Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: Seriously Playful and Playfully Serious

Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: Seriously Playful and Playfully Serious Una subversión en las prácticas de indagación: tan serias como divertidas Joanna Haynes1 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0510-4565 University of Plymouth Institute of Education (UK) Recibido: 30-04-2021 Aceptado: 30-08-2021 Abstract This paper is concerned with unhoming secure ideas and practices of knowledge creation, through non-hierarchical, boundary-crossing forms of pedagogy, in order to attend to how processes of enquiry matter, whenever we engage in the struggle to address injustice, and not only for humans. Entrenched assumptions related to age, phase, or education setting, are brought into question, to blur distinctions such as for/with; child/adult; playful/serious and learning/ teaching/research and to explore further possibilities for creative enquiry. Practices of enquiry are theorised through the movement of Philosophy for/ with Children (Haynes, 2018), its community of enquiry pedagogy, (Gregory & Laverty, 2017) and philosophy with picturebooks (Haynes & Murris, 2012, 2016; Murris & Haynes, 2018). What more can happen, when vibrant matter 1 ([email protected]). Dr Joanna Haynes is Associate Professor in Education Studies at Plymouth University Institute of Education, UK. Her background is in philosophy and her research interests are in democratic, community and inter-generational education; children’s literature, Philosophy with Children, and philosophy of childhood. Her books include Children as Philosophers (2008), Perspectives on Participation and Inclusion: engaging education (2009), Philosophy and Education: key questions and themes (2014) and (with Karin Murris) Picturebooks, Pedagogy and Philosophy (2012) and Literacies, Literature and Learning: Reading Classrooms Differently (2018). She is co-editor (with Maughn Rollins Gregory and Karin Murris) of The Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (2017). Together with Jocey Quinn, Joanna co-ordinates the Adventures in Posthumanism Group, originated at Plymouth University Institute of Education https:// adventuresinposthum.wordpress.com/. 350 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 is taken into account, is a driving question. “Thing-power” (Bennett, 2010) and “thinking-through-making” (Ingold, 2013) are activated as part of this exploration. Through accounts of research events from two international projects, the paper draws attention to artists Viviane Schwartz and Paula Rego, their picturebook artworks, and their artistic processes. Each example shows how the artists, artworks and processes came into play through the events, provoking different forms of experimentation. Through exemplification, showing rather than telling, further possibilities for creative enquiry might be inspired. Keywords: Enquiry, unhoming, philosophy-for/with, picturebooks, creative. Resumen El objetivo de este artículo es subvertir ideas y prácticas de creación de conocimiento que se dan como seguras, a través de formas de pedagogía no jerárquicas que traspasan fronteras. Ello, con el fin de prestar atención a cómo suceden los procesos de investigación siempre que nos implicamos en la lucha para afrontar las injusticias, también en lo que afecta a los no-humanos. En este sentido, el texto pone en tela de juicio suposiciones arraigadas relacionadas con la edad, la fase o el entorno educativo, para difuminar distinciones como para/con; niño/adulto; lúdico/serio y aprendizaje/enseñanza y explorar nuevas posibilidades de investigación creativa. Las prácticas de indagación que aquí se presentan se teorizan a través de la Escuela de Filosofía para/con niños (Haynes 2018), su comunidad de indagación pedagógica (Gregory y Laverty 2017) y la filosofía con libros con imágenes (Haynes y Murris, 1212, 2016; Murris y Haynes 2018). Todo lo que puede suceder cuando se tiene en cuenta la materia vibrante es una cuestión determinante. “Thing-power” (Bennett 2010) y “Thinking-throughmaking” (Ingold 2013) se activan como parte de esta exploración. Con relatos de ciertos acontecimientos fruto de dos proyectos de investigación internacionales, el texto llama la atención sobre las artistas Viviane Schwartz y Paula Rego, sus obras de arte de libros ilustrados y sus procesos artísticos. Cada ejemplo muestra cómo las artistas, las obras de arte y los procesos entraron en juego a través de los acontecimientos, provocando diferentes formas de experimentación. De este modo, mediante la ejemplificación, mostrando más que diciendo, se inspiran futuras oportunidades de investigación creativa. Palabras-clave: Indagación, desarraigo, filosofía para/con, libros ilustrados, creative. 