Anna Hickey-Moody

Religion, Hypermobility and Digital Media in Global Asia: Faith, Flows and Fellowship, 2020

Materiality communicates complex information, often about the perspectives of people whose voices... more Materiality communicates complex information, often about the perspectives of people whose voices are silenced, or left offf, historical records by colonised culture. Material cultures provide indirect archives of such social histories, values and feelings. Examining the expressive qualities of material culture, we draw on data from the trans-national research project 'Interfaith Childhoods'. This project generates and documents community perspectives on faith, identity and belonging. In response to our data generated through arts workshops with children and focus group discussions with parents, we develop a theoretical framework which observes how the materiality of religion can shape the ways young people and their parents build relationships with those from diffferent religions. Here, we theorise how our empirical evidence makes a case for thinking through visual and material cultures of religion.

Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

Matter Journal of New Materialist Reseach , 2020

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, i... more Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have put words to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can't describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can't be described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a route towards understanding children's bodily experience and expression, in ways that have been made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship.

STEAM Education, Art/Science and Quiet Activism

Why Science and Art Creativities Matter (Re-)Configuring STEAM for Future-Making Education, 2019

This chapter takes up the feminist new materialist concepts of “diffraction” and “intra-action” a... more This chapter takes up the feminist new materialist concepts of “diffraction” and “intra-action” as ways of thinking about children’s embodied and imaginative knowledge through, and in relation to, aspects of the world that can be classified as the non-human. It employs these new materialist frames of “diffraction” and “intra-action” to show how art/science intra-act through “quiet activism” in children’s art. It argues that this work can be considered a vernacular form of STEAM education that radically re-situates, and indeed deconstructs, forms of science education proposed through outcomes-based curriculum, and extends children’s sense of themselves as entangled in their environment. The data theorised in this chapter is drawn from findings from a multi-sited ethnographic project that runs in 13 sites in 6 cities. This ongoing empirical project utilises art as a research method in primary school classrooms and informal educational settings, ostensibly to explore issues of social value and community belonging. However, across the last three years working in the UK and Australia, children, unprompted, have returned repeatedly to concerns about the environment, climate change and pollution. The children are so enmeshed in their broader environment that some draw self-portraits of themselves as landscapes. The arts-making practices reported here have led children to create speculative and imaginative scientific inventions that were designed to respond to the now inevitable effects of climate change and that merge art and science in unexpected ways. In developing the concept of quiet activism as an inherently interdisciplinary art/science (STEAM) method of environmental and art education, this chapter argues for an intra-active and diffractive, interdisciplinary and speculative model of embodied pedagogy. Children’s creative, quiet activism teaches us interdisciplinarity in dynamic and applied ways.

Philosophy Today

Philosophy Today , 2020

This essay advances a new materialist philosophy of faith. Mobilizing affect , I show that a chan... more This essay advances a new materialist philosophy of faith. Mobilizing affect , I show that a change in the capacity to act, such as that created through belief or non-belief, is an experience that unites both secular and religious people. Belief in the superiority of secular culture over religious culture, or vice versa, are affectively similar corporeal orientations.

RMIT Interfaith Childhoods Impact Evaluation

Interfaith Childhoods Impact Evaluation , 2019

This is an evaluation of the social impact of the research methods developed in the Interfaith Ch... more This is an evaluation of the social impact of the research methods developed in the Interfaith Childhoods research project.

"Faith"

