Doing time and motion diffractively: academic life everywhere and all the time

Abstract

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice, the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life.

Keywords:

• Diffraction
• workplace
• time and motion
• posthuman
• new material feminism

Notes

1. Note that dispositif is used synonymously with, and sometimes translated as ‘apparatus’ (see Foucault, 1977 where he discusses the dispositif as an apparatus throughout the interview).

2. The Oulipo movement (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature), was formed in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Members were mostly writers and mathematicians who devised a series of enabling constraints to generate new writing. These include (i) ‘N + 7’ where the writer selects an existing poem and substitutes each noun with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary, and (ii) the lipogram, where the writer avoids a particular letter, as in Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969) or, in English, A Void.

3. By line we mean sentence within the text, marked by conventional punctuation – capital letter and full stop/ period, with one or more clauses. Where run-on text was not punctuated, the block of text was treated as a line.

4. This poem was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Mirror.

5. Last week, an ex-student talked about how she is unable to get rid of her son’s pram (he is now five and at school). It sits in her bedroom, and tells her (she said) of the joy of having an unplanned baby many years after her other children and that taking it out of the house would mean taking that part of her life out too.

6. Tom Wood is a professional photographer. His ‘Bus Project’ was the subject of many exhibitions. http://www.eightdaysaweek.org.uk/tomwood1998.htm