Shiva Zarabadi
University College London, Institute of Education, Department Member
- London School of Economics and Political Science, Sociology, Graduate Studentadd
- Sociology, Gender and education, Affect (Cultural Theory), Affect Theory, Queer Theory, Gender Studies, and 20 morePosthumanism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, New Materialisms, Post-Qualitative Research, Qualitative methodology, Creative Research Methods, Qualitative Research, Sense of Place, Human Geography, Phenomenology of Space and Place, Cultural Geography, Urban Sociology, Feminist new materialism, New Materialism, Karen Barad, Environmental Humanities, Critical Posthumanism, Gilles Deleuze, Jasbir Puar, and Homonationalismedit
- Posthuman sociologist, PhDedit
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In this chapter we explore how public feelings are constituted around imaginaries of British Muslim schoolgirls. We map various articulations that contribute to the formation of public feelings about Muslim girls and women as one... more
In this chapter we explore how public feelings are constituted around imaginaries of British Muslim schoolgirls. We map various articulations that contribute to the formation of public feelings about Muslim girls and women as one component of the securitization of the United Kingdom (UK) state’s engagement with Muslim communities. First, we argue that mainstream media coverage of ISIS terrorist attacks and global geopolitical meetings, talks, and decisions enables the formation of particular public feelings about Muslims that over-code them as “risky other.” Muslim girls and women are typically either constructed as invisible or positioned as victims and without “agency” in relation to dominant constructions of warring male Muslims. However, in 2015 the attempted “flight” of three UK Muslim schoolgirls to Syria and Islamic State camps set in motion a moral media panic over the radicalization of Muslim girls in London (Barnett 2015). Other headlines which followed, such as “Isis Supporters Offering Cash to British Girls as Young as 14 to Become Jihadi Brides in Syria” (Dearden 2014), point to the explicitly public fear around the sexual exploitation of British Muslim schoolgirls at the hands of Muslim men. As Judith Butler (2008) pointed out in relation to Islamaphobia, Western feminism is co-opted into a discourse of “protecting girls” against culturally backward racialized and religioned men in ways that encourage and legitimize racism and feelings of omnipotence over and against the Muslim others with new affective formations around Muslim girls. Indeed, also noteworthy are ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) advertisings such as “Cover-ed Girl, Because I’m Worth It” (Havlicek 2015), which draw upon these Westernized constructions and use them strategically. This ISIS advertisement facilitates a new turn in the recognition of Muslim girls’ sexuality; the former passive silenced Muslim female bodies are marketized via ISIS’s social media and then recirculated, cultivating a national news media panic and fear of girls who are “groomed” to become brides of Jihadis, proliferating the threat of the reproduction of terrorism.
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In this chapter we explore how public feelings are constituted around imaginaries of British Muslim schoolgirls. We map various articulations that contribute to the formation of public feelings about Muslim girls and women as one... more
In this chapter we explore how public feelings are constituted around imaginaries of British Muslim schoolgirls. We map various articulations that contribute to the formation of public feelings about Muslim girls and women as one component of the securitization of the United Kingdom (UK) state’s engagement with Muslim communities. Throughout this chapter we explore the construction of “jihadi bride” and the way it circulates in the mass media, specifically considering how “bride” invokes an eroticized and sexualized interest in Muslim femininity. Indeed, the sexual agency of these girls is what is of the utmost interest to the Western consumer of these images, conjectured through two questions: Are they willing participants in events? Or are they hapless victims to be rescued? We investigate these questions and some of the affective complexities of the public feelings generated by constituting notions of Muslim girls’ femininity and sexuality.. Affective moral panics generate public support and moral legitimization for political actions, policies, and guidance across civil society, including schools. Indeed, these wider public and media-fueled discourses have informed the Prevent strategy in British schools, a form of vague regulatory guidance implemented to profile and surveil students on the basis of identifying and stopping “radicalization” and “extremism.” We explore some examples of the media coverage to show how it positions Muslim girls in relation to the threat of radicalization. Finally, we present some tentative findings about how UK Muslim schoolgirls themselves intra-act, negotiate, and even challenge these media discourses and school policies, drawing on interview data from a pilot research project in a London school.
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This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new... more
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism-what we have also called elsewhere 'PhEmaterialism'. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting-edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory.
