Concept-ing with the gift: Walking method/ologies in posthumanist research

Carol A Taylor; Hannah Hogarth; Joy Cranham; Sally-Jayne  Hewlett; Eliane Bastos; Elisabeth Barratt Hacking; Karen  Barr

doi:10.33182/joph.v3i1.2715

Authors

Carol A Taylor University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0914-8461
Hannah Hogarth University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2993-1020
Joy Cranham University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4127-4465
Sally-Jayne Hewlett University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0569-5860
Eliane Bastos University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4457-3663
Elisabeth Barratt Hacking University of Bath https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4959-0166
Karen Barr Sheffield Hallam University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33182/joph.v3i1.2715

Keywords:

Concept-ing, Walking methodology, The gift, Processual methodology, Relational

Abstract

This article takes off from a project entitled Get Up and Move! which used walking as a methodology to envisage research in higher education beyond the human and outside individual, instrumental and competitive codings. The Get Up and Move! project activated new research possibilities for walking as an attentive, situated, emplaced and embodied practice of posthuman thinking, doing and becoming; it experimented with walking’s posthuman generativity as a relational and processual methodology; and it aimed to be inventive, experimental, less elitist, and more inclusive. The project’s posthuman orientation was inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis as a human-nonhuman doing-making-thinking-creating together, which is outlined in the first two parts of the article. This remainder of the article conceptually entangles this initial framing with/in a further process of concept-ing, which designates a theoretical-creative-speculative doing with the concept to unfold its ongoing potentialities and push its inventive mobilities. The concept we do our concept-ing with is the concept of the gift. Working from Mauss’s theorisation of the gift, we practice concept-ing as a means to trace new movements, possibilities and imaginaries for walking sympoietically. Our concept-ings pursue van der Tuin and Verhoeff’s (2022, 3) suggestion that concepts are “productive and experimental ‘doings,’ enmeshed in practice rather than fixed, retrospective labels for things.”

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Author Biographies

Carol A Taylor, University of Bath

Carol is Professor of Higher Education and Gender, Department of Education, University of Bath. Carol’s research utilizes trans- and interdisciplinary feminist, new materialist and posthumanist theories and methodologies focusing on entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education. I am co-editor of the journal Gender and Education and serve on the Editorial Boards of Teaching in Higher Education, Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning and Journal of Posthumanism. Research and publications profile: https://researchportal.bath.ac.uk/en/persons/carol-taylor

Hannah Hogarth, University of Bath

Hannah Hogarth is a PhD researcher in the Department of Education, University of Bath. Her doctoral inquiry explores the relationship between childhoodnature encounters and play in an urban forest school. Co-researching with young children alongside non-human nature, she is interested in finding ways to create knowledge collaboratively using creative, playful and embodied methods inspired by feminist, posthuman, relational and materialist approaches.

Joy Cranham, University of Bath

Joy Cranham has over twenty years of experience in the Primary Education sector. Her doctoral research in the Department of Education at the University of Bath focuses on preventative approaches to safeguarding. The essence of her research is how families construct knowledge collaboratively, enabling greater criticality and confidence to discuss concerns about safety and risk. Joy’s interest in collaborative writing simultaneously derives from her commitment to non-hierarchical educational practices and modes of knowledge productions

Sally-Jayne Hewlett , University of Bath

Sally-Jayne Hewlett has a background in working with young people aged 16-25 with learning difficulties and / or disabilities and specialist tutoring in higher education. She is currently completing doctoral research in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her research focus uses critical realist methodology to explore the invisible, hidden and complex realities of accessibility in higher education through the lens of academics. Sally’s interest is in innovative and accessible methodologies for knowledge production.

Eliane Bastos, University of Bath

Eliane Bastos is an Education PhD Researcher at the University of Bath (UK) interested in understanding how primary school children come to reflect their learning into the everyday through storying with objects, and how longitudinal ocean learning experiences may enable an ontological turn towards children’s understanding of the human-ocean relationship as human as ocean. Eliane’s research is located within a relatively new field – Ocean Literacy, which is concerned with the understanding of the ocean’s influence on us and our influence on the ocean. She has been active as a practitioner in the field of ocean literacy for over 7 years working with partners in the UK and internationally to accelerate ocean literacy in society, including playing a key role as a founding member of the We Are Ocean collective and as a Board Member of the European Marine Science Educators Association.

Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, University of Bath

Elisabeth Barratt Hacking has published widely in the field of environmental education and global citizenship education. She has been involved in numerous educational research, evaluation and development projects relating to childhood and environment, education for sustainability and global citizenship education with nurseries, schools, children and young people, teachers and leaders. Much of this research has employed participatory methodologies in school contexts. Elisabeth is interested in advancing theory, policy and practice in the area of childhood and environment. With Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Karen Malone, she has been instrumental in creating the new concept ‘childhoodnature’ through editing the international ‘Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of childhood and nature research’ (2020). Most recently, the new concept, ‘relational becoming’ (with Carol Taylor, 2020) brings together work in global citizenship, environmental education and childhoodnature to rethink education in a posthumanist frame, that is, beyond anthropocentric notions which privilege (powerful) human exceptionalism. Working with a group of interdisciplinary researchers, the ‘nature relations’ research group, Elisabeth is working on ways of embedding childhoodnature and Relational Becoming within climate change education in schools and early years settings. She is also Co-investigator of a University of Bath interdisciplinary research Beacon: ‘Living Well now and by 2050.’

Karen Barr, Sheffield Hallam University

Karen Barr has taught at Sheffield Hallam University for 15 years, mainly on courses relating to education and early childhood. She is studying for a PhD in Education at the University of Bath and the title of this research is ‘Affect and discursive-materiality in Early Childhood Studies placement assemblages’. This project considers placements as contingent and emergent assemblages of human-nonhuman forces; it explores the material aspects of placement contexts; how these material aspects come to matter discursively; and how affective forces influence students’ experiences. Karen’s study takes up posthuman theory to investigate how placement works as a material-discursive affective assemblage and how that produces learning. Its aims are to contribute a novel way of considering placement and to make a methodological contribution through its creative research practices that attune to affective flows, rhythms, and momentary intensities, which often go unnoticed in learning events.