Affirmative Ethics Research Articles

Theorizing Outside the Lines: A Self-Study of Collaborative Learning in a Critical Posthuman Reading Group

ABSTRACT Neoliberal conditions in academia often preclude space for ongoing processes of collective reflection and growth, particularly for women faculty. In this qualitative self-study, three women faculty members examine working outside the lines of neoliberal institutions and theoretical traditions to nurture onto-epistemological development through a reading group that has now spanned two years. Drawing on critical feminist posthuman lenses, we inquired into the ways in which we worked and talked through challenging philosophical and theoretical texts in community and connected to our everyday experience as researchers/instructors in ongoing conversations. Specifically, we asked: What opportunities were presented through this different approach to reading and thinking together? What connections to practice and scholarship were created? How did these inform our ways of knowing and being? Our analysis of reflections and meeting notes demonstrates the ways our work ‘outside the lines’ allowed us to do academia differently, in big and small ways – helping us disrupt the isolation and competition of the academy by developing an immanent and relational orientation, working to decenter our (white) selves, and folding our complexifying understandings into research and teaching praxis. Ultimately, we recognize our ‘working outside the lines’ as a form of productive resistance to the devastating effects of neoliberal capitalism, a form of affirmative ethics of care connecting into a larger movement of creating a more relational, supportive academia.

Relations of care and affirmative disruptions in academia: A conversation with Katie Strom

This article features an intra-view with critical posthumanist Professor Kathryn (Katie) Strom and the co-editors of the intra-view section of this journal Jacky Barreiro and Magali Forte. Throughout their conversation, Strom shares her determination to co-create relations of care and affirmative disruptions in the neoliberal context of academia while giving concrete examples and explaining how her feminist praxis evolved. The three authors discuss several initiatives Strom and others have implemented, inspired by Braidotti’s (2019) notion and praxis of affirmative ethics among other feminist scholarship, to create spaces of support for graduate students and early career scholars. This piece encourages readers to view and understand feminist processes as affirmative disruptions to foster affective flows, challenge conventions, and inspire innovative scholarly pursuits.

Telling it slant with side curved head and curiosity: posthumanist/feminist materialist creative activations in university spaces

ABSTRACT This article takes off from the tiny injuries that accumulate, calcify and shape our academic bodies and which live in university spaces and places. The paper moves analytically with the question: how may we insert our non-normative bodies into the material architectures, places and spaces of the university, and disrupt it by our very presence? Composed in post-authorship mode, we discuss the post-personal autoethnographies, research activations, their diffractive renditions and the speculative fabulations this question generated. Drawing theoretically on posthumanism/feminist new materialism, affirmative ethics and musings on bodily disposition, we propose the slow tempo of nonchalance as a theory-praxis. In telling it slant with side-curved head and curiosity, the article offers ways of imagining otherwise, making an appeal for the university to become a more capaciously hospitable place for bodies excluded by exceptionalist hu/Man/ism and extractive knowledge practices.

“Making the unimaginable imaginable?” The power of artmaking in understanding animal vulnerabilities and “humanimal” relationality in Organization Studies

The vulnerabilities of nonhuman animals in human–animal relationships have received scant attention in Organization Studies (OS). What could OS scholars learn about animal vulnerability and “humanimal” relationality by turning to the context of artmaking, where sensate animals, human artists, spaces, materialities, artworks, affects and critical audiences come together? Building on feminist vulnerability literature and insight from posthumanist affirmative ethics, we here analyze Finnish artists Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson’s artmaking, works, and their exhibition Siat – Pigs in particular, where the agency and vulnerability of animals can be conceived in non-anthropocentric, immersive and affective ways. We contribute to OS research by demonstrating the affective power of posthumanist artmaking that comes with the radical repositioning of the human in relation to others, as well as political motivation to elicit empathy for the plight of animals in the factory-farming complex. Specifically, we show how these insights can illuminate what is currently not centered or discussed enough in OS, help us to better acknowledge co-constituted humanimal vulnerabilities, and extend discussions on empathy in OS to include (hyper-vulnerable) animals in the factory-farming complex. We contend that by extending vulnerability ascriptions to animals, caring with the unseen and silenced agents in society, acknowledging our shared vulnerability and by taking further action, we can gradually change the exploitive ways in which humans have treated other animals in our organized society, and more emphatically work for the well-being of the many unseen “others.”

