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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800418810728Qualitative InquiryHickey-Moody

Special Issue - Material Methods

Qualitative Inquiry

New Materialism, Ethnography, and

2020, Vol. 26(7) 724­–732
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800418810728
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418810728

Folds and the Agency of Matter journals.sagepub.com/home/qix

Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody1

Abstract
This article is an investigation of the agency of matter and an exposition of the new materialist methods I have been
developing as part of a muti-sited trans-national ethnography that features socially engaged arts practices alongside more
traditional ethnographic and qualitative techniques. I think through the agency of matter and consider the temporality of
matter as part of its agency, understanding these agents as constitutive features of the research assemblage. Drawing on
ethnographic fieldwork from the United Kingdom, I examine how matter’s space-time can impact processes of making the
social. I develop theoretical resources for moving the field forward.

Keywords
ethnographies, methodologies, arts-based inquiry, methods of inquiry, feminist methodologies, new methods and
methodologies

This article is an investigation of the agency of matter
(Barad, 2008) and an exposition of the new materialist quali-
tative methods I have been developing.1 I employ a feminist,
new materialist approach to ethnography, in which I investi-
gate my experiences of the agency of matter in art-making as
a way of explicating how the research methods I have devel-
oped for my project function. I focus on space-time folding
and suggest that this aspect of the material-discursive agency
of matter facilitates access to knowledges in ways that are
specific to the materiality of creative making. My work
embodies an ethos of political practice popularized by the
phrase “the social turn,” a name that was first used by art
historian Clare Bishop to describe socially engaged art that
is collaborative, is participatory, and involves people as the
medium or material. In her 2006 essay The Social Turn:
Collaboration and Its Discontents, Bishop argues that art
that operates under the umbrella of the social turn tends to
happen outside museums or galleries, although this is not
always the case. Because much of the art produced through
socially engaged practices is collaborative and can focus on
choreographing constructive social change, it is rarely com-
mercial or object-based. Socially engaged art can be a politi-
cal resource. It is also a means through which young people
are able to co-create and communicate complex ideas. Art
can make cultural, lived, ephemeral issues visible, as it com-
municates through images, icons, feelings, color, textures,
and sounds. It can move us to feel positively or negatively
about subjects and it asks its makers to access nontraditional
knowledge forms, such as memory and attachment, in its
creation. If aesthetic choices can be considered a core means
through which young people communicate, and theories of
affect help us to see the unconscious and material ways art
impacts our emotions, one can consider that expressing
“their culture” through art is a way through which young
people continue to become who they are and come to feel
secure in their beliefs, as well as come to respect different
beliefs. Art offers young people a way to materialize rela-
tionships between different faiths in unique ways. Elsewhere
(Hickey-Moody, 2013), I have written about the way art
facilitates expression and changes embodied capacity as a
process I call affective pedagogy.
My project has multiple methodological strands and
these include focus groups, in-depth interviews, surveys,
and socially engaged arts practice workshops with young
people. This socially engaged work occurs largely not only
in primary schools but also in resettlement services for refu-
gees and migrants, mosques, and churches. I theorize the
work of the young people in their socially engaged arts
practice through the concept of intra-action. Intra-action is
a Baradian term uses to replace “interaction,” because inter-
action necessitates pre-established bodies that then partici-
pate in action “with” each other. In contrast, intra-action
1
RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody, School of Media and Communication,
RMIT University, 9 Bowen Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia.
Email: anna.hickey-moody@rmit.edu.au
Hickey-Moody
understands agency not as an inherent property of an indi-
vidual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of
forces (Barad, 2007, p. 141) in which all designated “things”
are constantly changing, exchanging, and diffracting, blend-
ing, mutating, influencing, and working inseparably.
