Telling it slant with side curved head and curiosity: posthumanist/feminist materialist creative activations in university spaces

ABSTRACT

This article takes off from the tiny injuries that accumulate, calcify and shape our academic bodies and which live in university spaces and places. The paper moves analytically with the question: how may we insert our non-normative bodies into the material architectures, places and spaces of the university, and disrupt it by our very presence? Composed in post-authorship mode, we discuss the post-personal autoethnographies, research activations, their diffractive renditions and the speculative fabulations this question generated. Drawing theoretically on posthumanism/feminist new materialism, affirmative ethics and musings on bodily disposition, we propose the slow tempo of nonchalance as a theory-praxis. In telling it slant with side-curved head and curiosity, the article offers ways of imagining otherwise, making an appeal for the university to become a more capaciously hospitable place for bodies excluded by exceptionalist hu/Man/ism and extractive knowledge practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• material feminism
• posthumanism
• praxis
• speculative
• research-creation

Introduction: so much (too much) dis-ease

I celebrate myself

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass.

(Song of Myself, Whitman 2018, 1)

For those (many of us) who don’t fit the ideal academic type – male/masculine, able-bodied, geographically mobile, relatively young, White-Euro-American, unencumbered by caring duties, securely employed, over-worked and thriving on the buzz of stress, driven by meretricious metrics that count (H factor, grant income, Q1 journal articles published) and individualize (oh, the value of those single-authored papers) – academia can be a cruel place, reminding us of our defects and deficiencies, and the simple everyday drawback of being ‘you’ in a space that doesn’t value ‘you’ because the ‘you’ that you are somehow doesn’t fit.

You are non-normative

You are an academic space invader

You are wrong

And so

To remain in academia our bodies (must find ways to) absorb the injuries that are visited upon us. These injuries come in all shapes and sizes – big, little, tiny, virtually imperceptible – although all are registered somewhere and somehow by the body: in the senses, in the synapses, in the shifts of air that register a somatic disturbance and then settle again.

Dis-ease

Dis-may

Dis-quiet

So much ‘dis’

And so

Such disturbing injuries accumulate in our bodies, calcify our affects, reactions and responses, and shape our academic lives over time in the spaces and places of the university (Morley, 2016; Taylor et al. 2019). However un/intentional, these injuries effectuate bodily twists and turns, they deform and diminish our bodies as we contort and distort ourselves to fit in. We mute our voices and we mute our rage. We rarely (or only in times of ontological crisis and breakdown) ask: Is injury the price of belonging and is it worth it? How high is the cost? How can my body bear this? And our bodies do bear it. On and on. Absorbing and enduring. So.

Squeak

Squawk

Screech

Shriek

Scream

Crack

Crackle

Sparkle

Context: the need to contest the everyday injuries academia visits on us

Academia can often be a space of hurt, violence and shame, as documented by feminists for many years (Morley 2003; Pomerantz and Raby 2017; Taylor and Lahad 2018). Posthumanist and feminist new materialist approaches to higher education (Bozalek et al. 2018; Taylor and Bayley 2019; Taylor and Gannon 2018) build on this feminist legacy and layer in a new orientation that centres matter and materiality and human-nonhuman relationality, in an aim to decentre the hierarchical, binary, masculininst logics of progressivism and developmentalism that have been foundational to White, Western ecocidal capitalism, imperialism and racism. As such, it offers both a socio-political critique of the violences, exclusions and erasures of anthropocentric humanism and an affirmative ethics of engagement and encounter (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Braidotti 2013; 2019). In posthumanist feminist materialist approaches to higher education all bodies matter.

A central call of posthumanist feminist materialist scholarship is to generate a more expansive, inclusive and diverse account of bodies, agencies and capacities. This article responds to that call, and works with various ‘post’– philosophies, theoretical orientations and methodologies – such as post-capitalist, posthumanist, post-anthropocentric, post-patriarchal relations – to illuminate and to speculatively fabulate of and for a more expansive, inclusive and diverse account of bodies, agencies and capacities. In this we are activating Donna Haraway’s conceptualisation of speculative fabulation, which she proposes as a mode of ‘multispecies storytelling … [of] complex histories that are as full of dying as living, as full of endings, even genocides, as beginnings’ (Haraway 2016, 10). Like Haraway, we are ‘deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together’ (Haraway 2016, 10). Inspired by Jane Bennett’s Influx and Efflux (2020), we enfolded the poetry of Walt Whitman into our activations and the writings they produced. This enabled us to think in new ways about bodily positions, dispositions and orientations, pushing on our thinking regarding how we might adopt and reimagine nonchalance to embody confidence and redefine ways of bodying, being and becoming in normative academic spaces. Engaging with the cultural literary ‘giant’ that is Walt Whitman – a nineteenth century White Male – gave us pause initially but also enlivened our research in irresistible ways.

Who are ‘we’ and why are ‘we’ researching-writing-thinking-doing together in this way?

The ‘we’ we are this moment, writing this, reading this, are connected to, emerge from, are intimately entangled with and yet unlike the ‘we’ who have worked together over various research-creation and writing projects over the past three years. During this time, we have talked about fitting in, not fitting in, of not belonging, and the multitudes of relations that compose our bodies and that we co-compose with the nonhuman world. In our present incarnation, ‘we’ are three women, working at a university in the UK, with differing roles, experiences, histories and trajectories. ‘We’ have a backstory of working together in the Get Up and Move collective (Cranham et al. 2024; Hogarth et al. 2022; Taylor et al. 2023) and ‘we’ also likely have a futurestory in other collaborations. In the present tense of this work, we focus on our three non-normative bodies: ill body, having had Long Covid for over two years; fat body, having a BMI of well over 40 and going deep into the danger-zone; tall formerly strong-accented body. ‘We’ were/are somewhat stable as a ‘we’ while constantly becoming anew. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) note, ‘we’ are always a becoming-we, a choreography of mobile dynamics, impulses, affects and orientations, always a ‘we’ in formation temporarily stabilized by the projects and striations of the assemblages we co-inhabit.