Entangled engagements: a posthumanist and affirmative ethics for tourism geographies

This review summarizes some key moments in the development of ethics in tourism research and practice where three main areas of concern are identified: socio-economic inequalities, cultural discriminations, and more-than-human speciesism. Following a brief historical review, the paper delves into some current trends and ethical concerns in tourism geographies, which trace back to the utilitarian ethics within which contemporary tourism emerged, after which, and with the growing concerns about tourism’s negative impacts, normative and moral approaches to ethics held sway. Then the paper addresses a critical gap in tourism ethics’ research and practice. With few exceptions, tourism environments are seen as something apart, things to be managed, developed or even protected, where the focus is instrumental on how these environments can be maintained or manipulated for human benefit. This modernization paradigm and its promise of progress through growth, together with a tourism industry that (re)produces colonial structures through neocolonial practices reinforced by neoliberal globalization has contributed to a host of present-day challenges and injustices. We argue that to address the injustices above and current existential crises like climate change, and other threats to socio-ecological well-being, a paradigm shift in tourism thinking is needed. Specifically, we propose embracing posthumanist ethics as a novel, experimental (as against normative or moral), situated (as against universal), and affirmative (as against oppositional) critique of structural injustices and structural power; epistemological pluralism (as against essentialism), acknowledging the relationality proper of indigenous cosmologies and other traditional knowledges (where more involvement from the Global South is needed); and a new materialist ontology that overcomes human exceptionalism and abandons oppositional binary thinking. In other words, what is needed, is an affirmative posthumanist ethics for tourism that is relational, plural and differential.

Diffractive Perspectives on Parents’ Role in Inclusive Online, Distance, and Digital Education

Before, during, and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic there is a need to understand parent work in online, distance, and digital education. Findings from previous research highlighted the challenges that parents of children identified with disabilities faced with little acknowledgment of the complexities and contextual nuances within and across studies. The purpose of this critical review was to use posthuman theories to engage in a diffractive reading of previous research and generate new insights. The diffractive reading revealed new understandings about the material construction of parents, called for the re-humanizing of the children who were mostly portrayed as burdens, demonstrated how parents engaged in the disentangling from technologies, and located agencies for affirmative ethics.

Girl power? Ethics of joy and becoming Chilean feminist high school students in relation to ideal citizenship normativities

This article traces the narratives and experiences of feminist high school students during the Chilean feminist movement of 2018 and explores their relations with normative political and gender subjectivization processes happening at their schools. The data for this article was produced through a critical ethnographic study in a Chilean all-female public high school, which included participant observation, testimonial interviews, arts-based collective testimonial workshops, and analyzed through affect theory. This article shows how this school reproduced binary norms under traditionally feminine parameters and at the same time neoliberal ones that demanded that students be successful and resilient women who individually managed to become productive members of society in the future. The student participants in this study were critical of how their school and their teachers tried to produce them as these types of gendered citizens. They managed to become feminist students in relation to these norms and at the same time create discourses, actions, and materialities that produced more just spaces for them in the present. This article suggests that reading the relations between the feminist students’ becomings and new gendered citizenship normativity deployed at school through a relational and affirmative ethics lens identifies relevant and often unseen aspects in research about structural oppression and resistance.

Affirmative Ethics in the COVID-19 Moment: Perplexities, Paradoxes, and Surprises

Posthumanism locates, progresses, and asserts knowledge in the openings for interconnection. In this article, we undertake a collective biography using an interconnected arts-based practice that affords us complex relations with each other and material ways of thinking and being together. With a shared interest in posthuman theory and memory work, the authors connected online from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa to address the question: What can we learn about the perplexities, paradoxes, surprises, and frustrations associated with our academic work during COVID-19? Using an arts-based methodology and a cartographic analytical approach for our critical posthuman research, our assemblage charted the power relations operating in and immanent to the construction and circulation of academic knowledge during COVID-19.

The ‘misplaced’ vulnerability of tourism studies: towards a relational ontology, epistemological pluralism and affirmative ethics

ABSTRACT As the closing article of the Special Issue of TRR, ‘Vulnerabilities and Viabilities in Tourism Studies’, the paper takes each one of the articles in the issue as reference and looks in them at concurrences and diffractions concerning claims of vulnerability and viability proposals for the field of tourism studies. The paper problematizes current practices of tourism research, and focuses on the vulnerability of tourism scholarship; postdiciplinarity in tourism studies; onto-ethico-epistemological enrichments for the field and futuring as worldmaking in the search of new viabilities. As a result, the meaning and placement of the field’s vulnerability is overturned and new viabilities for a ‘more-than-tourism’ field of tourism studies are proposed.

Notes on [post]human nursing: What It MIGHT Be, What it is Not.