Research Interests: Feminist Sociology, Gender Studies, Education, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism, and 13 moreQualitative methodology, Feminist Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Posthumanism, Feminism, Feminist activism, Feminist Research Methods, Feminist studies, New Materialism, Feminist Posthumanism, New Materialisms, and Post-Qualitative Research
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism... more
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies
of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality
change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cuttingedge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It
demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed
methodology and methodologically informed theory.
The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Her books include Post-Feminist Education? (2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013) and Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015).
Katie Warfield is a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the Director of the Visual Media Workshop, a centre for research and learning into digital visual culture. Her recent writings have appeared in
Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Issues, 6th ed. (2016).
Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work explores subjectivity in relation to assemblages of matter and meaning, humans and more-than-humans, and affect, taking a New Materialist and Posthumanist approach. Her PhD research focuses on the becomings of Muslim girls under the structure of Prevent policy in London secondary schools.
of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality
change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cuttingedge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It
demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed
methodology and methodologically informed theory.
The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Her books include Post-Feminist Education? (2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013) and Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015).
Katie Warfield is a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the Director of the Visual Media Workshop, a centre for research and learning into digital visual culture. Her recent writings have appeared in
Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Issues, 6th ed. (2016).
Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work explores subjectivity in relation to assemblages of matter and meaning, humans and more-than-humans, and affect, taking a New Materialist and Posthumanist approach. Her PhD research focuses on the becomings of Muslim girls under the structure of Prevent policy in London secondary schools.
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In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our... more
In this “paper,” we share our process of exploring the possibilities for the emergence of new ways of knowing-thinking-doing response-able collaboration. In an effort to come “together-apart” as author-collaborators, working from our different positionings and locations in the world, we shared text and images of the various ways the ideas from individual papers (nodal points) and our diffractive processes were moving (with) us. Sharing these creative respondings, new relations co-emerged through the texts-images and the various diffractive patterns that traveled widely through screens, devices, bodies, from New Zealand and Australia, to Iran, London, Finland, Canada, and the West and East Coasts of the United States. Paying attention to the fine details, difference emerged, as did new forms of more-than-human connection. The visual and written respondings were then cut together-apart (literally, metaphorically and methodologically) to represent the multiplicities of the diffractive ...
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various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded KEYWORDS (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We Tags; bodies; researchwrite as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions... more
various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded KEYWORDS (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We Tags; bodies; researchwrite as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and creation; embodied writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices experiments; writing shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole otherwise
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In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities... more
In this article, we share a curated version of a Zoom meeting in which we come together-apart to articulate our experiences of the diffractive review process. In the later part of the dialogue, we turn toward imagining the possibilities for creatively exploring ways to represent how the ideas from this collaborative process travel with us, into our everyday lives. We discuss the ethical and political response-abilities in such diffractive collaboration and respondings, and in so doing, different author perspectives, positionalities, and productive tensions and knots, come to the fore. In so doing, this article connects the first part of the issue—the nodal points (author manuscripts)—with the final part of the issue (diffractive respondings), and provides insight into our collaborative and diffractive process.
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Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open... more
Partaking in some of the material and affective moments and movements that emerged from my PhD research, I map the ontological, epistemological, and ethical possibilities/impossibilities that trans-corporeality and trans-materiality open in my research. Using walking and photo-diary as PhEmaterialist multisensory methodologies, I followed 15 Muslim schoolgirls in two London secondary schools (East Dulwich and Bethnal Green) mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. Employing Jane Bennett's creative and absorbent I as a partaker rather than either actor or recipient, taking in and being taken up by virtues specific to the moment, this article materializes some partaker agencies and "more-thans" that Maha (my PhD participant) and I walked, made, challenged, and became with in different "spacetimematterings." I argue that social injustice and inequalities, gendered and racial harassment as political, ethical, and material issues, are not always raised by those represented or able to name and speak up as part of social structures but emerge through complex webs of power relations and ordinary, everyday material moments and affective encounters. I consider bodies of walking as partakers of influx and efflux, many "I"s, moving and making the moments and experiences of racial harassment, affective entanglements, and the potentialities of the virtual, material, and affective that emerge in-between human and more-than-human walking bodies.
