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Reorganizing our library during the pandemic, James secretly placed Jasmine’s copy of The Hundreds by his copy of Exercises in Style, the latter offering 99 different narrations of the same story. In our accidentally large archive of abstracts for which we never wrote papers, we had a collection of constrained writings, all iterations of our shared research narrative. Many of these were unsubmitted responses to calls for papers (CFPs), conferences we were not able to attend, or papers we never got around to writing. We share the following sample of 24 abstracts here as an invitation, should anyone wish to develop these ideas. Furthermore, abstracts themselves constitute a genre of scholarly communications, the art of which might be developed to make research more accessible, abstracts themselves being situated in front of paywalls. Ultimately, this project led to the 25th abstract and introduction to our podcast, the Researchers’ Cardbox.

Rereading Walter Benjamin’s often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in the winter of 2018 in The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting this installation and Benjamin’s insights on preservation, we make recommendations on how to make readable rhetoric that might be used to positively shape digitally disseminated climate change activist media. We examine three types of preservation: 1. preservation that makes inaccessible, 2. dialectical preservation, and 3. the preservation of the collected. In so doing, we show how performative acts of publicly available art might directly respond to the environmental crisis and how the legibility of that art might offer hope for survival in the age of climate change. How to cite this article: Salvo, James M. & Jasmine B. Ulmer. "A Rhetoric of Preservation: Artistic Interventions in a Damaged World." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 25 (September 2021): 81-95. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i25.449

This article proposes a posthuman / materialist somatechnics approach which encourages a more nuanced, ethical, and embodied attentiveness to how humans, nature, and materialities are not separate, but actively emerge through entanglements and in co-constitutive relation with one another. Such an attentiveness recognises that we are shaped by the places in which we live and by the many others – human and nonhuman – with whom we live. It also urges the need to reshape research methodologies. To illuminate how we might more closely attend to the places in which we live, learn, teach, inquire, and research, this article offers a series of situated, speculative, and somatechnic engagements arising from our recent ventures in two separate post-industrial cities. The article is framed as a mode of writing otherwise – as a series of experimental elemental essays and the theory-practice diffractive musings they have given rise to. Taken together, the essays and musings aim to contest deficit discourses of post-industrial cities and the multiple bodies who / which inhabit them. The posthuman situated and speculative somatechnics approach we propose offers insights into unexpected and surprising new relations. We hope the elemental essays and musings which follow invite readers to take up the ‘practice of the pause’ in their own places and spaces.

With a pedagogical aim, we offer an overview of some, though certainly not all, of the potential initial framing considerations in forced displacement research. We then engage with several of the key terms currently in use by international agencies before discussing how those terms can be (re)interpreted as they are taken up in transnational contexts. In attending to the ethics of naming throughout, we suggest that terms developed by international policy bodies should be approached situationally in disasters as part of humanitarian aid. Just as document-specific definitions need not go beyond the document, situation-specific terms should not become oppressive labels that have the potential to stigmatize people for the rest of their lives. Thus, we caution against assigning such terms as fixed identity categories, as they have the potential to reduce a person to a situation in which they may have once found themselves.

There are many ways to frame how and why we go about research, particularly when it comes to unsettling traditions. From the beginning of our studies, we can be encouraged (or even required) to situate our contributions within gaps, or deficits, in the existing literature. This teaches us to launch our work on the limitations of others. As an alternative, I wonder how scholarship might turn on its own merits, instead. I suggest that care and gratitude offer two important possibilities.

Transdisciplinary feminisms remain in motion. In moving across disciplines, they flow—fall—seep into different theories, methodologies and practices. As the authors in this collection have expressed, there are many diverse and hopeful visions for how this can, and does, occur. Their writings are filled with rich endeavors that pose, perform, run away, live in the hyphens, inhabit spiritual dimensions, decolonize, and carefully—but willfully—intervene across varied global academic perspectives, genealogies and histories. From art to ecology, education, history, sociology, critical theory, chemistry and more, scholars are reshaping feminisms in ways that are at once inter-, multi-, post- and trans-disciplinary. And as they convey with us here, many of these movements have not been uncontested. Even more to the point: feminisms continue to be contested across disciplines. The pasts of feminist work carry over into the work of the present, and likely will continue to do so in futures that have yet to be determined. By way of response, this last chapter considers transdisciplinary feminisms through rusty futures. How it relates is this: the ‘rusty futures’ of transdisciplinary feminisms carry across the ways in which we choose to read, write, tell our own feminist histories, pass them on to others, and further our generative and generationally overlapping feminist commitments along the way. In these regards, rusty weatherings are not only figurative and literal in scope—they are also everyday expressions of hope for transdisciplinary feminisms yet to come.

Perhaps minor gestures are telling us to slow down and#SlowWriting is a daily #MinorGesture.

