Routledge Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events

Knowledge Production in Material Spaces is a curation of the interventions that the authors undertook at a range of academic conferences since 2016. It problematizes disciplined practices and expectations governing academic conference spaces and generates new ways of thinking and doing conferences otherwise. The authors use posthuman, feminist materialist and post-qualitative theories to disrupt knowledge production in neoliberal and bureaucratic conferences spaces. The analysis they offer, and the rhizomatic writing and presentational styles they use, promote a form of educational activism through theory. They interrogate the conference space as a regulated, normalized and standardized mode of academic knowledge production – which they call the ‘AcademicConferenceMachine’ – and playfully subvert the dominant meanings and modes of conferences and workshops to show how we can better interact and produce research, with and for each other. The authors indicate how creative conference practices promote playful possibilities to imagine and produce knowledge differently. This book will appeal to audiences ranging from established professionals to early career scholars, doctoral and master’s students in Education and the social sciences. Review The task: to produce an account that is less an archive than a field of conditions, a set of practices. To anarchive: activate the surplus of experience in the event, make felt how what eludes capture nonetheless makes a difference. To turn without turning against: the AcademicConferenceMachine is not the enemy so much as the symptom (of frontality, of measurability, of discipline). To move beyond authority, allowing the words to tunnel their own uneasy resonances, turning the soil, creating new paths. To become earthworm. – Dr Erin Manning, Research Chair - Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Director, SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada. In this provocative and disruptive new book, Fairchild and colleagues offer a lively, creative, and necessary intervention into the academic-conference-industry landscape. Questions of ethics, environments, and politics abound, read through intra-actions between (conference) events, geographies, human and non-human actors, and more. What results is a post-qualitative, post-methodological tour de force: Knowledge Production in Material Spaces will disturb your taken-for-granted assumptions about and entanglements within the neoliberal academy. – Michael D. Giardina, Professor, Florida State University, and Director, International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) This exciting book mobilises posthuman and feminist materialist theory to agitate the ‘Academic Conference Machine’. Issuing from a series of experimental conference presentations by the authorial collective, it converts the exhilarations of those original events, with their speeding pulses, sweaty palms and disobedient formats, into energetic, event-ful writing that opens new spaces for knowledge and action inside the neoliberal machine. –Professor Maggie MacLure, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K. This book is a playful intra-action with a geopolitical world, with multiverse connections, care and response-ability as vibrant nourishments. The six authors (CG Collective) and one more do not stand still; they do collective thinking and doings – IDEAS and materialities with ten events. Experimentations, speculations, process-orientations – push and risk the academic conferences continuously. – Professor Ann Merete Otterstad, OsloMet University, Oslo, Norway. After reading this book, attending or planning a conference will never be the same again. The authors put posthumanist feminist thinking, concepts and metaphors to work with great inventiveness and playfulness and they enable ways to know and learn otherwise within ‘the conference’ and beyond. – Dr Malou Juelskjær, Associate Professor in Social Psyc