Conference Agenda

In this symposium we explore how new materialisms including feminist materialism, new materialism, neomaterialism, and posthumanism provide inclusive and diverse ways of engaging with knowledge production brought to the fore by material and epistemic practices which are interdependent. This symposium provides space to engage with other approaches to knowledge generation that argue for the entanglement of reality and knowing which provides alternative ethical positioning for producing truths for a world in which culture and nature are entangled. Our responsibility is not to propose an idealized reality from which humans are removed but a vision of truth which imposes a responsibility to take the material world seriously because, if we do not, our empirical accounts will always be inaccurate.

In this symposium we seek to

Explore the nature of truth in research and how the idea that the world is composed of individuals awaiting representation undermines the consequential nature of research.

Argue for a relational ontology that challenges the presentation of truth endorsed by a correspondence theory of truth challenging scholars to think differently.

Invite participants and presenters to rethink the nature of knowledge production by looking beyond correspondence theories that dominate research approaches to truth.

The symposium will consist of four presentations that bring a unique perspective to educational research informed by new materialisms. This diversity serves to illustrate differential approaches to research and knowledge building that decenter humans and highlight the entangled relationships involving living and non-living that provide the possibility for consequential and ethical truth of world production.

This symposium focuses on interrogating consequential education research in pursuit of a diversity of apparatus to knowledge production. For example, education research using randomized control trials as the only basis for truth are underpinned by a correspondence theory of truth which is based on dichotomies, such as subject-object, researcher-researched, culture-nature and world-word (Barad, 2007, p. 125). These dichotomies or dualisms reinforce the separation of reality and knowing, which has ethical and moral consequences for how humans engage with the world in which they live. Correspondence theory assumes language is transparent and there is a direct relationship between the real actual experienced world and the knowing mind. One consequence of this belief for education is that observation is benign and acts as an open pane to the world leading to discovery. We challenge this classical notion of knowledge as representational, existing in the human mind with the object, what is known, separated from the (human) knower. This classical separation raises questions such as: how accurately do representations represent the known or how accurately does language represent the know? Correspondence theory is based on the false notion that knowledge in the form of concepts, graphs, photographic images mediate our access to the material world but new materialisms challenge the belief that we should trust our thoughts more than the material world. At the same time, we grapple with practices, such as randomized trials that have garnered traction that are presented as absolutely the truth even though they originated from people’s beliefs.