Minor Gesture Research Articles

The affective micropolitics of craftivism: Organizing social change through the minor gesture

While craft foregrounds the material, embodied, and affective nature of making practices, it also has capacities as a political resource which recognises the value of everyday materiality in creating the conditions for change to emerge. In this article, we explore these possibilities by focusing on craftivism, a diffuse social movement that uses traditional craft skills of hand making to address a wide range of complex societal and organizational causes and challenges. We draw on an empirical study of craftivists to explore how they use craft as a political resource to organise change by generating affective relations between people and material objects in physical and online spaces. We argue that minor gestures of craft, developed through practices of reclaiming historically defined, domestic, and feminine handcrafts, constitute a distinctive repertoire of contention and enable craftivism as a journey of change in the minor key. This helps us to think about change differently, where making is a form of change itself that is at least as significant as the destination of the resulting change. We thus draw attention to activism that subverts traditionally oppositional approaches to organizing resistance and surfaces complex coalitions directed towards individual, community and societal transformation. Such craft practices subversively bring together the politics of the domestic sphere with broader grand challenges, thereby subtly altering how we perceive traditional means of political engagement and different forms of activism. Our contribution offers deeper understanding of the affective potential of minor gestures of craft from the lived experience of those who use craft as a form of organizing change through creative, material, and affective practice. Affective micropolitical acts such as the habits, rhythms, and routines of craft are generative in the sense that they attune us to social change in the minor key.

Editorial

This issue of RERM includes four papers that boldly attempt to propose ways in which educational research practices, traditions and methods might be enacted differently. They take seemingly foundational research methods (reviewing literature, ethnographic observation, walking methodologies) and transform them in to something less familiar that invite our readers to stutter and reappraise how else research might be done and with what outcomes. Firstly, researching from Danish inner cities, Staunæs and Vertelyte draw on affect theory and a concern with moods and felt pedagogies in education to explore how hopes and anxieties are woven through school objects and architecture. Through minor interventions the authors propose that there are abundant possibilities to improve the inclusion of racialized students in the inbetween, and often pathologised spaces of school. This holds the potential to radically shift perceptions, prejudices and behaviours that are not always identifiable but that can be sensed through the minor gesture. The authors attend to the significance of language and what happens through translation and diffractive readings. They stress that concepts that travel require careful consideration when transposed into alternative geopolitical contexts. They take Ahmed’s ‘happy objects’ as a case in point to make visible the specificities of local context and what that means for advancing theory that can pay closer attention to time and space. The next two papers address ways in which literature reviews – a staple element to any research project – can be up-ended and reimagined when post-foundational theories and practices are put to work. Naomi Pears-Scown makes use of Baradian theoretical concepts to think-with literature rather than merely review what is already known and organize a corpus of knowledge into useful categories. Through literature cartographies, Pears-Scown develops a mapping strategy that makes visible her affective engagement with literature through the crafting of found-poems which tell stories of the ways in which place shapes approaches to arts therapy in various geopolitical contexts. This novel approach to engaging with and encountering literature disrupts received wisdom about how literature should be reviewed and instead invites the reader to sit with the discomforts of expanding how literature stories can be told. In resonance with Pears-Scown, the next paper written by co-authors Boks-Vlemmix and Aspfors, offers a similar challenge to orthodoxies surrounding what a literature review is and how it should be undertaken. In their experimental piece the authors offer glimpses into what gets generated when the emphasis concerns processes and practices of doing a literature review rather than what it represents. Like the previous paper, the authors are inspired by a cartographic approach that holds the potential to map the processes involved in becoming deeply immersed and affect with a body of literature. They take literature on Teacher Educator Professional Learning as a case in point to explore how mapping and tracing entangled concepts can generate unanticipated insights and present new lines of thought. Finally, Louisa Allen explores the potential of smell, with all the senses and beyond the human, for educational research. She takes the reader on ‘smellwalks’ which presented themselves as an unlikely research method during pandemic lockdown. Allen provides detailed accounts of the ways in which smellwalks came into being in a small coastal town in Aotearoa-New Zealand and enabled a deep exploration of pandemic-transformed life at a daily and local level. The paper offers a theoretical examination of smellwalk methodology as a means to consider smell through multisensory conceptualisations where human senses are understood as distinct but overlapping. Further, the paper theorises the act of smelling as unbounded and ultimately, always more-than-human. A series of research moments are examined to demonstrate how smelling involves a multisensory experience that emerges with/through the material landscape. Together these papers offer important ways to reappraise approaches to research methodology in education that have become so deeply embedded that they unwittingly shape conventional expectations of how research should be done, has always be done. Each of these papers offer exciting invitations to interrupt this routine way of thinking. Respond to the invitation to pause, to ask, must we do it that way? The way it has always been done? What happens if we question and dare to experiment with alternative approaches? When theory is mobilized through research that seeks to pursue alternative lines of inquiry, what then? When theoretical concepts are taken up in/to ‘foreign’ spaces what happens to them? How do they travel? What do they agitate? What do they make possible? Aligned with the aims of this journal, these papers individually and collectively, invite a pause to business-as-usual in educational research. Jayne Osgood Camilla Andersen Mona-Lisa Angell Ann Merete Otterstad Editors

