Dis/orientations with more-than-human whisperings: a feminist vibrant materialist exploration of the eye/I in auto-ethnography

This chapter was inspired by Rose-Anne Reynolds’ Adventures in Posthumanism (AiPh) online seminar ‘Re-membering as a sacred practice’ (2022), Jane Osgood’s (Keynote Paper, 2023) invitation to disrupt the ‘knowledgeability and linearity’ installed by traditional methodological approaches, and Barad’s methodology of ‘travel hopping as a temporal diffraction’ (2017). Their work ignited a posthumanist exploration of auto-ethnography as a method by bringing matter, affect, and theory together to push aside taken-for-granted practices and epistemologies within the method (Osgood, 2023). This posthuman exploration of auto-ethnography entailed thinking with two personal objects (a collection of letters and a handkerchief) to trouble the I/eye and detect intergenerational notions of agency and vulnerability. Thinking with these two objects, through a feminist vibrant materialist lens, did two things. First, it opened spaces to acknowledge and focus on the objects’ incessant mutterings (Bennett, 2010) to ‘recognise the material kinship with’ (Barad, 2017:82) moments and objects in time. Second, as a doctoral student immersed in data analysis, this exercise re-orientated my research and launched me on my own adventuring in conceptualising auto-ethnography through a posthuman lens. It helped me understand ‘how matter comes to matter’ (Barad, 2008) in alternative conceptualisations of the ‘self’ in auto-ethnography. It also helped disrupt entrenched binary understandings in auto-ethnography (insider/outsider, individual/group) and acknowledge the important role the more-than-human plays in shaping a human’s sense of agency and being.