Bronwyn Davies – författare

“At last a book that not only describes what collective biography is but also explains how to use it … The book describes how to set up collective biography workshops in which participants examine how discursive structures and power relations have both enabled and limited the conditions of possibility for their lived experience. Focusing on a more complicated reflexivity than is usually described in social science research, collective biography, inspired by Frigga Haug and refined by Davies, will no doubt be used increasingly by researchers interested in the production of subjects in a postmodern world.”Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, University of Georgia, USA

This book introduces the reader to collective biography, an innovative research methodology for use in education and the social sciences. The methodology of collective biography overcomes the theory/practice divide, by putting theory to use in everyday life, and using everyday life to understand and to extend theory.

Doing Collective Biography provides guidelines for developing a collective biography project and demonstrates how these guidelines emerged from and were shaped by projects on such topics as subjectivity, power, agency, reflexivity, literacy, gender, and neoliberalism at work. Each chapter gives a detailed example of collective biography in practice, showing how a group of students and/or scholars can work collaboratively to investigate aspects of the production of subjectivity, and clearly demonstrates how poststructural theory can be elaborated and refracted through the experiences of ordinary everyday life.

This is key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on Education and social science courses with a research element, as well as for academics and professionals undertaking research projects.

Honourable Mention, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book AwardEntanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of – a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others and are affected. This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photopraphs, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things. It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.

Honourable Mention, ICQI 2022 Outstanding Qualitative Book AwardEntanglement in the World’s Becoming and the Doing of New Materialist Inquiry explores new materialist concepts and the ways in which they provoke an opening up of thought about being human, and about being more-than-human. The more-than-human refers, here, to the world that we are of – a world that includes humans, who are emergent and permeable, and all of the animal and earth others they intra-act with. It explores how we affect those others and are affected. This book engages intimately in encounters of various kinds, some drawn from the author’s everyday life, some from the research projects she has engaged in over several decades, and some from others’ research. It works at the interface of living- and writing-as-inquiry, delving into the rich seam of conceptual possibilities opened up by Deleuze and Guattari, and Barad, and by new materialist inquiry more broadly. It brings not just words to the task, but also art, photopraphs, movement, memories, bodies, sound, touch, things. It delves into the ways in which the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures. New materialist concepts, as they are explored here, offer new and emergent approaches to life itself, and to ways in which we might research our lives as they are intricately enfolded in the life of the earth.

How has Judith Butler’s writing contributed to thought in the Social Sciences and the Humanities? The participants in this project draw on various aspects of Butler’s conceptual work and they question how it has opened up the possibilities of thought in areas of study as diverse as theatre studies, education and narrative therapy. In a format that demands careful listening and response, the scholars in this book interact with Butler, her writing, and each other. Within this dynamic space they take up Butler’s body of work and carry it in new and exciting directions. Their conversations and writing are, in turn, funny, exciting, surprising and moving.

How has Judith Butler’s writing contributed to thought in the Social Sciences and the Humanities? The participants in this project draw on various aspects of Butler’s conceptual work and they question how it has opened up the possibilities of thought in areas of study as diverse as theatre studies, education and narrative therapy. In a format that demands careful listening and response, the scholars in this book interact with Butler, her writing, and each other. Within this dynamic space they take up Butler’s body of work and carry it in new and exciting directions. Their conversations and writing are, in turn, funny, exciting, surprising and moving.

This volume, one of eight in a series entitled "Encyclopedia of Language and Education", examines spoken language as a field of study, looking at the various ways in which the place of talk can be theorized in education, and examining the way talk is actually done in educational settings. Given the centrality of literacy-based practices in schools, a book focusing on talk brings quite different and important perspectives to the study of education. Talk is something that has often been devalued and taken for granted. What becomes evident throughout the papers included in this volume is that talk is of central importance in establishing identities and the cultures in which those identities are located. However, because people are unused to reflexively examining the way they talk, there is a serious disjuncture between what they believe talk should achieve and what can be seen to be achieved in actual talk in educational settings. This book should interest those involved in teaching, and should be especially relevant to teachers at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and for researchers interested in spoken language in educational contexts.

