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This chapter suggests that welfare management is becoming a matter of being able to use the open space in between formal roles, silos and organisations to actualise a not yet possible, qualitatively better welfare here and now. The discourse about the open-ended and futuristic space in between is challenging practices of welfare education. A growing field of studies is criticising the centres of education, learning and research for being a McDonald’s culture, with an overly linear approach, unable to connect passion, sensitivity and intuition with knowledge. This chapter goes further than criticising existing practices. Building on notions of affective studies, the aim is to experiment on how to shift the focus from thinking about open spaces to intensifying thinking-spaces, able to generate the processual relations increasing the opportunity for a qualitative better welfare to occur here and now.

The object of the chapter is an experiment entitled The Future Public Leadership Education Now. It is based on non-representational studies and designed to operate on the affective registers.

The chapter offers a theoretical and pragmatic wandering as wondering. It continues and expands the experiment as an ongoing thinking-spaces moving between the known and the unknown. It aims at gently opening the opportunity for a qualitatively better welfare to occur.

Researchers become welfare artists intensifying affective co-motions as ongoing and form-shifting processes.

This chapter uses ethnographic data to explore the embodied aspects of parkour’s practice and how traceurs move around and navigate the city. It draws upon a blend of non-representational theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis to explain the attraction to parkour’s intensely embodied, effective and risk-taking practice. It then looks at how the traceurs exist in the interstices of hyper-regulated urban spaces and develop an alternative cartography of the city, which is generated from their situated knowledge and the temporal rhythms and flows in the city centre’s consumer economy. It is argued that this alternative cartography constitutes a spatio-bodily transgression that violates the hyper-regulated city’s command for its subjects to be passive bodies who accept the dominant cartography of the city geared towards consumption.

This chapter introduces the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Cultural Value Project and the ensuing legacy work. It suggests that this work has resulted in the re-positioning of the field of enquiry into cultural value by shifting attention away from policy constructs and towards lived experiences; away from measuring the outcomes of cultural participation and towards understanding the process of engagement. The challenge still remaining is to develop an empirically grounded pragmatist account of cultural value as a form of practice – a situated interface of agents, actions and structures taking place in an institutionalised and materially circumscribed environment. Reconceiving cultural value in these terms will have profound methodological implications, not least the challenge of finding methodologies appropriate to its analysis within the realm of historically and geographically variable relations and structures. It is, however, a challenge worth taking. The proposed shift, it is suggested, will provide a way of addressing some long-standing ‘problems’ arising in relation to cultural value: the separation of conditions and consciousness; the overemphasis on the cognitive at the cost of the bodily; the separation between ‘the best and the brightest’ and the ‘everyday’ conceptions of culture. The proposed approach may also drive the refinement of flat(ter)-ontology methodologies which neither succumb to methodological individualism nor overemphasise methodological structuralism.

This chapter is the actualization of an experimentation of two second language (L2) teacher educators (the authors) with(in) Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) ontology and the associated concepts of agencement, desire, rhizomes, becoming, and affect to contribute to the everchanging knowledge base associated with the work and experiences of teacher educators at a time when such contributions are urgently needed. More precisely, this chapter sought to illustrate what could happen when, as teacher educators and researchers, we become “intimate” with the various elements of a research–teaching–learning–writing agencement. To do so, the chapter presents research based on material collected as part of a study on a mentoring experience between the authors. The second author was preparing to teach an online graduate course in L2 education to in-service teachers for the first time, while the first author had more experience with online teaching. Through the rhizoanalysis of three vignettes, the authors engaged with(in) their experiences by considering how various elements of the research–teaching–learning–writing agencement – particularly the most intensively affective ones – impacted and were impacted by other elements. With(in) this process, desire emerged as a praxis and a force capable of generating new knowledge in part by encouraging teachers and teacher educators (1) to experiment with learning, teaching, and conducting research with(in) the productive energy of desire, and (2) to disrupt affective powers as well as the role played by the body in such a process.

This chapter analyzes the subject of critical digital tourism studies and envisions an agenda for technology research and education. Inspired by the insights of this book and the work of scholars in digital humanities and communication (Baym, 2010; Hayles, 2012), the study presents “embedded cognition” as a framework to comprehend the interdependencies between people’s actions and discourses, and technological affordances. It introduces the concept of “turistus digitalis,” discusses theories for conceptualizing society and technology relations, and examines the challenges of transdisciplinarity. This investigation contributes to increasing research reflexivity in understanding how tourism is enacted through digital worlds and how digital technologies evolve through tourism practices.