Etapa VI Presentación de resultados

Before moving to objects, voice/texts and spaces, the first area I was curious to explore, was to see if students could start building notions around the events in their cases. It struck me at the time that the act of trying to dis-entangle the “rhetorics”, “authorities”, “traditions” and so-called “objectivities” diffracting through the cases might temporarily produce a revelation of a main event or

phenomenon. Such an event or phenomenon would allow students to start a process of examining the different diffractions taking place around it, which in turn produced the case narrative as a whole. If students could, in small groups collaboratively agree on what the main event of their case was, then they could work with a range of diffractions to produced complex, critical readings of the events’ ensuing effects and how the case was selectively representing these. Habituated to analysing and producing narratives largely via individual essays, students found the task of agreeing together on a main event almost harder than trying to collaboratively make a circle at the very start of the course. As students ventured several propositions in their groups, their peers would question these, creating arguments that negated or approved them. As each small student group went on to present their agreed upon suggestion before the whole class, I would ask how they reached the conclusion that their proposition indeed was the “main event” of the case. Soon students from across groups began to debate whether almost any piece of information present in the case could be seen as the main event and how, if it wasn’t, it could be presented to be so. However, most students did agree that an event had effects or consequences – that, as Barad might state, it would produce “marks on bodies”. The authority of the case study as a valid representation of an event was thus questioned via a momentary deterritorialisation as the issue of complexity and the troubling of a more

simplified cause-and-effect approach to events challenged students to produce a number of critical diffractions, rather than accept the status quo presented by the case.

To zoom-in collaboratively on the issue of ‘event’ further, I gave each group a glass of water and an effervescent vitamin C tablet. I asked them to “change the conditions of water”, record it, and collaboratively decide on a main event, which they would then have to convince the rest of the class of. This process thus comprised of identifying and agreeing upon causes, effects and event within a multitude of micro actions both human and nonhuman. As I visited each small group in turn I asked to watch their process. Several students tried to ‘guess’ the main event abstractly, cautious not to “waste” their tablet before they “had it right.” I, and other students argued that they would do better to perform the actual task and critically discuss possibilities. Here again, students

demonstrated a difference between processes of research in theory and practice, where it seemed they were perhaps looking for the “right” answer to be

supported by the experimental practice, rather than practice informing the development of theory.

After a lot of lively discussion, which involved students’ zooming in to

increasingly minute detail, the class came up with a majority consensus. The event was deemed to be the moment the tablet encountered the water. The effects were the chemical changes. The causes, however, were more highly debated and varied: the hands that dropped in the tablet; gravity; the

instructions from the teacher; the lesson plan; and hosts of other things that brought “us” all into that moment of encounter. Interestingly, some mentioned that the narratives depended on where “you” were placed as “you” watched the tablet spin and dissolve in its unique way. Looking back, it is perhaps interesting to note that students were working on inter-active premises, but zooming in to such detail that they were beginning, inevitably, to deeply trouble the borders of separability, arguably entering a more complex and entangled sphere of inquiry. Perhaps this is a feature of intra-action, emerging more clearly the more the dynamics of everyday processes are zoomed-in on.

Thus, rather than immediately jumping into the muddy waters of cause, effect and event from a perspective always-already imbued with traditional case-based narrative judgments, envisioning events and the transformations that ensue as

movements or moving bodies perhaps makes strange, or decentres some of the more immediate, often ingrained stances students newly training in critical thinking might take. Here the approach is affective, embodied and

collaboratively practiced, taking a non-traditional or perhaps deterritorialising

route toward asking: what is the event and how is the story of cause and effect being wrapped around it in service of creating a particular representation (of a group, and identity or a political agenda)? Here the journeying towards a

separability of event, cause and effect is designed to start the process of critically exploring complexity and entanglement and to ask the question: how does a narrative evolve, develop, diffract?

Students began the serious play of creating, performing and discussing their short pieces. At the end of each short presentation I asked the student audience what they saw as the main event, how students performing collaborated – for example, did each student-performer correspond to an object, or did they work together to all give the illusion of a glass of water, etc.? What did their

collaborative style suggest about their working process? Did one appear to be a ‘director’ and others ‘performers’, or were the roles evenly distributed? How did the working process thus manifest in the presentation? What different forms of authority overall in the working process did students use? What might they use? And so on. Thus, the notion of event was discussed, the way the knowledge was produced was discussed, and the inherent strategies of representation, even in circumstances as crudely as this, were discussed. Furthermore, these were not discussed through readings, but through the practice of simple, embodied devising.

I set further short performance challenges, including a more complex one of two children playing with a ball. The case narrative was as follows: One child kicks it through a window, smashing it and hitting one of the children’s mothers on the head who reacts as she stands inside the house. I asked students to decide for themselves what they wanted to make the main event, to make it clear which of the characters or objects’ perspectives we were seeing it from, and to use no words in the performance at all. The different groups developed very different

performances, highlighting different events, and foregrounding very different perspectives. It seemed that this simple story comprised of a polyphony of events, causes and effects.

Students reported that when working with so simple and short a story in this way, such an overwhelming amount of factors were present that in the interests of time they eventually just settled on one to construct their representations around. After running through the same peer-to-peer feedback processes undertaken with the vitamin C tablet exercise, we concluded with a final

discussion on how the cases students were working with could be read in terms of complex interweavings of event, cause and effect, and how narrative

authorities – or highlighted perspectives - might be included in the way the events of a case could be represented according to whose agenda it is working with. When asked what they thought about all this, students largely responded that they had a clearer understanding of how case narratives might be

constructed and critically deconstructed. They also expressed surprise at “how quickly the lesson had gone” and that it was overall much more engaging

learning in this way.

This first lesson thus introduced the following key pedagogical themes:

1. working with case

2. working non-traditionally with performance

3. working with embodiment and everyday objects

4. developing strategies of peer-to-peer feedback for developing student-

centred critical thinking; introducing critical themes of representation, including Mingers’ four elements (mainly in this session notions of “authority”)

5. complicating “objective” notions of event, cause and effect and how these relate directly to the set cases as part of the standard curriculum