ABSTRACT
How do forces of space, time, materialities and bodies co-constitute the on-going shaping of human subjectivities? This article explores how we might consider this theoretically and engage with it empirically. The empirical material with which to think from and with this question was drawn from a study of 13-year-old students who changed schools to experience ‘new beginnings’. No one in the new school knew them and so they could start afresh as students and as classmates (Juelskjaer 2009). The research was designed initially as a social psychological, poststructuralist, feminist study of the multiple subjectivities that are associated with school transitions and what might be opened and closed down in terms of the constitution of subjectivities inspired by Butler, Davies, Phoenix, Staunæs, Søndergaard, Wetherell and others. The research was furthermore designed so that components such as time, space, bodies and (other) materialities could ‘surface’ as constitutive forces in the production of subjectivities. As the study progressed, additional theorising was needed. In the work of Barad (2007), space, time and mattering are the constituting forces in the production of natural-cultural worlds. Barad’s (2007) theorising is achieved by queering quantum physics by diffractively reading Niels Bohr’s work with feminist science
*Email: maju@dpu.dk
and Education, Vol. 25, No. 6, 754-768, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.831812
s, Copenhagen, Denmark
studies, notably Haraway’s, Foucault’s and Butler’s poststructuralist work. However, we need to acknowledge that there is a problem of ‘scale’ in considering Barad’s insights from quantum physics, in relation to processes of subjectivication that take place within everyday human and nonhuman life. I am aware that the shift in scale may be viewed as highly problematic, no matter what form it takes (Sokal and Bricmont 1998), and that translations need to be undertaken carefully. Yet, the new thinking this translation makes possible warrants the effort (cf. Childers 2013; Højgaard and Søndergaard 2011; Juelskjaer et al. 2013; Lenz Taguchi 2010, 2013; Palmer 2011; Plauborg forthcoming; Schrader 2010; Søndergaard 2013).
