(New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research) Norman K. Denzin (Editor), James Salvo (Editor) - New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research_ Theory as Resistance-Myers Education Press (202

Theory as Resistance
New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry

A book series edited by Norman K. Denzin and James Salvo
New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry consists of

thematic edited volumes that help us understand the philosophical
concepts undergirding theory and how to put theory into practice
to bring about social justice. The chapters in each volume, from
established and emerging scholars and largely drawn from papers
at the annual International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, repre-
sent new directions for incorporating theory into justice-oriented
qualitative research. Taking particular interest in theorists who
haven’t yet had mainstream influence, the series is designed to
reach a wide audience of scholars and students in the humanities
and social sciences, including those seasoned in the philosophical
language of theory and novices to theoretically oriented research.
The series aims to bring about experimental ways of reading lives
to implement radical social change.
Books in the series:

New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research:
The Arts (2020)
Indigenous Research (2020)
Theory as Resistance (2020)
Performance as Resistance (2020)
If you have a manuscript or a proposal for a book-length work,

please send it to Norman Denzin (n-denzin@illinois.edu) or James
Salvo (salvo3000@gmail.com). All books published by MEP are
peer reviewed. We will acknowledge receipt of your material, but
it may be 4–6 weeks before we can provide initial feedback about
your proposal.
New
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Theory as Resistance
edited by
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contents
Introduction • There’s No Time to Not Think vii
James Salvo
Chapter One • “Theory is Back”:
Theory as Resistance in the 21st Century 1
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre
Chapter Two • Speculative (Wombing) Pedagogies:
|Rəˈzistəns| in Qualitative Inquiry 11
Rebecca C. Christ & Candace R. Kuby
Chapter Three • Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry 29
Sara M. Childers
Chapter Four • Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity 39
Becky Atkinson
Chapter Five • Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry 51
Lucy E. Bailey
Chapter Six • Thinking About Theory and Practice
in Non-Oppositional Terms 67
Serge F. Hein
Chapter Seven • Missing Voices: A Documentary Practice About
Parents’ and Children’s Perspectives in Inclusive Education 77
Hanne Vandenbussche, Ellen Vermeulen,
Elisabeth De Schauwer, Inge Van de Putte, & Geert Van Hove
Chapter Eight • Lazy Pedagogy 105
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve
Chapter Nine • Global Hegemony:
Unraveling Colonized Minds and Indigenous Healing 119
Tina Bly
About the Authors 127
Index 131
Introduction vii
introduction
There’s No Time to Not Think

JAMES SALVO
T he world is in bad shape. Apart from continuing and escalating

injustice worldwide, we seem to be in the midst of a mass extinc-
tion event. Is there even time, some might ask, for philosophy? We
can’t just sit around and think, some might say, for the urgency of our
problems requires that we act now! There’s no denying that action is
necessary and urgently needed, but this isn’t to say that thinking is
but a luxury. It’s now, more than ever, that we need to think about
our actions. Panic at the situation in which we find ourselves won’t
save the day when there’s so little room for error. And in the first
place, it’s the lack of reflection that’s gotten us into trouble, for this
has led to thoughtless action. Thus, I’d assert that we no longer have
time to continue not thinking.
Resistance Activism as a Generic Ethical Orientation
If we practice an activism of resistance, we should be generically

activated against injustice, for an injustice to anyone is unacceptable.
In other words, the requirement for membership to the group who
has the right to justice is that one be anyone, meaning that everyone
has the right to justice, meaning that the beneficiaries of activism
are beneficiaries as such because activists are generically oriented
against injustice.
Inasmuch as it exists, injustice of any kind belongs to a system
that allows it, and for that system to be just, any traces of injustice
must be eliminated. That a system contains any injustice should be
the concern of anyone who rationally identifies injustice as wrong.
Anyone who lives in the world ought to feel ethically compelled to
remove any injustice existing in any system, to wrest it away from
viii Theory as Resistance
that system so as to obliterate it. It’s true that we may not share strug-
gles or the experiences of those struggles, but everyone must work to
make it such that no one struggles because of unfairness. This is the
right thing to do. How we go about doing this work is another thing.
Sometimes one isn’t invited to do certain kinds of work against
a particular form of injustice because that work requires an expe-
rience of that particular form of injustice. Of course, we mustn’t let
our well-meaning intentions cause us to forget that we can’t force
ourselves into the space of doing work we’re unable to do. Ought
implies can, and we should be aware of the times when we’re unable
to help, the times when what we’d offer as help would actually hold
progress toward injustice back. Otherwise, though, I don’t think we
need to wait for an invitation. In general, if we’re able to do some-
thing helpful about any particular instance of injustice or set of
injustices, we should. This is the resistance activism of an activist.
It can look like being in the street or posting things to social media,
but it can also look like anything else that’s aimed at seeking justice.
So we may not be able to generally describe what resisting injus-
tice looks like, but still, might we inquire into an essential quality
belonging to actions resisting injustice? I think this is possible, and
that an essential quality of actions resisting injustice is that they’re
all grounded in a rational ethical justification. Thus, if we seek to
bring about repeatable actions that, taken together, put us in the
direction of change, we must first start by making rational appeals
for those types of actions.
Rational appeals are all we have if we’re to exclude resorting to
violent means to rid ourselves of injustice, and this is a desirable
exclusion. In any just system, violence exists beyond its limit, for
violence itself is outside of the law. At most, within a truly just sys-
tem, the law can only address violence. Within a truly just system,
there’s no law preserving violence as such, for any enactment of law
preserving violence upon an individual would violate a universal
right of ontological beings—beings for whom being is a concern, as
opposed to ontic beings that have only being without concern as
such—the universal right to be free from violence. This isn’t to say
that law preserving violence doesn’t exist or isn’t sometimes neces-
sary, only that it’s beyond the limit of justice, and is, by definition,
Introduction ix
always extrajudicial. Violence can preserve the law, but this can
only happen in a state wherein the law is suspended. This is all to
say that if resistance activism has the requirements of remaining
within the system of the just, then our best hope is rational persua-
sion, as violent coercion is off the table. Further, toward alternative
metaphors of understanding activism, we might move beyond the
metaphors of violence, fighting, and war. We can think more peace-
fully and empathetically. For those who actually suffer through the
experience of violence, fighting, and war, violence, fighting, and war
are more than mere metaphors.
Still, this doesn’t account for the fact that within the realms of the
political, we must account for non-rational actors. And given that the
laws are ones that guarantee fairness, it’s here that we sometimes think
that law preserving violence is necessary. However, we shouldn’t be so
quick to think that violent means are here the only way. Unless they’re
entirely incorrigible, at least some would-be non-rational actors might
be brought into rational political deliberation through education.
Has a cleverly worded foamcore sign held by a screaming per-
son in the street ever made a White nationalist stop and think, You
know, that’s a good point? Will the suburban home floating down
the Thames be the one thing that will convince people en masse to
reduce reliance on fossil fuels and plastics, or did that just produce
that much more waste? I’m not sure about the answer to either of
these, but what if instead of temporary disruptions, we participated
in sustained efforts?
Here’s a moment that sticks with me, though: When Judith Butler’s
Gender Trouble was published, I was in high school, but it was only
a few years old when I became a Women’s Studies major in college.
I struggled to understand the philosophy behind the argument, as
did many of my peers. We were part of a larger conversation, but at
the time, it hadn’t gained much traction outside the university. At
the time, the more optimistic of us thought that perhaps we might
be lucky enough to see the change thinking differently could bring
to the world by the end of our lifetimes. I was among the more pes-
simistic. Never have I been so glad to be profoundly mistaken. The
discourse that started at the university eventually found its way
to mainstream culture, and though we still have improvements to
x Theory as Resistance
make, we’ve come much further than I or most people that I knew
at the time would’ve thought. Sure, I’d like for today’s activists to
understand the idea of anti-essentialism a little better, but here,
education has made a world of difference. If such a little thing—a
thing like a bunch of students and professors discussing a book in
scattered about classes—had made such a profound change, why
can’t we repeat this today? And don’t we need the same thing to hap-
pen if we’re to have any hope at not becoming extinct? If rational,
philosophical, and, in this case, scientific discourse regarding this
issue can be understood and taught, maybe things aren’t so hope-
less. Panic and anger can get us so far, but education and informed
action is what will turn things around.
Let’s partake in sustained efforts that think through our prob-
lems and let all those who have learned teach what they’ve come
to know. This is an effective way to make sure that when we act,
our actions will be ones that are oriented toward the good. It’s in
this spirit that the present volume collects together the following
essays. You want to change the world? That’s what teaching and
theory is for. If there’s one thing that oppressive regimes fear, it’s
learning. If through any one thing in particular, hegemony can
certainly survive on ignorance alone.
In This Volume . . .
Chapter One opens this volume with Elizabeth St. Pierre’s essay
that speaks to the necessity of both theory and teaching as we live
during a time in which we face possible extinction. She offers that
there’s perhaps been a failure to teach how to learn, especially if we
teach from pre-existing, systematized, formalized research meth-
odologies. She challenges us to think beyond these facile modes of
thought. In Chapter Two, Rebecca C. Christ and Candace R. Kuby
offer a thought-provoking reflection guided by the etymology of
resistance. Resisting any easy meanings, they show how slowing or
pausing the research machine can be a generative process regard-
ing pedagogy and knowledge production.
Chapters Three, Four, and Five are exemplars of what St. Pierre,
Christ, and Kuby encourage us to do in carefully thinking through
Introduction xi
theory. Namely, these chapters take an in-depth look at the thinking

of Sara Ahmed. In Chapter Three, Sara M. Childers deeply engages
with different philosophical accounts of materialism. In Chapter
Four, Becky Atkinson reflects upon the question of what it means
to live a feminist life. In Chapter Five, Lucy E. Bailey explores the
multiform ways in which theory can be a companion to us, taking
Ahmed’s work as an example.
In keeping with St. Pierre’s challenge to go beyond facile modes of
thought, we then turn to Chapters Six, Seven, and Eight. In Chapter
Six, Serge F. Hein explicates the concept of différance, and asks us to
question the concept of resistance itself as a hold over from humanist
and modernist thought. In Chapter Seven, Hanne Vandenbussche et
al. show us how to challenge ideas of segregation with regard to dis-
ability, seeking to perform an inclusive pedagogy. In Chapter Eight,
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve seeks to “put laziness to work, ironically
so, in the hope of generating a lazy pedagogy as resistance to our
contemporary conditions of knowledge production in academia.”
Chapter Nine brings this volume to a close with an essay from
Tina Bly. She considers how some central tenets and local use of
postcolonial theory respond to global hegemony regarding insti-
tutional experiences of academe. She addresses Indigenous perspec-
tives of climate change and how Indigenous epistemologies align
with postcolonial theory and represent thoughts upon which we
can act.
xii Theory as Resistance
Theory Is Back 1
chapter one
“Theory Is Back”1:
Theory as Resistance in the
21st Century
ELIZABETH ADAMS ST. PIERRE
T he news is not so good as we approach the third decade of the

21st century. Whatever worldwide stability 20th-century post–
World War II generations accomplished is rapidly and often deliber-
ately being destroyed as safeguards established then against fascism,
homophobia, nativism, sexism, racism, and on and on are overturned
by private organizations as well as by state and federal law in this coun-
try and others. Our nostalgia for that romanticized past, of course,
masks its inequities and ethical failures. Still, unthinkably dangerous
and unethical cartoon characters, made for TV, have been elected
to the highest political office in countries assumed to be stable and
advanced democracies. Comparisons to the fascism preceding World
War II have become common, and the diligent labor of prior leaders
who fought for social justice is being unwound, secretly in many cases,
in every sector of society to the point of no return. We can’t go back.
All this gets local and personal, of course. Even as democratically
elected leaders stoke hatred, individuals struggle to live ethical lives
at the beginning of a new century already steeped in discord and fear.
But regimes of power call forth resistance, and groups are organizing
everywhere to refuse the terrible and unimaginable that has become
“normal.” I learned theories and practices of resistance during
the last decade of the 20th century from feminists, from race theo-
rists, from the Frankfurt School critical theorists, from those we’ve
since labeled poststructuralists, and from others who resisted what
Deleuze (1968/1994) called the “dogmatic image of thought” (p. 148).
2 Theory as Resistance
The richness and creativity of that post–World War II theorizing was

thrilling, provocative, and immediately useful, but that period was
followed, for some, by what Braidotti (2013) called a “zombified land-
scape of repetition without difference and lingering melancholia,” as
well as “theory fatigue” (p. 5), even the presumed death of theory.
I must say that I never experienced such fatigue, nor can I imag-
ine the death of theory. Before I became an academic and studied
theory(ies), I felt stymied at every turn, frustrated that I couldn’t
explain or justify my gut resistance to what in my doctoral studies
I found language for—patriarchy, classism, the abuse of common
sense, and so on. I had no language to speak that resistance until
I learned theories and their concepts that gave me power to think,
argue, and resist. Theory saved my life. It still does.
Some people say we don’t need theory—that it’s elitist, over-rated,
too hard to understand—and that we just need better practices—what
works. The continuing deployment of that tired and wrong-headed
theory/practice binary, thinkable only in a particular and typically
unnamed theory, is not only astounding but also very dangerous.
I agree with Colebrook (2014) in the long quotation that follows:
In many respects theory, far from being an academic enterprise that

we can no longer afford to indulge, is the condition and challenge of
the twenty-first century or age of extinction: “we” are finally sensing
both our finitude as a world-forming and world-destroying species,
and sensing that whatever we must do or think cannot be confined or
dictated by our finitude. . . . Theory, or distance from the real, is nec-
essary: “we” are faced with an existing world that, precisely because
it exists, is not ourselves; without that “outside” world there could be
no inner subject, no “we,” no agent of practice. But this existing world
to which we are definitively bound is therefore impossible: the given
world is given to us, never known absolutely. We are not paralyzed by
this distance from the world, for it is the distance that provokes both
knowledge and practice (Stengers, 2011); but the distance never-
theless entails that practice cannot form the ground of our knowledge
(“do what works”) nor can knowledge ground practice (“act according
to your nature”). To avoid theory and pass directly to practice would
require forgetting that the self of practice is only a self insofar as it is
placed in a position of necessary not-knowing. (pp. 32–33)
Theory Is Back 3
“We” are, indeed, living in the age of extinction and, with each
new climate report, the date on which Earth will no longer be able
to support human life draws closer. Indeed, I feel as if I’m living in
one of those disaster movies that begins with a quick sequence of
clips of TV news reports featuring the worst-ever hurricane, tornado,
flood, earthquake, or heat wave. After that horrific prelude, the cam-
era switches to a group of embattled humans, some “we,” trying to
survive the end times.
Interestingly, Braidotti (2017) recently wrote that “theory is
back” (p. xiv)—the end times seem to demand it. She listed, among
others, the following new critical theories: animal studies, glo-
balization studies, internet studies, reconciliation studies, death
studies, trauma studies, eco-criticism, conflict studies and peace
research, and human rights-oriented medicine. Times change, his-
tory happens, and we need new theories to think about the world
given to us and the world we create. Ever since theory helped me
understand that the “I” and the “we” we believe ourselves to be is
simply one description among many possible other descriptions, I
have been obsessed with re-thinking human being as a practice of
freedom. Reading Rorty’s (1986) statement below at mid-life was
transformational, liberating, and challenging:
The urge to tell stories of progress, maturation and synthesis

might be overcome if we once took seriously the notion that we
only know the world and ourselves under a description [empha-
sis added]. For doing so would mean taking seriously the possibil-
ity that we just happened on that description—that it was not the
description which nature evolved us to apply, or that which best
unified the manifold of previous descriptions. (p. 48)
Rorty sent me to philosophy, searching for other descriptions

of being and human being that had not become normal, taken-for-
granted, and real, for “speculative possibilities that exceed our present
grasp, but may nevertheless be our future” (p. 48).
But different descriptions of being and human being have long
been available in an aberrant line of speculative philosophers—e.g.,
Lucretius, Leibniz, Spinoza, James, Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon,
and Deleuze and Guattari—some of whom are also called philosophers
of immanence—e.g., Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Bergson, and

Deleuze. In fact, much work that calls itself “new” (e.g., new mate-
rialism, new empiricism) is not so new but a return to philosophical
thought that was always different from the traditional, dogmatic line
of philosophers—e.g., Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. Perhaps we
hope that thought but ignored for centuries may enable a different
“we” and a different life. Smith (2012), writing about Deleuze’s work,
explained how philosophical thought can push against the “we” and
the “I” that have become habits, can put the dominant description of
human being in play, in variation:
Like each of us, the philosopher—or the artist or the mathemati-
cian—begins with the multiplicities that have invented him or her
as a formed subject, living in an actualized world, with an organic
body, in a given political order, having learnt a certain language.
But at its highest point, both writing and thinking, as activities,
consist in following the abstract movement of what Deleuze calls a
“line of flight” that extracts variable singularities from these mul-
tiplicities of lived experience—because they are already there, even
if they have been rendered ordinary [emphasis added]—and then
makes them function as variables in order to make them function
together in a singular and non-homogeneous whole, and thus par-
ticipate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”—for instance,
the invention of new compositions in language . . . and at the limit, the
creation of a new world (through singularities and events). (p. 185)
I read much hope in Smith’s words and Deleuze’s thought, but I

doubt we have enough time before the end times to do the hard work
of thinking differently so we can live differently. Hope lives side-by-
side with despair, and I survey the classes of 18- and 19-year-olds I
teach at my university as I explain different descriptions of human
being to them—hoping something I say will stick—and, at the same
time, fear the earth will not sustain them to a ripe old age. We may
have mourned the death of the subject in the 20th century, but, in
the 21st, we mourn the death of all of human being, no matter how
we describe it.
Despair finds every era, and when I was a new academic in the
1990s, I liked to repeat the words of 20th-century scholars who, in
their era’s despair, struggled to keep going. Foucault (1983/1984)
Theory Is Back 5
wrote that he proceeded with a “pessimistic activism” (p. 343); Tony

Kushner (as cited in Lather, 1995), with a “non-stupid optimism”
(p. 3); and Cornell West (1995), with “an audacious sense of hope,
not grounded in optimism.” I fear optimism and hope have mostly
dropped out of my life, and I’m left with Foucault’s pessimistic activ-
ism because, as Deleuze (1986/1988) wrote, “we continue to produce
ourselves as subjects on the basis of old modes which no longer cor-
respond to our problems” (p. 107). Why we repeat the same instead
of creating difference has become my overarching ethical question.
To be sure, the new critical studies Braidotti identified require
a different ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) arrangement
that enables a different description of being and, especially, of human
being, a being who refuses the old Enlightenment binaries—man/
nature, male/female, human/nonhuman—who is not the “master” of
the universe but completely entangled with all being. Barad put it
this way:
To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the

joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained
existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-
exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as
part of their entangled intra-relating. Which is not to say that emer-
gence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes
place according to some external measure of space and of time, but
rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into
existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action,
thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense
between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity
and discontinuity, here and there, past and future. (p. ix)
This is not a new idea, of course, that human being is not sepa-
rate from, prior to, and privileged over other forms of being; it can
be found in that aberrant line of philosophers listed earlier. So why
did Barad’s statement seem so radical in her 2007 book? Why hav-
en’t we studied those philosophers? Why haven’t their ideas been
taken up and become imperceptible in everyday thought and living
as have those of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel? Who wins by living his
life as master of the universe? The master, of course.
But the aberrant philosophers, especially Deleuze, I think,

“give us a philosophy of the impersonal, the pre-individual and the
non-subjective, a philosophy where the concept of subject plays a
minor part, if any part at all” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 93). In that image
of thought, humanist Enlightenment philosophy and its subject is
displaced so that another philosophy and its description of human
being—a minor being without exceptionalism can be thought. This
is classic deconstruction: reverse the binary to illustrate the violence
of the binary and then overturn the structure in which it exists so
that something different can be thought. But again, the thought of
those aberrant philosophers has been available to us for centuries.
Why have we not taken up that thought? As a student of Foucault
and as a feminist, I argue that whose thought dominates is a mat-
ter of power and politics and, further, that the dominant thought is
not rational or natural or given. And I repeat my argument that all
those so-called aberrant, minor theories we’ve thought for centu-
ries are right there waiting for our study and our use in critiquing
whatever has become normal and true. Critique enables freedom.
In regard to critique and resistance and the freedom they prom-
ise, Butler (1995) asked a key question almost 25 years ago: “How is
it that we become available to a transformation of who we are, a con-
testation which compels us to rethink ourselves, a reconfiguration of
our ‘place’ and our ‘ground’” (p. 132)? How do we become available
to those other descriptions of being and human being our forebears
have thought? Her theoretical question takes us to the personal, of
course, and believing education can be transformational, I have tried
to make the aberrant as normal as the conventional in my teaching
and writing. My politics, my resistance, has been to give my students
as much theory as possible so they have different analytics to bring
to their work and lives. Like Braidotti, I discourage repetition and
encourage students, once they’ve done their homework and stud-
ied the already thought, to invent new theories for this new century.
Foucault (1982/1988) helps me here. He wrote the following:
My role—and that is too emphatic a word—is to show people that

they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as
evidence, some themes that have been built up at a certain moment
Theory Is Back 7
during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized

and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that
is the role of an intellectual. (p. 10)
Indeed. I remain convinced that having diverse and contradictory

theories to live with is a powerful practice of resistance.
I close with some comments about theory’s relation to social sci-
ence research methodology, which it seems we must always address
in the social sciences. I’ve learned after many years of teaching both
theory(ies) and qualitative research methodology that that rela-
tion is seldom taught or learned. A research methodology course
might begin with a nod to theory but, typically, quickly shifts to a
pre-existing, stand-alone, (almost) theory-free methodology that’s
been formalized and systematized in a textbook—a methodology
with a process that promises to fill “gaps” in foundational knowl-
edge. As I’ve explained elsewhere (St. Pierre, 2012), that approach
works only in logical positivism. Nonetheless, in the social sciences,
methodology almost always trumps theory, probably because, as
Steinmetz (2005) wrote, logical positivism is the “epistemological
unconsciousness” of the social sciences. After many years in aca-
demia, I am more and more convinced that there are too many
social scientists who cannot name the ethico-onto-epistemological
arrangement that enables the methodology they use.
I suspect this may be more a failure to teach than a failure to
learn, but it is also a failure to teach how to learn, how to escape the
normalized, disciplinary boundaries of disciplines. Typically, disci-
plines and their methodology(ies) are repeated without question: we
learn what the discipline teaches us and then teach that to our own
students. But I believe another failure of teaching is at work here as
well. My sense is that we teach pre-existing, systematized, formalized
research methodologies because they’re easy to teach—after all, we
have many, many textbooks now that lay out the research “process”
from A to Z and tell new researchers exactly “what to do,” even though
Thomas Kuhn explained in 1962 that textbooks disappear scientists’
disagreements, creating a false consensus about the field. John Law
(2004) observed the same and asked, “How to move from the legis-
lations that we usually find in the textbooks on method? Away from
the completed and closed accounts of method?” (p. 141). In the end,
it’s much easier to teach students a process-driven, instrumental,
pre-existing methodology from a textbook than it is to teach stu-
dents how to read and how to think—how to thrive in the “rigorous
confusion” (Lather, 1996, p. 545), experimentation, and creativity
that thought can bring to bear on itself.
I believe that by the time a methodology textbook is written,
the methodology is closed, shut down, dead. In fact, a participant
in a recent conversation about the exhaustion and perils of pre-ex-
isting research methodology claimed that “qualitative research is
dead.” Another expressed dismay that qualitative research has been
reduced to interview research, which is quite efficient but lacks that
validity criteria for excellent qualitative research, length of time in
the field.
I have argued that the 19th- and 20th-century pre-existing, sys-
tematized, formalized research methodologies we teach and learn
in the social sciences are incommensurable with the “new” theo-
ries and their different descriptions of being and human being. The
old methodologies focus on epistemology and its rational/empirical
binary that aligns with Descartes’s mind/body binary. They begin
with an assumption that we know what the world is like (the world
has to fit the method) and that humans pre-exist the world. Those
methodologies are knowledge-productions machines focused on
repetition (which is all that’s possible if you always follow the same
process), filling supposed “gaps” in knowledge with something
recognizable, laying down foundations, and telling the truth about
(representing) the world.
I believe the age of extinction in which we live demands a great
deal more of us than social science that sidelines theory. Theory is
back—back not only to help us think with theory (Jackson & Mazzei,
2012) but also to begin with theory(ies) and concepts that re-orient
our thinking. I’m beginning to believe that ethics and rigor in the new
inquiry demand we begin with reading and studying philosophy—the
rest will come.
Theory Is Back 9
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critical reader (pp. 41–50). Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.
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Revising normativity with Deleuze (pp. 175–188). London, England:
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Endnote
1
See Braidotti (2017, p. xiv).
Speculative (Wombing) Pedagogies 11
chapter two
Speculative (Wombing)
Pedagogies: |Rəˈzistəns| in
Qualitative Inquiry
REBECCA C. CHRIST AND CANDACE R . KUBY
O ne morning, we (Candace and Becky) connected via Zoom (a

videoconferencing platform) for our weekly video chat and
opened a brand-new document on Google Drive. We had been invited
to participate in a plenary session titled “Pedagogy as Resistance” at
the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI). We were
excited about this opportunity, but before we could agree to be in it,
we felt we needed to have an idea about what we would say—a novel
idea for a conference presentation, we know. But as we looked at
each other on the Zoom screen and talked through the information
provided about the session, the Google Doc largely stayed blank.
Resistance. We had not thought about or written about resistance
before . . . or so we thought. . . . What would we say?
So, we stared at the Google Doc and at each other some more,
talked some more, and finally did what we “do best”—we looked up
resistance in the Apple Dictionary tool. If we had not been asked
to think with resistance, we might never have looked up the word
resistance, and then we might not have had any of the productive
thinkings1 that ultimately led to the writing of this chapter. This is
an interesting example of the entanglement of research and writ-
ing with the “outside” world. If our research and writing had never
1 We often purposefully use the word thinkings (and later thinked, too) instead of thoughts
(and thought) because for us, thought(s) is a word that refers an act that has been completed—it
is over; thinkings and thinked, however, allow for ongoing (albeit possibly past) thinking action,
as there is no end to thinking.
encountered the “problem” of the word resistance, these thinkings