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various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded KEYWORDS (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We Tags; bodies; researchwrite as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions... more
various stable body(boundaries). We write as a group of (un)bounded KEYWORDS (virtual) bodies who aim to collectively create and tag arguments. We Tags; bodies; researchwrite as a collective body where materialities, ideas, discussions and creation; embodied writing become in the doing. Different relational collective practices experiments; writing shared here disturb, disperse, question, undo and undermine sole otherwise
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Taking an affective and material turn, the author maps British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls' embodied and embedded experiences of racial harassment and racializing assemblages in London.
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Taking an affective and material turn, this paper maps British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls embodied and embedded experiences of racial harassment in London. I explore how mattering and moving, with where and what matters for them,... more
Taking an affective and material turn, this paper maps British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls embodied and embedded experiences of racial harassment in London. I explore how mattering and moving, with where and what matters for them, enable different affective and material entanglements to emerge. To work with the affective and material experiences of racial harassment, empowerment and belonging, I stayed attuned to the emergence of objects, spaces, times and feelings in their everyday ordinary lived experiences. My posthuman entry point to their experiences and stories happened through trans-material relations with matter, objects, stories and feelings that emerged during our walking intra-view and photo-diary making. I explore how embodied and embedded senses of belonging and empowerment is experienced, not through the language of the white western hu(man) citizen, but through the agential and vital materiality of wall, Brick Lane and a sewing machine. These entanglements allow for different material forms of becoming, belonging and empowerment between human-other, non-citizen, non-white, irrational, and illiterate which are normally stayed ordinary, unseen and unsaid.
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This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into... more
This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant’s lived experiences into another layer of ‘force field of differentiation’ (Alaimo, Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi, Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2...
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This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant's lived experiences into... more
This paper materialises the affective emergence of watery assemblages between sea, shark, swimming and British-Bangladeshi Muslim schoolgirls of my PhD research. Watery assemblages pushed further my participant's lived experiences into another layer of 'force field of differentiation' (Alaimo, Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, p. 14) where stories, flesh and sea became no longer discrete, where the ground is not solid but watery, the movement is not walking or speaking but swimming and the body is not just human but human-animal. Watery assemblages enabled the fluid and affective entanglements with complex and thick experiences of gender and racial harassment. Entangling with images and stories I explore how the affective and material agency of sea, swimming and shark as concept and a performative multiplicity (Protevi, Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013) works as praxis and provocations for thinkings and doings.
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During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within... more
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations usi...
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Abstract In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to moveaway from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist “I” in order to enable new and... more
Abstract In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to moveaway from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist “I” in order to enable new and multiple forms of subjectivity that do not rely on otherization from an ideal norm of the humanist man. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of difference and becoming, the subject is fractured and becomes different in each encounter with time, space, others, feelings, memories, and self. Rather than clinging to the notion of a unified identity, Jessica and Shiva suggest adopting a “becoming-minoritarian” movement and attempting to exceed the trap of identity. The authors further discuss post-qualitative research methods that help to decenter this “I/eye”, including those involving schizoanalysis, affective intensities, art-based inquiry, and walking methodologies. Moreover, Jessica and Shiva argue that these can, and indeed, must, be taken up alongside multiple more conventional methods and made accessible to a variety of audiences so to have the widest impact. In experimenting with posthuman and post-qualitative theories, researchers must ensure that they are putting these theories to work in ways that can combat the massive social justice issues we currently face. In times of precarity, they contend, we must think differently while also using every theoretical and methodological tool at our disposal to make a difference in the world.
Research Interests:
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism... more
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cuttingedge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals. Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Her books include Post-Feminist Education? (2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013) and Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015). Katie Warfield is a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the Director of the Visual Media Workshop, a centre for research and learning into digital visual culture. Her recent writings have appeared in Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Issues, 6th ed. (2016). Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work explores subjectivity in relation to assemblages of matter and meaning, humans and more-than-humans, and affect, taking a New Materialist and Posthumanist approach. Her PhD research focuses on the becomings of Muslim girls under the structure of Prevent policy in London secondary schools.
Research Interests: Sociology, Education, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism, Space and Place, and 14 moreEducational Research, Embodiment, Pedagogy, Feminism, Outdoor Education, Affect (Cultural Theory), Agency, Multispecies Ethnography, New Materialism, Diffraction, Craftivism, Digital Media Learning, Selfies, and phematerialism
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new... more
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism-what we have also called elsewhere 'PhEmaterialism'. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting-edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory.
