Presentation at the New Materialism Conference, 4th of December 2019, University of Western Cape

1. STAYING WITH
THE DISCOMFORT
XENA CUPIDO & DANIELA GACHAGO
CAPE PENINSULA
UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Rediscovery through Becoming-With....
An ethico-onto-epistemological awakening

2. Presentation
Outline
Past project
Re-turning
Diffraction
Knowledge making
Subjectivities
Indeterminacy

3. NEW MATERIALISM | 2020
“Practices of knowing
and being are not isolable;
they are mutually implicated.
We don't obtain knowledge by
standing outside the world;
we know because we are of the world.
We are part of the world in its
differential becoming"
(Barad, 2007: 185)

4. NEWMATERIALISMI2020
THE PAST
Decolonial moment
Discourses and practices
Co-Creation Project 2018
6 project members: academic staff,
academic staff developers, postgrad
students
Aim: develop a co-created short
course on critical compassionate
citizenship
1 year process
Output: Guidelines for Co-Creation
(Ngoasheng et al. 2019)

5. NEWMATERIALISM|2020
ProjectTeam
Intersections
Gender, Age, Race, Class, Culture, Language
Disciplinary background and roles, discourses
and practices
Locations: universities, coffee shops,
conferences
- impacting strongly on how we were
positioned and who and what we were
able to be / do in this project
(both materially and discursively)Ashton, Daniela, Xena, Asanda, Yolisa, Seun (absent),
Granger Bay, August 2018

6. NEWMATERIALISM|2020
RE-TURNING
“re-turning” which is not the
same as simply returning to the
past “but re-turning as in
turning it over and over again”
(Ceder, 2018)

7. NEWMATERIALISM|2020
DIFFRACTING
‘iterative reconfiguring of patterns
of differentiating-entangling...there
is no moving beyond, no leaving the
old behind...there is no absolute
boundary between the here-now
and the there-then’ (Barad, 2014:
168)

8. NEWMATERIALISM2020
Such thinking requires
a methodology that
does not center on our
research subjects as the
site of agency and
therefore the focus of
our inquiry, but rather,
to consider the
enactment of agency
and the co-production
of these enactments
(Mazzei, 2013: 777)

9. NEW MATERIALISM | 2020
THINKING WITH...
Knowledge-Making
Practices
Subjectivities Indeterminacy

10. NEW MATERIALISM| 2020
“No, the thing is when it comes to the book chapter let’s be
honest, I know we are co-authors and blah blah blah. But to
some extent, we don't have much of a contribution because
it’s already done. You know, you read it. The terminology is
kicking or the language is kicking for some time but the
abstract you can understand where we are going or what’s –
the book is all [about] – what the chapter is all going to be
about. That I can follow but the thing is there’s nothing much
that I can contribute to something that’s already made.
So I was happy with the abstract from the word go.
I didn't find anything that was amiss or anything that I could
add onto it. So we were happy about that.”
Project Meeting, Knead Wembley Square, August 2018
Re-turning: Knead Wembley Square, November 2019

11. NEWMATERIALSIM|2020
on knowledge
making practices
“Situating the knowing subjects as immanent to the
very conditions they are trying to understand,
change or rest….” (Braidotti, 2019)
knowledge making practices rather than discovery,
which are constitutive and performative, bringing
subjects, things, phenomena into being...
importance of material and discursive in knowledge
production
abstract-making as re-enacting colonial academic
practices - producing and being produced as
researchers - or not (Mazzei, 2013)

12. NEW MATERIALISM| 2020
“….”To be aware of my own identity and the power that it
assumes and sometimes unfairly imposes. Navigating this
new space is difficult … taking the lead, not taking the lead.
Taking ownership of terms, such as identity researcher,
teacher means encountering constructs that traditionally
convey very specific meanings. In actual fact, the more I do
this and the more I write, the more I begin to realise that we
have boxed ourselves in. Are we capable of free thought?”
Project Meeting, CommonGround, April 2018
Re-turning: Knead Wembley Square, November 2019

13. subjectivities
on difference
to become attentive to how “differences get made and
what the effects of these differences are” (Bozalek &
Zembylas, 2016: 2)
on positionality
“People [are] positioned in dramatically different power
relations. Situated and immanent practices allow for
sharper and ground analyses of the power differences’.
(Braidotti, 2019: 156)
on really seeing each other
“meeting the look of the other, and in so doing facing
oneself” (Haraway 2008, p. 88)
on becoming something different
‘experiment with new practices that allow for a multiplicity
of possible instances — actualizations and
counteractualizations [...] different lines of becoming’ and
most importantly to destabilise perspective’ (Braidotti,
2013: 140)

14. NEW MATERIALISM| 2020
“Are we capable of navigating space, without a plan, map or
GPS, so to speak? Are we able to allow what needs to
emerge, to emerge fluently … and are we able to be fluid
about this process? It is scary….”
Project Meeting, CommonGround, April 2018
Re-turning: Knead Wembley Square, November 2019

15. on indeterminacy
a different kind of stuck
A praxis of stuck places requires that questions are constantly
moving undefined, of never finishing, closing or defining or of
being sure (Derrida cited in Mackinlay, 2016: 10)
not looking for answers or solutions
situated the experience of the impossibility as an enabling
situation (Mackinlay, 2016)
guidelines as blockages in the system - false endings
staying with the trouble
‘In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address
trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of
stopping something from happening that looms in the
future, of clearing away the present and the past in order
to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the
trouble does not require such a relationship to times called
the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires
learning to be truly present (Haraway, 2017: 1)

16. NEWMATERIALISM|2020
what we learnt
(or not)
we are becoming in relation to each other
ongoing re-turning
acknowledging the presences and absences
patterns of difference
ethico-onto-epistemological
accountability!

17. NEWMATERIALISM|2020
something may
come out, though
one is not yet
completely sure
what (Rajchman 2000: 7)

18. NEWMATERIALISM|2020 References
Barad, Karen. (1999). “Agential Realism. Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices.” In The
Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli. New York – London: Routledge. pp. 1-11. Originally published
in 1998.
Barad, Karen. (2003). “Posthumanist Performativity. Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to
Matter.” Signs 28, 3: pp. 801-831.
Barad, Karen. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning. Durham – London: Duke University Press.
Barad, Karen. (2010). “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance. Dis/continuities,
Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-come.” Derrida Today 3, 2, pp. 240-268.
Barad, Karen. (2014). “Diffracting Diffraction. Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20, 3, pp. 168-187.
Ceder, S. (2018). Towards a posthuman theory of educational relationality. Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. (1994). Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International. Translated from the French by Peggy Kamuf. With an introduction by Bernd Magnus and
Stephen Cullenberg. New York – London: Routledge. Originally published in French by Éditions Galilée in 1993.
Derrida, Jacques. (2002). “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by David Wills.
Critical Inquiry 28, 2, pp. 369-418.
Haraway, Donna. (1988). “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, 3, pp. 575-599.
Haraway, Donna. (2008) When Species Meet. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
Ngoasheng, A., Cupido, X., Oyekola, S., Gachago, D., Mpofu, A., & Mbekela, Y. 2019. Advancing democratic
values in higher education through open curriculum co-creation: Towards an epistemology of uncertainty L.
Quinn, ed. Reimaging Curricula: Spaces for Disruption. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media, pp. 324-344.
Rajchman, J. (2000). The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge: MIT Press.