might never have been thinked, produced, or written.2
We were also surprised to find that we used the word resistance in
our own focus group interviews with students following the courses
we taught.3 Thus, resistance became “visible” to us in a way we did
not “see” or notice before as we returned to the focus group data.
We realized that we asked students, “Do you expect to come across
any resistance or challenges to these [more disruptive] approaches
[of qualitative inquiry]?” This was not something we had thought
deeply about until this point—the use of the word resistance in our
question and/or what a word such as resistance could produce for
students and for us as instructors and researchers. Because of the
entanglement of being asked to present at the ICQI panel with/in
our research, something new (be)came.
In Resisting Easy Meaning . . .
But, for now, back to the word resistance and its definition and
etymology. We engage in what we call (re)etymologizing, in order to
look at the meaning and trouble the meaning of a word at the same
time—to interrogate its meaning and origins as a way to encounter
something new and spark new thinking (see Kuby & Christ, 2020a,
for discussion on [re]etymologizing).4
resistance |rəˈzistəns|
noun
1. the refusal to accept or comply with something; the
attempt to prevent something by action or argument
2 We are reminded of Smith’s (2012) writings about Deleuze’s views on thinking: “thinking is
a process of learning or apprenticeship that is initiated by one’s encounter with a problem, and
necessarily stems from the depth of one’s own ignorance” (p. 143, emphasis in original). (One of)
our problem(s) in this case was the word resistance.
3 Together, we have been thinking and writing about our pedagogies of qualitative inquiry
since 2015 (e.g., Kuby & Christ, 2018a, 2018b, 2019, 2020a, 2020b). We have pursued institu-
tional review board consent from students in several qualitative inquiry courses we have taught
together and individually. After the courses are over, we meet in focus group formats with
students to discuss their experiences in the courses.
4 All definitions included in this chapter come from Apple’s Dictionary tool. We keep italics
in the original but keep only bolding of the word we are defining along with its pronunciation.
We also delete examples of the word being used and derivatives of the word for ease of reading.
These definitions were all pulled on or before October 7, 2019.
• armed or violent opposition
• [in singular] (also resistance movement) a secret
organization resisting authority, especially in an
occupied country
• (the Resistance) the underground movement formed
in France during World War II to fight the German
occupying forces and the Vichy government; also
called maquis
2. the ability not to be affected by something, especially
adversely
• Medicine & Biology lack of sensitivity to a drug, insec-
ticide, etc., especially as a result of continued exposure
or genetic change
3. the impeding, slowing, or stopping effect exerted by one
material thing on another
4. the degree to which a substance or device opposes the
passage of an electric current, causing energy dissipa-
tion. Ohm’s law resistance (measured in ohms) is equal to
the voltage divided by the current
• a resistor or other circuit component which opposes
the passage of an electric current
PHRASES
the path (or line) of least resistance
an option avoiding difficulty or unpleasantness; the easiest
course of action
ORIGIN
late Middle English: from French résistance, from late Latin
resistentia, from the verb resistere ‘hold back’ (see resist)
At first, we were struck by the idea that resistance is an “attempt

to prevent something by action or argument.” We asked ourselves, “Is
that what we are doing when we engage in resistance? Are we attempt-
ing to prevent something? What are we preventing? What are we hold-
ing back? And why?” We needed to go deeper, so we followed the path
of least resistance and looked up resist.
resist |rəˈzist|
verb [with object]
1. withstand the action or effect of
• try to prevent by action or argument
• succeed in ignoring the attraction of (something
wrong or unwise)
• [no object] struggle against someone or something
noun
a resistant substance applied as a coating to protect a surface
during some process, for example, to prevent dye or glaze adhering
ORIGIN
late Middle English: from Old French resister or Latin resistere,
from re- (expressing opposition) + sistere ‘stop’ (reduplication
of stare ‘to stand’). The current sense of the noun dates from
the mid 19th century
Resist, from late Middle English, from Old French, from Latin
resistere from re–, expressing opposition, and sistere meaning stop.
Re–. Sistere. Expressing opposition to “stop.” So, not stopping? “So,”
we asked ourselves, “how are we engaging in pedagogy as resis-
tance as ‘not stopping’?”
We see our pedagogy as resistance—as not stopping—in the sense
that we do not stop supporting students, that we do not stop chal-
lenging normative and taken-for-granted practices of pedagogy and
researching, and that we do not stop engaging the best we can in
ethical, relational practices with students, colleagues, and all those
with whom we research and live. We also do not stop seeking more
complicated understandings of the world and how to live with/in it.
But resistance, for us, is not only about not stopping. In thinking
about our pedagogies for the ICQI panel and in writing this chapter,
we were drawn to writings by Julietta Singh (2018), Bronwyn Davies
(2014), Vivienne Bozalek (2017), Jasmine Ulmer (2017), and Leigh
Patel (2016), who cause us to think about notions of mastery, listening,
slowing, and pausing in the academy.
For example, in Julietta Singh’s (2018) new book, Unthinking
Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, she writes,
drawing on Helene Cixous, that “mastery is everywhere” (p. 1) and

writes of “dehumanist solidarity” in the hopes of reaching toward
“other modes of relational being that may not yet be recognizable”
(p. 1).
She looks closely at decolonization—and the process of undoing
colonial mastery by producing new masterful subjects. She argues
the “discourse of anticolonialism, which was geared toward the
future, did not interrogate thoroughly enough its own masterful
engagements” (Singh, 2018, p. 2). Or said another way, she ques-
tions the “dismantling of mastery through an inverted binary that
aimed to defeat colonial mastery through other masterful forms”
(Singh, 2018, p. 3). And although we are not explicitly doing a decol-
onizing read of the pedagogies of qualitative inquiry (QI), we do
think Singh’s writing is provocative for us to think with. In teach-
ing and learning, the discourse of mastery is prevalent. There are
objectives we decide students should “accomplish,” and our aim is to
provide learning opportunities for students to “know” or master the
content. As Singh (2018) writes, “there is an intimate link between
the mastery enacted through colonization and other forms of mas-
tery that we often believe today to be harmless, worthwhile, even
virtuous” (p. 9). Could we say that about the content of pedagogies
in QI? How might we resist a mastery narrative in the pedagogies of
QI? What practices and ways of being might we engage with?
One practice might be emergent listening. When writing about
preschoolers and agency in learning communities, Davies (2014) says:
If the members of any community . . . are to have agency—that is,

the power to engage with others in ways that open up the capacity
for thought and being—they cannot be bound, mind and body, by an
overriding or closed set of rules and definitions dictated by powerful
alliances, whether those be from government or from groups within
the community itself. While each one of us might harbour a desire
to have our own truths become the only truths, it is important to
recognize that when truths become unquestionable, dialogue is suf-
focated; and it is dialogue . . . [that] make[s] a “deep contribution” to
the always-evolving story of their community. That deep contribu-
tion cannot be made-to-order through an orchestrated assent to the
already-known. (p. 9)
If we think of community here with regard to the QI community

and academia more broadly—not to mention the individual research
communities we and our students are a part of—then we have to
think about the truths that circulate about what QI should look like
and what pedagogies of QI should look like and include. What are
the powerful alliances that suffocate agency, dialogue, and deep con-
tributions? Are we asking our students, through our pedagogies, to
assent to the already-known ways of knowing, being, and doing QI?
How do we resist that?
Davies (2014) goes on to write about “emergent listening”—that
which begins with the known but is open to the not-yet known, the
new ways of knowing and being—and we would say also new ways
of doing and teaching of QI. Davies writes about emergent listening
as transgressive. Or perhaps as a way of resisting?
Another practice of resistance might be slowing. We are inspired
by the scholarship of Vivienne Bozalek and Jasmine Ulmer, who, in
their own ways, are urging scholars into Slow scholarship and Slow
ontological practices. Bozalek (2017) writes of how the corporatiza-
tion of universities has led to an increased pressure for scholars in
the academy to publish quickly and prolifically. Ulmer (2017) writes
in relation to the Slow Food and Slow Cities movements and thinks
with these Slow movements to articulate writing a Slow Ontology
as a site of creative intervention.
And slowing might actually lead to a productive pause. We are
inspired by Eve Tuck’s introduction to Leigh Patel’s (2016) writing
on decolonizing educational research, specifically in relation to a ped-
agogy of pausing. Patel (2016) also writes in the book about pausing:
Perhaps the best move that educational researchers can do, in the
interest of decolonization, that is to say eradicating, dismantling,
and obliterating colonialism, is to pause in order to reach beyond,
well beyond, the most familiar tropes in education and education
research. (p. 88)
Patel’s (2016) call for the pause interrupts our thinking and causes
us to stop for a minute to (re)think the constant drive for action as
perhaps reifying the inequities (and colonialism) we seek to resist in
the first place.
Thus, we take a moment to pause our chapter as we write, to

engage perhaps in a form of emergent listening that slows us down
to consider our pedagogy in new ways. In this case, these pauses take
the form of excerpts from transcripts of focus group conversations
with master’s- and doctoral-level students5 the semester following an
introductory QI course that Candace taught, as seen in the following
section. We hope you pause to listen and think with us.
Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down
Pam: [Sketching; see Figure 2.1] . . . the other night, I left there
[another class] thinking [pause] all qual is poststructural; you can do
whatever you want as long as you can justify it. It’s poststructural,
period.
Candace: Interesting.
Pam: And so, I don’t care what kinds of little paths they want you
to go on, because of what you said, every person is different, there
is no way we can capture exactly the same, whomever it is . . . so,
whatever you work on, is truthfully—although I would never pick
a poststructural methodology, I don’t think; I’d probably go more
traditional paths—I just, I just kept shaking my head, it’s like—it’s all
poststructural; it’s all do whatever is necessary. So.
Candace: Interesting.
Pam: My other question . . . This is more of a question or a
struggle . . . One of the things I still struggle with . . . wanting to do
something new. One thing I still can’t understand in the traditional
methods is, they always take you back to the old, all the base the-
ories, the seminal theories. Why do we always have to keep going
backwards? Why is research never giving me the latest, see where
we’re at; now, supposedly they claim all this is building on one
another, but you can’t just go here [“new” in Figure 2.1]; you have to
know who Foucault is, you have to know who Vygotsky is, you have
to know who Bandura is—before you even start; at least that’s where
it seems like they’re always starting [“theories” in Figure 2.1], so
5
All student names are pseudonyms.
how are we ever going to get anything new, if we’re always reaching
way back to the beginning and having to rebuild this path, and then
the next person rebuilds this path and then the next person rebuilds
this path, which is what I do like about, somewhat, of the disrup-
tive [approaches to QI]. Why can’t I start with my data right here
[“my research time/space” in Figure 2.1]? Okay, if you want me to
talk about them [the old scholars, written as “theories” on sketch], I
can. But let’s get these people up to where I’m at, and bring in some
more from this direction [from “new” at the top of Figure 2.1], and
then maybe I am building new because I’m . . .
Candace: Hmmm.
Pam: Well, anyway, that is kind of what I’m thinking. I don’t really
understand why everyone always forces us to go back to those pieces.
And they are the only people counted as [pause] really good [pause],
I mean, research. That’s just—that can’t be true. There have to be
people at this level [“new” in Figure 2.1] who have already discovered
or moved up and some variances. How come they are not considered
important enough as a starting point? Because you don’t grow very
fast, if you don’t keep building on, they say they are building but we
keep going back to the same starting point. And so I am confused by
that. And I’ve never really had anybody, in the classes I’ve had so far,
be able to explain that to me. So that’s what my picture is about [see
Figure 2.1].
Omie: I would say that is even beyond just research classes. I
think that is other types of, um, disciplines also, right? They want
you to go back to read those kind of founding works and then build
on that. I’ve found that is a common trend, what you [Pam] are
talking about.
Pam: I think it is good for everyone to know from where they
come. If that is what they are having us do, that’s fine. Here’s where
I started and here’s where we are now. But I don’t ever feel like
it’s been explained that way. It’s more like, well you have to find,
you need to find a base theory, or you need to go back and start.
Well, what if I’ve found this article [“new” in Figure 2.1] that was
resonating really well, why can’t I start here [“new” in Figure 2.1]?
And build from that? Who made these people [older theorists,
Figure 2.1.
Pam’s sketching during the focus group conversation
“theories” in Figure 2.1] so wonderfully special? Just because they

were cited a lot? That doesn’t really mean a lot to me, although I
am not a qualified researcher yet, so . . .
Candace: [pause, exhales a big sigh].
In an effort to be pedagogical, we resist (providing) easy meaning
by not “interpreting” the transcripts for you, our readers. We, instead,
hope you are engaging with/in the pause with us and seeing what this
excerpt produces for you. We offer you some questions to (continue to)
provoke (y)our pausing/thinking:
• Pam asks us: “Why do we always have to keep going

backwards?” and “Why can’t I start with my data right
here?” and “Who made these people [‘old’ theorists]

so wonderfully special?” How might you answer these
questions yourself and/or if a student asks you?
• For Pam, there seems to be a difference between knowing

where you come from and being forced to go back. How
do you engage yourself and your students in the notions
of literature reviews and conceptual and/or theoretical
frameworks in relation to their data and inquiries?
• Omie sees similar trends to what Pam is seeing in

other disciplines (outside of QI). In what ways are we
connecting QI to its many outsides (different disciplines,
fields, traditions, etc.)? What other disciplines, fields,
and traditions influence/shape QI (pedagogical and
researching) practices?
• Pam states, “I’m not a qualified researcher yet”—as

if someone or some standard will eventually tell her
that she is qualified. What does this term qualified
researcher do to/with/for you and your students?
• How do we perpetuate the notion of a “qualified

researcher” in how we teach? Or in statements that
students and pretenured faculty hear regarding playing
it safe in the tried-and-true methods and then after
tenure you can take risks and do something new?
Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .
In our pausing, we return to the word resistance, only this time

from within the pause, with fresh eyes and a desire to “reach beyond,”
and we begin by (re)interrogating the prefix re–.
re- |rē|
prefix
1. once more; afresh; anew: reaccustom |reactivate
• with return to a previous state: restore |revert
2. (also red-) in return; mutually: react |resemble

• in opposition: repel | resistance
3. behind or after: relic | remain
• in a withdrawn state: recluse | reticent
• back and away; down: recede | relegation
4. with frequentative or intensive force: redouble | resound
5. with negative force: rebuff | recant
ORIGIN
from Latin re-, red- ‘again, back’
The original meaning of resist incorporates the second meaning

of re–: “in opposition.” Resist: In opposition to stopping.
But what if to resist was not about opposition to stopping, but
rather, stopping “once more; afresh; anew” (another meaning of re–)
or “with frequentative or intensive force” (yet another meaning of
re–). Rather than resistance as not stopping, what about a resistance
that stops afresh, anew, or a resistance that stops with frequentative
or intensive force. If we stopped, or paused, intensively, what would
be produced; what would (be)come?
Now, up to this point, we have focused on the meaning of resis-
tance and have followed its path, but another very important word
is in the title of the original panel: pedagogy. So, as we do, we looked
up the word pedagogy and followed its path to pedagogue.
pedagogy |ˈpedəˌgäjē|
noun (plural pedagogies)
1. the method and practice of teaching, especially as an
academic subject or theoretical concept
ORIGIN
late 16th century: from French pédagogie, from Greek
paidagōgia ‘office of a pedagogue,’ from paidagōgos (see
pedagogue)
pedagogue |ˈpedəˌgäg|
noun
1. a teacher, especially a strict or pedantic one
ORIGIN
late Middle English: via Latin from Greek paidagōgos, denoting
a slave who accompanied a child to school (from pais, paid- ‘boy’
+ agōgos ‘guide’)
We were surprised by words such as strict and pedantic, but those

will have to wait for another discussion at another time. Focusing
on the origin of pedagogue, we read “a slave who accompanied a
child to school” from pais, paid– meaning “boy” and agōgos mean-
ing “guide” (Did you know this was the meaning/origin of the word
pedagogue?! We did not previously know this . . .). A boy guide.6
Patel (2016) reminds us that “[l]earning is fundamentally about
transformation. It is coming into being and constantly altering that
being” (p. 76). And so, we ask—as we have elsewhere (Kuby & Christ,
2020a), “How is being a ‘boy guide’ connected to transformation?
What needs to happen for the ‘boy guide’ to transform?” (p. 140).
Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down
Candace: So how did you define or understand qual[itative]

research at the beginning of the semester and how are you under-
standing it now [one semester later]?
Andrew: I thought [before the qual course] it was very straight-
forward, and I thought it was easy. . . . I thought qual[itative research]
was like a clean slate; you could just sit down and look for things and
pick people’s brains and try to structure and find new concepts. I
really like qual for that. But I had no idea that it [qualitative research]
was deeper than that, it was actually theories, and the paradigms and
all that stuff, so that is really something that I got out of the class. To
kind of see that you have to structure what you are doing in a cer-
tain way. And it needs to make sense. You can’t just be like, oh, I’ll do
6 Also see Kuby & Christ (2020a) for more (re)etymologizing and additional thinkings on the
word pedagogue.
focus groups, and this is it. You have to actually think about what you
are doing and have purpose in your methodologies. So I think that
really made me, probably, a better thinker. I think it allowed me to
structure my ideas better and to build purpose in what I am doing.
Candace: Okay. Um, so was there anything that confused you
at first, so whether it was the content of what we were talking and
reading about or something that we were asking you to do, like
assignments or something like that, that was confusing at first but
now you understand or get the why behind it?
Andrew: I wanted so much more, of, direction; it is not the best
word. But I remember that you kept saying, “It depends, it depends.”
And to me, that wasn’t satisfying. I need to understand, like, what is
it [qualitative research]? “Well, it depends” [Dr. Kuby said in class].
And I was like, “AHHH!” [lots of laughter from Andrew, Candace,
and research assistant). And I think I have a better appreciation of
that now.
Candace: Okay.
Andrew: I feel like, I catch myself saying, “It depends,” all the
time now in my qual two [qualitative research methods II course]
because I am like, “No.” There’s different perspectives, like, it depends
[laughter from research assistant and a little from Andrew]. I say it
with conviction, but at first I was like no, no, no, no, like, stop this for
a second now [lots of laughter from all]; there has to be some track or
path that I can follow, but I feel much more comfortable now being
like, no it’s, it really depends. So that is probably a really big take away
[from the course] for me.
Candace: Okay. So would you have suggested me do something
differently in the moment or do you feel like that was okay?
Andrew: I think, I think it had to happen that way. I think it was
okay for me to kind of have that realization over time that, like, you
know what, nope, I’m going/growing [can’t distinguish on audio
recording] on this idea like that, it actually does depend. Yeah.
Candace: Okay.
. . .
Candace: We [as a class] had discussions over how you define

them [paradigms], overlaps between them, um, can you have more
than one, can you change them in each study that you do? So how
do you understand paradigms now? How do you feel . . .
Andrew: It depends.
Candace: It depends?! [laughter]
Andrew: I feel like it’s, um, my understanding is that it is proba-
bly desirable to have one main paradigm, but I wouldn’t necessarily
say that you can’t change. . . . As you do research, I think you change
research, but I think research also changes you because you learn
new things, and you get a new context and I think that it’s okay that
your perspective or paradigm evolve a little bit or shift.
Again, in an effort to be pedagogical, we resist easy meaning by

not “interpreting” the transcripts for you, our readers. We, instead,
hope you are engaging with/in the pause with us and seeing what this
excerpt produces for you. We offer you some questions to (continue
to) provoke (y)our pausing/thinking:
• Andrew says, “You have to actually think about what you
are doing and have purpose in your methodologies.” In
what ways do we ask our students to think (in a Deleuzian
sense, meaning we have thoughts all the time, but think-
ing is rare)? And in what areas of our pedagogy do we actu-
ally not ask our students to think? How can we provide
pedagogical spaces that shock thought and force thinking?
• Andrew responds to Candace’s question: “This idea like
that—it actually does depend.” And notice, the student
uses Candace’s “own device” back on her; therefore, we
cannot expect certainty or clarity of knowing from our
students, which we perhaps often feel is a goal of teach-
ing/learning. How does uncertainty expressed by our stu-
dents change what is possible in the pedagogies of QI?
How does a phrase, perhaps as simple as “it depends,” open
up space for new ways of thinking, knowing, be(com)ing,
and doing QI?
• Andrew states, “I think you change research, but I think

research also changes you.” If we believe research changes
you, then many taken-for-granted norms and practices of
research don’t seem thinkable, or at least we have to be
open to uncertainties and newness in inquiry practices.
And in turn, as Andrew states, we change research. As
Lather and St. Pierre (2013) remind us, we have made it
(qualitative research) all up. We are reminded to be open
to the not yet known of research. And again, what needs
to happen for the boy guide to change/transform?
Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .
While thinking through all this, we came across this quote from
Anzaldúa (2000): “When you’re in the midst of the Coatlicue state—
the cave, the dark—you’re hibernating or hiding, you’re gestating and
giving birth to yourself. You’re in a womb state” (p. 226). Coatlicue
is the Aztec goddess who birthed the moon and the stars and is also
known as the “mother of the gods” or “our mother” or “our grand-
mother.”7 For Anzaldúa, when you come out of the Coatlicue state,
you are changing worlds. But before you can be (re)birthed, you need
to gestate.
gestate |ˈjeˌstāt|
verb [no object]
1. carry a fetus in the womb from conception to birth
• (of a fetus) undergo gestation.
• develop over a long period
ORIGIN
mid 19th century: from Latin gestat- ‘carried in the womb,’
from the verb gestare
Gestation is a time of being carried in the womb, and you “rest”

when being carried. But gestating is not inactive; there is actually
7 This information was gathered from “Cōātlīcue” (n.d.).

a lot happening during the period of gestation. You are developing

something over a period of time. It is a lively, yet rest(full) time.
So, we think about this gestating and (re)birthing as the process
of transformation that is/would be required for learning—for altering
your being in the world—as Patel (2016) writes. And in order to be
(re)birthed, you need to gestate. So, we ask, in what ways can we create
spaces for students to gestate in their learning and in what ways can
we gestate in our teaching/pedagogy?
And back to resistance… if resistance is not about not stopping but,
rather, about stopping with intensive force, the idea of pedagogy as
resistance fundamentally comes under questioning. Maybe pedagogy
as resistance is not about stopping something or preventing something
from happening but really about stopping with intensive force. If to
resist is to stop again (and again), you are allowing for a long(er) period
of gestation: waiting, slowing, pausing, developing, transforming. If
you do not stop, gestation cannot occur, and therefore, neither can we
(re)birth—no transformation.
So, perhaps pedagogy is not necessarily about being a boy guide
after all. How can we guide others, if we do not stop, pause, gestate
ourselves? Instead of guiding boys, what if we were wombing peda-
gogy? Wombing—not necessarily in a gendered sense (but yes, always
already also in a gendered sense, just as the word pedagogy from its
origin is always already also gendered). But we are thinking more
about wombing as being in relation to. We can only be(come) trans-
formed in relation. Wombing has an element of withness. We cannot
be alone if we are being carried.
Then there is the (re)birthing. Again, we are not alone in this, nor
is it easy. And it is difficult and violent because we are being trans-
formed into a new state. But the gestation period helps prepare us for
difficult, violent transformation.
In Resisting a Conclusion . . .
So, we, in our writing, are attempting to practice the resistance

that we are advocating for—in some senses, we were forced to stop, to
think about what resistance meant and/or did for/with/in us. And with
that stopping (be)came something quite productive, which also caused
us to consider how, when we do not stop, or pause, our pedagogical

(and researching) practices, we might reify the power structures and
inequities that we actually seek to resist.
Leigh Patel (2016) writes:
Learning is fundamentally about transformation. It is coming into

being and constantly altering that being; it is a subjective and often
messy act. It is, in essence, letting go of a rung we have a firm grip
on in order to fumble with the specter of a different rung. Coming
into being is in essence about being-in-relation. (p. 76)
So, we advocate for a slowing, a pausing, “withstanding the action

or effect of” the research machine—or perhaps said as wombing
practices and pedagogies as slowing, pausing . . . this does not mean
to be inactive, but it is about gestating for/toward a better future; we
are intensively pausing and still doing and responding in relation-
ships, and we are resisting the neoliberalism current to go, go, go
that, in its wake, reifies inequity and does not allow space and time
for transformation.
Valarie Kaur, at the end of her Watch Night speech,8 reminds
us—in giving birth—the midwife reminds us first to breathe . . .
and then push . . .
and if we do not push we die . . .
So, we call for us all to engage in wombing pedagogies of resistance
or else we die . . .
. . . but before we can get to the time of pushing,
we must gestate and breathe
and then . . .
we can push.
8 In this speech, Kaur (in the video posted by Worldwide Trends, 2017) begins by telling the
story of her grandfather’s emigration from India to the United States, where he initially was
imprisoned for being Sikh and seen as foreign. She continues the speech, describing past and
ongoing acts of violence and oppression committed against those who have been labeled as
“Other” in the United States, and asks, “What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb,
but the darkness of the womb? . . . What if our America is . . . waiting to be born? . . . What if
this is our nation’s great transition?”
References
Anzaldúa, G.E. (2000). Interviews/Entrevistas (A. Keating, Ed.). New York,
NY: Routledge.
Bozalek, V. (2017). Slow scholarship in writing retreats: A diffractive meth-
odology for response-able pedagogies. South African Journal of Higher
Education, 31(2), 40–57. doi: 10.20853/31-2-1344.
Cōātlīcue. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved January 13, 2020 from https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C5%8D%C4%81tl%C4%ABcue
Davies, B. (2014). Listening to children: Being and becoming. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2018a). An ethico-onto-epistemological pedagogy
of qualitative research: Knowing/being/doing in the neoliberal academy.
In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, M. Zembylas, & T. Shefer (Eds.), Socially
just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in
higher education (pp. 131–147). London, England: Bloomsbury Academic.
Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2018b). Productive aporias and inten(t/s)ionali-
ties of paradigming: Spacetimematterings in an introductory qualitative
research course. Qualitative Inquiry, 24, 293–304.
Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2019). Us-ing: Producing qualitative inquiry
pedagogies with/in lively packets of relations. Qualitative Inquiry, 25,
965–978.
Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2020a). Speculative pedagogies of qualitative
inquiry. New York, NY: Routledge.
Kuby, C. R., & Christ, R. C. (2020b). The matter we teach with matters:
Teaching with theory, theorizing with (textbook) bodies. Qualitative
Inquiry, 26, 71–80.
Lather, P., & St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). Post-qualitative research. International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26, 629–633.
Patel, L. (2016). Decolonizing educational research: From ownership to
answerability. New York, NY: Routledge.
Singh, J. (2018). Unthinking mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entan-
glements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Smith, D. W. (2012). Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh
University Press.
Ulmer, J. B. (2017). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23, 201–211.
Worldwide Trends. (2017, February 28). Valarie Kaur, a Sikh, talks about
the future and acceptance of different races, people, etc. . . [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2uv6-2FVhA
Disorientation in/as Feminist Inquiry 29
chapter three
Disorientation in/as
Feminist Inquiry
SARA M. CHILDERS
I n 2015, I published a chapter on motherhood in an anthology titled

