Abstract
Using wearable technologies in educational research and in relation to group-running, this paper inquires into new methodological landscapes through posthumanist and new materialist theories and methodologies. Embedding practice in an urban school in Canada, this paper particularly engages with the material and materiality of environments as a way to flesh out a methodology that attends to the complexity of technologically-mediated bodies in movement. This understanding suggests that technologies matter in ways that are generative of the ‘realities’ in cities, communities, and what is learned in schools. Concluding with a questioning of data and what might become of it, I suggest that a re-valuation of data, method, and methodology – as that which is part of a continuum – might redraw new cartographies in educational research.
Highlights
In Lost Subjects, Contested Objects, psychoanalyst, Deborah Britzman (1998) writes of the possibility of “unlearning” traditional practices and ways of knowing
Posthumanist and new materialist theories and methodologies are not embedded in psychoanalytical practices or poststructuralist frameworks, the influence of the ‘posts’ can be traced to the material feminists of the 1990s, such as Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 2014, 5
As part of a larger research study that inquires into the relational process of school gardening and ecological “intra-activity” (Barad, 2007) within urban landscapes, this paper focuses on grouprunning as an ecological practice that sets in motion new cartographies to be drawn in methodological research
Summary
In Lost Subjects, Contested Objects, psychoanalyst, Deborah Britzman (1998) writes of the possibility of “unlearning” traditional practices and ways of knowing. Grosz describes the “undoing” process as a self-differentiating movement that is created within and/or in-between humans, nonhumans, things, and/or systems It is this process of unlearning and undoing, becoming uneasy and understanding in ways that are not-yet-known that has become of inquiry in posthumanist and new materialist research. In the first section of the paper, I turn to Deleuze|Guattarian philosophy in relation to educational research to write of a becoming process that involves the simultaneous enactment of theory-practice To develop this argument, I use the practice of running, not as a method, but rather as a technique to explore new relationships between wearable technologies and the body. I problematize the notion of measuring data through an intimate exploration of relationships in urban schools and communities, which signals towards the impossibility of capturing ‘truth.’ Through Braidotti’s (2013) notion of “nature-culture” and that which is part of a “continuum,” I conclude the paper by offering one of many ways qualitative researchers can continue to rethink methodology and what data might become
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