Opening spaces

These blog posts reveal my thoughts. Creative movements are expressed as I experiment with my theoretical understandings. When I read the literature related to my PhD and engage with the process, lines of thinking connect and intersect. My progress is reflected by the online posts through a desire to record the research process. Yet the public space offers an extra dimension of openness and freedom that also invites unintended consequences. For instance, when I receive feedback from readers, it jolts me into this new reality.

Deleuze (1994:176) claims that “[s]omething in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter”.  As I work with student experiences in Obstetrics learning, there are different moments that trigger lines of flight, opening up alternative possibilities - offshoots in the rhizomatic process that form part of the iterative explorations. Ohlsson (2009) points to the fragility of thinking that opens up chaos. She refers to the “magic moments” which constitute lines of flight where new thoughts emerge.

This process of blogging enables me to take on a nomadic self to explore the potentialities in student learning - “how learning processes are produced and function and what social effects they have” (Olsson 2009:xx). Nomadic thinking is considered as “molecular becoming”.  It is a way of picking up the tensions in the cracks or ruptures. These emerge as forces in events or encounters,  breaking through into new spaces, in the middle/in-between spaces causing a disruption to established boundaries such as binary oppositions. It contrasts with the molar “where becoming is fixed or fitted into pre-existing categories” and controlled by power mechanisms such as hierarchy (Coleman & Ringrose 2013:15).

The photos above (taken with my iPad then collaged on Explain Everything App) were shot during my recent vacation at the newly opened Angama Mara Tented Camp in the Mara Triangle of Kenya. Sunrise represents a new day offering different potentials and possibilities. Below is my favourite photo; showing the plain of possibilities through the reflection from the washbasin mirror.

Deleuze, G. 1994. Difference and repetition. Athlone Press. London

Coleman. R & Ringrose, C. 2013. Introduction: Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh University Press. Edinburgh.

Olsson, L. M. 2009. Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning : Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education. Routledge. London.