Saturday, 10 January 2015

Patterning interconnectedness


This quilt that I made a few years ago, resulted from piecing together many fabrics. It was fun to design and to sew, and now fulfilling to enjoy the finished product on a bed in my home. However since reading Karen Barad’s work, I look at it in a different way. Is this a finished product? What does it tell me and what more could I have done or still do? How does it influence my thoughts?  For instance, the backing has a very different force on me with a bright orange energy. To continue to sit with these questions, I have kept the photo in its raw state choosing to let it facilitate my diffractive thinking.

Similarly in my research proposal I stated the type of data collection that would suit my research and the appropriate analysis that I anticipated would elicit the best results. Now I wonder how reading diffractively will change and influence how I consider the multiple intra-actions that occur in my classroom and online pedagogical practices, and the clinical context of student learning. It feels that my thoughts are shifting in an unexpected way. Where will this lead and how does one capture the different differences when all matter matters?


Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write about the relational aspects in a pieced quilt - considered as a smooth space without a centred focus. Lenz Taguchi (2010:145).expands on how different patterns and fabrics relate to each other “in different and infinitely possible ways”. In working with and on my research data, I will need to make choices in defining the “agential cuts”, or will the choosing be a consequence of other forces (Barad 2007). I wonder what patterns, possibilities and potentialities will emerge?

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