of those assemblages, though? How do we get beyond our own genre (Weheliye, 2014; Wynter, 2003) of humanness, which can carry biases, filters, and privilege? How do we make responsible network boundaries?

Bessie:

That’s a really hard question and something I continually struggle with. I understand how essential it is to examine our own lives and to consider how our experiences shape the knowledge we come to produce. But, at the same time, it also feels discomforting to put yourself out there in that way . . . to talk about and share your experiences with others—although I am aware that women of color have been doing this kind of work for some time (see, for example, Spillers, 1987). There certainly is a vulnerability to it all. It can feel confessional (see Lensmire et al., 2013). And yet, the fact that I can even hide behind my discomfort, can choose, the fact that I could write an entire article and only mention once that I’m White as if that settles everything . . . In truth, I have made the mistake of not sharing my personal history because of the pain attached to certain memories. Reverend Thandeka (1999) beautifully writes about White privilege as a process involving privileges and penalties . . . that we can’t talk about privilege without talking about the costs . . . the ways you need to cut off pieces of yourself that are “shameful,” that don’t fit within a White supremacist/racist sorting system.

So while not talking about who I am/was is, in some respects, a form of White privilege, I think we need to complicate what we mean by White privilege (see Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016). Instead of White privilege as say a possession you or I have, I think it’s probably more productive to think about White supremacy as a system linked to particular privileges and traumas or penalties . . . to think about how perhaps I have taken up White supremacist discourses unintentionally in my attempts to assimilate. In terms of qualitative inquiry, I wonder: How might our choices as posthumanist researchers—regardless of our distinct positionalities and social justice agendas—reify and maintain White supremacy? How might a force like White supremacy attach itself to diverse bodies (see also Matias, 2016)?

Daniel:

Treating White supremacy, then, not as an identity but rather an assemblage, a relational materiality, a system that we encounter and intra-act. And then as a researcher who identifies as White, being open about efforts, and sometimes failures, in recognizing our connections to these assemblages.

Bessie:

Exactly, what does Butler (2004) say, “My body is and is not mine” (p. 26)? We have to talk about the assemblages that we find ourselves in, even if language fails us.

Marjorie:

Trying to flip the script by privileging the material over the human can come at a cost . . . historical context is important here. What was unstated in early ethnographic research was the researcher as spectator, colonizing, dehumanizing, and inscribing participants as “the other.” The concern about research as dehumanizing has again become a focal point, as Django Paris and Maisha Winn (2013) point out, suggesting a need to consider the history of qualitative research. The idea of the researcher as the primary instrument of research immediately made it a requirement that qualitative researchers consider ethics. So what could be the metaphor that might address the ethical imperative we are faced with now? If, following the interpretive turn, qualitative research was all about making meanings and the researcher as a sign in the field (Herzfeld, 1983), what is it about today? Complicating the trope of the researcher as instrument who constructs “the other” through writing? Reframing participant-observation as taking action with participants? . . . So back to my original question, what should students consider when they take up posthumanist theories to inform their qualitative inquiries? Clearly there are many possibilities, but what are the concerns?

Bessie:

When I first started thinking with posthumanist theories, I did find them to be incredibly seductive. I remember naively saying things like, “I am doing anti-representational work.” Marjorie would often push my thinking by asking, “But, aren’t you still representing, even if the representations are partial and incomplete?” Until I was actually in the field and having to “write up” my research, I didn’t quite understand what she meant. When I finally did, I not only felt humbled but also concerned. How was I writing about the teacher and students who were so kind to me, who graciously let me into their social worlds? And what did those representations make possible and impossible for these human beings?

Daniel:

Yeah, and part of the allure is to get beyond the trappings of the human, but we the researcher still have to deal with our own humanness, which is entangled with inequities, like racism, sexism, or White supremacy.