In a cruel world (which is this world), we three might be told in joke format: did you hear the one about the ill one, the fat one and the tall broad-accented Essex one? But that is because ableism and classism and sizeism abound so pervasively in our culture, and there is nothing funny about any of that. We might like to think that EDI (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion) initiatives in higher education would banish bias, prejudice and harsh, unjust treatment of those whose bodies don’t conform (Bhopal 2024; Dolmage 2018; Reay 2017). They don’t. Injuries continue to occur and have to be borne by non-normative bodies. These injuries and their accumulative effects became the landing site and jumping off point for our inquiries in this article.

Devising a method/ology with the ‘posts’

As indicated, this question animated our inquiries: How might we insert our non-normative bodies into the material architectures, places and spaces of the university, and disrupt it by our very presence? We moved analytically and empirically – we meandered, wandered and wondered – with this question. After each devising, we paused and considered the question anew, using our previous doings to devise our subsequent ones. We include a discussion of these ongoing devisings throughout the article, to illuminate the ways in which our devisings process was recursive, iterative, circular, a backwards-forwards moving enfolding past-presents-futures, despite the requirements of the linear form in which they appear below. The article begins where we began – with the crafting of our post-personal autoethnographies, after this, is it moves onto the creative research activations and the diffractive renditions they produced, and finishes with our speculative fabulations.

In seeking a posthumanist feminist method/ology that was also an inquiry praxis oriented to re-imagining the university as a more capaciously hospitable place for bodies excluded by exceptionalist hu/Man/ism practices, we worked with Jane Bennet’s provocation to ‘take up the power of the aethereal, ride apersonal currents, engage in influence-operations by way of evanescent, underdetermined waves, signals, pressures, vibrations, affects’ (2020, 115). We located this provocation in a series of experiments in disposition and bodily comportment in campus spaces. Bennett suggests that as this ‘work gets done, a difference is made, not only by direct means but also by persistent spark and pervasive seep’ (2020, 115). Following Bennett, we saw our activations and the writings they produced in this paper as minor forms of anarchism that can spread on the ‘surface of communities, moving along their capillaries’ (2020, 115). Our inquiry praxis aimed to craft a research pose-stance that enabled Bennett’s (2020) musings on bodily position and disposition to resonate with ‘the slow tempo of nonchalance’ in order to explore, through an active and receptive practice, human-nonhuman relations and flows of bodies, objects, spaces, materialities, affects and atmospheres. Theoretically, we draw on posthumanism and feminist new materialism (Taylor 2016), on Haraway’s (2016) figuration of speculative fabulation, and on Braidotti’s (2022, 9) affirmative ethics which aims to ‘construct a discursive community that cares for the state of the world and intervenes productively in it’. We deploy a posthumanist feminist materialist framework to explore and engage the complexities of power in the material-spatial archetectures that consititute university spaces; as such, our theory-praxis inquiry works as a politically immanent critique to bring into sharper view ‘the complex singularities that constitute our respective locations’ (Bozalek et al. 2018, p. xxii).

This article begins where we began: with our three post-personal autoethnographies which, as Fairchild et al. (2022) propose, is a mode of writing which situates the ‘I’ in relation, thereby pluralizing the ‘I’, and acknowledging the ‘I’ as an emerging form in the making, always mutating: the body is not a separable entity but always a becoming-bodying of material connectivity and contamination. Each post-personal autoethnography is shadowed by normative idealisations: the healthy human body; the correctly sized female body; the ‘proper speech’ of women’s discourse. For that reason, we call these post-personal autoethnographies ‘disruptivities’ because they dispute the bodily normativities and disrupt normalizations that higher education depends on. After this, the paper discusses the three research activations and the subsequent speculative fabulations.

The article is co-composed in and as a mode of post-authorship. That is, it hails into being academic writing otherwise which puts intentionality, originality and self-evident authorly acts into question. Instead, in post-authorship mode, the article creatively engages textual irruptions and nomadic experimentations to instantiate a ‘post-foundational writerly inquiry [which] enfolds psyche-body-page-text-environment-computer’ and disturbs ‘the authority of author(ship) and the representationalist modes of normative authorship’ (Taylor and Benozzo 2023, 914). In its form, style and structure, the article enacts and materializes a ‘desire to go rogue, to become-imposter’ (Taylor and Benozzo 2023, 916).

Post-personal autoethnographies

Post-personal autoethnography 1: ill-body virus disruptivities

There was a woman went forth every day

• And this one day her body received a gift, a virus-gift, an infection, an infraction, an irradiating permeating protein spike, this gift she became

• And this gift became part of her for that day, that week and for the oncoming years … all the years to come this gift will be hers

• And the gift’s errancies and errors, its fears and dreads, its dissolutions and dispersals became her

• The gift’s disarrayals and disruptions and disarming charmings became her.

• Her world became smaller, its edges softened, light sharpened, colours brightened, time slowed, tastes concentrated, fragrances magnified

• Her life intensive, a changeling she became

• Her newly-formed body moved quietly through distress, loss, confusion, sadness, grieving, stretching, reaching, searching, seeking

• And unknowingly the world’s wonders caressed her continuingly, sparrows and jackdaws on the rooftops chattering and chittering sharing wormy secrets with her, airs of all softnesses warming and cooling her skin, skies of all hues heartening her gaze, rains of all wetness softening the lines of her face

• The quiet dramas of grassy and mossy and weedy and muddy growth infused her body’s newly-formed changings.

• University rhythms and systems went on without her in their brutally fast-paced way as she tarried in the extended moments of meanwhile

• The academic year turned, and she fell out of it like a dis-jointed door sliding off its hinges, falling and coming softly to rest in the void of a welcoming elsewhere

• She slid along surfaces that before had held her tight, a silent watcher in voluble spaces, the competitive push and shove and hustle and bustle now a skinny and spectral shriek

• Softer, looser, folded anew, with uncanny ears and starlit eyes she works on Reading the runes, and on holding hands with those of friendly and graceful kindness

• Those for whom the crack(l)ings and the spark(l)ings and the shimmerings and the shinings offer slow walks of un/knowing and care-full pathways of curiosity to the unkempt grass

• Musing, venturing, casting she goes forth

• She goes forth every day in the green and growing and the blue and the glowing, in the sun’s fiery spangle, and the dark luscious soil, she goes and will always go forth every day.