351 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Introduction This special issue of Araucaria adopts the theme of philosophy for peace and creativity, and invites contributors and readers to put those concepts, and their relations, into question. For the times in which we are living, we could surmise that such philosophy is bound to entail practical ways of working through and with pluralities, and including the more than human. Moments such as the now call for creative engagement with refusal, retreat and resistance, as well as with matters of difference and conviviality. This practical philosophy implies alertness and greater efforts to undo old prejudices, pedagogical habits, and authoritarian epistemic relations (Murris & Haynes, forthcoming). Imaginative struggles with plural perspectives and the ground of dis/ agreement are things that children, young people and adults report that they particularly value, through opportunities to philosophise with their peers and with educators (Haynes, 2002; 2007), as well as in informal inter-generational and community contexts (Tiffany, 2009). Right now it is the ground of dis/ agreement that demands more attention; dis/agreement that expresses relations of plurality, difference, connection and possibility. Simone Thornton and Gil Burgh (2017:60) argue for “a conception of peace as the ability and disposition to cope with conflict as a democratic community through environmentally and socially embedded inquiry”. They further propose that, “in a world where peace is never finally achieved, always struggled for, we need an educational process that embodies this struggle”. Following this line of thinking, perhaps it might be useful to consider the notion of peace/ability, as we explore what kinds of educational and research processes might embody these “struggles” in the now. Through what kind of democratic communities? Unhoming established practices of philosophical enquiry is part of such a struggle. The “for” of philosophy “for” peace is a reminder of the (never finally achieved) peace of the future – while the struggle “with” peace/ability takes place in the now. This movement of for/with echoes the “for” and “with” of Philosophy for/with Children. It implies communion with dis/agreement, with possibilities for becoming peace-able, with present/future relations. With the title chosen for this paper, “unhoming” denotes global and local ruptures for people, animals, places and matter; shifts of in/security; the precarious, changing condition of the world. Unhoming signals the shaky ground of the unfamiliar and the oddly familiar, the strange in the ordinary, the taboo; experiences that might be resonant, edgy, eerie, unsettling or uncanny. Through unhoming, familiar systems, structures and relations are brought into question. This includes anthropocentric dimensions of humanist thought and action, with all their destructive consequences. Unhoming might provoke discomfort and uncertainty, perhaps shame, fear or excitement, making cracks in the taken-for- 352 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 granted: cracks to sense a something else. Unhoming pedagogical and research enquiry is a response to precarity, as well as to injustice, and might lead to unexpected or hopeful possibilities. The movement of Philosophy for/with Children and Communities2 has enquiry at its heart. Its dialogical and participatory pedagogy seeks to engender critical, caring, collaborative and creative thinking, through community building. Typically, philosophical enquiry demands active engagement with concepts3, including those associated with epistemic practices, positions and relations, such as thinking/thinker, knowing/knower, theorising/theorist and researching/researcher4. The reflexive and dynamic pedagogy of this movement, the community of philosophical enquiry5 (Sharp, 1991), is one that also includes the possibility for the very processes of enquiry to be called into question, reviewed, checked for inclusivity and fairness, and adapted or changed to satisfy any concerns. In any educational practice, including one that intends to be liberatory, epistemic violence might be present, either hidden or overt. It might reside in the choice of texts, the silencing or diminishing of certain voices, the dismissal or exclusion of certain ways of knowing or practising philosophy – a failure to be sensitive to relations of power and authority or to recognise that the venue is not necessarily a safe space for enquiry. The flourishing of the community of enquiry depends on the rights, freedoms and relationships of power operating in particular contexts and the practical, material and social conditions created for involvement: what matters, who can speak, with what authority and by what means; in which spaces; who listens; and what actions should follow? Even as we hope for inclusivity, silences and absences go unnoticed, contributions are misunderstood or undervalued (Chetty & Suissa, 2017; Lin & Sequiera, 2017; Murris, 2013; Reed-Sandoval and Sykes, 2017). This is not a matter of merely amending procedure, but of deep attention to the removal of obstacles; whether located in prejudices and/ 2 Philosophy for Children is often used as an umbrella term for practices of philosophical enquiry in schools and also refers to the programme of novels and teacher manuals, originally created by Matthew Lipman with Ann Margaret Sharp at the IAPC (https://www.montclair.edu/iapc/what-isphilosophy-for-children/what-is-the-iapc-curriculum/). The term “Philosophy for/with Children and Communities” aims to reflect the broader band of practices with family resemblances, but that can take place in different settings, formal or informal, with adults and children, and opening the politics of children’s roles and participation in philosophical enquiry by toying with the prepositions “for” and “with”. 