Timetable “Deleuze. Guattari. Schizoanalysis. Education”
Monday 9th December
Time
Activity
8.30-9.45
9.45-10.15
Registration
Official Welcome and
Acknowledgement of
Country
10.15-10.30
10.30-11.30
LL.001
LL.002
Morning Tea
The Dogmatic Image of Education and the Production of the New
11.30-12.00
Keynote 1 – A/Prof Taylor
Webb
Concurrent Presentation 1
12.00-12.30
Concurrent Presentation 2
Nicholas Mercer
Affective Education in Singapore: A Deleuzian
Critique
12.30-1.00
1.00-3.00
Steve Johnson
Lessons from the Plagiarists Deleuze and Guattari
Lunch
Symposium 1:
The thesis as a minor literature:
reterritorialisation of research
conditions
Eilen Honan (Convener)
Papers
Eileen Honan “A tetralinguistic account of the
thesis text”
Sarah Loch “Write/Right there in the middle:
Journeying this thesis with Deleuze and Guattari”
Linda Henderson “Connecting with the “cramped
spaces” of thesis re-presentation”
Sam Sellar “Pedagogical dialogues: Toward
collective assemblages of enunciation in
educational research”
3.00-3.30
3.30-4.30
4.30-6.30
Jan Jagodzinski
Guattari’s Ecological Legacy <—> Facing the
Anthropocene <—> Scatter, Adapt, Remember
and Die <—> the Dilemma of Art and its Education
Jason Wallin
The onto-ecology of "dark art"
Playing with the arts with Deleuze
Bronwyn Davies (Convener)
Papers
Linda Knight “Imagination and creativity:
untethered or conditional?”
Anna Hickey-Moody “Decolonizing Beethoven:
Popular knowledges, popular culture and the
postcolonial primary classroom”
Stewart Riddle “Doing music with Deleuze:
assemblages of youth as musicking-machines”
Sheridan Linnell and Bronwyn Davies “poetry, art
and Deleuze”
Afternoon tea
Keynote 2 – Professor Ian
Buchanan
Deleuze and Guattari’s Topography
Drinks at the Tavern
LL.003
Tuesday 10th December
Time
Activity
LL.001
LL.002
LL.003
9.00-9.30
Concurrent Presentation 3
Ian Cook
The Multiple Topologies of the Lecture
9.30-10.00
Concurrent Presentation 4
Greg Thompson
Teaching-machines, smooth space and the
possibilities of Bartleby
John Scannell
Education: the subjectivising power of the
performative
10.00-10.30
Concurrent Presentation 5
Diane Mulcahy
Assembling spaces of learning: The dynamics of
de-/re-/territorialisation
Phan Nhu Hien Luong
Supporting Asian Teachers in Multicultural
Educational Setting: Leader-becoming
Kathryn Grushka
Pre-service teachers: becoming pedagogically
artful
Teija Loytonen
“Beyond fixed pedagogies, An experimental move
towards multiple possible pedagogies within
higher (arts) education”
Sam Matuszewsk
'Not a reform but a liquidation': The context of
Deleuze's theory of the society of control and the
emergence of a modulated school in 1980s France
10.30-11.00
11.00-1.00
Morning Tea
Symposium 2:
Video data and the time-image:
Assemblages and becomings:
Cinematic methodologies in education Researching with Deleuze and Guattari
research
as a way of negotiating ‘mechanisms
Stephanie Springgay (Convenor)
of control’ in early childhood
Papers
education
Nikki Rotas “Thinking Cinema with Deleuze: The
movement-image and new materialist
methodologies”
Anna Hickey-Moody “Dancing and filming with the
lost boys”
Stephanie Springgay “Aberrant movement: The
time-image and video data in research-creation”
Elizabeth de Freitas “Crumpled time: Gesture and
sensation in classroom video data”
1.00-1.30
1.30-2.00
Concurrent Presentation 6
Genevieve Noone
Smooth and striated space: A recapitulating
perspective of place and becoming in rural
education
2.00-2.30
Concurrent Presentation 7
2.30-3.00
Concurrent Presentation 8
Kristen Lambert
More than the Madonna or the whore: gender,
neoliberalism and becoming in senior secondary
drama classrooms
Teresa Tam
Art School Depression: From Obsolescence of Art
to Proliferation of the Everyday
3.00-3.30
3.30-4.30
Glen Fuller
Aspirations of Critical Professionalism: The
Intensive Present as a Modality
Tamara Cumming (Convenor)
Papers
Jennifer Sumsion “Curriculum politics and refrains
of resistance”
Tina Stratigos “Researching assemblages of desire
in early childhood education”
Corrina Peterken “Artifacts of assemblages
opening to pedagogical provocations in early
childhood education”
Tamara Cumming “Decentred subjects and early
childhood practice assemblages”
Lunch
Clare Britt
'Tracings and Mappings': Negotiating
"accountability", multiplicity, uncertainty, and
process in the early years of primary school
education
Linda Knight
Contrasting views of childhood in the Australian
context (don’t move)
Joel Farris
Therapeutic Resistance: Chaos and the Body
Afternoon tea
Keynote 3 – Professor
Jessica Ringrose
Schizo-Feminist Research Practices: Putting schizoanalysis to work post Deleuze and Guattari
Wednesday 11th December
Time
Activity
LL.001
LL.002
9.00-9.30
Presentation 8
Tim Flanagan
Learning the use of language
9.30-10.00
Presentation 9
Amina Singh
Transcending norms through speaking
Marceline Piotrowski
Media, moral panics and activist art: the multiple
folds of the cultural pedagogy of political
schizophrenics
John Kaye
Facilitating the simulacrum: Machinic connections
in a pedagogical context
10.00-10.30
Concurrent Presentation 10 Francis Russell
Creative Involution: Deleuze and the Question of
Creativity
10.30-11.00
11.00-12.30
2.00-2.30
2.30-3.00
3.00-4.00
4.00pm
Rahul Aline
Exploring Globalization in Indian Teacher
Education Reform as Assemblage
Morning Tea
Symposium 3
The assembling of Oscar Pistorius
Bronwyn Davies (Convenor)
Papers
Peter Bansel and Bronwyn Davies “Assembling
Oscar, assembling South Africa, assembling
affects”
Anna Hickey-Moody “Carbon fiber masculinity:
Homosociality, hegemony and late capitalism”
Sheridan Linnell “Out on a limb: assembling
Pistorius, Deleuzian theory and (my) feminist
outrage”
12.30-1.30
1.30-2.00
LL.003
Deleuze and Guattari’s
Schizoanalaysis: An Analytic for
Education?
Greg Thompson (Convenor)
Papers
Ian Buchanan “Me and my BwO”
Taylor Webb “A Schizoanalysis of and for
Pedagogical Folds”
Greg Thompson and Ian Cook “Producing the
NAPLAN Machine: A Schizoanalytic Cartography”
Sam Sellar “‘A strange craving to be motivated’: A
schizoanalysis of human capital’s affective
intensities”
Lunch
Concurrent Presentation 11 Nicole Goodlad
Concurrent Presentation 12
Media arts centres cyberkids and the potential for
creativity in learning
Angela Jones and Rebecca Bennett
Invoking the rhizome to de-emphasize the digital
and re-emphasize pedagogy in blended course
design
Lisa Cary
Re-Mapping Feminism in Australia Today
Eve Mayes
“Speaking for, before and between students and
teachers: A rhizoanalysis of an ethnographic study
of student participation in school reform”
Afternoon tea
Concluding Plenary Bronwyn Davies
What challenges have we made with Deleuze, Guattari and Schizoanalysis to the Neoliberal Education agenda?
Bus to Little Creatures
List of Presenters and Abstracts (in alphabetical order by author)
Last
Institution
Abstract Title
Abstract
Alinje
First/
Second Author
Rahul
Roskilde
University
Exploring Globalization in Indian
Teacher Education Reform as
Assemblage
This paper engages in the exploration of India’s teacher education policy; in particular, it will look into the National
Curriculum Framework for Teacher Education: Towards Preparing Professional and Human Teacher-2009 policy and
its action, which is a comprehensive attempt to change teaching and learning practices in Indian teacher education.
The phenomenon has been studied as policy borrowing and transfer in education policy by many other researchers,
through such lenses as the World Culture Theory (WCT), state theory, anthropological approaches and
structuralizing approaches. These have focused on nodal points, networks, understandings of actors and power
relations and institutional. Thus, I approach the empirical field through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model as a
tool in mapping (line of thoughts) de-territorialized (between contexts) and re-territorialized (in new contexts)
areas, and smooth and striated spaces of globalizing teacher education policy reform.
Bansel
Davies
Peter
Browyn
UWS/Melbourne Assembling the laager: fear of
nocturnal animals or the violent black
man behind the bathroom door.
In our reading of the cover feature of Time Magazine as an assemblage (Man, Superman, Gunman; Alex Perry,
March 11, 2013), we trace how the shooting body of Oscar Pistorius and the dead body of Reeva Steenkamp are
assembled in and as the body of Post Apartheid South Africa. We consider how the bodily presence or absence of
Oscars’ prostheses at the time of the shooting – critical to the juridical establishment of his vulnerability and fear,
and hence his innocence or guilt – is figured in the author’s assemblage of race relations and a moral compass that
points to South Africa’s future/becoming. We also speculate upon the relations through which the extra-textual
material body of the reader becomes part of this assemblage of becoming South Africa and becoming moral. This is
not to give a stable account of the text, the shooting, or the reader, but rather to contemplate the ways in which
textual assemblages might become assembled for, by, in and as the collective body of a nation state or a reader.
Britt
Clare
Macquarie
Tracings and Mappings':
Negotiating"accountability",
multiplicity, uncertainty, and process
in the early years of primary school
education
In this paper, I illuminate how teachers in one Australian government primary school have been negotiating the
tensions between dominant constructions and hegemonic notions of accountability,"proof" and evaluation
alongside their commitment to fostering learning that is flexible, open-ended, situated, contextual and diverse. I
draw on Deleuze and Guattari's notions regarding 'schizoanalysis', 'assemblages', and 'tracings and mappings' as
ways of seeking to understand complexity, multiplicity, and connectedness in education without attempting to distil
or reduce to a linear, predictable, rational explanation. In this paper, I will focus in particular on the usefulness of
the lens of 'tracings and mappings' as a tool to analyse the way in which many approaches used at the school such
as pedagogical documentation of long term projects are important factors that allow for multiple (and often
contradictory) perspectives, and that make visible a range of learning processes which may not be valued or
acknowledged through current dominant, more simplistic means of evaluation, accountability or assessment.
Through this paper, then, I argue that mapping of the lived curriculum as it is enacted may create the potential for
school communities to honour and seek out multiplicities, uncertainties and connections, and may thus create
important spaces for the unexpected possibilities and complexities of pedagogy in the early years of primary school.