With this paper, we walk out some central ideas about posthumanisms and the ways in which nursing is already deeply entangled with them. At the same time, we point to ways in which nursing might benefit from further entanglement with other ideas emerging from posthumanisms. We first offer up a brief history of posthumanisms, following multiple roots to several points of formation. We then turn to key flavors of posthuman thought to differentiate between them and clarify our collective understanding and use of the terms. This includes considerations of the threads of transhumanism, critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism, and the speculative, affirmative ethics that arise from critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism. These ideas are fruitful for nursing, and already in action in many cases, which is the matter we occupy ourselves with in the final third of the paper. We consider the ways nursing is already posthuman-sometimes even critically so-and the speculative worldbuilding of nursing as praxis. We conclude with visions for a critical posthumanist nursing that attends to humans and other/more/nonhumans, situated and material and embodied and connected, in relation.

The Logic of Posthuman Inquiry: Affirmative Politics, Validity, and Futurities

Empirical research informed by posthumanist philosophy is proliferating in the social sciences. This research takes many forms and is willfully pluralistic and creative in the analytic approaches it takes. The innovation, however, is not entirely free form. Posthumanist scholarship both employs familiar forms of inference and is also forwarding a distinctive array of inferential practices that until now have not been commonly present in mainstream/whitestream social sciences. Attending to the logic of emerging posthumanist empiricism can help clarify the affirmative ethics and politics of posthumanist inquiry. This essay offers that a modal, dialethic, paraconsistent logic of action is more suited to posthumanist inquiry than a classical logic of representation. This logic of action locates validity not with the accuracy of representations, but in the specific character of the futurities enabled and disabled by the ontologically generative action of inquiry. Implications for an axiology of posthumanist empiricism are explored.

Relational Ethics of Care in Pandemic Research: Vulnerabilities, Intimacies, and Becoming Together-Apart

In this article, we draw upon the ethico-onto-epistemology of feminist new materialisms to reflect on our experiences as feminists doing research on women’s embodied experiences of sport, fitness, and well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. For qualitative researchers around the world, COVID-19 presented a radically changed research environment. For many, the shift to doing digital interviews required the navigation of unfamiliar technologies and experimenting with different strategies for establishing connections through computer screens. As feminist scholars, working together and with the participants during times of increased stress and uncertainty prompted us to reimagine our ethical research practices. In this article, we engage and extend Rosi Braidotti’s writing on affirmative ethics and offer our personal experiences of grappling with the affective intensities of pandemic while doing ethical feminist research. Through this creative inquiry, we describe supporting one another through research and illustrate how the unique intersections of work, family, health, isolation, and exhaustion were influencing our own and participants’ lives differently. Engaging with Braidotti’s writings on affirmative ethics in the posthuman convergence, we illuminate the ways that our digital-material experiences and the human/nonhuman aspects of the research processes were re-turning our ethical considerations. Researching together, with a focus on creating space for the voices of women who have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19, we found moments of hope and joy as we creatively imagined expansive potentials for feminist research, fostered through caring collaborations.

Valedictory lecture: We are rooted but we flow

AbstractThis is the text of the valedictory lecture that Rosi Braidotti delivered in June 2022, to mark the retirement from her academic position at Utrecht University. It was conceived as a spoken text and written within the rhetorical tradition of valedictory speeches. The text traces the different phases of Braidotti's career in terms of institutional practice and theoretical developments over the last 40 years. Combining academic analysis with deep ethical passion, Braidotti argues for the need of combining critique with creativity, and radicalism with excellence, to highlight the relevance of the new humanities for our troubled world. Ending on a high note of affirmative ethics, Braidotti calls for a more inclusive, diverse and critical practice of the humanities, as a living experiment of what we are capable of becoming.

The transposing illustrator: Challenges and opportunities meeting the authorial illustrator that interacts, documents and bears witness of the unrepresented and the non-representable

What could be gained by exploring transposition as critical framework for illustration? Obviously, there was always the possibility of adapting narration from one semiotic text to another. In times of structural injustice, war and migration, what may be the contribution from the field of illustration? May the illustrator’s transposition lead to a more nuanced storytelling beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy? The ambition behind the artistic research project ‘Illuminating the non-representable’ was to be a laboratory for testing the definitions of illustration and illumination and to create a companionship of affirmative ethics Braidotti refers to. Challenges in illustrating the Holocaust have been a central topic in the project.

The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...

