Noncompliant Learning: Diffracting SpaceTimes, Intra-active Ropes, and a Museum’s Roping into the City through a Curious Child

Abstract

Abstract In this article, the authors intra-act with Barad’s (2007) conceptual toolkit to examine noncomplaint learning of a ropemaking activity at The Norwegian Fisheries Museum in Bergen. Barad’s concepts of intra-action and diffraction allow us to perceive the rope as noncompliantly diffracting into the two different SpaceTimes of the 19th and 21st centuries. The former SpaceTime is intra-actively constituted by historical ropemaking craftship and the museum staff, and the latter by the children’s approaching the ropemaking through toys and play. In the overlap of the entanglements of the two SpaceTimes, noncompliant and ‘new areas of curiosity’ (Wertsch 2002, p. 123) unfold and continue the rope’s diffraction into the city. By following the intra-active community of Ida and the rope, the authors map entanglements of more-than-human worldings and conclude with a call for more museal diffractions that can (intra-)activate the museum’s relational capacities in the ecology of the city.