The question becomes: how to interfere in and diffract realities in particular locations to generate more respectful and less dominatory alternatives. How to trope, to bend versions of the real, to strengthen desirable realities that would otherwise be weak. […] To deal with the materialities of specific practices. To discover difference. And then to intervene in ways that might make a difference to those differences.
John Law, 2008
I am an anti-disciplinary scholar and methodologist, with experience of working within and across the subject areas of Education, Urban Studies, Philosophy, Public Policy, Criminology and Sociology. My work across these sites focuses on practices of knowledge production and meaning-making, and seeks to engage within the relationships between dominant knowledge structures, acts and practices, and marginalised ways of knowing and being, including within higher education.
My work is grounded in auto theoretical, anti-colonial and post-qualitative inquiries and guided through readings with/in post-structural, new materialist, and affect theories. In tandem, I design and use a wide range of performative and transformational research-creation approaches, including (auto)ethnography, participatory research, speculative worlding, and arts-based methodologies.
Underpinning all aspects of my work is a view that theory and method should be treated as tools to prise apart dominant knowledge practices, towards realities unseen, and towards undisciplinary modes of thinking and doing. To this end I view the machinations and everyday practices of academia as a potent site for exploration, and I relatedly engage in alternative modes of scholarship as practices of critique and resistance, exercising slow, community-based and anti-colonial methods within my practice. I am just as at home (re)imagining the world through craft and making, and I am particularly partial to crochet, sewing and quilting as means to connect the head, the heart, and the hand.
In the spirit of Georges Perec, I like to question my teaspoons. Following Donna Haraway, I continually ask: with whose blood were my eyes crafted? And I remain ever optimistic in the potential of imaginative acts. As Marnie Stern implores us: see how easy to dream a scheme of sounds in your head. We must dream on.