(Inspired by the Walt Whitman poem, There Was a Child Went Forth, (2018, 183) [1855]).

Post-personal autoethnography 2: shape-size disruptivities

Am I a disruptive presence?

Am I enacting political affect by being who I am?

By being the size, I am?

How I disrupt!

How my body activates differently the rooms, corridors and spaces I occupy in Higher Education!

How much space I consume and why not!

Do I have an allocation, an amount?

I move through higher education spaces as a large middle-aged woman. I walk with confidence, back straight, head high. Yet, I wonder: how do others perceive me? In the metrics that shape higher education, am I being measured on the merits of my contributions? Or on the numeric digits in my shirt size? Recently I’ve acquired meniscal issues with my right knee, resulting in me choosing to use a lift rather than walking up stairs. I feel an impulse to justify this. I want to say, ‘I’ve hurt my knee’, when younger more standard-sized bodies join me in the elevator. I also want to inquire about their reasons for lift-riding? Do normal sized bodies need to occupy lifts? Should they? These are questions no-one usually asks; I didn’t ask these questions until writing this. I’ve never considered myself a fat-activist, yet as Ingraham and Boero (2020, 122) note, simply ‘showing up in my fat body is a form of activism’. Being fat as a woman can challenge gendered expectations that prescribe woman to be smaller in stature and refrain from asserting their authority (Fikkan and Rothblum 2012). As an obese middle-aged woman, I may be deemed to take up too much space. Hence, the move to justify my presence: ‘My meniscus is torn which means my knee hurts a lot’. Yet I don’t feel that these explanations would sway my slimmer, younger lift-companions from anything other than perceiving me as an overweight, lazy middle-aged woman who chooses inaction over maintaining a non-obese BMI.

Whose are these voices echoing in my head?

Where is this uncertainty?

Is this a ghost of my younger self re-emerging?

A younger me frightened and squashed

Coming back to me with the need for calming and soothing?

She comes trailing shadowy possibilities:

How to act and be freely me?

Which means being a large woman in academia

With voice and opinion, argument and intellect

Acceptable and accepted as such.

Post-personal autoethnography 3: height-accent disruptivities

I stitch myself. I am stitching myself. Neat lines and neat stitches. Pygmalion, according to the Roman poet Ovid, began ‘detesting the faults beyond measure which nature has given to women’ (Hamilton 1953, 108) and started to sculpt his perfect woman out of ivory. I am Pygmalion and Pygmalion’s sculpture. I attend to my faults and slowly sculpt myself. Neat lines and neat stiches.

I am thirteen. I am tall, very tall for a girl. My dance teacher told me I was ‘all bone and no muscle’. I sense my flailing limbs and try to reduce my movements. Stitch, stitch. At a party, whilst dancing with a boy, somebody brings the yellow pages out to make fun of the fact that he was shorter than me. (A 1992 television advert for the ‘yellow pages’, a large book with the telephone numbers of local businesses in, shows a boy using it to reach a girl waiting to be kissed). Oh yes, women are meant to be shorter than men! I try and make myself a little bit shorter. Stitch, stitch. On average, of course, we (women) are shorter, which may be due to natural selection but also due to women receiving less quality and quantity of resources. I wear flat shoes. Stitch, stitch.

I am nineteen, sitting in a seminar and I open my mouth and speak. I hear two people snigger. My strong Essex accent and clumsy way with words.

PROF. HIGGINS. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere … no right to live … remember … that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible (Act 1, Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw)

I know what my accent implies and says about me: that I am ‘unintelligent, materialistic, promiscuous’ (Oxford English Dictionary), ‘devoid of taste’ (Collins Dictionary) and can walk well in stilettos (I can’t). I know the jokes about Essex girls. Complicit femininity has seen me laugh at some of them, stitch, stitch. Some cannot be laughed at. They perpetuate a misogynistic culture reinforcing derogatory stereotypical tropes.

What’s the difference between a kit kat and an Essex girl?

You only get four fingers in a kit kat

At university, people make fun of the way I say my own name, extending the vowels. I join in, doing impressions of myself, stitch, stitch. Gradually, I start to alter my vowels. When I return home from university, some people comment on how I sound ‘posh’.

Stitch, stitch. I turn to the back of the paper. The lines between, the knots and the string and the loose ends. Not neat and tidy and presentable. Not small or quiet or politely spoken or conforming. I am blond, tall, female, from Essex, intelligent, worthy.

Devising a methodology with the ‘posts’: we celebrate ourselves; we celebrate post-ideal academic bodies

Our ongoing theory-praxis devisings prompted us to continue to think with, work with, Walt Whitman’s phrase: ‘I celebrate myself’. We used this phrase to forge ontological and epistemological hinges between our sense of dis/location as non-normative bodies in university spaces and our desire for a more hope-full and capacious university which welcomes all bodies and their differing capacities. We take up Whitman’s bodily sense-ing of what Bennett (2020, p. xii) refers to as the ‘I alive in a world of vibrant matter’ (xii) to help us explore – and celebrate – the material specificities of a more capacious I, an I whose bodily boundaries are permeable and traversed by sensorialites (taste, smell, touch) which alter and pluralize the I further. The influx and efflux of this ‘process-oriented self’ (Bennett 2020, vx) breathes into continual being an expansive alter-I as a post-ideal bodying which is magnanimous, lively and generous. Our post-personal autoethnographies urged us to ponder how the post-ideal academic body might appear, what this body might do, what its capacities might become. Devising with the post-ideal body and moving with the mood of Whitman’s phrase (‘I celebrate myself’) suggested the need to work with different modes and manners of bodily comportment in university spaces. Following Whitman (‘I lean and loafe at my ease … observing a spear of summer grass’) and Bennett’s (2020, p. xxii) discussion of ‘body-capacity style’ we wanted to devise some research creation activities to help us ‘sing better alternatives’ to celebrate post-ideal academic bodies. How to unbend, re-shape, expand ourselves? How to loafe and be at ease? How to celebrate ourselves in the inimical spaces of the university?