3 A term given to this investigation is cracking concepts, as Kennedy and Kennedy, (2011:272) put it “This crack in the concept is where contradiction is encountered, problematisation begins, and where its propositional content breaks open into a question, or series of questions”. 4 Interweaving epistemology with ethics highlights how categories of difference shape conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of enquiry. Some practices can lead to exclusion, denial of epistemic authority, dismissal of particular ways of knowing; representing women/the feminine, people of colour, children and elderly people, and differently abled people, as less than fully human, or mattering only in the ways they serve dominant interests. 5 Some writers and practitioners use the spelling “inquiry”, as does Ann Margaret Sharp in her 1991 essay: The Community of Inquiry: Education for Democracy. 353 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 or un/conscious bias; institutional discourses; a lack of imagination, spaces or materials. It means asking, what are the limitations of the process; what else might be possible? Hence, the need to disturb and unhome notions of “community” and “enquiry” as being secure, predictable or trouble-free. This paper is part of an on-going critical exploration of enquiry processes, and how they come to matter. This writing springs from related encounters with fellow academics, educators, postgraduate students, picturebook creators and researchers, one in Spain, one in South Africa and one in the UK, all incorporating philosophical enquiry with creative workshops. The particular focus of this paper first emerged through a Philosophy for/with Children course held at UJI, Castellon, where I had the good fortune to work alongside tutors and students from different parts of the world enrolled in the University’s postgraduate International Peace, Conflict and Development Studies programmes6. During the workshops, enquiries, informal conversation and meetings with colleagues, a particular question took shape and this was about the intra-sections of pedagogies related to three areas: Philosophy for/with Children, creativity and peace (-ability).7 Through involvement in two international research projects, Decolonising Early Childhood Discourses in Higher Education (DECD)8 and Unhoming Pedagogies: teaching ethics and global literature9, I have been party to rethinking knowledge creation practices as forms of collaborative enquiry and creative experimentation. Both projects are concerned with struggles for justice. This paper includes examples of these playful/serious approaches to enquiry, which emerge through philosophy with picturebooks. Each example has been inspired through the entangled relationships between an artist, her picturebook artworks and her creative processes. The first example features Viviane Schwartz and the second example engages with the work of Paula Rego. This paper explores creative enquiry through associations made between art practices, pedagogy and research, to consider what these associations bring to embodied struggles for justice and/or peace/ability. The paper begins by discussing unhoming methodologies at work in the projects. Next are the two accounts of playful/serious research events. The paper includes discussion of what artists, artworks and artistic processes bring to enquiry and concludes with thoughts about enquiry for/with creativity, justice and peace/ability. 6 UJI runs Masters and Doctoral programmes in International Peace and Conflict Studies https:// www.uji.es/estudis/oferta/base/masters/actual/centre/fchs/pau-2013/?idioma=en 7 Both leading tutors on the programme, Sofía Herrero Rico and Sonia París Albert, have a strong interest in enquiry based and creative approaches to teaching and Sonia has written about the value of children’s creative thinking in enquiry in a scholarly review of perspectives on childhood (París Albert and Haynes, 2020). 8 https://www.decolonizingchildhood.org/ 9 https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/internationalhumanities/globalchallengescollaboratory/#a2 354 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Unhoming enquiry – working creatively with/through texts Bringing together “child” and “philosophy” goes some way towards dislodging habits and assumptions about communities of enquiry, (whether or not they involve child/ren). This is particularly the case as we question developmental, linear accounts of fixed and idealized child/hoods and unsettle the child/adult binary. We can consider childing as a playful and serious way of being in the world that we can all do, as (to) “child” shifts from noun to verb (Kennedy and Kohan, 2008). In something of an affirmation of this proposal, many contemporary picturebooks are age-transgressive and unhome artistic and literary form/genre10. Through philosophy with picturebooks, we have argued for child to be taken seriously as a category of exclusion from the figure of the fully human, normally depicted as white, male, able-bodied and adult (Haynes & Murris, 2016; Murris & Haynes, 2018). I have also made the case that children are “already able” to philosophise (Haynes, 2014). It could be argued further, that child/ren are morethan-able, when Western adultist definitions of ability, including the ability to philosophise, are similarly unhomed. Picturebook philosophy engages serious/ playful enquiry with literatureartworks: conceptually, affectively, creatively and practically. Our collaborative research analyses connections between artists and artworks, the avoidance or disturbance they provoke, and the many controversies they “allow” to be aired (Haynes & Murris, 2012; 2016; 2017). This paper continues to push at the boundaries of philosophical enquiry. In addition to the picturebook artworks of Viviane Schwartz and Paula Rego, two other texts have been part of the generation of lively possibilities, in the process of re-thinking what creative philosophical enquiry might become. Part of our reconfiguration of enquiry must involve important thinking about how communities of enquiry involve the more-than-human. Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter (2010) is a powerfully moving text/thing. Her work is an investigation of what matters and of agency, and a re-thinking of their complex politics: a political ecology of things. She uses the term “thingpower”, to assert their connectedness in mutually affecting relationships, including the human and the more-than-human. In much Western thinking, 10 Picturebook artists, such as Maurice Sendak and Shaun Tan, for whom the picturebook is an art medium of choice, also reject the notion of their being “for children”. Shaun Tan writes on his website: Rather than talk about the differences between older and younger readers, however, I would prefer to consider what they might actually have in common. In particular, we are all interested in playing. […]I draw pictures and make up stories, and they don’t necessitate a consideration for any particular audience. What matters are ideas, feelings and the pictures and words that build them. How can they be playful and subvert our usual expectations? What are the ways that something can be represented to most effectively invite us to think and ask questions about the world we live in? (http://www.shauntan. net/about.html accessed 7th August, 2019) Tan demonstrates the playful/serious dimensions in his attention to subversive interpretations of play and in asking questions about the world. 355 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 human/being has been habitually portrayed as operating “against” a wider “backdrop” of the more-than-human, as if the world is a kind of “scenery” for human actors. Instead of this anthropocentric position, via congregational agency, “a wealth of agential entities […] surface” (Rautio 2013:397). A distributive understanding of agency involves both diluting and shifting the agency of the foregrounded human (Bennett, 2010: 20-24). Bennett’s concern with thing power is an ethical one. She argues that, through attending sensitively to compelling experiences with thingmatter, humans might become more attuned to the vital materiality they share with the nonhuman. They might come to understand that humans are matter, and treat the nonhuman, such as animals, plants, the earth and commodities more mindfully, more strategically and more ecologically (Bennett 2010:17-18). In keeping with de-centering the human, ecological sensitivity and peaceability, Tim Ingold writes, “knowing is movement to be taught by the world” (2013:1) and “we owe our very being to the world we seek to know” (p.5). He advocates a form of enquiry that is thinking-through-making and makingthrough-thinking, a kind of experimentation, “prising an opening and following it where it leads” (p.7), and moving in real time. Making, for Ingold, is not a “project” of linear transposition from idea, to choosing material, to artefact creation, but rather a confluence of forces and materials. This text is a call for humans to co-respond with the world. Such practices of correspondence are not about describing and representing the world, but rather opening perceptions to the world, in order to respond. Making as a process of correspondence is not “the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming (p.31). To respond to Ingold’s call is to commit to attunement, to attend to the affective correspondence of bodies and things and bodies as things, and to recognise their leakiness. Making, as a co-responding process, has been noted through the research events exemplified in this paper. Ingold describes the organism not as a thing that moves but as composed in movement and engaged in a dance of animacy. Animism surfaces in discussion of the art practices of Schwartz and Rego, later in this paper. Philosophy for/ with creativity and peace-ability turns to processes of animated, materialised methodologies of enquiry. Roz Birch (2019:32) has coined the term “pluriversal” to characterise the desirable space/relations of creative, materialized philosophical enquiry. These methodologies variously work to dilute humancenteredness. Working with/through these four books, I am curious to explore how dynamic engagement with artists, artworks, and mapping artistic processes (Rees-Jones, 2019:11), all come to matter in the pedagogy of the events reported in this paper. Research events have different constraints and opportunities of 356 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 time and space. Human participants are students, researchers, technicians, and academics from different disciplines and countries, and the many people that make the spaces welcoming, provide refreshments, cook the food and prepare the rooms. People continue to get more attention, at the expense of places and things. How to make these matter more? The imaginary of the artist’s studio, as differently depicted in the practices of Viviane Schwartz and Paula Rego, has been an inspiring part of the pedagogical mix in these philosophical enquiries beyond words (Giorza & Haynes, 2018). With this imaginary, the lowly workshop comes into its own in the encounters giving rise to this paper, not as a lesser practice of enquiry to presentation of “completed” papers, but incorporating the sharing of collaborative writingin-progress alongside the making and thinking-through-material, blending academic, creative, practical and affective ways of knowing. Like the best kind of serious/play/enquiry-based early years settings, workshopping fosters movement and new connections through the fluid use of inside/outside spaces and the offerings of seductive craft materials: experiences of thinking together through eating/food walking/ground, swimming/water, dreaming/sleep. Each event is an invitation to think with the material environment in enquiry, to let the material have us, to be affected. In contrast to an artmaking process, where participants might use materials and objects to re-present concepts or dialogues “about” concepts, the provocation in each of these events was to think with and among what is at hand: spaces, materials, ideas and conversations. 357 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Figure 1 - Materialising enquiry – workshop at UJI, Castellon, Spain, May 2019. Unsettling enquiry in higher education – pedagogies and research practices How do the examples work in this paper? The two research events depicted are not intended to model or illustrate an idealised process of creative enquiry, a “method” to be followed or imitated by others, such as readers of this paper. Bringing age, phase and context into question allows us to re-think what kind of enquiries can take place, with what texts, spaces, materials, processes and modes of exploration. Can teaching, learning and research take place simultaneously? Do enquiries have to be (taken) serious(ly)? Is it only children that learn through play? What happens when we seek to learn from children’s literatures and/or their enquiries? The work of the examples is to provoke and encourage different connections, new possibilities, and further enquiries. The two research projects featuring in this paper share some characteristics of creative enquiry and research creation. Springing from similar desires, they speak to each other. Both projects anticipate trouble: some un-doing, as well as 364 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Figure 3. Some sources and materials - Unhoming Pedagogies workshop - University of Cape Town, SA, July 2019. Paula Rego is a renowned artist, widely celebrated for her powerful, complex and taboo-breaking work. No kind of biographical “portrait” of Rego, with implications of fixity, is attempted here. Instead the re-turn to her Nursery Rhymes collection prompted renewed interest in Rego’s life and her pre-occupations with stories. In her wonderful book about Paula Rego, Deryn Rees-Jones talks of mapping an artist’s creative processes, rather than documenting an artist’s life, a different approach to biographical analysis (2019:11). Rego’s creative processes are embodied, relational and practical; enfolding lived experiences, memories, dreams and stories with materials and methods of artistic creation. Rees-Jones’ distinction between “portraying” and “mapping” is a helpful one, in this exploration of a single collection of Rego’s illustrative work. These emergent and animated processes communicate a vivid sense of the agency of the material and of the thinking-through-making of Rego’s artwork, of her being in/with the world (Auerbach, 2009; Rees-Jones, 2019; Willing, 2016). Born in Portugal in 1935, Paula Rego’s growing up was influenced both by her liberal immediate family, more traditional Portuguese grandmother, and a 365 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 wider climate of repressive, authoritarian politics and state-led Catholicism. As a young woman, Rego moved to study/train at London’s Slade School of Art. She spent long periods of adult life in Portugal too, as complications of her British husband’s long-term illness and the family business unfolded. Commentaries on her life refer to her sense of being neither one thing nor another, neither Portuguese or British, often moving between, part of a permissive, middleclass intellectual family in a repressive culture and society. In Paula Rego’s art, this perpetual unhoming permeates the literal and the imaginative, the preoccupation with re-interpreting stories, whereby the domestic/family context is entangled with