Hydro-Rugging as Reparative Caring Encounter: Re-Membering Southern Oceanic Hauntologies

ABSTRACT Expanding beach clean-ups to more than just removing plastic from the shoreline, citizens are invited to dwell with the ecological crisis and its intersectional entanglements of historical injustices related to the ocean, through a tactile mending practice using collected rubbish. Public story-doing (Rodricks, 2024) [Towards a (strategic) sensibility of unbelonging: Full participation revisited. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1–15] is initiated by generative dialogue enabled through the material call of the collected plastic which is re-membered and mended into the Mother Hydro-rug. This making-with thinking/theorising (Haraway, 2016 [Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press]; Manning, 2016 [The minor gesture. Duke University Press]) involves re-membering erased narratives that entangle people with the ocean. Hydro-rugging fosters reparative care practices within vulnerable communities through convivial organised events that bring together people, particularly Black and Brown bodies, together to share their memories of and with the ocean. Hydro-rugging embodies the importance of active listening and acknowledging emotions (Ahmed, 2004) [The cultural politics of emotion. University Press], engaging in a call and response with the very fabric of beach surroundings, be it the plastic or other more-than-human elements.

From video game to ethnographic video game

The evolution of visual methods transcends the traditional documentary film, embracing various digital formats alongside cinema. Video games, serious games, phone applications and virtual reality are now being used to carry out research, collect data and present the results to the scientific community and the general public. In this article, we look at the relationship between the human body and the 'gaming' technology. Through an empirical study of FIFA16 (the first FIFA game with female players), we observe, film, describe and analyse the gestures and discourses of FIFA players manipulating the joystick. We focus on minor gestures (Manning, 2016) surrounding the tool itself (the controller), illustrating the processes of physical and narrative immersion. The methods chosen follow the visual methods described above: immersive observation, filming, interactive manipulation and representation. In concrete terms, as a logical outcome of the epistemological request and as one of the main results of the research, we propose the creation of an 'ethnographic game'.

An Appreciative Aesthetic: Recasting the Minor Gesture in a World Already Lost

This is a partial, tentative account that explores how we can be renewed when the world may already be lost. What can we say about the world when we aren’t losing just it, but we are losing our minds? How can an aesthetic of appreciation renew us? The mind that got us here isn’t going to be the one that saves us.