Buchanan
Ian
Wollongong
Deleuze and Guattari’s Topography
In their landmark work, The Language of Psycho-analysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define
topography as follows: “Theory or point of which implies a differentiation of the psychical apparatus into a number
of subsystems. Each of these has distinct characteristics or functions and a specific position vis-à-vis the others, so
that they may be treated, metaphorically speaking, as points in a psychical space which is susceptible of figurative
representation.” I will use this definition as a framework for rethinking the relationship between several key
concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. My main focus will be the Body without Organs. As I will show, it is a key
element in Deleuze and Guattari’s topographical model of the psychical apparatus. It is a dynamic model, subject to
a variety of geological processes, which cause it to change shape and character over time. It is also populated,
though sometimes only very sparsely. The population it carries is diverse and subject to its own processes which are
only indirectly grounded in the landscape. The population interacts with the landscape and frequently leaves its
mark there, sometimes going so far as to damage the landscape in irreparable ways.
Buchanan
Ian
Wollongong
Me and my BwO
In this paper I want to think about the relationship between competence and performance. I will use Timothy
Gallwey’s 1974 bestseller The Inner Game of Tennis as a lens through which to see how Deleuze and Guattari deal
with this particular problematic. In doing so, I hope to cast their work in more practically-oriented and (hopefully)
simpler light. The Inner Game of Tennis isn’t an entirely eccentric choice. The Inner Game of Tennis is a work of pop
philosophy of the type Anti-Oedipus wanted to be, but never really was. The fact it failed to live up to the author’s
hopes should not be used to discount or dismiss the original intention and it is my hope that reading The Inner
Game of Tennis alongside Anti-Oedipus will enable me to illuminate its ‘helpful’ side and perhaps point a way
forward for those of us who do not merely laugh at the idea that schizoanalysis might be of practical use in everyday
life.
Cary
Lisa
Murdoch
Re-Mapping Feminism in Australia
Today
This paper is my virgin attempt to question the deterministic essentialism and overcoding that surrounds ‘Feminism’
in Australia today using a Deluezian lens. From a comfortably Foucauldian position as a poststructural feminist, I
have recently turned to the work of Deleuze to enable the consideration of other ways of knowing this complex
terrain. What new images of subject-positions might I find if I move beyond representational antinomy toward
more complex post-metaphysical figurations of the subject? (Bray and Colebrook, 1998; Braidotti, 2003). By
creating new images and re-mapping this terrain, I hope to find other ways into and around this project.
Cook
Ian
Murdoch
The Multiple Topologies of the
Lecture
In this paper, I seek to present a multiple topology of the lecture. I begin the paper by outlining the similarities
between multi-topological analysis and schizoanalysis to demonstrate how this exploration speaks to Guattari
theories, in particular, and to the cartographic practices that are central to his work. The paper then develops the
concept of the "part object" to describe a particular form of topological relation (in which one event is both a part
object of other topologies while being fully (or more fully) an object in a specific topology). Particular emphasis will
be placed on the ways that the lecturer functions as a part object for an Oedipalised topological formation. For
example, while an act of lecturing functions as an object in educational topology, or many education topologies, it
also functions as an object in architectural topologies. Of the most significance for this paper, however, is that ways
that the act of lecturing functions in an Oedipalising topology in which the triangular form of Mummy-Daddy-Me
"calls forth" the principal deformation of a familial topology.
Cumming
Tamara
CSU
Assemblages and becomings:
Researching with Deleuze and
Guattari as a way of negotiating
‘mechanisms of control’ in early
childhood education.
Despite continued critique, globalised discourses informing early childhood education (such as: developmental
psychology, evidence-based practice, romanticism and technicism) retain the potential to limit possibilities for
thinking differently. However, as in other areas of educational research, the work of Deleuze and Guattari is
providing early childhood education researchers with ‘new weapons’ for negotiating these ‘mechanisms of control’.
Accordingly, in this symposium, early childhood researchers from a rhizomatic network of collaborations across
three Australian universities, present possibilities for disrupting the normative power of these discourses, using
theoretical resources from Deleuze and Guattari. In each paper making up this symposium, Deleuze and Guattari’s
concepts are put to work to open spaces for other possibilities to proliferate. Jennifer Sumsion maps some of the
a/effects produced by Australia’s first national early childhood curriculum and considers ways of negotiating the
operations of power in these assemblages of desire. Tina Stratigos also takes up Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of
assemblages of desire, as she experiments with the politics of infants’ belonging in early childhood settings. Corinna
Peterken discusses the ways that her making of, and writing with artifacts, functions as a machinic assemblage for
thinking about early childhood pedagogy, and Tamara Cumming considers some implications of the decentred
subject (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) for early childhood educators in early childhood practice assemblages. The
disruption of what can sometimes be taken-for-granted elements of early childhood education assemblages, and
the discourses that are implicated in their territorialisation, give rise to new readings and help to open space for
other possibilities. Though in no way permanent, these disruptions gesture to the potential of Deleuze and
Guattari’s work for offering researchers ‘new weapons’ with which they may continue to negotiate the stratifying
tendencies of societies of control.
Cumming
Tamara
CSU
Decentred subjects and early
childhood practice assemblages
The subjectification of early childhood educators is often represented through the lens of child-centric pedagogies,
that situate educators as disembodied ‘do-ers’ of early childhood pedagogy. These positionings can subjectify
educators in ways that make it difficult to imagine alternatives, or to resist technicist discourses shaping early
childhood practice simply as a body of knowledge to be applied in evidence-based, and (hence)‘effective’, ways. In
this paper, I put Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages to work to propose a different way of seeing early
childhood educators - as-and-in early childhood practice assemblages. In this conceptualisation, educators and
children and materials and settings (and...and...and...) are not in hierarchical, nor ‘centred’ positions in relation to
each other. Rather, these ‘de-centred’ elements work in machinic combinations and recombinations, that at once
territorialise and stabilise early childhood ‘practice’, whilst also deterritorialising forces that close down possibilities
for the becomings of educators and children. In these ways, conceptualising early childhood educators as-and-in
practice assemblages offers a ‘new weapon’ against discourses that offer limited ways of ‘modulating’ selves and
practice in early childhood settings.
Davies
Bronwyn
Melbourne
Davies
(Convenor)
Bronwyn
Melbourne
What challenges have we made with
Deleuze, Guattari and Schizoanalysis
to the Neoliberal Education agenda?
The assembling of Oscar Pistorius
Closing plenary.
Davies
(Convenor)
Bronwyn
Melbourne
Playing with the arts with Deleuze
In this series of papers the authors engage with Deleuze through music, visual arts and poetry. They reflect on the
nature of creativity and seek to engage the audience in deleuzian experimentation in art and in thought. We are
interested in opening up moments of haecceity, moments “of pure speed and intensity (an individuation) – like
when a swimming body becomes-wave and is momentarily suspended in nothing but an intensity of forces and
rhythms. Or like when body becomes-horizon such that it feels only the interplay between curves and surfaces and
knows nothing of here and there, observer and observed” (Halsey, 2007:146). And we are interested in opening up
thought and affect through the arts, and also in the ways that striated spaces work to hold everything the same.
How does repetition of the already known work in relation to differenciation and to lines of flight that might open
up the not-yet-known? Deleuze and Guattari place a lot of weight on the arts to open up forces of creative
evolution, so it is vital in this conference to engage with the arts and their (im)possibilities in education.
de Freitas
Elizabeth
Adelphi
University
Crumpled time: Gesture and
sensation in classroom video data
Increased focus on the role of gesture in teaching and learning in STEM disciplines has led to the use of high-speed
cameras in classroom research with the aim of documenting and studying the micro-sensations that operate
beneath language and perception. Nemirovsky (2013) for instance has taken 1 second video data, and stretched or
unfolded the moment, so that he might ‘see’ what would otherwise escape perception in learning encounters. In
other work in the area of embodied cognition, eye-tracking video equipment are used to study the way that
students eyes attend to a mathematical task, tracking the exact location on the page where the eye rests (Cambell,
2012). Might video data of this kind allow us to get to what Massumi (2002) called the “asignifying particles”
between thought and language? But Deleuze’s cinema books demand that we study video for how it intervenes
rather than for how it represents. And indeed these new digital technological interventions also point in this
direction. How and when does the video image begin to couple materially with the bodies it ‘represents’? And
equally perturbing and promising, as a methodological question, how do the bodies that are presented with the
video become crumpled into its fold? Massumi (2011) suggests that vision entails a “speculative investment” and
that perception attends to the virtual indeterminacy of the material world, through the development of a “habitual
inattention to the imperceptible in vision”. If perception involves a “chaos of vision” (eyes jittering, light scattering)
then vision is inhabited by touch, smell, taste, proprioception (“the registering of the displacements of body parts
relative to each other”), anything and everything in a process of folding together of “undifferentiated sensory
experience” (Massumi, 2011, p. 95). Deleuze’s concept of the time-image allows us to theorize new ways of thinking
about video data in terms of how such data is imbricated with impersonal sensations and crumpled time. This paper
discusses three different experiments in “collecting” video data, and shows how Deleuze’s cinema books when
In this symposium the authors focus on the assemblage of Oscar Pistorius, otherwise known as the blade runner—
the first disabled athlete to compete in the London Olympic Games in 2012. In February 2013 Oscar Pistorius
became the object of global media attention, after shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp in the early hours of the
morning. The assemblage Oscar Pistorius includes an extraordinary multiplicity: vulnerable and disabled man with
no legs, athletic hero and pin-up, Superman, murderer, white elite South African... and so on. How does the concept
of assemblage lend itself to comprehending the humanity of Oscar Pistorius (and ourselves as part of multi-faceted
Being) and the event of Reeva Steenkamp’s death? How might thought work to extend our capacity to think about
what it is to be human in the face of one who occupies such deeply contradictory positionings? What implications
does this thinking have for the work of teachers in their encounters with those students who do not occupy the
generic normalized positions that are increasingly expected of them under neoliberal regimes of government?
combined with Massumi’s work on sensation help us examine the implications of video data in educational
research.
Farris
Joel
Alberta
Therapeutic Resistance: Chaos and
the Body
In “The Soul at Work” Franco Berardi argues “in the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same”.
(220) My paper argues for a therapeutic approach to student politics. Within a society that is involved in “the mass
production of unhappiness” (168) what is at stake is the very body of the student, recognized as a complex site of
opposing forces. When depression has become the most debilitating affliction of youth and student populations
“existentially incapacitated and violently dispossessed of its affirmative power of feeling” what is needed is a
politics of emotional empowerment centered around responsibility toward others. Using Teresa Brennan's notion of
affective transmission, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the refrain, or ritornello, my paper argues that by
refocusing attentive energies toward bodily (1) recognition, (2) witness, and (3) attunement, a therapeutic approach
to student politics could emerge to open up new affective constellations and deterritorialize internalized neoliberal
social relations the mass production of depression within and among young people.
