Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events

Knowledge Production in Material Spaces is a curation of the interventions that the authors undertook at a range of academic conferences since 2016. It problematizes disciplined practices and expectations governing academic conference spaces and generates new ways of thinking and doing conferences otherwise.

The authors use posthuman, feminist materialist and post-qualitative theories to disrupt knowledge production in neoliberal and bureaucratic conferences spaces. The analysis they offer, and the rhizomatic writing and presentational styles they use, promote a form of educational activism through theory. They interrogate the conference space as a regulated, normalized and standardized mode of academic knowledge production – which they call the ‘AcademicConferenceMachine’ – and playfully subvert the dominant meanings and modes of conferences and workshops to show how we can better interact and produce research, with and for each other. The authors indicate how creative conference practices promote playful possibilities to imagine and produce knowledge differently.

This book will appeal to audiences ranging from established professionals to early career scholars, doctoral and master’s students in Education and the social sciences.

Nikki Fairchild is Associate Head (Research and Innovation), School of Education and Sociology, University of Portsmouth. Her research focuses on place-spaces in Early Childhood classrooms and gardens and how they impact on bodies, this is activated using speculative embodied methodologies and theoretically informed by critical 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 entangled 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 psychology at the University of Valle d’Aosta in Italy where he also lectures qualitative research methods. His research can be described as lying at the crossroads 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 internationalization of higher education, research interests focus on queer and discursive methodologies. He co-authored ‘Discourse: the basics’ for Routledge (2017) and publishes in a range of academic journals.

Mirka Koro received her Ph.D., 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 intersection 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 the how materiality is present and revealed in everyday interactions both in Early Childhood and conference spaces.