From the curve of the snake, and the scene of the crocodile: musings on learning and losing space, place and body

Susanne Gannon

doi:10.7577/rerm.486

Abstract

Where else can educational research begin and end, if not with the body of the researcher, if not with the particular material/ corporeal/ affective assemblages that this body is and has been part of? This paper traces the mutual constitution of bodies, identities and landscapes through memory as the body of this educator travels through multiple scenes of geo-spatial-temporal movement, and down the east coast of Australia. This movement parallels the movement from being a school teacher to becoming an academic. Throughout the paper landscape is foregrounded, and the body in landscape is evoked through poetic and literary modes of writing around the themes of learning and losing. The body in landscape is not merely the body of the writer. Other bodies in the landscape include ‘the curve of the snake’ - the row of protective hills that were said to protect her tropical home from cyclones – and the ‘scene of the crocodile’ – the rock that hung over the valley she passed on her way to school that she had learned of from Indigenous teachers. The political and ethical consequences of memory work, of body and place writing, and of genres of writing in educational research, are also considered. The paper argues for an embodied and reflexive literacy of place that incorporates multiple modes of knowing, being and writing.

Highlights

On writingDespite the confident tone of the abstract, this paper is haunted by a sense of loss, and its writing has been experienced as a series of tiny aporias, blocks, stoppages, impossibilities
I am ‘choosing and not choosing’ as Frankham and Smears have recently put it, and I follow their preference with my own ‘profane approach, concerned with indirection, [and] informed by the contaminations of literature’ or, in this case, by a more literary and aesthetic mode of writing than is usually visible in educational research (2012, 362)
When cyclones come I nest under the stairs and pray that this won’t be the kingtide collusion that sends us under. This house is a talisman: a house to be brave in, an embrace a tower to shout from to a stranger get out of my yard, I’ll call the police and do it; to say no, that’s not what I want any more and jump from the everyday into these long days at my desk reading writing thinking blue butterflies flash by, sunbirds hover harvest cobwebs and spider’s eggs, green frogs leap from ledge to forearm to Foucault and out again, without noticing jasmine curling round the struts impossible - too late - to close them. It is almost ten years since I left the lush environs of Cairns in North Queensland, Australia, the quirky little seaside suburb of Machans Beach where I made my home, and the creaky wooden house that came to feel like my second skin

Summary

On writing

Despite the confident tone of the abstract, this paper is haunted by a sense of loss, and its writing has been experienced as a series of tiny aporias, blocks, stoppages, impossibilities. I am ‘choosing and not choosing’ as Frankham and Smears have recently put it, and I follow their preference with my own ‘profane approach, concerned with indirection, [and] informed by the contaminations of literature’ or, in this case, by a more literary and aesthetic mode of writing than is usually visible in educational research (2012, 362) This is a mode of writing that aims to move, in an affective sense, those who engage with the text as readers as well as the writer. My approach is mindful of Braidotti’s arguments that feminist researchers might ‘start cultivating the art of disloyalty’ through a ‘healthy disrespect for both academic and intellectual traditions’ (2011, loc 302, Kindle vs) This writing of place – of bodies. Through the writing, through my process of writing as an inquiry into place in this paper, my argument slipped towards a more reflexive and perhaps more complicated series of musings about the temporal and spatial cartographies of becoming

Prologue of place

Findings

Learning home