Through a diffractive lens, the materials used to make art
are seen as part of the distributed assemblage of “the artist,”
or author of a work. Here, diffraction is the relationship
between materials, people, and ideas. Materials have
agency, they change ideas in certain ways, and they “dif-
fract” human agency in unexpected ways. Through a new
materialist frame, artists are more than the people who work
with, or intra-act with the materials in the process of mak-
ing. Working with socially engaged arts practice as a
research methodology, knowledge generation is always
already collaborative. In bringing socially engaged arts
practice together with new materialist methodologies, the
materials that are molded, and craft practices that are
employed in the process of making, are collaborators, and
the physical nature of their form is central to how making
happens. The materials with which we work prompt us to
remember experiences, to modify materials in certain ways
rather than in others, and to have emotional, sensory, intel-
lectual, and memory-based responses that are quite specific
to the material assemblages of making practices. This intra-
action, or co-constitutive construction, mobilizes the forces
of matter in ways that can require people to relinquish
agency. It is this materialist collaboration as a core part of
social practice that I work to theorize here in considering
the methodological affordances and specificities of a new
materialist, socially engaged research method.
Thinking about making as a process of intra-action
acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation
between an apparatus, a person using an apparatus, and the
procedure performed. This theoretical approach rests on the
assumption that nothing is inherently separate from any-
thing else, but rather, separations are temporarily enacted so
one can examine something long enough to gain knowledge
about it. This view of knowledge provides a framework for
thinking about how culture and habits of thought can make
some things visible and other things easier to ignore, or
even to never see. The contexts in which my research takes
place, the geographical areas, the migration histories, and
the socio-economic milieus in which my research partici-
pants live are all key to how research questions are shaped
and answered. This dynamic intra-action is experienced in
often quite profound emotional, sensory ways and this
nexus of experience, memory, and making is part of what I
examine in discussing agential realism.
For me, agential realism is useful, if not critical, for
understanding how arts-based practices work. As I have
suggested, matter, contexts, and people co-create knowl-
edges in processes of art-making, and new materialist per-
spectives allow us to think about the agency of matter in
725
new ways. This is important because, as I go on to argue,
collaborative art production is a uniquely valuable research
methodology that accesses past times and spaces and envi-
sions future times and spaces in ways that other research
methods cannot. I begin my exposition of intra-active
agency of matter in art-making with an auto-ethnographic
excerpt from my Interfaith Childhoods fieldwork in
Manchester in 2017. The area in which I was working for
this particular part of the project is called Levenshulme. It
is an area with a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic population of
15,430. In the early 1900s, Levenshulme was a middle
class suburb of Manchester but then suffered economic
depression across the 20th century and was largely popu-
lated by Irish migrants during this time. The area is now
gentrifying, and has a significant Asian/Asian British/
Pakistani community, comprising 13.51% of the area’s
population. When living and working in and around
Levenshulme, one clearly has a sense of “two Levvies”:
the Levenshulme for those who are part of the newer wave
of gentrification and the Levenshulme occupied by fami-
lies who have been in the area since the economic depres-
sion of earlier times. Typical housing in Levenshulme
consists of “two up, two down” terraced houses built
around 1880-1980 and maintained in very different ways.
Gentrifying areas and streets in Levenshulme feature “open
garden” days where people invite community to share
enjoyment of their beautiful garden, and typically less gen-
trified areas are very multi-cultural and feature sound-
scapes, smellscapes, and streetscapes that perform this rich
tapestry of life. Rather than local orchestras and birdcalls,
both of which I have heard wafting along as soundscapes
of gentrified streets of Levenshulme, in the largely less
gentrified areas, selections of different languages and
hoards of children playing spill out onto the street. Families
stand and chat on the roads. Kids ride plastic bikes on the
footpath and the older generation of working class White
people who remain smoke cigarettes while looking through
their stained windows out at the children playing on the
street. Wildly different religious symbols are featured in
the windows of houses, from Islamic texts and symbols
stuck on glass doors and windows, to Catholic iconography
and Christian messages. A sense that it takes all types ema-
nates from the heady mix of life worlds displayed on
Levenshulme streets. Grocery shops sell pomegranates,
halal meat, and flat bread. As early as 2005, Cameron and
Coaffee (2005) argued that a “model of gentrification can
be recognized . . . [that] involves the use of public art and
cultural facilities as a promotion of regeneration and asso-
ciated gentrification” (p. 1). While the authors write about
the ways Docklands are reinvented through public policy
in the North of England—Salford Quays would be the local
case in point—the broader cultural trends they identify are
clearly visible in Levenshulme, a place in which street
murals and free community libraries adorn the train station
726
Figure 1. Library at the train station.