Philosophy Today, 2010

Faith is an ontological state, an orientation, and a capacity to act. It is a set of practices, a... more Faith is an ontological state, an orientation, and a capacity to act. It is a set of practices, an embedded emotional geography that choreographs subjectivities and communities. Philosophies of religion often account for transcendental frameworks, as a religion is a belief structure; however, faith is material, a capacity to act characterized by belief in the world. This essay puts forward a new materialist theory of faith as a cosmological, ontological condition. This project draws on resources from new materialist philosophy to think about what it might mean to have faith. I locate this perspective alongside a literature review of fairly contemporary philosophical work on religion, and a survey of recent work on material cultures of religion, so as to make quite distinct the kinds of contributions being made by a new materialist understanding of faith. The need for such a perspective is made plain to me on a daily basis through the empirical research I undertake for my Interfaith Childhoods (2016-2021) 1 research project. In this fieldwork I speak to religious and secular community members in Australia and Britain, all of whom have faith. For some of these research participants this faith begins with a faith in a God, or Gods, yet, for many others it doesn't; for them faith is about connectedness to community, family, values, places, and rituals. Faith is a way of being a person and belonging to a community. It is a capacity to act, or a set of embodied orientations that limit capacity to act. Having faith can increase, or alternatively decrease, a body's capacity to act. Faith can stop a person from connecting with another, can cause judgement, rejection, and create a "sharp edge" (Barad 2003: 803). Faith can also provide the capacity to reach out to others, to be there for others, to keep people going. Many people in my interfaith research tell stories of moving across worlds, living through wars, surviving change and separation from family, and their stories make clear the fact

Entanglements of Difference as Community Togetherness: Faith, Art and Feminism

Entanglements of Difference as Community Togetherness: Faith, Art and Feminism, 2019

Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion ... more Using a feminist, new materialist frame to activate ethico-political research exploring religion and gender at a community level both on Instagram and in arts workshops, we show how sharing ethnic backgrounds, religious beliefs, gender identities and sexualities through art practice entangles a diffraction of differences as 'togetherness'. Such entanglement creates cross-cultural interfaith understandings and gender diverse acceptance and inclusion online. We use diffraction, intra-action and entanglement as a way of framing our understanding of this 'togetherness' and show that human feelings rely on more-than-human assemblages; they rely on homelands, countries, wars, places of worship, orientations, attractions, aesthetics, art and objects of attachment. The feelings of 'community' and 'belonging' that we discuss are therefore direct products of human and non-human interactions, which we explore through arts-based research. In this article, we apply Karen Barad's feminist new materialist theories of 'diffraction', 'intra-action' and 'entanglement' to ways of thinking about human experience as intra-acting with aspects of the world that we classify as non-human. We use these new materialist frames to reconceptualize the human feelings of 'community', 'belonging' and 'what really matters' in feminist and intra-religious collaborative art practices and Instagram-based art communities. To better understand and encourage communities of difference, we argue that the feelings of 'community' and 'belonging', which are central to human subjectivity and experience, are produced by more-than-human assemblages and are central to identity. The methodologies we present are community focused, intra-active, arts-based research strategies for interrogating and understanding expressions of 'community' and 'belonging'. We identify how creative methods are a significant and useful way of knowing about communities and argue that they are important because they are grounded in being with communities, showing that the specificity of their materiality needs to be considered. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. (Braidotti 2013, p. 3) Diffraction as a way of thinking draws attention to the agency of the non-human, the ways that the materials used to make art can change thinking and can change relationships between people … building more than human relationships. Arts based practices offer an ideal way not only of accessing but also of reorganizing emotional investments. (Hickey-Moody 2018, p. 8)

WAYS OF KNOWING FAILURE

MAI: feminism and visual culture, 2019

This paper brings together two different ways of knowing failure, with a view to offering epistem... more This paper brings together two different ways of knowing failure, with a view to offering epistemological, methodological and ontological resources for undertaking feminist research. The idea behind ‘two ways of knowing failure’ is to make a point about the kinds of knowledge, data, and methods that are legitimate and valued in the research assemblage, while showing how a feminist ethnographic position can leave one vulnerable to feeling your whole person is a failure if parts of one’s research do not work. On face value, readers could be excused for thinking this research experience really does not matter: who cares if I feel like a failure? Especially when all the experiences of failure end up creating a portfolio of successful ethnographic work?

I maintain that recognition of the complexity of the research assemblage and the gendered nature of the research assemblage does matter in terms of supporting the work of emerging feminist ethnographers, who surely have similar experiences of feeling like a failure, experiences that are not necessarily echoed in the existing literature on methods and failure. Another way of saying this is that I am going on record talking about research failure so that women who fail in aspects of ethnographic research methods can understand their failure as normal, as something others have experienced, and perhaps as a step to success. Failure and success are enmeshed, although experiences of failure do not make this clear. Through putting academic and esteemed ‘theories of failure’ alongside first person, methodological experiences of failure in fieldwork, I mean to suggest that it is popularly seen as acceptable within social research assemblages to write about the political significance of failure (see, for example, Halberstam 2011), but not to actually do fieldwork that fails. Doing fieldwork that fails is somehow taboo, despite the gains made towards appreciating the political significance of failure in queer and disability theory.

