Embodying Affective Intra-Actions Online: Enacting Posthuman Methods in Virtual Spaces

Abstract

This article explores how the posthuman concepts of affect, intra-action, and diffraction helped me reimagine collaborative inquiry, a traditionally place-based action research method that emphasizes human affect as the root of all personal becoming, for an online context and posthuman world. I begin with a brief introduction to posthuman philosophies and the ways a 21st-century world increasingly mediated by digital technologies may be considered a shared posthuman present reality. Next, I look to the literature to show how scholars in digital contexts have used and created posthuman concepts, exploring some of the methodological implications of emerging posthuman perspectives for qualitative research, particularly in online spaces. Considering the insights various posthuman studies offer my attempts to design a virtual collaborative inquiry, I suggest an artful and embodied heuristic for starting from human experience to better understand and to create digital posthuman worlds.

Keywords

artful posthuman inquiry embodiment diffraction art-making online affective ethics

In preparing to initiate a collaborative inquiry (CI; Heron, 1996) in an online space, posthuman concepts inspired me to reimagine how one might adapt this holistic action research method with humanist roots to an online context. Most CI groups to date have gathered “in-person” to engage in action and reflection around a shared inquiry topic in a shared physical location. Furthermore, CI’s underlying whole person theory frames experience as a supposedly unmediated human-centered phenomenon and posits that “experiential knowing arises by being present with, by direct face-to-face encounter with, person, place, or thing” (Heron & Sohmer, 2019, p. 209). I wondered how a CI mediated by digital technologies might fully engage people’s affective capacities, the grounding psychic mode that Heron (1992) argued produced experiential knowing and laid the foundation for all other ways of knowing.

Posthuman theory drew my attention as I discovered how specific posthuman concepts resonated with the whole person theory out of which CI developed, while also offering methodological possibilities for researchers conducting inquiries online. Rosi Braidotti (2013) contends that posthuman concepts “reconceptualize the relation to the technological artefact as something as intimate, as close as nature used to be.” Her critical posthuman orientation attempts to respond to the reality of an emerging posthuman world in which “[t]he technological apparatus is our new ‘milieu’ and this intimacy is far more complex and generative than the prosthetic, mechanized extension that modernity has made it” (p. 83). Thus, this article asks, What does thinking with posthuman concepts in collaborative online spaces methodologically produce?

In pursuing this question, I first situate posthuman thought in relation to a historical context that has positioned Homo sapiens desire and intentionality as the unquestioned center of all things while narrowly defining who counted as fully human. After exploring the intimate relations between and coevolution of people and digital technologies, I consider how posthuman theorists have responded to this reality and scholars have experimented with various methods for pursuing posthuman research. Ultimately, I argue that enacting artful ways of inquiry in digital spaces opens up posthuman perspectives because artful methods diffract (Barad, 2007) online experiences in ways that break down persistent material/digital, embodied/disembodied, and self/other binaries.

Why Posthuman Inquiry?

In many ways, engaging posthuman philosophies is less of a choice and more of an acknowledgment of the conditions that characterize Earthly existence in the early 21st century. Posthuman scholar Rosi Braidotti (2022) describes the posthuman as a project of naming and navigating an unfolding present reality of a complex “posthuman convergence” operating on societal, environmental, and technological levels:

First, at the societal level we witness increasing structural injustices through the unequal distribution of wealth, prosperity and access to technology. Second, at the environmental level, we are confronted with the devastation of species and a decaying planet, struck by climate crisis and new epidemics. And third, at the technological level, the status and condition of the human is being redefined by the life sciences and genomics, neural sciences and robotics, nanotechnologies, the new information technologies and the digital interconnections they afford us. (pp. 3–4)

While important to recognize that posthumanisms are multiple and not confined to a single coherent philosophy or set of concepts (Ferrando, 2012), posthumanism does not signify or herald a time after or without humans (Hayles, 1999). The Braidottian posthuman perspective that this article takes sees posthumanism as indicating a shift toward more relational visions of being in the world. Braidotti’s (2013, 2019) posthuman condition responds to Homo sapiens’s growing understanding of how their complex technologies are altering human beingness at the same time they are becoming aware of the destructive impacts of human activities on Earth’s ecological capacity to sustain life.

Posthumanism’s Post-Humanism and Post-Anthropocentrism

Posthumanism does intend to oppose and hasten the slow demise of a liberal humanism that began with the so-called European Enlightenment in the 17th century and continues to proclaim humanity’s exceptional role in the universe. This concept of the human positioned knowledge and truth as objects men could achieve through the mind’s capacity for logic and reasoning. The rational humanist subject possessed free will and the capacity to transcend the limitations of the irrational animal driven by instinctual desires and bodily senses. Feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholars have challenged humanism’s vision of rational actors with stable, unified identities navigating the world with full agency and in accordance with a set of universal truths and values (Braidotti, 2013; Clough, 2009; Hayles, 1999). As Braidotti (2022) notes, “Humanism upholds an implicit and partial definition of the human, while claiming to provide a universal and neutral representation of all humans” (p. 10). Posthuman scholars reject liberal humanism’s centering of the White, able-bodied, heterosexual male perspective as the normative position and show how such a framing devalues, excludes, and harms all who fall outside these privileged categories.

