Seminar 1: Initial analysis of Interview data from the NRF Post humanism project.

On Thursday the 18 February the project group had an online session to extend an initial analysis of  interview data  recorded and transcribed by project members. Prior to the session seven project members had volunteered to analyse the 21 interviews already transcribed.

A preliminary initial analysis of the interview had already been done by Susan Gredley and presented at the project group’s Mont Fleur research meeting in November 2015. Susan Gredley’s presentation is available here. This online research meeting was led by Professor Richard Edwards and Professor Tara Fenwick from the University of Stirling, UK, who, before the session, created an analytical template based the initial analysis done by Susan Gredley. The templates were used to analyse transcripts, from which broad themes, issues and questions were derived. This was coordinated by Richard and Tara.

Based on the returned templates, Richard and Tara identified the Issues raised by interviewees. These were sub-divided into:

• issues relations to pedagogic and personal and social commitment; and  
• issues relating to teachers’ pedagogical perspective.

They also identified the Tensions faced by university academic staff. This was sub-divided into:

• tensions experienced by the the teacher in the situation; and
• tensions of engaging with the situation from a research perspective.

Based on the analysis, Richard and Tara raised further analytical Questions:

• What are the differences between the ‘socially just teacher’ and the ‘good teacher’?

• What really is the difference between good process pedagogies, and process pedagogies with a particular normative goal? And, are there any significant differences in student outcomes?

• Is there fundamental mismatch of the social justice ambition with certain subjects, class sizes, nature of student body, resources etc that prevent pedagogic possibilities? And, should this be better recognised and supported?

• How do normative stances of staff and structural role of higher education in reproducing social inequalities? And, are some social justice pedagogies complicit?

• How can the tension of provocation and nurture in pedagogic practices be better supported?

• Are social justice and affective pedagogic approaches necessarily always aligned?

In response, Denise Newfield noted that there was a thick description from each teacher on their own pedagogies, but that they were dependent on their own teaching paradigms and perceptions of pedagogies. She noted that there were tensions in the interviews she analysed between pedagogic descriptions and normative commitments to socially just pedagogies.

Denise further highlighted the complexity in having an authority position, such as a teacher, yet seeking to promote social justice or prevent injustice. She also pointed to the aspect of assessment in addressing injustice: If students are knowledge makers then how do you assess this, especially from a posthuman perspective?  

In her analysis Daniela Gachago returned to the teacher’s role as a central figure whose skills and capabilities appear crucial  in helping students to transform. This was especially significant from her analysis of interviews with a leader of a writing centre and a mature student. Daniela raised the question on how to go about this in a posthumanist perspective - what other resources could one draw from to transform students.

Richard suggested that the teacher should become more decentred in this context, but highlighted the paradoxical position that the role of the teacher to empower students can result in the teacher becoming more central - giving power to students.   

For Vivienne Bozalek, it was interesting to look more carefully at  two interviews - yet looking  through the lens of Nancy Fraser, despite the posthumanist criticism of Fraser, the analysis brings out two issues. From a regional perspective, Vivienne noticed that it makes a huge difference to how academic staff engage depending on what institution one work in South Africa. As an example, one interviewee only fully engaged with black students and ignored white students - a pedagogy of discomfort. Vivienne found it fascinating to see how people's conception of social justice  were playing out.

Richard suggested that one might want to go back to the interviewees to get more data, focussing on a range of different issues. In addition, Tara  quoted one interviewee who stated that educators in South Africa are ‘crippled’ by Anglo-American models of social justice.Tara suggested that one might rather look at e.g. South African practices, especially when it comes to talking about pedagogies and things that got messy. What is sayable and what is not - what positions are you allowed to hold?

Another point raised by Siddique Motala was the issue of language. He felt that in a posthumanist analysis he has to be able to speak many languages that he can’t. Siddique raised the question on how from an analytical point of view does one get around this.

Tara noted that in terms of language within the interview transcripts,  this appeared to be very emotional and contain a lot of pain, which therefore made it useful to include affect theory to consider what is occurring. On the point of pain, Lindsey Nicholls recommended looking at how pain is handled in societies e.g. in Post-apartheid South Africa and post-war Germany, where she finds this to be comparable.

