between languages, countries, institutions, homes, disciplines, people, voices, media, and fears; not always by free will. This study has literally ingrained itself in my body through the movement of my fingers on keyboards, the hesitant in-breath I take before speaking about this study, the hundreds of kilometers I carried the oftentimes too heavy material components of this study (including a metal sculpture), through airports, up and down mountains to writing retreats, to and from cars and trains, between lives I’ve lived ever since I started to have first a “PhD-companion” and later on, a book companion. Since September, 2000, when I spoke little English – insufficient to my thinking and to conversing – I’ve not spent a single day without this study in one way or another. When submitting the study this book is based upon as a PhD, I was still uncertain what a PhD was. This is also the case as not only what signifies a PhD study in process and appearance differs between countries, but also at German universities there are crucial differences. Having carried components of this study through discussions and reviews in colleges and universities in Germany, England, Cyprus, Iceland, Canada, Belgium, France, and the US, the only overlapping information I could identify was that a PhD dissertation introduces something that is new to the (scholarly) world. Introducing something new is a complex responsibility.
[12] The duration and journey the PhD that this book is based on took is unusual. During the last fifteen years, this study was exposed to collegial feedback from various disciplines. In parallel, aesthetic education (Ästhetische Bildung) and thus practice-led research strengthened and solidified its position in pedagogy and education. Stephanie Springgay, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, and Rita L. Irwin, who is the head of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada, emphasize that “Aesthetic inquiry is an ongoing active process that lingers in the sensual spaces of experience, simultaneously creating and disrupting meaning, being and becoming. Residing in-between and in the midst of these acts is not only an aesthetic experience, but more importantly, is an aesthetic inquiry of experience” (Springgay and Irwin 2004: 82). Thus with aesthetic education and aesthetic inquiry having strengthened their academic recognition in pedagogy and in related disciplines such as social work and educational sciences, scholarly contributions made (and this includes PhD studies) also may change the form of engagement required. This is so as scholarly engagement in the field of aesthetic inquiry includes the “aesthetic inquiry of experience,” especially sensory and embodied experience for readers of scholarly works as well (ibid).
Both the scholarly feedback that this study received over a long period in time, during which crucial developments in Reproductive and Genetic Technologies (RGTs) took place and the strengthened position of aesthetic education within pedagogy act as resources for the development of scholarly explorations this study can introduce. How these are introduced is a crucial component to the last chapter of this study, the conclusion, as it includes practical tools to engage various populations in an investigation of Leib2 through embodied encounters and thus joins the canon of scholarly activities that strengthen the academic standing of aesthetic education in pedagogy. In doing so, this book offers components to engage with knowledge production processes that are beyond reading and thus thrive to investigate diverse ways of including populations who cannot access the possibility of expressing themselves through language.
1.1 Introduction
Nina Lykke’s edited volume, Writing Academic Texts Differently. Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing, published in 2014, brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and writers that speak to acknowledging the place(s) from which one writes, to processes of [13] making language one’s own and to getting to “know a theory in an embodied way,” to name just a few topics discussed in the book (Davis 2014: 178). Already in 1995, Elizabeth Grosz had pointed out that, “Bodies are thus essential to accounts of power and critiques of knowledge” (Grosz 1995: 32). Subsequently the embodied engagement and the researcher’s body, factoring in its “cultivation,” including for example how – with an accent, with grammatical differences etc. – a (research) language is vocalized are crucial matters to power loaded processes of knowledge production. Crucial to grasping the trajectory this study took (regarding the embodied researching and writing subject), is that I have been living in Germany, England, on Cyprus, in Iceland and in the US while researching. Thus, I have and had to continuously move between (academic) environments in which I did or did not speak the majority language at all or not as a native tongue, and environments in which some of my “disciplinary homes” did or did not exist, or had different disciplinary traditions and histories attached to them. During the time of my research and the writing of this study, I furthermore experienced forced mobility in the sense that choosing when to leave a geographical setting and thus an academic setting, and crossing a border and in consequence being separated from the (research) culture within it, was not always my choice but partly based on inhabiting various roles that added complexities to how I could conduct research. Such roles included being categorized as visiting non-immigrant alien without access to professional engagements etc. Thus my “personal condition” as a researcher, as Siri Nergaard puts it in a lecture in 2016, is “to inhabit the translational space from which to continuously contribute and add to the relationship between transformation,3 interpretation and borders,” with borders applying not only to geographical borders, but to borders between disciplines, languages, cultural modes of experiencing, listening, analyzing, valuing and so on (Nergaard 2016: lecture). Such adding and contributing from within the translational space is a component of what I introduce as new to the world. The act of adding newness happens in the following forms: playing with the meanings a word has, or using it, unaware that I use it in a non-traditional manner. Yet, my unawareness puts readers into the space where the traditional meaning of a word is questioned, re-weighted or expanded upon. The confrontation with an expanded or misinterpreted meaning of a word might guide readers to rethink the word and its use, including the political, cultural and social histories engrained in its utilization.
All areas of inquiries into researching and writing, as listed and reflected upon in Lykke’s edited volume cited above, informed the methodological composition of this study as much as reading Michel Foucault did in the early years of this study, in that it allowed awareness of the researching subject as “the product of particular regimes of truth” (Foucault 1977). The subject [14] thus operates within historical, cultural, institutional, ideological, social and political mechanisms, which enforce particular discourses serving as “true” and powerful in certain times, locations and situations. Having to relocate often during this study consistently shook my work (as I had changed location, languages, modes of understanding, access to literature) and left me having to explain it to myself and to others over and over again. Eva Hoffman, although being in a very different situation, describes such experiences better than I could, stating that, “The reference points inside my head are beginning to do a flickering dance” (Hoffman 1989: 132). She continues describing displaced conditions of existence and of existing within a familiar language as, “[…] to remain outside reality itself […] I have to shift in the innermost ways, I have to translate myself’ (Hoffman 1989: 211). I came to understand that the only place to write this study from is the place that Nergaard calls the “in-between” or the translational space (Nergaard 2016). This space is the “contact zone” where boundaries are blurred and differences start to interact (Pratt 1991: 34). I would add that interactions are taking place in ways that are sometimes hard to grasp, as contact zones are filled with what I call “undisciplined interactions.” I understand the space that Nergaard calls “space in-between,” or what Mary Louise Pratt, in 1991, called the “contact zone,” and what I take a lead from to investigate “being in limbo” (in the closing pages of this book) to be greatly fertile. Pratt, defining “contact zones,” writes, “I use this term to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (Pratt 1991: 34). I add that such spaces are unclaimed. Amid what Pratt calls “clashes,” processes of investigating conflict are neither here nor there and neither past nor future: they are pure chance; they are “being
