Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody

Materialising the Social: Art Practice as a Transversal Methodology

Abstract

Socially engaged arts practices make new forms of group subjectivity. They are intra-active, diffractive methods through which we can craft new ways of being. Quantum literacies are the modes through which socially engaged arts practices occur: they are at once critical, performative and intra-active. Quantum literacies enable generative intersections between artistic and academic research regarding life and matter, nature and culture. Taking into account the multiple processes of material-discursive production, translation, transformation, and diffraction that constitute such practices, I consider the material-discursive space of my Interfaith Childhoods research project as a way of re-making multicultural urban spaces often fractured by differences in belief. I critically engage with arts practice as a concept and highlight the views of community and children in the process of art production. The transversal line of socially engaged practice with interfaith youth zigzags across, and brings together, a diverse selection of bodies, beliefs, knowledges, skills, and creates a material-discursive documentation of group subjectivity. Through an excavation of my arts research workshops, I demonstrate how aesthetic practices generate, and create material residues of, new group subjectivities. Such a bringing together of nature and culture, of different ethnicities and beliefs in urban environments, is urgently needed to bridge social divides created in relation to, or socially framing, ideas of religion. For example, the British Government spends 40 million pounds on an annual basis on the Prevent^[1] scheme. The capacity to understand and empathize with others from very different worlds is imperative if such measures are to be avoided in the future. Such outcomes are already being achieved with a very high level of success through Interfaith Childhoods, proving that a preventative approach to resolving social conflict needs to begin with community engagement.

Key words

Quantum literacy, Socially engaged art practice, Multiculturalism.

Introduction

Being together. All socially engaged practice begins from being together. The image above shows my own feet alongside a child’s feet. The photo, like all of the images presented in this exposition, was taken by me in the field. The child and I are making art outdoors together in Manchester, as part of the socially engaged practice discussed in this paper. We stopped for a moment, to balance on an old tyre lying on the floor of the forest. We were in the middle of building forest sculptures. This image is a fitting beginning for this exposition because it captures the central methodological axis for socially engaged practice: the art of being together. Being with communities, with children, with materiality. This holding, or being with, is central to building a relationship and to making art work. The photograph of the two feet is clearly a residue of such holding: a visual record of one of many moments of ‘being together’ and the ethics of togetherness, through which the Interfaith Childhoods project operates. This re-forming of subjectivity is a kind of code scrambling. A non-verbal quantum literacy. Bühlmann, Colman and van der Tuin explain and situate quantum literacy through stating:

“like the new materialist turn, feminist new materialist scholarship ... draws attention to a novel understanding of literacy that incorporates code and is not limited to linguistic registers of grammar, syntax and semantics.”^[2] 

Being together and making together is an ontological performance that simultaneously shapes and articulates complex positionalities across non-verbal media. To understand the workings of quantum literacies across socially engaged arts practices and quotidian intra-actions, we need to extend intersections between artistic and academic research regarding social life, beliefs and materiality. With a view to achieving this longer-term research goal, and taking into account the multiple processes of material-discursive production, translation, transformation, and diffraction that constitute socially engaged arts practice, I consider the material-discursive space of socially engaged practice as a way of re-assembling and re-making multicultural community relationships fractured by differences in belief. I am interested in how collaborative arts practices provide a medium through which young people learn about the concept of social and cultural values and begin to unpack their faith. This is necessary, as young people often demonstrate very limited understanding of the religious practices that mediate their lives. The picture below shows the result of young people from a South East London primary school being asked to show me what it would look like to have people from different religions living happily together in the same future. The image that provides the ‘answer’ to my question positions a mosque and church very close to each other, and a series of circles that look like a path, or a road, links them. Three children worked together to create this image, which re-articulates the theme of being side by side, or ‘being together’ that is introduced by the two feet above. Just as adults and children must be together, Muslims and Christians must be together.

For many children, rituals, words, symbols and ideas become sutured to the idea of a given religion. Belonging articulates through material, visual and digital cultures that can be specific to religion. The image above, showing a church and a mosque side by side, took a long time to create. The proximity depicted is the result of labour and negotiation. The children that I work collaboratively with will often say they believe in Allah ‘because he is pure and right,’ or make similar, simplifying claims about religion that focus on purity, service, cleanliness and the right way or the ‘truth.’ The transversal lines of making art, having a shared discussion about ‘what matters’ - or what might matter, what is valued, and what we believe, can push children to link simple ideas and words learnt through rote religious education with critical practices in ways they have never experienced. My research^[3] embodies an ethos of political practice popularized in some respects by the phrase ‘the social turn’ in arts practice, a name that was first used by art historian Bishop to describe socially engaged art that is collaborative, participatory and involves people as the medium or material. In her 2006 essay The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents, Bishop^[4] argues that art which operates under the umbrella of the social turn tends to happen outside museums or galleries, although this is not always the case. Because much of the art produced through socially engaged practices is collaborative and can focus on choreographing constructive social change, it is rarely commercial or object-based. Socially engaged art can be a political resource. It is also a means through which young people are able to communicate complex ideas. Art can make cultural, lived, ephemeral issues visible, as it communicates through images, icons, feelings, colour, textures, and sounds. It can move us to feel positively or negatively about subjects. Before moving forward with further analysis of these material, critical practices, I now outline the project design and methods of data collection.