Knowledge in movement: configuring Asian American studies in Asian classrooms

ABSTRACT This article takes classrooms as crucial sites to explore the critical challenges and opportunities arising from Asian American studies’ relocation to Asia. Taking a cue from Erin Manning’s theory on “the minor gesture,” I conceive classroom dialogism as operating not as much to pass on inured thoughts as to generate “minor” forces that push knowledge into movement. Specifically, I argue that the confrontations and encounters of various nationalist, culturalist and imperialist perspectives—which usually contribute to the differences and difficulties of teaching Asian American studies in Asia—may be taken less as obstructions than as “minor” activators that push for renewed knowledge structures. Section one of this article reads selected teaching accounts to not only highlight the implications of Asian classrooms’ readings of Asian American texts in the power dynamics between Asia(s) and America(s), but also excavate from students’ readings and responses the habitual models of receiving Asian American studies in Asia. Section two then turns to my experience of teaching an undergraduate Asian American literature course in Taiwan to explore classrooms’ potential to usher in the time and space needed for opening habitual thinking paradigms into movement and variation. By mobilizing in classroom switches and exchanges between thinking positions and interpretive frames, I invoked from the documentary film Voices in the Clouds (2010) the intersecting life stories of Atayal, Han Taiwanese, Asian Americans and Americans to underscore the importance to think in terms of historical change and human movements.

The Case for Minor Gestures

This paper lays out the groundwork for a concept we define as minor gestures within design education. Moving away from a conversation centered around decolonization—a term, we argue, that has been co-opted to become a placeholder for equality, diversity, and inclusion, and tick-box exercises within academic institutions— we assert that minor gestures create the conditions for meaningful conversations on what it actually means to move towards decolonizing design education. Using examples from our own pedagogical practices, we sketch out and outline a proposition for minor gestures as theory-in-the-making, or an incomplete pathway towards meaningful, structural change.

Shifting Focus

Erin Manning's concept of the minor gesture invites a changed approach to education and encourages a radical reconceptualisation of studying within educational institutions. Using examples from her teaching with students in teacher training as well as from her artistic practice, Elke Mark studies the intertwinement of her varied collective, practice-theoretical research approaches with Erin Manning's philosophical concepts in order to apply them to qualitative inquiry and educational research.

“Jeg skal sjekke”: Urban buggy-wayfaring and adventurous lines with data-ing and reconfigurations of children

In this article, the authors experiment with data-ing as a methodology, and wonder how three researchers — two in Oslo (Norway) and one in Melbourne (Australia) — can come closer to-with the research material by following and buggy-walking a young wayfarer in urban spaces and places. The ideas of not knowing and experimenting, making-with urban landscapes, transportation, materials, sounds, surfaces, bodily movements, minor gestures, and haptic engagement, transform their thinking about data-ing as research-creation while traveling and walking the city with a buggy and a young wayfarer's adventure. Their experimental method uses smartphones and digital technology, and the methodological contours in this article are attuned to and engage in and with multiple surfaces of an urban city landscape. Lines and threads transform into traces and create surfaces, and lines transforming into threads dissolve surfaces. The authors create city maps and investigate what digital tools, social media, and a chat service can generate and unfold when wayfaring locally and talking and writing across continents. Their project follows two layers — doing data-ing as research-creation and wayfaring. To do data-ing as collective open-ended productions among researchers invites one to ask what happened and what might occur temporally in cities as minor gestures here and there. The bodily movement offered by an urban wayfarer invites the authors to speculate with what the phenomenon of an investigator, an artist, a maker, a runner, or an activist can unfold in the moments to come.

Tracing the minor gesture in painting: a shift from reflection to diffraction

ABSTRACT It is commonly assumed that we come to know the world best by observing it and that innovation is a human centred phenomenon. However, the objective of this review is to synthesise literature that emphasises the under examined, yet crucial, role that materials and tools exert in generating embodied perception; a diffractive pattern experienced as a passage of intensity sensed in the body of the painter when interacting with the material aspects of painting. Drawing on new materialist philosophies, recent creative practice research and the practices of three contemporary painters: Bracha Ettinger, Jude Rae and Paul Ching-Bor, this review examines how this complex phenomenon, known as the ‘minor gesture’, occurs in the painting process. It concludes that common painting strategies activate this phenomenon and demonstrates that innovation has its origin, not only in the intentional acts of the painter, but also in embodiment during the painting process.