Research Interests: Sociology, Feminist Sociology, Gender Studies, Education, Feminist Theory, and 15 morePosthumanism, Qualitative methodology, Feminist Epistemology, Feminist Philosophy, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Posthumanism, Feminism, Feminist activism, Feminist Research Methods, Feminist studies, New Materialism, Feminist Posthumanism, New Materialisms, Routledge, and Post Qualitative Research
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This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning,... more
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional...
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Classrooms Margined With Threat "In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and terrorism cut into pedagogical environments and practices…What I call post-threat pedagogies and... more
Classrooms Margined With Threat "In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and terrorism cut into pedagogical environments and practices…What I call post-threat pedagogies and post-terrorist times in this chapter refer to the understanding of threat as a new capacity or, along with Mbembe (2018), a "racist affect" that charges, intensifies, moves, and hooks learning, teaching, and identity formations. Drawing upon new materialist and posthumanist understandings, "post" in post-threat and post-terrorist neologism does not imply a chronological and linear temporality as after or the end of threat or terrorism, rather the many layers of humans and more-than-humans with and beyond threat and terrorism and the affective entanglements and capacities that it allows. Borrowing from Massumi (2015) in that the autonomy of affect is in its uncertainty and vagueness, which provides the "margin of maneuverability" (Massumi, 2015, p. 2) to materialize the affective intensities of threat, I propose an analogy between affect and phantom. I use the metaphor of phantom to speculate what the threat of terrorism does to pedagogical spaces and the ways in which it phantomatically affects and cuts across spaces, times, bodies, memories, feelings, and desires and agentically elicits new and different "boundary-drawing practices" (Barad, 2007, p. 140).
"…threat as phantom carries the quality of affect; it moves diffractively, appears and disappears, affects and becomes affected, sticks, and slides. The classroom as one of "the affectual geographies" (Laketa, 2016, p. 666) of threat enables imaginary divisions to be reenacted in an extended contagious way, affectively drawing other humans and more-than-humans.... Phantomatic speculations can help us to explore how threat and fear affect educational spaces and interactions, the phantomatic pedagogies that emerge otherwise in the posthuman space and time…. Attainment to the political and racist affect of threat not only shows us the ways in which pedagogical environments and practices becomes "ethnicized" (Zembylas, 2008), but also how they terrorized and phantomatized" (p. 80).
"…threat as phantom carries the quality of affect; it moves diffractively, appears and disappears, affects and becomes affected, sticks, and slides. The classroom as one of "the affectual geographies" (Laketa, 2016, p. 666) of threat enables imaginary divisions to be reenacted in an extended contagious way, affectively drawing other humans and more-than-humans.... Phantomatic speculations can help us to explore how threat and fear affect educational spaces and interactions, the phantomatic pedagogies that emerge otherwise in the posthuman space and time…. Attainment to the political and racist affect of threat not only shows us the ways in which pedagogical environments and practices becomes "ethnicized" (Zembylas, 2008), but also how they terrorized and phantomatized" (p. 80).
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In this paper, we hone in on the final moments of the course which included an arts-based workshop as part of a focus on affect theory and feminist crafti- vism. At the onset of the course, students had been asked to bring meaning- ful... more
In this paper, we hone in on the final moments of the course which included an arts-based workshop as part of a focus on affect theory and feminist crafti- vism. At the onset of the course, students had been asked to bring meaning- ful ‘affective-material’ objects relating to gender to share with the class. Onthe last day, these shared objects were ‘storied’ and then ‘threaded’ to one another through a collective string figuration created with multi-coloured yarn. In this process, students found and charted group-generated connec- tions (e.g. themes, intensities, dissonances) between their objects by making string figures first on their group tables and then ‘shipping’ yarn across the entire classroom enabling the students to materially and affectively engage with difference and tensions, using Haraway’s words, ‘staying with trouble.’ We see this as a posthuman pedagogy that worked, rather than worked through or resolved, tension as an agentic and material co-presence in the classroom. Opposed to a humanist progress narrative that views tension as something to be overcome or eradicated, we see tension as an activating force that here intra-acted with the human and non-human bodies opening spaces
5
for maneuvering within difference. Haraway argues that staying with the
trouble entails finding ‘oddkin,’ or nurturing unlikely kinships between 6
bodies, critters, materialities, things, and ideas. The yarn workshop entangled human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies in pre- cisely such unlikely relationalities – an affirmative process we call kinshipping.