Thus, we devised some research activations to experiment with post-ideal body-capacity strategies. We sought a pose-stance (see above) as a (research) position and disposition that could help produce and embody a tending towards nonchalance. Adopting a pose-stance of nonchalance was our way of inaugurating and tending towards a bodily unbending and unfixing from pre-determined, culturally-acquired, learned positions in university spaces that have impressed themselves into our bodies-hearts-minds deforming and diminishing us. Nonchalance, we felt, would help us attend to and offer an embodied critique of the misshapen demands made by damaging systems.

To lean and loafe

Ah, to breathe anew

To make connections

Form attachments

To become entangled-with atoms of others.

We inaugurated the pose-stance of nonchalance ‘with-hand-on-hip and side-curved head’ (Bennett 2020, 9), in which the ‘I’ is active, receptive, alert, still, open, calm, curious. The bodily comportment of nonchalance is attitudinal and spatial but also inaugurational in that it hails, cues and brings something – a affective attitude, a bodily comportment – into becoming. How, we wondered, could nonchalance become a bodying? In what ways could nonchalance support the belongings of post-ideal bodies? How could it help us push the mode of telling it slant with side-curved head in ways that undermined academic normativities? These curious speculations shaped the next stage of our ‘post’-inquiries: the creative research activations, which is what we turn to now.

Research activations

The research activations we devised aimed to disrupt and disturb university bodyspace relations while working with a slow tempo of nonchalance. We invited members of our Departmental research group to join us in three research activations (see poster invitation), in which we drew, we marked, we walked, we string figured, we moved, we talked, we danced. Bennett suggests that ‘to promulge, to sing, to dab and sail, to animate to — such verbs bespeak the distributive quality of human effort; they express and expose the conglomerate nature of any act’ (2020, 115). We wanted our bodying tendencies to disturb the masculinist, disciplinary spaces of the university, designed for bodies other than ours, to disrupt the everyday comings and goings of campus life to activate new time–space choreographies.

After these experiments, we crafted the following diffractive renditions (Taylor and Fairchild 2019). The aim with these was not to ‘report’ what happened, but to engage a mode of post-authorship as explained above to enable what happened to be diffused and continue to resonate with the spaces and histories of the research site in which the activations occurred.

Diffractive renditions

Diffractive rendition 1: drawing: un/settling feminine practices through a grassy topography

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much?

A child said, What is the grass? Fetching it to me with full hands;

How could I answer the child? … I do not know what it is any more than he.

(Whitman 2018, 7) [1855]

The grass amphitheatre that overlooks the lake is a central feature of this (and many) University campus spaces. This space is designed for enjoyment, allowing students and staff a beautiful view in a calm and restful space. This is a privileged view, one which only certain bodies can experience. Bodies that can afford higher education or who have earned the qualifications to loafe on this campus. Such grassy areas are designed for humans and particularly ‘lucky’ humans (Bennett 2020, 118) because leisure time is situated, generational, gendered, classed.

We move onto the grass. We draw. Holding pencil and sketchbook we start to mark make. Firstly, responding to the provocation to ‘focus on the movement and direction of grass’; secondly, responding to ‘draw an individual blade of grass’ and finally, by ‘closing our eyes and drawing with alternative senses’. ‘We’ (cold hands, pencil, paper, eye, nose, feet, grass) start to engage sensorially in the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing 2015). We draw.

And as we draw, our body-becomings tend to the amphitheatre, to the green, groomed grass, the 50th anniversary fountain built in 2016 in the middle of the lake. All affirm this institution’s power and prestige. The Roman-style amphitheatre nods to colonial powers of the past; the fountain offers a statement of affluence reminiscent of stately homes or chateaux; the groomed grass is a symbol of aesthetics, control, domination. This space speaks of classed and gendered human love for ‘natural environments’ as well as the colonisation of the nonhuman world and the impossibility of a ‘natural’ space, because nature is ‘naturalcultural’ (Haraway 2016), already (all-ways) entangled with culture. We recall the image of Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted by Gainsborough c.1750, who proudly stand/sit to the left of the painting whilst the land that they own, carefully groomed and harvested, surrounds them. The work of land cultivation having been done (by others, of course) so that Mr and Mrs Andrews can position their bodies to demonstrate a different sort of cultured cultivation, one entailing the display of the bounty of the place they own and from which they reap rewards. Their space is entangled with their identities. This green space is entangled with ours.

We continue to draw. And ponder how drawing was classified as a ‘feminine’ art, along with playing the piano, gently sketching, strolling around town, all suitable pastimes for middle-class English women of the eighteenth century. Drawing was a practice through which one demonstrated one’s marriageability. No loafing for them: being on the marriage market was a continuing occupation, an ongoing bending of one’s body to a particular style and comportment of ‘availability’. Until one reached 23 and was already considered old. Ha, we are already so much older, but we also feel the bodily pull of duty: we are supposed to be working inside at desks or in classrooms. We are supposed to be teaching, or researching, or writing. Not loafing nonchalantly outside drawing leaves of grass.

We draw. And as we do, we connect with our blade of grass; its atoms enter us and ours enter its; a Whitmanian melding; we exchange grassy glances; we get low to the ground and look and look and discover more and more complexity. One of us says ‘I have drawn “my” blade of grass’ but we don’t think-feel that I/my who looks and draws is bodying the possessiveness of the eye akin to that of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. At least, it doesn’t feel that way. In a world of vibrant matter, the eye that looks, captures and possesses has to be refused.