Teacher, Mother, Scholar: Re-Envisioning Motherhood in the
Academy (Young, 2015). The chapter “More Mother Than Others:
Disorientations, Motherscholars, and Objects in Becoming” (Childers,
2015) was prompted by an experience I had with a group of moms when
I started my new position as an assistant professor. Working from
the middle of this “strange ontological haunting” (St. Pierre, 2019, p.
13) that plagued my thinking and left me disoriented, I wrote in an
attempt to dislodge myself from the emotional by-products to focus on
the problematic of the motherscholar as a becoming subject. In the
paper delivered at the 2019 International Congress of Qualitative
Inquiry (ICQI) conference, I addressed how I approached thinking
motherhood and academia differently, utilizing the conceptual work
of Sara Ahmed as a reorientation of thought (Childers, 2019). In this
chapter, I revisit that approach, consider the position of phenomenol-
ogy and critical materialism in the current moment, and bring some
concepts from Ahmed’s 2006 text, Living a Feminist Life, to bear on
this thinking back through the “well-worn lines” of theory. I end with
a reflection on the paradox of writing as reorienting disorientation.
Toward Disorientation
This was the moment of misrecognition:
My partner Mark and I are standing on the sidelines, watching our

kids at their first soccer practice. It’s the first semester in my first job
as an assistant professor at a large university in a small town where
everyone knows everyone and children’s extracurricular activities

become intense adult social hours. What appears to be a small wel-
coming committee approaches us, three women in their late 30s to
40s, who I’ve seen with their children at the playground or in my
neighborhood. Where are you from? When did you get here? Where
are you living? What school do your kids attend? “What department
are you in?” they ask Mark directly. “Not me. She works for the uni-
versity.” “I’m in the College of Ed.,” I say. They turn back to Mark, “Oh,
then you’re one of us.”
That statement, “You’re (not) one of us,” was the shifting ground
of thought. Whatever the women were, I was not, or at least not in
the same way. The effect of recognizing my spouse as “one of (them)
us” left me with an experience of misrecognition, illegibility, and
illegitimacy in relation to these other mothering bodies. What was I
then? I felt de-subjectivized and decoupled from a subject position,
that of mother, through which I oriented and made sense of myself.
A counterfeit mother, what was it about my orientation to the acad-
emy that disrupted thought so much so that my spouse was more
mother than I was?
I was confronted with the illegibility of my identity as a “mother”
because of my simultaneous identity as a “scholar.” I found less dis-
comfort in my meetings with other mothers if I “reverse-covered”
(Yoshino, 2002) and omitted any discussion of my academic life while
engaging in typical conversations about childcare or family. Similarly,
when I attempted to participate in political discussions about educa-
tional equity that consumed our small town, my academic expertise
in the issues proved to disrupt what were intended to be conversations
that bonded the mothers through a shared experience of protecting
their children from a failing system. If I wanted to appear as a moth-
ering subject within this local context, I was expected to cover my
concerns about racial inequity and put my educational background
aside because this critique, in turn, destabilized their political identi-
ties as progressive, middle-class White mothers whose children went
to school with “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995). This inability
to bridge motherhood and scholarship made each engagement with
them less and less worthwhile, and this was unsettling to me from
an academic perspective.
I often use writing to work through the storm in my mind and

through concepts and philosophies to think differently. Rather than
unproductively stew in my emotions, I wanted to use the energy of
this experience to consider the motherscholar identity and recon-
ceptualize the disorientation and dis-ease. I had been reading Queer
Phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006) and found it helpful for shifting my
thinking away from how I felt toward a provocative engagement with
subjectivity through a phenomenology of objects and relations. Mother
and scholar were worked through a framework of critical materialism
and feminist new materialism. What emerged was a discussion of how
“the motherscholar as a becoming subject that takes shape through
her orientations towards objects and how her proximity and nearness
to objects invokes dis-identifications and disorientation” (Childers,
2015, p. 114). Turning toward objects helped me reconceptualize power
relations ontologically as practices witnessed in the relations of bodies,
objects, and histories.
As I participated in the ICQI conference, I sat through many a
session scaffolded by the work of Karen Barad (2007) and other schol-
ars performing what has been labeled feminist new materialism. As I
delivered my paper utilizing critical materialism and Ahmed’s 2006
approach to a phenomenology of objects, I paused to say, “I feel like
I’m saying a dirty word,” as the concepts of “phenomenology” and “lived
experience” passed through my lips. Phenomenology has fallen out of
fashion, in part, because of its attention to lived experience, which has
been critiqued and picked apart by feminists (see Scott, 1991, for her
influential critique), and now from the perspective of new materialism,
for years. Ahmed was not carrying the same cache at this conference
as her new materialist sisters, and some comments lead me to believe
that the turn in phenomenology toward objects is misunderstood or
misrecognized as a return to traditional phenomenology à la Husserl
(1931/2013) or Heidegger (1962/2008).
Misrecognitions
The problem of feminist new materialism as it relates to my

work on racial equity in schools (Childers, 2017) has been its limited
utility for thinking about the oppression and inequity that permeate
students’ lives and their agency as educational subjects. The empha-

sis on the more-than-human was limited in the analysis and critique
necessary to honor the very real material experiences of students
of color and low socioeconomic status in urban schools (Childers,
2016). Critical materialism serves as a framework that does not
throw the “babies” of culture, social, discourse, living and breathing
out with the “bathwater” of humanist thinking. Similarly, it broad-
ened the scope of interrogating the motherscholar in deep relation
to not only objects but also histories, socialities, and discourses.
Through this approach, the motherscholar is a relational subject
in becoming, one that gets produced at the interstitial affective-
discursive-material relations with the world, both human and more-
than-human. She emerges as an assembling of bodies, objects, and
socialities that irrupt through language and being in such a way
that it provokes relations of discomfort when we are confronted
with this “oblique” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 92) figure—a mother who is
a scholar or a scholar who is a mother; she appears askance in the
world through her alignment with objects that appear inappropriate
to her identity, and this subtly undermines language, category, and
norms. Assembling and becoming across multiple relations move
thinking away from essence and fixity of identity or constrained
subjectivity toward multiplicity, potentiality, and the possibility of
something new. Critical materialism promotes a phenomenology
of objects that imagines these as part of the equation of experience.
I heavily relied on the work of critical materialist scholars because
they provided another route into the problematic of the mother-
scholar. I see new feminist materialism and critical materialism as
not only sharing important onto-epistemological claims but also
having significant differences when it comes to understanding lived
experience. An assembling of thought, “new feminist materialism”
(Hekman, 2010; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) reinvigorates the material,
or matter, for thinking. This brand of social theory emphasizes the
agential capacity of matter (i.e., objects) and the more-than-human
(nonhuman or animal) to destabilize the presumption that mat-
ter plays a passive role in the world. The discursive turn is down-
graded because “language,” which is in concert with the human, the
social, and representation itself, “has been granted too much power”
(Barad, 2007, p. 132). This posthuman onto-epistemology articulates

practices of knowing and being as mutually implicated, but matter
matters more here. Barad (2007) emphasizes “intra-action” (p. 33)
between human and more-than-human bodies to demonstrate how
nature and matter are always already acting on and with the human.
Objects, things, animals, what have you, are mutually constituted
and remain entangled with a force of their own.
Critical materialism emphasizes the inseparability of the human
and the material as well but such that the real, social construction, and
lived experience remain in play. According to Coole and Frost (2010),
For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real

and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally
mediated, but they are not only cultural. As in new materialist
ontologies, the challenge here is to give materiality its due while
recognizing its plural dimensions and its complex, contingent
modes of appearing. (p. 27)
Matter matters and remains in the company of the social and

the cultural.
Coole and Frost (2010) emphasize that there is also a more
Marxist materialist mode of social analysis that
entails paying attention to the material, historical, and sociolog-

ical structures of international political economy that lend con-
text as well as practical inertia to identities that entail unequal life
chances. It calls for a detailed phenomenology of diverse lives as
they are actually lived—often in ways that are at odds with abstract
normative theories or official ideologies. (p. 27)
Critical materialisms do not shy away from the materiality of

lived experience, whereas posthuman materialisms desire to undo
the subject entirely with an emphasis on the posthuman and the
more-than-human. The lived experience of the human is not a dirty
idea, but what is different is how lived experience is thought.
Through a phenomenology of objects, the becoming mother-
scholar takes shape through active orientations toward objects (and
these objects take shape in relation as well), and the proximities
and distances between invoke disidentifications and disorientation.
Here is a brief example:
Thinking about objects, it is apparent how what we are oriented

toward as mothers and scholars are often not aligned. Objects help
orient us to the world; when I turn to my desk, computer, and
books, open my document, place my fingers against the keys, I am
oriented toward academic pursuits. These objects help me to do
the work that I do. My intra-actions with and through these objects
produce local performative enactments of becoming scholar. The
mother that is a scholar simultaneously turns towards incongruent
objects like children and manuscripts, and engages in dissimilar
actions such as child care and writing, that tend to be viewed and
sometimes experienced as exclusive, such that turning towards
one often presents a potential turning away from the other. I argue
that motherscholars make apparent that one does not necessarily
have to turn purely one way or the other, though these multiple
and coincidental turnings produce often painful disorientations as
we take up these competing locations simultaneously. As we are
unsettled from one particular subjectivity of mother or scholar and
become motherscholar as an assemblage of multiple relations, we
disorient ourselves and others, and it is in the disorientation that
new possibilities emerge. (Childers, 2015, pp. 114–115)
Although new materialism provided fodder for thinking, I took a

turn toward critical materialism to bring matter, history, discourse,
bodies, and experience all into relation. Doing so made space for
attending to the discursive and social construction of motherhood
that produces motherhood as a site of racialization, gendering, and
heteronormativity. It opened the category to critique not just of the
construction of motherhood but also of the material experiences of
women living motherhood differently. Similarly, it allowed me to
engage the nature/culture binary and why the thought of the moth-
erscholar or the real body of a motherscholar in disjointed relation
pushes in on preconceived notions and assumed compatibilities,
creating an opportunity to see multiple configurations of a subject
and how it acts in concert with the world.
Power relations took an ontological turn as practices of living
were witnessed relationally to consider why some bodies appeared
to be more “mother” than others. I turned to objects to think about
subjects because subjectivity arises in relation, but I utilized crit-

ical materialism because it acknowledged that human living and
meaning-making are happening in the in-between of bodies and
objects, again calling for “a detailed phenomenology of diverse
lives as they are actually lived—often in ways that are at odds with
abstract normative theories or official ideologies” (Coole & Frost,
2010, p. 27). My experience of my body in relation to other mothers,
to children, to the objects, including my physical placement near
or far from the objects implicated in motherhood and scholarship,
arranged my subjectivity. But the recognition that turning away or
turning toward an object, while making me illegible or ill fitting to
those around me, my orientation to mothering and scholarship was
living out of the “complex plural dimensions” of motherhood and
scholarship, not mutually exclusive but always constitutive. It was
the disjointed living out of socially constructed subject positions,
the interpolation of my body as not mother or scholar enough, that
prompted my writing and allowed me to recognize disorientation
as the stuff of living. This new kind of phenomenology of objects via
critical materialism was useful and produced different thinking, but
it still felt like a dirty word, and I was indeed cautioned against the
tyranny of lived experience.
The Well-Worn Lines of Theory
The presentation of my ICQI paper (Childers, 2019), in which

the words lived experience and phenomenology felt against the grain
in relation to the other well-worn lines of theory being traveled by
panels and presenters, evinced a disorientation of thought. Rather
than begin from places of comfort and ease, where we fit our ori-
entations and follow lines, I start (again), now from the dirty words.
Disorientations “expose how orientations are organized . . . how
they shape what is socially as well as bodily given” (Ahmed, 2006, p.
158). If “disorientation is the way to describe the feelings that gather
when we lose our sense of who it is we are” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 20),
then at ICQI, I experienced being off-path, out of cadence, and step-
ping out of line through critical materialism, lived experience, and a
phenomenology of objects.
I began reading, writing, and teaching with new feminist materi-

alism back around 2011. Seeing new feminist materialism as a theo-
retical framework in education or qualitative journals was becoming
more and more common. Its eventual irruption was, for a while, novel,
and its critique of discourse and the human felt like new “lines of
rebellion and resistance that gather over time to create new impres-
sions . . . on the skin of the social” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 18). One can see its
further impression as it is far more common now to see the theoretical
approach in journals that showcase qualitative inquiry. The concepts
of intra-action, becoming, relation, or the attention to objects were at
one time more obscure to education and qualitative inquiry as a field;
a case in point: My rejection letter from a position I applied for in 2013
explicitly stated that the committee was not aware of the theoretical
approach I was using in the paper I submitted with my application,
that approach being new feminist materialism. I share this loose time-
line of my relationship to the theories of new materialism to illuminate
that what was once “new” now no longer is. We can debate if it was
ever a new way of thinking, but regardless, new feminist materialism
has shifted from a new impression to its own well-worn lines in the
theoretical imaginary of qualitative inquiry.
Using Ahmed, we can imagine the engagement with theory
through writing as a path, line, or trajectory that can be followed,
because it has been taken by others. According to Ahmed (2006), in
following the path, the taken-for-granted gets produced: “We follow
the line that is followed by others: the repetition of the act of fol-
lowing makes the line disappear from view as the point from which
we emerge” (p. 15). The once-novel approach to thought, the line of
new feminist materialism, becomes a well-worn line as it is traveled
by others. A kind of assurance, “when we face the direction that is
already faced by others” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 15), we know that we are
doing the right thing. Engaging new feminist materialism in qual-
itative inquiry as it has gathered steam creates its own kind of col-
lectivity that provides that sense of assurance, of doing the “right”
thing, by utilizing a common theoretical language that connects
one with other like-minded folks. I feel lined up with folks I want
to be in line with; I feel like my body is pointing toward objects of
shared understanding; I feel like we are sharing a train of thought.
When we become oriented by theory, we become oriented to each

other through thinking, oriented to shared thinking, oriented to a con-
versation of thought, we also can displace thinking or disorient other
modes of thought. If we think of these well-worn lines of thought as
“an effect of how energy, time, and resources are ‘directed’ toward
an object” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 119), we can see how energy, time, and
resources have been directed toward new feminist materialism to pro-
duce an orientation of bodies thinking in concert, traveling a more
common path. Where I become concerned is when thought gets on a
path that is taken for granted. As I read more and more articles with a
new feminist materialist approach, I often wonder whether is the “tail”
of theory is “wagging the dog” of inquiry? Has new feminist material-
ism reached its own hegemony? What other paths of thought are dis-
regarded in favor of falling in line with others? And how does the act of
repetition through following a path traveled by others create a kind of
reorientation, comfort, and ease, even when we think we are shaking
up thought? I wonder this for myself and for “the field.”
Reoriented
Starting from the place of experience, I used critical phenome-

nology about living as a motherscholar or a writer through critical
materialism and a phenomenology of objects. Although not a well-
worn path, it was a path traveled by myself, my reading group, and
my co-panelists as we followed this line together. Paradoxically, I uti-
lized a theoretical perspective about disorientation to “orient” myself
back to the world and to colleagues. Each time I write, regardless
of the approach, I experience a reorientation to the world as I sort
myself out in relation to it. This is not a good or bad thing or a dirty
word. It is just part of becoming with the multiple complex relations
of writing, thinking, and living.
References
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the
entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Childers, S. M. (2015). More mother than others: Disorientations, mother-
scholars, and objects in becoming. In A. M. Young (Ed.), Teacher, scholar,
mother – re-envisioning motherhood in the academy (pp. 111–126).
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Childers, S. M. (2017). Urban educational identity: Seeing students on their
own terms. New York, NY: Routledge.
Childers, S.M. (2019). Disorientations as/in Feminist Inquiry, presented at
International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois,
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Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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(Original work published 1962)
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Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Husserl, E. (2013). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology.
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Jackson, A., & Mazzei, L. (2012). Thinking with theory in qualitative research:
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Ahmed as Feminist Reorientation and Necessity 39
chapter four
Ahmed as Feminist
Reorientation and Necessity
BECKY ATKINSON
R eading Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) reoriented me

to feminism by provoking reflection on the question, “How have
I lived a feminist life?” Although I do not think I ever left it because I
have what Ahmed (2017) called “feminist tendencies” (p. 6), I think the
way a feminist thinks most of the time, and I write and teach femi-
nist theory; my reading Ahmed’s book provoked reflection on whether
and how I have been intentional in my feminism. Have I been a bad
feminist? In her introduction, Ahmed (2017) offers a starting point
for responding to my query when she asserts that she intended the
book to be an “intervention in academic feminism” to make feminist
theory more accessible but ended up writing a lingering examina-
tion of her own feminist becoming and doing, building a “slow argu-
ment” to show how “feminist theory is what we do when we live our
lives in a feminist way” (p. 11). Deliberations on what my living my
life in “a feminist way” meant expanded and became more textured
as I read Roxane Gay’s 2014 Bad Feminist, wondering how Gay, the
“bad feminist,” would speak to Ahmed, who might be considered the
“good feminist,” and how reading their insights might complicate my
thinking about my own feminist commitments. As I read across and
through both books, I recognized each writer’s ultimate commitment
to the necessity of living feminism as Ahmed’s (2017) “slow argument,”
acknowledging that it is a necessary but flawed but argument because,
as Roxane Gay (2014) reminds us, I am flawed, as are all feminists, all
humans. Ahmed and Gay demonstrate how and what living a feminist
life does and means in everyday words and experiences, even though I
can imagine one raising an eyebrow at the other, at times.
So all feminists, the bad as well as the good, are flawed. For exam-
ple, perhaps feminists have not made it clear enough that they never
claimed that “women should have it all,” as Gay (2014) points out in
her critique of Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 Lean In: Women, Work and
the Will to Lead. In her chapter entitled “Brick Walls,” Ahmed (2017)
accuses White critical scholars, including feminists, of reassembling
Whiteness in their championing of their critical stance: “I have called
critical racism and critical sexism this: the racism and sexism repro-
duced by those who think of themselves as too critical to reproduce
racism and sexism” (2017, p. 155). Similarly, Gay (2014) claims that
part of her hesitation to own up to the feminist label comes from
the “willful disinterest in incorporating the issues and concerns of
black women into the mainstream feminist project” (2014, p. 308).
We make mistakes of commission and omission, one reason living a
feminist life is a slow argument; it requires constant reflexivity, read-
justment, resistance, and reorientation.
The flawedness means that living a feminist life 1(a) never ends
nor rests because we make mistakes even while the struggle with
patriarchy persists and, chameleonlike, hides itself in the political and
cultural context; and 2(b) never achieves its ultimate goals because not
only is the finish line constantly reconstructing itself, but so also are
feminist lives as well as we self self-reflect and forgive ourselves and
each other, expand awarenesses, and enlarge the field of women who
live feminist lives. This is how living a feminist life is a slow argument
because the terms of the argument change with cultural change; as
a living argument, it is one that is built in of flesh, spirit, and words,
piece by piece, insight by insight, experience by experience, articu-
lated temporally and relationally to/within constantly shifting cul-
tural dynamics. That sort of nimble, responsive, and flexible living
argument calls for constant reorienting to the dynamics of cultural,
political, and personal change, so it is slow.
Thus, reorienting is a key process in living a feminist life as femi-
nism shows a dynamic ability to continuously respond to change at the
personal level, and to cultural critiques questioning the need for femi-
nism, as well as to feminism’s ongoing concerns about violence toward
women, equality of in pay and rights for women, and the implications
of ever-present misogyny and patriarchy. Reorienting and resisting
are necessary processes in living the slow argument of feminism. The

succeeding parts of this paper chapter address these processes.
Reorienting
Reading feminist texts provides touchstones for reorienting as I

found in reading Ahmed (2017), and Gay (2014), remembering how
reading feminist texts has always affected me. The companion texts
Ahmed (2017) brings to the surface as she reviews the feminist writ-
ings in her feminist toolkit were some of those that drew me to recog-
nizing the feminism I had always been living and offered intellectual
scaffolding for merging theory with life—Audre Lorde, Patty Lather,
bell hooks, Simone de Beauvoir, Chris Weedon, Bronwyn Davies, and
Judith Butler. I was also compelled by Jane Addams, Virginia Woolf,
Madeline Grumet, Sari Biklen, Mary Dalton, and Gloria Anzaldúa.
One of the characteristics of feminism as something we do or live
is its sensational quality. Because living a feminist life is a living and a
doing, even if a slow argument, it must be done and lived in the flesh
and in the senses as we engage with the world to “make sense of what
does not make sense,” as Ahmed says (2017, p. 21). She continues to
explain her assertion that “feminism is sensational,” noting that fem-
inism provokes, stirs up trouble, challenges conventions, reveals and
turns into the problem, becomes sensational in its “sensible reaction
to the injustices of the world. . . . register[ed] at first through our own
experiences” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 21). Building on that comment, I add
that feminism being sensational means that words and experiences
drawn from everyday life through which we come to feminism are
given epistemic status. Ahmed’s (2017) selection of words to name
the concepts she describes reflects this. The terms she shares are the-
oretical, intentionally expressed in physical/material language from
“the usual activity of life” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 13), as in the “killjoy,” who
in revealing the problem becomes the problem; “sweaty concepts,”
referring to our difficult working out the sense of things when we
are “thrown by things” such as racism, sexism, inequality, and per-
sistent violence toward women that break us out in sweat as we wres-
tle with them and provoke others to wrestle with them; “willfulness,”
the insistence on being heard and seen and being taken into account;
“feminist snap,” when the last straw has been laid on the feminist’s
back; “brick walls,” the constant reinvention and resurgence of per-
sistent sexism and agential racism despite one’s best efforts, terms
developed in Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed, 2017); and in her elab-
oration of the “stickiness” of emotions and their objects, introduced
and developed in her 2015 book The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
Concepts, especially concepts given sensational names drawn
from life experiences in the flesh and spirit, name the feeling and
sensing of those flesh and spirit experiences from the dailiness of
living. They “are in the worlds we are in” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 13) and
give us handholds we can use to understand our experience as one of
patriarchal violence, silencing, or apathy. We use them to make sense
of what does not make sense. We find them useful because the words
are accessible, are at our fingertips, and fit well to our hands. We use
these handholds to reorient ourselves in relation to the violence of all
kinds we and others have experienced, to ongoing struggle, to mak-
ing sense, and/or to obdurate brick walls. Concepts from the usual
activity of life offer “reorientation to a world, a way of turning things
around, a different slant on the same thing” (Ahmed 2017, p. 13).
Such handholds anchor us as new waves of unexamined assumptions
about feminism distort what we do, question our motives, and give us
ground for resistance. Concepts from life provide handholds to cling
to when we are shattered and our hands grow sweaty.
By intentionally using sensational words laden with physicality,
Ahmed (2017) succeeds in “drag[ging] theory to life” and sent me
reexamining my research inquiries into the feminist pragmatism of
Jane Addams, whose work seems to resonate with Ahmed’s. Although
this connection may be random, Addams lived and wrote in a time
when few women were seen as theory creators or philosophers, for
that matter. Addams was both as well as a sociologist. Like Ahmed,
Addams used her own everyday words from the usual activity of life
to narrate and contextualize the processes and issues concerning her
in developing her social ethics of democracy. Addams (1902/2002)
drew on the notion of “perplexity” to describe the intellectual and
emotional labor of a destabilizing experience when encountering
something unknown or of something that resists understanding or
change or when questioning a conventional practice that is similar
to Ahmed’s “sweaty concepts”—something with which we grapple to

make sense of to the point of sweating. For Addams (1902/2002), a
perplexity demanded a personal involvement in the puzzling circum-
stance, and in the working out of understanding, one must reevaluate
presuppositions and conventional wisdom. Addams (1902/2002) saw
perplexities as opportunities for growth, for action, and for reflection
as does Ahmed (2017) in the laboring with “sweaty concepts” such as
racism, patriarchy, and violence. Ahmed (2017) wrote, “The task is to
stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty”
(p. 13), much as Addams (1902/2002) urged in her wrestling with dif-
ference and what it meant for a democracy. If a perplexity initialized
an inquiry, Addams (1902/2002) conceptualized the untheoretical
sounding “sympathetic understanding” as a method for extending
inquiry into human relations their circumstances. She conceptu-
alized the moral obligation of intentionally seeking perplexities as
engagements with difference as a way challenge biases, believing that
using sympathetic understanding to make sense of one’s relation with
difference would ameliorate the ills of bias (Addams, 1902/2002).
The point here is that in the slow argument that is living a fem-
inist life, women construct and live theory from their doing and liv-
ing, as what Ahmed (2017) names “a set of arguments” from the
quotidianness of work and home. Because these constructions arise
from the everyday labor of home and work, they change as new per-
plexities arise and call for reorienting to the perplexity or for grap-
pling anew with a “sweaty concept,” the most persistent and vexing
of which is the “Why?” of violence and oppression directed toward
women. Realizing how Addams (1902/2002) dragged theory to life
as does Ahmed (2017) more than 100 years later draws us into the
community of women who have been doing this for years.
Reading with a community of feminists also reorients us both
through reading the texts and through the conversations the texts
generate. As one member of my reading group commented about our
shared conversations about Ahmed’s (2017) and Gay’s (2014) books,
they are “oxygen!” They open up breathing space for reorienting, find-
ing new handholds, and exploring new words, new experiences, shared
experiences and struggles, and shared questions. On one memorable
occasion, I took that conversation with me to a departmental program
meeting dominated by male conversation and chest-beating and then

shared it with the other women in my program when we met for lunch
after the meeting to reground ourselves, express our anger, and give
each other oxygen.
Because I was reading Living a Feminist Life (Ahmed, 2017)
with a virtual community of feminist scholars, we peopled a field
of women who felt as described by Audre Lorde (1982) in Zami, a
feminist biomythography that had a great impact on me. One of
the early conversations our group shared was coming to feminism
through reading. The first feminist companions many of us had
were found in the books we read as girls and adolescents—biogra-
phies of various famous women; novels of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni
Morrison, and Maya Angelou; and poetry by Sylvia Plath. For many,
Audre Lorde (1982) was an early companion and remains a main-
stay of a feminist reading kit.
Engaging in these textual encounters with the books of child-
hood and adult womanhood; with Ahmed’s, Gay’s and Addams’s
words; and with those of other feminist writers is practicing—doing—
living—feminism; it is a feminist act that critically engages the body
politics that entangle and ensnare women, particularly women of
color, and invites reorienting, reconsidering, and performing new
and renewing old acts of resistance (Bailey & Atkinson, 2018). And
these engagements with body politics through feminist texts shift in
constant motion in sustaining feminists’ sustained protest of patriar-
chal and racist violence because the political and cultural landscape
is in constant motion and the violence continues.
Furthermore, for the book group, this field of women formed
virtually across many states and bodies of water, our conversations
enveloped and expanded the reading. We shared personal concerns
alongside the companion texts, a part of practicing feminism. Ahmed
(2017) encourages, “An embodied experience of power provides the
basis of knowledge” (p. 10); thus, we shared knowledge of similar
experiences as women academics, such as departmental meetings as
vehicles of silencing and institutional violence, and neoliberal insti-
tutional demands that stifle time and energy for work that matters.
One member remembered the pain her mother had lived through as
a young girl in wartime followed by a battle with cancer that ended
her life, another was recovering from extensive shoulder surgery,

one member’s husband died unexpectedly, one was struggling with
ongoing symptoms that were difficult to diagnose, and one had hip
surgery shortly before her husband had back surgery. These personal
concerns from work and home wove into the fabric we were weaving
through our reading conversations. Through our personal and politi-
cal conversations, we were, as Ahmed (2017) wrote, bringing “theory
back to life” (p. 10) in a way that reoriented us to feminism, to living a
feminist life. From this experience, I acknowledged my own need for
the constant nurturing in reading and hearing the voices of women.
Of late, I have been undergoing treatment for very early Stage
I breast cancer and am now cancer-free. Women carried me like a
current through the lumpectomy (my female surgeon held my hand
as I was “going under”) and the radiation. I was amid a community
of women as we shaped a sanctuary for ourselves dressed in our hos-
pital patient gowns with the woefully insufficient backs sitting in the
women’s dressing area with other female cancer patients awaiting
our turns for radiation. We checked to make sure the ties in back
were secure. We asked each other how we were doing. We shared our
names, our diagnoses, our families, our careers. One woman from
South America had lived in Alaska for 40 years and on her move to
Alabama to be with her son developed breast cancer. Another woman
with tongue cancer and losing hair on the back of her head would
leave after her treatment to take care of her grandchildren. The first
woman I shared a conversation with had worked in a regional bank
for 40 years and in her retirement developed throat cancer. We talked
about the best milkshakes one could find. The radiation techs were
for the most part women, and they, too, were part of the community
as we were all dealing with a common threat and trusting that the
male-dominated field was doing the right thing.
Resistance
Reading feminist texts is an act of resistance because they offer

