Reconceptualising knowledge production in Higher Education through collaborative collaging

In this creative and interactive session in the Open Theme strand at the BAICE conference 2022, participants are invited to engage in the process of collaborative collaging to explore the complexities of becoming/being a researcher adult. We will explore ‘partnerships’ as relational: with the humans/non-humans that make and are made by our connections. Through collaging together, we hope to conceptualise ways to produce knowledge differently in conference spaces and Higher Education.

Drawing on empirical data from our ongoing praxis, we reimagine education as a tool for producing multiple ways of knowing rather than a mechanism for transferring knowledge, thereby dismantling traditional hierarchies.  ‘Collaborative collaging’ is a knowledge creation process where participants select and (re)assemble visual matter to create anew. It is a relational, generative process of slow scholarship which enacts post-human feminist pedagogies and research methodologies (Taylor 2016).  This approach has the potential to be utilised in multiple educational contexts – locally and internationally – offering ways for more just, inclusive and ethical research and practice.   

In this blog we share our ongoing and emerging story as a collective which began a couple of years ago when we were working from home and conceptualising ways to understand commonalities between ours and others’ research into child/hoods using visual and verbal snapshots (Cranham et.al. 2022). Collaborative collaging emerged as a method that allowed us to explore the immanence and emergence of connections and continues with our ongoing praxis including workshops at several educational research conferences and events.

Inspired by Fairchild et.al.’s Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing conferences and composing events (2022) we hope to create a space at the BAICE 2022, which allows for new ways of thinking and doing at conferences. By engaging with the multiple everyday experiences of adult/researchers, we will assemble visual representations of our complex, dynamic and emergent selves.  We, the authors and workshop delegates,  will create ‘enabling constraints’ (Truman, 2022) in the form of provocations for our collaging, preparing us for affects that may emerge.  Collaborators will begin choosing, cutting, pasting the images and artefacts that resonate with them.  Delegates are invited to bring their own materials (such as photographs, images, drawings, objects) but artefacts will also be provided.  Additionally, these collages could be built with text and emojis and other forms of print including appropriate materials from our own educational research. 

A collage brings together different stories into an emerging picture – complex, dynamic and messy. Inspired by contemporary relationships with technology and based on multi-sensory experiences, collaging stimulates emergent, embodied, material knowledge-creation. Collaging is a participatory and collaborative methodology where the outcome is undetermined and assemblages of materials give rise to non-hierarchical, holistic and non-linear ways of knowing. In these practices we are resisting accelerated modes of knowledge production which dominate neoliberal systems of higher education (Mountz, 2015) and make space for a feminist collaborative creative deceleration enabling care for self,  becomings and matterings (Taylor, 2020).  As Culshaw (2019) notes, “…alternative approaches such as collage can upset our assumptions, making the familiar seem uncomfortably strange”. 

At the end of the BAICE 2022 workshop we will share our insights about the process of collaging and what it produced. How were we affected by it? How might we attend to the complex relations, including more-than-human relations?  We will ponder the ways in which knowledge was produced and proliferated.  What provocations and resonances emerged? How might we take these insights into our practices?  

Please come and play with us!  We don’t know what the final assemblage will look like, but we will, we hope, experience re-imaginings and ponderings of who we are becoming as adult/researchers.   

References:

Cranham, J., Dutta, M., Hogarth, H., Boukhari, S., Govaerts, F., Neiada, E., & Krayem, M. (2022).  Collaging childhoods’ relationships, BERA Blog Publications.  https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/collaging-childhoods-relationships   

Culshaw, S. (2019) ‘The unspoken power of collage? Using an innovative arts-based research method to explore the experience of struggling as a teacher’. London Review of Education, 17 (3): 268–283. 

Manning, E. & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. 

Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T. and Curran, W., 2015. For slow scholarship: A feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(4), pp.1235-1259. 

Taylor, C., 2016. Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education. In: C. Taylor and C. Hughes, eds. Posthuman research practice in education. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 5-24. 

Taylor, C.A., 2020. Slow singularities for collective mattering: new material feminist praxis in the accelerated academy. Irish Educational Studies, 39(2), pp.255-272. 

Truman S.E. 2022. Undisciplined: Research-Creation and What It May Offer (Traditional) Qualitative Research Methods. Qualitative Inquiry. doi:10.1177/10778004221098380 

Images

Hogarth, H., Cranham, J., Dutta, M., Boukhari, S., Govaerts, F., Neiada, E., & Krayem, M. 2022. Digitally collaging relational children and childhoods

Dutta, M., Cranham, J. and Hogarth, H. 2022. Relational research adulthoods