Methods and Methodology: Project Design

The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT160100293) 2017-2021 and has a mixed methods approach that brings arts workshop groups for children in Australia and the UK together with focus groups for their parents and a trans-national public art campaign designed to create and survey social change. The public art is assessed through large-scale quantitative surveys and this is outside the scope of the current paper. The methods are structured in stages:

1) Arts workshops for children

2) Focus groups for parents and follow up interviews

3) Pop up galleries distributing a quantitative public survey

The rationale for this timing is as follows. The work with children facilitates a process of community engagement. As parents see my continued involvement in their children’s education through the arts workshops, which are often run as school holiday programs, the parents begin to develop a relationship with me as an artist researcher. Focus groups with parents are held after an intensive period of working with children. For example, after a week-long school holiday program or a consolidated period of my time making art in a school, mosque or church. Focus groups explore belonging, identity, community and religion. Follow up interviews with parents and family members facilitate greater detail in discussions on these themes. The rich visual, embodied and qualitative data gathered through these methods sits alongside quantitative data generated through survey responses measuring broader community perceptions of belonging, intercultural understanding, religious belief and acceptance of difference. Surveys are distributed in the communities in which the workshops and focus groups take place. Pop up galleries of the children’s art works are installed in shopping malls, libraries and community hubs and surveys are distributed at these pop-up galleries to those who pass by, or show interest in, the exhibitions. For the purposes of this paper I am only discussing stage one of the methods, the arts workshops with children. All three stages of the project run in Sydney, Melbourne, London and Manchester. For the purposes of this paper I focus on data from the UK, as this data has an explicit cultural and textual relationship to the discussions of the Prevent agenda I undertake below. For discussions of the Australian fieldwork see Hickey-Moody^[5]. The UK context provides a particularly useful point of comparison for Australian cities because of the history of cultural and political work undertaken through Prevent and the existing multi-faith communities in Manchester and London. Much British sociological research usefully maps ‘liminal forms of ethnicity’^[6] developed as a means of negotiating inter-faith prejudice in urban, multicultural contexts.

My arts workshops with children are a methodological mobilisation of affect theory, focusing on, activating and transforming emotional responses,^[7] art practice becomes a form of social choreography. I am interested in creating new forms of interethnic, interracial community and national belonging through art. My framework focuses on non-verbal, aesthetic and culturally coded forms of information exchange, or ‘quantum literacies.’^[8] Art-making workshops maximise the potential for non-verbal communication and allow for the observation of how interfaith young people relate to each other through body language, iconography, colours, and gestures. The arts workshops generate rich data sets that include images created by children, videos and photographs of children working together. These data sources offer invaluable insight into the embodied politics of art-making and the interpersonal relationships that these practices facilitate.

My theory of ‘affective pedagogy,’^[9] the way art can change what a body can do, forms the research sensibility mobilised in designing and producing the art workshops. The past ten years have seen a burgeoning of work on affect and increasing entanglements of this work with educational ideas and practices.^[10] As noted elsewhere^[11] affect-education scholarly entanglements draw on different intellectual traditions, notably the masculinist lineages of Tompkins, Deleuze, Spinoza and the newer, interdisciplinary field of ‘affect studies.’ More recently, the field of education has seen a turn to thinking through the emotionality of education^[12] and an associated consideration of the ‘emotional scapes’ of education. An exploration of connections between feminist work on affect and contemporary discussions of emotional scapes of education is outside the scope of this paper, but the methods of art-making discussed here mobilise feeling, materiality and what Bennett^[13] calls ‘the force of things,’ in community and school-based education settings. Implicitly and explicitly, generations of work undertaken by women’s bodies, emotions, care, and creativity are built on as sights and spaces of political and pedagogical importance in affect studies.

An affect is an increase or a decrease in a body’s capacity to act, which is effected through engagements with other bodies (bodies being units of operation or partial objects) and contexts, such as policies, institutions, beliefs. The politics of education is also a politics of materiality and affectivity, a politics of socio-economic learning and teaching bodies, school spaces and the emotional lives of children and their teachers. Educationalists need theoretical frameworks that are responsive to material and emotional truths and must approach theory as a political project. My previous research^[14] has both shown the particular value of working with socially engaged arts practices and illustrated how art communicates affectively through making and displaying compounds of colours, textures, and icons. Affects are things one cannot cognitively ‘read;’ rather, they are material connections one will register as an ‘experience,’ and by which one may be affected.