Manifesto: On Practice as Research

Associations: Creative Practice & Research, 2018

Arts practice as method, urban spaces and intra- active faiths

This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is int... more This paper examines the research design for an arts-based interfaith research project that is intended to build relationships between children from different faiths and to increase research participants' understandings of faiths other than their own. The project is funded as an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Early Start Arts to Counter Radicalization and has a mixed method approach that brings arts-based workshop groups for children together with focus groups for parents. Early findings demonstrate the utility of art for developing a sense of belonging and self-worth in children and clearly show ways in which art facilitates comment on complex social issues even from primary school age. The nature of such socially engaged arts-based research means it must be developed or, at the least, refined, through engagement with community and social context. As such, consideration of the urban environment that shapes the lives of the young research participants and their families forms part of the discussion undertaken.

Arts Practice as Method, Urban Spaces and Intra-Active Faiths (in press)

Books by Anna Hickey-Moody

Arts-Based Methods for Research with Children

Arts-Based Methods for Research with Children, 2021

This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with childre... more This book offers a practical, methodological guide to conducting arts-based research with children by drawing on five years of the authors’ experience carrying out arts-based research with children in Australia and the UK. Based on the Australian Research Council-funded Interfaith Childhoods project, the authors describe methods of engaging communities and making data with children that foreground children’s experiences and worldviews through making, being with, and viewing art. Framing these methods of doing, seeing, being, and believing through art as modes of understanding children’s strategies for negotiating personal identities and values, this book explores the value of arts-based research as a means of obtaining complex information about children’s life worlds that can be difficult to express verbally.

Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience: adults understanding young people (2018)

Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience: adults understanding young people, 2018

How do adults understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into young lives or... more How do adults understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into young lives or involve young people’s experiences?

This volume tackles these questions by exploring adults’ ideas about youth. Specifically, Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience examines the four titular concepts and their implications for a range of relationships between youth and adults. Utilising interdisciplinary methods, the contributing authors deliver a broad range of analyses of young people differentiated by gender, class, race, and geography across an array of contexts, including within the home, in media representations, through government bureaucracies, and in everyday life.

Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience also interrogates the meaning of technology and governance for youth studies, considering a range of ways they interact, including through social media, technologies of regulation, and educational tools. It will appeal to students and academic researchers interested in fields such as youth studies, cultural studies, sociology, and education.

Deleuze and Masculinity (2019)

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

This book uses Deleuze’s work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses mascul... more This book uses Deleuze’s work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses masculinity in terms of what it does, how it operates and what its affects are. Taking a pragmatic approach, Hickey-Moody shapes chapters around key Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in masculinity studies and then presents case studies of popular subjects and offers overviews of disciplines that have applied Deleuze’s work to the study of men’s lives. This book shows how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to, and transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Examining the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the psychoanalytic boy, as exemplified by their writing on Little Hans, Hickey-Moody reconsiders the politics of their approach to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. In this context, the author examines contemporary lived performances of young masculinity, drawing on her own fieldwork.

The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a nearly unprecedented fashion. Accordingly, the book also explores the gendered nature of disability, and canvases some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space, before introducing case studies of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and the popular Hollywood film Me Before You. The book provocatively concludes by challenging scholars to take up Deleuze’s thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination mediated through environmental exploitation.

