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1 – 10 of 147Kimberly McDavid Schmidt and Rebecca Beucher
This study aims to investigate the ways affective intensities arise in the intra-actions within an assemblage (three Black girls, objects such as computers and hoodies…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the ways affective intensities arise in the intra-actions within an assemblage (three Black girls, objects such as computers and hoodies, institutionalized discourse associated with race and successful participation in schools) as the girls create multimodal responses to literature. This paper shows how the intra-actions among the girls and material objects produce affective intensities or new ways of being and becoming through which youth reauthor themselves as central and peripheral participants.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors present an illustrative case of the ways girls’ embodied literacy identities emerge when Jillian, Isa, and Rhianna intra-act with materials in an assemblage that includes their material-discursive positionings through qualitative and multimodal interaction analysis.
Findings
The analysis describes the ways the girls agentively participate through play, composing and moments of becoming (fluid subjectivities) that include emotive acts such as acts of solidarity, loving connectedness and possible frustration that inform who counts and who can be successful in the classroom.
Research limitations/implications
This single case study gives a descriptive, in-depth analysis of the ways affective intensities emerge as three girls respond to literature to understand their embodied and discursive practices within the composing process.
Originality/value
To fully understand agency and the students’ emergent subjectivities, the authors combine embodiment and material-discursive analysis to understand affective intensities that evolve during three Black girls’ composing processes and the ways the girls’ subjectivities shift within the intra-actions.
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss how being led by a young child to unknown destinations without shared language offers an experience of indeterminacy that opens up (re)thinking of political co-existence.
Design/methodology/approach
The relational arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by children challenges the social practice of adults chaperoning children through public streets by inviting children to curate and lead unknown adults on walks of local neighbourhoods. This paper focusses on sensory ethnographic research of one encounter of a child-curated walk when this project took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The experience is relayed through multilayered sensorial storytelling inter-woven with diffractive analysis informed from a post-humanist agential realist position (Barad, 2007, 2012).
Findings
Perceptions, knowings, imaginings, memories and connections are read as explanations of intra-actions in the child-led walk to produce new meaning in the phenomena of political co-existence. Emergent, embodied, sensorial listening produces new awareness and understandings of intra-acting beings in an urban space regardless of age or form.
Social implications
Application of ethical ontological epistemological practice through emergent, embodied, sensorial listening to others opens affectual ethical ways of being and knowing for justice-to-come in political co-existence.
Originality/value
The concept of child-led walks is innovative as a political act by shifting from vertical adult-child relations to horizontal relations. Post-humanist agential realism is a new and emerging theory that offers possibilities to reconceptualise co-existence with others in public spaces.
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This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept…
Abstract
This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.
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The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it seeks to articulate a framework for different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. Second, it aims to advance a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper traces different foundational conceptions of performativity and then articulates and substantiates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity. It advances one of these conceptions by producing a Baradian posthumanist understanding of accounting’s performativity.
Findings
Seven conceptions of performative accountings are articulated: accounting as a (counter)performative illocution; accounting as a performative perlocution; accounting as a self-fulfilling prophecy; accounting as an overflowing frame; accounting as a controlled relational agency; accounting as a mediator; and accounting as an exclusionary practice. It is argued how a posthumanist understanding of accounting as an exclusionary practice turns accounting from a world-knowing practice into a world-making practice. As such, it should be called to account.
Research limitations/implications
Posthumanist qualitative accounting research that conceives of accounting as an exclusionary practice focuses on how accounting is a material-discursive practice that intra-acts with other practices, and on how there is a power-performativity in the intra-actions that locally and temporarily (re)produces meaningful positions for subjects and objects and the boundaries between them.
Practical implications
A posthumanist understanding teaches practitioners to be attentive to and accountable for the exclusions that come with accounting or, more generally, with measurement. Accounting raises ethical concerns.
Originality/value
This paper articulates different conceptions of accounting’s performativity and makes the case for empirical non-anthropocentric examinations of accounting as an exclusionary practice.
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This paper aims to engage nine women English teachers in exploring their personal memories centered around the perception of their raced, classed and gendered teacher bodies, and…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to engage nine women English teachers in exploring their personal memories centered around the perception of their raced, classed and gendered teacher bodies, and led them to conceptualize teaching as invasion.
Design/methodology/approach
The process of collective memory work (CMW), a qualitative feminist research method, was used to structure collaborative sessions for the nine women English teachers. In these sessions, the group took up the CMW process as the memories were written, read, analyzed and theorized together.
Findings
The analyses of two memories from our group's work builds understanding of how the use of new materialism and a conceptualization of emotions as social, collective and agentic, can expand the understanding of the teacher bodies and disrupt normalizing narratives of teaching and learning. The post-humanist concept of intra-action leads one to better understand the boundaries in the teacher – student relationships that is built/invaded, and to see the ways materials, humans, emotions and discourses are entangled in the teaching encounters.
Originality/value
This study demonstrates how sustained and collective research methodologies like CMW can open space for teachers to more fully explore their identities, encounters and relationships. Further, unpacking everyday classroom moments (through the framework of literacy-as-event) can yield deep and critical understanding of how bodies, emotions and non-human objects all become entangled when teaching becomes an act of invasion.
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School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is…
Abstract
Purpose
School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public pedagogy.