(see Figure 1), and a local produce/artist’s market attracts
the largely white middle classes for brunch and live music
on the weekend.
The local Medina Mosque is a notably less white cultural
hub, in which I was welcomed to break the Ramadan fast by
a substantial community of Asian British men and their chil-
dren, who cooked for each other and feasted with me (the
only woman and only white person in the building) after the
sun went down. I was also generously given a tour of the
Mosque and invited to sit in and enjoy evening prayer time
before breaking the fast with them. I am still carrying the
substantial translation of the Quran with me which I was
given by the Levenshulme Medina Mosque Imam, along
with specific instructions on how it is to be read. These are
but two of many possible vignettes about community life in
Levenshulme I can offer you, and I feel that these respective
experiences illustrate sufficiently clearly the wildly different
cultural practices, aesthetics, and communities that come
together in Levenshulme, a place I call “home” for the time
in which I undertake fieldwork in Manchester.
It was during a period of this embodied, immersive, eth-
nographic fieldwork in which I was living in Levenshulme,
and researching community values and religious beliefs,
that I was confronted by the agency of matter in the process
of making. I was called to consider the broader ethical
dimensions of having to give over our (human) control in
processes of making. At the time, I was making art in a local
primary school. Partly, my consideration of the extra-per-
sonal dimension of making and material agency began
because I was working with a young girl who drew feces
repeatedly both on her own artwork and on other children’s
work: It seemed to me that she was asking me non-verbally
why she had to shit on everything, why she had to shit all
Qualitative Inquiry 26(7)
Figure 2. Symbols of “what really matters.”
over other people’s work. But as I was working to answer
this question, I was reminded of the many dimensions of the
multiple knowledges that art creation makes one access and
how often we don’t even know what we access, why, or
how these processes happen. They just do. The italicized
text below is an extended excerpt from my ethnographic
field notes that illustrates the unconscious aspects of knowl-
edge production that accompany art-making.
“I have spent days adding layers to a papier-mâché bal-
loon. I have made three trips to the local Levenshulme hard-
ware shop to buy wallpaper powder and glue, experimenting
with the most cost effective but also practical binding agent for
paper. I have tried, and failed, and then failed slightly less and
succeeded slightly more, in perfecting the viscosity of the glue.
I have chosen brown unwaxed paper as it’s stronger and holds
together more thickly. Children will be able to paint and deco-
rate the sturdy surface this makes. The friend with whom I am
staying is away in Greece and the house becomes an art studio.
Papier-mâché orbs hang from clothes racks, and ceramic ves-
sels filled with wallpaper paste experiments populate the sur-
faces of the house: trails of my labor and investigations.
In the school, children have been working on symbols
depicting ‘what really matters (see Figure 2).’ Space-time
folds in which children have materialized their place attach-
ment and symbols of cultural significance are assembled
together through their creative labor to produce small pic-
tures drawn in felt tip pen, or collaged, painted, and glitter
glued so as to iconically represent ‘what really matters.’
Paper, felt tip pen, charcoal, felt, and glitter, become
religious texts, celebratory sweets, Halal symbols: vernacu-
lar semiotics of cultural values. Children are carried by
excitement, or perhaps the excitement is the agency of the
Hickey-Moody
Figure 3. Popped balloon.
papier-mâché object (see Figure 3), but either way, the chil-
dren decorate with keen enthusiasm. The papier-mâché bal-
loons need to be sturdy, they need to be an object that can
hold a child’s enthusiasm. Now that their collaged symbols
are ready, the surfaces on which they are to be applied need
to be ready too. Its drizzly and cold in Manchester even
though it is supposed to be summer. I can’t get the papier-
mâché to dry. In desperation, after turning up the heating,
and fanning the balloons, I try a hairdryer. I apply the hair-
dryer to the one remaining moist patch of my very best bal-
loon, gently waving the gun over the damp paper surface.
