Listening to children: a diffractive methodology

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Listening to children: a diffractive methodology

By Youth Research Centre, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne

Date and time

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM AEST

Location

Frank Tate Room, Level 9, Melbourne Graduate School of Education

100 Leicester Street University of Melbourne Carlton, Victoria Australia

Description

Youth Research Centre Seminar Series 2016

Professor Bronwyn Davies, Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Graduate School of Education

Facilitated by Professor Jane Kenway, Honorary Professor, Melbourne Graduate School of Education

In my book Listening to Children I develop the concept of emergent listening. Emergent listening, as I am conceptualizing it here, is a practice, an idea and ideal of attending to difference in all its multiplicity as it emerges in each moment in-between oneself and another. It responds not so much to what is already known, but to what is yet to come. What it is to be in encounter with another, in this emergent sense, is specifically not to be bound by what you already know; rather, each moment is an engagement with the ongoing possibility of coming to see life, and one’s relation to it, in new and surprising ways. Listening in this way involved me in developing what Barad calls a diffractive methodology—not drawing on usual metaphors of reflection and reflexivity but on diffraction. Barad’s radical intervention is to draw our attention to the representationalist trap social science researchers have fallen into, or never quite pulled ourselves out of. Representationalism is based on Newtonian geometrical optics--an optics that envisages boundaries of separate entities with clearly demarcated interiors and exteriors. She offers instead a physical optics, thus taking us to “questions of diffraction rather than reflection” (Barad 2008 122).

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