Flanagan
Tim
NDA
Learning the use of language
Amid the critical revaluation of education (as paideïa) that takes place in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze
remarks that we cannot know in advance “by means of what loves someone becomes good at Latin… in what
dictionaries they learn to think” (165; 215). The present paper considers this example seriously and contends that
the question of how language acquisition takes place is not simply an idle riddle, nor even a question which some
broader theory of education might subsume and resolve, but rather an ultimately inscrutable problem which
nevertheless signals a key aspect of Deleuze’s philosophical undertaking. The paper does this by exploring Deleuze’s
peculiarly transcendental project. Whereas traditionally, at least since Aristotle, thought has been informed by an
accord of subject and predicate, for Deleuze the harmony of “that, of which something is said” and “that, which is
said of something” cannot be given independently of its very own statement. (If this is to propose a certain
equivocity in things, this is because (their) unity is only ever something to be articulated univocally, something that
announces an irreducibly singular form of expression which Deleuze calls ‘clamour’). Working out from Deleuze’s
signature position, the paper shows how a peculiarly ‘non-synthetic’ (asymmetric or disjunctive) understanding of
the categories provides for experience and how this might be thought through the figure of the apprentice, or ‘new
Meno’, whereby the conditions by which one becomes fluent in another language do not resemble the analysable
elements of any such language.
Fuller
Glen
Canberra
Aspirations of Critical
Professionalism: The Intensive
Present as a Modality of the Future
Journalism education used to be premised on a shared sense of the necessary skills of a professional journalist and
thus understood as vocational degree, taught at universities as part of a process of professionalization. The newsbased media industry has now changed and many skills have changed or been redistributed. This paper reports on
the development of a new unit, called Newsroom, from the University of Canberra Journalism course and it is
designed to simulate this reconfigured industry workplace to provide an experience through which students can
develop necessary skills. The ‘journalist’ subject used to be defined in terms of what the journalist produced ‘hard
news’ which in turn was defined according to certain representational qualities. Journalistic output is now
characterised by what it does rather than its representational identity (relative levels of ‘engagement’ determined
by position in post-broadcast media ecologies and its social or pedagogical efficacy, such as verification and
trustworthiness). The learning modules of Newsroom are designed to prepare students not by ‘replicating’ a
possible future experience based on reproducing the representational identity of journalism, but by encouraging
students to critically attend to the conditions of individuation. More than a ‘tactical’ engagement with the rhythms
of normative skill, students are tasked with appreciating ‘experience’ as a multidimensional intensive quality: the
present as part of an event that shall ‘happen’ in the future but is already ‘happening’ in the present. Pedagogical
practice in the Newsroom unit is thus framed for students as an aesthetic practice of developing experiential milieus
through which they can develop (or ‘individuate’) the requisite professional skills; the present experience as a
modality of the future.
Goodlad
Nicole
Newcastle
Media arts centres cyberkids and the
potential for creativity in learning
Communication technologies shape the way young children learn to make meaning and communicate in our
contemporary society. Cyberkids can produce, play, record and consult a variety of media arts resources for
consumption and distribution - on the street, on the bus, or in the home. This sees children encountering real and
virtual experiences as they cross multiple spaces between school and home. Media arts learning centres the child’s
experiences in order to make new connections, open new territories and offer new learning opportunities. These
moments of subtle connections, fluid immersions with media arts learning provide productive ways for children to
synthesise their experiences through creative acts. This paper explores the key themes and the appropriateness of
Deleuzian theorising, to inform a study on media arts learning in the lives of young children.
Grushka
Kathryn
Newcastle
Pre-service teachers: becoming
pedagogically artful
This paper explores the potential significance of becoming pedagogically artful for pre-service teachers. It argues
that arts-based inquiry methods, grounded in the events of practical life, provide a unique affective learning context
for exploring the problematised nature of teaching, and the multiplicity of teacher identities. It focuses on the
liminal space of being a pre-service teacher, becoming a teacher, post an Internship experience. The paper
illustrates how arts-based inquiry is a critical and creative practice that supports individuals to evaluate experience
and to take on other frames of reference, in productive associations. It draws on the reflective voice and a
supportive learning community in an elective course titled "New learning, Visual Narrative and Wellbeing"•. The
examples illustrate how arts-based auto-ethnographic narrative method were used to construct teacher/learner
perzines. Perzines offer opportunity for experiential, critical and experimental encounters as the pre-service
teachers seek to move beyond competency rhetoric to becoming-other developing an "ethics of integration"
(Semetsky, 2011) making and re-making the learner- teacher self.
Henderson
Linda
Australian
Catholic
University
Connecting with the “cramped
spaces” of thesis re-presentation
This paper will begin with an exploration of the conditions under which the author found herself located as a
doctoral student. It will connect this location to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986) notion of a “cramped space” (p.17).
The purpose is to illustrate how this space forced the author to connect to the politics of thesis re-presentation in an
attempt to connect to the “whole other story vibrating within” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986, p.17) the thesis. I will do
this by outlining a series of encounters in this cramped space to illustrate how the notion of cracks became an
immediate concern, affording an opening for a deterritorialisation of thesis re-presentation.
HickeyMoody
Anna
Goldsmiths
Dancing and filming with the lost
boys
This paper take ups Deleuze's concept of the movement image to think about a film based methodology I employed
to research a dance program I ran with Dinka young men who had migrated to Australia from Southern Sudan.
These young men had left a nomadic lifestyle that supported a pastoral, agrarian economy and were learning to
embody the fairly sedentary life and capitalist economy of the Australian suburbs. Along with the speeds, sounds,
senses and economies of daily life, the belief systems that underlie the society in which they live had radically
changed. These boys can be considered part of an “ethnoscape,” or shifting landscape of people, that is
characterized in mediascapes as “the lost boys of Sudan” (Mylan and Shenk 2003, Eggers 2006). The phrase “the lost
boys” was developed by international aid organizations to refer to refugee young men who left Sudan after the
second Sudanese civil war.[i] As a noun, it is employed to name the 27,000 (plus) boys from the Dinka and Nuer who
were displaced or orphaned during the war. The young men involved in the community education programs I ran
were part of this moving scape of people. The ethnoscape of the lost boys is distributed across North America,
Canada and Australia (Department of Immigration and Citizenship 2007). Their depiction in mediascapes constructs
a sensibility of masculinity based around what are often fairly romantic ideas of struggle, survival and strength.[ii] I
began my work with the Sudanese boys by playing soccer with them once a week. After spending months building
trust through my involvement with this game, we planned our dance workshops as a group. At the boys’ request,
our workshops combined film, face painting, gymnastics and dance to explore styles and sounds presented in the
documentary film RIZE. Four of the boys were primary school age – ranging between 8-11 years. Others were older,
ranging between 15-19 in years. There were usually nine boys who attended the dance workshop. These boys
painted their faces like the Clowns and Krumpers. They loved using the video camera and their filming was
incredibly fast paced. They had a frenetic but playful energy and their video footage was analogous to their
movement styles. In contrast to the violent depictions of Sudanese masculinity that feature in dominant media
discourses of Australian black panic, these boys were playful, gentle and did they not want visibility in their local
public sphere. They did not want to create or respond to a public. As such, they chose not to work towards a
performance. These boys hadn’t danced before and they were surprised to learn that they enjoyed dancing for
recreation. They chose to film their dance as a way of experimenting with the production of subjectivity. Rather
than b-boying as a means of citing or signifying on a masculine or racialized identity, the Sudanese boys danced as a
means of experimenting with feeling their bodies. B-boying offered a way of becoming a less constrained, or less
competitive, kind of young male subject and created space for new “kinds of embodied selves [which emerged]
around, within and between stories” (Gard 2006: 113). Images of these boys dancing describes what Deleuze calls
the figure (Deleuze 1983: 5), in this instance a new figure of the refugee child. The filmed boys articulate the modern
concept of movement through their own movements, they are "capable of thinking the production of the new"
(Deleuze 1983:7), of new imaginings of what a young Sudanese refugee boy living in Australia might be.
HickeyMoody
Anna
Goldmsiths
Carbon fiber masculinity:
Homosociality, hegemony and late
capitalism
Heterosexual economies of misogyny that articulate the socio-sexual dynamic that Judith Butler calls ‘the
heterosexual matrix’ articulate across surfaces of carbon fiber. Like the many other signifiers of the phallus and the
successful realization of male sexual pleasure that occupy the global capitalist cultural imaginary and shape
economies of relation in late capitalism, carbon fiber is the masculine prosthesis of the decade. Harder, faster,
stronger, lighter, carbon fiber not only allows men to build more effective machines; it constitutes machines on
which men can become faster and can dominate other men. Oscar Pistorius’ biography extends the surface of
carbon fiber masculinity as technology of homosociality and misogyny, not just hegemonic masculinity. The
Pistorius-Carbon fiber assemblage overcame the feminizing position of being a ‘disabled’ athlete. With carbon fiber,
Pistorius was able to dominate non disabled male athletes and the killing of his then girlfriend, Reeva Rebecca
Steenkamp, shows us that he is also keen to dominate, indeed to control and abuse, women. Carbon fiber is the
technology that propelled Pistorius beyond the socio-cultural politics of disability, it is the surface that connects him
to global assemblages of sporting masculinity. This paper explores affects, economies and surfaces of what I call
‘carbon fiber masculinity’ and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fiber, homosociality and misogyny as forms of
protest masculinity through which he attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses
of disability.
HickeyMoody
Anna
Goldsmiths
Decolonizing Beethoven: Popular
knowledges, popular culture and the
postcolonial primary classroom
Student subjectivity in the classroom folds popular culture together with curriculum discourses. Popular cultural
representations of creative curriculum areas: art, music, dance and theatre, constitute important points of reference
in relation to which young people orient their experiences in the classroom and conceive a curriculum area. This
paper focuses on an anecdote from a multicultural, low SES classroom in which largely Vietnamese and Sudanese
primary aged students resisted their teacher’s encouragement to completely improvise and instead filled possible
‘blank spaces’, spaces which were intentionally left open as probe heads for the creation of new artistic subjectivity.
The students recited Western classical music when invited to improvise a sound. When asked later how they knew
the very traditional piece of classical Western music they cited, the students offered a range of answers. One
student had learnt the piece from scary movies. Another learnt it on ‘Piano-Man’, an i-phone app that teaches music
through basic forms of visual representation. Another student had the piece on auto memory on their keyboard at
home. Popular culture had taught these students that the proper subject of music education was Western classical
music. The teachers’ best efforts to deconstruct this subject area stood in opposition to popular discourses of music
education. However, the improvisational, intuitive, collective and relational teaching methodology the teacher
employed kinesthetically and aurally deconstructed the colonial teaching methodologies through which Western
classical music is traditionally taught. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on mapping, tracing, the diagram
and music, this paper considers the a-typical teaching methodology employed by the music teacher to develop a
collective, aural subjectivity and to decolonize the recitation of Beethoven.
Honan
(Convenor)
Eileen
University of
Queensland
The thesis as a minor literature:
reterritorialisation of research
conditions
This symposium draws together early career researchers who are working with the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari in
the education field. Part of understanding the relationship between theory and method is considering “the
conditions under which empirical research is conducted” (Coleman & Ringrose, 2013), and re-presented. In this
symposium we explore the different ways in which these early career researchers have worked to produce a
doctoral thesis that obeys yet stretches the boundaries of the scientific method and normative accounts of
acceptable thesis writing and research methodologies. These explorations are framed by a discussion of the thesis
as ‘minor literature’ characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as involving the “deterritorialization of language, the
connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1986, p. 19). The symposium will provide some ideas and ways forward for early career researchers and
others who are attempting to reterritorialise research, who are working within Norman Denzin’s eighth moment in
the history of qualitative research (2010), “characterized by a willingness to experiment with new representational
forms” (p. 29), making use of multiple methodologies
Honan
Eileen
University of
Queensland
A tetralinguistic account of the thesis
text
This paper serves as an introduction to the symposium and therefore begins with a description of the thesis as
minor literature through an investigation of the characteristics of the re-presentation of research in thesis form. In
their account of a ‘minor literature’ Deleuze and Guattari make use of a ‘tetralinguistic’ model of language,
developed by the French linguist Gobard who used the sociolinguistic and ethnographic work of Gumperz and
Ferguson. The tetralinguistics of an educational thesis are explored and discussed with illustrations from current and
previous work by early career researchers. The possibilities of reterritorializing the thesis document to allow the
experimentation of new forms of representing research are described.
Jagodzinski
Jan
Alberta
Guattari’s Ecological Legacy <—>
Facing the Anthropocene <—>
Scatter, Adapt, Remember and Die
<—> the Dilemma of Art and its
Education
This presentation at first situates Guattari’s ecological legacy and asks whether his proposals still offer ‘anything’
given an apocalyptic scenario of our species extinction; secondly, the essay grapples with the technological
optimisms of ‘futurist institutes’ and voices of hope who maintain “it’s not too late.” I worry these claims to ‘death.’
Lastly, I identify three artistic singularities: one sci-fi author, one film, and one installation artwork that open up the
pedagogical potential to help us ‘think’ of what is marked as the end of human history. The presentation ends with
“what is an [art] educator to do?”
Johnson
Steve
Murdoch
Lessons from the Plagiarists Deleuze
and Guattari
Deleuze and Guattari confess, in the opening paragraph of A Thousand Plateaus, to making use of the ideas of
others and rendering them imperceptible ("each will know his own", 1988, 3), to inventing pseudonyms, and to
being no longer themselves ("we have been aided, inspired, multiplied"). At a time when the moral panic (paranoid
delusion?) around academic integrity is drowning out more reasonable voices, we can learn much from these selfconfessed plagiarists. "There are many passions in a passion, all manner of voices in a voice, murmurings, speaking
in tongues" (1988, 77), that is why, as educators, we need to weigh our own words carefully, as well as forgive
others for their transgressions. This paper explores the way in which Deleuze and Guattari's concepts, from order
words to incorporeal transformations, from indirect discourse to abstract machines, can help to unravel the
complexities of source use in higher education. The paper concludes by suggesting how their insights can inspire
writing pedagogies that not only guard against teacher-induced offences in writing with/from the work of others,
but that also help novice writers explore the positive, creative aspects of this pervasive form of academic discourse.
Jones
Bennett
Angela
Rebecca
Murdoch
Invoking the rhizome to deemphasize the digital and reemphasize pedagogy in blended
course design
In response to technologically determinist rationales for the arbitrary digitization of university courses, we invoke
Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome for its potential to deconstruct online/offline dualisms that direct teachers and
learners towards digital delivery methods and modalities. Given a lack of empirical evidence to suggest that digital is
best practice for all learning situations, we invoke the rhizome as a conceptual structure for re-thinking and then reconstructing blended learning environments. The potential of the rhizome is that it renders the digital and the nondigital on a plane of consistency where delivery modes (online or offline) can be considered equally, in terms of
broader learning trajectories (what the students need to learn). Here, course design is imagined as forging a
pathway through the interconnected, non-hierarchical rhizome, encouraging learners to follow a particular train of
thought. In this rhizomatic space, learning objectives are visualized as nodes that are both digital and non-digital
and thus the respective mediums can be visualized as lines of flight. Invoking the rhizome as a meta-landscape for
course design means that both digital and non-digital elements can be placed under pedagogical scrutiny before
being uploaded or downloaded, as opposed to framing the digitization of learning as a fait accompli.
Kaye
John
UWA
Facilitating the simulacrum: Machinic
connections in a pedagogical context
This talk will outline the advantages of teaching students to think machinically by animating what I am calling the
situational assemblage. This pedagogical meta-modeling system aims at making the assemblage accessible to
students throughout their first, second and tertiary education. This process entails a primary level introduction to
the situational assemblage that will increase in amplitude at the secondary and university levels. Rather than
confining assemblage theory to specialists this talk will argue that the assemblage can benefit students from an
early age, and also current learning models, such as constructivism. It will be argued that Deleuze's understanding of
the simulacrum can additionally provide an overarching idea in the implementation of this new system, which will
also encapsulate the generative value of the problem in a pedagogical context.
Knight
Linda
Queensland
University of
Technology
Contrasting views of childhood in the
Australian context
This paper explores two differing concepts and theorizations around the connection of childhood to adulthood.
Australian policy and governmental alarmist discourses proclaim that attention to childhood is crucially important
because it is the definitive period of time whereby blueprints for adulthood are developed:1. Education plays a
critical role in shaping the lives of the nation's future citizens "the intellectual, personal, social and educational
needs of young Australians must be addressed" (ACARA 2013, p.5), and "Children's early learning influences their
life chances" (DEEWR 2009, p.9).
Knight
Linda
Queensland
University of
Technology
Imagination and creativity:
untethered or conditional?
Within education contexts, having a ‘good’ or inborn imagination to imagine the real or the imaginary is often
considered a rare gift – in children and in their educators. For Deleuze, imagination is not innate, but legislated and
authorized by constructed notions of taste. Deleuze considers Kantian thought on reason and judgment, he suggests
Kant’s ideas about imagination are determined by fixed constructs of judgment, taste and aesthetics and he
questions whether the conditions, or stipulations for these determinations are natural or universal. Deleuze
declares imagination unimpressive, as not inherently natural but tied to governing determinations that act as
authorizers. Additionally, Deleuze placed little importance on the imaginary, saying 'It depends, in the first place, on
a crystallization, physical, chemical, or psychical.’ (1990, p. 66). For Deleuze, the imaginary does not exist in its own
right, it relies upon the jostling energies that occur when disrupting and contrasting divergences enable/initiate it.
The imaginary 'defines nothing, but is defined by the crystal-image as a circuit of exchanges' (1990, p. 66). The
crystal-image reflects many things simultaneously; the imaginary comes in to play in response to this multireferential, reactive occurrence. This paper proposes that imagination and the imaginary, rather than being free,
ungoverned capacities that thrive irrespective of situations and contexts, require rich conditions and events to
nourish them. The audience is invited to participate in these propositions by creating a small drawing during the
session. Producing imagery in an authorized, determinative space assists in theorizing on the referencing and
reactions to context that are made by educators and children, and opens up discussion about fostering their
creativity and imagination.
Lambert
Kirsten
Murdoch
More than the Madonna or the
whore: gender, neoliberalism and
becoming in senior secondary drama
classrooms.
This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis can be used to examine how student-becomings and
teacher-becomings are actualised within the neoliberal and heterosexually striated spaces of the secondary school
assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari considered the narrow and limited approach to education problematic and called
for creativity, for ‘to create is to resist’ (1994, p.110). Drama is a subject where students create and embody a
variety of roles and characters, some from their own imagination, some from set texts. Senior secondary drama
enables adolescents to ‘try on’ and experiment with various identities at what is commonly understood as a critical
time in their adolescent development when they are negotiating the complex terrain of becoming other. In my
research with year 12 drama students and their teachers, drama is a subject which often attracts students who don’t
fit the mold, either because they can’t or don’t want to conform to hegemonic conventions of femininity and
masculinity. I argue that drama can be a dynamic rather than static space that redirects the flow of power toward
new and creative constructions. But this is not without conflict. Like a Trojan horse behind enemy lines drama is
often a contested space that constitutes ‘new weapons’ for the drama teachers and students who find beauty in
heterogeneity. This battle occurs in the midst of an increasingly neo-liberal wasteland of performativity,
homogeneity, and the commodification of education.
Linell
Davies
Sheridan
Browyn
University of
Western
Sydney/
Melbourne
poetry, art and deleuze
Our paper is a poetic and visual conversation that breaks open places and practices where thought might become
clichéd and repetitive, and enters into the affective flow among art-works, ideas, and ourselves. Deleuze invites us
into a conceptual playfulness that loosens the binds of quotidian modes of enunciation and subjectification. Deleuze
and Guattari challenge us to take off in lines of ascent beyond individualism, toward becoming BwOs, material
specificities among, and part of, many other material specificities, no longer locked into the descending line in which
semiotic chains and subjectifications hold predictable identities in place. It is through art and literature, percepts
and affects, Deleuze and Guattari claim, that such lines of ascent are likely to be found. In this experimental opening
up to affective flows between art works and ourselves, we are mindful of Spinoza’s observation that the ability to
be affected and to affect others is connected to the capacity to think: “As the body is more capable of being affected
in many ways and of affecting external bodies ... so the mind is more capable of thinking” (1992: pt. 4, appendix, no.
27). In opening a space for thought, this disorderly paper performs an alternative to the regimes of testing and
surveillance that currently organ-ise schooling and its subjects. A capacity to think, we suggest, is vital to life and its
capacity to endure – and vital, too, to the project of ‘education’.
Linnell
Sheridan
University of
Western Sydney
Out on a limb: assembling Pistorius,
Deleuzian theory and (my) feminist
outrage
This paper will look at the processes of assemblage and subjectification, and assemblage as subjectification, by
which ‘Oscar Pistorius’ is produced as a subject of scientific evaluation, public approbation or disapprobation and
moral scrutiny. A modest but thought-provoking body of literature has examined the controversies surrounded
Oscar Pistorius’ athletic performances from the perspective of discourse analysis and notions of the post-human.
Pistorius is/has been a focus for emancipatory discourses surrounding disability, for anxieties about the colonization
of elite sports by cyborgs, and for what one commentator calls the ‘imaginary of fairness’ in sport. More recently
Pistorius has also become the (gendered/male and racialised/white) subject of moral outrage as the perpetrator of
murder or manslaughter. My paper will extend on previous analyses by regarding ‘Oscar Pistorius’ as a shifting
assemblage of biological, technological, discursive and/or desiring parts, including the extension of Oscar Pistorius’
capacities through carbon-fibre blades/ legs and more recently (if the pun may be excused) through a weapon that
is sometimes called ‘arms’. My own ‘part’ in this assemblage, as a subject of another assemblage dubbed
‘poststructural feminisms’, will also come under scrutiny.
Loch
Sarah
University of
Queensland
Write/Right there in the middle:
Journeying this thesis with Deleuze
and Guattari
This presentation will explore a response to the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari from the perspective of a current
thesis writer. It will attempt to bring the language of formal ‘conferencing’ and ‘writing’ into a middle, gaping and
fertile space of de-territorialisation and follow me as I fold my ideas back to earlier stages of my research and tease
them out again for the journey ahead. In bringing forward a new part of me, my ‘becoming-my-self-researcher’, I
will explore my responses to being ‘spun off’, ‘scrambled’ and ‘broken down’ by my work and reading of Deleuze
and Guattari. I will also outline a stage of reterritorialisation threading through my work in the form of poetry
(which reconnects my writing to my data) and pockets (which envelop me through a time of transformation).
Loytonen
Teija
Aalto University
Beyond fixed pedagogies, An
experimental move towards multiple
possible pedagogies within higher
(arts) education
Research on disciplinary cultures has emphasized how fundamentally teaching and learning are intertwined with the
epistemic cultures and social practices of a particular discipline. This means that the teaching and studying practices
vary from one discipline to another. However, the educational development support and courses offered in
university pedagogy are mostly provided centrally and, accordingly, generic courses predominate. Consequently,
teaching is something you lay on top of your real work, unconnected with the local (disciplinary) community at the
heart of being an academic. This inevitably leads to harmonization of teaching and learning practices in a typically
western and colonial manner. (Davies and Bansel 2010, Jenkins 1996, Manathunga 2006, Manathunga and Brew
2012, Naskali 2007, Neumann 2001.) In this paper I am fumbling towards multiple possible pedagogies by looking at
disciplines and their pedagogical (material and practical) differences from the perspective of Finnish Art Universities.
But instead of understanding disciplinary differences through the often-used categories of hard vs. soft and pure vs.
applied sciences, which separate one from the other in terms of opposites, I approach difference through the
deleuzian concept of differenciation or becoming (Deleuze 1994, 1993). For Gilles Deleuze"real difference is a matter
of how things become different, how they evolve and continue to evolve beyond the boundaries of the sets they
have been distributed into"(Williams 2003). The differentiation within educational development, then, invites us
(academics and educational developers) to engage in encounters that open up possibilities of approaching
disciplines and their pedagogy through evolving and multiple (knowledge) frameworks instead of
compartmentalizing disciplinary pedagogies (only) through the concepts of educational sciences or the established
disciplinary categories. My paper draws from a process of collaborative inquiry, by which a group of colleagues
gathered to explore their pedagogical practices within higher arts education (Bray et al., 2000; Yorks, 2005). Based
on ethnographic participatory methods I will present some examples of how the university teachers used their
disciplinary basis, (diverse) knowledge frameworks and/or artifacts in making meaning on their pedagogies during
one-year period of collaboration. Based on our process, I believe, that approaching educational development
through collaborative encounters and acknowledging the full range of human sens(ibiliti)es in knowledge generation
might open up spaces beyond fixed (generic) pedagogies, where new possibilities might emerge from the previously
unthought or unknown. This kind of sensitive attention and disciplinary responsiveness could enhance respect and
appreciation for the locality, diversity, complexity and vitality within academia.
Luong
Phan Nhu Hien
Vietnamese
American
Training College
Supporting Asian Teachers in
Multicultural Educational Setting:
Leader-becoming
Previous research has shown that Asian teachers are faced with a variety of challenges when teaching in Australian
multicultural educational settings (McCluskey, Sim, & Johnson, 2011; Nakahara & Black, 2007), including lack of
support (see Collins & Reid, 2012). In response to the increasing number of Asian teachers in Australian teaching
workforce within the era Australia in the Asian Century, this paper examines the support needs of Asian teachers
from the perspectives of two educational leaders of an institution specializing in language teaching. Informed by
grounded theory, the paper develops three arguments: (a) first, that multicultural educational setting is an
assemblage of multiculturalism learning; (b) second, that all diverse background language teachers need cultural
and professional support; however, compared to other language teachers, Asian teachers have more specific
support needs; and (c) third, that supporting Asian teachers requires educational leaders to take prompt onsite
support and constructive culturally responsive leadership for diverse background teachers into consideration. The
event of supporting Asian teachers is elaborated, drawing upon the work of Deleuze (1988, 1993, 1994, 1995); and
of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987). Educational leaders are seen as machines rather than singular organisms in
order that what facilitates leaders in their leader-becoming are (a) that they constantly unfold themselves; and (b)
that their desire aim at connecting to diverse background teachers, particularly Asian teachers. The study offers
insights into Asian teachers’ support needs and how educational leaders support these teachers in a tertiary
language educational setting in Australia.
Matuszewsk
Samuel
Nottingham
Not a reform but a liquidation': The
context of Deleuze's theory of the
society of control and the emergence
of a modulated school in 1980s
France
In an interview entitled Contrôle et devenir from 1990, Deleuze stated that what is presented as an educational
reform is actually a liquidation of the school (Deleuze 2003: 237). In this paper I will seek to situate Deleuze's
comments regarding the shift from a disciplinary society to a society of control in the historical context of French
educational reform of the 1980s. By historicising these comments in relation to empirical changes in the French
education system, a more concrete idea emerges of how the school is transformed alongside the emergence of a
society of control.Bringing to the fore the significance of the original French, the paper will focus on the shift,
highlighted in Deleuze’s (1990) 'Postscript on Control Societies', from the hierarchically organised disciplinary
institution acting as a mould according to ‘precepts’ (mots d’ordre) to the control model of a
‘business’ (entreprise) made up solely of ‘administrators’ (gestionnaires) functioning according to
‘passwords’ (mots de passe) in the context of a universal modulation. Referring back to earlier discussions of
some of these concepts in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980) 'A Thousand Plateaus', and again stressing the
significance of the original French, I will indicate the usefulness of the twin concepts of ‘social subjection’ and
‘machinic enslavement’ (asservissement machinique) in describing and identifying this institutional shift
within the education system from a mode of discipline to one of cybernetic control. By applying these concepts to
the development of the French education system throughout the 1980s, we can distinguish shifts in the
administration of this system and also in the pedagogical practices deployed within it. These new elements would
appear to be symptomatic of a shift of the school from a disciplinary mould to a modulated institution of control.
Mayes
Eve
University of
Sydney
Speaking for, before and between
students and teachers: A
rhizoanalysis of an ethnographic
study of student participation in
school reform
Scholars and practitioners who align themselves with the "student voice" movement call for the participation of
young people in research about and 'reform' of their schools (Cook-Sather, 2006; Czerniawski & Kidd, 2011; Fielding,
2009). Research on students in schools is eschewed in favour of research with or by students (Kellett, 2011). In this
paper, I attempt to give an account of how I have come "undone" (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012) as a researcher and a
teacher in the process of research "in the fold" (Deleuze, 1988/ 1993; cf. St. Pierre, 1997) of a school where I
previously taught and facilitated a student participation initiative. Over a year of ethnographic fieldwork, students
and teachers were invited to discuss their experiences of students' involvement in the National Partnerships for Low
Socio-Economic Schools reform process and re-construct these memories in their virtual intensities (Davies &
Gannon, 2006). Examining my initial desire to ask those"directly concerned to speak on their own behalf" and its
associated danger of a"double repression" (Deleuze, in Deleuze & Foucault, 1977), I conduct a rhizoanalysis of the
lines at work in speaking for (cf. Alcoff, 1991; Spivak, 1987), before (Deleuze & Foucault, 1977) and between
students and teachers in two research encounters within the broader ethnography. The affective intensities at work
in vocal and non-vocal pedagogical encounters between students and teachers, and between myself and students
and teachers in these research encounters provoke the questions: What does student participation do? What does it
produce? What does research about student participation do? What does it produce?
Mercer
Nicholas
SIM University
(Singapore)
Affective Education in Singapore: A
Deleuzian Critique
Singapore ranks highly in global education surveys, with quality of teaching and cultural belief in the value of
education cited as the main reasons for the educational success of the island city-state. Yet, despite the strong
international performance of the education system, the Singaporean government and the Ministry of Education
(MOE) are currently restructuring the state's education model so that there is a heavy emphasis on broad-based
‘holistic’• learning and the development of physical, aesthetic, moral and socio-cultural competencies (referred to
as ‘affective education’) in addition to the traditional focus on cognitive skills. Singapore's current education policy
is informed by the expectation that twenty-first century knowledge economies demand a generation of creative and
innovative thinkers. Or, to put it in the language of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the education system is being
strategically retooled to ensure the efficient biopolitical production of "affective labour". This paper will conduct
two Deleuzian critiques of affective education in Singapore. In the first critique I will provide a "diagrammatic"
survey of Singapore's education policy in relation to the "deterritorialisation" and "reterritorialisation" of desire.
More precisely, the "diagram"• will describe the development of curricula, programs and pedagogies designed to
actualise and affirm creative and affective flows in students, as well as mapping the ways these energies are
harnessed and stabilised according to the logics of capture, commodification and instrumental-disciplinary control
that sustain Singapore's education system and the corporatist state. The second Deleuzian critique explores
affective education through Deleuze's "immanent ethics"•. Such a critique involves what Deleuze, channeling
Spinoza through Nietzsche, calls a "critical reversal" of value: so that the value of the physical, aesthetic, moral and
socio-cultural competencies cultivated through affective education are "not values but represent the differential
element from which the value of values themselves arise" (Deleuze, 1983, pp. 1-2). A Deleuzian ethics is expressed
in the power to be affected and the power to affect; and this power has no value in terms of what is good, bad or
useful. As such, the second critique will be looking at how affective education can be informed by Deleuze's
immanent ethics and by the "transvaluation"• of its core values.
Mulcahy
Dianne
Melbourne
Assembling spaces of learning: The
dynamics of de-/re-/territorialisation
in education policy and practice
The significant public investment that has been made in a number of countries over the past decade in the
educational infrastructure of universities, colleges and schools has prompted increasing interest in the reconsideration of learning and the spaces in which learning takes place. Set within policy interest in Australia in how
spaces can contribute to the broader policy agenda of achieving an ‘Education Revolution’, this paper takes as its
empirical focus the Building the Education Revolution (BER) infrastructure program. Promoting the idea of 21st
century learning in open, flexible learning spaces, this program embeds a particular view of pedagogic practice and
the spaces in which it is performed. It can be considered a performative agent with interventionist possibilities
regarding schools’ spatial and pedagogic outcomes and goals. Deploying data fragments drawn from video case
studies conducted as part of a study of how government schools within the state of Victoria are utilising open,
flexible learning spaces to improve teaching and students’ learning, I trace education policy in action utilising an
analytic of assemblage. This analytic affords thinking policies as processes rather than entities and impels one to ask
“What can a policy (or a policy object such as a ‘flexible learning space’) do?” It acknowledges that ‘policy’ and
‘intervention’ are never singular terms but always entail an array of meanings and practices. In the empirical
complexity of the passage of BER policy in schools, learning spaces emerge as open and closed, flexible and
contained; smooth and striated; pedagogic practices are similarly seemingly paradoxical – learner-centred and
teacher-centred, individualised and directly instructional or whole-group. While the architecture of the new, large
spaces allows for de-territorialisation, again, seemingly paradoxically, it depends on pedagogic structures of control
“re-territorialisation” in order for it to function. A process of de-/re-/territorialisation is in play. The politics of this
process can, with profit, be conceived as seeing double: as Haraway (1991, p.154) has it, “the political struggle is to
see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the
other vantage point”. Potentially, in so seeing, the partisan positions of education policy and practice are each made
available to the other, affording a ‘rich’ picture of the relationship between them.
