Abstract
This paper brings Barad’s agential realism into relation with educational ethnographic work, and longstanding concerns with matters of inequality. We extend previous work that foregrounds time and space in particular places, and that resists approaches to inequality that generalise about ‘best practices’ for schools in communities facing challenging circumstances. An Axminster Jacquard carpet loom—located in a particular place, the City of Geelong—becomes a specific point of entry to a discussion of agential realism, ethnography and inequality. This carpet loom was once a key machine in a thriving Geelong carpet factory employing families intergenerationally; it is now a demonstration machine in the Geelong National Wool Museum, operated by skilled carpet weavers (now employed as demonstrators) formerly employed at the (now closed) factory. We read questions of deindustrialisation and schooling through the carpet loom as apparatus, working with the questions that it materialises about educational research, ethnography and inequalities.
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Notes
It is beyond the scope of this article to review the debates about terminology: from deindustrialised, to deindustrialising, to post-industrial, and the continuities as well as breaks in the shifts to reindustrialisation and to different forms of industry (see Tregenna 2013). Terminology matters politically—it makes some things come to matter, and leads to the forgetting and discarding of other people, places and things.
By interfere, we invoke Barad’s discussion of the “diffraction or interference pattern that water waves make when they rush through an opening in a breakwater” (Barad 2007, p. 28). Barad uses the terms diffraction and interference “interchangeably” (Barad 2007, p. 29). Interference is not the intrusion of an external influence (for example, the ‘objective’ researcher), but rather, the movements and shifts that happen from within, in entanglement with what we (as researchers) research.
Barad describes her own use of “the metaphor of smoke” as a way “to displace the illusion of mirrors, particularly representationalism’s obsession with reflection and the view from a distance” (Barad 2007, p. 453, note 1).
These words are paraphrased from Karen Barad’s spoken response to an earlier draft of this paper at a workshop at Deakin University during Karen Barad’s Visiting Fulbright Fellowship in October 2018. We thank her for her generous contribution to our thinking and writing relating to the loom.
Acknowledgements and thanks to Lucinda McKnight for raising some of these points about whiteness and about the chemical properties of carpet in response to an earlier draft of this paper.
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Acknowledgements
The carpet loom that we discuss in this paper is currently located in the Wool Museum in Geelong, Victoria. In discussing the weaving practices of a carpet loom, we acknowledge the thousands of years of weaving and arts practices on this Country. The Wadawurrung people of the Kulin nation are the first peoples and traditional custodians of the land where this research work has taken place, and we pay respect to past, present and future Wadawurrung Elders of the Kulin nation. We acknowledge and thank the colleagues who are part of the broader project exploring Geelong, deindustrialisation and schooling: Shaun Rawolle, Louise Paatsch, and Amanda Keddie. We thank Nathan Green and Angela Bailey for their photography and permission to use their photographs in this article, and to Helena Spyrou for her encouragement and support in finding the Brintons Exhibition Catalogue. Karen Barad listened and was discussant to an earlier version of this paper, presented at a seminar during Professor Barad’s Fulbright Fellowship to Deakin University in October 2019. She offered a thoughtful and constructive commentary on the paper, raising pertinent questions for further consideration. Thanks also to the attendees at this seminar and for their comments in response to an earlier draft of this paper. Thank you in particular to the editor and anonymous peer reviewers for their supportive and helpful feedback, and to Helen Nixon for support in the final preparation of the manuscript for publication.
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Mayes, E., Mobayad, Y., Moss, J. et al. A carpet loom and matters of inequality: an agential realist approach to deindustrialisation and schooling in the City of Geelong, Australia. Aust. Educ. Res. 47, 1–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00331-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00331-5