The task: to produce an account that is less an archive than a field of conditions, a set of practices. To anarchive: activate the surplus of experience in the event, make felt how what eludes capture nonetheless makes a difference. To turn without turning against: the AcademicConferenceMachine is not the enemy so much as the symptom (of frontality, of measurability, of discipline). To move beyond authority, allowing the words to tunnel their own uneasy resonances, turning the soil, creating new paths. To become earthworm. - Dr Erin Manning, Research Chair - Speculative Pragmatism, Art, and Pedagogy, Director, SenseLab, Concordia University, Canada.
In this provocative and disruptive new book, Fairchild and colleagues offer a
lively, creative, and necessary intervention into the academic-conference-industry landscape. Questions of ethics, environments, and politics abound, read through intra-actions between (conference) events, geographies, human and non-human actors, and more. What results is a post-qualitative, post-methodological tour de force:
Knowledge Production in Material Spaces will disturb your taken-for-granted assumptions about and entanglements within the neoliberal academy. - Michael D. Giardina, Professor, Florida State University, and Director, International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI)
This exciting book mobilises posthuman and feminist materialist theory to agitate the 'Academic Conference Machine'. Issuing from a series of experimental conference presentations by the authorial collective, it converts the exhilarations of those original events, with their speeding pulses, sweaty palms and disobedient formats, into energetic, event-ful writing that opens new spaces for knowledge and action inside the neoliberal machine. -Professor Maggie MacLure, Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K.
This book is a playful intra-action with a geopolitical world, with multiverse connections, care and response-ability as vibrant nourishments. The six authors (CG Collective) and one more do not stand still; they do collective thinking and doings - IDEAS and materialities with ten events. Experimentations, speculations, process-orientations - push and risk the academic conferences continuously. - Professor Ann Merete Otterstad, OsloMet University, Oslo, Norway.
After reading this book, attending or planning a conference will never be the same again. The authors put posthumanist feminist thinking, concepts and metaphors to work with great inventiveness and playfulness and they enable ways to know and learn otherwise within 'the conference' and beyond. - Dr Malou Juelskjær, Associate Professor in Social Psychology, University of Aarhus, Denmark.
A beautifully curated book? Yes, but more of an event to be curiously returned to time after time as readers become respons-able for disturbing the taken for granted, normative and dominant modes of knowledge production and the AcademicConferenceMachine. An assemblage of theory and creative practices for different embodied and ethical possibilities. - Professor Alison Pullen, Professor of Management and Organization Studies, Macquarie University, Australia.