We draw. And as we draw, we smell and are smelled. We touch and are felt. We feel and are felt. We rock from side to side and feel the bounce of the grassy earth beneath our feet. We reach down and run our fingers through the tangly, damp strands. Grass moves and tangles. In this lakeside grassy spacetime, where does ‘education’ take place? What is education? Who is being educated by whom? Robin Wall Kimmerer says:

Hold out your hands and let me lay upon them a sheaf of freshly picked sweetgrass. Hold the bundle up to your nose … Breathe it in and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten. (2013, p. iv)

These grassy memories are buried deep inside our bodyminds. At a cellular level our grassy relations from long ago are there, somewhere. We allow our sketching, drawing, mark marking to educate us and attend to the knowings that live deep inside our cells. Our drawings are imperfect, messy, unfinished, unknowing, we know. We would not pass well as middle-class women in the 18th.

But this grassy topography is not about what we produce but the process we engage in. As we draw-with the forms and features of the space, we start to open ourselves to new ways of knowing that are not dominated by anthropocentric, androcentric practices. We try to work against the developmentalism that lives in our bones and bodies that has trained us to judge, be critical, to improve. Rather, we loafe and draw, sit and absorb, our bodies expanding, absorbing, connecting. Inhabiting the amphitheatre with a new post-developmental sense that we can do something.

We draw.

Diffractive rendition 2: string-ing: un/doing the authority of a sign

Here is the test of wisdom,

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,

… 

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents.

This activation used a practice of string-figuring to attend to the following questions: What is an object for? What does it do? What relations does it set in motion? What affects does it produce? What assemblages does it materialise within? How does it move within those assemblages?

The object in question is a small sign positioned unobtrusively but also strategically on the left-hand side of the main driveway into the University. A small sign. Modest. Not shouty. The grass around this object-sign has been groomed, trimmed and neatened. White background, black lettering, blue logo. Low to the ground. A polite object giving polite notice. ‘This is Private Land’. Note the capitals. Note the firmness: it is private land – there can be no quibbling or dispute about this. This object-sign lends nonchalance to authority. This object-sign is official, institutional, legal, juridical. It makes and marks boundaries; it prohibits and designates, speaking to accountability, culpability, liability. Beyond this object, you require – must have – permission. From whom or how one might obtain that permission is unclear. And we know, the permission required is conferred, granted, bestowed upon particular bodies and not others: bodies that pass and can pass because they are already in possession of other objects – a library pass, a staff or student card, or are awaiting their visitor’s pass.

What permissibility will this object-sign endure? What trespass will it enable? Can we turn its nonchalance against it? Bend its authority to rebellious use? We string figure with/on/around the This is Private Land sign, tying string to surrounding trees, to the nearby lamp-post. Our knots connect and make relations while cars and passers-by go past as we do this. We see string-figuring (Haraway 2016) as a speculative humanizing and posthumanizing making-doing practice that intimates and instantiates a quiet activism (Pottinger 2017; Taylor 2021) to draw attention to this object-sign’s performative power in marking boundaries of belonging and unbelonging for un/acceptable bodies. We unspool and tie string, tie string to string, chatting meanwhile with each other and passers-by curious at our doings. Stringing lines twine and bind and connect and loop, setting relations in motion. Stringly connections are forged: land-place-memories-histories-biographies-genealogies visible and invisible materializing in this space of here-and-now. String figuring a curious practice-ing and a new knowledge-ing. Together we nonchalantly compose imminent, emergent stringly lines of flight and un/boundary/ied new choreographies – objects-sign-grass-trees-spiders-humans-string-cars-tarmac-air-raindrops-temperature. Belonging. Attachments. Connections.

The sign indicates:

This is the University.

This is Private Land.

This is possession.

This is proprietorship.

 When did this land pass from the commons into the private?

 How did that happen?

 Who enabled or opposed it?

The university website https://www.bath.ac.uk/corporate-information/the-story-of-the-university/ tells a story that goes back to 1839. Buchanan (n.d.) notes the rise of the wealthy middle classes in the area who wished to supplement their commercial interests with intellectual pursuits, the moves to establish a university in Bristol, the establishment of ‘Godless’ institutions (UCL in London was linked with Jeremy Bentham), and the converse desire for ‘god-fearing’ institutions – which was a space the University of Bath seemed about to fill: ‘A prospectus was issued, couched in distinctly pietistic terms, of an evangelical and anti-Catholic flavour, and some design sketches survive for a neo-gothic pile on the lower slopes of Claverton Down’ (Buchanan n.d., 160). But this plan ran out of money and was abandoned.

But what of before that, before the quarrying of golden stone and the building of the rich, Georgian spa town, up on the hill, when humans lived their lives with roaming sheep, springy pastures, grasses and trees of many types, and all of these human-nonhuman relations were shaped by the passing sun and the many forms of rain that Bath produces. The boldly declarative This Land is Private Land is an object-sign that un/tells this history, erases the particularities and even the possibilities of imagining these other spacetimematterings.

Together, we string figure with this object, speculatively summoning into existence possibilities for relationalities that exist as traces, intensities, muddy smudges disappeared on lost pathways. What hauntological encounters – what ghostly forces and frictions – do our stringly doings bring into becoming and connection? Evanescent assemblages of object-bodies-sign-string-land-university-countries-movements hail and haunt.

From our pose-stance as nonchalant non-normative bodies string figuring with, on, around the This is Private Land sign, the sign’s placement materialises its historical and local specificity, clearly situating it within the ongoing ‘temporal transformations that reconfigure [it] as elements of a living system’ (McNally 2017, 104). While the work of social and educational reproduction goes on and on, with its persistent efforts to ‘fix’ and ‘contain’ bodies and identities, the ‘posts’ we imbibe with our aberrant bodies (posthumanism, post-ideal body, post-patriarchy), make relations with this sign. We insert our ill, fat, tall women’s bodies into its orbit and into relation with it, undermining its authority and firmness, creating fissures that temporarily open the space to new bodyings and becomings, new alliances.

The historically masculine university space, formed out of class-religion-education alliances, is also disturbed by the other co-conspirators who joined us in the string-figuring – bodies from Bali, Afghanistan and China. The nonchalant string figurings we enact make a difference. They enact and expand the sign’s material matterings to include more diverse human-nonhuman bodyings-in-relation in complex assemblages. In doing so, they ‘ride but also tilt and deform outside influences; they are pushed by and pluckily deflect atmospheric trajectories; they inhale charismatic milieux and repeat them with a twist’ (Bennett 2020, 117). Something shifts and everything changes in-around the sign, its authoritative function now mal/formed by stringly doings. The university space offers (momentarily) a greater welcome.