This publication examines spoken language as a field of study, looking at the various ways in which we can both theorize the place of talk in education, and examine the way talk is actually done in educational settings. Given the centrality of literacy-based practices in schools, a book focusing on talk brings quite different and important perspectives to the study of education. Talk is something that has all too often been devalued and taken for granted. What becomes evident throughout the papers included in this volume is that talk is of central importance in establishing identities and the cultures in which those identities are located. However, because we are unused to reflexively examining the way we talk, there is a serious disjuncture between what we believe talk should achieve and what can be seen to be achieved in actual talk in educational settings. Becoming more aware of the centrality of talk and what it achieves is important both for enabling us to find ways to bring our ideals more in line with our practices and for being able to recognise and reflect on the ways our talk can be achieving things quite other than what we intend.This book is relevant to teachers at primary, secondary and tertiary levels and for researchers interested in spoken language in educational contexts.

Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge is not a methods book in the traditional sense, but methodology as lived praxis, and as artistic, poetic worlding. It weaves thoughts and emotions together, through words and paint, through art, literature, poetry, ecology, history and auto-ethnography. It moves back and forth in-between the two authors, Jane and Bronwyn, as they explore their different scholarly approaches to life itself, as they have lived it, imagined it, thought about it, and occasionally argued about it. It is partly historical, wondering how we humans arrived at this point, partly speculative, considering our (im)possible futures, and it is highly personal and intra-personal. It explores the acts of living and dying, not an individualistic living and dying, but the living and dying of the more-than-human, who are of the world, entangled in the matter and mattering of the world. The analysis draws on new materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, ecology, autoethnography, art, literature, and the authors’ own everyday relationality. It seeks to find|forge a new and sometimes hopeful sense of the world, and of thought and action. It does so mindful of the broader context of the new populism being deployed by autocrats, a populism that limits and controls human thought, and with it, creativity and freedom.

Two Women Walking Along the Emergent Edge is not a methods book in the traditional sense, but methodology as lived praxis, and as artistic, poetic worlding. It weaves thoughts and emotions together, through words and paint, through art, literature, poetry, ecology, history and auto-ethnography. It moves back and forth in-between the two authors, Jane and Bronwyn, as they explore their different scholarly approaches to life itself, as they have lived it, imagined it, thought about it, and occasionally argued about it. It is partly historical, wondering how we humans arrived at this point, partly speculative, considering our (im)possible futures, and it is highly personal and intra-personal. It explores the acts of living and dying, not an individualistic living and dying, but the living and dying of the more-than-human, who are of the world, entangled in the matter and mattering of the world. The analysis draws on new materialism, post-humanism, post-qualitative inquiry, ecology, autoethnography, art, literature, and the authors’ own everyday relationality. It seeks to find|forge a new and sometimes hopeful sense of the world, and of thought and action. It does so mindful of the broader context of the new populism being deployed by autocrats, a populism that limits and controls human thought, and with it, creativity and freedom.

This study, first published in 1982, approaches children from an ethogenic viewpoint. It records their own accounts of their social world and sees them as members of a distinct culture with its own perspective, code of behaviour and strategies for making sense of their lives. The author suggests that teachers who can take the pupil’s perspective into account will work together more successfully with these pupils in the process of communicating their adult knowledge to the children. This title will be of interest to students of sociology and education.

This study, first published in 1982, approaches children from an ethogenic viewpoint. It records their own accounts of their social world and sees them as members of a distinct culture with its own perspective, code of behaviour and strategies for making sense of their lives. The author suggests that teachers who can take the pupil’s perspective into account will work together more successfully with these pupils in the process of communicating their adult knowledge to the children. This title will be of interest to students of sociology and education.

Through a series of exquisite encounters with children, and through a lucid opening up of new aspects of poststructuralist theorizing, Bronwyn Davies opens up new ways of thinking about, and intra-acting with, children. This book carefully guides the reader through a wave of thought that turns the known into the unknown, and then slowly, carefully, makes new forms of thought comprehensible, opening, through all the senses, a deep understanding of our embeddedness in encounters with each other and with the material world. This book takes us into Reggio-Emilia-inspired Swedish preschools in Sweden, into the author’s own community in Australia, into poignant memories of childhood, and offers the reader insights into: new ways of thinking about children and their communities; the act of listening as emergent and alive; ourselves as mobile and multiple subjects; the importance of remaining open to the not-yet-known.Defining research as diffractive, and as experimental, Davies’ relationship to the teachers and pedagogues she worked with is one of co-experimentation. Her relationship with the children is one in which she explores the ways in which her own new thinking and being might emerge, even as old ways of thinking and being assert themselves and interfere with the unfolding of the new. She draws us into her ongoing experimentation, asking that we think hard, all the while delighting our senses with the poetry of her writing, and the stories of her encounters with children.

