Conference Agenda

In this paper I will refer to my personal and academic experience of writing collaboratively with colleagues across different disciplines, countries and institutional affiliations acroos Europe and beyond. I will think-with authors located within Posthumanism (Braidotti, 2011, 2013, 2018), New Materialism (Bennet, 2010) and Post-qualitative theories and methodologies (Lather & St.Pierre, 2013) who challenge the traditional view and practice of academic discourses, particularly in relation to academic writing. I will refer to my personal experiences of writing some papers for academic publication with colleagues across different disciplines, opening therefore a space for dialogue and for new meanings to emerge at the crossroad of different fields of inquiry and of different national boundaries.

I will particularly think-with the work of Richardson and St.Pierre (2005) in their view of academic writing as a creative and disruptive practice that destabilizes traditional, fixed academic structures in favour of rizhomatic and multiple experiences where the poetic and the playful replaces the objective and the quantifiable. Through the work of Holman Jones et al.(2013), of Gale and Wyatt (2021), I will paly with the idea of a collaborative voice, where the individual position get lost in between a diffractive multiplicity of voices. Diffraction (Barad, 2007; Lambert, 2021) , a key concept within Posthuman theories and practices, is also a guiding principle in my writing and in my presentation, whereby diffraction is conceived as a concept borrowed from quantum physics where the multiplicity of voices and positions, like waves in their interaction with each other or with an obstacle, loose their individuality in their merging into one new entity. Diffraction is not just a reflection of each other into each other's voice, it is rather a juxtaposition and a merging of different perspectives. It is not 1+1=2, but rather 1 with1= multiplicity, where the thinking space becomes a relational and creative inquiry, highlighted through a sense of togetherness and of withness.

Collaborative writing will be proposed throughout this paper as an alternative, poetic and evocative (Kirkcpatrick et al, 2021) way to conceive and to practice academia differently (Bozalek, 2022); as a way to resist a neoliberal discourse that places productivity and quantity over quality and beauty. Collaborative writing will be proposed also a 'learning' possibility beyond the traditional conception of teacher education as a mere development of skills and as a quantifiable training through a set of frameworks. Proposing in this way an alternative view of research, possibly starting from teacher training, research that is entangled with practice, with identity, with embodied and lived experiences that matter and that we care about. A practice-research that is grounded on the value of ourselves as individuals beyond the professional domain that considers us solely as a means of production.

The paper will also draw from psychoanalytical theories, particularly in relation to object-relation theories that position relationality at the centre of identity formation in the work of M.Klein, Winnicott and W.Bion, through which collaborative writing can be seen and read as a transitional space for learning and for approaching education differently.

Professional work in the fields of psychoanalysis as well as psychoanalysis and education is based on the fundamental assumption of a dynamic unconscious in the human being (Freud 1915), so that the subject carries diverse, even contradictory parts within itself. The subject is a divided one, in this sense diversity is internal to the subject.

The planned contribution deals with the significance of theories on internal diversity of the subject and other psychoanalytic theories for practice in the field of psychoanalysis as well as psychoanalysis and education from the perspective of persons who are professionally occupied in these fields.

Even if the reference to scientific theories can sometimes grant professionals a certain degree of security, relevant publications from a psychoanalytical perspective (Zwiebel, 2013; Datler, 2016) and in accordance with literature on pedagogical professionalism (Helsper, Hörster & Kade, 2003; Rottländer & Roters, 2008) point to the conviction that it would be illusory to think that the orientation to theories or concepts could lead to the fundamental elimination of the moment of uncertainty in processes of psychosocial practice. Based on brief reflections on the theory-practice debate, the special nature of psychoanalytic theories is discussed as they take into account moments of complexity and instability or dynamics of psychosocial processes and help professionals to understand that and why the experience of uncertainty in various situations is unavoidable in different intensities and colours.

In my planned contribution, results from an ongoing research project TheoPrax of the Research Unit Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna will be presented. Within the research project, persons working in different educational and psychotherapeutic fields were interviewed with the help of a specific interview instrument. In the course of these interviews, professionals were asked to give self-selected examples of the ways in which they are guided by theories or concepts in their daily practice. In the course of the evaluation of these interviews, (a) we identify which theories or concepts are mentioned, and (b) using a rating system, we determine with what precision the interviewed persons are able to explain the practice-guiding significance of the theory or concepts they have mentioned (Strobl & Datler, 2020, p. 210).

In the context of the conference topic, of particular interest are those interviews that were conducted with people who, in their practical work, are guided by theories and concepts that assume a divided subject.

The following research question will be addressed:

With what precision the interviewees who mention psychoanalytic theories and concepts are able to explain their practice-guiding significance, by example of their daily practice?

Enrolled in “psychoanalytically orientated clinical approach in education science” (Blanchard-Laville et al., 2005; Blanchard-Laville & Chaussecourte, 2012), we have been conducting participatory research for several years: action-research (Dubost, 1987), intervention-research (Dubois & Hans, 2018), intervention in an open environment (Bordet, 2021) with education professionals (middle and high school teachers, academic trainers, special educational needs teachers…) in France, Lebanon and Morocco. For us, one of the challenges of contemporary educational research is to strengthen the link between researchers and education professionals. This link engages work “with” professionals (Lieberman, 1986) but also work “on” the discourse of the participants involved in the research (Dubois & Kattar, 2017).

However, what we call “participatory research” should be understood more as appellation grouping together a diversity of nominations and practices, rather than a methodology per se. Yves Bonny’s work (Bonny, 2017) highlights this diversity. Indeed, for this author, participatory research can be distinguished from one another according to the place of the scientific frame of reference and the participation of professionals within. Without going back over the history and debates concerning “participatory research” which have marked the different fields of the human and social sciences for more than sixty years, this diversity of doing research “with” refers to epistemological issues which make up the richness, diversity and conflict of the scientific field. Moreover, diversity is also to be understood from a second angle, that of the actors with whom the work is done and pushes us to think about the commitment and the unconscious framework of these actors, their practices as well as the contexts in our research.

For this paper, we will rely on participatory research projet (2019-2021) conducted with eight academic trainers (A.T.) of the academy of Amiens (France) in which we sought to understand how the set of values, social norms and cultural and educational models that support the accompaniment, is experienced by the academic trainers; to study how their representation of the accompaniment that they provide is developed.

Starting from the diversity of participatory research, we will show what characterised our research by analysing the work “with” the A.T. in the aftermath. More specifically, we will discuss the impact of the research process on these professionals involved as the research stages unfolded. In other words, in what way did the collaborative work that was instituted between practitioner and researcher allow for collective elaborations based on experiences that opened up a balance to be achieved between their expectations as academic trainers, the researcher's request and the expectations of the institutional order? In the aftermath, we will analyse the researcher's commitment on the one hand, and on the other, the A.T.'s position, caught between the will to transform elements of their professional practice and the intention to search in a comprehensive way. Moreover, as the A.T. constitute “an instituted collective”, their links “are in a way already there” (Dubois & Hans, 2018), inscribed in an institutional history. Our paper will therefore be an opportunity to return to the “containing function” (Bion, 1962; Winnicott, 1960; Ciccone, 2001; James, 2016) experienced in this group space (A.T. and researcher) where a singular phantasmatic is actualised and in which unconscious anxieties emerge and unfold, including those of fragmentation. Indeed, this unconscious anxiety of fragmentation is present in training and research groups and each member is, more or less, inhabited by the fear of losing “his unity” (Anzieu, 1999) when confronted with alterity.