The Conservative Forces of Life as a Possibility of Facing the Dialectics Oppression/Insurgence Facing the Peace Culture

Abstract

This paper is concerned with unhoming secure ideas and practices of knowledge creation, through non-hierarchical, boundary-crossing forms of pedagogy, in order to attend to how processes of enquiry matter, whenever we engage in the struggle to address injustice, and not only for humans. Entrenched assumptions related to age, phase, or education setting, are brought into question, to blur distinctions such as for/with; child/adult; playful/serious and learning/ teaching/research and to explore further possibilities for creative enquiry. Practices of enquiry are theorised through the movement of Philosophy for/ with Children (Haynes, 2018), its community of enquiry pedagogy, (Gregory & Laverty, 2017) and philosophy with picturebooks (Haynes & Murris, 2012, 2016; Murris & Haynes, 2018). What more can happen, when vibrant matter is taken into account, is a driving question. “Thing-power” (Bennett, 2010) and “thinking-through-making” (Ingold, 2013) are activated as part of this exploration. Through accounts of research events from two international projects, the paper draws attention to artists Viviane Schwartz and Paula Rego, their picturebook artworks, and their artistic processes. Each example shows how the artists, artworks and processes came into play through the events, provoking different forms of experimentation. Through exemplification, showing rather than telling, further possibilities for creative enquiry might be inspired.