Marjorie:

Right, so maybe we have to live within the limits of language or representation, but we don’t want to live within the limits of White supremacy. Yet, the work of Black studies scholars suggests that posthumanist studies can work to disrupt White supremacy. We may be stuck with the crisis of representation, but the work of scholars like Weheliye and Sharpe reaches beyond the concern over the limits of representation and invites a practice of ethics that calls on us to acknowledge our complicity—as White scholars—in maintaining White supremacy, even as we believe we are dismantling it. When I entered the conversations on literacy research in the early 1980s, the dominant discipline was cognitive psychology, which paid little attention to questions of context, let alone questions of injustice. The turn to sociocultural and critical theories in the 1980s and 1990s was thus compelling for literacy educators interested in going beyond the methods fetish over the “correct” method for teaching reading. Instead, a new narrative about literacy pedagogy emerged, one that took up the question of how race and power worked through curriculum and teaching thus making literacy pedagogy culpable in producing and maintaining inequities. This current moment in which Black studies scholars are in conversation with posthumanist writing offers a way to think about the ethics of post-qualitative research without reinscribing either White supremacy or the human/nonhuman binary.

Bessie:

I think as students, teachers, and human beings we become vulnerable in the face of these theories. They can feel a bit abstract, a bit utopian in their promise of possibility and expansiveness, and no doubt, there is a danger in that. It is only through doing that I’ve come to discover it’s a lot messier than it seems.

Daniel:

This feels hopeful though . . . in being vulnerable about where a theory or method is limiting, it puts a distinction between the ideal (the posthuman) and the everyday, or between humanity in an abstract sense, and the children, teachers, parents, etc. that appear in our research. It feels hopeful to think of an ideal that we strive towards, despite our limitations.

Bessie:

True, but it’s really hard having these conversations and talking about race, in particular. They bring such intense emotions to the surface. Emotions, as Cheryl Matias (2016) argues, “make the possibility of racially-just education so hard to achieve” (p. xix). Within the current “post-truth” era of Trump, we see the pulls of humanism more than ever now, especially when it comes to “race talk.” The tricky part is people aren’t always aware that they are drawing upon White supremacist discourses, that they are being racist (e.g., Julianne Rancic’s discussion of Zendaya’s dreadlocks smelling of patchouli oil or “weed”—Steiner, 2015). Fueled by the media, the idea is if you say or do something that is perceived as racist then you’re inherently evil and incapable of change, which is why no-one wants to acknowledge their own complicitness (e.g., note Rancic’s repeated denials). This kind of logic fails to see the ways that the human never acts alone and is always entangled within dynamic—often oppressive—forces. I think Ta-Nehisi Coates (2013) said it best in relation to Paula Deen’s “accidental racism” and subsequent public shaming:

We have conditioned ourselves with a kind of magic to believe that racism is a matter of kindness and prohibitive vocabulary—as though a hatred of women can be reduced the use of the word “bitch.” But what does a country which tolerates the terrorism of Southwest, Georgia expect? What does a country whose left wing’s greatest policy achievement was made possible by an embrace of white supremacy really believe will happen to children raised in such times? What do we expect in a country where many find it entirely appropriate to wear the battle-flag of the republic of slavery?Perhaps if we were to seriously take up this idea of intra-action, then we might possibly come to see posthumanism and qualitative inquiry as a problematic (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018) yet hopeful coming together: an entangled process of inquiry where we as students, teachers, and human beings become willing to openly talk about and feel our frustrations and breakthroughs, shortcomings and brilliance, inhumanity and humanity. After all, posthumanism allows us to understand that “we” are not in this alone.

Marjorie:

Teaching and doing qualitative inquiry have never been innocent. More openness about our own shortcomings and biases, and more attention to ethics for justice is what is needed right now. The entanglements of human/nonhuman assemblages in these dangerous times call on us to act, not only think, with theory so “things might be otherwise” (Greene, 1995, p. 16).

Haunted: Thinking and Acting with Posthumanisms

WARNING: If you’re looking for a conclusion, you may not find it here. Instead, you’ll find more lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Lines that may inspire you, lines that may confuse you, and lines that may even move you to think and act differently. Feel free to follow whatever lines call to you; we know we did. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you . . .