Deleuze AND Guattari AND The Witch’s Broom - Call for papers

Deleuze AND Guattari AND The Witch’s Broom

6-9 SEPTEMBER, UCT, CAPE TOWN

A two day conference on philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

and their relevance for work on gender and sexuality

Keynote speakers to be confirmed

www.deleuzeguattari.co.za

Call for Papers

For Deleuze and Guattari, identities, societies, organisations, structures and so forth are always en fuite; that is, leaking or deterritorialising along lines of flight, forming new assemblages and connections and creating change through singular encounters and becomings. In this view, it is not identity and representation that are primary, but the ongoing processes of different/ciation that give rise to them. There is thus a fundamentalindetermination underlying that which we usually understand as well-determined; an endless unfolding of flows and processes beneath familiar final forms that suggests a machinic rather than transcendental or anthropocentric model of subjectivity. In this model, in other words, subjects and subjectivities are the result of immanent and material flows and processes of subjectivisation and the focus is on dynamism and relationality instead of unified being.

Importantly, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 213) claim that “everything is political” and argue that politics precedes being. If this is the case, then in order to successfully engage with questions of gender and sexuality, we must conceive of a politics that can create different subjectivities – a politics which allows for new ways of conceptualising the immanence of being. In their joint work, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari propose becoming-woman as one way of effectuating this politics – a deterritorialising away from conventional, normative and moralising subjectivities. They argue that “all becomings begin and pass through becoming-woman” and that it “is the key to all other becomings” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 277). However, because everything is political for Deleuze and Guattari, this does not connote a merely creative movement or undertaking. Such an understanding of becoming – and becomings-woman in particular – is not only a crude reading of their work but in fact undermines several of their core philosophical aims: to situate philosophy within the messiness of the socio-political; to describe society in its multiple macro-political and micro-political arrangements, intersecting flows, processes and resonances, overcodings, territorialisations, lines of flight, reterritorialisations and collapses; to formulate new problems and create new concepts for exploring the complexities and potentialities of the myriad machinic subjectivities of contemporary life in an ongoing process of questioning. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 248) ask us, “toward what void does the witch's broom lead?”

Keeping these threads in mind, we invite anyone interested in presenting at this, our second annual Deleuze and Guattari and Africa conference, to submit abstracts of 300-500 words for blind review to deleuzeafrica@gmail.com. Please make sure to include your affiliation (if any) and contact details in your submission, as well as any access, dietary or other requirements. We also welcome proposals for the delivery of presentations through art, performance, poetry, multimedia or any other mode of creative expression.

Some suggested topics

•

The politics of gender and sexuality

•

Deleuze and Guattari and queer theory

•

The politics of becoming-woman

•

Identity and difference/heterogeneity

•

The potentialities of subversive genders and/or sexualities

•

Deleuze and Guattari and critical posthumanisms/new materialist feminisms

•

Radical, revolutionary and anarcha-feminisms

•

Intersections between gender, sexuality and race

•

Biopower/biopolitics/societies of control

•

Deleuze and Guattari and the life sciences – queering biology

•

Body modification and transgressive sexualities

•

Critical engagement with rights discourses, policies and programs responding to LGBTQI persons and related issues

•

LGBTQI subjectivisation, subjectivities and subject-formation

•

Identity categories as instruments of regulatory regimes

•

Affect in feminist, queer and gender-related methodologies

•

Transgenderedness and non-binary becomings

•

Liminal genders and sexualities

•

Minor literatures responding to these or related topics

•

We welcome proposals on other topics broadly related to our theme

Working group: Post-qualitative methodologies in social sciences - The 28th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association

Call for abstracts now open:  The 28th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association, 11-13 August, 2016

Working group: Post-qualitative methodologies in social sciences

Organizers: Marjo Kolehmainen (University of Tampere, Finland) & Tuula Juvonen (University of Tampere, Finland)

Where, when and why are post-qualitative methodologies needed? What kind of consequences do they have for the processes of knowledge-making? The conventional qualitative research practices have been increasingly criticized for being normative or standardized in their approaches. What is the relevance of post-positivist models of knowledge production to social sciences?

Openings in post-qualitative methodologies pose new challenges to social sciences:
– How to approach networks or things that are multi-directional?
– How to apply categories on things that are fluid, or in the constant state of becoming?
– How to get the hold of the unknown and unanticipated and do justice to such complexities?
– How to find alternative ways of attuning, noticing, and registering the social as it happens?