vocabulary and concepts to name and describe our experiences and
to walk alongside us as we engage perplexities and use the “sweaty
concepts” to be intentional in our acts of resistance to the ever-present
violence and discrimination practiced toward women, in our constant

questioning of the status quo that oppresses so many. As Ahmed (2017)
expressed, the difficult questions, “the harder questions, are posed
by those feminists concerned with explaining violence, inequality,
injustice” (p. 9) and relentlessly taking them up again and again.
Just reading feminist texts enacts resistance, especially in post-
truth times, a time when a Missouri congressman proclaims his
opposition to abortion, confident in his scientific belief that no child
would be conceived in a “legitimate rape.” Reading feminist texts
with other women augments the scope and power of that resistance.
But the majority of women do not necessarily read feminist texts.
They read women’s fiction, for the most part, and they do not nec-
essarily read it as feminists. Yet they receive the messages about
women and women’s lives with men. This is Roxane Gay’s forte as
a novelist herself and a literary critic. Gay models reading women’s
fiction as an act of resistance illustrated through her critiques of
popular culture and how we consume it, particularly “women’s fic-
tion.” She reads as a feminist, albeit the bad feminist she embraces.
Following her thinking through her commentaries illuminates the
explicit, as well as nuanced, reading feminists, the bad and the good,
need to do when reading these popular texts and watching televi-
sion and movies. Gay (2014) harshly critiques popular writing such as
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James (2011) and the Twilight series by
Stephenie Meyer (2005) as examples of “women’s fiction” that offer
“happily-ever-afters” that do not count the cost of male-dominated
heterosexual happiness.
On the other hand, Gay’s (2014) outspoken enthusiasm for The
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (2008) partially stems from the
author’s demonstrating that “happily-ever-after” comes at a price as
we read how the flawed heroine Katniss “with issues” (p. 146) gave
everything for the flawed peace that ends the series. Gay (2014) owns
up to her girlish bad feminist adoration of Peeta, the male protago-
nist and Katniss’s team member, whom Gay describes as “a place of
solace and hope, and he is a good kisser” (p. 138). Gay (2014) comes
clean and explains that her love of these books grew from her admi-
ration for the damaged Katniss, “a young woman [who] is fierce and
strong but human in ways I find believable, relatable” (p. 146).
Gay (2014) observes that strong women resist and suffer and
survive the unendurable. Even though Gay (2014) claims that she
is not strong, she finds strength in stories such as Katniss’s. I find
it significant that in this essay she refers to the brutal gang rape
and subsequent humiliation she suffered and endured as a middle
school student. Somehow, she read her story of enduring brutality
and suffering alongside Katniss’s unendurable pain and struggles
and found “the tempered hope that everyone who survives some-
thing unendurable hungers for” (Gay, 2014, p. 146). In sharing this
in her book, Gay (2014) also provides evidence of the need for fiction
that provides stories of girls like the girls who read them, stories
that offer salvation in forgetfulness and resistance to ugly realities.
Even though not touted as such, stories such as these enact a fem-
inist reaching out to share pain. Gay’s (2014) comments on these
works of fiction demonstrate the range of feminist critique picking
its way through the plethora of what is called “women’s fiction” to
assess the depictions of what being a woman means through the
representations of women heroines.
Gay (2014) uses similar feminist lenses to critique some national
magazines’ depictions of feminism that seem to say “there is some-
thing wrong with feminism” (p. 308) because they imply that there
is a right way to be a woman and a right way to be a feminist and
that women keep getting it wrong. Gay (2014) derives this from
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s metaphor in a 2012 article “The Atlantic” that
feminism is “a nice girl . . . [who] . . . has become the easy lay of
social movements.” Wurtzel (2012) critiques women who choose
to stay at home as “1% wives” to support her argument that gain-
ing economic equality is all that feminists need to do to succeed.
Besides the narrowminded, distorted, and very White vision of fem-
inism and its concerns Wurtzel’s (2012) article offers, Gay (2014)
points out, as does Ahmed (2017) with her feminism as slow argu-
ment being lived rather than a static consensus, that there cannot
be an “essential feminism” by which all feminists are measured as
good or bad. There is not and cannot be one goal that by achiev-
ing it will wipe out the necessity for feminism. Distortions such as
this put forth by women who consider themselves feminists clearly
demonstrate the necessity of feminism, the necessity of reorienting
and enacting resistance to any essentializing of what living a feminist

life is and does.
That is one of the reasons Ahmed (2017) wrote that living a fem-
inist life, one that makes everything questionable, is exhausting.
Using the concepts, she offers to engage in the daily work of living
the slow argument that is feminism in the spaces of home and of
work “reorient(s) us” in worlds in which we feel, “frankly, bewil-
dered” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 12). She honors the resistance of the “kill-
joy” who continuously hits her head against the patriarchal wall,
the concept of “feminist snap” when resistance becomes inevitable,
and the accusation we have all experienced of “being too much”—
too loud, too rebellious, too quiet, too sarcastic, too big, too small,
too stubborn. We want to be accused of “willfulness,” recognizing
it as a necessary force in sustaining a feminist life. Reading others’
experiences and sharing conversations about our reading and our
responses to the texts nourished and challenged our book group
to consider willfulness in our daily lives, to be willful, and to keep
asking questions—to make everything questionable. Ahmed (2017)
asserts, “To live a feminist life is to make everything into something
that is questionable” (p. 132). To do so, we need our feminist compan-
ions and companion texts for oxygen that reorients and gives breath
to resist and keep on reorienting and resisting.
Finally, in living a feminist life, we are ourselves feminist texts to
be read with and alongside others. Living a feminist life is a necessity
more than it has ever been and requires more feminist companions to
share the struggle. Even as I write this, I share occasional texts with a
colleague who is also finishing a manuscript—a feminist companion
sharing page totals. The women at the cancer center with whom I
shared conversation may not have been feminists, but we shared our
daily living as women dealing with a toxic adversary. As feminists, as
women, we need each other, and we need feminism in whatever form
it shapes itself. We ourselves embody what Ahmed called “feminism
as a fragile archive, a body assembled from shattering, from splatter-
ing, an archive whose fragility gives us responsibility: to take care”
(2017, p. 17).
Such a charge stirs us to search for other feminists and to read
and write more feminist texts that can be companions along the
way for ourselves and future feminists not even born yet. Reading
feminist companion texts among companions arms us and arms the
future for the post-truth world through helping us recognize, resist,
and act as allies and companions in seeking possibilities for trans-
formation even when/if we do not see it happening in our lifetimes
or in the future.
References
Addams, J. (2002). Democracy and social ethics. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press. (Original work published 1902)
Ahmed, S. (2015). The cultural politics of emotion. London, England:
Routledge.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. London, England: Routledge.
Bailey, L., & Atkinson, B. (2018). Embodied reading practices as feminist
resistance in post-truth times: Lessons from Ahmed. Paper presented
and conference proceedings for Research on Women in Education, San
Antonio, TX.
Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Gay, R. (2014). Bad feminist: Essays. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.
James, E. L. (2011). Fifty shades of grey. New York, NY: Vintage books.
Lorde, A. (1982). Zami: A new spelling of my name: A biomythography.
London, England: Persephone Press.
Meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. Los Angeles, CA: Little, Brown.
Scovell, N. & Sandberg, S. (2013). Lean in: Women, work and the will to lead.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Wurtzel, E. (June, 2012) 1% wives are helping to kill feminism and make
the war on women possible. The Atlantic. Retrieved from: https://www.
theatlantic.com.
Ahmed as Companion for Feminist Inquiry 51
chapter five
Ahmed as Companion for

Feminist Inquiry
LUCY E. BAILEY
We can theorize by “staying close to the every day.”

—Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017, p. 11)
Do not adjust to an unjust world.

—Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (2017, p. 84)
I n this chapter,1 I draw from the work of feminist theorist Sara

Ahmed to consider how it has served as a “companion” for me in
recent years, intruding, nourishing, dis/orienting, and re/orienting
me as I “stay . . . closer to the everyday” (2017, p. 11) as a place for
theorizing what she calls a feminism fueled by the “dynamism of
making connections” (p. 3). Ahmed’s work on the politics of emo-
tion (2004), racism in institutional life (2012), and, most recently,
Living a Feminist Life (2017) have been resources for teaching and
thinking about contemporary feminist inquiry. For Ahmed, theory
arises, in part, through “staying close” to the sensations, events, and
puzzles of the everyday and working their dimensions through thick,
textured description to surface how power works on and through bod-
ies in pervasive, mundane ways. Her work has much to contribute to
feminist inquiries both in and out of the academy.
In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed (2017) describes her “femi-
nist tool kit” of resources that function as balm and “companion
texts,” in her daily labor as a feminist diversity worker. Her compan-
ions are diverse, ranging from films to the scholarship of feminists
of color, providing nourishment for her to “proceed on a path less
trodden” (p. 16). We all have these touchstones to which we return,
again and again, that can fuel us, dis/orient and re/orient us, and aid
us in working the words of our worlds, whether such words are

orientation, theory, willfulness, sticky, diversity, feminism, meth-
odology, inheritance, or responsibility, in wrestling with “how
to live,” and in “thinking about how to live” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 1).
Ahmed’s work has functioned as such a touchstone in my daily
labor, inviting me to pick up words; turn them over and around, as
she does; and ponder, resist, and stretch their meanings and appli-
cations to dis/orient and re/orient my thinking. She uses concepts
that connote the haptics of institutional engagements and strug-
gles, such as brick walls, homework, and feminist “snap,” to trace
how power relations reflect and manifest in embodied sensations;
how they sort, arrange, and orient bodies; and how they demand
tangible sweaty labor to unsettle and resist them. Here I focus on
three recent engagements nourished by Ahmed’s companionship:
first, the importance of teaching feminist inquiry; second, feminist
haptics as “homework”; and, third, the sticky (Ahmed, 2017) con-
cept of feminist inheritances (see Bailey, 2018). Each is a site that
works the contours of feminist inquiry.
Teaching Feminist Inquiry: The Same Things Keep Coming Up
We enact feminism in how we relate to the academy.

—Ahmed (2017, p. 15)
Ahmed (2017) insists that we “learn from how the same things
keep coming up” (p. 9). In thinking about and teaching research
courses in a public university, I have found that the same things
keep coming up. The academy speaks a type of grammar “all the way
down to the letter, to the bone” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 4), shaping the lan-
guage, spaces, and conditions in which inquiry approaches become
intelligible and cultivating the dispositions that allow or persuade
people to take them up. Fields produce certain kinds of languages
in which we can “move around” once we learn their governing gram-
mar (Ahmed, 2017, p. 9), and as we learn those languages, they cul-
tivate norms through orienting, directing, and “giving residence to
[our] bodies” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 115). Iris Marion Young’s (1980) classic
feminist work on body comportment underscores the minute gen-

dered orchestrations of such powerful processes in inscribing into
the very fibers of bodies the gendered parameters of how they move
and residences that feel possible to inhabit.
Methodological norms work much the same way, moving and
orienting bodies, suggesting that we should look, collect, record,
memo, write, code, theme, and theorize in particular ways as the
“shoulds” and “musts” can seep into and direct our bodies, making
it difficult to move and think in other languages. Both “momentum”
and “disciplinary fatalism” can propel us in following along the paths
laid before us (Ahmed, 2017, p. 150), cultivating orientations that
necessitate feminist attention. We are invited to practice “method-
ological taxidermy” at every turn, dusting off our designated sets of
tools, questions, purposes, and terminology for research design that
give the appearance of life even as they sit frozen, decontextualized,
and bloodless in our academic curio cabinets (Bailey, 2017; 2019, p.
96). Many of us feel these taxidermic impulses deeply as we wrestle
in our institutional contexts with the latest assessment initiatives
and retention demands and feel a bit more free to breathe in such
spaces as the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI)
that supports the productive cacophony of multiple methodological
or even anti-/non-/sans/post-/trans-methodological languages.
Working against taxidermy is an ongoing feminist project. One
way I have tried to do so is through incorporating resources for fem-
inist inquiry in varied research courses, a set of dis/orientations that
can interrupt the flow of dominant methodological traffic in refus-
ing design prescriptions, embracing openly ideological inquiry, and
pondering the dimensions of what contemporary inquiries might
look like if they take up “sticky, sweaty” concepts (Ahmed, 2017) of
resistance, transformation, embodiment, disruption, critique, advo-
cacy, responsibility, collaboration, and/or push against the bound-
aries of the intelligible (see Lather, 2006). Although feminism can
happen in any space, moment, or inquiry and need not proceed under
that sign, naming modules or courses in the institutional fabric as
“feminist inquiry” is a mechanism of visibility in its potential to dis/
orient us from prescriptions for methodology-as-usual and to invite
us to consider the work we might do if freed from its constraints.
This body of approaches has a long history that demands both

protection amidst methodological instrumentalism as well as ongo-
ing “willful” use (Ahmed, 2014) and theorizing to intervene in often
“bewildering” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 12) worlds riddled with violence and
injustice. Preserving these intellectual/activist legacies in inquiry
also involves unsettling uniform prescriptions and origin stories
of what constitutes “feminism.” Depending on the inquiry space,
we have had diverse companions along the journey, including the
scholarship of Ahmed, Cynthia Dillard, Mary Margaret Fonow,
Audre Lorde, Patti Lather, Tsianina Lomawaima, Janet Miller,
Wanda Pillow, and Adrienne Rich, among others, some trans* and
queer work that destabilizes conceptions of gender and sexual-
ity, some gentle narrative pieces, some fist-raising diatribes,2 and
a hands-on collection that details the complexities of conducting
feminist activist ethnography in neoliberal contexts (see Craven
& Davis, 2013). Blogs, websites, and museum visits are generative
feminist sites as well.
In some spaces, students read exemplars on black feminist anal-
ysis (Evans-Winters, 2019) , eating problems (Thompson, 1992), nail
salon workers’ experiences (Kang, 2012), and gendered dimensions
of tattooing (Inckle, 2007), among others, to consider how feminist
thought can guide and nourish inquiry across diverse fields and in
diverse ways. In many cases, this type of work was entirely new to
the community members, and some voiced disappointment that
they had not learned about it earlier in their schooling. Discussions
about texts and our toxic political climate were alive, electric, and
filled with possibility as people wrestled with how these companion
texts might fuel their research, teaching, and lives, which is pre-
cisely a feminist point: Feminism is a dis/orientation and a re/orien-
tation to the workings of the “everyday” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 9). In this
sense, feminist re/orientations are ontological as much as episte-
mological or methodological in imploding boundaries among one’s
movement in daily life, work, teaching, gathering in community, or
engaging in inquiry.
This rich field of possibility, this electricity, could also fizzle at
powerful moments when discussions hit against the “brick wall”
(Ahmed, 2017) manifestation of dominant doctoral academic grammar
and the palpable fear rather than promise it can embody: The
Dissertation. The Committee. The Gatekeepers. Getting Out. Here
the types of questions that keep “coming up” are jarring and serious
and familiar to me as a teacher across diverse courses: “I’ve never
thought of research, as Dillard (2012) does, as a kind of responsibil-
ity. What if my committee doesn’t see it that way? What will people
say if I want to work with my community? What if I want to do an
activist project? Will my committee let me do this work?” And a pow-
erful question, “What if we don’t feel like we can do this work? That
we should just do the dissertation and do this work later?” Working
the words of these lived worlds—can we, allowed, let me, should,
what if, my committee—and witnessing the embodied transforma-
tion from excitement to uncertainty that can, at times, accompany
them reflect the heavy flow of institutional traffic and emissions
that we all breathe in, that we, in fact, read about in our companion
texts, in which governing “norms give residence to bodies” (Ahmed,
2017, p. 115). Forging feminism in daily life and inquiry; fighting the
racist, colonialist, capitalist patriarchy in its varied guises; pursuing
research as nourishment, resistance, and responsibility; stretching
the boundaries of the possible—it is all worthy, all compelling; we
want to do it—but maybe we should do it later.
The questions that “keep coming up” in these generative spaces
speak to the continuing labor of forging feminist subjectivities in insti-
tutional terrain made for “some bodies” more than others (Ahmed)
and some pathways of inquiry rather than others: feminist inquiry,
inquiry without methods, counter-storytelling—Will people let us?
These are legitimate questions that underscore how power gets div-
vied up around groups of “we/us/people” and embody im/proper
spaces and times to do feminist work. Perhaps feminist inquiries seem
particularly “willful” (Ahmed, 2014) because they refuse to keep their
politics to themselves. As Ahmed (2017) notes, “when a path is harder
to follow . . . you might find an easier route” (p. 46).
And encountering some compelling texts or taking a class or two
may not be enough to dis/orient and reorient our pathways. As Ahmed
(2012) described in her critique of university diversity and inclu-
sion efforts, institutions can use the opening of a women’s center or
hiring a queer woman of color to testify that they have achieved
effective diversity work in some form even as their entrenched

institutional practices remain oriented to serving some bodies over
others. Incorporating curricula about diverse inquiry approaches
directed to action, community, critique, and responsibility can sim-
ilarly work toward inclusive efforts in graduate education yet lack
the broader supporting apparatus (culture, committees, faculty and
peer familiarity, program and dissertation genre requirements) to
enable that work to come to fruition. Even so, I want to urge stu-
dents: Do what you want, read, push, imagine, and find your insti-
tutional allies and companion texts to do work that needs doing
rather than leaving convictions at the dissertation’s door to negotiate
“the way it is” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 150), a messaging history that feels
hardened into barriers.
Ensuring that diverse feminist work is visible in inquiry spaces
remains important “homework” for cultivating research imaginar-
ies and practices as well as creating future pathways of inheritance.
Ahmed’s (2017) theorizing reminds us that such work is ongoing
and notes that “the more people travel upon a path, the clearer
the path becomes” (p. 46). The deep path of creative feminist work,
some decades old and some hot off the press, can provide compan-
ionship, can help in softening the cumulative feeling that the path
is not yet wide enough to allow easy travel, to imagine searching for
new allies, to push against institutional walls, and to recognize how
power is at work in our very orientations.
The Feminist Haptics of “Homework”
Feminist theory is what we do at home.

—Ahmed (2017, p. 7)
Feminist “homework” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 7) is haptic, sweaty

labor. The term invites us to consider how attention to feminist
haptics as a form of “homework” might enhance inquiry through
highlighting the haptic dimensions of power that manifest in both
the touch and feel of institutional “brick walls” and forms of resis-
tance that might help build other dwellings (Ahmed, 2017). Ahmed’s
concept of homework has been a recent companion for me in analyz-

ing the work of a Canadian feminist artist and teacher, Ellen Wright,
a graduate of York University in Toronto, Ontario, who engaged in a
multiyear process of Arts Practice Research for her dissertation proj-
ect (Wright, 2019).3 Considering Wright’s art practice has led me to
consider how, in conversation with Ahmed, the haptics of feminist
theorizing, teaching and inquiry might be forms of the homework
Ahmed (2017) describes in Living a Feminist Life.
Arts Practice Research is a body of approaches for exploring the
process of creating, what James Elkins (2006) describes as the “day
to day experience of making—its exact pedagogy, its method, knacks
and skills, its feel” (p. 246; cited in Wright, 2019, p. 2). Loveless
(2019) argues that artistic practices such as “research-creation”
are “site[s] of generative recrafting” that both “trouble disciplinary
relays of knowledge/power” and invite more “creative, sensually
attuned modes of inhabiting the university” (p. 3). Such practices dis-
rupt methods and research products-as-usual and neoliberal univer-
sity cultures to nourish the reconfiguration of practices throughout
the university (Loveless, 2019, pp. 9–10). Although definitions among
this body of approaches are contested and unfolding, the emphasis
is on artistic practice and creation. In that sense, these approaches
differ from arts-based research that involves collecting art products
as data or engaging in art to help make meaning of data or to repre-
sent findings. Instead, arts practice–based research focuses on the
integration of doing, touching, thinking, and sensory work involved
in the creative process itself—in Wright’s (2019) case, exploring the
haptics of home through committing a range of what she calls “sen-
sory misdeeds” in domestic spaces. The focus of what I am calling
Wright’s “homework” is on the generative process of making. The
role of embodied touch is central to her project to disrupt and remake
the material objects of the home through the haptics of arts practice.
Wright engages in a variety of misdeeds. She blends seemingly
incommensurable materials in her work, including salt, cold cream,
bacon fat, wire, doilies, paint, eggs, fur coats, mirrors, fragile tracing
paper, bulky household furniture, and Vaseline, among others. Her
labor includes slathering a 1950s vintage middle-class woman’s dress
with bacon fat to “obliterating” a classic cookbook through stabbing
and smearing it with Vaseline and crumbs to transform this thick

“cooking archive”—a place of memory and instruction (Wright, 2019,
p. 22)—into something that appears chewy and textured enough to
consume. At times, these engagements evoked her repulsion. She
describes stepping back with nausea from massaging bacon fat and
lard or stuffing elegant dress shoes with cold cream, reflecting on the
experience and pedagogy of the creative process, pondering its haptic
and aesthetic properties, and then turning away to engage in other
forms of making. Her labor is palpable even as she underscores the
inadequacy of writing to capture its haptic dimensions (Wright, 2019,
p. 55). Her projects include juxtaposing lard and chocolate, making
Jell-O with house slippers, ripping apart fur coats to line a makeshift
closet, and even creating a “rancid fat dress covered in flies and mag-
gots [that became] appealing to her” even while “the making of it,
[was] not” (Wright, 2018, p. 41).
In her characteristic style of playing with words, Ahmed (2017)
notes that “feminism is homework,” a kind of “self-assignment” in
which we engage that “works on as well as at our homes,” because
many of us inhabit bodies that “have much to work out from not
being at home in a world” (p. 7). Whether homes are academic,
domestic, or community structures, they remain complicated sym-
bolic and material sites to carry out feminist work because they
are saturated with sticky histories of power. Women’s social place
has frequently circled around the domestic in all its tyranny and
productivity—and such homework has been utterly haptic. We can
consider how the touch and feel of mundane tactile engagements
within home spaces repulse, invite, and form subjects, includ-
ing feminist subjectivities, that might work to resist, reform, and
re-create ways to be “at home,” much like the touch and feel of
pushing against the dominant flow of methodological traffic in edu-
cational spaces. Read through Ahmed’s framing, I see Wright’s arts
practice as homework, engaging in haptic labor that surfaces the
politics and embodied dimensions of the domestic through work-
ing its various constituting sticky substances and reconfiguring the
materials that constitute home spaces. Wright’s (2019) focus on
the haptics of making resists concretizing artwork as a “research
text” (p. 95), “representation,” or product of “knowledge” to instead
emphasize the inherent temporality of domestic objects and dwell-

ings produced through embodied sweaty, labor. To Wright (2019),
art is both “encounter” and pedagogy (p. 66), which she illustrates
through making, rubbing, transforming, painting, and covering
various objects with gooey substances while thinking, reading, and
processing about what they do to and for her. We can reconfigure
ourselves through such haptic labor.
Read alongside Ahmed, Wright’s practices have implications
that transcend the intricate haptics of ripping apart coats and get-
ting the mysterious qualities of gelatin to hold together. From the
outset, this labor symbolizes to me that homework is necessarily
ongoing sensory, haptic labor, like the work of feminism, pushing
against walls and inviting disruption, process, and practice rather
than a completed product that is seamlessly intelligible within
institutional research logics. Attention to haptic homework invites
all kinds of productive questions for feminist inquiry: How might
attending to haptic practice as constitutive elements—or the very
purpose of inquiry—produce new ways of being at home? How can
these methodological disruptions in our home spaces move against
taxidermic impulses to fuel new purposes, outcomes, and trajec-
tories of inquiry? How might these inquiry practices create more
inhabitable home spaces? What might such spaces look and feel
like? How might they take us up?
For me, Wright’s compelling images of 600-pound blocks of lard
juxtaposed with creamy chocolate and a fat dress covered in mag-
gots alongside hairy closets and dissolving gelatin—all textured,
material, and sensory disruptions—evoke the haptics of diversity
homework that I sense in Ahmed’s pages and observe in teaching
inquiry: sweating, pushing against institutional and methodologi-
cal walls, staying with the nausea and pleasures, dismantling and
reconfiguring common domestic materials, and trying to name
and work the difficulties through thick sensory description. Like
Ahmed’s (2017) concept of homework, Wright’s (2019) labors are
not oriented to tidy closure; they represent and invite endless messy
new practices, configurations, and ways of making and being.
Companionable In*her*itances
We might aim “to reside as well as we can in the spaces

that are not intended for us.”
—Ahmed (2017, p. 9)
I recently revisited Bud Goodall’s (2005) well-known concept of

“narrative inheritance” as a touchtone to consider what feminist nar-
rative in*her*itances might look like (Bailey, 2018). In that essay, I
played with the term inheritance to displace the heir with her to work
through the politics of constructions of family, the desire for origin
stories that fuel patriarchal narratives, and feminist theorizing that
has stretched notions of kinship to better account for diverse ways
of living and connecting. The materiality of home spaces as well as
Ahmed’s (2017) intentional practice of citing feminist foremothers
are other forms of feminist in*her*itance. In continuing to work
the dimensions of inheritance for feminist inquiry amid neoliberal
accountability and productivity tallies, the struggle for grant funding,
and the ranking of publications, I think considering the diverse ways
feminists can reconfigure forms of inheritance that operate outside
of conventional inquiry and publishing logics is useful.
Much has been written about the power and politics of field for-
mation through citation practices, academic genealogies, and the
implications of the dominance of English as the primary language
for publishing scholarship (e.g., see Lillis & Curry, 2010). Reading
and producing scholarship are, of course, thoroughly embroiled in
the institutional politics of time—who has the power to control one’s
time, in which spaces, and with which resources and support and
to share with which audiences. In the context of doctoral research
courses discussed earlier, there are clear implications for “epistemic
justice” (see Fricker, 2007) in terms of whose knowledge claims
and activist work we can make visible in which academic spaces to
enable some texts to become companions—and thus inheritable in
conventional academic genealogies. Fricker (2007) describes forms
of epistemic injustice that include the act of dismissing one’s knowl-
edge claims, when one is “wronged specifically in her capacity as a
knower” (p. 20) or in being unable to contribute forms of knowledge
to the world that can make one’s experiences intelligible to others.

