Sounded histor-futurit-ies: Imagining posthuman possibilities of race and place in qualitative research

Abstract

This paper examines how histories of racism, slavery, and white supremacy continue to resonate in the present through the creation and curation of an audio compilation of student narratives. Grounded in posthuman theories, the sound compilation of layered student narratives offers a starting point for exploring the relational, embodied, and material web of affects that characterize the nomadic posthuman subject. This article takes up Braidotti’s call to question who ‘we’ are in this together, what it means for ‘us’ to negotiate the convergence of the present together when we are not one and the same. Through compiling and overlapping student voices, this article works to attend to the patterns and differences in their tellings as ethical and relational starting positions. The tracing of stories and threads of student voices in the audio compilation 'puts to work' posthuman theory and offers possibilities for qualitative research methods grounded in posthuman theories.

Keywords:

• Posthuman
• higher education
• sounded methodology
• racism
• white supremacy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Listen here: https://bit.ly/SoundedHistorfuturities. The audio is six minutes and 12 s in length, and will be returned to as a textual representation, or transcript, of segments and interludes throughout the paper.

2 BCE refers to an entry level freshman seminar class, of which Leo was a peer mentor for.

3 Students who took part in this project provided multiple levels of consent including agreeing to be audio recorded, agreeing to allow the use of their voice in audio compilations, and allowing images that they created or took be used in publications. For a more robust description of the process of recruitment for this study see Flint (2019c). For a further engagement with the ethical considerations of the artful (walking, images, sound) methods in this project see Flint (2019a; 2019b); Flint (2020). Specifically, Flint (2019a) and (2019b) explore the ethics of mobile (walking-based) methods in educational research; Flint (2020) takes up the ethics of the presentation of the sounded and visual work in an installation that incorporated the sounded compilation woven throughout this article.

4 Revising this article, I am pulled to mention that this did indeed happen, three years after Leo’s initial wondering, and after he, along with myself and almost all of the other students who took part in the study had moved on, left the campus. The chalk markings Leo speaks of had long since faded, but traces remain in the student response and campus reception see: Rogers (2019). In particular, the article noted the ongoing “booing” controversy of Mr. Trump at sports events, and that when attending The University of Alabama, “the red-clad crowd responded with rousing cheers as a smiling Mr. Trump waved and clapped and drank in the support. There were some boos as well, but the cheers dominated and some fans chanted, “U-S-A, U-S-A!” We might wonder, listening to Leo, what would the response been, had the chalking extended in time and space to the steps of the stadium in November 2019, how a different conversation may have become possible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maureen A. Flint

Maureen A. Flint is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Research at the University of Georgia where she teaches courses on qualitative research design and theory. Her scholarship explores the theory, practice, and pedagogy of qualitative methodologies, artful inquiries, and questions of social (in)justice, ethics, and equity in higher education. Representations of her artful inquiries can be found on her website at www.maureenflint.com.