Drawing loosely on feminist and post-human notions of learning as an “untamed” and “more-than-multiple” experience (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 154), I play with the use of Artistic Memoir as a method to explore my affectual experiences (Braidotti, 2002; Springgay, 2008) as a British Columbian, school-based Child and Youth Counsellor working as a visitor in the context of a shanti-school in Goa, India. Well practiced in traditionally Western paradigms of education, my intention is to move beyond my familiar understandings of what it means to be educated in North America to heighten awareness of intuitive forms of learning that arise in an encounter between intra-acting bodies, materials, and the agentic spaces between (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Understanding learning experiences as relational and enigmatic events, composed of rather than in the world, I engage with an inductive, intuitive and becoming-with process, exploring the emerging themes and entanglements of my presence in this Goan classroom as they grow out of a collection of child-driven, emergent art projects (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Mazzei, 2010). As I take on the implications of methodology and “data analysis” in post-qualitative research, I think with Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) constructions of maps, expressing my interpretation of these events with my own poetic and visual assemblages and navigating curiosities through Artistic Memoir. Thinking with philosophies of immanence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), new materiality (Braidotti, 2002; Stewart, 2007) and the autobiographical nature of a/r/tography (Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, Bickel, 2006), Artistic Memoir has unravelled as a nomadic method, giving my experiences and understandings of the projects a temporal body – a disjointed place for my data, fragments of my affectual reverberations with Goa, to momentarily settle. A fragmented and non-linear collection of poems, images, anecdotes and short stories, this composition begins from the middle and poses no end; its process is designed to stir up questions over answers. Through this method, my intention is to look into the “events of activities and encounters” with affective, arts-based education, “evoking transformation and change” in my experience with “data” and understanding of learning, being and knowing (Hultman & Taguchi, 2010, p. 535). / Graduate / 2018-05-01 / 0273 / 0727 / 0998 / a.berry089@gmail.com

In the context of early childhood education, in England and internationally, ideas and practices of ‘readiness’ have been of interest within research, policy and practice for some time. Much critical research, scholarship and activism has focused on exploring developmental aspects of this phenomenon arguing for: more ‘appropriate’ standards of ‘readiness’ against which to judge children’s learning and development; closer relationships between schools, preschools and communities that produce culturally responsive concepts of ‘readiness’; and the critical examination of the relationship between early childhood and compulsory school education. Within this body of work there is significant emphasis on developing and articulating alternative ideas and approaches that can unsettle dominant, normalizing practices of teaching and learning. Within these critical explorations of ‘readiness’ however, there is an avenue of scholarship that, seemingly, is as yet unexplored – one that addresses the concept of ‘readiness’ itself and asks how it may be possible to conceptualize ‘readiness’ in a way that is consistent with, and responsive to, complex processes of teaching and learning. This is not just a shift in practice, or in policy narratives, but is an ontological and epistemological change – a reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ that takes as its starting point a fundamental assumption of the positive and productive force of difference, in learning and in life. This thesis explores the ontological and epistemological shifts required to move away from ideas of ‘readiness’ that attach progression to a mechanistically linear movement. It develops and articulates an approach that embraces the emergent and unpredictable nature of learning, from which a concept of ‘readiness’ emerges which works with open, non-linear and emergent dimensions of education as necessary aspects of the complex systems within which we work. The thesis works with the concept of a ‘diffractive methodology’, exploring the concept of ‘readiness’ through ideas and theories drawn from complexity theory, from the immanent philosophy of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, and through onto-epistemological ideas of materiality and the entanglement of matter and meaning explored in particular by Barad. Methodologically, this study works within the space opened up by recent developments within ‘post-qualitative’ approaches to research. Working with concepts of ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ it engages critically with often taken for granted concepts and practices such as: assumptions concerning empirical/theoretical research; ideas of ‘data collection’ and ‘data analysis’; and the production of knowledge in and through experience. Deleuzian philosophy (among other influences) is approached in this methodological context as an open system, as opposed to a totalizing structure. Concepts including ‘sensation’ and ‘affect’ are approached as potentialities, the methodological value of which is affirmed through the ways in which they have been productively put to work in the context of this study in order to produce spaces in which it is possible to think and act in ways that challenge conventional structures. What is developed in this thesis is a concept of ‘readiness’ as an ‘active-affective-ethical-relation’, as opposed to a fixed and normalizing identity. It is argued that, through this reconceptualization of ‘readiness’ as a central concept within early childhood education, other taken for granted concepts are unsettled, in particular ideas and practices of assessment. In exploring these concepts, the original ideas produced within this thesis, in relation to both early childhood education and research methodology, aim to contribute to the creation of more ethical and inclusive spaces of early childhood education and educational research.