If “aligning bodies” is a “mechanism” of power (Ahmed, 2017, p. 55)
in the grooves and grammar of institutions, then which knowers are
absent, present, or un/intelligible in the terrain of inquiry is also a
matter of epistemic justice.
We might even consider the pace and volume of work produced
these days as a matter of serious epistemic concern for all justice-ori-
ented scholar-practitioners simply because it exceeds our capacity to
engage with much of it, use it productively, and thus become folded
into formal academic knowledge processes. These conditions beckon
feminist theorizing. Hilton Kelly’s (2019) provocative recent call for a
“moratorium in publishing in educational studies” reflects a similar
spirit. He details how publications in educational studies are “simply
not trickling down to classroom teachers, school administrators, and
boards of education” (Kelly, 2019, p. 4) in usable ways. He also notes
that conferences have become more about “presenting and docu-
menting” one’s work than serious political and intellectual exchange
(Kelly, 2019, p. 4). Perhaps this is another form of academic taxidermy
in which one is constantly invited to stuff, collect, and display for the
pleasure of one’s own home spaces.
Yet, in addition to these concerns, underscoring that scholarship
is only one form of potential feminist inheritance is important. As
it is, much daily feminist work is unintelligible in the institutional
logics of citation practices that become systems of inheritance, such
as the kinship and care work (di Leonardo, 1986; Hochschild, 2012)
of teaching and service, the page after page of track changes one
leaves in the margins of student papers, the carefully crafted phi-
losophy sections in syllabi, the rhythm of encounters in hallways as
bodies “turn . . . this way or that, impress[ing] upon others, affecting
what they can do” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 189). Just as Ahmed (2017) notes
it is difficult to find “less tired words” to refer to the ongoing insti-
tutional issues demanding equity work (pp. 98–99), also difficult is
finding less tired ways to refer to the relentless dimensions of “care
work” in higher education that continues to fall more on some bodies
than others. These patterns of inequity are fundamentally connected
to the availability of time and intellectual energy for producing the
primary material of academic inheritance. In addition, for various
reasons, including changes in higher education, much dissertation

work never becomes published in other formats (see Evans, Amaro,
Herbert, Blossom, & Roberts, 2018, as an example in psychology) to
enter wide networks of communal academic scholarship. There are
hierarchies in circulation and access.
It seems productively dis/orienting to redirect the traffic of inheri-
tance to envision other flows of information and bequests. We might
imagine networks that move back, forth, and sideways, rather than
in unidirectional ways, taking up different people, ideas, texts in
diverse, circuitous arrangements. Rather than passing down or
bequeathing objects, inheritances might involve a productive brew
of well-known feminist scholarship, new dissertations, hallway con-
versations, and embodied arts practice. Wright’s (2019) dissertation
work, in fact, might be an aspect of my inheritance. Some of my
most meaningful engagements with Ahmed’s work have been nour-
ished in a community of feminists whose academic inheritances
overlap with mine and who constantly fuel my thinking. Reading
varied texts together and talking through the details of our work-
days has re/oriented us toward new understandings of the work
of familiar companions (Ahmed, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Renato
Rosaldo) and introduced us to ones as well, such as Eli Claire’s (2017)
Brilliant Imperfection and Roxane Gay’s (2017) memoir on Hunger
(see Bailey & Atkinson, 2018). This meaningful collaborative work
is ongoing as our list of ideas for books competes for attention with
the daily demands.
These encounters do not reflect traditional academic inheritances
in the form of words, citations, and entities. They are dis/orienting
forms of feminist inquiry and inheritance. Varied home spaces—
activist gatherings, book groups, classrooms, hallways, hiking trails,
playgrounds, arts practice inquiries—can enable academic kinship
formations and trajectories of inquiry whose “findings” never land
on journal pages. They might swirl in the space of a Zoom meeting,
channel through text messages, emerge in a classroom, or propel a
policy change. These processes and provocations of temporal dis-
ruptions, entangled moments, people, haptics, places, and texts that
orient our bodies, ideas, desires, and time seem simply un/inherit-
able in conventional forms of inquiry or inheritance.
Feminist theorizing and inquiry remain vital re/orientations

in living a feminist life. They should never become a specific set of
practices, concretized and replicated in their own grammar, but a
process of making and moving “built from many moments of begin-
ning again” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 6) as conditions beckon and demand.
Ahmed’s theorizing invites us to continue to work practices, words,
and ourselves anew in the diverse spaces we find ourselves through
the haptics of embodied labor.
References
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Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional
life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2014). Willful subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bailey, L. (2017, April). Methodological taxidermy: Working with/against the
scholarship of Patti Lather. Presentation at the American Educational
Research Association Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX.
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stretching a concept. Vitae Scholasticae, 35, 93–112.
Bailey, L. (2019). Thinking critically about “social justice methods:” Methods
as contingent foundations. In K. K. Strunk & L. A. Locke (Eds.), Research
methods for social justice and equity in education (pp. 91–107). New York,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bailey, L., & Atkinson, B. (2018). Embodied reading practices as feminist
resistance in post-truth time: Lessons from Ahmed. Paper presented and
conference proceedings for Research on Women in Education annual
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Craven, C., & Davis, D. (2013). Feminist activist ethnography: Counterpoints
to neoliberalism in North America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
di Leonardo, M. (1997). The female world of cards and holidays: Women,
families, and the work of kinship. Signs, 12, 440–453.
Dillard, C. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget:
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teaching. New York, N.Y: Peter Lang.
Elkins, J. (2006). Afterword: On beyond research and new knowledge. In
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art as research (pp. 241–247). New York, NY: Routledge.
Evans, S. C., Amaro, C. M., Herbert, R., Blossom, J. B., & Roberts, M. C. (2018).
“Are you gonna publish that?” Peer-reviewed publication outcomes of
doctoral dissertations in psychology. PLoS ONE, 13(2), e0192210.
Evans-Winters, V. E. (2019). Black feminism in qualitative inquiry. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and ethics of knowing.
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Gay, R. (2017). Hunger: a memoir of (my) body. New York, NY: HarperCollins
Goodall, H.L. (2005). Narrative inheritance: A nuclear family with toxic
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Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of
human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Inckle, K. (2007). Writing on the body? Thinking through gendered embod-
iment and marked flesh. Newcastle, NE: Cambridge Scholars.
Kang, M. (2010). The managed hand: Race, gender, and the body in beauty
service work. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kelly, H. (2019). Toward a moratorium on publishing in the field of educa-
tional studies: Where is this train going? Educational Studies, 55, 1–11.
Lather, P. (2006). Paradigm proliferation is a good thing to think with:
Teaching research in education as wild profusion. International
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Loveless, N. (2019). How to make art at the end of the world: A manifesto
for research-creation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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of women’s eating problems. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
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Wright, E. (2017). Her place and what was learned there: Rubbings of inher-
itance, narratives of disinheritance. Vitae Scholasticae, 34(2), 43–61.
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Endnotes
1
An early version of this paper was presented at ICQI in April 2019 as part of a panel focused on
Sara Ahmed and feminist inquiry.
2
As one example, see Stacy Otto’s (2018) blistering critique of the claim that gender-based violence
is an aberration.
3
Wright also produced an art installation made up of tracings of her family home that relates to
the body of work discussed here. She analyzes this installation in rich detail (Wright, 2017) and
later in her dissertation (Wright, 2019). I analyze elements of this work in Bailey (2018), “Fem-
inist narrative in*her*itance: Revisiting, pondering, stretching a concept,” Vitae Scholasticae
35 (2), 93–112. There remains more to analyze in her arts-practice given its utter entanglement
in issues of haptics, feminist inheritance, refusals, and embodied, sweaty labor that push back
against institutional norms of legitimate research.
Thinking About Theory and Practice in Nonoppositional Terms 67
chapter six
Thinking About Theory

and Practice in
Non-Oppositional Terms
SERGE F. HEIN
W hen I think about social justice–oriented qualitative research,

I certainly understand the importance and usefulness of the
concept of resistance.1 I also understand the need to emphasize
theory in qualitative inquiry. But as a poststructuralist—and I
realize that most social justice-oriented qualitative researchers work
within a different qualitative paradigm than I do—I view resistance
as a holdover category of humanist, modernist thought. As Nealon
(2003) notes, “After all, what is ‘humanism’ (what is ‘freedom’) if it’s
not about resistance to domination?” (p. 165). And in the same way that
I view resistance as a modernist concept, I think that theory is often
understood in a modernist way in qualitative inquiry, as the binary
opposite of practice. Binary or conceptual oppositions permeate our
language and thought and encourage us to take sides, to choose
one binary pole over the other. Another danger that is inherent in
binary (i.e., polarized or oppositional) thinking is that binary oppo-
sites become naturalized over time: They are viewed as natural or
self-evident and, hence, impose limits on our thinking. In this chap-
ter, I begin by discussing the binary thinking that characterizes
Western thought and how différance is the “source” of all binaries. I
then examine deconstruction as a strategy for undoing binaries such
as theory/practice and relate deconstruction to the Derridean con-
cepts of contamination, doubling, supplementarity, and undecidabil-
ity. Last, I discuss another prominent binary in qualitative inquiry,
presence/absence, and emphasize how nonpresence is a blind spot
within life itself, one that destabilizes all binaries, hierarchies, and
limits. Along with thinking about theory as resistance, then, I suggest
that, instead of thinking about the relationship between theory and
practice in terms of opposition, that we do more to think about this
relationship in terms of a nonoppositional difference.
Binary Thinking, Différance, and Deconstruction
Western thought since Plato has been mired in binary think-

ing, which has given us prominent dualisms such as mind/body,
subject/object, objectivity/relativity, animate/inanimate, and iden-
tity/difference.2 Binary opposites are based on a fixed notion of
difference (e.g., subject is different than object), and these abso-
lutes are deeply held within modernist thought. Also, for Derrida
(1972/1981a), modernist thought attempts, in some way, to play the
poles of a binary against one another so that one of the concepts or
terms in the binary is given preference (i.e., is privileged) over the
other concept. As Derrida (1972/1981a) notes, one of the concepts
“governs the other or has the upper hand” (p. 41). In privileging one
of the concepts, it is necessary for modernist thought to assume that
the concept is incapable of being contaminated by the other con-
cept (i.e., the poles of a binary constitute two sides of an irreducible
difference). In other words, the concepts in a binary presuppose a
strict separation between “inside” and “outside.” It should be added
here that the privileged concept is only capable of being thought in
opposition to the other concept, and it therefore requires the other
concept for its meaning.
For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1973b, 1967/1976), différance
puts difference into play and is the “source” of all binaries. It involves
a difference that both defers (i.e., delay or temporal separation) and
differs (i.e., discernibility or spatial separation), but it is also prior
to the separation between both of these. Moreover, différance cannot
be revealed because it outruns thought. Hence, it is unthinkable, but
this unthought is not external to thought. It inhabits the very core of
thought. Furthermore, because différance is not spatiotemporal, it
cannot happen or arrive; it is always-already-there. Thus, we could
think of différance as having meta-ontological status. It is neither
a word nor a concept,3 and it cannot be named in any way. In other

words, it has no essence or meaning, but it is the means by which
concepts such as theory and practice appear as such, and more gen-
erally, it allows for the possibility of conceptuality and a conceptual
system in general.
Deconstruction is, arguably, the term that is most often associ-
ated with Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1978, 1972/1981a). As is well
known, deconstruction focuses on the binary structure of Western
thought and, more specifically, identifies and undoes binary oppo-
sitions. Like différance, deconstruction has no essence (i.e., it is not
an identifiable entity), and so we should not view it as a procedure,
technique, intellectual practice (e.g., critique), or philosophical
method, if we understand these as involving a general set of rules or
practices or a prescribed formula. Similarly, deconstruction should
not be equated with theory. Instead, Derrida insists that deconstruc-
tion be viewed as a strategy, but it is important to avoid viewing this
as something that is brought to a binary (or to a text that contains
that binary). Deconstruction is always already inhabiting binaries
and other structures and subverting them from within. During his
career, Derrida made a number of revisions to his conception of
deconstruction, but in what follows, I focus on its first, and most well-
known, formulation, which appears in the preface of Dissemination
(Derrida, 1972/1981a).
If we use the theory/practice binary to illustrate the activity of
deconstruction (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1978, 1972/1981a), the first phase
involves a reversal of the hierarchy discussed earlier. That is, the
privileging of practice over theory, which we currently see in many
parts of higher education, is reversed so that the suppressed or infe-
rior term, theory, is now elevated or prioritized. By shifting attention
from the privileged term to the suppressed term, we are able to see
that the binary constitutes a false opposition that is working in the
service of a particular set of interests. We can then use a variety of
means to promote the importance of theory, but for Derrida, to stop
at this point would be to remain mired in binary thinking. Instead,
the second phase of deconstruction focuses on the issue of genesis
and involves reinscribing (i.e., redefining or placing under erasure)
the originally suppressed term so that it now indicates the “origin”
(i.e., a nonsimple or nontraditional origin, one that calls into ques-

tion the modernist logic of the origin) or “resource” (1972/1981a, p.
42) of the binary and the associated hierarchy. This process involves
a destabilizing of the binary opposites and, more generally, a dis-
placement of the entire system of binary thinking. The “origin” of
the theory/practice binary is, of course, différance.
For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1967/1973b, 1967/1976), concepts
such as theory and practice, like all binary pairs, are dependent on
one another. As discussed earlier, the relationship between them is
not oppositional but, rather, has its basis or “origin” in the funda-
mental, nonoppositional difference that is différance. This difference
is nonempirical and takes place without synthesis or mediation. In
other words, différance separates and joins both poles of the binary
simultaneously (i.e., there is no separation between both poles, but
there is also no coincidence). Both of these relationships need to be
thought at the same time (e.g., Lawlor, 2003a). It should be added
that différance is not some “thing” or identity that is “between” both
poles (i.e., it is not a third thing); as margin, edge, or hinge, it has no
independent status. Or, put another way, there is “an empty space
between, a void between, . . . even an abyss that separates and joins”
(Lawlor, 2003b, p. 57). This empty space or gap allows the poles of
a binary to be related to each other without unifying them, but it
cannot be identified with either pole.
Thus, binary opposites are always already contaminating or
“infecting” one another (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1973a, 1967/1976). Rather
than a strict separation between “inside and “outside,” then, there is
an irreducible (i.e., originary) contamination of “inside” and “out-
side,” which is, of course, another way to refer to différance. This
originary contamination also means that there can be no “inside”
without an “outside” and that the “inside” is always a doubling of
the “outside” (i.e., there is a mutual implication of the inner and the
outer).4 Thus, the concepts of theory and practice interpenetrate or
inhabit one another, thereby undoing the theory/practice binary. In
discussing the deconstruction of the theory/practice binary, we could
also refer to the Derridean concept of supplementarity (e.g., Derrida,
1967/1976). More specifically, the supplement (i.e., différance) is that
which always escapes any formal system and simultaneously inserts
itself into the system to demonstrate the impossibility of that system

(i.e., it is the condition of possibility of any system and simultaneously
makes a system impossible as a system).5
There is a final Derridean concept that I would like to discuss
in relation to the deconstruction of the theory/practice binary. Later
in his career, Derrida (e.g., 1991/1995, 1994/1997) described the rela-
tionship between the poles of a binary as undecidable. More specifi-
cally, the empty space or gap that was referred to earlier, which is the
nonfoundation (or abyssal foundation) that simultaneously separates
and joins the poles of a binary, is also the moment of undecidability
or aporia.6 In other words, the relationship between both poles of the
theory/practice binary is undecidable and destabilizes the binary. We
can therefore see that equivocation is inherent in deconstruction, but
we can also say that deconstruction involves experiencing, in some
way, the “origin” of a binary: “We are made to experience the essen-
tial connection—itself undecidable—between [the poles of a binary]”
(Lawlor, 2006, pp. 6–7), one that is incapable of conforming to either
pole. This undecidability means that any text, practice, or other entity
that we might try to categorize as either theoretical or practical is, in
fact, simultaneously theoretical and practical. In other words, any
time that we try to label something as theoretical, there will always
be a way to view it as practical and vice versa.
The Blind Spot Within Life Itself
Having discussed the theory/practice binary and its deconstruc-

tion in some detail, I would like to focus on another binary that exerts
a great deal of influence over many parts of qualitative inquiry: pres-
ence/absence. Presence, as used here, is a philosophical term that
can refer to a direct observation, sensation (i.e., perception), idea,
concept, thought, or essence. Absence, on the other hand, is the
opposite or counter-concept of presence and, hence, functions as
the opposite pole in the binary. Almost all Western philosophical
conceptions of truth have involved the knower being present in
some way to the object of knowledge, and modern science and main-
stream qualitative inquiry therefore construct knowledge on an
unquestioned value: presence. Moreover, the form of any scientific
inquiry (i.e., “What is ___?”) predisposes the inquirer to focus exclu-

sively on that which can be made present. In other words, questions
make a demand for presence, for an essence. As a result, presence
is privileged or valorized and is taken as a foundation. But, as May
(2005) points out, “If we think of our lives solely in terms of what
appears to us, and if we think of what appears to us as exhausting
our possibilities, we are already hedged in, already committed to
conformism” (p. 23). For Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a, 1972/1982), the
privileging of presence is one of the most serious errors of Western
philosophy, and pure (i.e., universal, ahistorical, clear, immediate)
presence of the kind conceived by Western philosophy and modern
science cannot be achieved.
In Speech and Phenomena (Derrida, 1967/1973a), which was
written before Derrida began to emphasize language, he under-
takes a deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. In chapter
6 (“The Voice That Keeps Silence”), he examines the issue of voice
(i.e., the phenomenon of private or silent speech) and “hearing one-
self speak” (Derrida, 1967/1973a, p. 78). In this critique, Derrida
is referring us to an experience, but what he is trying to bring to
our attention can never be made present. More specifically, when I
speak to myself silently (i.e., when no vocalization occurs), it must
be the same me who is hearing as is speaking (this involves univoc-
ity). But my experience also reveals that it is not the same me who
is doing the hearing when I am speaking and vice versa. So it is not
the same me who is speaking as is hearing (this involves equivocity).
Thus, when I silently hear myself speak, there must be a gap, a blind
spot, that differentiates me into speaker and hearer yet allows me to
be both of these. As a blind spot within life, this gap is a “dead zone”
(Lawlor, 2006, p. 130) of sorts, a topic that I will return to later.
It is also clear from the preceding discussion that hearing one’s
own voice is fundamentally a temporal activity: The hearing repeats
the speaking, which has by then passed away (Derrida, 1967/1973a).
Thus, subjective presence is always already passing away. As
McQuillan (2001) describes it:
Consider, if I were to say “I exist here and now.” In uttering this

linguistic statement I am proposing that I am a real person who
exists in the present moment and articulate this present by affirm-

ing my existence here and now. However, due to the infinitesimally
small split in time between my thinking or saying the words “here
and now” and the actual moment to which they refer, the “here
and now” of my statement is not identical with the one I refer to.
The “here and now” I refer to is always already past by the time I
think about it, but I retain it as a regulatory principle by which I
understand my present existence. . . . For conceptual purposes, we
assume that the two “presents” are indeed the same. This becomes
a habitual mode of perception and we no longer give it a second
thought. . . . The desire for presence is merely the understandable
desire for stable and coherent origins. (p. 11)
Drawing on the earlier discussion of Speech and Phenomena

(Derrida, 1967/1973a), it can be seen that, in the earlier quote, this other
“me” (i.e., the actual moment of my existence that is being referred to
by the statement “I exist here and now”) is always already nonpresent
and therefore “dead” ontologically. It should be added that “dead,” as
used here, does not refer to the death of a person: This dying “has no
author” (Caputo, 1997, p. 83). Instead, death occurs in a different order,
namely, the ontological death inherent in temporal delay.
In terms of the presence/absence binary discussed earlier, rather
than an irreducible difference between both poles, there is originary
contamination (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1973a, 1967/1976), which undoes
the binary. In other words, there is an irreducible contamination of
“inside” (e.g., presence) and “outside” (e.g., absence), which involves
doubling (e.g., Derrida, 1967/1976, 1972/1981b). Also, it should be
emphasized that the nonpresence discussed earlier is not synony-
mous with absence (i.e., unlike absence, nonpresence is not in oppo-
sition to presence). Instead, nonpresence, which is yet another way
to refer to différance, always inhabits, or is internal to, presence.
Thus, nonpresence is always part of any thing’s identity (i.e., it is
always part of what a thing “is”), doubling and dividing that identity.
More generally, we could say that reality is always doubled between
presence and nonpresence.
Nonpresence or ontological death means that the subject is
marked by a kind of radical blindness, passivity, or powerlessness.
The power that we exercise in life, and that is manifested in lived
experience, is founded on a type of blindness, and this blindness

destabilizes all binaries, hierarchies, and limits. In terms of the unde-
cidability (e.g., Derrida, 1991/1995, 1994/1997) discussed earlier, this
blindness also destabilizes all decisions and evaluations. As Lawlor
(2007) notes:
In short, values cannot be properly posited or juxtaposed. Because

of this fundamental blindness, one cannot determine whether what
is looking at you is a remedy or a poison,7 a menace or a benefit, a
human or an animal. There is only uncertainty, which tests one and
makes one suffer. (p. 35)
We could extend the preceding quote by saying that we also can-

not determine if what is looking at us is theoretical or practical. In
other words, the concepts of theory and practice are no longer distin-
guishable (i.e., they have no essence). Fundamental blindness under-
mines our decision-making so that we suffer, but there is nothing
that we can do to remedy this blindness. No matter what we do, we
suffer. But an awareness of the blind spot in life itself, and the asso-
ciated suffering, encourages a kind of constant self-monitoring or
self-interrogation that is aimed at undoing various forms of binary
thinking and their hierarchies. Moreover, in terms of the earlier
deconstruction of the theory/practice binary, risking ourselves in the
empty space or gap between binary poles also encourages an open-
ness to new possibilities for inquiry. Or, as Lather (2007) puts it, a
“post-Enlightenment undecidability becomes not the last word, but
the first in making room for something else to come about” (p. 7).
As discussed earlier, there is certainly social, political, ethical,
and other value in thinking about theory as resistance, but in this
chapter, I have tried to show that, at its center, theory is also practice
(i.e., practical) and vice versa.8 Along with Derrida (e.g., 1967/1973a,
1967/1973b, 1967/1976), I see it as important to view the relationship
between binaries such as theory/practice not in terms of opposition
but in terms of a nonoppositional difference, which is différance. In
other words, instead of thinking of theory as separate and distinct
from practice (i.e., as its binary opposite), we should think both of
them together. And, more generally, we should try to live and think
with as little dichotomy as possible.
References
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Endnotes
1
A shorter version of this chapter was originally presented during an invited session titled
“Theory as Resistance” at the Fifteenth International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry.
2
It should be emphasized that non-Western cultures do not necessarily reduce life to more basic
parts and irreconcilable opposites. Instead, some of these cultures emphasize wholeness and
unity.
3
The term différance is sometimes referred to as a semi- or quasi-concept, but it is more accurately
viewed as a nonconcept. One way of articulating the reason for the latter status of the term is that
it “cannot function as the name of anything that can be thought of as ever [being] simply present”
(Kamuf, 1991, p. 5).
4
Deconstruction also involves this double movement, situating itself both inside and outside of
binary poles or categories.
5
For this reason, Derrida (1999/2000) refers to deconstruction as the impossible condition of
possibility of every opposition.
6
Aporia refers to a blockage, impasse, dead end, or unresolvable paradox or dilemma that arises
within modernist thought, and it requires one to decide between both poles of a binary. As
Malabou and Derrida (2004) explain, “The aporia is not synonymous with unproductivity or
acquiescence: indeed, it involves rather the matter of decision. To decide to take such and such
a direction, in and toward the future, cannot by definition obey the certainty of a calculable
program” (p. 251).
7
An undecidable is something that is incapable of conforming to either pole of a binary/dichotomy.
Pharmakon, understood as both cure and poison, is a famous undecidable that Derrida (e.g.,
1972/1981a) discussed extensively during his career.
8
I have referred here to theory rather than to the act of theorizing because there are practical
aspects to all social activities, which include theorizing.
Missing Voices 77
chapter seven
Missing Voices:
A Documentary Practice
About Parents’ and
Children’s Perspectives in
Inclusive Education
HANNE VANDENBUSSCHE,
ELISABETH DE SCHAUWER , ELLEN VERMEULEN,
INGE VAN DE PUT TE, AND GEERT VAN HOVE
The Voice of Parents and Children in Inclusive Education
I n 2016, the first two authors started working with a filmmaker,

the third author, to make a documentary about “Missing Voices”
(Allan, 2008) in inclusive education. We wanted to reveal the voices
of children with a disability and their parents from a disability stud-
ies perspective (e.g., Figure 1). Disability studies is an interdisciplin-
ary field of scholarship, critically examining the dynamic interplays
between disability and aspects of culture and society. It leans on
scholarly approaches from the humanities, humanistic/post human-
istic social sciences, and the arts (Gabel, 2005, p. 1). The choices that
were made to film (with filming as an artistic practice), and to film in
a specific way, are connected with the complexities that people with
disabilities face in order to belong.
It is also from this framework, the neglection of the voices of
children and their parents in inclusive education are questioned,
in practice as in research (Hodge & Runswick-Cole 2008). Several
studies (Adams, Harris, & Jones, 2016; Grove & Fisher, 1999; Hornby
& Witte, 2010) illustrate how important parental involvement is in
inclusive education. Grove and Fisher (1999) studied how the dis-
course of inclusion meshes with parents’ goals for their children and
the educational reality of the school setting. They offered a starting
point for understanding inclusion as a cultural product that par-
ents are not only introduced to but also wrestle with as they want
to meet their children’s educational goals. Parents appear to play
a central role in realizing inclusion for their children in the school
(Grove & Fisher, 1999). Clavering, Goodley, and McLaughlin (2006)
also stated that parents have sophisticated knowledge of their chil-
dren that they have built from a wealth of different resources and
experiences. According to Adams et al. (2016), teacher–parent col-
laboration leads to successful achievement of children in inclusive
classrooms. They state that differences between the parents and the
teachers can be helpful for setting common goals in education through
a creative process. In addition to studies illustrating the importance
Figure 1. Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn.