politics. This art works through materialised and embodied dynamics of family and state (Rees-Jones, 2019:75). Rego’s art is characterised by courage and humour. Refusal and resistance infuse her work. There is this sense of her being compelled to create art to address injustice; whilst always refusing to ignore emotional and political contradictions, rather bringing these to closer attention, always unsettling. Rees-Jones discusses Rego’s art-with-literature made between 1987-1994 (2019:117-169) and is a primary source for this paper. The chapter cites Rego as she explains how she responds to well-known tales: “Loving the stories I want to undermine them, like wanting to harm the person you love. My favourite themes are power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots. If the story is “given” I take liberties with it to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous. At the same time above all, though, I want to work with stories which emerge as I go along”. (2019: 117).21 The relationship between literature and visual art in Rego’s work is very striking22blurring boundaries of love and aggression and encompassing themes/practices of animation, animism, anthropomorphism and automatism.23 Paula Rego worked on the 35 etchings for Nursery Rhymes in 1989, shortly after the death of her husband and around the time her first grandchild was born. Bringing this picturebook to shared exploration with Natalie, in preparation for our research workshop, we were struck by unexpected reversals, the flipped, compound anthropomorphism of humans “animalised” and animals “humanised”, without trace of sentimentality. Animals are 21 Cited by Deryn-Rees, whose endnotes indicate source as MeEwen, J. Paula Rego, p162. Edn. unknown. 3rd edition published in 2006 by Phaidon Press 22 In a film made by her son (Willing, 2016) titled Paula Rego: secrets and stories, Rego talks of how, during a very difficult period in the early 1970s, Jungian psychoanalysis aroused her memories of family life and being told stories, awakening the need to turn to imaginative sources and continue with the art, in all its physicality, that she reports as her source of sanity (Auerback, 2009). This turn, enabled by a series of large grants and awards, led to an extended period of literature/artwork. 23 Her narrative sources ranged from folk/fairy tales from Italy, France and Portugal as well as returning to Disney films, such as Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia. 366 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 depicted realistically, on a par with and socially integrated with humans. Animals appear as knowing creatures. Rego plays with the size and scale of animal, insect and human bodies. A fiddle-playing cat, a hen or a beetle are portrayed as towering over the humans, and the Three Blind Mice are half the size of the knife-wielding farmer’s wife who cuts off their tails. An old woman whips the naked bottom of a bending child because of living in a shoe and having “so many children she didn’t know what to do” (so the rhyme explains). Diminutive female figures scrub the much larger naked bodies of the three men squashed in a bathtub. The illustration to Rock-a-bye Baby induces a kind of nausea, through the juxtaposition of the rocking cradle and the figure of a seemingly disinterested woman, her heavy legs parted, looking elsewhere and beyond. These illustrations collapse binaries of adult/child; fantasy/reality; obedience/subversion; tame/wild; primitive/cultured; familiar/ strange; comforting/frightening; art/politics. These are simultaneously comical and sinister depictions with a sense of the surreal. Rego locates her art in the “beautiful grotesque” (Rees-Jones, 2020:23). During the period of making her illustrations, Rego worked closely with the Opies’ (1979) famous collection of nursery rhymes, tuning into, but unconstrained by this source. Rees-Jones writes: The link between nursery rhymes and nonsense, as well as the frequent subtexts of violence, offered Rego a way of accessing the world of childhood and the pleasures of repetition. By drawing on these forms, Rego foregrounded the importance of communal experience, as highlighted in the folklore tradition (2019:153). The sense of repetition, the subtext of violence, the allusions to spells, mesmeric movement and dancing of figures underline the physicality and drama of Rego’s artistic practices. Her art making involves a wide variety of art media, models, tools, mannequins, things and processes. Her studio is a place of personal and artistic drama, a space for craft, tea-drinking, reading, eating and cutting. It is full of stuff: clothing, textiles, ladders, chairs, stories, visitors, beds, mannequins and beings such as Pillowman (Rees-Jones, 2019:256-7). There is such a strong sense of the agency of these things in her work, and of her body moving, interacting, observing and responding. Striking examples are her cuttings-up of her old paintings to make collage; the physical experience of etching, needle-through-wax-onto-copper, a process edging towards sculpture (p.139). She is not tied to a single method or material and it appears these suggest themselves to her, are played with and improvised, for example through her