PhEMaterialist encounters with glitter: the materialisation of ethics, politics and care in arts-based research

Coleman, Rebecca and Osgood, Jayne ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9424-8602 (2019) PhEMaterialist encounters with glitter: the materialisation of ethics, politics and care in arts-based research. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10 (2-3) . pp. 61-86. ISSN 1892-042X [Article] (doi:10.7577/rerm.3669)

Preview	PDF - Published version (with publisher's formatting) Available under License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download (1MB) | Preview
	PDF - Final accepted version (with author's formatting) Restricted to Repository staff and depositor only Download (2MB)

Abstract

This paper re-turns to a workshop we co-organised in London in 2018 as part of a series called ‘how to do sociology with...’ (Methods Lab, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London). The series aims to consider what happens when the materials, media, objects, devices and atmospheres of social research central to our practices are brought into focus. The specific material that we worked with and thought through in this workshop was glitter – a thing that is ubiquitous in early childhood and in wider feminine, gay and queer cultures. We draw on new materialist theories, methods and practice research, to consider how preparing and dismantling this workshop might be understood as a means of enacting feminist new materialism. We do this not to propose a blueprint for how new materialisms should be done so much as to offer a series of questions, reflections and diffractions on what unfolded and the affective and embodied traces that were left. In this sense, the paper understands arts-based practice to hold unanticipated pedagogical capacities which we attend to throughout the paper in terms of ethics, politics and care. We dwell upon ethics and politics by drawing on long-standing feminist arguments regarding what is often neglected in written accounts of doing research, and through focusing on the affective work involved in designing, choreographing and managing a workshop that asked participants to seriousplay (Haraway, 2016) with glitter and explore its material and affective properties. We discuss our own discomfort with, and uncertainty about, organising such a workshop and go on to outline what we see as the productive aspects and implications of orchestrating a glitter workshop for how we might conceive and do new materialist work. This includes a discussion about the response-ability of seriousplay with plastic in the contemporary climate, and more broadly about what new materialist methods and practice research might contribute to an understanding of educational and social research, and pedagogical and political practice. Throughout, photographs taken by us before, during and after the workshop (as jpeg images) are included, to not only illustrate the points we make and give readers/viewers a different sense of the workshop, but also extend what might count as academic knowledge production and circulation.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Statistics

DownloadsShow export options

Export as CSVXMLJSON

Activity Overview

6 month trend

65Downloads

6 month trend

87Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.