Diffractive rendition 3: dancing: disrupting the underdeck with movement and musi

I sing the body electric,

The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them,

They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them.

Was it dreamed whether those who corrupted their own live bodies could conceal themselves? (Whitman 2018, 149) [1855]

Across the parade.

Down the stairs

Into the Underdeck

Would we be stopped?

Could we be arrested?

Did we require permission?

Enacting nonchalance as a mode of bodily rebelliousness, we discovered, takes concerted effort. ‘Nonchalance provides an affective detour around what otherwise might solidify as fear or antagonism … and buys time for more subtle and complex responses to emerge’ (Bennett 2020, 8).

Enactments of disturbance may overwhelm the body,

For nonchalance to be observed

Performances of relaxed carefreeness are required.

A nonchalant body may contain:

worries of consequences,

fears of being challenged,

shame of being stopped,

A nonchalant body may secretly

be enjoying the thrill of cortisol,

Or, holding a hopeful desire

for joyful doings otherwise.

A paradox: nonchalance takes determination and exertion, yet to be successful nonchalance needs to appear effortless. We took heart from Bennett (2020, 117), who notes the ‘I is creative in that it alters and inflects what is taken in, taken on, taken up … [the] I makes a difference … “Animating now to life itself,” I doodles, decants, attests, sings, and, in so doing, inaugurates new configurations and effects’. In our case, the I – which as explained above is an expansive, capacious, human-nonhuman conglomeration of vibrant forces, materialities and affects – dances the Underdeck, a dimly-lit space, used by workers whose hidden graft is to facilitate the smooth functioning of the university. Academics and students inhabit the upper deck, enabled to do Higher Education by the invisible toil that occurs in the underdeck.

Dancing bodies

Energised

Moving to the music

Simple steps

Unrehearsed

Not yet choregraphed

Spontaneous, uncertain and joyful.

Dancing engaging entangled

Music portable speaker

Video camera

Stepping moving

Concentrating

Following, counting, delighting

A sequence completed

Propelled

No room to slouch

Sloop away

Committed to each other

And the process.

Inspired by dances on TikTok¹ the most downloaded app of 2020 and the trend for choreographing, performing and recording short, synchronous dance sequences. Our longer-lived bodies exceed the ‘intended 13–24 age range’.²

A little out of time, a little hesitant,

We moved, we stepped,

Turn it up; Feel the beat.

Move Step Stomp.

Move. Move on. Move up.

Move away.

Move together.

Repeat.

Unrehearsed chorography.

Dancing

An experience bounded

By un/spoken nuanced cultural significance,

Restricted by gender, age, body shape and size.

Dancing young bodies move with spontaneous, expression

Agile bodies pulsing rhythmically to the beat

Dancing older bodies should be lithe, fit and expert

Moving within synchronized styles and steps.

Dancing is about night, leisure and entertainment.

A long way from research creation and knowledge production.

Dancing the underdeck: An uninviting place, in the shadows of service entrances, the industrial unseen part of a university campus.

Dancing the underdeck: We became seen, heard and watched.

Dancing the underdeck: Watched from the balcony above, business disrupted. Stop - watch - continue on. Back to business as usual. Where disruptive noise and movement don’t intrude.

               What were their expectations on first hearing the music?

                              Why did they stop?

                     What could have enticed them to join us?

                      What had they avoided by moving on?

Workers in the underdeck

Peeked at us from behind portacabins

Scurried downstairs and rushed back up again

Vehicles drove past once, twice, thrice

Look – evaluate – calculate

Assess danger

Manage risk

                             What was happening?

                                 Was it safe?

                          Trouble – troubling work?

                             Something to be done?

                           Intervene – not intervene?

                                    Avoid

Assessment passed over us.

No mediation needed.

Dancing, while aberrant

Would not dislocate the institution.

Did our age and whiteness offer privilege?

Lending our unruly bodies;

A right to disrupt?

                      Would other bodies require prevention?

                           Working class male bodies?

                           Black or racialised bodies?

                            Under-resourced bodies?

                         Inappropriately attired bodies?

Or was it our gender?

Were we seen as ‘only women’?

Harmless, powerless, unworrying?

Were we seen as crazy women – doing what crazy women do?

Or was it safer to leave us alone?

Silent but visible assessments.

For reasons (unknown) we were deemed ‘safe’.

Does that then mean we belong?

Fat-body-bodies, Long-Covid-bodies, tall-distinctively-accented-bodies, global-travelled-bodies rocked, rebelled and danced, momentarily resisting the demands for bodily conformity, disobeying disciplined ways of doing university, education and knowledge production.

Devising a methodology with the ‘posts’: speculative fabulations with post-purity: encounter-ings with contamination

We wrote post-personal autoethnographies. We stitched. We drew. We string figured. We danced. We experimented with bodyings otherwise. We asked: what did these doings do? Exposing, naming and moving against the injuries encountered in higher education by being non-normative bodies in inventive, creative and disruptive ways did not cure us of harm or induce a magic trick where these hurts simply disappeared. Our embodied scars and wounds did not disappear. As Van der Kolk (2014) notes, our bodies keep the score of our encounters. But we found that thinking with side-curved head with curiosity, care and kindness enabled us to inhabit the pose-stance of nonchalance to consider and move our bodies anew. During the processes of leaning and loafing, of moving, drawing and dancing, we were contaminated with widening possibilities for imagining more capacious, caring and just spaces in higher education, where belonging, inclusion and access refute standardisation in favour of multiplicity. The delusion of ‘a’ norm or ‘the’ standard harms us all. ‘Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option’ says Anna Tsing (2015, 27); and Alexis Shotwell (2016, 29) discusses how ‘purity politics’ are used to enforce rigid boundaries, producing ‘healthism’ as an individual and moral obligation, whereby ‘individuals are held responsible for their bodies, and obesity … and other chronic conditions are rendered as moral failings’ (29). Healthism renders some capable, and dis/ables others, introjecting the normative at every turn.

