Susanne Gannon

The ambivalent practices of reflexivity

Reflexivity involves turning one’s reflexive gaze on discourse—turning language back on itself to see the work it does in constituting the world. The subject/researcher sees simultaneously the object of her or his gaze and the means by which the object (which may include oneself as subject) is being constituted. The consciousness of self that reflexive writing sometimes entails may be seen to slip inadvertently into constituting the very (real) self that seems to contradict a focus on the constitutive power of discourse. This article explores this site of slippage and of ambivalence. In a collective biography on the topic of reflexivity, the authors tell and write stories about reflexivity and in a doubled reflexive arc, examine themselves at work during the workshop. Examining their own memories and reflexive practices, they explore this place of slippage and provide theoretical and practical insight into “what is going on” in reflexive research and writing.

The (im)possibilities of writing the self-writing : French poststructural theory and autoethnography

Poststructural theories problematize taken-for-granted humanist notions of the subject as capable of self-knowledge and self-articulation while simultaneously providing a rationale for incorporating the personal into research. The body, emotions, and lived experience become texts to be written and read in autoethnography. However, a paradox arises for poststructural autoethnography in that autoethnographic research presumes that subjects can speak for themselves, whereas poststructuralism disrupts this presumption and stresses the (im)possibilities of writing the self. This article explores the work of pivotal French poststructuralists—Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, and Cixous—as they write themselves and put those selves under erasure in writing. The author identifies the implications for a reconfigured poststructural autoethnography, tracing textual strategies that evoke fractured, fragmented subjectivities and provoke discontinuity, displacement, and estrangement. In poststructural autoethnography, the writing writes the writer as a complex (im)possible subject in a world where (self) knowledge can only ever be tentative, contingent, and situated.

Constituting the feminist subject in poststructuralist discourse

In this article, we describe a collective biography that we convened in order to revisit the site of the radical theoretical break with the liberal humanist individual marked by the poststructuralist work of Henriques and colleagues and the feminist poststructuralist work of Weedon. These writers suggest that the new subject of poststructuralist theory will be more open to the changes desired by feminist and social justice movements. They describe the break with the liberal humanist subject as a break that heralds new possibilities of personal and cultural transformation. In this article, using the medium of collective biography stories, we revisit the relation between the liberal humanist individual and the transformative possibilities poststructuralist writers envisaged for the new subject of poststructuralism. We situate the discussion in the context of our transformation into neoliberal subjects over the last three decades.

Collective biography and the entangled enlivening of being

In this paper we explore the very particular forms and productive possibilities of collaborative writing that are generated in collective biography workshops, focusing in particular on the collaborative generation of memory stories. Drawing on conceptual resources from Deleuze and Barad we work our way through the paradox of working with intensely felt evocative memories within the poststructural conceptual space of the deconstructed -of-thought. We analyze a story told in a collective biography workshop on writing, and work with it in relation to the concepts of being as emergent within the encounter, intra-action or the entanglement of agencies, the significance of matter, the movement from perception and affection to percept and affect, and diffraction as concept and practice.

(Re)presenting the Collective Girl: A Poetic Approach to a Methodological Dilemma

This article identifies the salient characteristics of collective memory work and collective biography research. Methodological dilemmas that can arise in the course of the research are identified and an argument is made in favor of imagination and creativity as essential elements of any effective response. Particular reference is made to a collective biography project completed by the author where she (re)presented the collective texts in the form of poetry.

Neo-Liberal Subjectivities and the Limits of Social Change in University-Community Partnerships.

In this paper the authors analyse a university–school partnership that went awry. It was designed to develop a new set of philosophical principles to inform work with violent student behaviour in schools. The project brought together a team of researchers from the university and school sector with a strong record of examining and improving the management of behaviour in classrooms. The authors sought volunteer school‐based educators to work with them as co‐researchers. Despite the teams strong school‐based research background, the mutual interest in developing a new approach to work with violence, and the strong collaborative base, they found themselves, as the initiating research team, unable to progress in the ways they had anticipated. This paper analyses the dynamics at work in that lack of progress. The analysis is put forward with the hope of enlivening discussion about what makes for successful collaborative projects between schools and universities.

Technologies of audit at work on the writing subject : a discursive analysis

This article examines the everyday practices of writing in the context of the technologies of audit, as they have been practised on and by the four authors in their capacity as students and researchers. It examines the activity of writing as governmentality, through which students and academics make themselves into appropriate subjects, and also exceed and disrupt the effects of government.

Deleuzian Thought and Collaborative Writing: A Play in Four Acts

This article involves four writers exploring together the insights into collaborative writing that Deleuze can offer. Jonathan and Ken in the United Kingdom and Bronwyn and Sue in Australia have separate histories of collaborative writing, and in this collaborative project, they extend their thinking about Deleuze and work reflexively with his concepts to examine their own four-way collaboration. The thoughts of Deleuze provide a means of looking at collaborative writing as performance, as a means of becoming, each for the unknown other; selves as writers and academics but also sexed subjects living complex lives, in this case in worlds many miles apart. The article offers the collective and multiple senses of how the thoughts of Deleuze can be brought to life in collaborative writing.

Difference as Ethical Encounter

This article uses Deleuze and Levinas and those who work with their ideas to explore pedagogical encounters across difference in two texts: A collective biography story of a White teacher in an Indigenous school and an excerpt from the landmark “Sorry” speech by the previous Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It begins with a reflection on the methodology of collective biography and speculates on how difference, and ethical encounters across difference, might be rethought in ways that demassify categories of difference and at the same time recognize the exigencies of historical disadvantage.

Rewriting "the road to nowhere'' : place pedagogies in Western Sydney

Negative representations of parts of our cities are endemic in the Australian media, where certain suburbs function as motifs for failure—past, present, and future. Indeed, as one journalist put it after invoking the “interchangeable” triumvirate of Sydney’s Mount Druitt, Melbourne’s West Heidelberg, and Brisbane’s Inala, “geography is destiny” (Wynhausen, 2006). This article critiques the discourses at play in the media and explores the possibilities and limitations of a pilot project wherein an urban place-based pedagogy is taken up as a mode of critical response as high school students begin to document in text and images what they love about “Our place.” Further possibilities for engaging critically with place are explored in the concluding section of the article.