Bronwyn Davies – författare

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 Award

Entanglement 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 Award

Entanglement 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 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:

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:

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.