At ECER 2022, I sketched the “posthumanist” framework of a recently initiated research project which also informs the current paper proposal. In this project, I venture into what Bruno Latour (2004) would perhaps have considered “articulations”, associations/translations/adaptations in ongoing erratic movement, but what Karen Barad (2007) would figure as iterative entanglements or “enfoldments”, of “education” and “street art” imbued with “history” which have come to help shape the city of Porto, Portugal in ways similar to yet different from other European cities. “Troubling time/s” (Barad 2017, 2018), this project views “historical eras” as “multitemporal” (Serres & Latour, 1995: 60), rather than singular and successive, although it upholds the importance of precise incisions into their fabric. Likewise, “history” emerges from it not as a representational study of the past linearly distanced from it in the present but as performative practices of simultaneously “knowledge seeking and -effecting” (Thyssen 2023; Thyssen et al. 2023, 2021) that help mark/embody (cf. Barad 2007) temporalities in education and street art enfolding.

At ECER 2023, I wish to explore methods to help “re-turn” (to) or “cut together-apart” (Barad 2014; Thyssen & Herman 2019; Thyssen et al. 2023) such enfoldments of history, education and street art, some of which pertain to as early a period as the 1850s as much as they do to the early 2020s. I intend to highlight tools of analysis (“contemporary” audio-visual as well as more traditional textual-archival ones) which may have innovative potential for the historiography of education and education research more broadly when used “diffractively” (Barad 2007, 2014), that is: when employed purposely to allow results from these to be analysed through one another as ways of “re-membering”/reconfiguring (Barad, 2017, 2018) enfoldments such that particular inclusions-exclusions embodied therein, “mattering (...) simultaneously [as] )...) substance and significance” (Barad 2007, ix), are teased out. I plan to explore, in one and the same move, such methods’ potential on the premise of an approach geared at grasping matters “compositionally”, in their immanence, as matters worth “assembling” (around), precisely because of their bodying forth of inclusions that are also exclusions (Latour 2010).

My proposal takes a cue from António Nóvoa (2015: 49, 50), who urged scholars researching education historically to engage in “risk-taking and transgression”, so as to help “discover new problems (…) left hidden, in silence, by (…) educational historiography”. With reference to its etymology, I have suggested elsewhere (Thyssen et al. 2021, 2023; Thyssen 2023) that historio-graphy can be figured as “drawing(s)-together” of knowledge effecting concerning education. Here, I wish to explore particularly the potential of “street-wise” drawing together of knowledge effecting, not so much from an interest in the street itself as an educationally relevant “place and space” (Smith 2001) and/or “object” (Watt 2016), as from a fascination with (non-formal and) informal education (of various kinds) as it has been emerging with street art, which may help understand historically education, however conceived, in different, more formal contexts as well.

Theoretically, I adopt a Baradian perspective, yet onto this lens I also place a Latourian one to illuminate how knowledge in movement can be traced as it gets effected through “non/human” collective effort (ANT) and how such effort, despite perpetual movement, gets bound together through time/s (AIME)(Latour 2005, 2010, 2013, 2014), here around matters of education and street art. Barad’s account (agential realism) suggests enfoldments thereof are best seen as “phenomena” (Barad 2007), whose boundaries have remained open to re-drawing, and whose features, thus ongoingly re-/de-stabilised, have come to matter differentially due to varying “apparatuses” (material-discursive “configuring”-s from across spheres – from the artisanal to the political) “intra-acting” with (that is: being embodied in) these. The question of precisely to what different effects enfoldments of education and street art have come to matter historically, and how their grasping methodologically might help renew the historiography of education, is central to my proposal here of exploring ways of re-membering. Methodologically, I adopt a “diffractive” approach (Barad, 2007, 2014), while simultaneously employing a “compositionist” stance (Latour 2010): combining interview methods and tools of textual-archival and audio-visual analysis purposely geared towards analysing results through one another with attention to differences emerging and how these matter, while also employing an approach aimed at assemblage, with attention to immanence concerning education and street art and ways that their ongoing enfoldments may constitute “matters of concern”, which “gather (…) because they also divide” (Latour 2014: 16, 2005:120). Among archival materials and publications analysed are those held at the Historical Municipal Archives of Porto and the Municipal Library of Porto featuring, for instance, the widely spread vernacular journal “Tripeiro” as well as extensive photographic and other collections. Through these materials and vice versa are analysed a number of semi-structured interviews with street artists centred around audio-visual recordings (one chosen by each of them from a body of circa 1,875 performances of street music in Porto recorded by me and made publicly available on Instagram and YouTube), as well as street music-related writings and other materials issued by street artists themselves (e.g. Garcia 2021), drawing in experiences from across Europe and beyond (e.g., Watt 2019; Fernandes & Herschmann 2018; Campbell 1981).

In taking risks by exploring ongoing enfoldments of temporality and “education”, here implicating “street art”, I not only help shed light on the importance of informal areas of educational practice like that concerning a phenomenon neglected even in musicological research (Watt 2016, 2019) but also help expand current notions of history pertaining to education and education research. Indeed, the interest in posthumanist approaches to history (e.g., Domanska 2018) is not a purely academic one; it is also one that recognises that “doing history is a political act. It combines the art of activism with the power of storytelling” (Dyck 2021: 76). Without needing to educationalise, then, (cf. Depaepe 2010) education research imbued with history figured as always already invested in drawing(s)-together of knowledge effecting, may be ideally suited to helping understand education where it too emerges as a political act of activism and storytelling implicating the self (cf. Gustavsson 2013). The diffractive-compositionist approaches adopted here suggest this applies also to education enfolding historically in street music in the city of Porto. Yet, differences emerge in how such matters (and more besides) have been enabled to enfold. For instance, from reading results of retracing accounts of curiosities like “O Cartola” or “José das Desgraças”/“O Desgraça” in Tripeiro and elsewhere (e.g. Pimentel 1873) through interviews and films of current street artists performing, residue can be felt of enfoldments seeming to bind within them over a century and a half of embodied education and art practice. Yet, any history venturing into Porto has to take account of the diversity of possibilities for phenomena to enfold across the markedly different eras (however “multitemporal”) of the Constitutional Monarchy, First Republic, and Estado Novo, among others (including our “contemporary” era in which education and street art are reconfiguring through social media- and tourism-related processes of commodification).

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