The Interview-Event-Agencement as Creative Movement and Methodological Disruption

Abstract

In her article “Towards a Politics of Immediation,” Erin Manning (2019a) writes about the process of “immediation, the withness of time, of body in the making” (p. 1) that bodies subjectivity through the interstitial experience of/in the event. Drawing from Manning’s movement-oriented philosophy, and thinking-with her concepts of immediation, agencement, interval, and memory of the future, I invite alternate visualizations of interviewing as a research method through my study with international graduate students in a TESOL program at a Canadian university. By shifting focus from human-centred researcher intentionality and pre-determined research tools of the interviewing method, to the entangled human and non-human affective agencies of the interview-participant-voice-recorder-assemblage, I offer possibilities for experiencing the interview-event as an affective ecological attunement. Manning’s concepts also create interferences with existing institutional and TESOL representations and discourses, where multilingual students are often interpellated into rigid identity constructions and difference is seen as deficiency.