My arts methods workshops for children include participants aged 3 and up, however the data analysed in this paper is from UK participants aged 6–10. These children explored the themes of ‘love,’ ‘friendship,’ ‘my future,’ and ‘different beliefs.’ They visually answered the question ‘What really maters’ in pairs and created group paintings of interfaith futures. The children were provided with mixed media materials including paints, wool, pencils, crayons, and felt, and were asked to create artworks within the themes discussed, as well as self-portraits and artworks representing different emotions (‘happy,’ ‘sad,’ ‘joy,’ and ‘angry’). The children initially worked on their own, before collaborating in groups to create images of ‘shared values’ and then a large ‘inter-faith future.’ They were also encouraged to explore other media types, such as video, Instagram, and Snapchat if they wished. Their art making was recorded on a digital video camera. The recordings show children’s relationships building through collaboration. The resulting artworks transmitted feelings non-verbally through colour, sound, texture, and moving image. The artworks are a part of a process of quantum thinking “that is inevitably situated and always already physically active.”^[15] For example, the image below is a photograph of a large canvass painted by 6 children in South East London. It is a picture of the future and, more specifically it is a picture of what an interfaith future that embodies the values of the whole group will look like. The large red shape in the middle of the canvass is a mosque. There are three people holding hands in the mosque, illustrating the kinds of support that can be found in religious community. The lower left-hand side of the painting depicts a zoo (featuring a very lovely giraffe). The zoo demonstrates the children’s concerns about the environment, and has been included because the children thought zoos keep animals safe. The lower right-hand side of the image features a church and then a forest (the green in the far right). The top right-hand side features an airport with planes flying in to land, showing that “we understand differences from other countries,” as the children said. The sun shines a rainbow spectrum of colour over this world of acceptance and healthy ecosystems, it is a future in which I would be happy to live. The picture is a transmitter. It is both the result of a lot of discussion and it evoked much more discussion, even though its methods of communication are material and visual.

Data is collected and transferred across many frequencies in my research method. As I note above, workshops are captured via a stationary digital camera and microphone on a tripod. Portable recording devices capture conversations and still images are taken on digital SLR cameras and smartphones. Additional video is captured on smartphones, in individual interviews with the children, on Snapchat and Instagram. The children are asked about how they practice their faith at home and at school, as well as what they have learnt about other faiths from the children they had met in the workshops. Midway through each day, the workshops pause for lunch, and the children and facilitators eat together as a group. The children are allowed to choose music to play, and share stories about their home life. Many of the symbols of their faith that children create seem quite stereotypical, representing ‘Eid’ and celebration or ‘Diwali’ and celebration. But others complicate relationships between religion and belief. For example, a female, vegan, Muslim participant drew a basket of eggs and a ‘stop’ sign with a cross through it, showing that part of her personal belief system involved not eating animal products. Other children struggled to connect what they saw as abstract principles of their religion to their daily life, but often happily settled on shared beliefs such as ‘being kind to people,’‘being clean’ and ‘reading the Qur’an.’

If aesthetic choices can be considered a core means through which young people communicate,^[16] and theories of affect help us to see the unconscious and material ways art impacts our emotions,^[17] one can consider that expressing ‘their culture’ through art is a way through which young people continue to become who they are and come to feel secure in their beliefs, as well as come to respect different beliefs. Art offers young people a way to materialise relationships between different faiths in unique ways. Putting my theory of affective pedagogy^[18] to work in exploring aesthetics as a form of communication and art as a way of crafting new affective relationships between Muslim and non-Muslim children, affective pedagogies allow young people to represent themselves in - or as part of - very specific community assemblages. The children materialise themselves as part of a larger faith community in ways that are gender and age-specific, but each of which presents their subjectivity as already collective. 

My empirical work in London is centred in the South East London boroughs of Greenwich, Lewisham and Tower Hamlets - and, specifically, the primary schools that are located in these respective areas. My work in Manchester is based in Levenshulme, Hulme and Moss Side. In these contexts, I am working to negotiate quite complex social dynamics with fairly limited resources. Many children have had quite limited art experiences. A seven-year old girl in South East London exclaimed excitedly “this art is so much more fun than my iPad! I am coming to this class all the time.” She is in the minority of participants who would own their own iPad (most do not have computers at home). Even still, she has not experienced art classes that made her feel empowered and like she is being heard. She is a migrant from an Irish Catholic family. Her ‘self portrait’ is a re-presentation of a Sri Lankan-Australian girl’s self portrait: a beautifully decorated image that had caught her eye. The Irish girl’s self portrait is positioned just before the image that inspired the picture, drawn by an Australian-Sri Lankan girl.

Particular aesthetic codes have moved between images, and have mediated young subjectivities in doing so. The young Irish Catholic migrant embodies Australian-Sri Lankan girlhood for a moment of celebrating Diwali. A moment that is spoken across countries, time zones, and lives. This identity work, and the affective pedagogical transferal of aesthetic, political and religious information is intersected by the transversal line of Prevent when working in the UK.

