Re-storying schools as “research sites” of climate change in the Chthulucene: diffractively reading through the land of a primary school in South Africa

Abstract

Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism and Donna Haraway’s use of the Chthulucene, our paper profoundly troubles and unsettles the humanist subject that has been the cause of so much trouble. Re-turning to a government primary school in Cape Town as the “research site,” we adopt temporal and spatial diffraction as a postqualitative research methodology. The colonial practices related to land ownership, are not in the past, but remain in its be(com)ing. Land “use” in South Africa during Apartheid, was, and still is, a form of violence. Thinking-with Neimanis and McLauchlan, we understand a school as not separate from the phenomenon of climate change, but as one of its sites and as a feminist project. A diffractive image articulates aesthetically and politically how the land as the more-than-human is a significant part of the phenomenon and queers school as a concept and “research site.”

Keywords:

• school
• research site
• temporal and spatial diffraction
• land
• climate change

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Similarly, and relevant for this article, is how later concepts related to size have been put in scare quotes throughout this article, thereby disrupting how matters of scale already rely on the power producing binaries that presuppose human-centric ways of seeing the world.

2 We think with Barad (2018, p. 213) who suggests “re-membering - which is not about going back to what was, but rather about the material reconfiguring of spacetimemattering in ways that attempt to do justice and account t for the devastation wrought.”

3 Queering in agential realism is about radically questioning identity and binaries (Barad, 2012).

4 Throughout this article the Apartheid racial classifications of white and coloured are deliberately written with a lowercase letter so as to contest these racial categories as enforced by the Apartheid government of South Africa, who were in power 1948–1990.

5. The Group Areas Act No. 36 of 1966, enforced the separation of people based on Apartheid racial designations. It involved uprooting people from their homes and moving them to other areas based on the colour of their skin and racial categorisation. It also determined where people could and could not live “The consequences of the Act were felt for generations after its implementation by those who were forcibly removed from their homes” (O’Connell, 2019, p. 38).

6 The lineage of “coloured” people could include Khoisan people, slaves brought to Southern Africa from Asia and Africa, settlers from Europe and other parts of Africa.