P(l)aying Attention: Wilding Correspondence as Methodological Possibility

There is an overwhelming focus on scholarly agendas in the field of qualitative inquiry, yet what about scholarly attention? In responding to this question, the authors draw upon Ingold’s (2018) conceptualization of research as becoming “a practice of correspondence,” locating their methodological curiosity and wondering “in the world that affect proposed” (Stewart, 2017). Thinking with these questions and with theorists invited stories, stories invited photographs, photographs invited packages. Letters, poetic ruminations, artworks, time, and conversations unfurled—seeds opening and dissipating across currents of air. Sparked by various understandings of correspondence, the authors created degrees, conditions, and propositions for attending to how correspondence becomes with attention. The authors evoke the concept of p(l)aying—playing and paying attention as minor gestures that open potential for inquiry. Each variation sparked circuits of matter and mattering, as the authors attuned to the question, What might be learned from arts-based approaches to p(l)aying attention to scholarly attention?

Pursuing the Post Philosophical New: Taking Our Thoughts for a Walk

We meditate on and talk/write about issues that arose for us during the Post Philosophy series, specifically engaging with a topic entangled within each presentation, “the new.” Quandaries that emerged for us include the post philosophical raison d’être for the new, the possibility and nature of the post philosophical new, and its ethical, ontological, and epistemological consequences. Taking the form of conversation, we provide tracings of our collaboration, with its multiple, complex plug-in points, hauntological connections, and missed calibrations—an agencement set in motion by this series as a minor gesture and fueled by our thinking-with the work of the presenters.

Into the periphery: Acting into fleeting, unfinished, just perceptible movements of experience in scenes of joint action

Much of what goes on in organisational life happens at the edge of language, in the form of vague stirrings, fleeting feelings or small gestures. In the midst of relating to others, we may sense a potential new opening or an ill-defined disquiet. Usually, it is only later that we can make reference to a some-thing that has since emerged. I offer two reflective narratives of moments of action occurring with colleagues and students. I propose that as organisational and action research practitioners we need to learn a particular kind of artistry, one that pays attention to minor shifts and variations as they are occurring, often at the periphery of our awareness. I draw on Manning’s work on ‘minor gestures’ and Shotter’s notions of ‘joint action’ and ‘withness thinking’. I turn to novelist Clarice Lispector to explore how we might approach crafting after-the-fact, reflexive accounts that remain in touch with the precarious potentiality of where things might go next.

What else can a crush become: working with arts-methods to address sexual harassment in pre-teen romantic relationship cultures

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a study in which feminist new materialist and arts-based methodologies were employed to explore how three girls address their experiences of sexual harassment as part of ‘crushes’ with boys in fourth and fifth grade. The study stems from longitudinal research on how Finnish children from pre-school to pre-teen years are caught up in entanglements of power in the formation of romantic relationship cultures. Such entanglements often escape articulation and are therefore difficult to study using more traditional research methods. During the arts-based process, the girls began to negotiate consent and self-determination in new ways through collecting, crafting, and making a booklet and a YouTube video. Conceptualising the changes as minor gestures [Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] that gradually transform girls’ somatic archives [Paasonen, Susanna. 2013. “Grains of Resonance: Affect, Pornography and Visual Sensation.” Somatechnics 3 (2): 351–368. doi:10.3366/soma.2013.0102], we argue that arts-methods can empower children to relate differently to each other, refuse harassment and assert their desires.