With a huge bang the balloon explodes and sucks inward
with a wheeze, as the vacuum of air brings crackling paper
in with it. The sudden sadness of losing the best balloon the
children had to work on, and losing all my labor, is over
ridden by another grief which rises up unexpectedly with
the wheeze of the balloon’s last breath.”
Moving from quoting my field notes to ponder the sad-
ness they document, I can see that the balloon’s (see Figure 3)
material exhalation sucks me in to a moment in 2002, in the
Julia Farr Centre, which was founded in 1879 as the “Home
for the Incurables” in Fullarton, Adelaide, Australia. At this
time, the Julia Farr Centre was a marker of the State
Government’s policy shift to deinstitutionalization. Entering
the space, the smell of food and urine combined used to
overwhelm me. I would brace myself for it each time I
would visit, riding my bicycle through the streets of one of
Adealide’s most affluent suburbs. I used to look at the sur-
rounding houses and their aesthetics of privilege with con-
tempt, wondering how long a home for “destitute” and
“incurable” people would survive in such prime real estate.
Not surprisingly, the building was demolished in 2011. By
2000, some floors were already uninhabited and I am still
haunted by a memory of elevator doors opening to reveal a
corridor of beds stripped bare, an empty drip standing in the
middle of the space and a resuscitation dummy that had
727
been left, seemingly incidentally, on a strange angle, lean-
ing toward the drip, as if in need of medical care.
I had pressed the wrong button on the elevator, which
led me into a gothic performance of the residues of institu-
tionalized life. I pressed the correct button and the lift
resumed its ascent. I wondered how many floors of the
building looked like that. My father lived on the floor for
behaviorally disordered people, in the men’s side of the
ward. Arriving at the ward was something like entering a
teenage boy’s bedroom. Heavy-metal posters, motorbike
flags, and gang symbols surrounded the beds as one walked
along the corridor: various articulations of the significance
that risk taking had played in these men’s lives.
My father’s room was decorated with pictures of his
race horses and memories of his earlier life in Ireland.
Race horses were one of my father’s investments in risk
and our family was consistently going without to support
the addiction to gambling. I had been given half a horse
for my 11th birthday. The soundscape of the behaviorally
disordered ward is an inseparable aspect of my space-time
memory of the place. One of the men used to yell “fuck
off, you cunt” repeatedly, with a two-second pause in
between statements” “fuck off, you cunt . . . fuck off you
cunt . . . fuck off you cunt.” A chorus of occasional agonal
howls echoed alongside him and constituted a wall of
sound to be blocked out when attempting to hear my
father’s labored attempts to communicate verbally despite
severe muscle degeneration.
The balloon’s last breath in Manchester brought me back
to my fathers’ last breaths in Adelaide. Agonal breathing is
the medical name given to death breath. Agonal breathing is
characterized by gasping, labored breathing, accompanied
by strange vocalizations. Watching agonal breathing, the
breath is breathing the body: The body has lost control of
its breathing—agonal respiration can continue for several
minutes after the heart stops. Dad’s eyes were already milky
and glazed. They would not see again. I was not sure if his
heart was still beating. My mother and I sat next to him and
told him he was brave. He was brave enough to die. His
agonal breathing stopped.
As the balloon popped, the deflating air moved the
papier-mâché, like the breath that breathes the body in ago-
nal breathing. The material agency of the balloon popping
folded the temporality and spatiality of my father’s death
into a failed act of preparing research materials. An institu-
tional bed in the Julia Farr Centre folded into the lounge
room in Levenshulme where I stood with a hairdryer in
hand and a deflated papier-mâché balloon at my feet. A
transversal line of death-time cut across space-time matter-
ing in a zigzag that sewed different worlds, and different
subjectivities, together. This remembering was valuable,
because it reminded me of the emotional, personal, and
social significance of the acts of making that I ask children
to undertake.
