Special Issue title: Wit(h)nessing as politics of nonviolent postqualitative research

Editors: Mirka Koro and Jayne Osgood

The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore and reimagine different ways in which political contexts, immediate responsibilities, and their global consequences shape relationality and nonviolent research practices in education and postqualitative contexts. The contributors share examples of wit(h)nessing research practices, dialogues of their nonviolent educational inquiries, and relational perspectives at the time of continuous political turmoil.

The issue features diverse dialogues, including

• Practicing wit(h)nessing inquiry: Resonating and relating in ways that emphasize co-emergence and relationality over objective separation between observer and observed, knower and un-knower, scholar and participant, privileged and oppressed and so on.
• Enacting nonviolence in educational research: Resisting violence and injustice through countermeasures and responsive processes (see Gandhi, 2001/1926; King, 1963; Lederach, 2005).
• Reimagining relationalities: Cultivating multidimensional and multisensory ways of education and being in relation beyond the human.
• Expanding connections: Generating response-abilities that move beyond human-to-human relationships toward objects, environments, concepts, technologies, and more.
• Fostering pluriversal relationalities: Caring across multiple worlds within the world, engaging pluriversal practices and dialogues (see Escobar, 2018).
• Resisting structures of harm: Acting against disempowering, dehumanizing, neoliberal, capitalist, and other ‘othering’ forces in education. Practices of wit(h)nessing generate attunements and responsive educational engagements.

Wit(h)nessing as a caring process brings together the practices and papers included in this Special Issue. According to Ettinger (2006), wit(h)nessing refers to ‘witnessing whilst resonating’ and describes a relational encounter where the I and the non-I are open to each other's affective influence. Ettinger writes that each of us is already in relationship before any assumption of an independent subjectivity—an I—is established. The “I” is already co-emerging in relation to the “non-I”: a priori, the first person is relational and always interdependent. Being with oneself and the world at large.

By showcasing nonviolence and relational research process examples, the Special Issue seeks to inspire and demonstrate new ways of thinking and doing educational research that acknowledge the political and critical forces at play and ethically respond to them through profoundly relational and nonviolent inquiry practices. 

For Whitehead, one of the most important prepositions is ‘with’, and its associated characteristic of ‘withness’ (Whitehead, 1978). ‘For instance, we see the contemporary chair, but we see it with our eyes; and we touch the contemporary chair, but we touch it with our hands’ (Whitehead 1978, p. 62). This mention of ‘eyes’ and ‘hands’ and their importance for sense-perception signals a rather neglected element in Western philosophy: the body. Yet in everyday life, the existence of our bodies is important, ongoing and unquestioned; bodies are not brought with us, they are us and through our bodies we are with/in the world.

Another key proponent of becoming-with is Haraway (1988, 2007, 2016) who has consistently argued that there is an urgent imperative to dismantle human exceptionalism through affirmative critique. Doing so can incite creative, multispecies approaches to inquiry that are shaped by world-making practices. When sympoiesis (or becoming-worldly-wit(h)nessing) is privileged there is huge potential for research to become more political. Through a conscious and activist displacement of visual optics; an active refusal to privilege the all seeing/knowing I/eye, inquiry can better attend to the feltness of life lived in the Anthropocene, in all its non-innocent complexity.

Relationality and being-with calls for alternative and experimental practices. For example, exploring and valuing different knowledges can stimulate speculative thinking and future-oriented processes. Latour (2018) promotes the value of seeing things from the outside since this might become one way to carry future orientation. We live in ecosystems where “there are not organisms on one side and an environment on the other, but a coproduction by both. Agencies are distributed” (p.76). Latour encourages us to move from the system of production to the system of engendering. Rather than focusing on freedom, centrality of humanity, and responsibility as a mechanism, the system of engendering would operate on dependency, distributed humanity, and responsibility as a genesis. According to Latour, dependency and the value of dependency limit, complicate, and reconsider the project of emancipation to amplify it. Latour also proposed that maybe it is time to stop speaking about humans and use the notion of terrestrials, Earthbound, instead. Latour encourages us to learn how to be dependent on life with and beyond humans and to share dwelling places with kin and Earthbound. Each being and becomings that form the composition of dwelling places have their own way of identifying their local, global, and entanglements with others.

Similarly, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) foregrounds our need for nonviolence and care for the earth. Care is a form of politics and ethics reflecting everyday materialities of life. Puig de la Bellacasa draws from permaculture and connects ecological living with ‘edges’ where “the encounters are both challenging and diversifying beyond the expected and manageable” (p.129). For example, alterbiopolitics signals alternative forms of biopolitics, “ethical engagement in a politics of bio” (p.130), where human bios are not separable from other forms of existence and becoming. Furthermore, Puig de la Bellacasa encourages us to view ordinary personal practices as collective and to decenter ethical subjectivity. World-webs of life and different forces of world-making realities situate practices within alterbiopolitics.

In working with this perspective, we aren’t attempting to downplay the very real harm produced by humans against other humans, or to claim that animals are more “at risk” of facing violence from humans and therefore require our saving. We think about nonviolence in education as a relational act, following Hohti and MacLure (2022) and their insect-thinking. Some of the more radical possibilities of what humans can do are unknown until we are more attuned with more-than-humans that we cohabit with.

In this special issue, we seek to discuss these complexities and the un/intended consequences of (non)violence and with-nessing in education and postqualitative inquiry practices. We invite manuscripts that attend to what we view as possibilities of more nonviolence, caring, relational, and response-ability driven inquiry.  

We invite original articles of no more than 3,000 – 6,000 words responding to the above themes, questions, and beyond. Please submit a 500-word abstract (including the proposed title) to Mirka Koro (Mirka.Koro@asu.edu) and Jayne Osgood (J.Osgood@mdx.ac.uk) by December 1, 2025.

 

Timeline

Paper solicitations out: Oct 15th 2025

Abstracts due: 1st Dec  2025

Invitations to contribute to the authors: 15th Dec 2025

Complete papers due: 15th June 2026

External reviews: June-Aug 2026

Revisions due: 1st October 2026

Second round of review: Oct-Dec 2027

Potential 2nd round revisions due: January 30th 2027

Complete issue to the editors: Late February 2027

 

References:

Gandhi, M. K. (2001/1926). Non-Violence in Peace and War. Navajivan Publishing House.

Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.)

Ettinger, B.L. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. 

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066

Haraway, D.J. (2007) Haraway, D.J, (2007). When Species Meet. Univ of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Lederach, J. P. (2005). The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. Oxford University Press.

Hohti, R., & MacLure, M. (2022). Insect-Thinking as Resistance to Education’s Human Exceptionalism: Relationality and Cuts in More-Than-Human Childhoods. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(3–4), Article 10778004211059237. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211059237

Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime: polity.

King, M. L., Jr. (1963). “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Whitehead, A. N., Griffin, D. R., & Sherburne, D. W. (1978). Process and reality : an essay in cosmology (Corrected ed. / edited by David Ray Griffin, Donald W. Sherburne.). Free Press.