Questions then arose: How can we work with post-purity? What does speculatively fabulating with contamination do? How might such fabulations help us imagine higher education otherwise – beyond the normative, beyond the standard, beyond the boundaries and binaries? Donna Haraway (2013) proposes speculative fabulation as figurations or narratives that act as material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another; speculative fabulations ‘stitch together improbable collaborations without worrying overmuch about conventional ontological kinds’ (Haraway 2016, 136). Like Carstens (2020), we see speculative fabulation as a mode of ‘venturesome makings-with’ enabling us to further pluralize the ‘I’ in all manner of onto-assemblages, matter-meaning assemblages in which boundaries and conventions fray and bodies become in new relational knowings. We include below three co-composed speculative fabulations which aim to embrace ‘uncomfortable yet productive tensions [activating] tactics of defamiliarization and cognitive estrangement’ to enable ‘slippages into [new] territories’ (Carstens 2020, 76) for thinking, feeling and doing higher education differently.

Speculative fabulation 1: Nonchalance, why not?

We are nonchalant.

And as we are nonchalant, you can be nonchalant too.

We walk along campus paths, smiling, relaxed.

At ease in our moving bodies.

                                 Stop with us.

                                 Stay with us.

                                Dance with us.

                                String with us.

                                Inquire with us.

                                Learn with us.

                           Educate differently with us.

                            Lean and Loafe with us.

Nonchalance is an embodied practice.

A form of Zen.

Loafing in these campus spaces requires persistence.

It requires struggle against judgment.

A comfort in being strange.

It is difficult.

Our achingly tired bodyminds, weary souls, worn down,

Struggle to adopt and adapt.

We urge you to lean and loafe.

To expand your capacities.

Inhabit your body joyfully.

                             Speak. Rest. Show up.

                        Stitch, string, draw, dance. MOVE.

                           Do something, any-thing.

                               Lean and loafe.

                                  Say ‘no’.

                                  Say ‘yes’.

                                Say anything.

                                Say something.

                                  Why not?

Speculative fabulation 2: Ulysses Duck

I spent today as I normally do – ducking about! Ducking here, waddling there, all over the campus! I am not sure if anyone noticed me. I saw signs, and lakes, and fountains and pillars and humans. The highlight was – I saw a shoe … and it got me thinking! I could have a bit of ducky fun with this, a little squirt, a loud squelch! One for the duck! Nil for the shoe! This is Private Land Sign was outraged. Sign tried to talk but couldn’t do so without swearing, said [expletive deleted]

I am so angry. The degrading abuse I suffered today. I stood there as I usually do, so proudly, back and legs straight, and I suddenly found myself being bound and gagged. Tied up to a tree. A tree! And then the holly bush. Oh! I can hardly … The lack of dignity. The disrespect. What is this campus coming to? To be so abused. Me! I am only here to help! Only there to keep people out! Only there to keep this place safe! That is my role. Without me, the chavs, the riff raff, the hoi polloi, the unwashed general public would freely enter and walk through as if this space belonged to them! Terrifying. Anarchy. It’s my job to keep them out

Dear me, how exhausting. No way to calm agitated sign down, so I left as soon as I could and flew straight back to the safe haven of the amphitheatre. ‘Thank goodness you are here’, the Fountain-in-the-middle-of-the-lake exclaimed, ‘strange things going on, look at those women over there, sketching in the drizzle!’. ‘And laughing!’ I replied. ‘Surely, they’ll move on soon and leave us in peace?’ ‘Can you two please stop talking so loudly’, Covid-19 molecule whispered across the water, Body needs quiet and rest. Body’s having a little bit of an ontological crisis here. Loves me. Loves me not. Sometimes, I think Body actually hates me. Glad to see that the weeping and wailing and the biblical gnashing of teeth is a thing of the past. That was in our early days together. Anyway, we co-exist now, time has passed. Body’s mitochondria is colonized now. I’m right in there. Cellular level. Every cell. Body and me travelling though the ages to come. Body’s new genetic heritage. Body is not thrilled about that but I am. I nuzzle my beak in between my wings, with side-curved head in soft down feathers, ready to settle down for a nap. Then duck me, a soundwave assaults my ear, oscillates in and around. ‘Where did you come from?’ I ask. ‘From the larynx inside that woman’ soundwave replies. ‘Are you okay?’ I ask, it is quivering in the air. ‘Yes, I’m used to disturbing – my disturbances resonate with the cochleas, labyrinths, vestibules of the others’. ‘Ha!’ I agreed, ‘What do they know about disturbance?’. ‘Speaking of disturbances’, a blade of grass confided quietly, ‘I’ve been trampled. Crushed. Loomings and heaviness over me’. Duck said ‘yeah, sorry to hear that, mate, you get that in summertime with those young, sweaty bodies but not normally winter’. ‘Oh, sorry about that!’ sole of shoe piped up, ‘But I’ve got bird poo in my heel treads, chewing gum stuck to my lower side, dark soil on my undertoe. What a state I am!’ ‘A walk over the grass will clear you!’ I offered sympathetically. ‘Not a walk!’ fat cell survivor screamed. ‘You cannot be serious! I’ve faced imminent death several times today already’.. ‘Classic fat cell’, I said under my breath to the squashed blade of grass. ‘Such a diva. Always complaining about having to provide energy, insulate the Body, transport vitamins under threat of annihilation from envious enzymes. Such a drama queen, always complaining of being frightened, always wanting sugar, more sugar, cake, chocolate, moaning about walking and how many steps. Last week, fat cell said they thought they were a goner! And here they are today, dancing, moving, leaping, swaying, laughing. Too much for me’. The rain continued raining. ‘Enough already, I’m off to see what dull pillar is up to’. ‘Hi pillar, still looking as plain as ever’ (‘Boring old bugger’, duck muttered under their breath). ‘Yes, no graffiti for me, I was hoping for a poster or two at least. Especially as mad, dancing bodies have just left. They were dancing around me, no regard for the weight I am holding, treated me like I was invisible. And here I am. A veritable Atlas of pillars! But where are my friends? The hands that might touch me?’