Post-anthropocentrism extends the posthuman vision further, highlighting the damage humanism’s self-centered focus has caused natural ecosystems and diverse forms of life with which humans share a life-giving context: planet Earth. Rejecting the persistent placing of human desire and intentions at the center of all things, post-anthropocentric thought seeks to reinscribe agency and worth to animals and various beyond-human entities. New materialist philosophers who espouse the vibrancy (Bennett, 2010) and agency (Barad, 2007) of matter align with posthumanist thinkers around this anti-anthropocentric emphasis. So, while posthumanism does not long for a time without humans, it does point to a new era in which humans reconsider their previously unquestioned exceptional status and no longer assume the central position of ultimate importance in all action and inquiry. In drawing on “the insights and understandings which can be learned from indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 7), Braidotti’s vision embraces a posthuman new materialist tradition that positions “posthumanism as coming both before and after humanism” (Bayne, 2018, p. 3).

Posthuman thought, therefore, encompasses a transdisciplinary project overlapping with a multiplicity of philosophical perspectives that seeks to deconstruct taken-for-granted binaries and hierarchies: subject/object, discursive/material, mind/body, rational/empirical, science/art, and material/digital. All of these connect to the posthuman troubling of the human/nonhuman binary. The next section turns to two prominent posthuman concepts, affect and intra-action, and the ways they seek to undo these binaries while building posthuman understandings of reality as relational, interdependent, and co-constituted.

A Brief Introduction to Two Posthuman Concepts: Affect and Intra-Action

The concept of affect plays a central role in posthuman ontologies. Seigworth and Gregg (2010) offer an expansive and poetic explanation of posthuman affect. Revealing its elusive, multifaceted nature, they describe affect as

aris[ing] in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. . . . found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves. (p. 1)

They present affect as invisible charges, often-subtle forces that possess power to change, move, and modulate other bodies, materialities with the “potential to reciprocate or co-participate in the passage of affect” (p. 2). Affects, then, are flows of energies that propel and/or repel material entities, including theories and concepts, themselves, toward and away from each other, following lines of potential in constructing and deconstructing arrangements in unpredictable ways, moving as rhizomes move. “Affect is the non-human becoming of the human, the non-human becoming of all matter” (Clough, 2009, p. 49), enacting something much more messy, unclear, and in constant motion than simple cause-and-effect logic.

Posthuman affect argues that entities never exist as discrete beings but always and only in relation to others in their environment. Therefore, affect leads to Barad’s (2007) posthuman concept of intra-action, “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies [emphasis in original],” which “recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through their intra-actions” (p. 33). In other words, objects or entities with the capacity to affect and be affected (what Barad calls “agencies” here) never merely “interact,” a term that assumes separate entities; they always already exist in co-creative relation. The posthuman concepts of affect and intra-action extend far beyond rational humanist subjects.

Clough’s (2009) comments on methods of attending to affect preview the methodological implications of posthumanist perspectives and concepts:

Any method of attending to affect will necessarily become entangled with an immanent dynamism, with the potential for individuation. Method attending to affect is necessarily performative, having become entangled or assemblaged with affect’s capacity of self-information-ality. . . cannot simply be a matter of containment; it also cannot simply be a matter of interpretation, meaning, signification or representation. Method cannot help but produce affective resonance, attunement, that is, the intensifying or dampening of affect. (p. 49)

Before exploring posthuman methods further, the next section will seek to illustrate the concepts of affect and intra-action at work in how humans and nonhuman digital technologies have encountered each other to produce more complex and open-ended rhizomatic relations than a human/technology binary suggests.

Becoming Digital Posthumans

Posthuman scholars recognize the intimate co-constituted relations between humans and various digital technologies and tools (Braidotti, 2019) and that “it is no longer possible to isolate human consciousness from its ‘social and technological environment’” (Bayne, 2016, p. 86). As Paulus and Lester (2021) note, human cultures and digital technologies exist as “[c]onstitutive entanglement[s] . . . as completely interdependent with no aspect having independence from, priority over, or privilege over another” (p. 10). Hayles, citing Stiegler, calls this affective socio-technical feedback relationship “technogenesis,” the coevolution and co-constitution of humans with their technologies (Pötzsch & Hayles, 2014). The human–technology relationships being described here resonate with Barad’s concept of intra-action and posthuman concepts can help reveal how the internet and digital technologies have affected the inner workings of humans. What follows are some specific examples exploring how, just as human cultures have shaped digital technologies, these technologies have also literally restructured human being and becoming.