We invite to our working group presentations by scholars who are searching for and applying alternative and creative ways of thinking about methodological understandings and research practices.

Deadline for submitting an abstract: 16 February 2016

Notification for accepted abstracts: 5 April 2016

The working group gathers at the 28th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association, “Knowledge-Making Practices and Sociology’s Global Challenge”, 11–13 August 2016, Helsinki.

For more information, please visit: http://nsa2016.org/

Marjo Kolehmainen
Post-doctoral research fellow
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
FI-33014 University of Tampere
Finland

E-mail: marjo.kolehmainen@uta.fi
Phone: +358 50 318 7599
http://affective-inequalities.fi/en/marjo-kolehmainen/

An American Educational Research Association List If you need assistance with this list, please send an email to listadmin@aera.net.

Call for Abstracts: Workshop on Affect and Methods with Lisa Blackman & Patricia Clough University of Tampere (Finland), May 23-24 2016

How can we develop new methodological approaches for registering and studying affect in empirical research?

We invite abstracts for an international workshop on Affect and Methods, to be held at the University of Tampere, Finland, on May 23-24, 2016. The workshop includes open to public keynote lectures by Professor Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths) and Professor Patricia Ticineto Clough (CUNY), as well as a two-day workshop, where the participants’ papers will be commented on by the keynote speakers and their fellow participants.

We welcome contributions from scholars, PhD students included, who address affect in their empirical research. As intersecting inequalities are increasingly mediated affectively, we assume that the arrangements of gender and sexuality can be approached in novel ways by attuning them to affects. Albeit we encourage submissions from participants whose work stems from different theoretical and methodological backgrounds, the workshop is especially targeted at those working on feminist research or other scholars dealing with questions of power and inequality within cultural or social research.

There has been ongoing theoretical interest in the affects in social sciences and humanities with sophisticated outcomes. In recent years the interest has shifted to include empirical questions regarding affect and methods, which also coincides with the rise of post-qualitative approaches. The latter development has raised the question about whether affects can simply be integrated into the already established research methodologies, or whether profound rethinking is required, especially as the current qualitative methodologies mostly rely on language and sight without attuning them to alternative technologies of noticing and observing.

Hence the themes about developing and employing inventive and experimental methods for the study of affect that can be discussed in the workshop may include but are not limited to the following:

-        How can we work with the notion of affect in a particular research process?
-        How can we enrich our understanding of attuning, noticing, observing and registering non-verbalized signals of affect? How do they support, challenge or complicate the verbalized emotions?
-        What does the study of affect require from the data, if we are to attune to affective dynamics or to access atmospheres, moods, and energies? How does such an approach shift the relations between affect and knowledge production?
-        If one seeks to work with one’s empirical data without renewing post-positivist ideas of coding, verification and measurement, how can one address the questions of describing, interpreting, positioning, and naming affects?
-        How can we examine the cultural and social shaping of affect? How can we analyze the affective dimension of gendered and sexualized power dynamics?
-        How can we make use of affective intensities while conducting research, and how can we conceptualize the affective relationships between the researcher, the research, and/or the researched? How can we avoid relying on the idea of singular, autonomous subjects?

The maximum number of participants presenting their papers will be 12, and the auditing of the workshop is limited by registration only. Participation is free of charge, yet participants are expected to cover their own travel and accommodation costs as well as their meals.

The deadline for abstracts (max. 250 words) is February 15th, 2016. The decisions about acceptance are based on the abstracts and are due at the end of February. The accepted participants are expected to submit a work-in-progress paper of 10-12 pages by April 30, 2016. The papers should preferably present and analyze empirical data and address questions that are pertinent to affect and methods. Papers will be circulated among the participants, and all participants are expected to read both the work-in-progress-papers as well as the literature suggested by the keynotes. Please submit your abstract to: affective-inequalities@uta.fi.

For further information, please contact:

Dr. Tuula Juvonen (Academy Research Fellow): tuula.juvonen@uta.fi or Dr. Marjo Kolehmainen (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow): marjo.kolehmainen@uta.fi.