This post-qualitative inquiry project investigated subjectivity (sense of self) among graduates of creative writing Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs. The project asked how subjectivity is involved in the creative writing process and how that process fuels further writing after a creative piece (such as the MFA thesis) is completed. A post-qualitative, thinking-with-theory approach was used to explore the role of subjectivity among four anonymous graduates of creative writing MFA programs who provided writing samples describing their creative writing processes. Following the thinking-with-theory approach, the data were analyzed using Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of productive desire. Study findings are presented in two formats. First, a traditional, qualitative presentation of findings describes how unconscious desires develop a beneficial weakening of subjectivity that may encourage creative writers to continue writing after completion of the MFA degree. Next, further findings are presented via a nonlinear, rhizomatic data assemblage. The project concludes with recommendations for the use of Deleuzian productive desire as a pedagogical framework in graduate-level creative writing courses, as well as a call for the consideration of post-qualitative research methods in the field of education.

Using postfoundational and postqualitative frameworks, this dissertation considers what materializes when four child care centres adopt a multiage grouping structure, which includes children born in four consecutive years in each centre. The research question asks how do children live their lives in multiaged child care? To explore that question, the study challenges developmentalism as the dominant principle for organizing child care groupings. Engaging with three theoretical concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, the dissertation further questions: a) what characterizes relationships in these multi-aged centres? b) how do children negotiate through the curriculum in the centres? c) how can the children’s transformations be conceptualized in postdevelopmental theory/practice? This action research project employs the process of pedagogical narrations to story three ordinary moments that occurred in the child care centres. The pedagogical narrations process extends those storied moments through the critical reflections of the caregivers who work in the centres. The analytic process, thinking with theory, plugs-in the three concepts, caring relations, dwelling, and becoming, to the stories, producing beyond-developmental understandings of children, childhood, and child care. The study demonstrates pedagogical narrations as an effective postqualitative methodology for caregivers to research their own practices. This study concludes that child care structures such as age groupings, require situated ethics of care and responsibility, as well as, an early years reconceptualized curriculum that resists universalizing and normalizing practices in favour of situated ones. Considering caring relations, in spaces for young children, provides a context for thinking beyond simply, and only, adults caring for children, to thinking of children in relations of care with place, other non-human beings and non-living things, as well as other people, including other children and adults. Thinking with the dwelling concept encourages an attention to the present in early years settings, allowing more-than-developmental interests to flourish. Thinking becoming means thinking becoming-other, and positions subjectivities, including those of children, caregivers and place as unstable, shifting, and in relation. / Graduate

Feminist theorising has been instrumental in efforts to challenge gender hierarchies and conceptualize care as an ethic of relationality and interdependence, and has influenced visions of pedagogy as a relational, ethical and political endeavour. While these pedagogies importantly challenge simplified, uncontextualized, apolitical notions of both gender and care, they do not necessarily attend to the increasing complexity of children’s heterogeneous commonworlds. Following a theoretical and methodological framework aligned with material feminism and post qualitative research, in particular thinking with feminist scholars Barad and Haraway, this research questions what an engagement with human-and non-human relationality might do to complicate conversations about gender and care. Employing pedagogical narrations through a post-qualitative lens, this inquiry explores how children, educators and things become implicated in gendered caring practices. A diffractive analysis is put to work wherein gender and care are analyzed with/in several child-doll and child-car encounters, and are diffractively read through other doll and car stories near and far from the classroom. This analysis illuminates the political and ethical embeddedness of early childhood pedagogies, and the understanding that gendering and caring emerge with/in a complex web of many relations. Material feminism loosens ties that bind simplified constructions of gender as explanations for care and vice versa, and instead puts forward that gender and care per formatively emerge through intra-action. As such pedagogical and research practices need to pay careful attention to that which is always already on the verge of becoming. / Graduate

This study explores the promise of student success in undergraduate education that exceeds its standard definition and measurement as retention and graduation rates. The research paradox framing this dissertation is: In what ways can universities support conceptions of undergraduate student success that escape measurement? This paradox is explored through two analytic questions: What do the orientations of student success in the American higher education literature produce? and What does the map of student success at Great State University produce? To explore these questions, this study utilizes assemblage theory, a theorization of the composition of the conditions that produce our social fields to develop a molecular sociology, the methodology by which this study opens up the determinate world to the map of the assemblage. A genealogy of the undergraduate education literature explores what the orientations of student success produce. This section first destabilizes the notion that student success is a collection of literature that moves forward linearly with the march of scientific measurement. Second, it provides the orientation of the current student success assemblage in American higher education, data-driven control. A cartography of student success at Great State University next maps the orientations and disorientations of the first year of GSU’s student success initiative to data-driven control. In this mapping, we explore the initiative’s continued production of the in/dividual student: the dividual, or data point subject produced by data-driven control through the justification of student-centered practices. We also explore the moments that escaped the capture of data-driven control, or liberal education. Through a compilation of cartographic locations, we come into relation with student success at GSU as an assemblage of indeterminate molecularities productive of determinate reality. This study concludes with a call for a fractal student success, a student success incommensurate with itself and its locations. This expansive success is fostered by critical methodologies and practices. Narrow policy changes suggested by many organizations active in student success serve to re/produce data-driven control. Change in our students’ lives and possibilities will come from unyielding experimentations in research, practice, and policy to warp and overthrow data-driven control, and all assemblages that follow.