728
I am asking children to excavate, to signify, and to hold
the most important parts of their lives. Above I mentioned
the little girl in Manchester who repeatedly drew feces on
her own and other people’s work. The feces were actually
accompanied by the occasional bottom. When I asked her if
there was anything good about her home, and really pushed
her to draw the best thing she had at home, she drew a
“Frisbee.” A plastic toy, a very simple plastic toy, but an
object that moves with freedom through the air. With my
encouragement, the class teacher and I filed a duty of care
report to the Department of Education. To date this is the
only instance in which I have felt moved to lodge a report
during fieldwork, but my balloon deflation reminded me
that through my socially engaged practice, children are
being invited to express their emotions through making and
this is a potentially dangerous invitation.
When prompted to create symbols of what really matters
to them, children often draw or make artifacts that perform
the specificity of their home life, the material and visual
languages of their religion, their attachment to the environ-
ment, and perhaps their social values. These are the things
they say they want to carry forward with them into the
future. Asking children to materialize what really matters
(see Figure 2) to them is what I call a new materialist meth-
odology, that is a research method that embraces the agency
of matter and that provides a way to think about social value
as it articulates through visual cultures, aesthetic codes,
symbols, and practices of making across space and time.
Simply asking children what they want to take into the
future can be slightly abstract, perhaps too abstract for
some, but asking them what the most important things in
their lives are and asking them to re-make the material,
visual and symbolic codes, and semiotic systems associated
with their lives creates an aesthetic materialization of social
value that I then suggest they take forward into the future.
The methods I have developed explicitly mobilize the
agency of matter and they ask young people to access the
archive of their own experience through engaging creatively
with art materials. They also ask young people to work
together and make new forms of group subjectivity. The
research questions I look to answer are as follows:
Research Question 1: In what ways does materiality
inform engagement, expression, attachment, and
understanding?
Research Question 2: How do stories unfold through
the intra-active process of making?
Research Question 3: How do stories come to be in
relation to symbol, texture, and color?
Research Question 4: In what ways are histories carried
and re-performed through symbols and textures and
colors?
While I do not provide comprehensive answers to these
questions here, I do speak to ways in which the methods I
Qualitative Inquiry 26(7)
Figure 4. Mosque and Church.
employ respond to these questions. Before I do this, I offer
a broader overview of the project I theorize.
Interfaith Childhoods employs socially engaged arts
practices to engage with the views of children, their parents,
and community in Sydney, Melbourne, Manchester, and
London. Socially engaged practices with interfaith children
zigzag across, and bring together, a diverse selection of
bodies, beliefs, knowledges, and skills, and negotiate differ-
ence in a process that creates a material-discursive docu-
mentation of emergent group subjectivity. Such a bringing
together of different ethnicities and beliefs is urgently
needed to bridge social divides created in relation to, or
which socially frame, ideas of religion. The capacity to
understand and empathize with others from very different
worlds is imperative if violent responses to social difference
are to be avoided. Such outcomes are already being achieved
through the project, proving that a preventive approach to
resolving social conflict needs to begin with community
engagement.
This image of the two places of worship pictured above
(see Figure 4) took the children who made it a long time to
arrive at. Working together on a shared artwork is central to
my method and the children are asked to collaborate on a
shared canvass as a way of working together. For many chil-
dren, rituals, words, symbols, and ideas become sutured to the
idea of a given religion. Belonging articulates through mate-
rial, visual and digital cultures that can be specific to religion.
The image showing a church and a mosque side by side not
only took a long time to create but is evidence of engagement,
openness, discussion, and responsivity (see Figure 4). The
proximity between the mosque and church is the result of
labor and negotiation. The children I work collaboratively
Hickey-Moody
Figure 5. Irish girl’s self portrait.
with will often say they believe in Allah “because he is pure
and right,” or make similar, simplifying claims about religion
that focus on purity, service, cleanliness, and the right way or
the “truth.” The transversal lines of making art, having a
shared discussion about “what matters”—or what might mat-
ter, what is valued, and what we believe—can encourage chil-
dren to link simple ideas and words learnt through rote
religious education with critical practices in ways they haven’t
experienced.
