Pedagogy Is a Messy Affair: A Performative Narrative of Being New

Abstract

This article uses performative writing to explore the pedagogical entanglement of staff, students, and matter at the University of the Free State, South Africa. It is a collaborative narrative in which different voices share the textual stage. Each author contributes to one of the voices to create a performative narrative of how our experiences occur and emerge in this messy, complex, and volatile context. Our story sketches the backgrounds, in-between spaces, and “negative spaces” that pedagogy produces as relational encounters between human and the more-than-human world. We abandon the world of the real and move into a creative collaborative performative narrative space to explore the entanglements that pedagogies produce.

Diffractive memory-stories and response-activeness in teaching social justice

“…In keeping with the manner in which we draw on the concepts of nested-time and memory, we do not assign the memories to individual voices nor do we arrange our narrative linearly. What we present to be the voice of one person, should thus rather be understood as a collectively of voices (Müller, Kruger, Lekoala & Mokoena, 2020) given that there is always already a crowd (cf. Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3).…”