Gender knowledge, territorialising the rhizome, and playing with creative methods

Abstract

ABSTRACT Constructing academic knowledge in and from the global South is riddled with negotiations of oneself, our collectivities, and the demands of productivity. In our activism in and outside academia, gender knowledge emerges like grass: unpredictable, collective, abundant, messy. In policy and higher education, the field is limited by the credentials of expertise with all the restrictions, pressures, and limitations of higher education and its demands for publication. Gender studies is currently a contested field, facing attacks from across the political spectrum that question its rigour, ethics, and very nature. In this context, rooted in our concern for how we construct gender knowledge and the continued colonial consequences of academia, we reflect on our own negotiation processes and offer our methodologies of creativity and play as a way to evade the limits of expertise. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomes as well as MacLure’s call to wonder, we examine the intersections of our experiences and our positionalities in and with the academic spaces we inhabit, to discuss methodologies in knowledge construction. We look at how these methodologies allow us to map contradictions and tensions in the construction of knowledge between the arboreal forms of what is considered knowledge and the other that is possible, born from where we have been cut, the phantom members of the decolonial ghost.