Missing Voices 79
of parent involvement to create more inclusion, several studies look

at the necessity to listen to the students themselves (e.g., Messiou,
2012; Messiou & Hope, 2015). We consider the voices of parents and
children as indispensable in the daily classroom practice but as often
neglected in the debates around inclusive education (Allan, 2008).
Flemish Context on Inclusive Education
In Flanders (Belgium), there is a challenge to create inclusive

education that is related to a long history of segregation (Network
of Experts in Social Sciences of Education, 2012). Belgium ratified
the UN Convention for People with Disabilities in 2009, as such
agreeing with the right of children to be included in the regular
school system at all levels (United Nations, 2006). The M-decree is
aimed at creating a more inclusive system by keeping children with
special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools. The idea of
inclusion has accumulated diverse meanings, thus generating both
narrow definitions (referring to the inclusion of disabled students)
and broad ones (referring to high-quality education for all students;
Armstrong, Armstrong, & Spandagou, 2011).
In Flanders, a narrow definition focusing on children with SEN
is being used. Although the purpose of the M-decree is to refer
fewer children with SEN to special education, this does not happen.
The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD)
has, therefore, expressed its concerns about the slow and limited
progress that Belgium has made regarding inclusive education.
The inclusion of students with SEN is a particular concern because
these students are often reported to experience difficulties in par-
ticipating fully in regular education (Bossaert, Colpin, Pijl, & Petry,
2013). The legal position of parents is also insecure. De Schauwer,
Van de Putte, and de Beco (2019) argue the involvement of families
is superficial, as parents are considered as people who do not know
about education and should simply be informed by schools. Parents
always have to defend their choice for inclusive education, not only
to teachers but also to several support workers.
Potential—Power to Teach All!
The film we discuss later in the chapter is embedded in a bigger

project called Potential (The Power to Teach All!). Potential (n.d.) is
an interuniversity research project in Flanders aiming to help teach-
ers develop more competences to create inclusive learning environ-
ments. The focus in the project lies in realizing more connected
collaboration in the school, on one hand, and recognizing and valu-
ing diversity as an enrichment, on the other. A professional devel-
opment program (PDP) to reach these competencies and objectives
has been developed. In this PDP, eight sessions were organized
in 2017–2018 in 18 primary schools and 10 secondary schools. In
every school, teacher teams (4–10 teachers) are following the PDP
in which they are supported by one or two coaches. Those coaches
are special needs coordinators or pedagogical counselors with the
assignment of supporting teachers in inclusive education. In the
eight sessions, the teachers work with their own learning questions
around diversity and collaborative practices in the school. From the
beginning on, they formulate their learning questions; during and
between the follow-up sessions, they experiment to learn and cre-
ate more inclusive education. In the fourth session, the documen-
tary on Missing Voices is shown to help the teachers to take the
perspective of parents and children in inclusive education. Our aim
in this fourth session is to gain insight into how teachers experience
inclusive education while looking at a lived story in motion and how
to work with parents and children in that process. After the film,
the coaches (pedagogical counselors or special needs coordinators)
supported the discussion of the teachers.
The Documentary Inclusief (Inclusion)
We chose for the medium film out of the conviction that an image
can give the opportunity to look with different eyes. The aim of work-
ing with film was to take the voice of the children and their parents
seriously and to understand the complexity of their lives. Moving
images are able to break often fixed conceptions of complex process
(Knowles & Cole, 2008).
Missing Voices 81
The realization took two years. The filmmaker and the other
authors worked together closely to find children and parents willing to
participate. Four situations were carefully chosen based on a variety
of stakeholders (child, parents, school, etc.), the practices of collab-
oration, and an intersectional approach of difference. The scenario
was based on reading on the perspectives of children and parents
and months of observations at home and in the classroom, close to
the families of the disabled child. The filmmaker wrote intensely on
the scenario, searching for important images to catch. In close dia-
logue with the other authors, the filmmaker (re)shaped the scenario
in detail time and again. They often sat together to look at what was
already in and what they felt was missing.
Figure 2.
Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn.
INT. BATHROOM. MORNING (Figure 2)

Irakli lies in a big bathtub. Mother washes her son with tender-
ness. “Look at me, Irakli.”
The boy looks in the camera and smiles. Mother washes his
fingers.
INT. CORRIDOR. MORNING

Mother and father carry their son, with the help of an elevator,
to his room to put on his clothes. Mother dries his hair. “First, I
dry your hair,” she says. Mother makes up his bed while father
handles the elevator.
The filming took off with Irakli, a 14-year-old boy, following his
inclusive education in a country town. He was in his sixth year of
primary school. Irakli is following his individually adapted curricu-
lum, which means that he has his own goals to accomplish concern-
ing his learning and participation in school. His mother explains
the difficulties they faced in finding a school willing to welcome
him. A boy with his severe motor and communicative difficulties can
easily be referred to a special school in the Flemish speaking part of
Belgium. The concept of reasonable accommodations is used as a
means to secure the rights of children with special needs in the reg-
ular schools1. The regular school has an obligation to inscribe, but
it can also dismantle his access when the accommodations it has to
make are considered disproportionate.
Formal choices in the filming were made, like a dogma. These
choices match and interact with the disability studies perspective of
the authors seamlessly.
• Filming as inclusively as possible. Every image is a
well-considered shot. The cameraman follows the
movements of the child, the height of the camera is
1 In Article 2, the UNCRPD defines “Reasonable accommodation” as “means necessary and

appropriate modification and adjustments not imposing a disproportionate or undue burden,
where needed in a particular case, to ensure to persons with disabilities the enjoyment or exer-
cise on an equal basis with others of all human rights and fundamental freedoms” (UN, 2006,
retrieved from https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-
persons-with-disabilities/article-2-definitions.html)
Missing Voices 83
at eye level of the child, and the filmmaker is always

aware of inclusion and exclusion processes. In Figure
3, we witness Irakli on his way to school, besides the
soft roaring sound of the car, we hear the intense and
almost lone silence. But once at school, the noise gets
loud, and he is surrounded by his classmates who see
him as an evident part of their classgroup. These move-
ments of getting “in” and “being part” always go together
with moments of difficult connection.
Figure 3. Source. Photo by Jonathan Wannyn
• The film is shot in black-and-white to reduce the differ-

ence between the classmates and the characters in the
different sequences. The attention on the screaming
colors of the classrooms is reduced. There is no focus
on labels; the central question is, who is the child?
• The film works with detailed and soft lighting to
emphasize the beauty of the children. Presuming com-
petence and humanness is a central element in all the
stories and a major concern of children and parents in
inclusive education.
• The filmmaker films, when possible, from the per-
spective of the children. The images show their
point of view, and the spectator sees what they see.

Frontal images are avoided; the children are not being
observed. The camera follows their daily lived experi-
ences through their eyes.
• It is shot on film because film is radical: limited and
concentrated. The filmmaker is looking for little inter-
actions and avoids explanations. How can spectators be
brought to the position of “What is it to be this child in
this situation?” Disability studies takes the insiders per-
spective central, listening to the voice of people whose
life it is about, is crucial (Goodley, 2011, p. 55). The choice
was made to move away from judging people’s choices.
It is not about being “for” or “against” inclusion. The
children do not want to explain what inclusive education
is, but just bring to life how it works.
INT. LIVING ROOM. MORNING (Figure 4)

We see the legs of the boy, strangely positioned. We hear the
father’s voice. “Come on, Irakli, turn around.” He swipes his one
leg over the other, with lots of effort. “How many times I have to
turn around?” he asks. Father says he has to be silent and work.
Irakli tries his best.
A next exercise: “Good, Irakli; now some more, until seven.”
Irakli says, “And now, stop.” His father holds him tightly and
helps him to get up.
“Good. Irakli.” His father walks him to the couch where Irakli
can sit. Irakli is falling on his side. “Come on, Irakli, please!”
Irakli: “Sorry.” Irakli’s voice: “My name means Heracles, but I
know I will never be Heracles. My father wants me to practice a
lot, but for me this is really hard.” (Figure 5)
The story of Irakli was shot and edited in January 2018. This piece
of documentary is used in the PDP of Potential to discuss how the
teacher teams could look through the eyes of the child and his parents
to realize more inclusive education.
Missing Voices 85
Figure 4. Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn

Aporia as a Theoretical Guide
“The possibility of impossibility . . . It is about a strange log-

ical figure of contradiction that would take the form of an antin-
omy or aporia, a problem of language or of a logic to be resolved”
(Derrida, 1993, p. 72). As stated earlier, we heard the reactions of
teacher teams from primary as well as secondary regular schools
in Flanders. The concept of “aporia” from Derrida (1993) became a
theoretical guide for listening to the discussions among the teach-
ers and in the teacher teams. What is at stake in this concept is the
“not knowing where to go” (Derrida, 1993, p. 12). Allan (2008) states
that inclusive education is a domain with a lot of aporias. These
double duties are generally experienced as absolute contradictions
compromising the teachers. As Allan (2008) notes, the experience
of the impossible is not just the opposite of the possible or something
that is inaccessible; what Derrida (1993) is speaking about is rather
a responsibility toward thinking where it is most inconceivable.
This requires effort and giving attention to feelings and thoughts
not easy to cope with. In what we say and what the teachers share,
they seem to speak in a contradictory way. The so-called conflict-
ing discourses are confusing. When following Derrida (1993), we
could look at the plurality of the speaking here. Some words and
language can “tremble in an unstable multiplicity as long as there
is no context to stop us” (Derrida, 1993, p. 9). We hear teachers say,
“This is unrealistic,” and “We cannot do this [anymore],” slipping
into general statements and not giving full attention to the context
and how this can work to open up new possibilities to realize more
inclusion. What is it that does not work? What is it that makes
including disabled children in regular education unrealistic? The
contextual approach of the film of Irakli makes some teachers
uncertain and confused. A lot of concerns, fears, and tensions that
need attention are addressed in their responses.
In what follows, we approach the discussions in an affirmative
and constructive way by connecting the idea of a pedagogy of discom-
fort to aporias. Zembylas (2015) discusses a pedagogy of discomfort
and its ethical implications. He argues a pedagogy of discomfort
is grounded in the assumption “that discomforting feelings are
Missing Voices 87
important in challenging dominant beliefs, social habits and nor-

mative practices that sustain social inequities” (Zembylas, 2015, p.
163). This creates openings for individual and social transforma-
tions. Zembylas draws on the ideas of Michel Foucault (1994), where
he writes on an ethic of discomfort that
Is never to consent to begin completely comfortable with one’s

own presuppositions. . . . To be very mindful that everything
one perceives is evident only against a familiar and little-known
horizon, that every certainty is sure only through the support of
a ground that is always unexplored. (Foucault, cited in Zembylas,
2015, p. 4)
In the unsettling of what the teachers see and experience, shifts

in conceptions, thinking, and acting can occur. We put the idea
of aporia to work by exploring how the story of Irakli moved the
teacher discussions.
Focus on the Piece of the Documentary on Irakli –

the Story of Him and His Family
The story of Irakli opens with his hard work before he goes to
school. We get to know his mother and his father, who are doing
everything they can to make their boy as resilient as possible. The
family came to Belgium from a former Soviet satellite state and
moved to Belgium to get more appropriate support for their two
disabled children. They want their sons to get all possible opportu-
nities, according to their abilities. They show us where they live, a
very modest, small house, with a lot of practice materials for Irakli.
We see the concerned and loving looks of his mother; we hear
her whispered praying; we hear the soft but persistent voice of his
father—devotion to their boy.
With his support worker and his father, the boy is brought to
school. In the classroom, Irakli participates by using his computer.
He cannot write with a pen, so he types everything (Figure 6). He gets
full support from his support worker, who is sitting next to him in the
classroom (Figure 7) and helps him with lunch, on the playground,
and so on.
Teacher: Next word: eigenaardig (extraordinary).

Class: Eigenaardig.
They write it down; Irakli is typing on his computer.
Teacher: Next word: vijand (enemy).
Class: Vijand.
Again, the class is writing it down; Irakli is typing, very slowly;
we see he is still writing the first dictated word.
Teacher: And now a sentence: De operatie is geslaagd (The oper-
ation has succeeded).
Irakli is doing as fast as he can, his one-finger typing of every
letter of every word, the doubt: geslaagt or geslaagd. His support
worker whispers, “Think hard.” He chooses the wrong one.
Figure 6 Figure 7
Source. Photos by Jonathan Wannyn
Irakli takes part in several courses. When school is out, the other
pupils say goodbye. Irakli’s father is picking him up. While Irakli’s
father is waiting for him, he talks about how he did an experiment
the other day. He was hiding from Irakli to see how he would react
if his father was not around as he normally would be.
“Irakli showed me a strength I did not see before. He just went
home on his own.”
Back home, Irakli is working at the computer while standing
up. His mother is on the phone in the same room. She’s calling
a person, Elisabeth, who has been supporting them for a long
time. His mother is expressing her concerns.
Missing Voices 89
Mother: Elisabeth, we will need your help again. We will need

your guidance and other pedagogical support (Figure 8). Irakli
is going to secondary school next year. I would really like him to
stay in his class where he is well accepted. We want to keep him
in the regular school as long as possible, of course. The head of
the secondary school never had a child with a disability in his
school before. You know it has been difficult before.
In this 20-minute sequence, we start to feel the longings and fears,

the hard work, and the joyful moments that Irakli and his family are
sharing.
Bricolage as a Methodology of
How Teachers Work With Irakli’s Story
For this research, we work with schools participating in the

research project Potential. In seven schools (two secondary and five
primary schools), we recorded the fourth session when the docu-
mentary was shown, as such making it possible to learn how the
film was received. We analyzed the fourth session of these seven
teacher teams (each took approximately 2.5 hours) during which
the documentary is debated with the teachers.
To analyze the sessions of the seven schools, the first author

started to transcribe them. After several readings by the first author
and reflecting with the other authors, we came to some central
recurring ideas and statements. We started bringing those together
and pulling them apart. We confronted elements for the different
teacher teams with each other. Which patterns kept returning? A
process of bricolage commenced and endured through the practice
of writing. Denzin and Lincoln (1998) define narrative bricolage
as a method to do qualitative research: “a pieced together, close-
knit set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a con-
crete situation” (p. 5). We draw on the methodological approach
Metz (2018) and Kincheloe and Berry (2004) describe. Kincheloe
and Berry (2004) pose that a bricolage is subversive, accepting
that human experience is marked by uncertainties where order
is not that easily established. We thus try to avoid a reductionist
form of researching and not disconnect and fragment our view of
the world and the social-historical-political processes going on. We
put the concept of “aporia” to work by plugging it into the discus-
sions (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013). We draw on Julie Allan’s (2008)
exploration of Derrida and his own work to make it vivid in this
context of inclusive learning environments: parts of thinking with
Derrida, parts of our practice and thinking around the Missing
Voices of children and parents, parts of the documentary filmed by
Ellen Vermeulen, our conversations together around the choices in
film, the conversations of the teachers and their strong responses,
and the writing together in which a filmish perspective was brought
into contact with a disability studies perspective. These elements
were woven into each other and clung together. This brought the
authors to the analysis of the sessions with the teacher teams who
watched the film from Irakli’s perspective and his family. This
involves a great deal of self-reflexivity from the researchers where
images, as well as words and thoughts to explore the problem, are
stitched together (Metz, 2018). This also means that our own values
and historiographical notions are entangled in the analysis that fol-
lows. As Metz (2018) states, while using this method, the researcher
has to “do” something; this implies a beginning and a conversation.
From our disability studies focus, we try to capture multiple layers of
Missing Voices 91
discourses, voices, and experiences, which we study more in-depth in

the following. We share the constant search for inclusion and exclu-
sion of the teachers and our noticing how teachers get trapped in
conflicting discourses on normality and ethics.
Discussion of the Teacher Teams—

Figuring Out What We Can Learn
In what follows, we want to look into the main discussion issues

that were raised. We experience the difficulties of teachers doubt-
ing their capabilities to teach children with disabilities in their reg-
ular classrooms. Their capacities as teachers are deeply intertwined
with doubting Irakli’s learning potential. Confronted with the vul-
nerability of his body, teachers think Irakli has no potential to learn.
His severe physical and communicative needs are considered bar-
riers to his learning. Some teachers also presume that he is lacking
intellectual competencies. A lot of teachers question the presence of
Irakli in the regular class, even though his longing to be there and
to learn and participate is perceived as very authentic.
Slowness and/in/of Speed

A first, often recurring comment in all the teacher teams, and

thus, in several schools, concerns Irakli’s slowness. Irakli is typing
on his computer, very conscientiously using one finger to go from
this to that letter. The teacher at first forgets to consider that he
has to wait for Irakli. When dictating the sentences, he pauses. The
class waits. In this waiting, the teacher and the class are aware of
Irakli’s needs and participation. While watching this scene, a cer-
tain uncomfortable feeling arises. This reminds the viewer of an
ethics of discomfort (Foucault, cited in Zembylas, 2015). Irakli’s liv-
ing through time appears to contradict the stress and hurry every
teacher experiences in his or her job. Is it wasting time? Is it losing
time? Is it playing in a creative sense with time? The teachers use
time in many ways: giving time, needing time, asking time, wasting
time, losing time, Irakli’s waiting, the father’s waiting, the class’s
and teacher’s waiting.
Irakli’s being “in time” has an impact on class management.
Through the teachers’ discussions, a great need to get more time,
not just for Irakli but also for themselves, is raised. The teachers are
confronted with the way “ableist time” (Inspiration & Co., 2014) is
dominating their way of working, and they feel like time is catching
up on them. Titchkosky (2011) states that there are many senses of
time. There are many ways to refer to time and many ways to “do
time.” She argues for a more reflective conception of time.
Irakli can teach the teacher teams encountering his lived expe-
riences new ways of understanding. Thinking about his pace made
teachers reflect about special moments where they created time
for a child, with a child, and for themselves. A teacher said, “It was
when I went to the swimming pool with one of the pupils I started
to talk with the child and this was special. I feel like in these little
moments there is really time to listen.” It is not just about “hearing.”
The teachers are unfolding moments of emergent listening (Davies,
2014); time is then experienced in duration (Bergson, 1907); it opens
a space where we listen with a fullness we tend to forget when
haste is overwhelmingly blocking this attending. One of the teach-
ers stated that there is a lot of capacity and capabilities to grow in
teaching, but a lack of time withholds them from developing or
exposing these capabilities.
Missing Voices 93
Another teacher argued that he does not see a big problem in

the story of Irakli. According to him, Irakli’s teacher does not have
a lot to change in how he organizes his teaching. Irakli looks very
disabled, but he is supported intensely, and he is clever enough to fol-
low the lessons. Giving time, in his account, does not seem intrusive
for teaching. In contrast, others see Irakli’s slowness as “the impos-
sibility.” It makes doing their work as a teacher impossible; too much
care is involved, and they will not be able to give added value as his
teacher. Irakli needs a teacher who is an expert in his problems and
who can make time for him individually all the time. It makes us
wonder: What is this possible impossibility (Derrida, 1993)? Could
using time to feel and listen be a key for working in relationality, as
such experiencing time differently? Maybe, lessons from slow move-
ments can be learned to help teachers experiencing time in another
way (Ulmer, 2017)? In parts of the teachers’ stories, we read a desire to
control time, to suppress time, a desire to regulate and manage every-
thing on our path: who is in your class and how, the events in teaching,
while teaching, the speed of children, the colleagues, the class organi-
zation, and so on. They express a longing for predictability. By looking
into working with slowness and drawing on philosophy, we want to
shift away from this suffocating thinking.
Opening/Closing Access

Teachers from every school discussed the legitimacy of Irakli’s

presence in the regular school. Teachers think Irakli would be better
off in special education. This belief that Irakli should be in special
education troubles their minds and affects how they look at him.
His deficits are dominant and receive master status in what Irakli
needs in education. They question Irakli’s place in a regular school.
“I think Irakli should go to special education. We would refer him
to such a school.” “For the parents, it would be better if he would
be in special education. Letting him attend a regular school is very
demanding for them.” “I don’t know if he has ever been invited to a
birthday party, but I can tell you, it will be zero.” “Sometimes we invest
a lot in children; they ask us so much of our time, while they just
don’t belong here.” The “not belonging” of some children in regular
education is connected not only to the difference of the child, to the
support needs, but also to the competencies the teachers address
to their selves. Teachers talk repeatedly about “place.” What is the
“right place” of a child? A lot of teachers put all their trust in special
education and are convinced the expertise to “teach these children”
is much higher there. How children with disabilities are and stay
“essentially excludable” (Titchkosky, 2011) is striking.
The teachers conceive many barriers to learning; a lot of teach-
ers already defined striated conditions (e.g., being able to walk, to
talk, to think, to work with your hands, to understand, to follow the
pace, to be independent, etc.; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). The teach-
ers “know” who can be the “inhabitants” of regular classrooms; the
teachers “know” they are “at home.” Irakli is a strange arrivant2
then, making his (teacher) host wonder whether that school could
be his home. Derrida does not consider the arrivant as someone or
something in particular. The arrivant does not have any identity
yet; its place of arrival is deidentified (Derrida, 1993, p. 34). This is
rather confusing for the people watching the film. The teachers are
getting to know Irakli through following him with his parents, in
his school, and together with his support worker. This is difficult;
2
In Le Monde, Derrida explains what he means with the “arrivant,” a specific term he intro-
duces: “Pure hospitality consists in welcoming the arrivant, the one who arrives, before laying
down any conditions, before knowing or asking anything of him, whether this be a name or a
piece of identification” (Derrida, 1997 in Naas, 2005, p. 8, italics in original).
Missing Voices 95
Irakli seems to be “at home” in his rural school in the countryside,

but what does this mean in the schools of the teachers watching the
film? This implies an introduction of a new border, a new stopping
by the teachers. They build strong arguments about why it is not
possible in their schools. One of the strongest arguments is physical
accessibility: “Irakli cannot get in our school, the only place acces-
sible is the playground.” “It is not possible to enter the school with
a wheelchair.” The attitudinal and structural barriers behind this
thinking are rarely attended to in the reflections of the teachers.
Only some individual teachers go there and question their routine
practices of excluding disabled children.
(Non)Passing Borders
Teachers see Irakli as in need of more care. Throughout the film,
they recognize his capability of learning. This makes them doubt.
Can Irakli access a regular school? Does he seem clever enough?
He understands several languages, and the teachers recognize his
spelling mistakes as appropriate for his level of schooling in the
sixth grade of primary school. So what borders could be legitimizing
his presence, or where do we go a bridge too far?
The teachers could not always give him access in their minds
with openness and fully believe in his abilities. “Irakli is living in an
air bubble; it will explode and then he will see and know his inclu-
sion in society is a dream.” “Irakli might be clever, but even if he
would study law, he would still need so much care.”
Some teachers judge Irakli’s capabilities while looking at his par-
ents. The parents overestimate his capacities. Coming from abroad,
they do not have enough information about what is the best solu-
tion for their son. The teachers state they were surprised to hear
Irakli speak. His intelligence seems incompatible with his severely
impaired body and difficult, comprehensible speech. The teachers
keep disability as an individual matter; it is situated in Irakli’s body,
and the teachers do not show insight into the social constructed-
ness of disability/ normality. There is a need for teachers to connect
more with role models, people with disabilities showing their ways
of living in a society where accessibility is challenging in many ways.
In Titchkosky (2011), we witness the processes of how some people

are imagined as “in” and other people as “out.” It is troubling and
confusing when we shake these fixed conceptions. Could it be that
not recognizing this normalizing and hegemonic thinking is para-
lyzing teachers’ imaginations? Disability is more than an embodied
individual issue; it is a complex set of meanings located in cultural
processes, “a barrier to accessing a collective desire to form new
relations between who people are and where they find themselves”
(Titchkosky, 2011, p. 48). Inclusive education is about social justice
(Allan, 2008). How difficult this is for some of the teachers discuss-
ing the film is striking. We only think of disability on a personal,
individual level; we do not look at disability as a contextual arrange-
ment among an individual, the material context, the other pupils,
the teacher, the support workers, the material context, the curric-
ulum, and reasonable accommodations to participate. We witness
this complexity in Figures 9, 10, and 11 where we follow Irakli in
school, but also at home, resting in cushions after a long day in his
wheelchair, with his father handling the elevator for helping him
to go to bed. Thinking in this multiconnected way opens possibili-
ties instead of putting children with special educational needs in the
corner of the extra burden and heavy workload. It forces us to think
in terms of collective reassembling of what is happening in a class-
room among all stakeholders instead of feeling individually respon-
sible for the learning processes of the children as the class teacher.
The judgments and dominant interpretations in a determined
direction are powerful forces. It is not by watching the film one time
and discussing it in group that all practices, thinking, and beliefs
in how disabled children are treated in Flemish education will be
transformed fundamentally. Some teachers do bring in other ways
of looking at these children; some do see their shared responsibility
in making the children feel belonging in the school and giving them
opportunities to learn. Other teachers continue to search for which
children inclusion should be an option and how to clearly demar-
cate the borders for others (children with intellectual disability,
children with behavioral problems, etc.). Also here, we let Derrida
(1993) guide us. He states:
Missing Voices 97
Endekhomāi means to take upon oneself, in oneself, at home, with

oneself, to receive, welcome, accept, and admit something other
than oneself, the other than oneself. . . . It is indeed a question of
admitting, accepting, and inviting. But let us not forget that in the
passive or impersonal sense (endekhetāi), the same verb names
that which is acceptable, admissible, permitted, and, more gen-
erally, possible, the contrary of the “it is not permitted,” “it is not
necessary to,” “it is necessary not to,” “it is not possible” (e.g., to
cross the “limits of truth”). Endekhomenos means: “insofar as it is
possible.” (Derrida, 1993, p. 11)
The phrase “insofar as it is possible” is exactly what the mother

of Irakli says when phoning Elisabeth: “We want to keep him in reg-
ular education, as long as it is possible, of course . . .” But what does
this mean? What would make him be there and learning with his
peers impossible? So where is the “nonpassage”? One of the teachers
interprets this sentence of the mother as “proof ” that the mother
understands Irakli’s presence is unsure and that schools will have to
say “stop” at a certain moment. The teachers question the position
of the parents and the dependence of Irakli and his parents on the
goodwill and power of the regular school deciding to welcome him
or not. Some teachers think about the long negotiations between
the parents and the school to get Irakli in. They imagine themselves
in the shoes of the mother and father, searching and encountering
a lot of the difficulties along the road. They also could see why Irakli
and his parents wanted him to attend a regular school. “They want
the best for their child.” The same teacher, however, says, “I don’t
see how he could be here in our school; I would not dare to tell my
colleagues he is coming.” And the same teacher utters, “We should
stop to see this as an individual responsibility. Looking [at] how
Irakli can participate in our school is a team matter.” Some teach-
ers come closer to multiple perspectivism; others find reflecting less
from their point of view as a teacher who knows best where children
should be educated difficult.
Status of Normality:
Education to Becoming Human/Fitting the Norm
The questions about belonging in regular education also open the

discussion around the finality of education. Some teachers think of
education as a place where people meet and become “human.” It is
not all about learning mathematics and languages. So what does this
mean for what is expected from teachers? Biesta refers to a composite
answer when talking about “good education,” with a need to focus
on three functions of education: qualification (knowledge, skills, and
understanding, often dispositions and forms of judgments to “do”
something), socialization (the many ways in which we become mem-
bers of and part of particular social, cultural, and political orders), and
subjectification (ways of being that hint at independence from the
requirements following the socialization function) (Biesta, 2009).
Also in this regard, Simons and Masschelein (2017) discuss several
perspectives on education. In talking about the pupil as the Other,
they consider the pedagogical relationship as always intersubjective
or interpersonal. In this ethical-pedagogical perspective, they refer
to the humanization of pupils and teachers where human responsi-
bility, ethical doing, and relationality are central. Every teacher needs
to address or be trained as a general and special educator. Every
teacher needs some expertise on labels to be able to invest in more
participation for each child and to take away barriers to his or her
learning. This is not the same as handing children over to disabil-
ity experts and therapists who are supposed to treat, resolve, and
rehabilitate the differences for the teacher.
In this theme of normalization and fitting and the idea of a
“good” autonomous and independent citizen, we also want to
give attention to the role of the support worker. The presence of
this woman supporting Irakli on his way to school, in school, and
bringing him back home scares a lot of teachers. On one hand, her
presence is a stressor because there is an extra person in the class
witnessing what the teacher is doing. On the other hand, she is
named as a necessary condition for being able to work with a child
such as Irakli. It would be impossible without her. Her presence
also brings judgment about how she takes up her role. She is very
Missing Voices 99
close to Irakli; some teachers wonder: “Isn’t she interfering in the

relationship between the teacher and Irakli?” “Why would he get
support and not other children?” The shift in recognizing relation-
ality and interdependency (Reindal, 1999; Van Hove & Roets, 2000,
p. 46) in working in an inclusive learning environment is crucial to
the change teachers need to handle. This is not evident for a lot of
teachers, and it requires a big mind shift to imagine their classroom
as a social and relational space with a multiplicity of connections,
not only among education professionals but also among children.
Several aporias came up:
How can teachers experience “slow” educational practices

and still have the feeling they get done what is expected
from them?
How can teachers adjust their pace to the ability of each
child and still achieve appropriate standards for all children
in their group?
How can teachers be uncertain about their abilities to teach
disabled children and still be open-minded enough to try
to give each child a chance to develop his or her learning
potential?
How can teachers be challenged by Irakli’s story to think
and transform their daily practices in the classroom and
still realize how strongly the daily assumptions on segrega-
tion and deficit thinking around disability are ingrained in
our education system?
How can we let difference exist in all its complexity and still
be focused on participation and belonging of all children in
the classroom?
How can the support worker be present and do his or
her work and still have teachers feel in full control of the
learning processes of every pupil in their class?
How can we be uncertain about inclusion processes and
still manage to proceed to build on inclusive education at
all levels?
(In)Conclusive Ideas
In the discussions, teachers confront us with several double move-

