Makers-Philosophers-Researchers: Experimentations with (Dis)placements

Abstract

In 2017, a graduate class became something otherwise. It became an experimental place in which experiences poured through students rather than providing students ready-made experiences. It became a space to encourage the play of difference that challenge our ideas about race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and so on as frictional events (Puar, 2012). It became a space in which students came to know themselves differently, even subjectify themselves in different ways through experience. By attending to the delicacies of social, material, aesthetic, cultural, historical, and disciplinary forces, the class became a generative space of producing knowledge differently, knowledge that changes us as it much as it changes disciplines (Manning, 2016). It became a space to write and do scholarship differently so as to stay close to the ground to attend to “the sensed social-material-aesthetic atmospherics resonant in a scene, the threshold onto worlds of expressivity in a problematics” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 34). This Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology special issue offers five experimentations that materialized from such a course.