The empty desk in class: a metaphor in the lives and classrooms of expelled immigrant children and their teachers

This paper engages with conversations with two teachers who each build socially just pedagogies and engage in minor gestures in response to the socio-educational-political reality they were confronted with – namely, a pupil disappearing from the classroom when her parents’ application for immigration was rejected. In an assemblage connecting the conversations to a transforming picture of an empty desk, to social media posts and online news sources and to post-qualitative literature, we reconfigure the empty desk into polyvocal, continuously moving metaphors and remain attentive to the affective and material forces of the stories that the two teachers tell. The desk functions as (1) a speaking medium and symbol of protest against the violation of children’s rights, (2) a relational force in a broken class group, (3) a part of a pedagogical space for learning democracy, and (4) a mirror on our contemporary society. These metaphors become minor gestures and invite us to fulfill our ability to respond (‘response-ability’) to the violation of rights of ‘invisible children’ and the daily realization of inclusive education for all children in class.

Careful Practices: Ethics and the Anethical in Canadian Addiction Trajectories

ABSTRACT A drug overdose epidemic in North America has sped the expansion of harm reduction services. Drawing on fieldwork in Ottawa, Ontario, we examine forms of care among people offering and accessing these resources. Notably, our interlocutors do not always characterize harm reduction as caring for oneself. Thus, we differentiate between the ethics of care through which one enters desired subject positions, and anethical careful practices. Harm reduction is sometimes anethical, enacted through minor gestures that do not constitute ethical work but allow for its future realization.

Afterword

Afterword Shepherd Steiner Mosaic issue 54.2 is a special archival issue developed as the first part of a collaborative project with the Dutch artist team Bik Van der Pol. The second part involves a collaborative project hinging on a series of lectures that will be published in a subsequent issue. Relative Time/Little Time concentrates on the flow or pace of current time, especially in relation to past time. We are particularly interested in the different granularity of current time relative to the period beginning in 1989, which marked a decisive acceleration of economy, growth, extraction, globalism, movement, population, transportation, etc., and ending in 2020, when over a few weeks the world came to a halt under the influence of the pandemic that spread as rapidly and widely as people, commodities, and capital once moved. We wonder what the compression and contraction of time into these discrete units of temporal flow suggest? We wonder how to conceptualize the transference and exchange of time stamps between production quotas and life at the microbiological level, not to mention the palimpsest-like construction of these times we live? Does the elasticity between periods on either side of the divide provide the momentum we need to think the future, which is such an uncertain time at this point? Might this relate to attempts to get the system moving again in a new direction? How can Indigenous knowledges, the Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter, or decolonizing perspectives from the global South forge a new future from out of the context of relative time? [End Page 201] The participants include: Frédéric Neyrat, Associate Professor and Mellon-Morgridge Professor of Planetary Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a member of the editorial board of Multitudes and his books include Biopolitique des catastrophes (2008), L'indemne. Heidegger et la destruction du monde (2008), Instructions pour une prise d'âmes: Artaud ar l'envoûtement occidental (2009), Clinamen: Flux, absolu et loi spirale (2011), Le communisme existential de Jean-Luc Nancy (2013), Homo Labyrinthus. Humanisme, antihumanisme, posthumanisme (2015), Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism (2017), and The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (2019). Erin Manning, University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is the director of SenseLab, "a laboratory for thought in motion," which brings together individuals from a diversity of fields to work at the intersection of philosophy, art, and activism. Her books include Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2009), Always More Than One: Individuation's Dance (2013), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (with Brian Massumi, 2014), and The Minor Gesture (2016). Jonas Staal, a visual artist dealing primarily with the relation between art, propaganda, and democracy. With lawyer and writer Radha D'Souza he is developing the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. This attempts to articulate a legal framework for interdependent and intergenerational climate justice. Intersecting temporalities of past and present as well as unborn plant, animal, and human life in the future are the key issues broached. His books include Nosso Lar, Brasilia (2014), Steve Bannon: A Propaganda Retrospective (2018), and Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (2019). With Dilar Dirik and Renée In der Mauer he co-edited Stateless Democracy (2015). Dr. Dominic Pettman, Professor of Media and New Humanities at the New School of Social Research. His books include After the Orgy: Toward a Politics of Exhaustion (2002), Avoiding the Subject: Media, Culture and the Object (with Justin Clemens, 2004), Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age (2006), Human Error: Species-Being and Media Machines (2011), Look at the Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology (2013), In Divisible Cities (2013), Infinite Distraction (2015), Humid, All too Humid (2016), Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (2017), Creaturely Love (2017), Metagestures (with Carla Nappi, 2019), and Peak Libido: Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire (2020). Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, New York based collaborative artists who use photography. Their primary focus is what they call the transportation of place—situations [End Page 202] in which one limited or isolated place strongly resembles another distant one. Accepted as genuine...

Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing

This paper explores what place means for early childhood education at a time of global environmental precarity. We draw on fieldwork in Arctic Norway, where kindergarten children spend time with snow for more than half of the year. Children’s movement attunes to the nuances and diversity of the snow, as seasons, temperature, light, wind and weather change the consistency of snow and the possibilities for what can occur. The paper presents data of children walking in deep snow during an ice-fishing trip, a practice known as ‘grynne’, asking what we can learn both about the moment-by-moment attunement between child, snow and place necessary to grynne, and the paths of movement left behind in the snow afterwards. We draw on Manning’s work in order to trace the major and minor gestures running through grynne, as an analytic starting point for educators considering the role early years pedagogy might play in planetary sustainability.Thinking beyond the notion of humans as masterfully in control of environment, Ingold’s notion of correspondence offers a counter, advocating for a ‘lifetime of intimate gestural and sensory engagement’ as a way of learning to attune more deeply to place and take seriously the way in which place and humans mutually shape each other. In a place where seasonal temporality matters, in extreme ways that change how children’s bodies can move, we consider what children’s entanglement with snow can teach us, educators as well as researchers, about education for sustainability.

Doctoral Thesis as Entangled Becomings: Moments That Tremble With Potential

This paper attempts to exemplify an emergent doctoral research process that plugs into the political activism of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming minoritarian” and the transformational potential of Erin Manning’s “minor gesture.” Revisiting and responding to texts and images produced over the course of one month, the author attempts to demonstrate how an attentiveness and openness beyond the bounds of the traditional doctoral thesis can generate shiftings and shimmerings that have the potential to produce tangible impacts and affects. In a process of writing to the human and nonhuman matter she encounters on her everyday walkings and wanderings, the author senses a shift of herself in relation to the world, generating an imperative to act that can not be ignored. As a tentative exploration of a process that resists the constraints of an externally imposed methodology, this paper works to trouble the prescribed linearity of more normative approaches to doctoral research. This is done in the spirit of encouraging and promoting speculative enquiries with a social conscience for, as Brian Massumi argues, even tiny acts and interventions have the potential to make a difference in the world.

Composing the Actual: Brainwave Sonification as Materialized Intensity of Virtual Relations

My recently performed experimental music performance I Sit and Worry About Her comprises a transdisciplinary research project that explores the function of large-scale cortical networks and application of EEG, monitoring the brainwaves in music making and perceiving. The project aims at understanding the activity of the brain and its electric impulses as an affect or intensity of virtual relations. There are several assemblages that relate rhizomatically in different dimensions inside an event; from minor gestures in the brain’s electric impulse continuum, its self-enjoyment and experience of sound frequencies, to the affective modality that creates authentic collective identity during the performance, thus questioning the unity of movement between subject and object. The project involves playing pre-recorded music content back to the performance space in real time, triggered by a threshold of a certain brainwave frequency; thus, it functions as a sonification of the brain’s electricity – a kind of materialization of a virtual property. Pre-recorded music is perceived in the performing space before the subject becomes a knower of the actualized potential, before she perceives her thought. Does that make me a composer of the perceiver’s actual dimension? If we apply this performance technique, is it possible to actualize the virtual open-social identity, even while involved in a social collaborative interaction? Article received: April 30, 2020; Article accepted: May 30, 2020; Published online: October 15, 2020; Original scholarly paper