ments. In one movement, a lot of them question inclusive education,
doubting the value it adds and doubting their own experiences and
their capacities to teach children with a disability. In another move-
ment, we hear a different discourse of transformation and change
slipping in now and then. According to some teachers, the film is a
beautiful example of how inclusion becomes possible, and it shows
how unrealistic inclusion is. The possible and impossible go hand
in hand; they are not opposites. “Aporias” (Derrida, 1993) help us to
blur these binaries and polarities, to see the double movement of the
possible and impossible as co-existing. It makes us think about how
inclusion can be a process where a final and definite outcome is not
possible. We will always continue to be confronted with new chal-
lenges in supporting the children we work with and in the learning
environments we work in. These aporias do not need to be solved. In
the aporias, we can find ways not only to work through inclusion by
listening to the child and the other pupils, the parents, colleagues, the
head of school, and pedagogical counselors but also to see the close
Missing Voices 101
connection with the environment, the class organization, the play-

ground, the curriculum, and so forth. It is working in and through
these meshworks that new oxygen is given, helping us stop excluding
the excludable other. Hence, we are looking for a mastery of uncer-
tainty no longer questioning Irakli’s “place” but are searching for
ways to make him belong and participate fully (Vandenbussche & De
Schauwer, 2018). In our aspiration, we hope to keep heading toward
a shift from questioning inclusion as such to exploring and imagining
how inclusion works in all its complexity and challenges.
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Lazy Pedagogy 105
chapter eight
Lazy Pedagogy
RYAN EVELY GILDERSLEEVE
T ime and labor are two sides of the same coin in the neoliberal
condition. Each promises and reneges emancipatory principles,
and through such circuitry, fashions Homo economicus in servitude
to the economy. Scholars in the neoliberal academy face the false
promises of the time/labor circuit at increasingly stronger velocities
of production. As academe’s knowledge imperative becomes ever
more ensnared in the economic lines of flight produced through the
neoliberal regime, pedagogy begins to mirror the time/labor circuit,
normalizing the truncated notions of time that beget ever frenzied
labor. Such a frenzy often allows for the radical instrumentation of
pedagogy in the scholarship of research and teaching. Scholarship
becomes a tool for efficiency and production in neoliberal academia,
conflating economic measures of productivity with quality and gen-
erative potential. To combat the extraordinary yet seemingly ordi-
nary efficiencies unfolding from the frenzied instrumentation of
scholarship, I propose an ontological shift in academics’ relationship
to them—one founded on laziness rather than work.
I am trying to put laziness to work, ironically so, in the hope of gen-
erating a lazy pedagogy as resistance to our contemporary conditions
of knowledge production in academia.
As a departure point, I acknowledge the neoliberal condition of
academe as the normative condition of academic practice, at least
in North America. Analyzed through Thomas Nail’s (2018) ontology
of motion, I put forward a reading of the contemporary knowledge
imperative as it takes shape in the teaching and learning practices of
scholarship and as embedded within the neoliberal condition of aca-
deme. I then review a few lazy postures toward the work imperative
of scholarship and ultimately provide a framework for lazy pedagogy

that might reorient scholarship toward life, living, and creating.
On the Knowledge Imperative of Academe and Academic Work
Put simply, the knowledge imperative of academe is the cen-

tral and foundational role of the university as a social institution
(Gildersleeve, 2016). It signifies our responsibility to produce, share,
and engage academic knowledge for the benefit of society. This
includes
• knowledge built from teaching and learning practice,
• knowledge built from research and creative expression
practice, and
• knowledge built from service and outreach practice.
This knowledge imperative gave rise to knowledge workers as a
socioeconomic regime—a class of labor—with the academic knowl-
edge necessary to inform and reflexively engage with the everyday
demands of becoming more fully human in a more-than-human
environment. It is a massive responsibility.
In the early part of the 20th century, scholars in the United States
organized around a few key principles that should guide how knowl-
edge workers, as a class of labor, should be regarded, as well as how
the universities and colleges that employ them should protect their
knowledge-building work. The notion of academic freedom and the
concept of tenure were born of this movement with the establish-
ment of the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP’s)
statements on academic freedom in 1940. Under these statements,
the pursuit of academic knowledge became work that was recognized
and protected for its role in contemporary society. These early efforts
by the AAUP were built on broader labor movements in the industri-
alized West that was wrestling with how to ensure that everyone who
wanted to had a right to work.
Lazy Pedagogy 107
On Laziness and the Refusal of Work
Capitalist critic and socialist revolutionary Paul Lefargue (1907/

2013) wrote from Saint Pélagie Prison that “the Right to Work which
is but the right to misery” (p. 56), contending that if we were only to
work less and enjoy leisure more, “the old earth, trembling with joy
would feel a new universe leaping within her” (p. 56). Lefargue’s 1883
essay, “The Right to be Lazy,” was a refutation of the right to work,
arguing that centering labor reinscribed the cartographies of slavery
and servitude from which previous revolutions sought to emancipate
people. Labor did not create freedom but, rather, ensnared workers
into the capitalist machine, subordinating them to the terms of pro-
duction and consumption. Lefargue (2013) argued that laziness should
be the centerpiece of revolution, not just in the sense of seeking leisure
time for a more balanced life but, rather, that lazy activities also beget
a higher quality of life for all.
Lefargue (2013) recognized that the elite classes always centered
laziness in their lives. Work for elites was optional, a hobby, or occu-
pied so little time that it was inconsequential to their constitution
as a subject. This last point is one that Lefargue took most seriously,
pointing out that centering labor in emancipatory politics emplaced
personhood within the terms of capital, whereas centering lazi-
ness emplaced personhood within the terms of leisure, including
family, recreation, the arts, and the enjoyment of—perhaps even
enjoinment with—nature. For Lefargue (2013), emancipation from
serfdom, from slavery, from the overlords, needed to be focused on,
expanding human potential to engage in lazy activity rather than a
conscription to labor. Labor should only be engaged inasmuch as is
necessary for humankind to enjoy becoming human in a dynamic
assemblage with nature, the arts, recreation, family, and the ability
to do nothing.
Twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp avoided work as much
as possible. He explored such a theme and other critiques of capi-
talism throughout his oeuvre but prominently through his works on
the “readymades.” The readymades were items such as prefabricated
shovels, brooms, dustpans, and so on. By submitting them as art,
Duchamp demonstrated how all dimensions of life were becoming
defined by work. For even the technological innovations meant to

free time from overly time-consuming tasks (e.g., dusting) were use-
ful only when the time saved allowed for more labor to be performed.
There was no relation between freed time and leisure or pleasure.
Effectively, time and work entrench within one another in producing
a human subject unknowable through leisure or pleasure.
In Duchamp’s studio, he arranged the readymades upside down,
some literally hanging from the ceiling. According to Molesworth
(1998), “the lack of a hard-and-fast divide between work and lei-
sure is emphasized by these images of functional maintenance
objects—objects designed to aid in the cleaning and tidying up of
places and people—rendered deliberately dysfunctional” (p. 52). In
a spit of irony, Duchamp draws attention to the dysfunction of tech-
nological innovation in relation to the quality of human life. The
readymades did not engender a better quality of life but, rather,
reenforced the commodification of life into economic portions of
work. As an analysis of art itself, Molesworth (1998) shared that
“arguably, the readymade has done more to reorganize aesthetic
categories than any other twentieth-century art practice. One of
its many ramifications was a disavowal of an ontological definition
of art” (p. 51). Duchamp’s lazy aesthetic, nefariously rendered via
the readymades, challenged the commodification of art and the
enterprising artist.
To confront the neoliberal condition of contemporary being,
Maurizio Lazzarato (2015) argues for the refusal of work. In
Lazzarato’s (2015) analysis, neoliberalism has exacerbated the
equation that work equals life to such extremes that our only hope
for dismantling the neoliberal regime lies in our refusal to accept
(and enable) its terms of subjectivation. Those terms, according
to Lazzarato (2015), rely on our indebtedness to the economy, an
indebtedness that requires valorization for the modern state to
secure itself as necessary and good. According to Lazzarato (2015),
“We must recapture these conditions, arrest valorization, desert
the flux of communication/consumption/production, and in this
way recover equality, the basis of political organization” (p. 245).
The refusal of work is a refutation of the neoliberal imperative to
construct selves and others in strictly economic measures.
Lazy Pedagogy 109
Money is but one expression of economic measure. The lines

counted on a curriculum vitae for promotion and tenure are another
(see Gildersleeve, 2016). The rapid-fire and ever-accelerating pace
of academic production (i.e., more journal articles, more grants,
more technology-transfer initiatives) illustrates the stranglehold
that neoliberalism has taken over researchers’ sense of time (see
Ulmer, 2017). Lazzarato (2015) argues a counter posture, to be found
in laziness:
In order for subjectivation to emerge, we do not need to accelerate,

but to slow down. We need “time,” but a time of rupture, a time that
arrests the “general mobilization,” a time that suspends apparatuses
of exploitation and domination—an “idle time.” (p. 246)
Here, Lazzarato’s refusal of work echoes some themes from

the slow scholarship movement championed by Berg and Seeber
(2016), as well as Ulmer (2017) and others, arguing that the com-
pression of time needs to be reversed. Lazzarato’s “idle time” echoes
with ways that slow scholars seek to enact timelessness. Yet most
slow scholars are quick to point out that they are not lazy. Slow is a
negotiation of time, a tactic for engaging the new normal (i.e., neo-
liberalism) of an academe focused on production. For slow scholars,
lazy remains relegated to a moral undertaking. In slow terms, lazy
is lethargy. However, against the normative and populist render-
ings of what it might mean to be lazy, as a refusal of work, laziness
becomes generative in Lazzarato’s configuration.
Across LeFargue, Duchamp, and Lazzarato, recognizing that
lazy is not lethargy is important. Furthermore, lazy is not neces-
sarily slow. Laziness is political (à la Lefargue) and aesthetic (à
la Duchamp). Laziness is an ontological project, whereas slow is
tactical and pragmatic, operating axiologically.
To champion lazy pedagogy then is not simply to slow our
teaching and learning processes. A lazy pedagogy is ontologically
disruptive to how we understand the affect of pedagogy—that which
our pedagogy ontologically produces—the realities made knowable
through academe’s knowledge imperative. Speed really might have
nothing to do with it. Laziness is the arresting of the materialist
machine that produces scholars as workers. Laziness flips the right
to work on its head and instead insists on the right to be lazy—a

right to leisure, a right to live, to life, to zoe.
An Ontology of Motion and the Kinopolitics of Academe
As mentioned earlier, I take the neoliberal condition of contem-

porary academia as a departure point for thinking-doing lazy ped-
agogy as resistance. But the tired wailings of academics belying the
contemporary condition is insufficient for building a lazy pedagogy
that might somehow resist the trappings of neoliberal higher edu-
cation. Put plainly, plenty of other scholars have documented the
characteristics of neoliberal higher education (Slaughter & Leslie,
1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Shumar, 1997). Plenty more have
illustrated how these characteristics might imperil the knowledge
imperative of academe (Kuntz, 2015; Metcalfe, 2010; Saunders, 2014).
Suffice it to say, neoliberal higher education is the normative con-
dition of contemporary academe. And that condition is generally
considered to be dangerous for the pursuit of knowledge. Rather
than rehash these arguments, I hope it will be more fruitful to
explain the affective consequences of neoliberal higher education
in the knowledge imperative, with a focus on teaching and learning
processes. I draw from Thomas Nail’s (2018) philosophy of move-
ment and ontology of motion to provide such an explanation. Such
a framework provides an opportunity for intervention absent the
traditional critical examinations of neoliberal higher education. For
building tools of resistance, à la the thematics of this edited volume,
I find Nail’s philosophy especially fruitful.
To put movement and motion into the broadest context, I think
recognizing that we have more migrants on the planet today than at
any other time in human history is important. We transport more
things longer distances with greater multitude of technologies than
ever before. The movement of people and things has become so
important to our historical reality today that we wage wars—wars
over the movement of things (e.g., trade wars) as well as wars over
the movement of people (e.g., the Syrian refugee crisis). We are part
of a historical era in which motion, movement, and mobility increas-
ingly define human activity. The kinetic nature of contemporary
Lazy Pedagogy 111
events therefore requires a historical ontology that recognizes the

primacy of motion (Nail, 2018).
Movement is not reducible to space and time. The new mobili-
ties turning in the social sciences, championed by Sheller and Urry
(2006), recognize that there is nothing that is not or has not been in
motion. Nail’s (2018) ontology of motion builds on historical precur-
sors of Lucretius, Marx, and Bergson and works to demonstrate the
affective consequences of motion in the more-than-human condi-
tion. Although an ontology of motion shares influences from process
ontologies in that each emphasizes flux and becoming, an ontology
of motion is strictly interested in the flux of matter, not space, force,
or time. In a movement-centered ontology, force, space, and time
do not transcend matter in motion. They are dimensions of reality
but irreducibly material kinetic dimensions.
To further differentiate the ontology of motion from the increas-
ingly popular process ontologies and ontologies of becoming, Nail
(2018) provides a critique of Whitehead and Deleuze via motion,
matter, and history. Ultimately, he claims that process ontology and
becoming fit very much in an Einsteinian paradigm where the uni-
verse is absolutely static but internally and spatiotemporally dynamic:
immobile but creative and becoming—a motionless voyage.
Our contemporary condition simply does not allow that.
Thus, an ontology of motion is a complete inversion of an ontology
of becoming, wherein:
All becoming is rendered fully material. Stasis becomes an eddy

or vortex of flows. Thought becomes a coordinated rhythm of self-
affective matters immanent to the bodies, brains, tools, and so
on that compose them. Ontology becomes historical, grounded in
the material conditions of its time. (Nail, 2018, p. 67)
The methodological primacy of motion therefore is a historical

ontological claim about becoming qua history.
Nail earlier demonstrated his ontology of motion as he was devel-
oping it from his thesis of kinopolitics—the politics of movement—
through which he examined migration and borders.
In his books Figure of the Migrant (2015) and Theory of the
Border (2016), Nail details various historical political developments
by documenting ways that Western societies emerged over time via

regimes of expansion by expulsion. Expansion by expulsion is a process
of strengthening political power by expelling those deemed unwanted
from the body politic. At different times in history, this expansion was
characterized by inward movement, outward movement, tensional
movement, and elastic movement.
Nail (2015) calls these regimes kinetic forces, each of which
positioned the migrant into a particular figuring, for example, the
vagabond who is a migrant who cannot seem to fit anywhere due to
the tensions of prevailing juridical regimes that make one illegal in
competing contexts. The figuring of the migrant—the undesired—
also was accompanied by a prevailing bordering technology, for
example, the cell, which is a border used primarily to entrap people
into predictably economized scales of human activity. Nail’s (2015)
kinopolitical project maps these movements onto kinetic forces and
then along with various migrant figurations, border technologies,
and pedetic (2015) (i.e., of the foot) strategies of resistance.
Recognizing that within a broader philosophy of motion, borders
are recognized as always in motion, never static, never fixed, and
never quite knowable is important. Nail (2016) comprehensively illus-
trates this in Theory of the Border, but such a comprehensive review
is beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice it to say, borders are a pro-
cess. They are in motion. The acts of bordering are used to control
movement and constrain human activity.
In cultivating and illustrating how a lazy pedagogy can engage
resistance in an effort to strengthen and perhaps redirect the knowl-
edge imperative toward life or zoe, I use Nail’s (2015, 2016, 2018)
concepts of tensional force, the border technology of the time cell,
and suggest a pedetic strategy of rebellion for actualizing a lazy
pedagogy.
Kinetic Force of Tensional Power

Expansion by expulsion using juridical domination creates a
social juggernaut through contradictory sets of laws or rules and
expectations. These contradictions can seem like a maze one needs
to navigate and negotiate and are hallmarks of academic institu-
tions. For example, consider the contradictory yet fully forcible rules
Lazy Pedagogy 113
of free speech, academic freedom, hate speech, and the zeitgeist that
require us to make sure no one is ever offended on campus. Many
campuses wrestle with progressive values around inclusion and lib-
eral values of free speech, generating challenges for administrators
and oftentimes constraining academics in how they engage difficult
and controversial topics in research, teaching, and outreach. Rules
designate certain areas of campus as “free speech zones,” and pro-
fessors are asked to include “trigger warnings” in the syllabus or
classroom instruction, yet academic freedom suggests that regulat-
ing how a faculty member builds knowledge is just as dangerous as
regulating what knowledge can be built. Students are “protected”
from offensive material yet not from everyday prejudicial abuses.
For example, campuses might choose to celebrate Native American
awareness events yet fail to replace a racist mascot that regularly
attends athletic events.
Tensional kinetic force uses juridical domination to expand social
power by expelling those who cannot navigate this contradictory and
complex overlay of rules. As the rules keep changing, the desired aca-
demic (and academic knowledge) keeps getting refined, and the unde-
sirable is expelled. Consider the adjunct faculty member expected to
be an expert instructor but cannot access basic resources, such as an
office to hold office hours. She might be expected to use state-of-the-
art instructional technology but cannot access the faculty reading
room in the university library. She is only included inasmuch as she
performs an economic function—instruction. She, as a knowledge
worker, is expelled, juridically and tensionally, from participating in
the knowledge-building regime of the university.
Bordering Technology of the Time Cell

The timetable controls movement by time. Time cells “bind and
direct movements through a system of cellular linkages; they func-
tion to bind cellular mobility into a border-time matrix that orches-
trates the tempo and rhythm of social circulation across and through
the borders of” teaching and learning (Nail, 2016, p. 200). Time itself
becomes a boundary. Examples of timetables in academia include
the following:
• The credit hour, which might be operationalized as 1:1

in class and 1:3 out of class, with a 10-minute exception
for travel time between classes
• The faculty member’s position responsibility statement,
which might be operationalized as 40% research, 40%
teaching, and 20% service, with no exceptions for travel
time
• The effort certification (aka the course buyout) for
external funding, which might be operationalized any
number of ways to manipulate the position respon-
sibility statement and realign the faculty member’s
timetable. Effort certification also does not allow any
exceptions for travel time.
These time cells constrain the knowledge-generating process and
enable an economic imperative to take hold of knowledge. One can
only produce knowledge through teaching in certain credit-bear-
ing increments, yet one must also cover the expected material in a
given course. A faculty member must generate knowledge across
three broad venues of knowledge production but only in certain (i.e.,
40/40/20) proportions, regardless of the time it might take for certain
knowledges to come into being. Thus, faculty must economize their
pedagogical engagements within proportional allotments, serving the
work of the university, first, and the imperative for knowledge, second.
The contemporary context of U.S. higher education requires that
course work contribute to useful skills and knowledge for careers.
Colleges and universities are expected to produce a population of
career-ready graduates, prepped and primed for the U.S economy. So
not only does the time cell function as a boundary marker of peda-
gogical knowledge production, but it also bounds the knowledge into
that which can be made useful for a career—it orients pedagogical
activity as work for work.
Pedetic Force of Rebellion

As a resistance strategy, to rebel is to lay claim in the face of
expulsion. It is an outright refusal of the state’s bordering technology
and kinetic force of tensional power through juridical domination.
Lazy Pedagogy 115
What can an academic refuse? If, as I theorize, the contemporary con-

dition of academia exerts tensional force through juridical domination
and uses, among others, bordering technologies such as the timetable
to fashion our pedagogical knowledge production into work for work,
then the answer is simple. We must engage in the refusal of work, as a
pedetic force of rebellion. We must enact a lazy pedagogy.
Lazy Pedagogy as Rebellion
Contemporary academe constrains the movement of knowledge

building, in part, via the bordering technology of the time cell, oper-
ationalized in academic timetables, such as the credit hour, the
position responsibility statement, and the course buyout (or effort
certification), all of which operate as timetables’ descendent of the
right to work and the subsequent labor movements’ legal (juridical)
advances in protecting capitalist workers. Academic timetables estab-
lish space-time borders that then come to define academic social
activities of teaching and learning and research and creative expres-
sion, as well as service and outreach. Academic timetables produce
circuit junctions that we recognize as the space/time of knowledge
building. These become the only moments wherein we can engage in
our knowledge-building practices, regardless of whatever space/time
the social circulation of learning might actually command. These
moments become the economy of our pedagogical opportunities.
Academic timetables produce an inescapable economic peda-
gogy, one that redirects all knowledge production toward the object
of work (juxtaposed to leisure, or life, or zoe). The credit hour, the
position responsibility statement, and the course buyout all func-
tion to direct knowledge in terms of work, career, and labor. The
timetable, in part, directs the motion of the knowledge imperative
to valorize knowledge production as work and toward work.
Rebellious pedagogies, then, must ontologically operate via
motion. To resist the reality of the timetable, we need a pedetic
pedagogy that redirects the knowledge imperative junction, chal-
lenging the borders of knowledge production instantiated by the
timetable that ultimately always direct our pedagogies toward
the object of work. We need a rebellious pedagogy that directs us
toward life, zoe, leisure (understood as the act of living). Rather,

we need a lazy pedagogy.
I dare not prescribe lazy practices in recommending a lazy peda-
gogy. Rather, having outlined the principles that underlie laziness—
(in)action directed toward life, zoe, leisure—I prefer to simply offer
some guiding questions for those who might want to engage lazi-
ness in their pedagogy. These questions are meant to be particularly
rebellious in their refusal of the timetable and their refusal of work in
pedagogical undertaking.
What might lazy pedagogy look like if knowledge production via
teaching and learning practice was built from leisure, nature, the
arts, and families?
What might lazy pedagogy look like if advising graduate students
emerged from shared leisure practices of reading and writing rather
than timed comprehensive examinations?
What might lazy pedagogy look like in (post)qualitative engage-
ments not tied to effort certification or course buyouts but, rather,
tied to the enjoyment of learning culturally within more-than-human
environments rather than about them?
How rebellious could that be? What kind of knowledge might be
produced through such a lazy pedagogy? What kind of lives could we
lead by engaging such zoe-infused knowledge? What kind of academe
could we move through?
Lazy Pedagogy 117
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Shumar, W. (1997). College for sale: A critique of the commodification of
higher education. New York. Routledge.
Slaughter, S. & Leslie, L. (1997). Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the
entrepreneurial university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Slaughter, S. & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new econ-
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Global Hegemony 119
chapter nine
Global Hegemony:
Unraveling Colonized Minds
and Indigenous Healing
TINA BLY
When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last
river poisoned, only then will the white man realize that one cannot
eat money.
—Native American proverb
Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus should
we do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.
—Black Elk
When I was a very little girl, I would watch my grandmother

braid her hair. I would sit across from her, and Grandmother would
sit on the side of her bed. She would part her hair down the middle
in the back and then pull each half of her hair over each shoulder;
I was in awe of how her hair was so long, that it flowed down over
the side of the bed. Grandmother would brush her hair and visit
with me, sharing stories. All the while, I sat mystified. First, she
would brush her long strands of silver, and without a mirror, she
would then braid each half of her hair along the side of her face and
then complete the long braid to the end. Because of the length of
her hair, it took considerable time, and this meant more time for
stories. In all its simplicity, there was something deeply spiritual
there, and I never missed a chance to be with Grandmother when
she tended her hair.
Having observed my grandmother in this way countless times,
I would often sit on a quilt under a big oak tree with my friends as
we took turns braiding one another’s long dark hair. As the wind
gently whispered sweet summer musings through the leaves, we
would share stories in the shade and giggle, making memories
never to be forgotten.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Kimmerer (2013) describes a
precious vision of little girls taking turns holding up the sections of
sweetgrass for the other so each may braid the glistening strands
of green blades. I mention Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013)
because this reading brings healing so that I may go back to the old
ways, seeing all the gifts the earth springs forth for us, gifts such as a
lush, green summer garden; a tinkling brook; walking upon a patch
of beautiful wildflowers; or taking in the Indian colors painting the
sky at sunset.
In this chapter, I consider some of the central tenets and local use
of postcolonial theory and how these tenets are a response to global
hegemony in academic institutional experiences. In particular, in
briefly addressing research methodologies and ways of engaging in
dialogue, I explain how some Indigenous responses in situations of
domination align with postcolonial theory and represent the action-
able pieces supported in Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Education,
authored by Vanessa Andreotti (2011).
I shall also make visible some of the Indigenous ways of know-
ing, being, and doing and how these ways align with postcolonial
theory. Because of recent intellectual interactions of ambivalence, I
could not help but hear Andreotti speaking to these circumstances,
and I make known how postcolonial theory applies there. Last, as
the chapter progresses, a healing is located that I had not antici-
pated, and that healing is represented from the beginning sentence,
culminating in the last. The terms Native American and Indian are
used interchangeably.
I had a long conversation with my daughter, Celeste, today as
we discussed some of these matters and how the idea of a civilized
society was so vastly different to Native American people as opposed
to the colonizers. What we discovered in our exchange of ideas was
based on the foundation that after coming here, systematically car-
rying out genocide, and destroying our ways of doing, knowing, and
being, the colonizers then went about the process of putting in place
Global Hegemony 121
a system of domination that we all contend with daily. This domina-

tion included the destruction of a collective way of life where greed,
individualism, profit, and money became more important than rela-
tionships or gifts from the earth. Now, in 2019, Western civilization
could do with taking in the lessons from the first colonizers to arrive
here who only survived because Indians were generous in sharing
their ways of being, living off the land.
Along these lines, our conversation turned to Greta Thunberg,
and we support her. But Greta is not saying anything that Indigenous
people have not been saying for generations. Standing Rock is only
one recent example where none of the powers that be could seem to
hear Indigenous voices. How is it that when a little White girl comes
along, suddenly everything makes sense, but when Indigenous peo-
ple cried out at Standing Rock, they were put in dog cages? We would
never go against Greta, but these questions remain. These kinds of
questions disrupt the dominant narrative and align with postcolonial
theory. As we learn from Andreotti (2011), this colonized system is
massive and has been created to psychologically manipulate, control,
and perpetuate the production of hegemonic knowledge.
And so it is with research in academic institutions, as well as
for new scholars pursuing advanced degrees, who are continually
offered traditional research methods courses (Smith, 2012). Many
of these methodologies perpetuate the erasure of history and identi-
ties, leaving no space for lived experiences, stories, music, poetry, or
art. A rigid curriculum that denies histories, people, and identities is
written to serve those who wrote it, destroys creativity, and destroys
the possibilities for the freedom of authentic intellectual exploration
and discovery. Western superiority creates a gap between Indigenous
and non-Indigenous, and we must have access to research methodol-
ogies that allow us to disrupt this Western superiority (Smith, 2012).
When considering four of the main paradigms, positivism, post-
positivism, constructivism, and critical theory, they all hold in com-
mon the idea that knowledge is seen as being individual in nature
(S. Wilson, 2008, p. 38). “This is vastly different from an Indigenous
paradigm, where knowledge is seen belonging to the cosmos of
which we are a part and where researchers are only the interpret-
ers of this knowledge,” and “this distinction in the ownership of
knowledge is one major difference between” Indigenous paradigms