staging of live models, creating moving tableaux. Her animalhuman reversals and her animation of mannequins provoke questions about what it is to be human. Rees-Jones writes that all Rego’s work is to do with 367 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 metamorphosis: the reinvention of literary narratives, between word and thing, between language and the affective realm of lived experiences, between animal and human (2020:20). Our invitation flyer for the Unhoming Pedagogies event at the University of Cape Town proposed: “This workshop engages with artworks and texts that instigate playful, provocative, and uncanny entanglements. […] The workshop will activate modes of reading, interpreting and educating that are nomadic, wandering, digressive, vulnerably between agencies – unhomed – rather than treating these as secure, domesticated, belonging, or easily graspable” (https://b143d3e14b1a-4b9f-8c09bef260bde6b4.filesusr.com/ugd/8e6b19_7e2b21d302324f559e 2784cf79a57db2.pdf accessed 26th June, 2020). The workshop drew a diverse group of teachers, research assistants, postgraduate students, visiting researchers, informal educators and academics. Some of those present in the workshop were also involved in the DECD project discussed in the previous example. Sharing a tasty lunch together was an important part of the day. The room was arranged informally, so that we could all face one another during presentations and the discussion that followed. Space was left to make tea, for movement, for thinking-through-making. In an alcove large cushions and some toys were on the floor where young children sat, wearing headphones and playing with tablets. It was noticeable that, during the presentation, some participants chose to draw, doodle, knit or fiddle/make with materials they had brought or that they had picked up from the table. Photos and videos were made of workshop activities. Figure 4. Doing something else - Unhoming Pedagogies Workshop, UCT, July 2019. 368 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Having been immersed in various sources about Rego’s work in the period leading to the event, the material discussed above related to her art work, creative processes and nursery rhymes formed the basis for an opening presentation of illustrated slides, and ended with the question: “What do Rego’s nursery rhymes provoke for you?” As with the UJI and DECD workshops, the invitation was to enquire with the material (including the space, sounds, bodies) and think-through-making. There was no expectation to re-present and summarise these intra-actions. The photographs included here perhaps convey some of the co-responding activities taking place that day, as well as now becoming something else, in the context of this paper. Figure 4. Inside-outside, Unhoming Pedagogies Workshop, UCT, SA, July 2019.24 In the image above there is a dramatic sense of movement through involvement of bodies leaning-in or hanging-on or propping up, legs in dancelike positions, arms and hands wrapped around; the rope, string and the posts that house the wiring in this classroom, perhaps seldom drawn into knowledge making. The rope is taut between the posts. The film footage shows their earlier collaboration to make the curtain/boundary of knotted string, sitting and talking on the floor, through this dynamic exploration of inside-outside. 24 http://www.humanities.uct.ac.za/news/unhoming-pedagogies-workshop-hosted-uct 369 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Figure 5. Animated animation - Unhoming Pedagogies Workshop, UCT, SA, July 2019 In another part of the room, playing together with a remnant of fabric printed like leopard skin, a small something has been created and stuffed with some other material to give its body shape. Here in the image captioned “animated animation” participants bring their hands together to bring life to their creation, provoking laughter and humorous exchanges – eyes, eyebrows, hands and mouths arrested in this frame. Elsewhere in the space, in the image of Figure 6 below, “paper becomes string” as materials merge in an expanding installation that seems to just grow, with few words exchanged between the bodies, whose hands are cutting, tying and weaving. We look without knowing what these images are “about”. They do not re-present ideas that might have occurred during the earlier presentation, but rather emerge through the intra-actions of presentation, people, space, materials and atmosphere, through unpredictable workshop crafting activities. The workshop concluded with tea and discussion, which could include reference to small group makings – but it did not have to. This talk was testimony to plural and strikingly different experiences of childhood, schooling and curricula and to the colonisation of education and childhood – exclusion, racism and white privilege; contested ideas of what childhood/s should or could be. 370 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Figure 6 Making paper string - Unhoming Pedagogies Workshop, UCT, SA, July 2019, photo made by Katherine Wilson, UCT Conclusions Paying attention to visual and material detail around us could be useful in pursuit of the kind of educational processes that can embody the struggles to dismantle