This thesis draws on the experiences of 21 young people transitioning from a special school for students with labels of moderate learning difficulty, to further education college. Taking a disability studies approach, that is, viewing disability as a social and political response to human diversity, I examine some social processes through which student identity and agency meanings may be negotiated during transition. Times of change offer circumstances of opportunity in which new identity and agency meanings may be improvised and tested in various forms. Some students found emergent ways to subvert and transgress expectations, given the different labels applied to them. Transition, with its focus on future change, offers limbic moments which appear to support situations for such opportunistic transgression. Of particular interest are the environments and circumstances that support or promote broadening of identity and agency options, because an understanding of these may enable the engineering of such situations. Whilst the students were transitioning to college, my own researcher subjectivities and understandings of ‘knowledge’ were also in flux. I describe the considerable influence these changes had on the research processes and my understandings of identity and agency. I propose that identity and agency meanings, whilst fluid and ever-changing, are linked with particular people and situated in particular social sites. With this in mind, and as a provocation to new ways of thinking I discuss foundation level further education as an ethical project, envisaging circumstances that may support and promote broader, more positive opportunities for identity and agency negotiations amongst young people with labels of learning disability. In this context, further education is re-imagined as an opportunity for potential empowerment, repositioning learning disabled students as agents of social change.

Text component of a doctoral dissertation, which references the full dissertation content in a multi-media web-based format. It includes a background statement, acknowledgements section, printed navigation guide and site map for the website, and a full list of references.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between older women and contemporary dance in a choreographic project. I explore in what sense the participation in the project is of artistic value to these women and also what happens in the meeting between me as a researcher, the project itself and the women. The background of this study is a personal interest in age, body and dance as well as an ambition to change normative ideas about the dancer body through action. With a globally ageing population, I have an interest in highlighting an aging female body as a resource in the context of contemporary dance. The study is conducted on the basis of post-qualitative research and decolonizing methodology. The artistic practice is leading and is based on the experiences of the women who participate in the project. As a researcher, my participation in the practice is necessary. By articulating and visualizing the marginality of older women, dance discourses are deconstructed. With improvisation as a performative choreographic practice, transformative learning emerges among participants. The findings of the study show that older women are resourceful and have the capacity for change through dance. This can be achieved in interaction with others and can then be an artistic experience. The artistic and pedagogical values which are experienced by the women in relation to contemporary dance are self-determination, trust and a sense of community. Both individual and collective struggle emerge among me and the women as a force of action. I argue that age norms and bodily ideals in contemporary dance can be challenged by giving older women access to contemporary dance. By articulating and visualizing the experiences of a marginalized group, the meaning of the concepts of dance, body and age are deconstructed and new insights are created which challenge and broaden normative ideas about dance and the dancer body.

According to the 2022 IPCC report on mitigation of climate change, a transformational change is necessary in every aspect of society, industry and commerce by 2030 in order to keep global temperatures within safe limits. What would this transformation look like and how do we begin? I argue that applying Bruno Latour’s concept of the Terrestrial can help lead us towards the path of transformation. More specifically how the multispecies management of ecological farming in Puerto Rico can help us understand how to reorient management practices in what he calls The New Climatic Regime. I explore what it means to land in the critical zone and situate ourselves within what Haraway calls the Plantationocene. I situate Puerto Rico as a microcosm of the living wholeness of the Earth. I approached uncovering stories of the earthbound as a way to discover a world where colonialism, neoliberalism and racism have led to environmental degradation, food insecurity, and poverty. By placing Bruno Latour’s arguments for a new political landscape in dialogue with post-qualitative inquiry, I hope to gain insight into the world in a different way, one that acknowledges the intricate nature of the connections between the social and the ecological. Connections that cannot be unravelled into neat and easy to follow strands of cause and effect but are tangled and knotted, allowing for multiple entry points into ideas of becoming Terrestrial. I approach stories as a way of being in continuous dialogue with the self and the surrounding world. What stories do ecological farms tell us about collaborative engagement in a multi-species organisation? Not as an attempt to provide solutions or definitive answers for how organisations should orient themselves but rather as an uncovering of the possibility of exploring new ways of thinking and doing.