The workshop is organized by an Academy of Finland funded research project “Just the Two of Us? Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships” led by Dr. Tuula Juvonen. More information is available at http://affective-inequalities.fi/en/

PS. Please note that the project has started negotiations on publishing an edited volume “Affect and Inequalities in Intimate Relationships” (working title) with Routledge in 2018. The call for papers will be opened in spring 2016. We encourage prospective participants to also consider responding to that call.

Marjo Kolehmainen
Post-doctoral research fellow
School of Social Sciences and Humanities
FI-33014 University of Tampere
Finland

E-mail: marjo.kolehmainen@uta.fi
Phone: +358 50 318 7599
http://affective-inequalities.fi/en/marjo-kolehmainen/

An American Educational Research Association List If you need assistance with this list, please send an email to listadmin@aera.net.

Relevant conferences during 2016

ICED conference, Cape Town, 22 - 25 November 2016.  Abstract submissions round 2 deadline: 30 May 2016 (round 1 was in November 2015).250 word abstract

7th Annual Conference on the New Materialisms 21-23 September 2016, Warsaw, Poland. Deadline for abstracts: 1 April 2016

Ultrecht Summer School 

Abstracts for individual papers and performances (300 words) should be sent in the following format: 1. Title 2. Presenter(s) + short bio3. Institutional affiliation 4. Abstract 5. Key words 6. Technical requirements Pre-organized panels for consideration should additionally include a summary paragraph along with proposed session title.Proposals to organize workshops should contain:1. Workshop proposal (300-words)2. Summarized CV All submitted abstracts, panel proposals, and workshop proposals will be peer reviewed. DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: April 1, 2016.

DELEUZE AND GUATTARI &THE WITCH'S BROOM, UCT, Cape Town 29 August - 1 September 2016 (Please not change in dates). Deadline for abstract: 15 March 2016

The 28th Conference of the Nordic Sociological Association, 11-13 August, 2016: Knowledge-Making Practices and Sociology’s Global Challenge Tampere, Finland. Abstract deadline: 16 February 2016

Workshop on Affect and Methods with Lisa Blackman & Patricia Clough, University of Tampere (Finland), May 23-24 2016. Abstract deadline: 16 February, 2016

Deleuze AND Guattari AND Africa: Southern Responses Conference Feedback

By Dr. Chantelle Grey van Heerden

In recent years there has been a widespread surge of interest in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although Deleuze and Guattari studies is still in its infancy in South Africa, many of the themes that emerge from their individual and collaborative works – a politics of deterritorialisation, an ethics of becoming, a materialist ontology and so forth – hold great promise for thinking through and engaging with the complexities of contemporary South Africa and Africa more broadly, with pressing concerns around identity, geopolitics, culture, art, time, memory, autonomy, oppression and justice desperately calling for a bold, radical new praxis.

With the emphasis on Africa (but also keeping in mind what Deleuze says about the untimely),

the first Deleuze and Guattari conference was held at UCT in Cape Town earlier this year from 15-16 July. Keynote speakers included Rosi Braidotti, Ian Buchanan, Claire Colebrook and Paul Patton. Expecting a small conference, we were pleasantly surprised to see how many people responded to the Call for Papers and, in the end, we had about 120 delegates and about 35 speakers, including a number of international ones.

Topics covered included decolonisation practices, the anthropocene, ethics, minor literatures, art, rhizomatic pedagogies, feminism, transgressive sexualities, politics, ecology, and so on. Together with the help from the NRF Posthumanism Project, the conference was organised by Chantelle Gray van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff. Speakers from the NRF Posthumanism Project included (listed alphabetically):

Delphi Carstens – Deleuzo-Guattarian sorcery

Deleuze and Guattari use the supernatural to reveal the numinous possibilities inherent in the quotidian, thereby recognising the inherent strangeness of the world and naming aesthetic relations as the ground of being. Their transcendental or gothic materialism, which combines vitalism, intensive abstraction and an interest in ‘unnameable things,’ has produced many sorcerous ofshoots like ‘thanatropics’ and hyperstition, which have themselves morphed into explorations of radical hertzian and sonic spaces. I will also explore how these and other sorcerous interventions, based on a Deleuzo-Guattarian praxis, present ways of bridging the so called ‘fatal’ incongruence between materialism and the mythic.