Writing can be a (playful) practice that develops through techniques. To illustrate, I draw from the works of Erin Manning to describe how I take up techniques in both writing and dance. I then suggest several potential techniques for fostering a postqualitative writing practice: following creative impulses, situating writing within concepts, and finding time to not write. Discussions of these techniques are augmented by a series of play spaces in which readers might choose to experiment by folding, cutting together-apart, slowing, and more. The play spaces are designed to encourage readers to consider how they might invent techniques for their own practices. Significantly, writing techniques shape practices that emphasize how and why writing becomes. Without examining writing habits and how they might develop further through techniques, we risk holding scholarly writing in stasis and limiting its future only to what already has been done.

The posthuman turn has radically–and rapidly–shifted what is possible in research methodology. In response, my aim in this conceptual paper is to suggest entry points into posthuman educational research methodology. I outline aspects of posthumanism while recognizing its multiplicity: there are many posthumanisms and each offers different twists, turns, and ways of thinking about methodology. In unfolding the potentials thereof, I locate posthumanism within our current epoch, which some scholars have suggested be renamed the Anthropocene to account for the impact of humanity on the planet. Then, I describe how posthumanism situates, processes, and affirms knowledge in interconnected and material contexts. Next, I consider how non-representational research imagines and animates methodologies that think differently. I conclude by discussing a postdisciplinary future for more-than-critical inquiries. Significantly, this article addresses recent advancements in posthuman research and engages with ongo...

In the current moment of social, political, economic and environmental disquiet, unprecedented numbers of children have been forced to leave their homes and settle in new communities. As schools worldwide receive increasing numbers of refugee youth, there is a pressing need for thoughtful educational research that inquires into the unique individual needs and experiences of displaced learners. Given that students’ journeys are shaped by movements across physical, cultural and linguistic spaces, we suggest that related scholarship might benefit from Third Space theory. Within this theoretical framework, neither language nor culture is static. Rather, both are continuously shaped through interactions – including those that are non-verbal. For students who may be learning in an unfamiliar language, visual methodologies offer a means and venue for communication. To explore how refugee youth might benefit from Third Space theory and visual methodologies, we first review scholarship that examines how ch...

In the move toward a critical form of qualitative inquiry that realizes its transformative potential, this article encourages scholars to consider axes of need within research. A flexible framework suggests how researchers might respond to situated need through theoretically and contextually grounded inquiries. In first drawing from critical geography, the concepts of heterotopic space and spatial justice are used to theoretically explore potential sites of critical transformation. These fluid spaces next are situated along five possible axes of need: food, water, shelter, justice, and love. By way of illustration, axes then are read through the lens of an urban city; potential responses take shape as a research agenda that could include visual and experimental forms of mapping. Importantly, the framework offers methodological openings for a critical form of qualitative inquiry that directly responds to, and participates in, issues of local need.

Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist method of diffraction aligns with many elements of critical policy analysis. Both involve critical theory, complexity and multiple analyses. To examine diffraction as a potential method of critical policy analysis, this paper enacts Karen Barad’s method of diffraction through the theoretical writings of Jane Bennett and Gloria Anzaldua. Using the example of teacher leaders who are involved in educational policy, Bennett’s vibrant ecologies illustrate ecosystems of teacher leadership and Anzaldua’s borderlands demonstrate how teacher leaders bridge their roles within multiple layers of community, governance and identity. Through the method of diffraction, critical policy analyses may produce broader perspectives regarding the ways in which differing stakeholders, grou...

What if—in light of the escalating pace of academic production—scholars adopted a Slow Ontology? Because this question moves beyond slowing the pace or volume of productivity to address underlying issues of ontology, it asks not how we can find a slower way of doing scholarship, but how we can find a slower way of scholarly being. A philosophy of Slowness has sparked movements around the globe regarding Slow Food and Slow Cities; these and similar movements disrupt daily practices that prioritize speed, efficiency, and output at the expense of quality. In response, a Slow Ontology approaches writing as a site of creative intervention. This article offers methodological possibilities for writing a Slow Ontology in qualitative inquiry: each attends to how we might write the materiality of our local environments. In writing a Slow Ontology, researchers might create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive.

In this article, the street is both a place of travel and a space for critical discourse. As tensions between public and private spaces play out in the streets, street artists claim visible space through multiple forms of art. Through a critical performance geography and a qualitative inquiry of the street, I photograph the movement of art across walls, doorways, windows, sidewalks, lampposts, alleyways, gutters, and dumpsters over a 7-month period in the Eastern Market neighborhood of Detroit ( N = 806). After describing street art as a fluid genre that has developed into a diverse spectrum of post-graffiti, I explore how street art contributes to a changing visual terrain through discussions of racism, decolonization, gentrification, and the role of art in spatial justice. Photographic cartography is introduced as (a) a visual method of performance geography that illustrates material-discursive “fault lines” and (b) a critical means of analyzing conversations in contested public space. Significantly, street artists simultaneously work within and against urban renewal policies in “creative cities” such as Detroit. Given that the arts are at the center of sophisticated visual discourse regarding neoliberalism, democracy, and the battle over public space, researchers might continue to examine how street artists inscribe social justice in, on, and around the streets.