hierarchical and authoritarian forms of knowledge creation, as we realise that we are not “brains-on-sticks” but feeling, fleshy bodies, with 371 Unhoming Practices of Enquiry: seriously playful and playfully serious Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 appetites and inclination to movement, part of a world of vibrant matter. Our adult bodies are typically trained to sit still, receive, and listen, in educational settings. As adult learners, we often do not pay much attention to the materiality of the space (unless we feel too cold or hungry) and just think of it as a stage where we pay attention mostly to other humans, and the words being spoken, or displayed. There are many examples of creative approaches to teaching, learning and research, and of working with practising artists, for example through residencies, or in partnership with museums and galleries. I set out to show ways in which the entanglement of artists who work with/through literature, their artworks and their creative processes become an integral, dynamic part of the emerging enquiry. This paper has exemplified ageless thing-play enquiry, being taken by ideas, and thinking-through-making. These examples interweave conceptual enquiry with ambiguous artworks, artists and their creative processes. The artists’ blurring of domestic/studio spaces encourages unbinding of teaching/ learning and research spaces, unsettling their purposeful arrangements. These examples grow out of association with the community of enquiry pedagogy, and a desire for that to continue to expand, shift and grow. In thinking-throughmaking, the workshop comes into its own, with its more flexible, boundary shifting use of space, time and associations with activism, collectivism and creativity. Workshopping, particularly in higher education spaces, and when it spills out of the designated room, moves furniture aside and makes some mess, is available to disturb and re-configure hierarchical academic practices and reimagine creative scholarship. Inspired by Rego, unhoming practices occupy the difficult borders of loving and undermining, dis/agreement, turning things on their heads and taking liberties. Emergent pedagogies of struggle are not easily graspable, but precarious and uncertain. Events related in this paper constitute part of an effort to loosen, dismantle and undo anthropocentric pedagogical and research habits, to dilute and shift the human from the centre, as part of the effort for educational processes that engage with the struggle for/with peace-ability, justice and eco-sensitivity. How might we go further? Through examples of research events exhibited and affirming the movement Philosophy for/with Children throughout, with its pedagogy the community of enquiry, this paper has proposed more expansive, playfully serious and seriously playful processes of enquiry. Through reimagining and materialising processes of enquiry, inspired by artworks, artists (whether bodily present or not), and their creative methods, the very nature of “community” is also unhomed. 372 Joanna Haynes Araucaria. Revista Iberoamericana de Filosofía, Política, Humanidades y Relaciones Internacionales, año 23, nº 48. Tercer cuatrimestre de 2021. Pp. 349-375. ISSN 1575-6823 e-ISSN 2340-2199 https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/araucaria.2021.i48.16 Acknowledgements This paper emerges from collaborations with generous, warm-hearted colleagues and students and with things that have come into play. Thank you to Sofia Paris Albert and Sonia Rico Herrero and international post-graduate students who are associated with the Department of International Peace and Conflict studies at University of Jaume 1, Castellon, Spain, for your warm hospitality and inviting me to join in with your enquiries about creativity, peace studies and Philosophy for Children. It has been a privilege to join the DECD project, led by Professor Karin Murris and Professor Viv Bozalek, and to learn alongside academics, researchers and students, artists and teachers, from different countries and parts of South Africa, as well as other countries around the world. The residential events and workshops of this project have been an inspiration. Thank you for permission to include images from the DECD and Unhoming workshops in this paper. Getting to know Dr Natalie Pollard through the Unhoming Pedagogies project has opened new possibilities for research collaboration, also nearer to home. I am very thankful to Natalie for creating the opportunity to work/play together in friendship through this project, in Cape Town and back in Falmouth, with Natalie’s colleagues and students, and in Plymouth, with colleagues and postgraduate students in the Adventures in Posthumanism Group, which also includes colleagues and students from Exeter, Bath and Bath Spa Universities. These are wonderfully leaky and promising creative networks. Thank you Natalie for permission to include photos of the Unhoming Workshop at UCT held in July, 2019. Thanks to both Karin Murris and Natalie Pollard for their helpful feedback during the writing of this paper. Bibliography Auerbach, J.: Paula Rego: Telling Tales. DVD made by Jake Auerback Films Ltd, 2009. 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