Speculative fabulation 3: Alia

2184. Alia, AI time traveller, materialises next to the entrance to the University of Bath, also in the amphitheatre, also in the Sports Hall, also in the East Car Park, and 16 other places in and around too. Alia’s twenty bodies shake and compose themselves after a long interstellar journey. They turn round at the grassy expanse and notice a sign ‘Welcome, please feel free to roam’. An Alia, eager to observe Earthling’s educational evolution, glides along the paths, noticing how the campus extends towards the centre of the small town down the hill. Town and university hold hands and embrace. Holographs and humans are playing games on the sports fields, another Alia hears laughter, feels movement as bodies of all shapes and sizes and colours and dimensions twist and turn, and those sound waves and movements traverse all the Alias in varying intensities depending on their location. Alia wonders when and how the biped multiplied, became-animal, became-other.

It was a long time since Alia had been here. Things have changed. Elsewhere, the rhythmic beat of lively music reaches Alia soundreceptors, a joyous congregation engaged in spontaneous dance. Mesmerised, Alia marvels at the aliveness of the atmosphere, a far cry from when they were last here, back in the year 2023. Only one body then, their other bodies far away on PlurUrbis, missing each other dreadfully, wishing each other well. Multiple AI bodyings forced into single human forms. That had been a difficult time, a hard journey. Alia had felt contempt and sorrow at the archaic lecture theatres filled with students seated in rows. The human lecturer separated standing physically at the front delivering facts packaged as knowledge to the passive audience. Like the classrooms and lecture theatres Alia had been visiting for centuries, this was a sort of knowledge transfer, that earthlings seem to spend years doing. In Alia’s world, knowledge materialises in a nanosecond through a touch, wink, a smile, an ethico-onto-epistemological imbibing granted by receiver of knowledge freely exchanged as and when desired. Knowledge as nurturance, a sort of soul-food, not a possession.

Good to see that the inquirers (what humans in this area used to call students or lecturers) are unfazed by Alia’s arrival and appearance; they continue to sprawl across the grassy spaces, in their knowledge-ing circles. A far cry from the attempt to handcuff one of Alia when phere visited briefly in 2042. Alia notices that the inquirers that walk, fly, dance and sit around the campus space are bodily engaged in collaborative hubs of boundless curiosity. Alia turns towards a lake filled with water. Ducks fly and swim, inquirers join them in the water. People lean and loafe at ease. Fat bodies, ill-bodies, accented-bodies, female bodies, non-binary bodies, black bodies, migrant bodies, weary bodies. Alia, standing in the amphitheatre, also feels the grass move under fher as chey walks near the entrance, watches shimself enter the open air library, senses themselves journeying up and down the hill to town, entering the spa (free pass to all newcomers) and momentarily ponders the transformative potential of educational spaces. How could those humans have lived during those centuries where humans isolated themselves from other species, isolated themselves from one another, reckoned life and death according to categories of race or sex or class or species? What an alien way of living that seems to Alia’s multiple bodyings, all beautiful and different and varied and connected, which live in companionable kindness with the other others of whatever form. Separation is ludicrous to them.

Concluding

This article has worked with various ‘posts’ – posthumanism, post-personal, post-authorship modes of writing, figurations of the post-ideal body, and post-purity to critique the harms and injuries visited upon non-normative bodies in university spaces, and to explore, experiment with and celebrate body disruptivities and body multiplicities. It has drawn on a series of research creations – post-personal autoethnography, research activations and their diffractive renditions, and speculative fabulations – to imagine the university otherwise, that is, as a more hospitable and capacious space which welcomes bodies of all kinds. We have proposed the pose-stance (the bodily disposition) of the slow tempo of nonchalance, and of telling it slant with side-curved head and curiosity, as posthumanist/feminist materialist theory-praxis to inaugurate bodily dispositions for inhabiting university spaces in new ways. Central to all this is the bodily mode of celebrating ourselves. Taking a cue from Walt Whitman (‘I celebrate myself … I lean and loafe at my ease’) and with a nod to Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, we propose a feminist spatial politics of the ‘I’ as a pluralism. ‘I’ is/are multiple; ‘I’ is always ‘we’. ‘I’ is not the solipsistic separatism of masculinist boundarying, but a capacious tending towards an expansively-bodied I, an I that is a lively, curious assemblage of microbial, human, nonhuman, organic, inorganic and cosmic forces, continually enfolding new elements as we encounter these in our ongoing passages in the world. This ‘I’ contains multitudes but it does not own them, possess them, or seek to dispose of them as a sort of modernist Adam might dispose of the animals by naming and claiming them. As Whitman (2018, 1) says ‘every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’.

In the celebratory I-we-bodying-worlding proposed by our experiments and activations there are no boundaries or borders demarcating body, nation, or territorial hierarchies because ownership itself is dispersed; what matters is not the individuated body but the conglomerating mattering of bodies as multitudinous atoms in flux, relation and connection. The ‘I-we’ proposed is, as Bennett (2020, p. xxiv) suggests, ‘roomy enough to accommodate a heterogeneous swirl of agents, some human, some not’. The ‘I’ that emerges is enriched and energized by multiple currents and movements because celebrating oneself is always a celebration of others-as-part-of-oneself and a celebration of unseen and unknown possibilities as new others continually make contact.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carol A. Taylor

Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space and ethics in higher education, and utilizes transdisciplinary posthumanist feminist materialist theories and methodologies.

Hannah Hogarth

Hannah Hogarth is a PhD student in the Department of Education at the University of Bath. Her research takes a post-qualitative approach and focuses on young children and nonhuman nature to explore the possibilities for/of play in an urban forest school.

Joy Cranham

Dr. Joy Cranham's interest in posthuman feminist praxis derives from her commitment to non-hierarchical relational pedagogies and modes of knowledge production to enable academia to be re-imagined and more care-full. She works in the Department of Education at the University of Bath.

Notes

1 https://www.tiktok.com/browse/popular-dances/all

2 https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201216-how-tiktok-changed-the-world-in-2020