Chantelle Gray van Heerden - Reshaping Social Practices through Masochist ‘Smut’ Literature: From Heteronormative Mimicry to a Radical Becoming-woman

I argue that Patrick Califia’s collection of lesbian S/M short stories, Macho Sluts, deterritorialises from heteronormative pornographic literatures, such as 50 Shades of Grey, in that it avoids capture by what I term the onceuponatime abstract machine. Like Deleuze, Califia distinguishes between masochism and sadism and offers a real alternative: a radical becoming-woman. Such a kind of becoming, I contend, may be likened to cannibalism in that both relations could be described as alimentary anthropophagy with a double-sided foundation: an irrepressible will to pleasure on the one hand and a death drive on the other. This death drive, however, is not to be understood as desire for an end, nor as premised on lack or regulated by laws. As such, the emphasis shifts from morality (the transcendent) to power (the immanent).

Veronica Mitchell - A nomadic becoming through blogging

This presentation explains how my iPad ruptures me in unexpected nodes, facilitating lines of flight that deterritorialize the assumed role of technological support. The tablet forms an integral, embedded and embodied part of my becoming and my research subjectivity in Obstetrics teaching. Rhizomatically creating images in blogging opens new meanings.

Karin Murris - Reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another as a way forward for South African schools

Against the ontoepistemic injustice routinely done to child, and with a view of child as unbounded ‘mangle’ - inhuman materialdiscursive becoming of unique being with fluid boundaries which manifest in materialdiscursive relationship with others, I explore the application of intra-active pedagogies that do justice to the ontology of child and child’s reconfiguration as rich, resilient and resourceful, appealing to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus to argue for a ‘learning’ focused on difference and becoming.

For more information, see http://deleuzeguattari.co.za. The organisers are currently talking about next year’s conference which will respond to feminism, gender and queer studies in Africa.

SAHJE review session at UCT with Vivienne and Michalinos

A few months ago we circulated a call for papers for South African Journal of Higher Education (SAHJE) for papers to be included in a special edition dedicated to critical post-humanism, new materialisms, and the affective turn for social pedagogies in higher education. Several project members submitted papers and had opportunity to have these reviewed by Professor Vivienne Bozalek, University of the Western Cape and Professor Michalinos Zembylas from the Open University of Cyprus. This happened at a session at the University of  Cape Town at the Graduate School of Education. Currently, the review progress for the journal is ongoing, however authors will be informed shortly whether submissions have been accepted. This issued has been planned to be published during 2016. The original call can be downloaded here. Below a few photos from the review session at UCT

Michalinos, Karin and Veronica

Rouxnette, Tammy and Daniella

Michalinos, Karin and Veronica

Daniella

Tammy and Michalinos

Seminar: In conversation with Elspeth Probyn - UWC 12 October 2015

Women’s and Gender Studies

Faculty of Arts, University of the Western Cape

Invite you to the following seminar 

In conversation with Elspeth Probyn

Elspeth Probyn (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia) is Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, as well as adjunct Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Western Australia, and adjunct Research Professor at the University of South Australia. She has taught media, cultural studies and sociology at universities in Canada and the USA, and has held several prestigious visiting appointments around the world. Her work has helped to establish several new areas of scholarship – from embodied research methods to cultural studies of food. Professor Probyn is the author of several groundbreaking monographs and over a hundred articles and chapters across the fields of gender, media, and cultural studies, philosophy, cultural geography, anthropology and critical psychology. Her research (funded by an ARC Discovery Project) analyses the role of place and community within the transglobal food system. She is particularly interested in the sustainability of the production and consumption of fish, or what she calls ‘more-than-human” sustainable fish communities, the results of which is published in a new book, Oceanic Entanglements (Duke University Press, 2014). In this seminar, she speaks to her scholarship on affect and shame as elaborated in her book Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

DATE: 12 October 2015

TIME: 12h00 – 14h00 (light lunch will be served)

VENUE: TBC

For RSVP and more details please download the poster here.

This seminar forms part of an NRF funded project on Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn and Socially Just Pedagogies and is convened by Viv Bozalek, Directorate of Teaching and Learning & Tamara Shefer, Women’s and Gender Studies at UWC, and Ronelle Carolissen at Stellenbosch University.

Deleuze AND Guattari AND Africa: SOUTHERN RESPONSES

15-16 July 2015, University of Cape Town

A two day conference on philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their relevance for Africa. Keynote speakers include Ian Buchanan, Achille Mbembe and Rosi Braidotti.