5
for maneuvering within difference. Haraway argues that staying with the
trouble entails finding ‘oddkin,’ or nurturing unlikely kinships between 6
bodies, critters, materialities, things, and ideas. The yarn workshop entangled human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies in pre- cisely such unlikely relationalities – an affirmative process we call kinshipping.
Research Interests:
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (01) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning,... more
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (01) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
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In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to move-away from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist "I" in order to enable new and... more
In this chapter, posthuman feminist researchers Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi discuss schizoanalysis and intimate scholarship as ways to move-away from the rationalist, Eurocentric, masculinist "I" in order to enable new and multiple forms of subjectivity that do not rely on otherization from an ideal norm of the humanist man. Instead, following Deleuze and Guattari's notions of difference and becoming, the subject is fractured and becomes different in each encounter with time, space, others, feelings, memories , and self. Rather than clinging to the notion of a unified identity, Jessica and Shiva suggest adopting a "becoming-minoritarian" movement and attempting to exceed the trap of identity. The authors further discuss post-qualitative research methods that help to decenter this "I/eye", including those involving schizoanalysis, affective intensities, art-based inquiry, and walking methodologies. Moreover, Jessica and Shiva argue that these can, and indeed, must, be taken up alongside multiple more conventional methods and made accessible to a variety of audiences so to have the widest impact. In experimenting with posthuman and post-qualitative theories, researchers must ensure that they are putting these theories to work in ways that can combat the massive social justice issues we currently face. In times of precarity, they contend, we must think differently while also using every theoretical and methodological tool at our disposal to make a difference in the world.
Research Interests:
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism... more
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies
of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality
change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cuttingedge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It
demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed
methodology and methodologically informed theory.
The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Her books include Post-Feminist Education? (2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013) and Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015).
Katie Warfield is a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the Director of the Visual Media Workshop, a centre for research and learning into digital visual culture. Her recent writings have appeared in
Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Issues, 6th ed. (2016).
Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work explores subjectivity in relation to assemblages of matter and meaning, humans and more-than-humans, and affect, taking a New Materialist and Posthumanist approach. Her PhD research focuses on the becomings of Muslim girls under the structure of Prevent policy in London secondary schools.
of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality
change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cuttingedge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It
demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed
methodology and methodologically informed theory.
The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.
Jessica Ringrose is Professor of Sociology of Gender and Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work develops innovative feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity, affectivity and assembled power relations. Her books include Post-Feminist Education? (2013); Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013) and Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015).
Katie Warfield is a faculty member in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. She is the Director of the Visual Media Workshop, a centre for research and learning into digital visual culture. Her recent writings have appeared in
Social Media + Society, Feminist Media Studies and Feminist Issues, 6th ed. (2016).
Shiva Zarabadi is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Her work explores subjectivity in relation to assemblages of matter and meaning, humans and more-than-humans, and affect, taking a New Materialist and Posthumanist approach. Her PhD research focuses on the becomings of Muslim girls under the structure of Prevent policy in London secondary schools.
Research Interests:
In this chapter, I map the cynical flow of threat codes by considering the savage triangle of terrorism and counter-terrorism as a strange ‘despotic machine’ (AO, 198), threat as ‘infinite debt’ (AO, 217) and Muslim schoolgirls as... more
In this chapter, I map the cynical flow of threat codes by considering the savage triangle of terrorism and counter-terrorism as a strange ‘despotic machine’ (AO, 198), threat as ‘infinite debt’ (AO, 217) and Muslim schoolgirls as ‘missing people’ (Braidotti 2018). Building on Seigworth, I ontologise the threat (of terrorism/counter-terrorism) as new ‘lived socialities of debt’ (Seigworth 2016: 16) to argue that the cynical over- coding (AO, 198) of threat in its ‘new alliance and direct filiation’ (AO, 223) with terrorism and counter-terrorism de-/reterritorialises Muslim schoolgirls into the aective and material racialising relations of indebtedness. I explore how threat can be worn as a ‘debt-garment’ (Seigworth 2016), how living-with-threat weaves through and between human and more-than-human bodies gradually and continuously alter- ing the atmosphere of existence; as a garment it can be worn loosely or tightly, but cannot be easily got rid of (Seigworth 2016: 15–16). I follow threat as it is experienced by participants in my PhD research, in their everyday, ordinary, walking through London’s Underground, then into university spaces, teaching halls and conferences. We walk and map our entanglements with threat and the terrorism capitalist-machine. Text boxes and images throughout the chapter show another layer of mapping the thinking, feeling, becoming with threat.
