Shared by Nina Odegard and Tove Lafton
How might we connect master students with agential stories through material intra-actions? In a workshop at our university we invited master students to relate to recycled materials to activate the student’s agential stories. Intra-acting in a room full of people and recycled materials with different properties and potentials, arranging, and working with patterns, trigger affects, experiences, and thoughts emerging as an assemblage.
One of the students picked a capsule that was black, round, and made of plastic. His story took us on a ride with a car travelling long distances. The capsule smelled of gasoline as they had to refill the car when travelling as refugees from their old home and heading towards Norway to create their new life. Intra-acting with the capsule evoked the story of travelling through time and space, by crossing borders, bringing smell, flavors and feelings into our common entanglements and produced shared agential stories. Thereby, these stories triggered our questions as teachers, of how materials matter in our production of common worlds and knowledge in higher education working with the notion of materiality (Barad, 2007).
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, ND: Duke University Press.