Shared by Nicole Land and Randa Khattar on behalf of the Microblog Committee
As we share worlding, commoning, and inheriting as organizing concepts for the Common Worlds Research Collective to grapple with into futures, we want to offer microblogging as a process of slowly engaging a fragment – a moment, a question, a tension, a failure, an otherwise – differently together. Microblogging is the creation of 150 word blogs, led by a question, created by Collective members and shared on the Collective website and Collective Twitter account. As we re-energize the microblogs, we (the Microblog Committee) want to offer our thinking toward why and how microblogs might matter as a practice of collectivity – and we do so through sharing the following microblog.
Why propose microblogs as a practice of collectivity? If microblogs body temporalities, they presence a slowness that resists the drive for progress and consumption. As microblogs articulate a grammar, it is of thinking with the fractured, rough edges that live in violation of the orderly erasures of anthropocentrism. To slow is not to drop a pace but to see pausing as pedagogical, as a falter that implicates us in the precarities of living. Microblog fragments are not incomplete but in motion, unfinished stories that demand we respond. Microblogs incite slowness and fragmenting in their worlding as contributions ask “what kinds of worlds? Why? How?”. In commoning, microblogs wonder how a collective and its complex contagions are made and remade in sharing 150 word bundles. We make slowness and meet fragments with inheriting as microblogs traffic in messiness, injustice, extinction, and hope. As a propositional project, microblogs nourish lived practices of patience, fissure, and responsiveness in-the-making in situated encounters.
References
While we have not directly cited any work, we want to acknowledge that our thinking unfolds in the company of the following, and many more, scholars.
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Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Blaise, M. (2021). Feminist ethicality in child-animal research: Worlding through complex stories. Children’s Geographies, 1-12.
Pollitt, J., Blaise, M., & Gray, E. (2021). Enacting a feminist pause: Interrupting patriarchal productivity in higher education. In D. Lupton & D. Leahy (Eds.), Creative approaches to health education (pp. 28-40). Routledge.
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Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge: Polity.
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Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. Routledge.
Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507-529.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton University Press.
Vintimilla, C. D., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2020). Weaving pedagogy in early childhood. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal. 10.1080/1350293X.2020.1817235