In this seminar the idea of the land of ‘a’ school as research site as neutral is troubled. Karen Barad (2017) refers to Trinity, in New Mexico, in the USA, the testing site of the first atomic bomb as “wounded ground.” I propose the research site of the school where I was a teacher for many years and then where I did my doctoral research in South Africa, is also wounded ground. A school as place (for places are not containers) leaking with the wounds of colonisation and then Apartheid, ill-treatment of animals, plants and trees including insects and fungi, ignoring child and childhood and denying particular humans’ existence. The land of the research site is deeply entangled with research practices. Attention will be drawn to a practice that land does not need a pseudonym for ethics clearance and how this speaks to the negation of ‘the’ land as important in the research about ‘a’ school in this posthumanist research. What becomes possible if we become more curious and are more attentive to the land as educationally, historically, philosophically, and geo-politically, significant for schools, for child and childhood?
Rose-Anne Reynolds is a Childhood Studies lecturer at the University of Cape Town. Her PhD is entitled. ‘A Posthuman Reconfiguring of Philosophy with Children in a Government Primary School in South Africa’. Some of her research interests and publications are in the fields of Philosophy with Children (P4wC) and Communities of Philosophical Enquiry, the Philosophy of Child and Childhood and Postqualitative Research in the context of Apartheid and post-Apartheid schooling in South Africa. Rose-Anne theorises teaching and learning as political (across all ages) and engages with emergent, experimental, experiential, enquiry-based pedagogies in her lectures, seminars and workshops.
ROOM- Town Hall room CR2