Transcript Rhizomatic Pathways in qualitative research

Unearthing the forces of globalisation in
educational research
David R Cole
University of Western Sydney
Abstract
• “The global system of post-industrial and newly industrializing worlds
produces scattered and poly-centered yet always profit-oriented power
relations which function not so much by binary oppositions but in a
fragmented and all-pervasive manner. The rhizomic or web-like structure of
contemporary power, however, does not alter fundamentally its terms of
application. If anything, power relations in globalization are more ruthless
than ever,” (Braidotti, 2012, p. 169).
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Arjun Appardurai
If globalisation is
characterised by disjunctive
flows that generate acute
problems of social well-being,
one positive force that
encourages an emancipatory
politics of globalisation is the
role of imagination… On the
one hand, it is through the
imagination that modern
citizens are disciplined and
controlled—by states,
markets, and other powerful
interests. But it is also the
faculty through which
collective patterns of dissent
and new designs for collective
life occur. (p. 6)
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Cartographies…
• “What I am precisely concerned with,” Guattari explained, “is
a displacement of the analytic problematic, a drift from
systems of statement [énoncé] and preformed subjective
structures toward assemblages of enunciation that can forge
new coordinates of interpretation and ‘bring to existence’
unheard-of ideas and proposals”
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4 division of the unconscious
• The four divisions of the unconscious diagram deal with: 1)
cut-outs of existential territories; 2) complexions of material
and energetic flows; 3) rhizomes of abstract ideas and 4)
constellations of aesthetic refrains. Perhaps more tangibly,
one could say about these 4 zones that they are — i) the
ground beneath your feet; ii) the turbulence of social
experience; iii) the blue sky of ideas and; iv) the rhythmic
insistence of waking dreams.
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The group
• This idea concerns the passage
from a ‘subjected group’, often
alienated by globalisation, to a
‘subject group’, that is capable of
making its own statements. The
theme occurs throughout
Guattari’s first book, 1972,
Psychanalyse et transversalité:
Essais d’analyse institutionnelle.
La Découverte, Paris. For example
in “Introduction à la
psychothérapie institutionnelle.”
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Abstract machines
• Yet what the fourfold diagrams
try to map out are not just the
latencies and possibilities of
speech on the edge of an allabsorbing state of anticonditioning and strikingly
revolutionary action, but more
specifically, the material
situations and logical steps
that draw subjectivity out of
its containment and into
unfolding, globalised flows
and inter-relationships which
are themselves reshaped
through their collisions with
ceaselessly mutating
operational diagrams that
Deleuze & Guattari (1988)
called ‘abstract machines’…
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Escape routes…
• The point of this method of
participatory educational research
is to resist, create, propose
alternatives and to escape in terms
of the evolving singularities of the
group, despite the normalizing
forces that are continually brought
to bear on collectivism by aspects
of contemporary capitalist society,
e.g. the confinement of the
bourgeoisie, or the oedipal family.
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Meta-modelling
• On the contrary, the metamodelling of this article works
from within to make
difference happen in each
example, so globalised
subjectivities are not
essentialised, but realised in
terms of the interrelationships between
examples and in the
singularities of the examples
themselves that have no
relations
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Sudanese families in Australia
• There has been extensive coverage in the Australian media
and in the political arena about the ways in which the
Sudanese have fitted in or otherwise into mainstream
Australian society, and this coverage has not always been
positive. See, for example, an ABC interview with the former
Immigration Minister, Kevin Andrews, at:
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2007/s2057250.htm
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Diagram
i) the houses where the Sudanese currently live in Australia,
which replicate the tribal and village spaces in the Sudan, and
their convoluted journeys to get to these places from different
regions in the Sudan, e.g. via Egypt; ii) the Sudanese community
world, including the influences of Christian worship and their
perspective on Australian social life taken from Australian media
and their contact with Australians; iii) the idea of being
Sudanese and what that means, for example, in terms of the
strong gender divisions in traditional Sudanese society, and how
the idea of being Sudanese is changing under pressure from the
transition to life in Australia; iv) the aesthetics of becoming
Sudanese-Australian, for example involving craft, needlework
and dress codes, music such as rapping, dancing, religious
worship and imagery, and hairstyling.
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Literacies
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Peer and youth literacies
The literacy of synthetic time
War literacies
Oral literacies
Tribal literacies
Physical literacies
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Young Muslims in Australia on
Facebook
• … 82% of the 15-18 age group asked said that their primary
focus on the Internet was to socialize. 63% of the 18-25 age
group responded similarly, which points to the ways in which
globalised social life is evolving under the influence of social
media. The sample of 323 young Muslims was taken from the
Sydney area, and the urban focus of the research prejudices
the study in that all respondents should have access to
computers…
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Information Sources
- Top five websites Muslim youth have consumed recently
4 divisions of the unconscious
• : 1) The Australia that the young Muslims inhabit, which might be Lakemba,
Greater Western Sydney, or the suburbs in which they live, and the place
where they go to study and work, e.g. Australian university campuses or the
Sydney CBD; 2) Muslim identity as it is portrayed in everyday life in
Australia, e.g. through media reports on Muslim countries, terrorism, issues
to do with religious identity, differences between Muslim life, Christian life
and secular life or the multiple cultures in Australia and the ways in which
they interact with Islam, plus the contemporary political position of Islam in
Australian culture and politics ; 3) the notion of being a Muslim and what
that entails on an abstract level, for many young Muslims in Australia the
interaction on Facebook encapsulate the search for abstract Muslim identity
through social contact with youth from Islamic countries, readings from the
Koran, teachings from the Mosque and the abstract ideas of what it means
to be a young Muslim in Australia that is passed on by word of mouth
amongst Muslim youth; 4) Muslim art, calligraphy, the style and essence of
what it means to be a young Muslim, including the history of Islam, the
teachings of the Koran and the 5 pillars of Islam and how they are played
out in the lives of the young people, e.g. through the desire to go on the
Hajj or Ramadan.
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Literacies of Muslim youth
• In terms of multiple literacies, the globalised young Muslims
practise political, visual, rhetorical, religious and affective
literacies online. The affective literacies are especially
important to young Muslims using Facebook, as the affective
contrast in environmental and digital realms is a powerful
driver in their learning.
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The politics of affect
• There is a politics of affect, which is produced through young
Muslims using Facebook in Australia. By excluding affect from
their calculations, one could say that neo-liberal civil society
may be at odds with the often-violent resurgence in
contemporary revolts against the state…
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History
• In contrast, history may be cast as narrative that emphasizes
regularity and predictability, in Massumi’s (2002) words,
history comprises a set of “identified subjects and objects”
whose progress is given “the appearance of an ordered, even
necessary evolution… contexts progressively falling into
order” (p. 218).
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Conclusion
• The results from this study show how globalised identities
determine difference and complex, divergent imaginations,
which follow desires and form new ways of looking at the
world from changing perspectives. Both the Sudanese families
and young Muslims in Australia face ongoing intergenerational and communal tensions, as the fracturing of
globalisation continues to make the nodes and sources of
their identities, such as tribal life in the Sudan or Islam, spread
out further and harder to access in a society dominated by
capitalism.
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