Re-Situating ‘Prevent’

A bringing together of nature and culture, of different races and beliefs in urban environments, is urgently needed in the contemporary political climate. This ‘political climate’ to which I refer is characterized by increasingly militarized daily experiences and the continued, substantive investment of public funding in various forms of terrorism prevention. To cite just one example, as I outlined in the abstract to this paper, the British Government spends 40 million pounds on an annual basis on the Prevent scheme. For those unfamiliar with the scheme, Prevent is just one strand of the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy which has four strands – to Pursue, Protect, Prepare, and Prevent. Through Prevent, local UK police forces have specialized Prevent officers funded, and both teachers and children are trained to identify ‘radicalised children.’ The damaging pedagogical implications for this imperative have been considered in a suite of articles by O’Donnell.^[19] In the Global South, between 2015-16 the Australian budget committed $22 million to ‘countering violent extremism.’ This financial commitment reflects the fact that the everyday atmosphere of both Australian and British life is characterised by implicit and explicit relationships to ‘terrorism’ prevention. This emphasis, indeed these national atmospheres, and the financial investment it requires, has not reduced the quantity or severity of terrorist threats. More than anything, increased securitisation has inspired a corresponding increase in violence and anxiety. The atmosphere of Islamophobia at the heart of such national imaginings that are mobilised to justify funding ways of ‘countering violent extremism’ is increasing.

A transversal line is generative, it is a curved or zig-zag line that connects two things that are not otherwise materially or contextually related. Transversality shapes people and contexts by connecting otherwise unrelated things. As Reynolds says: “Transversal movements drive subjectivities in directions alternate to those aligned with prescribed subjective territories. In effect, the parameters of subjective territories expand and reconfigure along with those of the official territories they compromise and of which they are essential constituents.”^[20] My project is situated at the intersection of four overarching transversal lines: the transversal line of Prevent, the transversal line of a global cosmopolitan childhood, a particular version of which is produced by the project fieldwork, the transversal lines of different faith/s and that of capitalism, or economy.

The transversal line of Prevent connects youth workers speaking to homeless Muslim street kids in a park to global travellers trying to leave or enter the UK. It has a paranoid logic that violently interrupts quotidian life. As a policy discourse, Prevent connects settings that are not usually related, in fact, there might be no logic to their relation. Prevent possesses an ill-logic that connects contexts such as early childhood education settings to madmen bombing people they do not know; in the name of a religion they also know very little about. Because of Prevent, children’s drawings are read in terms of international security threats. The line of this attachment creates a logic of suspicion, and it also brings very specific agendas of securitization into play in contexts where they would not otherwise have had purchase.

As I have noted, my project is designed to complicate and extend the acute nature of contemporary counter-terrorism work^[21] in Australia and the UK, which at present, largely acquiesces to dominant cultural imaginaries that assume the legitimacy of the concept of counter radicalisation and associated processes of so-called ‘radicalisation.’ As a British colony, Australian work has been influenced by aspects of the UK’s Prevent policy and as such, there is an existing relationship between the sites. All four urban sites: in Sydney, London, Melbourne and Manchester continue to experience rapid population growth and increases in security threats. London and Manchester saw unrelated violent public attacks during my fieldwork in these cities, and both attacks were linked to discourses on terrorism in news media. Neither attack appears substantively linked to religion, although media discourses have made this connection to religion very publicly. 

As O’Donnell^[22] has shown, radicalisation is employed in inherently problematic ways in contemporary political and popular discourses. Despite the lack of clarity concerning what exactly ‘radicalisation’ is, and numerous methodological problems associated with ideas of how people might become radical, rhetorics of ‘counter-radicalisation,’ fears of cultural contagion and xenophobia are discourses in relation to which Muslim communities are often represented and, at times, through which the politicization of refugees and asylum seekers is justified. Further, such discourses can become the means through which non-Muslim young people learn about the Muslim faith. Through developing arts-based community engagement programs, designed to make new kinds of ‘interethnic habitus,’^[23] my project crafts new repertoires of feelings about multicultural and multifaith youth (or what I call ‘intra-faith futures’). 

Art remains an underutilized resource in the field of interfaith research,^[24] concerned as it is with making affective interventions in cultural logics. As a scholar known for work on affect and a socially engaged arts practitioner, I bring together my areas of expertise to develop arts-based programs that build interfaith relationships. Mohyuddin, McCormack, Dokecki and Isaacs acknowledge that the term interfaith is often used interchangeably with, or in a similar way to, terms such as ‘inter-religious, multi-religious, and multi-faith.’^[25] They state that “although the research on interfaith organisations itself is still in its formative stages, the implications of this process of interfaith research on deepening understanding is equally important.”^[26] Drawing on this understanding of interfaith work as having inherent value, I argue that my arts workshops with children are uniquely positioned to “advance current understandings of the processes and mechanisms that lead to reduced prejudice.”^[27] Within my fieldwork, I consider two children from different faiths making shared artwork as an inter-faith practice.