Through a series of exquisite encounters with children, and through a lucid opening up of new aspects of poststructuralist theorizing, Bronwyn Davies opens up new ways of thinking about, and intra-acting with, children. This book carefully guides the reader through a wave of thought that turns the known into the unknown, and then slowly, carefully, makes new forms of thought comprehensible, opening, through all the senses, a deep understanding of our embeddedness in encounters with each other and with the material world. This book takes us into Reggio-Emilia-inspired Swedish preschools in Sweden, into the author’s own community in Australia, into poignant memories of childhood, and offers the reader insights into: new ways of thinking about children and their communities; the act of listening as emergent and alive; ourselves as mobile and multiple subjects; the importance of remaining open to the not-yet-known.Defining research as diffractive, and as experimental, Davies’ relationship to the teachers and pedagogues she worked with is one of co-experimentation. Her relationship with the children is one in which she explores the ways in which her own new thinking and being might emerge, even as old ways of thinking and being assert themselves and interfere with the unfolding of the new. She draws us into her ongoing experimentation, asking that we think hard, all the while delighting our senses with the poetry of her writing, and the stories of her encounters with children.

Pedagogical Encounters demonstrates how learning spaces that are ethical, responsive, and transformable can enable students and teachers to open toward new ways of being in the world. Through collective biography, ethnography, and arts-based research, the authors – educators with experience in diverse settings – generate rich descriptions of classroom practices, and elaborate and clarify new theoretical concepts through their discussion in relation to specific sites of teaching and learning.

The author explores with primary school age children the possibility of discovering different ways of being, as well as looking at the ways in which gender relations are resistant to change. The author is present in many ways: as writer, child, research, mother and daughter. Shards of Glass looks at the processes through which gender is constituted from a poststructuralist perspective: at the usual ways knowledge is constructed in classrooms, the nature of femininities and masculinities, and the children's experience of sexuality. The author challenges us to work with children to allow them as speaking subjects to invent, invert and break old structures and speak/write into existence other ways of being. The new edition involves a refining and developing of the theoretical framework and analysis.

In the revised edition of this popular volume the author takes the position that sex and gender are things created by individuals and within individuals as they learn the discursive practices through which the social structure is created and maintained. The social structure is something individuals can attempt to change through a refusal or certain discursive practices or by practicing new and different forms of discourse.

This text presents the authors observations of Japanese preschool children in classrooms and playgrounds. Questions addressed are: what does it mean in Japan to be a boy or girl?, what impact does traditional Japanese culture have on children?, are Japanese girls seen as powerful and more.

