Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry: A Speculative Adventure in Research-Creation

by David Rousell

Overview

Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry introduces immersive cartography as a transdisciplinary approach to social inquiry in an age of climate change and technological transformation.

Drawing together innovative theories and practices from the environmental arts, process philosophy, education studies, and posthumanism, the book frames immersive cartography as a speculative adventure that gradually transformed the physical and conceptual architectures of a university environment. The philosophical works of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari are touchstones throughout the book, seeding the development of concepts that re-imagine the university through a more-than-human ecology of experience. Illustrated by detailed examples from Rousell’s artistic interventions and pedagogical experiments in university learning environments, the book offers new conceptual and practical tools for navigating the ontological turn across the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Rousell’s wide-ranging and detailed analysis of pedagogical encounters resituates learning as an affective and environmentally distributed process, proposing a "trans-qualitative" ethics and aesthetics of inquiry that is orientated toward processual relations and events. As a foothold for a new generation of scholarship in the social sciences, this book opens new directions for research across the fields of post-qualitative inquiry, art and aesthetics, critical university studies, affect theory, and the posthumanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367418359
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/16/2021
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

David Rousell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University, Australia, where he works in the Creative Agency Lab and Digital Ethnography Research Centre. His research is invested in the reimagining of educational cultures, theories, and environments through new empirical approaches drawing on the relational arts and process philosophy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements x

Foreword Maggie MacLure xii

Introduction: A Speculative Adventure xiv

1 Cartography 01

Beginning in the middle 02

Extensive and intensive mappings 05

Towards a cartography-art 09

The third map of virtualities 11

Technique and technicity 14

The movement of concepts 21

2 Aesthetics 26

The composition of sensation 27

Territory and milieu 29

Framing the Earth 31

The detachable percept 33

A logic of feeling 36

Collaboration after humanism 37

Exchanging particle signs 38

Molecular collaborations 41

Becoming a work of art 43

3 Ecology 45

What is ecology? 47

An ecology of practices 50

Cosmopolitical societies 51

Becoming-ecological in Bundjalung National Park 53

A cosmic event 59

A thousand ecologies 60

4 Pedagogy 62

An ecological aesthetics of learning events 63

Anomalous pedagogies and undercommons study 65

An architecting of experience 66

Rephrasing the learning self 70

Learning to be affected 71

Non-compliant learning environments 73

Harbouring the elements 74

An ecology of sensation 76

5 Data 79

The metabolics of data 80

Feeling the data 81

A society of feelings 83

The data event 85

An influx of otherness 89

Data abduction 91

The occurrent diagram 92

6 Affect 95

Whitehead's affect theory 96

No simple location 99

Memories of the future 100

Reco(r)ding what moves you 102

Biomorphic belongings 103

Life in the interstices 105

Geomorphic affects 106

Living and non-living concerns 111

7 Justice 113

Two variations on the concept of event 114

Three variations on the concept of immanence 116

Doing little justices 119

"We can eat the clones" 122

Non-human qualities of life 124

The creation of rights 125

The micropolitical sphere 127

Inconclusion 128

Afterword: Propositions for an Immersive Cartography 130

References 134

Index 145

Editorial Reviews

"Immersive cartography is an innovative approach to inquiry that employs multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives to create the "new." In his engrossing book, Rousell produces the kind of 21st century experimental work that is possible once we leave behind the 20th century’s pre-existing social science research methodologies that shut down thought and simply repeat what already exists. Researchers who feel constrained by dogmatic approaches to inquiry will be energized by immersive cartography’s daring and its rich possibilities for creativity". – Professor Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, USA

"David Rousell’s book articulates an exciting new direction for research across the arts, education and critical posthumanities. This is a groundbreaking book which offers a unique vision of what'scholarship and pedagogy in the posthuman university might look like. Drawing on process philosophy, Rousell radically opens questions of art, learning, and the multiplicity of creativities that animate life within an expanded field of more-than-human relations, affects, and concerns. An excellent resource for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, educators and scholars working in and across the fields of arts, education, critical posthumanities and postqualitative methodology". – Professor Pamela Burnard, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK

From the Publisher