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How teacher training and mind maps can help EFL teachers better support students with dyslexia 7 things I liked about EERA's
Research Interests:
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within... more
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue "Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality," this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical selfpositioning of the participants' (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists.
Research Interests:
In this chapter, we aim to explore what advertising images/messages do and how they shape participants’ experiences, their feelings, and states of becoming, rather than simply what do these images mean to participants. We explore the... more
In this chapter, we aim to explore what advertising images/messages do and how they shape participants’ experiences, their feelings, and states of becoming, rather than simply what do these images mean to participants. We explore the questions of: What sort of material effects and affects do image-body advertising encounters bring with them? How do these intra-actions enable or disable new capacities, possibilities and impossibilities in our participants and us? We demonstrate how arts-based, participatory methods of collaging create a craft-back form of art activ- ism for young people that enables something different to materialise in the space of engaging with advertising beyond critical dissent. The collages as ‘dartaphacts’ (Renold, 2018) are also a medium for messages of change to be communicated to
a much wider audience: particularly from young people, whose voices and ideas for social transformation were not central to our original research brief from the Mayor of London.
a much wider audience: particularly from young people, whose voices and ideas for social transformation were not central to our original research brief from the Mayor of London.
Research Interests:
Classrooms Margined With Threat "In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and terrorism cut into pedagogical environments and practices…What I call post-threat pedagogies and... more
Classrooms Margined With Threat
"In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and terrorism cut into pedagogical environments and practices…What I call post-threat pedagogies and post-terrorist times in this chapter refer to the understanding of threat as a new capacity or, along with Mbembe (2018), a "racist affect" that charges, intensifies, moves, and hooks learning, teaching, and identity formations. Drawing upon new materialist and posthumanist understandings, "post" in post-threat and post-terrorist neologism does not imply a chronological and linear temporality as after or the end of threat or terrorism, rather the many layers of humans and more-than-humans with and beyond threat and terrorism and the affective entanglements and capacities that it allows. Borrowing from Massumi (2015) in that the autonomy of affect is in its uncertainty and vagueness, which provides the "margin of maneuverability" (Massumi, 2015, p. 2) to materialize the affective intensities of threat, I propose an analogy between affect and phantom. I use the metaphor of phantom to speculate what the threat of terrorism does to pedagogical spaces and the ways in which it phantomatically affects and cuts across spaces, times, bodies, memories, feelings, and desires and agentically elicits new and different "boundary-drawing practices" (Barad, 2007, p. 140).
"…threat as phantom carries the quality of affect; it moves diffractively, appears and disappears, affects and becomes affected, sticks, and slides. The classroom as one of "the affectual geographies" (Laketa, 2016, p. 666) of threat enables imaginary divisions to be reenacted in an extended contagious way, affectively drawing other humans and more-than-humans.... Phantomatic speculations can help us to explore how threat and fear affect educational spaces and interactions, the phantomatic pedagogies that emerge otherwise in the posthuman space and time…. Attainment to the political and racist affect of threat not only shows us the ways in which pedagogical environments and practices becomes "ethnicized" (Zembylas, 2008), but also how they terrorized and phantomatized" (p. 80).
"In this chapter, I explore the affective, embodied, and embedded capacities that threaten, and terrorism cut into pedagogical environments and practices…What I call post-threat pedagogies and post-terrorist times in this chapter refer to the understanding of threat as a new capacity or, along with Mbembe (2018), a "racist affect" that charges, intensifies, moves, and hooks learning, teaching, and identity formations. Drawing upon new materialist and posthumanist understandings, "post" in post-threat and post-terrorist neologism does not imply a chronological and linear temporality as after or the end of threat or terrorism, rather the many layers of humans and more-than-humans with and beyond threat and terrorism and the affective entanglements and capacities that it allows. Borrowing from Massumi (2015) in that the autonomy of affect is in its uncertainty and vagueness, which provides the "margin of maneuverability" (Massumi, 2015, p. 2) to materialize the affective intensities of threat, I propose an analogy between affect and phantom. I use the metaphor of phantom to speculate what the threat of terrorism does to pedagogical spaces and the ways in which it phantomatically affects and cuts across spaces, times, bodies, memories, feelings, and desires and agentically elicits new and different "boundary-drawing practices" (Barad, 2007, p. 140).