Putting my theory of affective pedagogy to work in
exploring aesthetics as a form of communication, and art
as a way of crafting new affective relationships between
interfaith children, affective pedagogies allow young
people to re-make and represent themselves in—or as
part of—very specific community assemblages. The
children materialize themselves as part of a larger faith
community in ways that are gender and age-specific, but
each of which presents their subjectivity as already
collective.
In all my research contexts I am working to negotiate
quite complex social dynamics with fairly limited resources.
Many children have limited art experiences. A 7-year-old
girl in South East London exclaimed excitedly “this art is so
much more fun than my iPad! I am coming to this class all
the time.” She is in the minority of participants who would
own their own iPad (most do not have computers at home).
Even still, she has not experienced art classes that made her
feel empowered and like she was being heard. She is a
migrant from an Irish catholic family.
729
Figure 6. Sri Lankan Australian girl’s self portrait.
The Irish girl’s “self portrait”, (see Figure 5) is a re-presen-
tation of a Sri Lankan Australian girl’s self portrait: a beauti-
fully decorated image of Diwali celebrations that had caught
her eye (see Figure 6). The Irish girl’s self portrait is positioned
just before the image that inspired the picture. In the flesh, the
two girls are from profoundly different worlds. The Sri Lankan
Australian girl is dark skinned, very slight, with inky eyes and
hair and she is always moving. She speaks Tamil at home, and
is part of an actively Hindu family and culture, proud of their
Tamil culture and rich in knowledge of performance art tradi-
tions associated with Tamil celebrations.
The Irish/English girl has very pale skin and a face cov-
ered with red freckles and light red hair. She has large blue
eyes and a stocky frame. The aesthetic commonalities in their
work bring their respective selves together as new material-
izations of their young feminine bodies in a way that may not
otherwise be possible. The materiality of the Australian
Hindu girl’s picture shaped the Irish/English girl’s self por-
trait (see Figure 5), and her expression of self unfolded in
relation to the Hindu Australian girl’s expression of self (see
Figure 6). Her re-citations of colors and symbols used by the
Hindu Australian girl is important: It illustrates the agency of
matter through the transference of visual symbols.
This process of re-creation of the self and my documenta-
tion of the self can be thought about as what Barad (2007),
Warfield (2016), refer to as processes of making new cuts.
My making workshops, the videos and photos I take to
remember them, are “cuts” I make in existing material and
conceptual assemblages. Barad (2007) argues that “agential
730
Figure 7. Narratives that unfold through making.
realism” is useful to the analysis of social inequalities; it is a
way of understanding the politics, ethics, and agencies of any
act of observation, and indeed any kind of knowledge prac-
tice. Any act of observation makes a “cut” between what is
included and excluded from what is being considered.
Separations are temporarily enacted so one can examine
something long enough to gain knowledge about it. My
methods of asking questions, making, and recording cut into
children’s memories, belongings, and attachments to material
and visual cultures in a process that re-builds, folds, and
expresses constellations of significance in their lives.
Stories That Unfold Through Making
The 2 years of making I have undertaken to date with chil-
dren and the associated conversations I have had with their
parents since beginning this project have taught me that nar-
ratives unfold through making (see Figure 7). Symbol, tex-
ture, and color carry and re-perform histories and critically
inform how memory operates and shape the registers people
mobilize in constructing narratives. There are many exam-
ples I can give that illustrate this point, and for the sake of
brevity, I will give two, which illustrate the significance of
symbol, color, and texture as agents of thought-assemblages
or as narrative devices.
