A posthuman conference experience by Manchester Met doctoral student, Ruth Churchill Dower.
My train from the airport to the centre of Helsinki arrives in the dark and I am thrilled to see villages nestling in valleys of deep snow along the way, lit up by the magical nightlights that surround this elegant city. I am attending ECQI2024 – the 7th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry at the University of Helsinki in Finland. The title of the event is: ‘Participation, collaboration and co-creation: qualitative inquiry across and beyond divides’. It attracts a diverse gathering of international scholars from early childhood, arts, health, social science and disability fields, with excellent encouragement for doctoral students and ECRs largely interested in posthuman new materialisms.
The conference seeks to challenge traditional approaches to participation in qualitative research that are associated with emancipatory, inclusive and empowering ways of involving marginalised groups in knowledge production. Instead, the focus is on how we think-with somebody or something in multispecies inquiry, challenging researchers to consider a broader ‘crowd’ of possible research participants including nonhuman, inanimate and more-than-human agencies. From these perspectives, we consider how to de-centre the human, disrupt Anthropocentric supremacy and re-centre the many different ways in which environments, creatures, plants, atmospheres, and other-than-humans can produce intelligent ways of knowing that often get hidden behind what is deemed progressive by humans. In thinking-with nonhuman ways of being and knowing, we pay attention to the ethical complexities associated with participatory research and develop more complex ideas of what collaboration does for different groups, how it might be sustainable, and whose justice or ethics is valued in such approaches.
It is always good to attend a conference for more than just presentation practice and, as a final year PhD student writing up my thesis, time is of the essence and I find I have become quite picky about what I attend! To experience different cultures is always exciting, but even more important for me is the chance to listen to ideas that resonate with my research and are potentially transforming of its structure or content. This was exactly what ECQI2024 offered and I spent an intense four days absorbing the arts practices, inquiry based methods, thought experiments, new materialist theories, intelligent technologies and multispecies discussions of key thinkers-with in the post-qualitative field.
Key moments from these encounters included:
- The notion that rendering capable the many intelligences of multispecies relations in the world (Haraway, 2016 #458) also has implications for what or who is excluded from those relations, especially those who might be rendered incapable by those actions (Osgood, 2024 #732).
- Glissant’s theory of opacity as a useful way to frame children’s rights to opacity to counter the educational focus on transparency where so much is simplified for assessment, reducing the complexity inherent in every child’s knowledge, cultures, languages, bodies, etc., prompting the question, ‘what is lost when understanding is gained?’ (Shannon, 2024 #706).
- Problematising the idea that everything has meaning, since the purpose of asking, ‘what does this mean’, as if adults must know everything about a child, results in homogenising knowledge in order to ‘represent’ it (or a child) as being rational (Barad, 2007 #49). Failures to ‘understand’ and ‘represent’ in this way render a child incapable by normative standards. Furthermore, they position non-normative ways of knowing (which are difficult to assess) as always already lacking, irrational, problematic or abnormal. Thus, children who might think-with the world in different ways are set up to fail, including disabled, neurodivergent, non-speaking, anxious and otherwise different children (Goodley, 2018 #755).
- Considering the fact that, despite children’s multiple modes of expression, it is often the audible expressions that attract attention and the nonlingual ways of being that are rendered invisible or inaccessible simply because adults struggle to pin down meaning in these modes. How do we harness the inexpressible, the inexplainable, and render children capable without explanation (Murris, 2016 #143)? How do we view a child’s ‘voice’ as being beyond the confines of the vocal organs? (Mazzei, 2017 #760). Thinking-with embodied forms of knowing is helpful, wondering, experimenting, relating and perceiving through bodies (Manning, 2016 #626), and acknowledging that all have embodied and embedded histories within those relations (Braidotti, 2019 #698).
I responded to these challenges in a presentation with a colleague from Bath University (who I met at ECQI2023). We problematised the discomforts of dealing with posthuman inquiry theorists such as Barad (2007 #49) by setting up our own posthuman reading group where participation was co-produced, open to complexity, welcoming of neurodivergent ways of thinking-with posthuman theorists, and built on the relations across both human and nonhuman participants. We found that co-reading as a generative, participatory practice multiplied our radical curiosities for collaborative contaminations (Tsing, 2015 #631), and increased our shared passion for moving, shaking, reconfiguring and subverting reductive education tropes. By enacting speculative, creative inquiries involving the arts, the environment and the creatures entangled within, we found we could express the indeterminate experiences that made a difference, whilst acknowledging the genealogies that came before and went ahead, giving hope for education in bleak times.
The conference enabled the enacting of relational ontologies (Murris, 2023 #716) through the mapping of multiverses and contact zones (Fairchild, 2023 #695). By attending to the intersections across fields that have previously been divided, I found that there is a growing recognition that there are many possibilities for working collaboratively, productively and creatively across different species, times, spaces, sciences, arts, and matterings.
Ruth was supported by the Manchester Met Doctoral College Conference Support Award to attend and present at ECQI2024.