While I believe firmly that arts engagement programs can produce images depicting positive ‘interethnic habitus’^[28] of children from different faith backgrounds, the project of working with art to build interfaith relationships is a relatively new field of empirical research. Set against the backdrop of the Brexit vote, a politically polarised Europe, Australian anxiety around achieving and maintaining a successful, cohesive national identity, and accompanying fears of ‘boat people’ and multicultural failure, the face of the so-called terrorist has become almost synonymous with the face of the Muslim. Recent attacks in Manchester and London are a case in point. Such “faciality stands … for the very intimacy and physicality that abstract discussions of evil and fear often overlook.”^[29] As Noble cogently identifies, the imagined threat of the terrorist has come to symbolise individual and national vulnerability to attack. New public faces of inter-faith youth are needed to change the texture of this imaginary, and associated modes of inter-faith belonging must underpin such intersubjective relations. Starting young is thought to be critically important in terms of achieving social cohesion and enduring cultural change.^[30] Inter-faith art workshops designed to examine ideas of community, belonging, meaning, love, faith, and belief can teach children that their friends can have very different religious beliefs but shared values. This can prevent feeling detached from those who do not share the same faith system. The day after the Manchester bombing of 2017 I was making art in a primary school. The children’s work spontaneously became symbols of place-based belonging. They drew multiple iterations of ‘Manchester Bees’ (a symbol of the Manchester worker) and one young British girl drew the Union Jack as her example of what really matters.

The glittery Union Jack above is a young Manchester girl’s presentation of ‘what really matters.’ Clearly, issues of place-based identity, security, and national belonging are live for these children. The art workshop gave all children an inclusive space to articulate their feelings of belonging visually and without censorship.

Prevent is designed to have similar outcomes to some of my fieldwork, yet it is far less inclusive. It has clearly placed a very particular kind of discussion about Muslim youth in the British public sphere, although the Prevent discourse is framed in terms of regulation rather than inclusion or recognition. As such, the UK context makes increasingly visible the ways that faith, cultural history, and race are processes of identification that call forward belonging, empathy, and understanding but can also create fear, resentment, and disavowal. Any politics of recognition is configured around materialities of the everyday, and as such, arts work for cultural cohesion is well placed in the contexts in which I am located. My work of building interfaith relationships in childhood through art compliments, and also conceptually differs from, existing Prevent policies through the new materialist frame of affect and affective pedagogy. The research design discussed above is unique in its theoretical framing and method, and as such, some space needs to be devoted to explicating differences between existing work and this project. There is some work in the UK that is designed to build interfaith relationships through arts,^[31]and other initiatives linked to Prevent.^[32] Originally introduced by the Labour government in 2003, the Prevent strategy was revised, and its scope widened, under the subsequent (and ongoing) Conservative government in 2011.^[33] Prevent was initially a five-year national policy aimed at terrorism prevention, and a national report on counter-terrorism^[34] was released in 2014 as an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. As the BBC reported in the lead-up to this year’s General Election, the annual cost associated with implementing this strategy is not officially disclosed; however, it is believed to be approximately £40 million a year.^[35]

Underpinning Prevent, Britain has attempted to and continues to, build a public discourse for social cohesion, yet it remains a thin veil over divisive strategies that encourage teachers, community figures and publics to report ‘suspicious,’ or non-secular, non-Christian behaviour and potential ‘radical’ thoughts or beliefs. At times this is a counter-intuitive task. For example, how can a university teacher encourage critical thinking while preventing ‘radical’ thought?^[36] There currently are and have been, arts-based responses to Prevent in the UK and many of these offer examples I follow in my critique of the concept of counter-radicalisation.^[37] In 2016, an article published by The Guardian reflected on the contemporary nature of British-based arts (primarily in regards to the theatre, but also to visual arts and television programs) within a political, social, and cultural climate impacted by the implementation of a heightened Prevent strategy (post-2011).^[38] According to El-Khairy and Latif, in the U.K “Muslim voices… are policed in the arts.”^[39] This can result in the enduring relevance of a problematic, ‘ugly,’ binary, involving the “airing of dirty laundry – grooming gangs, FGM, honour killings and the like” or, conversely, the deployment  of “monstrousness or minstrelsy.”^[40] Of particular concern to El-Khairy and Latif was the cancellation of the play, Homegrown, by the National Youth Theatre in 2015 (El-Khairy and Latif were the writer and director, respectively). 

As O’Donnell^[41] has shown in her exposition of the educational implications of Prevent and the associated deployments of epidemiological logics of contagion, infection, risk and bodily threat, such narrow social imaginaries, and the prohibitions they legitimate, shape and limit forms of community engagement. This needs to change because a community in which young people from different cultural backgrounds thrive together cannot be founded on xenophobia. I offer a strategy for change through arts-based affective pedagogies^[42] designed to encourage young people to refuse the racist attitudes at the heart of many public discourses about religion and multiculturalism. Socially engaged art practice is a process and text that changes culture. This process of change must always feature, and focus on, an acknowledgement of shared values, an appreciation of ‘what really matters,’ show respect for others and be grounded in a practice of being together.

I took the two pictures of papier mâché objects below in the field in Manchester. The first image of a papier mâché balloon shows a 6-year-old girl’s ginger cat. Female ginger cats are rare, and her cat is something that ‘really matters’ to her. The second picture - the hanging balloons in the woodland - shows the collective effort children participating in Manchester undertook to put together a piece of work detailing what really mattered. The garland of balloons in the woodland is one stage of the development of the work, another moment of the objects, like the children, ‘being together.’