First, I begin with an example from one of the east London
sites in which a girl was making her family story on textile
Qualitative Inquiry 26(7)
materials, as a collage. I want to give a material-discursive-
semiotic reading of the colors and symbols used before mov-
ing on to discuss the words she uses. Even if one was not able
to read English, if one knew anything of Islamic visual and
material culture, one could see the author becomes in relation
to the Muslim religion and cultural practices. The use of textile
is an almost accidental start. Textiles are, and historically have
been, a significant and enduring medium in Islamic visual cul-
ture. This is partly because textiles are portable: more portable
than ceramics, for example, and this is and has been a feature
that makes them accessible to desert bound people across the
world. Whatever the fabric choice for Islamic textiles, they
tend to be patterned with non-representational symbols and
particular shapes. The piece of work I discuss here, and pic-
tured in Figure 7, is rich in symbolic and shape-based forms of
visual communication. The color blue chosen for the work
shows the artist/maker’s capacity for symbolic and visual com-
munication very clearly. The color chosen is a dark Cyan,
almost Prussian blue, printed with enough magenta to give the
color depth. Cyan blue can be traced back to the color of corn-
flowers which were once used as a dye, and also to cyanide
which derives its name from Prussian blue.
This color is an enduring feature of Islamic material and
visual culture and locates the artist/maker’s work in this
context. At the center of the image (see Figure 7) is a tree,
which Gruber (2017) notes is a significant aspect of Islamic
material and visual cultures. As one gets closer, we can see
words adorning the leaves of the tree.
The tree features family names of the young British artist
and is surrounded by other symbols of Islam, such as the
crescent moon, the stars, and also featuring the words cele-
bration and Islam. Family members who have died are
named in a heart shaped balloon that says RIP. Texture and
dimension is given through buttons, pipe cleaners, glitter,
and paint. The colors and shapes here clearly cite a long
tradition of Islamic visual culture (see Figure 7).
The second example moves us to Western Sydney and my
fieldwork in a community refugee resettlement service (see
Figure 8) in which color, texture, shape, and form express
meaning is the pink painted Henna hand which traditionally
symbolizes Eid celebrations in Muslim culture. The pink fab-
ric is covered in pom-poms, sequins, and painted exploding
stars, which are supposed to be fireworks, and in the center of
the picture is a decorated hand, drawn by an Australian
Muslim girl to symbolize the very special and embodied
experience of celebrating Eid (see Figure 8). Both of these
examples of textiles (see Figures 7 & 8) that tell stories
through line, shape, color, form, and matter are, in part, the
result of children talking to their parents about the project. I
send home worksheets and homework packs for children and
their parents to do together and this process of children and
parents collaborating teaches the children about their family
history, their religion, and their migration history.
Hickey-Moody
Figure 8. Islamic textiles.
I try to choreograph relationships between children
and parents from different faith backgrounds in ways that
encourage mutual understanding and empathy and which
allow children to re-create themselves in relation to their
broader faith communities. Research on interfaith com-
munity building is gaining momentum outside the realms
of psychology, international relations, and politics.
Bringing such work into the field of arts practice as
research and thinking through diffraction and intra-
action shows the agency of interfaith work, by highlight-
ing the fact that bodies and beliefs are contextually
co-constituted. Diffraction as a way of thinking draws
attention to the agency of the non-human, the ways that
the materials used to make art can change thinking and
can change relationships between people and building
more than human relationships. Arts-based practices
offer a way not only of accessing but also of re-organiz-
ing emotional investments. They provide an excellent
vehicle through which to build convivial interfaith
futures. While the intra-relationships between sex, gen-
der, race, and culture and the negotiation of binaries and
difference have been widely debated in gender studies
and feminist theory, ideas of intra-action and diffraction
offer new momentum and fresh insights into debates
about interfaith subjectivities because they give us a way
of understanding how community art projects make col-
lective subjectivities and faith beliefs through collective
artworks.
731
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
This research is funded by The Asutralian Research Council
Future Fellowship FT160100293, “Early Start Arts to Counter
Radicalization.”
Note
1. These are methods that I have developed for my Future
Fellowship, which is a 5-year research project called “Interfaith
Childhoods.”
ORCID iD
Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
8141-1359
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Author Biography
Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody is professor of Media &
Communication, ARC Future Fellow & RMIT Vice Chancellor’s
Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.