Deadline for submission of papers 1 May 2015. For more information please refer to the conference web site 

Special Edition of SAJHE 2016 call for papers on critical posthumanism

Yusef Waghid kindly offered to devote a special issue  of the journal he edits - the South African Journal of Higher Education (SAJHE) - to critical posthumanism, new materialisms and the affective turn for socially just higher education pedagogies.  The issue will be published in 2016 and Michalinos Zembylas and Vivienne Bozalek will be the special editors.  There will also be a colloquium on 24 July 2015 in Cape Town for people who are keen to submit papers to the special issue.
We hope that some of you will be interested in submitting something, and if not, you would be willing to make yourself available to review one of the papers. The call for papers is available for download here and contains all the information about the special issue.
If you have any questions about it, don't hesitate to contact Vivienne or Michalinos.

Photos

Conference venue Mont Fleur - Seen from a bit up the mountain

Lindsey, Ronelle, Vivienne, Michalinos and Jakob enjoying lunch

Vivienne and Michalinos

Time for some fresh air - Veronica, Jakob and Karin on the daily "Walk with Michael"

Community map drawing by Siddique on the second day of the seminar

Ending a long day with wine tasting!

Another "Walk with Michael" through entangled and not very smooth terrain

Bit of chatting before braai

Michalinos and Karin at dinner

The sauna - Some delegates' preferred work space during evenings! 

Another popular work space - the pool

Human/Inhuman/Posthuman course - Utrecht Summer School 2015 - The Netherlands

For those who are travelling to or located  in Europe during August 2015 this course by Professor Rosi Braidotti may be of interest:

Organizing institution: Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities (UU)

Period: 24 August 2015 - 28 August 2015 (5 days)

Course location(s)

» Utrecht (Utrecht city campus), The Netherlands

Credits: 2.0 ECTS credits + Certificate of Attendance

Course code: C30

Course fee (incl. housing): € 500

Level: Advanced master level

Please see original post here:

Human/Inhuman/Posthuman course - Utrecht Summer School 2015 - The Netherlands

Research Colloquium: Silenced Voices: Diversity and Social Justice in Higher Education Call for Papers (invited scholars)

29-30 January 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Conveners: Frans Kamsteeg (VUA/Organization Sciences, Amsterdam, Netherlands), André Keet (UFS, IRSJ, South Africa), and Charles Alexander (UCLA, Los Angeles, US).

Background

It is acknowledged, globally, that higher education institutions are complex organisations, with complicated systems and surfaces on which the intricate social dynamics amongst a growing body of heterogeneous peoples, knowledges and experiences, and between people and structures are played out. This heterogeneity is, at one and the same time the energy of and condition for the academic project, and, the major challenge to which universities have to respond. Nevertheless, universities have been hesitant in taking up this challenge, and tend to convert it into diversity management discourses, thus effectively silencing diversity. Working against this trend, the colloquium wants to contribute to critical studies on diversity in higher education that pursue  insightful, innovative, interpretive schemes on which bases more socially just academic policies and practices can emerge.

  

Comparison and interdisciplinary approach

This colloquium  will explore how scholars from various disciplines engage in studying the patterns of silenced voices that dovetails with a range of discriminatory categories, and differences. These studies may focus on curriculum, pedagogy, communication, organization and institutional culture.  We welcome contributions from engaged scholars who support comparative and interdisciplinary approach to share the results of their work, the way they disseminate their views and make them available to both the scientific and the broader community. The organizers – researchers from UFS, VUA, and UCLA – have joined forces in studying diversity in settings as different from one another as the Netherlands, South Africa and the USA.

Themes and proposals

We invite abstracts of no more than 400 words on one of the following themes:

1. Institutional culture

2. Students’ experiences.

3. Diversity strategies, policies and practices.

4. Inclusion and exclusion: HEIs as communities.

5. Transformation and human rights.

7. Situated identities: students, scholars, managers.

8. Researchers’ responsibilities

9. Teaching-learning and research

10. Migration studies

However, we also welcome contributions in other themes not mentioned here. Contributions may be theoretical, methodological, empirical and/or policy driven.

