Missing things and methodological swerves: Unsettling the it-ness of VET

Abstract

This paper argues for approaches to research methodologies that interrupt the machinic metaphors and relationships for living circulating in so much VET research. Using the schematic of ‘cyborg as a figuration’ and Wilson’s (2009) four epistemological interventions (witnessing, situating, diffracting, acquiring) the authors practice a form of ‘materialised refiguration’ (Haraway, 1994) to re-engage with experiences of doing vocational education and training research over more than two decades. The approach manifests as story telling of/for complexity and opens up a research methodology guided by two questions: How are researchers deeply implicated in knowledge-making practices in and of VET? What vocational lives do we make in and through those practices? The aim of this approach is to call into question machinic VET stories as the only way to narrate vocational education and training research/practice. In so doing, the authors affirm hybrid methodological work that invokes vocational education and training researchers as authors-in-themaking of heterogeneous worlds.

Keywords:

• cyborgs
• figuration
• heterogeneity
• machinic VET
• vocational education and training
• VET epistemologies