This book re-turns to the colonisation of New South Wales through the lives of the author’s ancestors. By looking hard and listening carefully, by being prepared not to look away, and at the same time, by delving with love into the specificity of those ancestral lives, this research entangles the author, and the reader, in the acts of colonisation that are taken for granted in their present day lives. Through letters, journals, photos, portraits, newspaper clippings and official records, the author re-turns to the spacetimemattering of colonial lives. She finds the means to re-think the scarifications of the present, of people and landscapes. Bringing concepts from Deleuze and Barad, among others, she re-thinks the way history might be done. "New Lives in an Old Land is an extraordinary book of narrative scholarship in relation to the great global colonisation of the world in the eighteenth century. It traces the origins of the settler colonial establishment of Australia through the major historic events of the time, such as the Irish uprising, the American revolution and the fierce wars for land and culture in Scotland, that led to extreme poverty and displacement of large numbers of people. Through a delicately narrated family history Bronwyn Davies teases out the threads of complex networks of entanglement that produced the numerous lives through which she interprets the coming of settlers to the Australian colony. Not shying away from the horrendous impact on the Aboriginal custodians who had cared for the land for tens of thousands of years, or the brutal treatment of convicts on whose labour the settlement was built, the book looks unstintingly at the complex characters involved in this entanglement. In its forward-looking possibilities, it is essential reading for all Australians who struggle to comprehend the ethical, social and environmental challenges of this land". Margaret Somerville, Professor, Western Sydney University. "Bronwyn Davies’ New Lives in an Old Land has ambitious, glorious, scope. The book spans centuries; it traces and re-traces its protagonists’ arduous, sometimes violent, journeys across the oceans; and it addresses the micro- and macro-politics that infuse, shape, and are shaped by, actions and actors. The book, however, is also a work of profound intimacy, in which the author takes the reader into hers and her ancestors’ worlds, “re-imagin[ing] the vital specificity of their lives”. Compelling, provocative, and scholarly, Davies’ book is joyously impossible to categorise, a historico-literary-theoretical portrayal of family, social and political life". Jonathan Wyatt, Professor, University of Edinburgh. "New Lives in an Old Land is a deep journey into the colonisation of New South Wales through the lives of Bronwyn Davies’ ancestors. Davies re-turns to historical events that most Australians would be familiar with, events that are re-animated in surprising ways in this book. Drawing on family lore, personal documents, photographs and following every possible trail of evidence, Davies moves beyond the silences and myths that are passed down, to confront the realities of colonisation and the part her forebears played in it. This book reveals the webs of connection across generations, unexpected continuities across time, even where people made strenuous efforts to make breaks. The people in this book come to life in ways that evoke compassion and empathy, refusing the judgement that slips so easily into historical work. Recognising the threads that bind past and present, Davies shows how we risk becoming ignorant of ourselves, and of what is to come when we forget our ancestors, the lives they lived and the passions that drove them. This book weaves a gripping and deeply moving account of migration, generation, of love and power, of aspiration and struggle, of ‘what it was to be’ her ancestors, each in the context of their time and place as they built new lives in this old land". Johanna Wyn, Redmond Barry Distinguished Emeritus Professor, The University of Melbourne. "New Lives in an Old Land is a gift to readers. There are astonishing insights about ancestors whose lives are intertwined with people today. But, more than this, Bronwyn Davies has used the much-lauded writing skills she has developed over a lifetime to create a ground-breaking shift in the way history can be written. These subtle and audacious moves offer new ways to grapple with old contradictions within Australian history. While writing this book, Bronwyn discovered that her family emerged from a tangled romantic conjunction of convicts exiled to 'terra nullius' and affluent entrepreneurs from England, Wales, Denmark and beyond. These people of different social origins, who might never have met in their countries of origin, were thrown together in this land that claimed to be 'new' while failing to acknowledge the ubiquitous presence of the indigenous peoples already in place. The book brings these ancestors to life with their own words (evidence that writing talent goes back a long way in this family) supplemented by a haunting archive of photographs. These diverse stories give the reader poignant insights into the doubts and angst early colonists experienced as they carried out sometimes horrendous acts of appropriation and even murder, acts that had direct resonance with earlier experiences in countries such as Ireland. This alternative history rattles the comfort of long-held clichés about the founding and flowering of European life in this 'great southern land'. These ancestors often knew what they were doing and, as we come to grips with this insight, we have to wonder how our descendants will view us". Lise Claiborne, Professor at Waikato University, New Zealand.

This is an exploration of body/landscape relations and what is possible when body and language are thought of and written together instead of in opposition to each other.

This is an exploration of body/landscape relations and what is possible when body and language are thought of and written together instead of in opposition to each other.

Weaving together her most influential writings of the 1990s, Bronwyn Davies offers a unique engagement with poststructuralism that defies the boundaries between theory and embodied practice. Whereas poststructuralists are often accused of excessive abstraction, Davies' sophisticated and nuanced discussions of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, feminism, and power are embedded in vital depictions of lived experience and empirical research. A renowned scholar of education and gender formation, Davies shows the importance of poststructural perspectives for her own research in classrooms, on playgrounds, with literary texts, and her own life history. Lucid prose—accessible for students and refreshing for researchers and theorists alike—makes postructural concepts usable as conceptual frameworks for interpreting and analyzing the social world.