Table Of ContentThe task: to produce an account that is less an archive than a field of conditions,
a set of practices. To anarchive: activate the surplus of experience in the event,
make felt how what eludes capture nonetheless makes a difference. To turn with-
out turning against: the AcademicConferenceMachine is not the enemy so much
as the symptom (of frontality, of measurability, of discipline). To move beyond
authority, allowing the words to tunnel their own uneasy resonances, turning
the soil, creating new paths. To become-earthworm.
— Erin Manning, Research Chair – Speculative
Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Director,
SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada.
In this provocative and disruptive new book, Fairchild and colleagues offer a
lively, creative, and necessary intervention into the academic-conference- industry
landscape. Questions of ethics, environments, and politics abound, read through
intra-actions between (conference) events, geographies, human and non-human
actors, and more. What results is a post-qualitative, post- methodological tour de
force: Knowledge Production in Material Spaces will disturb your taken-for-
granted assumptions about and entanglements within the neoliberal academy.
— Michael D. Giardina, Professor, Florida State
University, and Director, International Congress of
Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI).
This exciting book mobilises posthuman and feminist materialist theory to ag-
itate the ‘Academic Conference Machine’. Issuing from a series of experimental
conference presentations by the authorial collective, it converts the exhilarations
of those original events, with their speeding pulses, sweaty palms and disobedi-
ent formats, into energetic, event-ful writing that opens new spaces for knowl-
edge and action inside the neoliberal machine.
— Maggie MacLure, Professor, Education and Social
Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K.
This book is a playful intra-action with a geopolitical world, with multiverse
connections, care and response-ability as vibrant nourishments. The six authors
(CG Collective) and one more do not stand still; they do collective thinking and
doings – IDEAS and materialities with ten events. Experimentations, specula-
tions, process-orientations – push and risk the academic conferences continuously.
— Ann Merete Otterstad, Professor, OsloMet University,
Oslo, Norway.
After reading this book, attending or planning a conference will never be the
same again. The authors put posthumanist feminist thinking, concepts and met-
aphors to work with great inventiveness and playfulness and they enable ways to
know and learn otherwise within ‘the conference’ and beyond.
— Malou Juelskjær, Associate Professor in Social
Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
A beautifully curated book? Yes, but more of an event to be curiously returned
to time after time as readers become respons-able for disturbing the taken for
granted, normative and dominant modes of knowledge production and the
AcademicConferenceMachine. An assemblage of theory and creative practices
for different embodied and ethical possibilities.
— Alison Pullen, Professor of Management and
Organization Studies, Macquarie University, Australia.
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN
MATERIAL SPACES
Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events
assembles and produces interventions that problematize disciplined practices and
expectations governing academic conference spaces to generate new ways of
thinking/doing conferences. The authors use posthuman, feminist materialist
and post-qualitative theories to disrupt knowledge production in neoliberal, bu-
reaucratic conferences spaces. The analysis they offer, and the rhizomatic writing
and presentation styles they use, promote forms of educational activism through
theory. They interrogate conference spaces as regulated, normalized, standard-
ized modes of academic knowledge production – which they call ‘Academic-
ConferenceMachine’ – playfully subverting dominant operations and meanings
of conferences and workshops to show how we can better interact and produce
research, with and for each other. The authors indicate how creative confer-
ence practices produce playful possibilities to imagine and produce knowledge
differently.
Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Ed-
ucation and Sociology, University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on
place-spaces in early childhood classrooms and gardens, this is activated using
speculative methodologies and theoretically informed by feminist materialisms
and posthumanisms.
Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender, and Director
of Research (Education), at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on en-
tangled relations of knowledge-power-gender-space-ethics in higher education.
She utilizes transdisciplinary, feminist materialist and posthumanist theories and
methodologies and experimental academic writing practices to contest dominant
knowledge formations.
Angelo Benozzo is an undisciplined researcher in work and organizational psy-
chology at the University of Valle d’Aosta, Italy where he lectures on qualitative
research methods. His research is located between organizational psychology,
critical management studies, qualitative research, and cultural studies.
Neil Carey’s Ph.D. explored creative fiction as queer disruptor for socio- cultural
stories attaching to (homo)sexuality. As well as emerging work on internation-
alization of higher education, research interests focus on queer and discursive
methodologies. He co-authored ‘Discourse: the basics’ for Routledge and pub-
lishes in a range of academic journals.
Mirka Koro received her Ph.D. from University of Helsinki. She is Professor of
qualitative research and Director of doctoral programs at the Mary Lou Fulton
Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her scholarship operates in the in-
tersection of methodology, philosophy, and socio-cultural critique.
Constanse Elmenhorst is an Independent scholar and works as a kindergarten
teacher. She has a Masters in Early Childhood Education and her research focus is
on how materiality is present and revealed in everyday interactions both in early
childhood and conference spaces.
KNOWLEDGE
PRODUCTION IN
MATERIAL SPACES
Disturbing Conferences
and Composing Events
Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor,
Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey, Mirka Koro
and Constanse Elmenhorst
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor, Angelo Benozzo, Neil Carey,
Mirka Koro, Constanse Elmenhorst
The right of Nikki Fairchild, Carol A. Taylor, Angelo Benozzo, Neil
Carey, Mirka Koro Constanse Elmenhorst to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 9780367464806 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780367464837 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003029007 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003029007
Typeset in Bembo
by codeMantra
To all our curious souls. To all our curious kin. To those who enjoy
disturbances.
CONTENTS
List of images xi
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xv
Prelude 1
Entry 19
Bags 30
Thinking-with dirt: viral configurations of/for knowing 47
Autopsy 71
Tables, or not: multiple productions of tablediffractions
through spacetimemattering 91
Playful cuts and cartographic mapping: gender-in-
the-making - with Teija Rantala 107
String figuring sympoiesis: stringly matterings for doing
knowledge-making differently 123
Subversion 141
