Entanglements of Difference as Community Togetherness: Faith, Art and Feminism

Abstract

Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion and gender at a community level both on Instagram and in arts workshops, we show how sharing ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice entangles a diffraction of differences as ‘togetherness’. Such entanglement creates cross-cultural interfaith understandings and gender diverse acceptance and inclusion online. We use diffraction, intra-action and entanglement as a way of framing our understanding of this ‘togetherness’ and show that human feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages; they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, orientations, attractions, aesthetics, art and objects of attachment. The feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’ that we discuss are therefore direct products of human and non-human interactions, which we explore through arts-based research. In this article, we apply Karen Barad’s feminist new materialist theories of ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘entanglement’ to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. We use these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of ‘community’, ‘belonging’ and ‘what really matters’ in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and Instagram-based art communities. To better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that the feelings of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’, which are central to human subjectivity and experience, are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. The methodologies we present are community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of ‘community’ and ‘belonging’. We identify how creative methods are a significant and useful way of knowing about communities and argue that they are important because they are grounded in being with communities, showing that the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered.

Rethinking digital media literacy to address body dissatisfaction in schools: Lessons from feminist new materialisms

“…In terms of developing pedagogical responses to body disaffection in schools, this new materialist understanding of media engagement shifts from placing the onus on individual young people to emphasising the need to make visible and challenge those relations and forces shaping young people’s mental health. Understanding young people’s ‘capacity’ when engaging media as relational orients pedagogical approaches concerned with ‘contextually specific experience’ (Hickey-Moody and Willcox, 2019: 264), and how the support, resources and conditions in which to navigate online learning may be collectively fostered. Hickey-Moody and Willcox (2019: 264) highlight the processes of intra-acting, rather than intervening, in their arts workshops with young people as one in which they ‘learn and feel and change with the people with whom we work, as opposed to measuring and quantifying their being’.…”

“…Understanding young people’s ‘capacity’ when engaging media as relational orients pedagogical approaches concerned with ‘contextually specific experience’ (Hickey-Moody and Willcox, 2019: 264), and how the support, resources and conditions in which to navigate online learning may be collectively fostered. Hickey-Moody and Willcox (2019: 264) highlight the processes of intra-acting, rather than intervening, in their arts workshops with young people as one in which they ‘learn and feel and change with the people with whom we work, as opposed to measuring and quantifying their being’. New materialist informed creative methods can serve as ‘non-prescriptive’ tools with which to extend and re-imagine media literacy approaches in the digital era.…”

Thinking with feeling: Children’s emotional orientations to public life

“…The emerging empirical record demonstrates the ways in which children’s affective responses to their historical conjectures both refracts and constructs public feelings as shared social realities. In this paper, we would like to push this empirical record further by tapping into the more speculative possibilities of the affective turn, which asks not only about the possibilities of the ‘now’ but also invites us to re-imagine the futurity of the possible (Hickey-Moody and Wilcox, 2019; Knudsen and Stage, 2015; Springgay, 2020).…”

Children’s Carbon Cultures

“…In the arts-based methods for Anna Hickey-Moody’s ARC future fellowship project Interfaith Childhoods, she asked children to express their values through making artwork about “what really matters” (Hickey-Moody & Willcox, 2019). Many of the perspectives children presented foreground knowledges about carbon that are not part of popular discourses and are omitted from parent cultures of carbon production and consumption.…”