Abstract
An art project conducted with twelve Grade 10 learners at an art centre in Cape Town from April 2016 to June 2016 was analysed diffractively using perspectives of posthumanism and new materialism. This post-qualitative approach to research was an attempt to move away from research methods based on humanist thinking. Data consisted of the art project, learners’ responses in terms of source book content and work produced, informal discussions, and videos and photographs taken during the work processes. Several specific agential cuts were performed on the data, some of which are presented here. The analysis of these entanglements of data provided rich content and interesting lines of flight, which led to thought-provoking questions about art education, sensory education, and the possibilities of applying posthumanist thought and methods in the South African art classroom.
Highlights
With reference to education theory and educational research, Nathan Snaza and John Weaver (2015: 2) point out that, posthumanism has been receiving much attention in most fields of study, it has remained rather neglected within fields of education
Researchers’ thoughts It is one thing to read, think and talk about these notions and the exciting possibilities they offer for moving beyond a humanist mind-set, but we discovered that it is a different thing altogether to try to harness them in a diffractive analysis of the project
Alice Fulton, remarked that ‘nothing will unfold for us unless we move towards what looks to us like nothing’, and as we considered this sense of lack of certainty, of not-knowing, of indeterminacy, we began to realise that for the kind of post-qualitative attempt at analysis we aimed to do, and in terms of the notions that constitute diffraction as a methodology, this might not be a bad position to find ourselves in
Summary
With reference to education theory and educational research, Nathan Snaza and John Weaver (2015: 2) point out that, posthumanism has been receiving much attention in most fields of study, it has remained rather neglected within fields of education. Education is still steeped in the humanist tradition (Morris, 2015: 46), and the epistemologies and ontologies of humanism, as well as Ancient Greek metaphysics and Christian mythologies, continue to inform the discourses of contemporary education (Gough, cited in Pedersen, 2015: 61) These influences rely on strict, constructed, and unchallenged hierarchies of power and knowledge which do not allow for pluralism or inclusive views of the lesser-than-human and non-human. According to Jan jagodzinski (2015: 126), it is the task of arts-based research to ‘redistribute the sensible beyond the limitations of [the human]’ This refers to an inclusion and exploration, through aesthetic acts, of the sensorium of ‘those that have no voice and cannot be seen’, in other words those of the ‘inhuman and non-human world’ (jagodzinski, 2015: 126)
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