Abstract

The relational agencies of how we think, where we think, and what we think-with directly influences the ways in which knowledge is made, shaped and takes flight (Haraway, 2016; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Historically this has resulted in binary logic (Braidotti, 2013). As a collective of early career researchers and postgraduate students working with Feminist, New materialist and Posthuman (FNMPH) theories we continuously challenge this by disrupting methodological approaches in knowledge-ing (MacLure, 2013, 2011; Strom et al., 2020) to ‘produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently’ (St. Pierre, 1997, p.175). Adopting FNMPH, as navigational tools, we think beyond humanism to blur the boundaries of language technologies and Cartesian dualisms that have been privileged to date. Here philosophy-becomes-method for us to re-think the importance of more-than-human matter in knowledge-making in educational spaces by embracing difference and casting out categorical thinking in troubled times (Haraway, 2004).

In our kin-ship, learning is never a solo endeavour and we put to work our re-imagined bag-ladies-methodology (Le Guin, 1986) to generate affirmative spaces for other early career education researchers to play-with and think-with theory. Le Guin (1986) explains bags are holders of things, such as stories, that do not weaponise, dominate or hold court. Instead, there is ‘room for everyone’. These bags and the stories can gesture towards what is happening and reveal the potential to perceive life differently (Fairchild et al., 2022). By storytelling our own cultural carrier bags through more-than-human elicitation we draw attention to mundane politics and the infra-ordinary (Perec, 1973). Our vulnerability in these spaces is empowering, threaded with response-ability (Bozalek, 2020). Using the blog as an impetus we extend our Bag lady-ship to collectively story with attendees to make sense of posthuman theorising, which can be inaccessible and dense (Strom et al., 2019), because there is room for everyone. Using our Bag Lady-methodology we will use more-than human matter as an entry point to consider what storying might mean in wider knowledge-ing and open up an interactive space to re-think and (re) imagine what counts as data in educational research and where voices can be revealed.