Design/methodology/approach
The inquiry process involved poetic inquiry to produce an affective poetic witness statement to an event of school climate strikes, and then a performative enactment of diffractive reading using the poem created. The diffractive reading is used to conceptualise school climate strikes as public pedagogy and move towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy. Diffused throughout is the question of where the more-than-human fits in public pedagogy and youth climate justice activism.
Findings
School climate strikes are dynamic and differently acting (diffracting) public pedagogies that work by open spaces of appearance that enable capacities for collective action in heterogeneous political spaces. Consideration of entanglements and intra-actions between learner, place, knowledge and climate change are productive in understanding how phenomena work as public pedagogy.
Originality/value
This inquiry extends on important considerations in both climate change education and public pedagogy scholarship. It diffuses consideration of the more-than-human throughout the inquiry and enacts a move beyond the humanist limits of existing public pedagogy scholarship by introducing climate intra-action, heterogeneous political spaces and non-conforming learning to an understanding of activist public pedagogies and the educative agent.
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Marcela Porporato and Tameka Samuels-Jones
The purpose of this paper is to use the case of York University in Canada to analyze the connection between University Social Responsibility and voluntary disclosure. The authors…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to use the case of York University in Canada to analyze the connection between University Social Responsibility and voluntary disclosure. The authors examine whether the university’s voluntary air emissions disclosure is performative by exploring whether York University’s espoused commitment to its community stakeholders truly guides its incentive to disclose carbon emissions in the absence of a legal mandate.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative exploratory study uses a post-humanistic approach to build on publicly available data on key measures and metrics of air quality and carbon emissions to facilitate our understanding of representational and interventionist uses of measurement models by social actors and their basis for making voluntary disclosures.
Findings
York University linked the logic of capital markets with sustainability disclosures as an incentive for managing the cost of long-term debt. This paper contributes to measurement practice of sustainability disclosure by reinforcing the practice-theoretic conception of measurement that questions the independent nature of objects measured from the measurement methods and reporting tools.
Practical implications
The findings of this study are important to higher education administrators, regulators and policymakers, as they offer a strategic guide for the assessment of reports on an organization’s commitment to sustainability and in determining the efficacy of voluntary reporting to community stakeholders in general although they are intended for specific groups.
Originality/value
Using York University as an illustrative case, the authors argue that air emissions per se are not a reality that shapes decisions at the organizations; instead, the intra-action of air emissions measurement, communications and operational investments define the reality where sustainability is advanced. Specifically, the authors find that the performative effects of emissions disclosure may be associated with socially desirable outcomes in terms of social responsibility and concrete financial rewards.
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Maria Hvid Dille and Mie Plotnikof
While recent theoretical discussions around discourse–material relationality have facilitated important conceptual and analytical advancements within the broader field of CMS…
Abstract
Purpose
While recent theoretical discussions around discourse–material relationality have facilitated important conceptual and analytical advancements within the broader field of CMS, less progress has been made methodologically with regard to innovating empirical methods and data modes. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to contribute to strengthening the methodological focus in the literature when grappling with the relationality of discourse–materiality and co-constitution. This includes a method-retooling framework inspired by new materialism.
Design/methodology/approach
In this article, the authors engage at the methodological level by developing a method-retooling framework that combines insights from organizational discourse studies and new materialist thinking. This framework enables a retooling of existing methods to become sensitive to multimodality and offers two concrete examples that were developed during fieldwork for a multi-sited and multi-method case study in 2018.
Findings
Based on the framework for retooling methods for multimodality, two illustrations are offered. These include retooling interviews by employing multimodal vignettes and retooling observations by using multimodal mappings. They are unfolded and discussed regarding their appropriation of discourse–material relationality.
Originality/value
This paper includes original research and method developments – adding a critical focus on the methodological aspects and potential advancements that are necessary in the wake of the ongoing debates around discourse–materiality across CMS and specifically within studies of organizational discourse and CCO. By suggesting a framework, the authors stimulate methodological explorations and contribute to furthering method developments that are equal to the rich conceptual progress made within the field.
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Beata Segercrantz, Annamari Tuori and Charlotta Niemistö
Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing on a performative ontology, this article extends the literature on health promotion in organizations by exploring how health promotion is performed in care work. The focus of the study is on health promotion in a context of illness and/or decline, which form the core of the studied organizational activities. The paper addresses the following question: how do care workers working in elderly care and mental health care organizations accomplish health promotion in the context of illness and/or decline?
Design/methodology/approach
The article develops a performative approach and analyses material-discursive practices in health promoting care work. The empirical material includes 36 semi-structured interviews with care workers, observations and organizational documents.
Findings
Two central material-discursive health promoting practices in care work are identified: confirming that celebrates service users as residents and the organizations as a home, and balancing at the limits of health promotion. The practices of balancing make the limitations of health promotion discernible and involve reconciling health promotion with that which does not neatly fit into it (illness, unachievable care aims, the institution and certain organizing). In sum, the study shows how health promotion can structure processes in care homes where illness and decline often are particularly palpable.
Originality/value
The paper explores health promotion in a context rarely explored in organization studies. Previous organization studies have to some extent explored health promotion and care work, but typically separately. Further, the few studies that have adopted a performative approach to material-discursive practices in the context of care work have typically primarily focused on IT. We extend previous organization studies literature by producing new insights: (1) from an important organizational context of health promotion and (2) of under-researched entanglements of human and non-human actors in care work providing a performative theory of reconciling organizational tensions.
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