"…threat as phantom carries the quality of affect; it moves diffractively, appears and disappears, affects and becomes affected, sticks, and slides. The classroom as one of "the affectual geographies" (Laketa, 2016, p. 666) of threat enables imaginary divisions to be reenacted in an extended contagious way, affectively drawing other humans and more-than-humans.... Phantomatic speculations can help us to explore how threat and fear affect educational spaces and interactions, the phantomatic pedagogies that emerge otherwise in the posthuman space and time…. Attainment to the political and racist affect of threat not only shows us the ways in which pedagogical environments and practices becomes "ethnicized" (Zembylas, 2008), but also how they terrorized and phantomatized" (p. 80).
In this chapter, we explore how media events generate affect that resound across the contemporary climate of counter-terrorism in the UK (Sampson, 2012; Grusin, 2010, p. 76). In the first part of this chapter we show how viral media... more
In this chapter, we explore how media events generate affect that resound across the contemporary climate of counter-terrorism in the UK (Sampson, 2012; Grusin, 2010, p. 76). In the first part of this chapter we show how viral media events create new forms of ‘affective qualities’ (Lupton, 2017, p. 13) and affective agential assemblages, constructing security thinking and pre-emptive risk adverse logics which then become a material means of regulating Muslim children. We explore the re-mediated coverage of three British girls who ‘fled’ to Syria to marry jihadi fighters in 2015 and their subsequent construction as ‘jihadi brides’. Specifically, we argue these media events contribute to the construction (becoming) of Muslim girls in contemporary UK society as ‘terrorist assemblages’ (Puar, 2007). We show how the temporal and affective relations of these media events reach out to inform policy initiatives and shape school environmental educational systems through ter- rorism related policies such as UK Prevent Duty to prevent (religious) radicalisa- tion. We draw upon Deleuze (1992) to think about this media event not as a story having a causal essence but rather a series of viral medialogical affective and rela- tional intra-actions, with momentum and punctum piercing and travelling in the social terrain. We think about media events as rhizomatic, with connections that grow in-between the material forces and entanglements with bodies, matters, images, space and time. Indeed, this event itself as an affective assemblage opens up new assemblages emerging between the milieus of human body-subjectivity, edu- cational environments and media images, forming a new collective that develops new potentialities and expressions.
In the second part of the chapter we move beyond a theoretical application to show how we can interfere into such logics of meaning and matter through ped- agogical intra-actions with terror-thinking and terror-images that create uneasyopenings for transformation. We explore the actual and virtual force that can affectively entangle us in relation to counter-terrorism culture and then demon- strate two experimental arts-based participatory pedagogical activities designed to interfere with and transform the affectivity of media events surrounding Muslim femininity, terrorjarring and quiltingveils. We argue such artistic, creative practices can subvert, reorganise and re-matter the pre-emptive logics of counter-terrorism through embodied entanglements.
In the second part of the chapter we move beyond a theoretical application to show how we can interfere into such logics of meaning and matter through ped- agogical intra-actions with terror-thinking and terror-images that create uneasyopenings for transformation. We explore the actual and virtual force that can affectively entangle us in relation to counter-terrorism culture and then demon- strate two experimental arts-based participatory pedagogical activities designed to interfere with and transform the affectivity of media events surrounding Muslim femininity, terrorjarring and quiltingveils. We argue such artistic, creative practices can subvert, reorganise and re-matter the pre-emptive logics of counter-terrorism through embodied entanglements.
