Migrant mothers: family photographs and the intra-active fashioning of a visual-material ethics

Migrant mothers play crucial roles within the social landscape of schools, particularly in providing care, education and a transition between home and school for their children. My research considers the relevance of theories of space, place, temporality and mobility in Iranian migrant mothers’ production of subjectivity for themselves and their children in and through their family photograph collections. Gillian Rose’s anthropological approach to visual objects is put to use in an exploration of the co-constitution of migrant women and their photographs. In this paper, I trace the shaping of a visual-material ethics within the research context and appropriate to the sensibilities and needs of the participant women who each moved from Iran to Australia with their children. Karen Barad’s notion of a posthumanist ‘ethics of mattering’ is drawn upon in conceptualising a visual-material ethics as fashioned in the intra-actions of people and visual objects. Specific ethical issues considered include the collaborative process of producing a family photograph, and the shaping and reshaping of images from photograph to line drawing to hybridised photograph-line drawing. A research ethics committee’s application of a liberal individualist, utilitarian and positivist biomedical paradigm in considering the research project is discussed as not only inadequate but also incompatible with the fashioning of a visual-material ethics in concert with the participant women and their photographs.

Swimming lessons : learning, new materialisms, posthumanism, and post qualitative research emerge through a pool poem

This article shifts from the formal learning spaces of school anduniversity to an Australian public swimming pool to playfullyengage some of the dilemmas that recent theory poses forcurriculum studies. The article enacts multiple diffractions(Barad, 2007) as theory becomes swimming and swimmingbecomes theory, and ideas and movements are themselvesdiffracted or changed by the writing of a poem. What does thepool teach us? What is learnt at the pool? How does learningemerge at the pool? Physics, chemistry, biology, and artistrycombine, as multiple human and non-human bodies intra-act(Barad, 2007), calling each other into being in this exploration ofhow distributed agencies and fractal causalities (Bennett, 2010)change how learning might be thought, represented, andswum. The poem incorporated here serves as provocation andinspiration for other scholars struggling with these educationaldilemmas and interested in arts-based research.