A Call to Action

[There is] the possibility that humanism will haunt or taint posthumanism . . . a problem of what remains. (Badmington, 2003, p. 12, emphasis added)

When we recently met up again at the 2018 Literacy Research Association conference to present our research, we realized that it had been a few years now since we had first started thinking with posthuman theories. Yet, in one way or another, we all still found ourselves grappling with the ethics of “doing” posthumanism, especially when so “much violence has been done in the name of ethics and ethical attentiveness” (Kuby, Spector, & Thiel, 2019, p. 13). Worried that we ourselves may be contributing to such violence, we couldn’t help but wonder: Had “thinking” with posthuman theories—even a resignified form of thinking—taken us as far as it could in helping us make sense of our ethical concerns? And how, in these dangerous times, could we act, and not just think, with theory so “things might be otherwise”? To be clear, we in no way wish to suggest here that, within a “post-” landscape, thinking is synonymous with Descartes’ ideas of what it means to be human (“I think, therefore I am”). For Descartes, thinking is a self-contained act of cognition that affirms the “superiority” of Man, as it evokes order and judgment. When we say we have been “thinking with theories” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) we mean that we have been working with posthuman theories/theorists to reimagine interpretive methodologies so as to “decenter some of the traps in humanistic qualitative inquiry” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012, p. viii). Inspired by Colebrook (2002), who draws upon Deleuze, we imagine thinking as something that happens to us from “without.” This happening moves researchers to intra-act (Barad, 2007) with data as vibrant matter (Bennett, 2010): a dynamic becoming that constantly shapes and transforms us, as it distributes agency among various life forms, e.g., human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, actual and virtual. This kind of thinking, thus, implicates the body (writ large) in language and opens up possibilities for conducting qualitative inquiry in more materially engaged ways (MacLure, 2013). So, if thinking for us implies dynamism, becoming, and movement, then why the worry? What might the concept acting with theory afford us ethically that “thinking” perhaps does not?

The verb act not only denotes a doing but also an active undertaking: an important, difficult task as well as a promise to do something (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). To help educators better grapple with “our current situation” in ways that create new formations of intersectional justice (Strom & Martin, 2017), we suggest that acting with theory becomes part of a post/humanist project in which “data, theories, writing, thinking, research, researchers, participants, past, future, present, and body-mind-material are entangled and inseparable” (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018, p. 479) from the hauntings that make up the very fabric of our social worlds. As we will argue here, hauntings—in addition to being traces of the past in the present (Newfield & Bozalek, 2019)—are ontological agents that call on us to both acknowledge and act upon our own participation with/in violent systems of oppression (e.g., of colonialism, racism, hetero/sexism, classism), which continue to be dehumanizing and deeply hurtful. Hauntings can serve as useful ethical tools as they enable us

to consider a different way of seeing, one that is less mechanical, more willing to be surprised, to link imagination and critique, one that is more attuned to the task of “conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent.” (Gordon, 1997, p. 22)

Within education, scholars have explored the concept of hauntings in different ways, for example, how data (for haunted data, see Blackman, 2012) haunt the researcher (Dernikos, 2018), how racialized histories haunt “our” research and teaching (e.g., Johnson, 2017; Kennedy, Middleton, & Ratcliffe, 2016), and how classrooms are haunted by colonial legacies that have “ghostly effects” (Newfield & Bozalek, 2019, p. 38) on curricular practices. In one way or another, then, these scholars all acknowledge the presence of ghosts with/in research and teaching: whether they be the ghosts of the dead with whom we’ve had personal relationships (Dernikos, 2018) or the ghosts of the colonial past whom we may or may not know (Johnson, 2017; Newfield & Bozalek, 2019). While Johnson specifically refers to ghosts as “white people,”¹ thereby implying that racial hauntings are re/produced by Whiteness and White supremacy, Newfield and Bozalek (2019) assert that ghosts are not necessarily oppressive figures. In fact, Newfield and Bozalek go as far to say that we should revere ghosts, noting how ghosts/hauntings have always been a significant part of African cultures—something to be revered and not feared.

