presentation made at seminar for research project led by Vivienne Bozalek on Posthumanism and higher education

1. CSI Project
Socio-materialism – some
thoughts to its applicability
as a lens for
analysis/Confessions of a
“socio-materialism agnostic”
Brenda Leibowitz
Brendal@uj.ac.za

2. From Reconceptualising Professional
Learning (eds Fenwick and Nerland, 2014)
• “constitutive entanglement of the social and
the material”
• “yet materiality is often overlooked or
dismissed in analyses of professional practice
and knowing” (p 3)
• “materials are enacted, not inert; they are
matter and they matter. They act, together
with other types of things and forces, to
exclude, invite, and regulate activity” (p.3)

3. Cont.
• “these approaches all tend to show how
materiality is relational and distributed within
webs of thought and activity, social and physical
phenomena in education. They offer methods for
analysing these materializing processes and their
effects on particular practices, identities and
knowledge processes that we call learning are
phenomena of both emergence and orderings,
within and across different spaces and times.
They show the interdependence of entities,
revealing that learning is always more-than-human”
p. 4

4. Cont.
• “in fact, rather than asking what kinds of
cognitive processes and conceptual structures
are involved, researchers ask what kind of
social arrangements and material settings
provide the context for knowing, working,
learning and innovating (p. 12)

5. Cont.
• Practice-based research encompasses the
range of practical resources that people bring
to bear in the accomplishment of their work
and the diverse rnage of interactional forms
which feature in their organisational conduct”
p. 12

6. From previous CSI presentations and
publications …
• A focus on the material was both intentional
Maps, on-line learning, choice of locales
• And overlooked
(the inequalities, the focus on geography, electricity,
the embedding with practice)

7. Salience of place
The way I defined a community was very broad and I honestly
did not consider the definition to be broad. One of my group
members defined the term ‘community’ and then went further
to say that because she is Afrikaans she belongs to the Afrikaans
community and because she is Christian she belongs to the
Christian community. I was absolutely astonished because I did
not think like that. Her definition made me consider I am
Afrikaans and Christian, so does that mean we can say that we
belong to the same community even if she lives in Stellenbosch
and I live in Strandfontein?

8. Salience of place
GROUP N: Transcending Boundaries!
Left to right: Fundiswa Seti , Nina Rossouw (A), Tembela Mgini, Simon Lolliot , Ntsikelelo Mahobe and Miriam Ameermia

9. Technology as part of practices
Conclusion
In a multi-dimensional society, it is important to embrace
that people, even professionals, are individuals and have
different ideas about life, but that everyone has an unique
and important contribution to make. (This is the main
lesson we learned from being a part of this programme). It
does not mean that we cannot have our own opinion, the
importance is accepting our own identities while
acknowledging and respecting others. Like the puzzle,
every piece is a different colour, but together it forms a
whole. All the pieces have one purpose, to form a puzzle.
All of us differ, but we all share the same goal – to help
people in need.

10. Salience of Technology
The Stellenbosch part of the
group did the work, while the
UWC part was sitting back,
trusting us. The UWC members
kind of assumed that we at
Stellenbosch would drive
through to them for the
preparation of the group
project
(SU)
The experience has a definite
positive effect on my future
work as I have grown
individually. This positive
personal growth has important
impacts on my professional
ability in the future… The
experiences I gained from
listening to others’ definitions
of community and identity gave
me a new platform from which I
can work. I also realised that
ones past experiences can never
be denied
(SU)

11. Salience of Technology
The most important progress that was made though was
the attempt to equalize status as much as possible where
no members were part of the majority or minority but all
members were equal. An additional challenge that was
placed on our group was that a minority was created as
two students belonged to Stellenbosch and four students
belonged to UWC. This made working together
increasingly difficult, as we had to rely on communicating
online for the most part of our project. We tried to
eliminate this majority by not electing a group leader and
consciously discussing the challenges that this may pose
to our group seeing that there was inequality from the
onset. (SU)

12. The material as part of ‘practices’
UWC social work student had done the practice of
PowerPoint for a single hour, which was not
fair for them, as they had struggled to do it. If
the presentation was not prepared according
to the mixed institutions that is UWC and the
US it could had been an embarrassment for
UWC students because were not familiar with
it. The US students had played a big role to
help the UWC students to get used in
techniques of using the PowerPoint. (UWC)

13. Remaining questions
1. Can we separate the concept of the ‘material’ from the
base theories, eg Deleuze-Gattari; practice based
theories; actor network theory?
2. “Materials are enacted … they act, together with other
types of things and forces, to exclude, invite, and regulate
activity” – can you really say that ‘not only humans have
agency’? (cf Taguchi, xv)

14. References
Fenwick, T. and Nerland, M. 2014. (eds) Reconceptualising
professional learning: Sociomaterial knowledges, practices
and responsibilities. New York: Routledge
Leibowitz, B., Swartz, L., Bozalek, V., Carolissen, R., Nichols, L.
and Rohleder, P. Eds. (2012) Community, self and identity:
Educating South African university students for citizenship.
HSRC Press.
Taguchi, H. 2010. Going beyond the theory/practice divide in
early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active
pedagogy. London: Routledge.