The Politics of Widening Participation: Making Educational Futures (2016) Harwood, Hiickey-Moody, McMahon, O'Shea

by Anna Hickey-Moody, Samantha E McMahon, and Sarah O' Shea

Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings (2010)

Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and... more Cultural studies provides an analytical toolbox for both making sense of educational practice and extending the insights of educational professionals into their labors. In this context Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education provides a collection of books in the domain that specify this assertion. Crafted for an audience of teachers, teacher educators, scholars and students of cultural studies and others interested in cultural studies and pedagogy, the series documents both the possibilities of and the controversies surrounding the intersection of cultural studies and education. The editors and the authors of this series do not assume that the interaction of cultural studies and education devalues other types of knowledge and analytical forms. Rather the intersection of these knowledge disciplines offers a rejuvenating, optimistic, and positive perspective on education and educational institutions. Some might describe its contribution as democratic, emancipatory, and transformative. The editors and authors maintain that cultural studies helps free educators from sterile, monolithic analyses that have for too long undermined efforts to think of educational practices by providing other words, new languages, and fresh metaphors. Operating in an interdisciplinary cosmos, Transgressions: Cultural Studies and Education is dedicated to exploring the ways cultural studies enhances the study and practice of education. With this in mind the series focuses in a non-exclusive way on popular culture as well as other dimensions of cultural studies including social theory, social justice and positionality, cultural dimensions of technological innovation, new media and media literacy, new forms of oppression emerging in an electronic hyperreality, and postcolonial global concerns. With these concerns in mind cultural studies scholars often argue that the realm of popular culture is the most powerful educational force in contemporary culture. Indeed, in the twenty-first century this pedagogical dynamic is sweeping through the entire world. Educators, they believe, must understand these emerging realities in order to gain an important voice in the pedagogical conversation.

Masculinity Beyond the Metropolis (2006) Kenway, Kraack, Hickey-Moody

Masculinity beyond the Metropolis, 2006

This book gives insights on youth, masculinity and place by exploring spatially marginalized masc... more This book gives insights on youth, masculinity and place by exploring spatially marginalized masculinities in stigmatized and romanticized out-of-the-way places in 'developed' Western countries. It shows the impact of globalization on place and identity through global ethnographic studies and media representations of young men in peripheral places.

ISBN 978-0-230-62578-5

Edited Collections by Anna Hickey-Moody

Deleuze and Children

by Anna Hickey-Moody and Markus Bohlmann

Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience: Adults Understanding Young Lives

by Catherine Driscoll, Liam Grealy, Anna Hickey-Moody, Cristyn Davies, Remy Y . S . Low, Emily Lockhart, Thomas Crofts, Catharine Lumby, and Rachel Cole

How far do adults truly understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into youn... more How far do adults truly understand youth? How do their conceptions inform interventions into young lives or implicate young people’s experiences? Centrally exploring adults’ ideas about youth, Youth, Technology, Governance, Experience seeks to tackle these questions. Specifically, this timely volume uses the four central concepts of youth, technology, governance and experience to examine a range of relationships that exist between adults and youth including those within homes and educational institutions, government bureaucracies, online, via media representations and new technologies; and elsewhere in everyday life. Topics such as media classification, surveillance, sexting, tertiary education, and health provision are approached using a range of disciplines and methods, including survey and ethnographic interviews, action research, policy, archival and textual analysis, and critical theory. The collection’s key concepts – youth, technology, governance, and experience – provide connecting themes across the essays, while also considered on their own terms and with regard to their implications for how we interact with young people. Readers can expect analyses of young people differentiated by gender, class, race, and geography across a range of sites, with attention also given to dominant ideas about and expectations of youth and their varied effects.

Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance: New Materialisms (2015)

Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts prac... more Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts practices. Each contribution synthesizes creative approaches to philosophy and new materialist understanding of practice to show how human-nonhuman interaction at the core of Arts practice is a critical post human pedagogy. Across fine art, dance, gallery education, film and philosophy, the book contends that certain kinds of Arts practice can be a critical pedagogy in which tactical engagements with community, space, place and materiality become means of not only disrupting dominant discourse but also of making new discourses come to matter. It demonstrates how embodied, located acts of making can materially disrupt cultural hegemony and suggest different ways the world might materialize. It argues that the practice of Arts making is a post human cultural pedagogy in which people become part of a broader assemblage of matter, and all aspects of this network are solidified in objects or processes that are themselves pedagogical. In doing so the book offers a fresh and theoretically engaged perspective on arts as pedagogy.