As the possibilities of hypermodal inquiry intensify against the boundaries of qualitative research, a hypermodal assemblage performs an unfolding–refolding of layers within the space of Deleuzian thought. By exploring a literary question asked by F. Scott Fitzgerald and later repeated by Deleuze, a Deleuzian lens transports the ontologically real into the realm of the postmodern, expanding alternative conceptualizations of the conventional question, “What happened?” Here, layered text, images, and sound flatten into a hypermodal intensity of passageways through poststructural philosophy, literature, and visual art. By exploring hypermodal reading and writing practices, this assemblage reimagines prohibitive thresholds within qualitative inquiry.

This study examines how participation in a US Department of Education policy fellowship influenced the career pathways of teacher leaders. This sample of teacher leaders is illustrative of teacher leadership development beyond the classroom and demonstrates challenges and opportunities. Notably, 64% of participants reported changing their work-related position post fellowship. Although many participants left the classroom, most remained within the education profession by adding and path-finding new teacher leadership roles. We suggest that these trends have significant implications regarding the structure of occupational roles for teacher leaders.

scape. 1 a brief ‘escape or means of escape’ 2 ‘a scenic view, whether of sea, land, or sky’ 3 ‘in its various senses’ 4 ‘a long flower-stalk rising directly from the root or rhizome’ 5 a theoretical approach to writing

This special issue of Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology offers a series of curations and creations from emergent scholars within the equally emergent field of postqualitative research.

This paper seeks to examine how embodied methodological approaches might inform dance education practice and research. Through a series of examples, this paper explores how choreographic writing might function as an embodied writing methodology. Here, choreographic writing is envisioned as a form of visual word choreography in which words move, pause, gain emphasis, and flow as if dancing across the open page. To explore writing as choreography, this paper primarily draws from three theoretical perspectives on embodiment: phenomenological, new materialist, and Deleuzian. For each of these perspectives, this paper describes its approach to embodiment, provides choreographic writing examples, and discusses the implications thereof for dance education practice and research. Given the increasing importance of practice-as-research and creative arts inquiry, this paper finds that choreographic writing provides an alternative mode of communication for dance writers and qualitative researchers alike. Significantl...

This article explores visual forms of writing through cartography and methodological events. As re-envisioned writing practices and textual methodologies potentially push boundaries of qualitative research, these new lines of inquiry also may respond to persisting educational challenges that confine occupational job design and career pathways in education. Various related and unrelated inquiries, representations, and practices set in motion a series of methodological events related to writing, analysis, and our researcher selves. In this article, career pathways provide one topical example that is used to focus our writing and cartographies, but we also imagine broader methodological mappings that extend beyond data on teacher career pathways. We therefore propose that writing visually through cartography may help scholars avoid recycling research and retracing existing educational policies. Furthermore, we propose that uncertain textual authority and non-linear textuality may manifest as productive analytical and methodological space within a Deleuzian installation of visual writings.

Recent publications by major newspapers in the USA have reinforced the perception that teacher quality represents a national crisis. By releasing individual teacher evaluation data in online, searchable databases, several newspapers have influenced public perceptions of teachers and teaching. A framing analysis of selected media events and publications identifies how these media-based actions have created and perpetuated a discourse of professional inadequacy. Rather than envision educators as fixed within media frames, however, the author discusses how practitioners can reinscribe their profession by engaging with the media and the public themselves. In this model, counter-narratives become a means to deconstruct metanarratives, foster complexity, and expand practitioner voice(s). In a turn toward poststructural theory, the author considers how counter-narratives and petit narratives might proliferate across online media into an assemblage of multiplicities that de/reterritorialize educational discourse....

In this chapter, we examine how the discourses of education reform intersect with twenty-first-century policies that purport to prepare students to be productive members of a global economy. Through the example of a national reform organization that promises to deliver twenty-first-century skills and competencies, we demonstrate how discourse shaped and revealed the aims of the program as it was implemented in three high schools. We show that education discourse shapes policy initiatives at the same time that it influences practices of schooling and society that prioritize commercial interests over social improvement.

Maybe this text complicates writing as a fixed and normative scholarly practice. Maybe it problematizes premeditated and co-constructed textual production. Maybeit refuses the always already existing possibility for (collaborative) writing while engaging different materials in various (un/non)writing contexts. Maybe it is time to acknowledge presence and absence in the collaborative construction of visual writing (see Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015). Maybe this project builds from other collaborative and experimental projects, projects that extend various forms of academic writing, including the work of Bridges-Rhoads and Van Cleave (2014); Gale and Wyatt (2009); Hofsess and Sonenberg (2013); Guttorm, Hilton, Jonsdottir, Loytonen, McKenzie, Gale, and Wyatt (2013); Loytonen, KoroLjungberg, Carlson, Orange, and Cruz (2015); and Wyatt, Gale, Gannon, and Davies (2010, 2011).

What if we expressed critical qualitative inquiry is/as love?