Research Interests:
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning,... more
This article explores a series of tentacular troublings inspired by Donna Haraway's (2016) concept of String Figuring (SF). We consider these troublings as relational entanglements which produce perturbations of our gender, positioning, recognition, and respectability as feminist academics in Higher Education. We activate tentacular troublings as a refrain for contemplating differences/ings in our academic lives and as a critique of contemporary neo-liberal academia which ossifies, fixes, and freezes feminist flows. The article makes two contributions. The first is to deploy string figuring as a proposition for feminist thinking which troubles the notion of fixed positions in favour of position(ings)-plural in motion. The second is to enact string figuring as a mode of ecriture feminine (Cixous, 1976) in which connections are made, dropped, and picked up in tentacular relays and patterns of entangled encounters, thereby perturbing normative modes of writing and troubling traditional modes of knowledge making. Feeling Medusa helps us with this work. Medusa, as powerful woman, Amazon goddess and gorgon, and vilified proto-feminist whose glance turns men to stone is knotted into our perturbations and troublings; her presence informs and inspires our SF-ing.
Research Interests:
Reviewing Tara Page’s book, Placemaking, A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy for Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, specifically its section Affecting Affirmative Reviews, was an affective and material placemaking journey(ing).... more
Reviewing Tara Page’s book, Placemaking, A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy for Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, specifically its section Affecting Affirmative Reviews, was an affective and material placemaking journey(ing). Taking new materialist thinking and doing, Page explores how we make and learn place through the entanglements of body with the socio-materiality of place-world. Page’s book is an invitation to a journey of placemaking, with the children of a particular place-world, the Australian Bush, and with Page, herself, an Australian artist scholar based in London. The reader learns and makes place with Land and Bush alongside Page and her human and more-than-human participants. Through a series of images, Page’s embodied and embedded experiences of the Bush, walking with children in their everyday placemaking practices, show us how learning, knowing and becoming happen through the intra-action of bodies of humans, the Land, Bush, dirt, rain, clouds, their colour, texture, sounds, tastes and feelings.
Research Interests:
Recent years have seen rising trends in terrorism, hate crime and Islamophobia in the UK. Enforced Prevent and counter-terrorism strategies have re-located all Muslims as threatening and having potentiality to radicalisation. This PhD... more
Recent years have seen rising trends in terrorism, hate crime and Islamophobia in the UK. Enforced Prevent and counter-terrorism strategies have re-located all Muslims as threatening and having potentiality to radicalisation. This PhD thesis is concerned with how a Muslim schoolgirl feels, lives and experiences everyday life in this era. I follow fifteen Muslim schoolgirls across time and space by mapping relational materialities between things that matter for them in their ordinary everyday practices and experiences. This thesis takes up the feminist new materialist and post- humanist call for anticipating potentialities of the virtual, material and affective to find a different capacity for the analysis of events, practices, assemblages, feelings, and the backgrounds of everyday experiences against which relations unfold in their myriad potentials. I argue that the affective atmospheres around Muslims provide the conditions for the emergence of racialising encounters. Multi-sensory methods of walking intra-view, creating photo-diary and face-to- face interview were developed to explore relations between bodies, spaces, times, virtual and actual. Stories, places, objects, thoughts and feelings that emerge as data and in-between relational materialities were mapped and read diffractively through one another.
Thinking through relationality, materiality and affect enabled this thesis to actualise the plurality of Muslim schoolgirls' relations-in-the-world and their subjectivity as part of the becoming-assemblages with human and more-than- human bodies. This thesis mapped and challenged some of the racialised, gendered and hegemonic views of Muslim schoolgirls as risky, threatening and with a potential to radicalisation. Mattering with what those Muslim schoolgirls mattered with, their fear of racial harassment in the course of their everyday lives, of what to say, do and wear, their desire to live in safe houses and blossom in safe schools, all showed that safeguarding educational policies need to shift their focus towards threats of racial harassment, of living in overcrowded housing and being silenced rather than seeking to prevent the threat of radicalisation.
Thinking through relationality, materiality and affect enabled this thesis to actualise the plurality of Muslim schoolgirls' relations-in-the-world and their subjectivity as part of the becoming-assemblages with human and more-than- human bodies. This thesis mapped and challenged some of the racialised, gendered and hegemonic views of Muslim schoolgirls as risky, threatening and with a potential to radicalisation. Mattering with what those Muslim schoolgirls mattered with, their fear of racial harassment in the course of their everyday lives, of what to say, do and wear, their desire to live in safe houses and blossom in safe schools, all showed that safeguarding educational policies need to shift their focus towards threats of racial harassment, of living in overcrowded housing and being silenced rather than seeking to prevent the threat of radicalisation.
Research Interests:
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within... more
During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists.