Matters of Learning: Socio-material Approaches to Researching Professional Education and Learning
With Professor Tara Fenwick (University of Stirling)
Monday 29 April 2013
5.00pm to 6.30pm
Room M101, Mayfield House, Falmer
The 'matter' of everyday interaction is too often ignored, dismissed, or isolated in educational research. Objects and technologies are often assumed to be separate and distinct from human desire and action, in ways that lead to other unhelpful distinctions between virtual and real, knowledge and action, human and nonhuman. In this presentation I introduce arguments for a different configuration, that are becoming increasingly influential in research in professional education and learning.
From different perspectives these arguments recognise that the social and material are entangled in assemblages of human and nonhuman, and that educational and other professional practices and knowings can be understood as effects enacted through these assemblages. Sociomaterial analyses trace how and why particular educational processes become stabilised and even powerful, what is holding them together, what is excluded and what inequities are created. Capacities for action are more-than-human: they are relational, distributed, and enacted through particular dynamic assemblages. This is a posthuman, not anti-human approach - a sociomaterial sensibility that can open radical new questions and imaginative possibilities for professional education and learning.
Tara Fenwick is a Professor of Professional Education at the University of Stirling and Director of ProPEL: an international research network for professional practice, education and learning. With colleagues, she recently published Emerging Approaches to Educational Research: Tracing the Socio-Material (Routledge 2011, Fenwick, Edwards and Sawchuk).