Enacting affirmative ethics through autotheory: sense-making with affect during COVID-19

This autotheoretical paper exploring a collaborative project we engaged in during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic (March–May 2020) is structured as two intertwined stories. The first, a series of autotheoretical vignettes, expresses our process of sense-making about affect as well as multiple affective productions that spurred learning, personal and relational growth, and becomings-otherwise. The second delves into posthuman methodology, autotheory, affect, and affirmative ethics. Together these highlight the ways that our collaborative work of attending to affect helped us enact an affirmative ethics by tapping into traumatic lived experiences of COVID-19, isolation, and academic work, and transforming them into knowledge-producing, connection-creating, hopeful encounters. These encounters gesture to ways that enacting affirmative ethics as a collaborative critical posthuman praxis can help us collectively thrive in neoliberal conditions.

The Vitruvian nurse and burnout: New materialist approaches to impossible ideals.

The Vitruvian Man is a metaphor for the "ideal man"by feminist posthuman philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013) as a proxy for eurocentric humanist ideals. The first half of this paper extends Braidotti's concept by thinking about the metaphor of the "ideal nurse"(Vitruvian nurse) and how this metaphor contributes to racism, oppression, and burnout in nursing and might restrict the professionalization of nursing. The Vitruvian nurse is an idealized and perfected form of a nurse with self-sacrificial language (re)producing self-sacrificing expectations. The second half of this paper looks at how regulatory frameworks (using the example of UK's Nursing and Midwifery CouncilCode of Conduct) institutionalize the conditions of possibility through collective imaginations. The domineering expectations found within the Vitruvian nurse metaphor and further codified by regulatory frameworks giverise to boredom and burnout. The paper ends by suggesting possible ways to diffract regulatory frameworks to practice with affirmative ethics and reduce feelings of self-sacrifice and exhaustion amongnurses.

On sustainability and higher education: Towards an affirmative ethics

Sustainable development has been the dominant focus in sustainability discourses over the past three decades. In 2015, the United Nations Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a blueprint for peace and prosperity. The agenda is to be driven by the now well-known 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The higher education sector has not been left unaffected by these developments. In 2021, we saw Times Higher Education (2021) for the first time introducing its impact rankings, which assess universities against the United Nation’s SDGs. This new category of the university ranking system may see universities increasingly account for their contributions towards both ecological sustainability and social justice. Paradoxically, higher education would have to embrace SDG targets as a social justice imperative, but within a neoliberal performance architecture and by applying the ethics of neoliberal market fundamentalism. In this article, we trouble the underlying normative, economy first (instrumentalist) assumption and anthropocentric approach to sustainability and its relationship with (higher) education. We argue that sustainability is not a means to an end (instrumentalist), but a social and ethical process that is situated, open and forever inbecoming. In doing so, we draw on Rosi Braidotti’s (2019; 2013) critical, posthumanist perspective, which enables us to perform two methodological moves: 1) a critical philosophical exploration of the concept sustainability and 2) generating affirmative propositions for thinking about sustainability education. At the heart of Braidotti’s (2019; 2013) postulations is the affirmation of hope to enable sustainable transformations and futures. In addition, she proposes an ethics of joy and affirmation that functions through transforming negativity into positivity. Through this affirmative ethical philosophy, we offer alternative imaginings of sustainability and generate six affirmative propositions for sustainability in higher education.

Education in a ‘neoliberalised’ online teaching and learning space: Towards an affirmative ethics

Transformation in Higher Education is an international, transdisciplinary journal that seeks original contributions that reflect upon and theorise transformation in higher education in all its different nuances. It aims to disseminate high impact, evidence based research across disciplines in higher education that could ultimately support high level learning, teaching and research.

Rethinking the space of tourism, its power-geometries, and spatial justice

This article critically reflects on the space of tourism and its intersection with spatial justice. Despite the urgency to embrace a more just, sustainable, tourism the space of tourism has not yet received a sufficiently forceful reflection. Our study contributes to filling that gap by proposing a novel theoretical framework that combines Massey’s spatial turn in the social sciences, with the posthuman, affirmative ethics of Braidotti, while drawing on elements of Field Theory/Hodological Space in Lewin. We move from an overview of the sociological space of tourism, articulated by neoliberal capitalism, through a critique built upon the spatial turn in the social sciences, arguing that space is relational, imbued with power geometries, the product of interrelations, and always under construction. We develop a conceptual model that draws on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and aspects of Field Theory, which understands space as an individual lived experience (hodological space). That theorisation is then extended to the space of tourism through the lens of the posthuman, affirmative ethics, and mobile ontologies of both human and non-human actants. In doing so the novel theoretical framework we develop exposes the complexity and nuance of the space of tourism and enables the possibility of spatially just tourism.