This Friday: Research Colloquium featuring Aaron Kuntz

Higher Education, Inquiry, and the Government of Things

• Friday, March 17
• 12:30-1:30 p.m.
• Aderhold Hall Room G5

Aaron Kuntz is the department head of educational studies in psychology at the University of Alabama. In his presentation, Kuntz will examine how contemporary practices of research provoke governable things through a particular rendering of materialism. He says, “As a gloss, conventional forms of research emphasize representational identities that exist outside of material context. I situate these research practices as operating from a logic of extraction. Alternatively, new materialist research orientations emphasize relations within phenomena, foregoing commitments to external or a priori subjects. These inquiry practices operate according to relational logics. More than academic wordplay, engaging extractive or relational logics has very real implications for inquiry practice, particularly in education and the social sciences. As such, I ground my presentation through a close examination of faculty work as understood according to extractive and relational logics, emphasizing the consequences of both approaches. I end with a consideration of materialist methodologies as an attempt to inquire differently within the field of higher education and making possible alternative conceptions of faculty work, productive resistance, and a renewed governance of things.”