Noone
Genevieve
University of
New England
Smooth and striated space: A
recapitulating perspective of place
and becoming in rural education
In re-imagining rural education as relations between place and becoming, I have appropriated the DeleuzoGuattarian concept of a nomadology, as opposed to a history, or a genealogy. This "new weapon" suggests that the
assemblages of rural education, consisting of all manner of relations between the elements of rural places and
spaces, and the people, organisations and institutions of educational bureaucracies, are complex phenomena, which
require intuitive and nuanced forms of research if we are to discover ways to counter the "terminal decline" of rural
education in Australia. This paper examines research into rural education through the lenses of smooth and striated
space. It supposes that there is a becoming-teacher, and a becoming-place, which, on the plane of consistency, have
varied speeds and slownesses, and affects and capacities. This perspective provides insights into how teachers,
pupils and communities in rural places may be better supported in creating educational practices "ways of being and
becoming“ which result in improved outcomes for rural Australians. A nomadology is able to produce a generative
analysis, as opposed to the often promulgated deficit discourse of rural education; an analysis which suggests a
more positive outlook for rural education in Australia.
Peterken
Corrina
Monash
Artifacts of assemblages opening to
pedagogical provocations in early
childhood education
The doctoral research I am immersed in, wonders about young children and art-making in their learning, through a
self-study of an artist/researcher/teacher (Irwin, 2003) becoming-child and becoming-academic. This work
embraces ways (other than in words) of exploring and making sense of the world, with young children and their
artworks virtually present. This is a story of-and- from artifacts, where new weapons for research have been found
in (and made considering) concepts from Deleuze and Guattari. I am using ways to think and know that include
making and doing art, along with writing in many forms, to embark on, and be in transit with/in, an emergent living
inquiry that leads to pedagogical provocations. The way art is used to think and to present thinking by children has
great power, and is a means used in early childhood education and arts-based researchers in education for thinking
and knowing. Accordingly, in this presentation, I am engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages
as a productive tool for thinking and knowing through artmaking. I will present and discuss three artworks made as
an analysis of data gathered during visits to sites where children have learned art. The artworks are: a mosaic on the
outside lid of an old suitcase, a quilted carpet bag with fused photographic images, and a scrapbook/album. The
making of and writing with these artifacts function as assemblage where artist/researcher/teacher and data
materials are a productive space for thinking. New possibilities open and wonderings about early childhood
pedagogy are provoked as opportunities for becoming transpire.
Piotrowski
Marcelina
University of
British Columbia
Media, moral panics and activist art:
the multiple folds of the cultural
pedagogy of political schizophrenics
This paper leverages Deleuze's concept of the fold to explore the education of political subjects. It discusses various
forces that attempt to educate subjects with ideas and practices about "good" politics, and how these relate to
global media in the context of social and political change. Politics and political activism are highly mediated
processes, and media contribute to the cultural pedagogy of political subjects. The paper illustrates how media
practices and representations contribute to contradictions that try to educate subjects about what "being political"
means. From discourses about whether online activism is "real politics" to media's role in moral panics, to the
circulation of symbols of dissent through activist art, various aspects of mediation can be said to double within
subjects' bodies and their actions, as they learn about their relationship to the political. I argue that the conflicting
folds educate political schizophrenics.
Riddle
Stewart
University of
Southern
Queensland
Doing music with Deleuze:
assemblages of youth as musickingmachines
Music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all
about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of
their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies (Deleuze, 2003, Francis Bacon: The Logic of
Sensation, p. 54) In this paper I attempt to ‘music’ with Deleuze by drawing on Christopher Small’s notion of
musicking as action, while engaging with Deleuze’s understanding of the productive flows and affects of music as
force. Data developed from a doctoral project that investigated the musicking, literacy learning and schooling
experiences of teenagers by constructing songs have been revisited in an effort to re-song and re-sing youth as
musicking-machines; creative assemblages of intensities and durations, experimentations and rhythms. The
powerful sense of musicking on the edge of young people’s lifeworlds is offered as one creative assemblage that
might work towards engaging youth with the particular predicaments and complexities of our post-humanist
historicity.
Ringrose
Jessica
IOE London
Schizo-Feminist Research Practices:
Putting schizoanalysis to work post
Deleuze and Guattari
This paper starts by considering the claim that there is “no post-Deleuze-and-Guattarianism” because “the field of
engagement has been taken up by “introductory summaries and secondary exposition” devoted to “the basic task of
explaining Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts” (Osborne in Buchanan, 2013). The paper explores what evidence there
is of post- Deleuze and Guattarian praxis in empirically informed educational research: What tools have been taken
up for transforming research methodologies and practices from conception to design, to data collection to analysis?
Difficulties that arise from uncritically applying singular untethered concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre,
and potential mis-matches between method, theory and analysis are considered; and goals of methodological
inventiveness, creativity, and having immanent socio-political relevance are discussed. Next the paper explores the
specific potentialities of Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis for politically charged feminist educational research.
Tasmin Lorraine (2008: 80) suggests that schizo-feminism is a multi-faceted set of practices that might “intervene
with contemporary configurations of modern subjectivity”. Following this idea I outline how the negative and
positive tasks of schizoanalysis could inform schizo-feminist research. I explore the ‘negative’ task of overthrowing
psychoanalysis and challenging pathologizing psychological driven educational research. I also think about the
‘positive’ tasks of: discovering desiring machines that are dammed up by the forces of Oedipus and society; and
‘learning what a subject’s desiring machines are, how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the
machine, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains and what becomings in each case’ (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1984: 338). Taking seriously the suggestion that schizoanalysis is more of an (anti-) method (Dolphijn and
Turin, 2011: 386) I do not offer correct explanations of the schizoanalytic tasks or decree new methodological rules
derived from them, but show how they may be put to work, debating the usefulness of concepts like anti-Oedipus,
desiring machines and de-and re-territorialisation for thinking through and transforming my own empirical research
with girls around femininity, sexuality and the body. Guattari’s ecosophy is also drawn upon as a complex framing
to think about context and various scales and intensities of schizo-feminist research. I discuss a feminist activistresearch-pedagogical assemblage that involves government, policy makers, third sector charities, schools,
universities and the media, touching upon the idea of schizo-feminist impact – the aim for research to discover and
intervene by doing something positive in the socio-political terrain.
Rotas
Nikki
University of
Toronto
Thinking Cinema with Deleuze: The
movement-image and new
materialist methodologies
In this paper I discuss notions of desire and becoming through Deleuze & Guattari’s (1977) collaboration AntiOedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. I take up narrative writing and running as data-machines that ‘plug’ into
each other. I conceptualize the act of ‘plugging in’ as an ecological practice and becoming methodology that I then
relate to the recent interest in new materialist methodologies in education. In the latter section of the paper, I turn
to Deleuze’s (1986; 1989) work in Cinema 1 and 2 in order to conceptualize the ‘plugging in’ of a third machine – the
movement-image. This is illustrated through the visual data collected from GoPro technology, a ‘wearable’ camera
that I harness to my running-body. Using Deleuze’s Cinema with materialist methodologies to analyze the visual
data, my methodological questions inquire into the ‘how’ of practices and ‘how’ knowledge is produced as an actual
running-body and as a singularity in space-time. I then move towards an inquiry that questions whether forms of
knowledge can be captured within methodological ordering.
Russell
Francis
Curtin
Creative Involution: Deleuze and the
Question of Creativity
Since the mid twentieth-century the concepts “creativity” and “innovation” have become increasingly significant
within a host of fields, such as education, medicine, engineering, technology, and science. Moreover, such terms
appear to have become ubiquitous, if not hegemonic, within the contemporary discourses that inform debates that
surround the allocation and cultivation of the social capital that is native to education, both tertiary and otherwise.
Given that the thinking of creativity appears increasingly to be possible only within the contemporary logics of
utility and productivity that inform the discussion of the “knowledge economy”, the philosophical works of Gilles
Deleuze are perhaps now more vital than ever, at least insofar as he is able to provide the possibility of approaching
an “otherwise” to the contemporary thinking of “creativity”. This paper will discuss the possibility for Deleuze’s
interlinked accounts of novelty, creativity, and art — as can be located in his texts Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand
Plateaus, and his works on painting and cinema — to be used as means of evaluating and critiquing our
contemporary approach to both the teaching and thinking of creativity.
Scannell
John
Macquarie
Education: the subjectivising power
of the performative
Informed by the Postulates of Linguistics plateau, 'teaching' might be conceived as a "reiteration of information to
one's self", and a performance that produces teacher and student through incorporeal transformation. As Deleuze
and Guattari provocatively claim, language is more concerned with ordering and compliance than representing or
conveying information, and it is this subjectivising power of the performative that stabilises identity. If the capacity
to teach is leveraged upon a recitation of information to one's own satisfaction, and produces identity as a result,
then it is little wonder that many of us teaching in the tertiary sector are in a state of existential crisis. As the
burgeoning world of MOOCs and digital interfaces instantiate a rapid decline in traditional modes of face-to-face
communication, the disciplinary regime of the classroom which once produced the identity of teacher and student
through affective encounter and performative language must make way for a new subject borne of the networked
anonymity of the control society. Without recourse to faciality, and the feedback of affective encounter, the digital's
rigid system of order-words (passwords) will promote the programmatic over the dialogic and risk aversion instead
of experimentation. Learning and teaching requires performance and performance requires bodies in space, and this
paper will discuss why this will forever be the case.
Sellar
Sam
University of
Queensland
Pedagogical dialogues: Toward
collective assemblages of enunciation
in educational research
This paper will describe an experiment with collective theorising undertaken as part of my doctoral study. Formal
and informal discussions were staged with a small group of teachers to enable thought to be ‘forced’ by
philosophical concepts and ethical questions associated with pedagogical work in marginalised schools and
communities. This process generated a series of dialogues that were then analysed as movements of thought in
relation to a set of problems rather than the individual opinions of enunciating subjects. The paper will reflect on
how this process tended toward a collective individuation of thought and the expression of a collective assemblage
of enunciation in moments of the thesis.