Intra-Active Faiths and Inter-Faith Futures

Intra-action is a co-constitution that is effected through proximity: being together. Intra-active faith is a shared belief forged through being in relation to other’s faiths or belief systems.^[43] Articulating the materiality of change, interference, expression, and bonding created by arts workshops, I turn to examine the work of philosopher and physicist Barad, who offers a frame for thinking through the co-constitutive qualities of bodies, things and meanings. Barad^[44] describes ‘intra-action’ as the mutual constitution of entangled agencies which arise by virtue of bodies and things being co-located. “A diffractive apparatus is designed to produce evidence about our shared quantum ontology. As such, it must occupy or interfere with a plane of generative philosophical problems.” ^[45] The arts workshops in which we craft interfaith futures are a diffractive apparatus that plugs into the quotidian philosophical problem of ‘what really matters?’. Young bodies intra-act in shaping answers. Bodies impact on each other’s beliefs through expressing in relation to one another. Individuals and things materialise through intra-action. Agency emerges from within the relationship between things, not outside it. Through the co-constitution of agency embedded in intra-action, the art of building interfaith relationships through making together can be seen as co-creating shared faiths. Through the concept of intra-action, Barad develops what she calls a diffractive methodology. Diffraction makes and values new differences while recording interactions, and interferences to the process. It is generative and messy. In response to the provocation that Barad’s work is a ‘critique’ of many theorists’ refusal to accept the material-discursive and performative nature of intra-actions, Barad advocates diffraction as an alternative to the notion of critique. For Barad, diffractive readings are “respectful, detailed, ethical engagements.”^[46] After Haraway,^[47] Barad believes the entanglement of matter and meaning questions the dualism of nature and culture, and the separation of humanities and sciences.

Through thinking about diffraction as the differences and relationships between faiths created in the act of making interfaith art, the meanings and values of faiths are expanded. An example given by Barad that explains the generative power of diffraction is water waves, or ripples, overlapping.^[48]  Points of intersection between two different ripples offer a way of understanding the significance of an artwork about faith made by children of different beliefs. The materiality of an artwork in which children of different faiths explore what faith means to them, like the intersection of two ripples meeting, makes intra-faith: two faiths coming together to make new beliefs. Such co-constitution of belief is critical in contemporary times in which religion is used repeatedly as a reason to ‘other’ certain demographics. Intra-faith relationships hold the possibility for building communities of understanding that hold the key to bridging what is often constructed as one of the greatest divides in contemporary times. A residue from the diffractive experiments I am explaining is presented below. This image of the ‘world’ was co-created on the first day of an arts practice workshop by children participating in the project in London. The artwork creates community and fictively speculates a future of community being united in global togetherness. Here, religion and belief unite bodies rather than separate them.

Conclusion: Choreographing a Quantum Touch

The ‘artwork’ I have discussed in this exposition is not the images above, it is the creation of a shared understanding of different beliefs and the mediation of friendship through materiality. The real ‘art’ of the Interfaith Childhoods project is choreographing relationships between children and parents from different faith backgrounds in ways that facilitate mutual understanding and empathy. Children materialise, or create themselves in relation to their broader faith communities. Research on interfaith community building is beginning to gain momentum outside the realms of psychology, international relations, and politics.^[49] While the issues around inter-faith community have, until now, not been approached through transnational empirical arts-based research, clinical studies show that exactly such qualitative approaches are needed.^[50] Approaching inter-faith relations through art as affective pedagogy engenders new possibilities for intra-active^[51] community building in which materialist aspects of community are created through sharing belief systems. Arts-based practices establish and re-organise emotional investments.

The picture above is a depiction of ‘what really matters,’ created in Manchester. It is an ‘identity picture’ in which one of the research participants shares the national flag of her family’s home country as a way of expressing what is unique about her contribution to the group. Moving from individual identity pictures to co-creating shared ‘values pictures’ and large group interfaith futures pictures, two children become one, and then become a collective subject through creating as a group: “Quantum relationality partakes of a connectivity that breaks with classical physical models, troubling human-scale understandings of space and time.” ^[52] This collective, generative methodology choreographs what, after Barad, we can understand as a quantum touch: “quantum touch stretches across the inhuman field of virtual indeterminacy and can furnish an ethics adequate to the world.” ^[53] A collectively devised understanding of an interfaith future is one in which communities comprised of people from different places, who possess different beliefs, come together to share values and principles of religion. This is not just an ethics adequate to the world, it is an ethics that is urgently needed.

Author Biography:

Anna Hickey-Moody is Professor of Media and Communication, ARC Future Fellow 2017-2021 and Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne.

Copyright: © Anna Hickey-Moody

[1] For those unfamiliar with the scheme, Prevent is just one strand of the UK government’s counter-terrorism policy which has four strands – to Pursue, Protect, Prepare, and Prevent. This is a very particular way of trying to bridge different cultural beliefs, one that has been rightly criticised. Nonetheless, this substantive financial investment made by the British Government illustrates the urgency with which these issues need to be attended.

[2] Vera Bühlmann, Felicity Colman and Iris van der Tuin ‘Introduction to New Materialist Genealogies: New Materialisms, Novel Mentalities, Quantum Literacies’ Minnesota Review. 2017, 88 p. 47.

[3] Anna Hickey-Moody Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings, Rotterdam 2009; Anna Hickey-Moody and Vicki Crowley Disability Matters: Pedagogy, Media and Affect. Oxon: Routledge 2012; Anna Hickey-Moody, ‘Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics and Affective Pedagogy’, in Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose (eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2013,  pp.79–95; Anna Hickey-Moody, ‘Arts Practice as Method, Urban Spaces and Intra-Active Faiths’, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2017.

[4] Claire Bishop ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, pp.179–85.

[5] Anna Hickey-Moody ‘Arts Practice as Method, Urban Spaces and Intra-Active Faiths’, International Journal of Inclusive Education 2017.

[6] Les Back New Ethnicities and Urban Culture, London and New York 2013, p.248.

[7] Silvan Tompkins Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Cognition, Vol. 4, New York 1992.

[8] Vera Bühlmann, Felicity Colman and Iris van der Tuin. ‘Introduction to New Materialist Genealogies: New Materialisms, Novel Mentalities, Quantum Literacies’ Minnesota Review. 88, 2017, pp. 47-58.

[9] Anna Hickey-Moody 2012; 2013.

[10] Jessica Ringrose and Emma Renold ‘“F** K Rape!” Exploring Affective Intensities in a Feminist Research Assemblage’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol.20, no.6, 2014, pp.772–80; Sharon Todd, Rachel Jones and Aislinn O'Donnell ‘Shifting Education's Philosophical Imaginaries: Relations, Affects, Bodies, Materialities’, Gender and Education, vol.28, no.2, 2016, pp.187–94.

[11] Anna Hickey-Moody 2009; 2012; 2013.

[12] Anna Hickey-Moody, Valerie Harwood and Samantha McMahon ‘Feeling Futures: The Embodied Imagination and Intensive Time’, in Derek Bland (eds.), Imagination for Inclusion: Diverse Contexts of Educational Practice, Routledge, London and New York 2016, pp.128–40; Jane Kenway and Deborah Youdell, ‘The Emotional Geographies of Education: Beginning a Conversation’, Emotion, Space and Society, vol.4, no.3, 2011, pp.131–6; Megan Watkins, ‘Bodies, Pedagogy and Writing’, in Megan Watkins (ed.), Discipline and Learn, Sense Publishers, Rotterdam 2011, pp.39–59.

[13] Jane Bennett ‘The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter’, Political theory, vol.32, no.3, 2004, pp.347–72.

[14] Anna Hickey-Moody ‘Manifesto: The Rhizomatics of Practice as Research’, in Anna Hickey-Moody and Tara Page (eds.), Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance: New Materialisms, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., London 2015, pp.169–92; Anna Hickey-Moody, ‘Femifesta for Materialist Education’, in Carol Taylor and Christina Hughes (eds.), Posthuman Research Practices in Education, Routledge, London 2016, pp.258–66.

[15] Vera Bühlmann, Felicity Colman and Iris van der Tuin 2017, p. 49.

[16] Anna Hickey-Moody 2009; 2012.

[17] Anna Hickey-Moody 2013; 2015; 2016.

[18] Anna Hickey-Moody 2012; 2013.

[19] Aislinn O’Donnell ‘Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent’ 2016; Aislinn O’Donnell ‘Contagious Ideas: Vulnerability, Epistemic Injustice and Counter-Terrorism in Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 2016, pp.1–17.

[20] Bryan Reynolds Transversal subjects: from Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, p. 2.

[21] Anne Aly ‘Countering Violent Extremism: Social Harmony, Community Resilience and the Potential of Counter-Narratives in the Australian Context’, in Christopher Baker-Beall, Charlotte Heath-Kelly and Lee Jarvis (eds.), Counter-Radicalisation: Critical Perspectives, Routledge, London and New York 2015, pp. 71–88; Samuel J Mullins, ‘Australian Jihad: Radicalisation and Counter-Terrorism’, ARI: Análisis del Real Instituto Elcano, 2011, pp.1–9.

[22] Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent: The Educational Implications of Prevent’, British Journal of Educational Studies, vol.64, no.1, 2016, pp.53–76.

[23] Anita Harris, ‘Conviviality, Conflict and Distanciation in Young People's Local Multicultures’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol.35, no.6, 2014, p.572.

[24] Hasina Mohyuddin, Mark McCormack, Paul Dokecki and Linda Isaacs, ‘Creating a Mosaic of Religious Values and Narratives: Participant Researcher Roles of an Interfaith Research Group Seeking to Understand Interfaith Organizations’, in Sandra Barnes, Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, Bernadette Doykos, Nina Martin and Allison McGuire (eds.), Academics in Action! A Model for Community Engaged Research, Teaching and Service, Fordham University Press, New York 2016, pp.191–212.

[25] Ibid, p.201.

[26] Ibid, p.192.

[27] Ibid, p.192.

[28] Anita Harris 2014, p.572.

[29] Greg Noble, ‘The Face of Evil: Demonising the Arab Other in Contemporary Australia’, Cultural Studies Review, vol.14, no.2, 2008, pp.14–33.

