In this presentation we will share our post-qualitative new materialist methodological approaches to learning in museums and heritage sites. This approach has been developed over a decade and involves the blending of roles as we embrace practices of researcher/ visitor /makers producing arts-based outcomes alongside scholarly outputs. This work begins with traditional historical inquiry and then enhanced by the embodied encounter in the museum space. Subsequently the arts-based work explores the interconnections of theory, matter, affect and history. Learning in museums and at heritage sites is always mutli-layered and the complex tensions of history require teachers and students to be critically reflective and to be open to different ways for engaging with those histories. Taking this deep dive into post-qualitative and new materialist methodologies in museums, which often deal with difficult histories, creates an opportunity for the learner to be entangled in the affective and relational encounters and in turn be reconfigured by the experience. The outcomes of this work might be thought of as speculative fabulations (Haraway, 2016b); multi-layered creations that evolve from walking, talking, listening, drawing, stitching, drawing, and writing. We are deeply conscious of the way in which this work is shaped by our own ethico-onto-epistemologies (Barad, 2007) and our work demands critical reflection on researcher positionality.

In this presentation we will trace a series of encounters with place, matter and history at museums and heritage sites. At each site we have employed historical inquiry, alongside, walking methodologies (Springgay &Truman, 2019) and arts-based responses. These sites include museums, foundling homes sites, holocaust memorials, exhibitions, ‘old town’ sites tracing signs of vital matter and lingering histories. In each location we have sought representations or traces of the absent child in curated exhibitions, heritage sites but also in historic locales that have been subsumed and used for new purposes. This work has occurred in the UK, Italy, Czech Republic, Germany and Bosnia Herzegovina. At each of these sites we, as researchers, became entangled in the relational encounters of the vitality of matter, affect and an ethico-onto-epistemological unfolding. Often these research encounters include the unanticipated, the obscure, and the serendipitous bringing a new level of richness to the project. The arts-based products include spontaneous drawings done on site, more intricate pencil art works, digital art productions, reproductions of baby dresses and hand stitched brevi with enclosed prayers. Each production reflected the representations of histories of absent, isolated or surrendered children and their mothers. These are often difficult and sad histories thus posing the potential risks as well as opportunities for thinking differently about place, matter and loss.  Women’s arts and craft work can create connections across time and generations; as acts of memorialisation (Whitty, 2019) as a witness to the past (Fisk, 2019), as a gift (Clarke, 2016), and as an activity for “embodied and hand(y) knowledge making” (Goggin, 2012, p33-4). We regard such feminist arts-based productions as a means for engaging in an ethics of care across time and place.  In each of our encounters at the museums or heritage sites and the subsequent research creations, we found ourselves to be reconfigured by the experience.  In this presentation we will seek to trace this reconfiguration by revisiting the sites, showing the products and sharing the ways in which this approach has been personally and professionally enriching. 

In this presentation we generally locate our work in the post qualitative, arts-based and new materialist spaces but we also align our practice with postfoundational research creation (Ruby & Bozalek, 2024), performative paradigm (Østern et al, 2023), speculative fabulations (Haraway 2016, Truman, 2018), onto-ethico-epistemologies (Barad, 2007, Ruby & Bozalek, 2024) and affect theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, Hickey Moody, 2013, Thrift, 2009). Each of these inform our work in different ways. Postfoundational pedagogies for example allow for a breadth of inquiry, as Ruby and Bozalek suggestion this approach has “Both traces of what might be called traditional pedagogies and reconfigurations and opening to newness” (2024,182). We recognise the significance of our own positionality and critical reflection of our ethico-onto-epistemologies. (Barad, 2007). As Ruby and Bozalek further explain through ethico-onto-epistemologies “we come to know through our being and doing in a lively powered world” (2024,182). Similarly, Østern et al assert that “The research material, the process and the researcher perform on one another, constantly in-becoming.” (2023, p284). The notion of a performative paradigm allows for new possibilities for emergent research practices and providing “a space where we can breathe and move, even with unexpected twists” (Østern et al, 2023, p283). In keeping with these ideas of being open to the not yet, the possibilities, and new encounters we find resonance with speculative fabulations. Speculative fabulations allow for a different, and transformative, way for revealing the histories of matter and space. As Truman notes “While rooted in everyday storytelling practices, speculative fabulation defamiliarizes, queers perception, and disrupts habitual ways of knowing …. [it] is a material force that probes, critiques, and lures future-pasts across academic disciplines and in everyday life. Speculative fabulation is not neutral.” (2018, p 1-2). We regard the affective and relational entanglements inherent in research practice. As Jackson and Mazzei suggest we “sense the relations of intensities that signal encounters, motions and flows” (Jackson & Mazzei, 2023, 5). We see encounters as pivotal threshold moments or experiences in the research journey. Using historical inquiry, embodied walking / talking methodologies, and arts-based creations we find ourselves immersed in theory, matter, bodies and place. As a performative process methodology, we create a means for thinking with and plugging into the multiple layers of curation, vital matter, stories, memories, and acts of commemoration and memorialisation.

By employing a researcher/ visitor/ maker approach to learning in museums and heritage sites we have engaged in an arts-based methodology that allows for critical reflection but also, very consciously, celebrates the unexpected and the spontaneous. Like most arts-based work we recognise the value of being open to the unanticipated and the risks (Leavy, 2017) and its capacity to illuminate situatedness and relationalities (Onsès-Segarra & Hernández-Hernández, 2023). The transversal and temporal nature of this methodology evokes questions of relationality regarding about the role of the learner amid memories, legacies, threads over time, traces of absent children and vital matter. In our speculative fabulations we see the traces of our own learning, the questions that transfixed us, and the experimental risks we took. They have become a trail of the research practice and memory markers of place. The locations varied from beautiful buildings to grim sites of difficult and painful histories. Some sites were so overwhelming that we still recall in our bodies the affective flows, the shiver up the spine and the urgent desire to retreat into a corner of a museum room to find distance from objects that emanate extreme and dreadful histories. Yet as we undertake this work we are also always reminded of our privilege of living in safety, the capacity to travel and to work as researchers. Even as we stitch, sketch and write we reflect on the way in which our work is infused with debates about onto-ethico-epistemologies, contestations, and the inevitable narrative of love and loss. Through these arts-based approaches we see opportunities for thinking with theory, matter and bodies and for expanding ways for learning in the history discipline, for the roles of the historian and the way in which the past and the present are intimately linked through such embodied historical experiences.

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