Sellar
Sam
University of
Queensland
‘A strange craving to be motivated’: A
schizoanalysis of human capital’s
affective intensities
Commenting on control societies a little over two decades ago, Deleuze (1995, p.182) observed that young people
were exhibiting ‘a strange craving to be motivated.’ This prescient aside foreshadowed dramatic changes in the
global education policy landscape during the mid-1990s, when the OECD released its now highly influential policy
positions on lifelong learning and knowledge-based economies. More recently, the OECD (2002) has argued for
widening the conception of human capital to include personality traits, particularly those associated with
motivation. In the contemporary Australian education policy context, the Melbourne Declaration of Educational
Goals for Young Australians ratified the goal of producing motivated and optimistic learners, while hgher education
policy now focuses on raising young people’s aspirations. Early work on human capital insisted on the distinction
between productive capacities and non-cognitive personality traits, but economists have been paying increasing
attention to relationships between them and the OECD now seeks to quantify personal qualities through its
international skills assessment programs. Yet, the economic literature acknowledges that traits which increase the
value of human capital are ‘irreducibly heterogenous’ (Bowles, Gintis and Osbourne 2001) and context dependent,
making it difficult to identify and measure a common factor across individuals and signaling the need for theoretical
approaches that are sensitive to the specificities of events in which bodies act and are acted upon. In this paper I
argue that Deleuze’s Spinozist conception of affect and the literature on affective labour (e.g. Hardt 1999) can
provide an alternative perspective on what is felt to be important in ‘wider’ conceptions of human capital. In
particular, a schizoanalytic approach opens up the task of mapping the multiple desiring-machines that policy texts
reductively describe as unitary traits such as motivation or aspiration. As a result, the problem of ‘irreducible
heterogeneity’ that economists encounter when trying to isolate and measure personal qualities can be brought
into clearer focus. I then also hope to show, through analysis of policy documents and recent research literature on
human capital, how certain affects are becoming more visible as ‘objects of power’ (Anderson 2010) and are being
targeted as sites for new mechanisms of control in economic and education policy.
Singh
Amina
University of
Technology
Sydney
Transcending norms through
speaking
The act of speaking is often valorised as a way of expressing truth and knowledge through the authentic voice.
Hence, being able to speak in contrast to being silent has often been celebrated as a mark of empowerment;
especially within the discourse of empowering marginalized people. However, the act of speaking is a discursive
practice regulated by social codes and norms. Drawing on Deleuze, I see speaking not as conveying voice and
expressing 'truth' but a capacity of the body to affect and be affected. This paper explores the possibility of
transcending norms through the act of speaking as an affective act. It is based on life stories of personal
transformation gathered through open conversations with 23 women throughout Nepal. In analysing acts of
speaking that participants claim as being transformative, I examine how speaking works in these specific instances
and what type of speaking act produces transformation that enhances the person's capacity to be and do. I argue
speaking works through generating an affective dynamics between the bodies related in the act of speaking. I
suggest that a closer examination of this affective dynamics may provide a more useful account of how speaking
works to enhance capacities and enable to transcend norms.
Sonenberg
Jennifer
Georgia
Learning Experiences with
Shakespeare, Performance, and
Deleuze
This paper is centered around a research study of undergraduate students enrolled in a seven-week study abroad
program in the summer of 2013 focusing on Shakespeare and performance. Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of
becoming and experience offer a framework and vocabulary for the study in which the researcher explores how the
experiences of teaching and learning through performance form and shape a Deleuzian becoming as well as what
the findings bring to bear on Shakespearean pedagogy more generally. Learning experiences that encourage
creation and experimentation (such as those that take place when focusing on Shakespeare through performance)
provide a rich environment to explore becoming since becoming “by definition is an experiment with what is new,
that is, coming into being, be-coming” (Semetsky, 2010, p. 480). The overall research design of this study aligns with
poststructural research practices in which the subject “both the researcher and the researched” is always fractured
and shifting throughout the research process. Accordingly, research data are not viewed as “transparent evidence of
that which is real” (Davies, 2004, p. 4) that can be translated, coded, and then produced as a transparent narrative.
Instead, data are messy, shifting, and unsteady. One way poststructural researchers have embraced these shifts is to
consider data collection and analysis as rhizomatic in which thought grows and functions horizontally and in the
middle, fleeing the vertical, arborescent structure in order to create and form new connections that may not be
made arborescently. The rhizome opposes linear thinking for it has no foundation but is constantly in the process of
becoming, seeking out new relations. Any text can be viewed as a rhizome in which the discourse operating within it
follow lines of flight that intersect with other texts that are also rhizomes, and so this paper also extends the
concept of the rhizome to analyze the learning experiences that form and shape Deleuzian becomings.
Springgay
Stephanie
University of
Toronto
Aberrant movement: The time-image
and video data in research-creation
Deleuze’s books on Cinema provide us with the theories to think about research methodologies and video data
liberated from a sequencing of images attached to a single observer, to a presentation of affects, intensities, and
‘any point whatever.’ In this paper I engage with particular concepts in relation to video data collected in a large
research study on artistic interventions in public schools. In particular, I’ll discuss the movement-image and the
time-image and their relationship to faciality. As opposed to organizing perception from our own interests and
embodied locations, cinema, Deleuze argues, presents us with indirect and direct images of time. The movementimage produces indirect images of time. In the movement-image the camera moves, as a body moves, while the
camera also produces other moving bodies. With the time-image we get a direct image of time where movement
becomes aberrant and irrational. In the time-image it is not movement that happens to objects. Rather, according to
Deleuze, life is movement from which distinct things are then actualized. In the time-image we can begin to
experience another kind of time, one not bound to linearity or narrative unity. Colebrook (2002) writes: “Visual
images are composed and ordered, not to form moving things or ordered wholes, but images as such – not images
of some world from some point of view” (p. 33). Thus, movement is not contained within a particular body with a
particular point of view, rather movement is transversal becomings from which we compose and re-compose the
world. Cinema, Deleuze suggests, enables us to think about mobile sections and the process of montage. Using
concepts like montage, time-image, movement, and affect I examine a series of video pieces collected during a large
research study on artistic interventions in schools. Rather than examining the data as a part within a whole, I
approach the video as singularities, as time-images where “[t]he set cannot divide into parts without qualitatively
changing each time: it is neither divisible nor indivisible, but ‘dividual’” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 14). This is absolute
movement where “singularities are distributed in a properly problematic field as topological events to which no
direction is attached (Deleuze, 1990, p. 104). As aberrant movement data becomes: “machinic montages that bring
into conjunctions semiotic chains and an intercrossing of material and social fluxes” (Guattari in Manning, 2013, p.
52). Rather than thinking of video data as a whole we need to think about it as singularities; as an Open whole: “if
the whole is not giveable, it is because it is the Open, and because its nature is to change constantly, or to give rise
to something new, in short, to endure” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 9). This is crucial because the time-image as difference
exceeds the present that enables the moving video data to become inventive, no longer conditioned by an image of
what is worth learning (Pinar, 2004).
Springgay
(Convenor)
Stephanie
University of
Toronto
Video data and the time-image:
Cinematic methodologies in
education research
Deleuze’s (1986; 1989) work on Cinema proposes a radical approach to the use of video in qualitative research.
Drawing on his own prior work, his collaborative work with Guattari, and the philosophies of Bergson, his Cinema
books foreground the fluid indeterminacy and potentiality of film and video. Screen media have the potential to
sustain the mobility of the virtual or to create their own fluid differentiation, rather than “repeat the already
formed and recognized” (Colebrook, 2006, p. 15). In discussing and comparing various kinds of screen media,
Deleuze opposes the movement-image, which is determined by linear causal relationship, rationality, and
continuity, to the time-image, which breaks from logical progressions of images and engages with the image-itself.
The time-image is aberrant movement that creates openings for transversal linkages and “machinic montages”
(Guattari, 1977, p. 54) that bring into conjunction distorted temporalities, which are “distributed in a properly
problematic field as topological events to which no direction is attached” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 104). Aberrant
movement is irrational, purely optical and auditory, and presents a direct image of time. The consequences of this
shift in film theory and philosophies of thought have direct implications to the methodological use of video in
qualitative research. Rather than immobilizing and distilling research data through video frames, time-image and
aberrant movement grasps events as they exist in duration. Each ‘image’ thus contains its own capacity for
differentiation and change, which results in a destabilization of representation, displacing notions of signification
and association in favour of an affective and dynamic image that is encountered directly. This panel session will
address these concerns through the questions: Why can or should one use Deleuze to think about film/video as a
qualitative research methodology? What potentials does Deleuzian theory offer to those who use video-based
research methodologies, and what implications will his work have for qualitative research?
Stratigos
Tina
Charles Sturt
University
Researching assemblages of desire in
early childhood education
Recently, concerns have been raised about the potential for ‘belonging’ to become a romanticised, simplistic and
taken-for-granted notion within early childhood education, and, calls have been made for belonging to be critically
interrogated and further theorised. This provocation regarding belonging is explored here in relation to the lives of
infants in early childhood education settings - an area that has traditionally been influenced by attachment theory,
and a resultant focus upon dyadic infant:adult relationships, and a limited view of infants’ ability to interact with
peers. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblages of desire offers a way of exploring how belonging might
actually operate for infants in family day care. The research assemblage discussed in this presentation brings
together data from an episode that took place between a 15-month old boy, a group of older children and an
educator in family day care, along with the researcher, and concepts from Deleuze and Guattari. I will discuss how
using their concepts of assemblage and desire helped me to view the data in a ‘different’ way, and to move beyond
an initial ‘common sense interpretation’ of what this episode ‘meant’. In particular, rather than assuming answers
based upon dominant views of relationships between infants, older children and educators, this process revealed
the complex and unresolved nature of belonging, and the potential roles of infants in the politics of belonging. In
these ways, the research puts Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to work as ‘new weapons’ against romanticism, and
attempts to stretch thinking about the capacities of infants in the politics of belonging, and further the possibilities
for theorising belonging in early childhood education.
Sumsion
Jennifer
Charles Sturt
University
Curriculum politics and refrains of
resistance
In recent years, globalising policies targeting early childhood education have seen a proliferation of early childhood
curriculum frameworks in countries around the world. These have been generally framed in terms of human capital
investment, and designed to mediate and maximise young children’s development and learning. Like many
curricula, they embody the modulations of Deleuze’s (1992) societies of control. They (are intended to) work
through codes, passwords and order-words. Yet at the same time, as assemblages of desire, these curricula produce
mulitiplicitous and unpredictable forces and a/effects. This session maps some of the a/effects produced by
Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework (Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and
Workplace Relations, 2009), with a focus on the molecular micropolitics of resistance to neoliberal agendas and
some of the refrains of that resistance. These mappings open up opportunities to think with Deleuze and Guattari
about the operation of power in the flows and intensities of curriculum politics, and the new weapons these
concepts provide and allow.
