ABSTRACT
This article focuses on objects, bodies and space as vital materialities which possess active, dynamic agency. Through an analysis of the complex choreographies within which object and bodily materialisations are enacted, power relations are mobilised and educational space is continually re-constructed, the article sheds light on how material cultures of everyday classroom life are both active and constitutive in processes that recreate gender inequalities. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a UK A Level Sociology classroom, the article elaborates a material feminist analysis which empirically takes forward Barad’s (2007, 170) argument that ‘bodies do not simply take their place in the world… rather “environments” and “bodies” are intraactively constituted’. In doing so, it shows that space is not simply a physical container; objects and things are not inert, fixed or passive matter awaiting ‘use’ by human intervention; nor is the body a mere corporeal vehicle to be moved by the mind. The article draws new attention to how objects, bodies and spaces do crucial but often unnoticed performative work as vital materialities within the classroom. To explore how objects and bodies work to produce the classroom as a gendered space of differential matterings, I focus on a number of ‘material moments’ – including the manner in which a
*Email: c.a.taylor@shu.ac.uk
and Education, Vol. 25, No. 6, 688-703, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.834864
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fi fi ll i it , Sheffield, K
chair is occupied, the irregular use of a pen and the wearing of a particular t-shirt – to illuminate how that which is resolutely mundane within everyday pedagogic practice nevertheless possesses a surprising material force. My central argument is that bringing to the fore how material things act on and with us reveals educational practices to be a constellation of human-nonhuman agencies, forces and events.
