Reconfiguring Community of Practice as Socio-Material Practices for Making Differences With/in the World: A Creative-Relational Inquiry

Abstract

As a concept Community of Practice (CoP) is generally understood as a learning system in which a group of people within a profession, or practice field, reflect and learn together. Notions of situated learning and enculturation emphasise the socially constructed nature of these contextualized reflexive pedagogical processes. Engaging with the posthuman turn in education and the social sciences, we think with concepts from Karen Barad’s agential realism framework to reconfigure CoP as entangled affective, socio-material knowledge-making practices. Specifically, through creative-relational inquiry, this paper offers an account of three intra-active mo(ve)ments from a posthumanist reading group CoP in Aotearoa New Zealand in which we, as academics in counselling, social work, and early childhood education, experimented with arts-based inquiry and posthuman texts. We discuss the more expansive knowing made possible through our engagement with/in these differentiated, in/determinate mo(ve)ments as professional practice educators and researchers. This paper contributes to onto-ethical-relational research and teaching practices, enabling CoP to be re-configured from socially constructed reflexive processes to affirmative, affective, socio-material practices for making differences in the world.