Tam
Teresa
Alberta
Art School Depression: From
Obsolescence of Art to Proliferation
of the Everyday
Art school obsolesces art of the spectacular, singularity and exception of its existence. This causes depression, a
spiral of self-loathing and lack of self-esteem in its inability to serve art. The regime of the spectacle of knowledge
confines and subjugates the classroom and administrative body of the institution. The regime of the spectacle of the
artist creates elitism and subordinates the student to an elusive image of an artist. Both regimes renders art school
subservient its own depression. Art school, in order to save itself from the confines of depression, is to abolish the
regimes from itself. To achieve this abolition is to also dissolve itself into non-existence. In the process it will
become be a place of incubation, a space for new thoughts on the future of art. By releasing itself, art will manifest
anew. And by releasing students, they will change art. As such, art school dissolves art into the multitude of the
everyday. The role of art school, then, is to change art and render art into the everyday. Art is in an existential crisis.
Following the writings of Allan Kaprow, Gerald Raunig, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I am proposing a call
for change in thought and methodologies on the role of art school and its place in education.
Thompson
Greg
Murdoch
Teaching-machines, smooth space
and the possibilities of Bartleby
Logics of teaching are being reconstructed by various policy and conceptual reform interventions in the Anglophone
world. Paradoxically, many of these reforms operate not through increased striation, but rather through a
smoothing of space, or those codes traditionally expected to be found within disciplinary and disciplining
institutions such as schools and classrooms. While there is currently much literature that valorises "smooth space"
in education as a way out of the disciplinary past of the school, and by extension the teacher-face, this paper takes
seriously Deleuze and Guattari's reminder that we should "never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us"
(Deleuze & Guattari, 2005, p. 500). This paper will present high-stakes testing and teaching-machines as
provocations to think through what can we do when the history of 'minor' teaching, predicated on the notion of
resistance to striation or State thought, ceases to adequately explain those compelling machines of capture in a
control society. Finally, the paper will conclude by suggesting that Deleuze's essay on Bartleby presents a formula
for becoming-imperceptible, or at least indeterminate, within these modulatory machines.
Thompson
Cook
Greg
Ian
Murdoch
Producing the NAPLAN Machine: A
Schizoanalytic Cartography
“Everything revolves around desiring-machines and the production of desire… Schizoanalysis merely asks what are
the machinic, social and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the parts,
wheels, and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them to enter into their own parts, wheels and
motors” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, pp. 380-381).
Achievement tests like NAPLAN are fairly recent, yet common, education policy initiatives in much of the Western
world. They intersect with, use and change pre-existing logics of education, teaching and learning. There has been
much written about the form and function of these tests, the ‘stakes’ involved and the effects of their practice. This
paper adopts a different “angle of vision” to ask what ‘opens’ education to these regimes of testing (Roy, 2008)?
This paper builds on previous analyses of NAPLAN as a modulating machine, or a machine characterised by the
increased intensity of connections and couplings. One affect can be “an existential disquiet” as “disciplinary subjects
attempt to force coherence onto a disintegrating narrative of self” (Thompson & Cook, 2012, p. 576). Desire
operates at all levels of the education assemblage, however our argument is that achievement testing manifests
desire as ‘lack’; seen in the desire for improved results, the desire for increased control, the desire for freedom, the
desire for acceptance to name a few. For Deleuze and Guattari desire is irreducible to lack, instead desire is
productive. As a productive assemblage, education machines operationalise and produce through desire; “Desire is
a machine, and the object of the desire is another machine connected to it” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 26). This
intersection is complexified by the strata at which they occur, the molar and molecular connections and flows they
make possible. Our argument is that when attention is paid to the macro and micro connections, the machines built
and disassembled as a result of high-stakes testing, a map is constructed that outlines possibilities, desires and
blockages within the education assemblage. This schizoanalytic cartography suggests a new analysis of these
‘axioms’ of testing and accountability. It follows the flows and disruptions made possible as different or altered
connections are made and as new machines are brought online. Thinking of education machinically requires
recognising that “every machine functions as a break in the flow in relation to the machine to which it is connected,
but at the same time is also a flow itself, or the production of flow, in relation to the machine connected to it”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 37). Through its potential to map desire, desire-production and the production of
desire within those assemblages that have come to dominate our understanding of what is possible, Deleuze and
Guattari’s method of schizoanalysis provides a provocative lens for grappling with the question of what one can do,
and what lines of flight are possible.
Thompson
(Convenor)
Greg
Murdoch
Deleuze and Guattari’s
Schizoanalaysis: An Analytic for
Education Assemblages?
The Habit and Memory of education operate within a landscape of permanent crisis. However, the neoliberal
proliferation (or addition and subtraction) of axioms of and about education, such as efficiency, teacher quality,
PISA envy, the intensification of accountability and transparency machines, is reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari’s
axiomatic capitalism: “The situation seems inextricable because the axiomatic never ceases to create all of these
problems, while at the same time its axioms, even multiplied, deny it the means of resolving them” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 2005, p. 468). The “hyper-activism” of education policy (Dunleavy & O'Leary, 1987), as evidenced by; the
intensification of performative machines (Ball, 2003; Thompson, 2010), the increasing fear and scepticism about the
course and practices of education (Clarke, In Press), the fixation on accountability (Webb, 2011), testing (Thompson
& Cook, 2012), equity in and of markets (Sellar, 2013) to name a few, manifest as a bewildering array of
technologies, interventions, debates, experiences and desires jostling for prominence as answers to the imperative
“to improve”. How do educators and scholars sense, and make sense of, this complex, contradictory and
increasingly acrimonious terrain? What can be done in such a milieu? This symposium brings together national and
international theorists to map the theoretical and methodological possibilities for dealing with the schizophrenic
terrain of education through Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of “schizoanalysis”. Schizoanalysis is a tool for mapping
desire-production, the various blockages and flows, or lines of flight, available within complex, inconsistent, and
contradictory systems. It links the systemic with the self, the macro and the micro, the molar and molecular to ask
“what are the machinic, social and technical indices on a socius that open to desiring-machines, that enter into the
parts, wheels, and motors of these machines, as much as they cause them to enter into their own parts, wheels and
motors” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 381). Schizoanalysis, then, is “a micropolitical analysis which never cuts itself
off... from the real and the social field” (Guattari, 1996d, p. 153). Schizoanalysis is fundamentally, but more
importantly self-consciously, diagrammatic. This is not to say that it can “provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’
that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to
one single factor” (Buchanan, 2013). It is not local and simply of the room-assemblage in which connections
(individual or group) occur but concerns the machines at work in and through that assemblage, and indeed through
every assemblage. Schizoanalysis is also about resisting those normalisations that reterritorialise theory, or if you
will, is about keeping theoretical understandings of the terrain of education open, immanent and outlandish.
Wallin
Jason
Alberta
The onto-ecology of "dark art"
In Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (2010), Giroux weds the contemporary popularity of
zombies to a cultural obsession with death, catastrophe, and human suffering. Herein, Giroux casts the zombie as a
perverse harbinger of corporate America's feral politics and its material proliferation of suffering and exploitation
recalcitrant to the public good. While sympathetic to Giroux's analysis of the corporate exploitation of human and
non-human life, this presentation will utilize a Deleuze|Guattarian schizoanalytic approach to steal back the import
of the zombie as a social conductor irreducable to the ethically devoid or death-obsessed interpretations by which it
has been thought. My intent here is relatively straightforward insofar as it pertains to detecting the pedagogical
potentials for resistance and experimental alterity inhereing the concept of the zombie. This task will call into
question a number of presuppositions and commitments in the field of pedagogical research including its latent
anthropocentrism, posthuman anxiety, and avoidance of what will herein be dubbed "dark art".
Webb
Taylor
University of
British Columbia
The Dogmatic Image of Education and
the Production of the New
Education has approached the limits to what it can do. At least this is my starting point. These limits are products of
what education has done, and products of what it can not, or never did. Such limits are reinforced, I believe, by
global machines that further instrumentalize education and that simultaneously obscure educational practices that
seek flight from a deleterious, striated, and decaying political system - what I take to be an essential relationship
between education and politics. Within, I borrow and extend the dogmatic image of thought to education in order
think through some openings that arise when education is practiced without recourse to ideas of recognition and
representation. Instead, the so-called aims of education might pause for a moment and note how difference is not
something to be categorized - if this is even possible - but rather, note how difference can be used to produce the
new. And while the production of the new may sound like something that education has always aspired to, a
particular problem emerges: once the new is established it can no longer be considered new. Here, I discuss how
education might produce the new - and not the same differently - which would entail, among many things, a move
away from educational aims and objectives and a move toward educational emergences and ‘things yet to come’.
Webb
Taylor
University Of
British Columbia
A Schizoanalysis of and for
Pedagogical Folds
A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.
- Deleuze and Guattari
What’s your road, man? — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road
for anybody anyhow. Where body how?
- Kerouac
I use Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the fold to discuss how teachers write - and are written by - desires about their work. I
theorize the idea of pedagogical folds as a particular, and possibly productive, form of schizoanalysis that is
concerned with traversing the competing and contradictory values contained in curriculum-policy, for instance,
quality and efficiency; and, I theorize the idea of pedagogical folds as a way to map the competing and contradictory
responses to curriculum-policy, for instance, guilt and denial. My aim in this talk is to move beyond documentations
of curriculum-policy (i.e., neo-liberal) and teacher identities (e.g., “professional”). Instead, I am interested in
developing a particular form of schizoanalysis that provides a teaching subjectivity with pedagogical folds can be
used to assist thought and thinking to develop particular intensities within the endless “capitalist axiomatics” of
educational reform (Deleuze, 1971). Nevertheless, my discussion does raise a number of objections to a preferred
discourse concerning neo-liberal curriculum policy (e.g., standards, performance, accountability, rankings), but also
a number of objections to preferred discourses concerning “teacher identity” found within the literatures on
teacher preparation, teacher education, and teacher professionalism. I note how teachers are constantly folded
between an immanence of curriculum-policy desires, and between the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of teachers. I
illustrate the immanence of pedagogical folds as a kind of ‘origami of the self’ and specifically as an affective
schizoanalysis of nial-a-pend-de-quacy-in (Webb, 2013).
The concept of pedagogical folds, then, is both descriptive of performative educational axioms, and a schizopragmatics in its potential responses to such axioms. Schizoanalysis, with its attention upon cartographies of desireproduction, can provide educators with emergent and adaptive maps to traverse, and potentially avoid, attempts to
reterritorialize them in micropolitical performative scripts desired by curriculum policy. Deleuze (1971) explained,
Whereas the schizo, he does more, he does not let himself be axiomatized either, he always goes further with the
decoded flows, making do with no flows at all, rather than letting himself be coded, no earth at all, rather than
letting himself be territorialized.
The discussion concludes by highlighting schizoanalysis as a powerful spatial tool - mapping device - that deals
specifically with the emergent, adaptive, and nonlinear spaces produced in curriculum policy and teaching bodies.
However, the conclusion also warns that any attempts at a schizo-pragmatic entails risks for educators. In other
words, I note some of the possibilities and challenges of working within different and competing affective spaces,
best articulated by Kerouac’s (1957) “where body how?”