This episode of the 'Research @ OU Graduate School' Podcast is an informal introduction of the OU's Posthuman Collective research group. In the podcast the Posthumanist Collective members, students and academics, will talk about how and why the group started and how the weaving, thinking, and becoming with each other, their PhD experiences and their research led to different, positive, and productive ways of working and researching in the academia. The group will discuss several key Posthumanist and New Materialist concepts and modes of inquiry, such as diffraction or the processes of making-with, to provide a window into and start a discussion around these significant theories. More importantly, they will talk about what Posthumanist/New Materialist concepts do for our daily struggles, in the academic and personal life and at times of a pandemic, and how they can be harnessed towards rebuilding and rethinking what next in relation to academic career and personal life. The following content therefore engages, entangles, and thinks-with Posthumanist and New Materialist theories as they are lived and enacted by a group of OU researchers in their personal and academics contexts. To contact the group please email Posthumanist.Collective@gmail.com or reach them individually through their respective institutional emails.
AUTHORS
Petra Vackova is a fourth-year PhD student at the Open University and a member of a Children's Research Centre. She has recently completed her PhD thesis that engages feminist new materialist theories to explore socio-material interactions in and around artmaking beyond processes of social inclusion and exclusion and towards educational justice to come in early-years settings working with historically disadvantaged children and families.
Donata Puntil is studying for a Doctorate in Education at the Open University as part of the Language Acts and Worldmaking Project. She is also the Programme Director for the Modern language Centre at KCL, and she has an extensive teaching and research experience in Second Language Acquisition, Intercultural Studies and Applied Linguistics, with a particular focus on using cinema and literature in language teaching.
Carolyn Cooke has recently, successfully completed her PhD at the University of Aberdeen focused on music student teachers' experiences of 'living' pedagogy. She has worked as a music teacher, a head of music in a large secondary school, and is now working as a Lecturer at the Open University with particular responsibilities for the music PGCE course and generic aspects of PGCE courses for six secondary subjects.
Emily Dowdeswell is a second-year PhD student at the Open University and her doctoral research explores the role of fun in learning. In her research she focuses on the perspectives of primary schools pupils to learn how they understand fun and learning to develop and build an innovative model for the role of fun in learning in primary education.
READING LIST
1. Haraway, D. (2013). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.Duke University Press.
3. Braidotti, R. (2006). Affirming the Affirmative: On Nomadic Affectivity. Rhizomes, Fall 2005/(11/12), 1–19. Retrieved from http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/
4. Burnett, C, Merchant and Neumann, M. (2020). Closing the gap? Overcoming limitations in sociomaterial accounts of early literacy. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20:1, pp. 111-133.
5. Braidotti, R. (2011) Nomadic Subjects. New York: Columbia University Press.
6. Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: the Science Questions in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 575-599.
7. Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
8. Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