Drawing again upon the work of Sharpe (2016) and Weheliye (2014), we believe it productive to consider the ways ghosts/hauntings might be all of those things. As both Sharpe and Weheliye distinctly note, White supremacy as a force-relation has historically resulted in the disappearance, destruction, and erasure of Black life in myriad ways. Yet, Black being always “exceeds that force” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 134) in ways that offer up both disaster and possibility (Sharpe, 2016; Weheliye, 2014). As researchers seeking to think and act differently, we have come to the realization that, as we cannot fully escape humanism, we must forever be haunted by its ghosts—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We are haunted by those histories that may or not be our own but that almost certainly make up who we are and who we might become. We are haunted by our own omissions: those “cuts” (Barad, 2007; Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) we make as researchers, those decisions about who and what we focus our research on, who and what we ignore, marginalize, or potentially erase altogether, and how we choose to represent the people and places that invite us in—even as we acknowledge those representations are always partial, incomplete, and subject to change. For us, then, to become haunted involves a commitment to examining the disastrous effects of White supremacy, acknowledging our own complicitness in feeding the “larger destructive force[s]” (Sharpe, 2016, p. 13) of humanism, and constantly striving to see/hear/feel/think the potentialities present in any given moment—the ghosts who linger to remind us, as Gordon notes, to stay “attuned to the task of ‘conjur[ing] up the appearances of something that [is] absent’” so that we might be open to recognizing and affirming the humanity that is already, always present.

All that said, conjuring up absences is never easy. As Dillard (2012) argues, we have been “seduced” by racialized histories of oppression—and, we would add, the ghosts of humanism—to forget our individual and collective humanity (p. ix). As such, we are all complicit in processes of dehumanization that divide and separate us from one another. We hope that acting with posthuman theories is one way to not only re/member our complicitness, but also our shared humanity (Dillard, 2012), and the ways that the dead are always entangled with the living—the un/dead. At the same time, we acknowledge that “acting” involves intense work—reading, thinking, sharing, feeling with others, as well as a willingness to hear/listen to what others have to say. As researchers and human beings, we cannot always name, know, or understand how we are being complicit—how we continue to energetically feed those terrifying apparitions whose presence enables us to further perpetuate violence against ourselves and others, despite our good intentions. Acting with theories means sitting with the discomfort of knowing that at any given moment—days, weeks, months, years later—data might open up to you in a different way, a way that perhaps shows you something about yourself that you didn’t quite see before, something that may even disturb you.

Although the ghosts of the dead can surface at any time to haunt us, they are here to teach us something valuable about ourselves, others, and the social worlds we traverse. After all, the Latin root spect means to see, and from that root we find such words as spectator (one who watches), respect (a feeling of deep admiration), and auspicious (favorable, suggesting future success) (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). So while ghosts serve to haunt us, they also watch over us, enabling human beings to “see” anew—even as humanism’s forces threaten to obstruct our view. For that reason, ghosts deserve our respect, and even our love. And, as the living are always entangled with the dead, the living deserve our love too—despite our differences, and the anger and frustrations those differences may produce. To act with theory, then, involves an ongoing commitment: a promise to lovingly re/member (Dillard, 2012; hooks, 2000) these ghosts so that we can think ↔ act in different, more ethical ways that seek to affirm the humanity of all humans and the vitality of all beings. Ultimately, if the goal is to create a less damaging world (Gordon, 1997), we must be willing to concede the possibility that data and research are not only alive (Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018; MacLure, 2013) but also have an afterlife that is all at once messy, painful, loving, and vibrantly (Bennett, 2010) haunting.

Footnotes

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.

Notes

Author Biographies

Bessie P. Dernikos is an assistant professor of Reading and Language Arts at Florida Atlantic University. Her research interests connect to two interrelated projects: examining the affective forces that impact language and literacy learning for young children; and rethinking normative literacy practices in order to foster cultural, linguistic, and gender diversity.

Daniel E. Ferguson is an assistant professor of Early Childhood Education at George Mason University. His research interests include the materialities of early childhood schooling, literacy curriculum and reform.

Marjorie Siegel is a professor of Education in the Department of Curriculum & Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her scholarship seeks to disrupt the settled boundaries, practices, and performances of literacy in the school curriculum through the lens of multimodality.

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