Organization and Outcomes

The colloquium is a co-effort between VU, Amsterdam, UFS, Bloemfontein, and UCLA, Los Angeles. It will be held at the VUA campus, Amsterdam, in cooperation with VUA Diversity Desk (Wim Haan).

The outcomes of the colloquium will be:

·       Sharing of and engagement with research papers

·       Peer collaboration and collaborative learning

·         An increased awareness of contemporary themes in diversity in higher education.

·       Special edition (journal) and/or edited compilation (book)

Deadline

Please submit your abstract ASAP (preferably before 1.12.2014) to: keeta@ufs.ac.za, frans.kamsteeg@vu.nl and CAlexander@college.ucla.edu

Keynote speakers at the Colloquium will be:

Melissa Steyn

Professor of Critical Diversity Studies

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS)

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

M. Belinda Tucker

Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

Vice Provost, Institute of American Cultures

University of California, Los Angeles

Karen van Oudenhoven-v.d. Zee

Professor of Intercultural Competence

Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences

VU University Amsterdam 

Principles for data analysis using critical post humanism and affective turn

Engaging with the complex theories from critical post humanism and affective turn theories the project team set out to develop a set of principles, as a basis for an analytical framework. In this process Google Docs were used in the conference venue - One for critical posthumanist perspective and one for affective turn perspective; team members were requested to work on these two documents, outline principles and questions for further exploration. This process took about an hour and the outcome was subsequently discussed. 

Based on critical posthumanist theories team members outlined these principles for the foundation for an analytical framework:

1. Descriptions/interpretations never to be located with a particular object but within the relation/intra-action in between (cf. e.g. Davies, 2014 p.5)
2. The material and the discursive are both important and mutually constitutive of each other in data analysis
3. The entanglement of the human and the non-human - entanglement of relations
4. Attention on how discourses materialise, how they work, not what they mean
5. Data are not neutral, objective, speak for itself, but framed technically, economically, ethically, temporally, spatially and philosophically ‘situated’/framed (Kitchin, 2014)
6. We are transformed through the intellectual energy and both made and unmade by data analysis, which is an embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2012) process. There are no divisions between theory, thinking, writing, participants and data - they work together and make one another to create ‘new analytical questions’ and constitute us to produce different ‘researcher selves’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012: 118).
7. Data illustrates theory and vice versa - you need to stay with both in analysis
8. Collaborative data analysis helps in this process
9. The process is unpredictable and intense ‘As readers in an intensive mode, we are transformers of intellectual energy, processors of the ‘insights’ we are exchanging’ (Braidotti, )
10. As humans we don’t have a unidirectional relationship with materiality we affect and are affected by it - this impacts on conventional notions of agency, choice and acting on the world. Agency is an enactment and is distributed over human and non-human forms (including data and writing) - it is not something that is possessed by an individual, something someone has and is not exclusive to humans. Matter is vital.
11. Understanding the linkages and connections between subjectivity and other things and bodies
12. Using diffraction (patterns of difference) to ‘move away from habitual normative readings’ grounded in the discursive to reading ‘insights through one another’ (Barad, 2007) rather than critical self-reflection (mirroring/sameness).
13. knowing, being and ethics are not separate but are mutually implicated

From the affective turn perspective the following principles were outlined:

1. Emotions as socially / historically/culturally constructed
2. Emotions as moving between/in bodies
3. Emotions as practices/praxis
4. Emotions as public and political
5. Affects and emotions as intersections of language, power, bodies, social structures, subjectivity, materiality
6. Focus on relationality / the in-between
7. Acknowledging the (im)possibility of language to translate/map emotions?

References:

Post-humanism:

Barad, K. (2007)

Blagaard, B. and van der Tuin, I. (eds.) (2014).  The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Malden: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2012). The Posthuman.

Butler, J. (2014). Reflections on ethics, destructiveness, and life: Rosi Braidotti and the Posthuman. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Davies, B. (2014). Reading Anger in Early Childhood Intra-Actions: A Diffractive Analysis, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Hemmings, C. (2014). Reading Rosi Braidotti: Returning to Transpostions. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Affective turn:

Childers (2014) Promiscuous Analysis in Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Ivits, S. (2009). Disturbing the comfortable: an ethical inquiry into pedagogies of discomfort and crisis. Unpublished Masterthesis from The University of British Columbia (Vancouver).