as compared to the dominant (S. Wilson, 2008, p. 38). And so, on
my path I presently look to Braiding Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013)
for Indigenous wisdom and healing. I am also presently exploring
Indigenous ways of being and knowing and the methods to inform a
healing process from historical trauma.
Because of some of my recent intellectual interactions of ambiva-
lence, I look to Andreotti (2011) because she so eloquently points out
that Spivak (1988) questions how uncontaminated some marginalized
groups can be, including academic elites claiming authenticity, and she
argues that this may lead to ethnocentrism, fabricated solidarity (that
ignores problematic power relations within), reverse racism, and cen-
sorship of the subaltern becomes untenable. What Andreotti (2011) is
speaking of is a hierarchy of power within marginalized groups where
one becomes censored and dominated by those who have taken on the
mechanisms of ethnocentrism so that they are operating with the use
of dominating mechanisms themselves.
When I contemplate this phenomenon, I understand that
Andreotti (2011) responds to this, stating that:
Pedagogically speaking, the bottom line is that pain and anger cannot
be the foundation of a pedagogical or political project that aims to not
reproduce the violences of colonialism: arrogance, coercion, manip-
ulation, conceit, and subjugation should not be viable pedagogical
options. (p. 176)
And so when I am faced with imperialist embedded ideologies

where I am subjected to a triple dose of colonialism and domination,
both historically and in present interactions, I find tremendous peace
in Indigenous ways of knowing and being.
For example, the time spent with my daughter was basically a
talking circle, also known as a focus group discussion. The talking
circle may be used for a community in the exchange of ideas and
would have presented the healing warranted in some of my recent
interactions. Also, talking circles are considered to be an Indigenous
research method, in which each person has an opportunity of unin-
terrupted time in discussing a topic (S. Wilson, 2008). There is a
deep respect for each individual having an opportunity to speak and
Global Hegemony 123
to be heard (S. Wilson, 2008). Wilson and Wilson (2000) describe

the talking circle as follows:
Typically, group members sit in a circle that represents the holism

of Mother Earth and the equality of all members. In some circles, an
eagle feather or other sacred object is passed around, following the
direction of the sun. In other groups, a stone is passed from speaker
to speaker, symbolizing the connection among group members
and to the guiding spirit. The holder of the object speaks “from the
heart” and the group listens silently and non-judgmentally until the
speaker has finished. Each member is given a chance to speak. A
common rule of circle work is that members must not speak out
of turn. In most instances, a complete talking circle comprises four
rounds, although time restraints, rules, and norms vary with each
group. Most important is that group members feel ownership of
these rules (p. 11).
Research must be a part of a community based on relationships

to be counted as Indigenous (Cardinal, 2001; Steinhauer, 2001a,
2001b; Weber-Philwax, 2001; J. Wilson, 2000; S. Wilson, 2008).
Indigenous epistemology rests in ideas developed through the for-
mation of relationships (S. Wilson, 2008). To understand my research,
you must know my stories and know who I am (S. Wilson, 2008).
Andreotti (2011) also acknowledges this viewpoint as she writes, “My
experiences as a granddaughter, daughter, sister, friend, and mother
in the specific contexts where I was born and where I have lived cannot
not shape the focus and questions that I ask as an educator” (p. 176).
This very concept of the significance of experiences in postcolonial
theory pointed out by Andreotti is foundational to Indigenous ways of
being and knowing.
My writing and research process is a chronological depiction of
my relationships, lived experiences, and stories, “so in addition to
putting forward ideas, they also represent a chronology of my matu-
ration as a writer and Indigenous researcher” (S. Wilson, 2008, p. 9).
So any time I am subjected to a way of engaging where the respect
that is so crucial in the talking circle is not present; any time I am in
a space where no one is allowed nor encouraged to share who they
are, what their story is, what they believe in, what they stand against;
and when I am silenced, I know that I am in an imperialist site of

colonized domination.
And so I find peace in a talking circle, even when it is just me
and my daughter, Celeste. I find peace in the reading of Braiding
Sweetgrass (Kimmerer, 2013), in writing stories, poetry, songs; cre-
ating art; or touching the earth when planting seeds for vegetables
or flowers. I find peace in learning and sharing Indigenous ways
of being and knowing. Every single shred of Indigenous knowledge
shared here is an example of postcolonial theory in action.
When I share my teaching experiences in urban areas where I
have taught students of color, when I explain how I avoid hegemonic
textbook-generated worksheets, how I provide experiences for my
students, creating spaces for them to learn their histories and iden-
tities, creating spaces so that they may engage in creative explora-
tion and exchange dialogue, I am teaching critical thinking skills,
and all these methods are examples of postcolonial theory in action.
Yet I have struggled in my interactions here with one small group
who had no knowledge of postcolonial theory and have attempted
repeatedly to criticize that which they had not yet comprehended.
Their parochial criticisms have been shared with my department,
and I have been silenced.
This group, who is also marginalized, has fallen victim to hege-
monic institutionalization to a degree that through (Andreotti, 2011)
coercion, manipulation, arrogance, and subjugation, they perpetu-
ate hegemony themselves. Spivak was correct. Yet I shall not return
these ethnocentric mechanisms. I shall respond with tenderness
and caring and understanding.
On the other hand, I am blessed at my present institution as I
have had the opportunity to study postcolonial theory deeper and
learn of these ways to conceptualize my experiences. I am blessed
that I have one professor who supports arts-based methodologies and
other alternative methodologies that make space for disrupting the
dominant narrative. This very professor shared with me Kimmerer’s
(2013) book, Braiding Sweetgrass. And I am deeply thankful.
Through postcolonial theory, I have conceptualized my confus-
ing experiences so that I may understand my circumstances, making
sense of these painful interactions, and that has enabled me to respond
Global Hegemony 125
with kindness and caring. I have greatly advanced my knowledge, and

I am left with an unforgettable experience.
All these combined, including the refusal of the powers that
be to hear Indigenous voices at Standing Rock, the destruction of
our environment, the silencing of Indigenous voices on college
campuses and in the political sphere, and the lack of knowledge
surrounding Indigenous ways, are the components of an impe-
rialist machine of domination. So colonization is not something
from the past. Colonization is happening here and now. Celeste
and I discussed all these matters.
Last, I reviewed with Celeste, so that she may never forget the
concept of seeing with two eyes, recognizing that there are multiple
knowledge systems. My daughter shared that some folks are only
looking through a tiny peephole. And still others cannot even see
the peephole in the door. Some cannot even find the door; they are
as if in a dark room fumbling, trying to find their way. So I explained
to my daughter that it is up to us. We must find the way and then
blaze a path so that others may follow.
As the talking circle with Celeste came to an end, I said, “You
know, I read something the other day that said trees communicate
with one another.” Celeste became nostalgic, saying, “The trees send
out messages, for long distances . . . and when one tree is dying . . .
right before it dies . . . it sends out all of its nutrients to all the other
trees, so that the rest may survive and live on.”
When I heard my daughter share all this through her misty hazel
eyes, I was very proud of her. I realized that this is a metaphor for pre-
cisely what I have accomplished in raising my children. Her brother,
Michael, is deeply fond of all matters ancient; he and Celeste are
both intelligent, spiritual beings. The ultimate postcolonial action in
response to global hegemony that I can gift to the world is my children,
whom I have deeply loved and cared for, cooking for them, teaching
them, and embracing them in songs and stories and prayer. My chil-
dren are the richest of nutrients that I have nurtured and sent out into
society before I complete my circle in this world. And like the ethereal
wisdom of a thousand ancient trees, my children are a sight to behold.
References
Andreotti, V. (2011). Postcolonial studies in education. New York, NY: Palgrave

Macmillan.
Cardinal, L. 2001. “What is an Indigenous perspective?” Canadian Journal
of Native Education, 25, 180–183.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scien-
tific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed
Editions.
Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous
peoples (2nd ed.). London, England: Zed Books.
Spivak, G. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? Philpapers, 14(27), 42–58.
Steinhauer, P. (2001a). Situating myself in research. Canadian Journal of
Native Education, 25, 183–187.
Steinhauer, P. (2001b). Kihkapiw: Sitting within the sacred circle of the Cree
way (Unpublished doctoral candidacy proposal). University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Canada.
Weber-Philwax, C. (2001). What is Indigenous research? Canadian Journal
of Native Education, 25, 166–174.
Wilson, J. (2000). King trapper of the North: An ethnographic life history
of a traditional Aboriginal sporting king (Unpublished master’s thesis).
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
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Studies, 32(2).
Author Bios 127
About the Authors
Becky Atkinson is an associate professor in the College of Education at the

University of Alabama. She teaches courses in cultural and social founda-
tions and qualitative research. Her interests pragmatic semiotics, feminist
materialism, and critical theory guide her current research, which ranges
from feminist theory to connections between pragmatist articulations of
relationship of ontology and semiotics in feminist materialism. Atkinson has
a particular fascination with Jane Addams’ philosophy and methodology,
reflected in her recent work.
Lucy E. Bailey is a faculty member in Social Foundations and Qualitative

Inquiry and director of Gender and Women’s Studies at Oklahoma State
University. She is interested in a variety of trajectories in qualitative inquiry
and diversity studies in educational research and practice.
Tina Bly is Cherokee and Choctaw from southeastern Oklahoma in the United
States. Working toward a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Vermont,
she promotes social justice, stories as knowledge, and Indigenous healing.
Bly is a bohemian, an explorer, artist, writer, musician, a seeker of ancestral
wisdom, and protector of Mother Earth. The love she holds for her children,
Celeste and Michael, is greater than all the heavens in all the worlds.
Sara M. Childers is the Director of Strategic Diversity Planning, Training,

and Assessment for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Ohio State
University and associated faculty for the College of Education and Human
Ecology, where she teaches courses in qualitative inquiry.
Rebecca C. Christ, PhD is an assistant professor of Social Studies Education

in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Florida International
University in Miami, Florida. She received her PhD in Learning, Teaching,
and Curriculum, with an emphasis in Social Studies Education and a grad-
uate certificate in Qualitative Research, from the University of Missouri in
Columbia, Missouri. While at the University of Missouri, she taught social
studies methods, education foundations, and qualitative inquiry, and prior
to her graduate degrees, she taught at the secondary level in a public school
in Missouri.
Ryan Evely Gildersleeve is professor of higher education at the University

of Denver. His scholarship uses transdisciplinary methods to investigate
educational opportunity and the role of postsecondary education in con-
temporary democracy.
Serge F. Hein, PhD, is an associate professor in the Educational Research

and Evaluation Program at Virginia Tech. His areas of specialization are
qualitative methodology and the social psychology of education, and his
research interests include poststructural theory, the implications of post-
structural theory for qualitative inquiry, and social psychological processes
in education settings.
Candace R. Kuby, PhD is Associate Professor of Learning, Teaching, and

Curriculum at the University of Missouri, serving as the Department Chair
and the Director of Qualitative Inquiry. She received her PhD in literacy, cul-
ture, and language education from Indiana University. Dr. Kuby previously
taught primary grades in public U.S. schools and preschoolers in Japan.
She currently teaches courses on early childhood literacy, approaches to
qualitative inquiry, and philosophical perspectives in educational research.
Elisabeth De Schauwer has a background in Educational Studies. She is

working as a guest professor at the Department of Special Needs Education
(Faculty of Psychology and Pedagogical Sciences) at Ghent University. As a
researcher, her field of interest is situated in disability studies and inclusive
education. She is intrigued by the role of difference/disability in (pedagogical)
relations.
Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre is a professor of Critical Studies in the Edu-

cational Theory and Practice Department and Affiliated Professor of both the
Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program and the Institute of Women’s
Studies at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on theories of language
and human being from critical and poststructural theories in what she has
called post qualitative inquiry—what might come after conventional humanist
qualitative inquiry.
Author Bios 129
Ellen Vermeulen is a professional filmmaker. She made a documentary

9999 about internment in the prison of Merksplas, Belgium. She also created
Catch-19to25 (‘8) about refugees brought together on a boat in Flanders,
Belgium. The documentary Inclusief was in premiere in November 2018.
She works as a researcher and guest lecturer at RITCS in Brussels.
Hanne Vandenbussche is connected to the field of disability studies at

Ghent University. She has a specific interest in the relationship between dis-
ability studies and philosophy. In her research, she focusses on belonging
and inclusive citizenship. Hereto she cooperates with parents, children, and
young adults following inclusive trajectories.
Inge Van de Putte supports children, parents, and schools in the processes
of inclusive education. Support of teachers and the position of special needs
coordinators were the topics in her PhD research project in the field of dis-
ability studies at Ghent University. In her research and publications, she
finds the transfer to practice very important.
Geert Van Hove is a full professor at the Department of Special Needs

Education at Ghent University in Belgium. His field of research is disabiity
studies and inclusive education.
Index 131
Index Beista, G., 98

Biklen, S., 41
binary thinking, 67, 70–71
A Blossom, J.B., 62
ableist time, 92 body comportment, 53
absence, 73 borders, 112
academic freedom, 106 Bossaert, G., 79
academic timetables, 113–14, 115 Bozalek, V., 14, 16
Actionable Postcolonial Theory in Braiding Sweetgrass, 120, 122, 124
Education, 120 Braidotti, R., 1, 3, 5, 6
Adams, D., 77, 78 Bricolage, 89–91
Addams, J., 41, 42–43, 44 Brilliant Imperfection, 62
Ahmed, S., 29, 30, 37, 39, 41, 43, 46, 51, 62 Butler, J., ix, 6, 41
companionable in*her*itances,
60–63
disorientation and, 35 C
feminist haptics of “homework,” Caputo, J.D., 73
56–59 Cardinal, L., 123
feminist life and, 48 Childers, S.M., 29, 31, 32, 34, 35
feminist tool kit, 51–52 Christ, R.C., 12, 22
inclusion efforts, 55 Cixous, H., 15
motherscholar and, 32 Claire, E., 62
politics of emotion, 51 Clavering, E., 78
racism in institutional life, 51 Coatlicue, 25
teaching feminist inquiry, 52–56 Cole, A.L., 80
theory and, 45, 63 Colebrook, C., 2
universal diversity, 55 Collins, S., 46
Allen, J., 78, 86, 90 colonial mastery, 15
Amaro, C.M., 62 Colpin, H., 79
American Association of University Committee on the Rights of Persons
Professors (AAUP), 106 with Disabilities (CRPD), 79, 82
Andreotti, V., 120, 122, 123, 124 companionable in*her*itances, 60–63
Angelou, M., 44 conflicting discourses, 86
Anzaldúa, G.E., 25, 41 constructivism, 121
aporia, 86–87, 99, 100 Coole, D., 33, 35
Armstrong, A.C., 79 counterfeit mother, 30
Armstrong, D., 78 Craven, C., 54
arrivant, 94 critical materialism, 31, 32–35
Arts Practice Research, 57 critical racism, 40
Atkinson, B., 44, 62 critical sexism, 40
critical theory, 121
critique, 6
B Cultural Politics of Emotion, 42
bad feminist, 39, 46 Curry, M.J., 60
Bad Feminist, 39
Bailey, L., 44, 53, 60, 62
Bandura, A., 17 D
Barad, K., 5, 31, 33 Dalton, M., 41
Berg, M., 109 Davies, B., 14, 15, 16, 41, 92
Bergson, H., 92 Davis, D., 54
Berry, K., 90 de Beauvoir, S., 41
de Beco, G., 79 sensational quality of, 41

decolonization, 15 slow argument and, 40, 43, 47, 48
deconstruction, 67, 69 taxidermy and, 53
Dehumanist solidarity, 15 feminist activist ethnography, 54
Deleuze, G., 94 feminist new materialism, 31–35, 36, 37
Delpit, L., 30 feminist snap, 48
Denzin, N., 90 Fifty Shades of Grey, 46
Derrida, J., 68, 72, 73, 74, 90, 93, 94 Figure of the Migrant, 111
aporias and, 100 Fisher, D., 77, 78
deconstruction and, 69 Fonow, M.M., 54
endekhetāi and, 96–97 Foucault, M., 4, 5, 6–7, 17, 87, 92
theory and practice, 70 Frankfurt School, 1
Descartes, R., 8 free speech zones, 113
De Schauwer, E., 79, 101 Fricker, M., 60
Deleuze, G., 1, 4, 5, 6 Frost, S., 33, 35
thinking and, 12
di Leonardo, M., 61
différance, 67, 68–69 G
Dillard, C., 54, 55 Gabel, S., 77
disability studies, 77 Gay, R., 39, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 62
disciplinary fatalism, 53 Gender Trouble, ix
disorientation, 29–31, 35, 37 genesis, 69
Dissemination, 69 gestate, 25–26
“do time,” 92 Gildersleeve, R.E., 106, 109
double movements, 100 global hegemony, 120
Duchamp, M., 107, 108, 109 good education, 98
good feminist, 39
Goodall, B., 60
E Goodley, D., 78, 84
Elkins, J., 57 Grove, K., 77, 78
emergent listening, 15, 16 Grumet, M., 41
endekhetāi, 96–97 Guattari, F., 94
endekhomenos, 97
Enlightenment binaries, 5
Epistemic justice, 60 H
essential feminism, 47 haptic homework. See Ahmed, S.
ethnocentrism, 122 haptics of institutional engagement, 52
Evans, S.C., 62 Harris, A., 77
Evans-Winters, V.E., 54 Hekman, S., 32
expansion by expulsion, 112 Heidegger, M., 31
Herbert, R., 62
here and now, 73
F Hochschild, A.R., 61
feminism, 39 Hodge, N., 77
essential, 47 hooks, b., 41, 62
flawedness of, 40 Hope, M., 78
as a fragile archive, 48 Hornby, G., 77
national magazines’ depictions human being, death of, 4
of, 47 humanism, 67
reorienting, 40–41, 41–45 Hunger, 62
resistance and, 44, 45–49 Hunger Games, The, 46
Index 133
Hurston, Z.N., 44 Kuhn, T., 7

Husserl, E., 31 Kuntz, A.K., 110
Husserlian phenomenology, 72 Kushner, T., 5
I L
Inckle, K., 54 language, 32
Inclusief, 80 Lather, P., 5, 8, 25, 41, 53, 54, 74
inclusion efforts, 55, 78 Law, J., 7
inclusive education, 77, 91–95, 95–97 Lawler, L., 70, 71, 72, 74
aporia and, 86–87, 99 laziness, 107–10
barriers to learning and, 94 lazy pedagogy, 105–6, 109–10, 115–16
bricolage and, 89–91 Lazzarato, M., 108, 109
double movements and, 100 Lean In, 40
filmmaking and, 80–85, 87–89 Lecercle, J.-J., 6
Flemish content on, 79, 80–85, LeFargue, P., 1090
86–87, 95–97 legitimate rape, 46
normality and, 98–99 Leslie, L., 110
parental involvement in, 77–79 Lillis, T., 60
social justice and, 96 Lincoln, Y., 90
time and, 92–93 lived experience, 31, 35
indigenous epistemology, 123 Living a Feminist Life, 29, 39, 42, 44,
indigenous ways of being and knowing, 51, 57
122 logical positivism, 7
Inspiration & Co., 92 Lomawaima, T, 54
interdependency, 99 Lorde, A., 41, 44, 54, 62
International Congress of Qualitative Loveless, N., 57
Inquiry, 11, 29, 53
intra-action, 33, 34, 36
M
Masschelein, J., 98
J May, T., 72
Jackson, A.Y., 8, 32 Mazzei, L.A., 8, 32
James, E.L., 46 McLaughlin, J., 78
Jones, M., 77 McQuillan, M., 72
M-decree, 79
Messiou, K., 79
K Metcalfe, A., 110
Kang, M., 54 methodological taxidermy, 53
Kelly, H., 61 Metz, J.M., 90
killjoy, 41, 48 Meyer, S., 46
Kimmerer, R., 120, 122, 124 Miller, J., 54
Kincheloe, J., 90 mind/body binary, 8
kinetic forces, 112 misrecognition, 31–35
kinopolitics, 111–12 Missing Voices, 77, 80, 90
knowledge workers, 106 momentum, 53
knowledge imperative of academe, 105, Morrison, T., 44
106 motherhood, 35
Knowles, J.G., 80 motherscholar, 29, 32, 33–34, 37
Kuar, V., 27
Kuby, C.R., 12, 22
N Q
Nail, T., 105, 110, 111, 112, 113 qualification, 98
narrative bricolage, 90 qualified researcher, 20
narrative inheritance, 60 qualitative inquiry
Nealon, J.T., 67 narrative bricolage and, 90
neoliberal higher education, 110 pedagogies of, 15, 16
Network of Experts in Social Sciences of presence/absence and, 71–74
Education, 78 social-justice oriented, 67
new critical studies, 5 Queer Phenomenology, 30
new feminist materialism, 36, 37
new materialism, 31
nonpresence, 73 R
non-stupid optimism, 5 re-, 20–21
normality, 98–99 readymades, 107, 108
reasonable accommodations, 82
rebellion, 112
O (re)birthing, 26
ontological death, 73 refusal to work, 108–10
ontologies of becoming, 111 Reindal, S.M., 99
ontology of motion, 105, 110–12 relationality, 99
optimism, 5 resist, 14
resistance, 6, 11, 12
definition of, 12–13
P feminism and, 44
Patel, L., 14, 16, 22, 26 lazy pedagogy as, 110
pedagogue, 22 pedagogy as, 26
pedagogy, 21 pedagogy of, 14
pedagogy of discomfort, 86 power structures and, 27
pedagogy of pausing, 16, 17–20, 22–25 theory as, 1–8, 74
pedetic force, 114–15 reverse-cover, 30
perplexity, 42 Rhoades, G., 110
pessimistic activism, 5 Rich, A., 54
Petry, K., 79 Right to be Lazy, The, 107
phenomenology, 31, 35 rigorous confusion, 8
philosophers of immanence, 3–4 Roberts, M.C., 62
philosophy of movement, 110–12 Roets, G., 99
Pijl, S.J., 79 Rorty, R., 3
Pillow, W., 54 Rosaldo, R., 62
Plath, S., 44 Runswick-Cole, K., 77
positivism, 121
postcolonial theory, 120, 124
postpositivism, 121 S
poststructuralism, 1 Sandberg, S., 40
Potential, 80, 84, 89 Saunders, D.B., 110
Power to Teach All, 80 Scott, J.W., 31
presence/absence, 67, 71–74 Seeber, B.K., 109
process ontologies, 111 Sheller, M., 111
professional development program Shumar, W., 110
(PDP), 80, 84 Simons, M., 98
Singh, J., 14, 15
Slaughter, S., 110
Index 135
slow argument and, 40, 43, 47 Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and

Slow ontological practices, 16 Decolonial Entanglements, 14
Slow scholarship, 16, 109 Urry, J., 111
Smith, D.W., 4, 12
Smith, L., 121
social science research methodology, 7 V
socialization, 98 Vandenbussche, H., 101
Spandagou, I., 79 Van de Putte, I., 79
special educational needs (SEN), 78 Van Hove, G., 99
speculative philosophers, 3 Vermeulen, E., 90
Speech and Phenomenon, 72, 73 Vygotsky, L., 17
Standing Rock, 121, 125
Steinhauer, P., 123
Steinmetz, G., 7 W
St. Pierre, E.A., 7, 25, 29 Wannyn, J., 78, 81, 83, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93,
subject, death of, 4 100
subjectification, 98 Watch Night speech, 27
sweaty concepts, 41, 43, 45 Weber-Philwax, C., 123
sympathetic understanding, 43 Weedon, C., 41
Syrian refugee crisis, 110 West, C., 5
Whiteness, 40
willfulness, 41, 48
T Wilson, J., 123
talking circle, 122, 124 Wilson, P., 123
taxidermy, 53 Wilson, S., 121, 122, 123
Teacher, Mother, Scholar, 29 Witte, C., 77
tensional forces, 112 wombing, 26
theory, 2, 35–37 women’s fiction, 46, 47
qualitative inquiry and, 67 Woolf, V., 41
return of, 3 Wright, E., 57, 58, 59, 62
writing and, 36 Wurtzel, E., 47
Theory of the Border, 111, 112
theory/practice binary, 69, 71
thinking, 12 Y
Thompson, B.W., 54 York University, 57
Thunberg, G., 121 Yoshino, K., 30
time cell, 112, 113–14 Young, I.M., 29, 52
Titchkosky, T., 92, 94, 96
trade wars, 110
trigger warnings, 113 Z
Tuck, E., 16 Zami, 44
Twilight, 46 Zembylas, M., 86, 87, 92
U
Ulmer, J., 14, 16, 93, 109
UN Convention for People with
Disabilities, 78
United Nations, 78
universal diversity, 55

(New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research) Norman K. Denzin (Editor), James Salvo (Editor) - New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research_ Theory as Resistance-Myers Education Press (202

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Theory as Resistance

New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry

New Directions for Theorizing in Qualitative Inquiry consists of

Books in the series:

If you have a manuscript or a proposal for a book-length work,

Norman K. Denzin and James Salvo

Published by Myers Education Press, LLC

Myers Education Press is an academic publisher specializing in books, e-books,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress

13-digit ISBN 978-1-9755-0284-3 (paperback)

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Sophie Appel

Visit us on the web at www.myersedpress.com to browse our complete list of titles.

There’s No Time to Not Think

T he world is in bad shape. Apart from continuing and escalating

Resistance Activism as a Generic Ethical Orientation

If we practice an activism of resistance, we should be generically

theory. Namely, these chapters take an in-depth look at the thinking

T he news is not so good as we approach the third decade of the

The richness and creativity of that post–World War II theorizing was

In many respects theory, far from being an academic enterprise that

The urge to tell stories of progress, maturation and synthesis

Rorty sent me to philosophy, searching for other descriptions

of immanence—e.g., Spinoza, Nietzsche, Whitehead, Bergson, and

I read much hope in Smith’s words and Deleuze’s thought, but I

wrote that he proceeded with a “pessimistic activism” (p. 343); Tony

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the

But the aberrant philosophers, especially Deleuze, I think,

My role—and that is too emphatic a word—is to show people that

during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized

Indeed. I remain convinced that having diverse and contradictory

O ne morning, we (Candace and Becky) connected via Zoom (a

encountered the “problem” of the word resistance, these thinkings

In Resisting Easy Meaning . . .

At first, we were struck by the idea that resistance is an “attempt

drawing on Helene Cixous, that “mastery is everywhere” (p. 1) and

If the members of any community . . . are to have agency—that is,

If we think of community here with regard to the QI community

Thus, we take a moment to pause our chapter as we write, to

Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down

“theories” in Figure 2.1] so wonderfully special? Just because they

• Pam asks us: “Why do we always have to keep going

here?” and “Who made these people [‘old’ theorists]

• For Pam, there seems to be a difference between knowing

• Omie sees similar trends to what Pam is seeing in

• Pam states, “I’m not a qualified researcher yet”—as

• How do we perpetuate the notion of a “qualified

Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .

In our pausing, we return to the word resistance, only this time

2. (also red-) in return; mutually: react |resemble

The original meaning of resist incorporates the second meaning

We were surprised by words such as strict and pedantic, but those

Listening to Pedagogical Pauses That Slow Us Down

Candace: So how did you define or understand qual[itative]

Candace: We [as a class] had discussions over how you define

Again, in an effort to be pedagogical, we resist easy meaning by

• Andrew states, “I think you change research, but I think

Back to Resisting Easy Meaning . . .

Gestation is a time of being carried in the womb, and you “rest”

7 This information was gathered from “Cōātlīcue” (n.d.).

a lot happening during the period of gestation. You are developing

In Resisting a Conclusion . . .

So, we, in our writing, are attempting to practice the resistance

us to consider how, when we do not stop, or pause, our pedagogical