[30] Janet Currie, ‘Early childhood education programs’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol.15, no.2, 2001, pp. 213–238; Janet Currie, ‘Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Socioeconomic Status, poor health in childhood, and human capital development’, Journal of Economic literature, vol.47, no.1, 2009, pp.87–122; James Heckman, ‘Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children’, Science, vol.312, no.5782, 2006, pp.1900–1902; Gabriella Conti and James Heckman, ‘The Economics of Child Well-Being’, in Asher Ben-Arieh, Ferran Casas, Ivar Frønes and Jill E. Korbin (ed.), Handbook of Child Well-Being, Springer 2012, 363–401. Steven J. Howard and Anthony D. Okely, ‘Catching fish and avoiding sharks: investigating factors that influence developmentally appropriate measurement of preschoolers’ inhibitory control’, Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, vol.33, no.6, 2015, pp. 585–596.

[31] Alice Bartlett, ‘Preventing Violent Extremism and ‘Not in My Name’: Theatrical Representation, Artistic Responsibility and Shared Vulnerability’, Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, vol.16, no.2, 2011, pp.173–95.

[32] Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent’ 2016; Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Contagious Ideas: Vulnerability, Epistemic Injustice and Counter-Terrorism in Education’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2016, pp.1–17; Angela Quartermaine, ‘Discussing terrorism: A pupil-inspired guide to UK counter-terrorism policy implementation in religious education classrooms in England’, British Journal of Religious Education, vol.38, no.1, 2016, pp.13–29.

[33] BBC News, ‘Reality Check: Why does the Prevent strategy divide opinion?’, 26 May 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2017-40060325, accessed 20 June 2017.

[34] UK Government, ‘2010-2015 Government Policy to Counter-Terrorism’, 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2010-to-2015-government-policy-counter-terrorism/2010-to-2015-government-policy-counter-terrorism/, accessed 13 February 2016.

[35] BBC News 2017.

[36] Chris Allen, ‘Is Prevent harming universities?’, Political Insight, vol.8, no.1, 2017, 38–39.

[37] The Guardian, ‘Drama in the age of Prevent: why can't we move beyond Good Muslim v Bad Muslim?’, 14 April 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/apr/13/drama-in-the-age-of-prevent-why-cant-we-move-beyond-good-muslim-v-bad-muslim, accessed 13 May 2017.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Securitisation, Counterterrorism and the Silencing of Dissent’ 2016; Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Contagious Ideas: Vulnerability, Epistemic Injustice and Counter-Terrorism in Education’ 2016.

[42] Anna Hickey-Moody, Glenn Savage and Joel Windle, ‘Pedagogy Writ Large: Public, Popular and Cultural Pedagogies in Motion’, Critical Studies in Education, vol.51, no.3, 2010, pp.227–36.

[43] Anna Hickey-Moody 2017.

[44] Karen Barad, ‘Interview with Karen Barad’, in Rick Dolphijn and Iris Van Der Tuin (eds.), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor 2012, pp.48–70.

[45] Elizabeth de Freitas ‘Karen Barad’s Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics: Rethinking the Concept of Relationality’. Qualitative Inquiry 23(9), 2017, p. 742.

[46] Karen Barad, ‘Interview with Karen Barad’, in Rick Dolphijn and Iris Van Der Tuin (eds.), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Open Humanities Press, Ann Arbor 2012, p. 50.

[47] Donna Haraway Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan_ Meets_OncoMouse. Feminism and Technoscience. New York, NY Routledge, 1997.

[48] Karen Barad Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Ann Arbor 2007, pp.67–8.

[49] Anthony McCosker and Amelia Johns, ‘Contested Publics: Racist Rants, Bystander Action and Social Media Acts of Citizenship’, Media International Australia, no.151, 2014, pp.66-72; Catherine Gomes, ‘Negotiating everyday life in Australia: Unpacking the parallel society inhabited by Asian international students through their social networks and entertainment media use’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol.18, no.4, 2015, pp.515–536; Theresa Lynn Petray, ‘Protest 2.0: Online interactions and Aboriginal activists’, Media, Culture & Society, vol.33, no.6, 2011, pp.923–940; Chris Gaine, Camilla Hallgren, Servando Perez Dominguez, Joana Salazar Noguera and Gaby Weiner, ‘“Eurokid”: An innovative pedagogical approach to developing intercultural and anti-racist education on the Web’, Intercultural Education, vol.14, no.3, 2003, pp.317–329; Jamie Cleland, ‘Racism, Football Fans, and Online Message Boards: How Social Media Has Added a New Dimension to Racist Discourse in English Football’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, vol.38, no.5, 2014, pp. 415–431.

[50] Mats Dernevik, Alison Beck, Martin Grann, Todd Hogue and James McGuire, ‘The Use of Psychiatric and Psychological Evidence in the Assessment of Terrorist Offenders’, The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, vol.20, no.4, 2009, pp.508–15.

[51] Karen Barad 2012.

[52] Elizabeth de Freitas. 2017. ‘Karen Barad’s Quantum Ontology and Posthuman Ethics: Rethinking the Concept of Relationality’. Qualitative Inquiry 23(9), p. 747.

[53] Ibid.