Calleja and Schwager (2004) argued that immersion in digital hypertext environments have made the metaphor of the complex, living network a lived experience, influencing humans toward more “rhizome-oriented mental reconfigurations” (p. 13). They see these hypertext intra-actions as marking one significant shift toward nonlinear, multilayered posthuman consciousness that, nevertheless, affect the way people understand themselves in relation to the world. Similarly, human intra-actions with increasing amounts of multimodal digital media, especially visual materials, feed into a societal push toward quantity and speed that affect the human body. Hayles argues that “the development of ubiquitously networked digital devices . . . [has] created a socio-technical environment that systemically privileges hyper attention” over deep attention, producing “profound effects on human cognition” (Pötzsch & Hayles, 2014, para. 14) and how bodies are expected to move and act.

With the entrance of mobile technologies into this socio-technical feedback loop, Renold and Ringrose (2017) contend that the proliferation of “[m]obile digital technology devices and networks extend the affective capacities of the human body [while] also dissolving the virtual/real digital/material and online/offline binaries” (p. 1068). Twitter, a social networking application that sees the majority of its users access the platform through mobile devices (Han et al., 2015), provides a great example of how digital technologies can extend the affective capacity of bodies. Niccolini and Lesko (2018) explore how three education reformers’ Twitter engagements become significant “algorithmic presences” (p. 628) that create “nodal points of intensity in larger education debates” (p. 630). Using emotional analysis apps, the authors visualize how these individuals become digital “‘radioactive’ conduits for stoking and circulating affects” (p. 628) and producing “a new infrastructure of feeling” (p. 626).

Vea’s (2019) group of animal rights activists, similarly, created social media memes and virtual reality experiences to spread, across space and time, the ethical consciousness members had gained through “‘direct’ encounter[s] between human and nonhuman bodies” (p. 1589) as they bore witness to animal abuses. Digital materials created for maximum affect created a sense of “im-mediacy,” a term Vea introduces “to describe feelings of direct encounter that are produced through media practices” (p. 1592), enabling the group to contribute to scaling the efforts of a larger social movement. These activities directly relate to Gershon’s (2020) posthuman reconfiguration of the sonic phenomenon of reverb as a tool for amplifying and modulating social affects through the “rhyzomatic blooming of information that is the internet” (p. 1169), often through algorithms. This type of reverb encompasses “ways in which individuals and groups manipulate ideas, ideals, processes, and ecologies according to particular sets of norms and values to attune them in a given direction” (p. 1168), creating echo chambers with the potential to reverberate on global scales. These posthuman scholars emphasize the need for ways to pay attention to the affective intra-actions of humans with algorithmic processes that respond to human desires (i.e., the click) and work to affect certain actions and outcomes.

Furthermore, people perceive digital spaces as more than blank, characterless voids (Markham, 1998). Warfield (2018) argued that “[o]nline and social media spaces . . . present to many students not as flat walls [emphasis in original] on which flat, bodily, disconnected images are posted, but as spaces similar to physical rooms and places” (p. 83). Yoon (2021) offers the term digital flesh in arguing for experiences of embodiment, including the perpetuation of gendered cultural biases, in online spaces and against the often invoked in-person/online binary in digital spaces. In Yoon’s view, “what technology-based classrooms lack is not our bodily presence but technological artifacts that acknowledge the sensoriality of virtual experience” and enable “collective access to meaningful materials” (p. 5).

Sarah Pink’s (2012) sensory ethnography work, which engages embodiment and digital technologies, has also argued that people experience digital spaces as material places. Inspired by Doreen Massey and Tim Ingold, she understands places as assemblages of entities engaged in continuous transformation, not as geographical locations. This relational and processual understanding of place “invites us to understand the Internet as a field of potential forms of relatedness” (p. 122) wherein diverse digital materials may “be interwoven into particular intensities of place that also involve persons, interactivity, material localities and technology” (p. 120). Her concept of multisensoriality argues for a holistic understanding of the body’s sensemaking, recognizing the senses as overlapping, interconnected, inseparable, and open to the more-than-human. Echoing Hine’s (2020) call for an ethnography of the internet recognizing the embedded, embodied, and everyday nature of human experiences in digital environments, Pink’s (2012) research showed how digital artifacts not only index “the immediate physical environment that the Internet user is part of, but also . . . the physical locality and persons that Internet content represent, and the ways the body is engaged in imagining and remembering them” (p. 122). Experiencing digital spaces as virtual places, then, involves developing multisensorial awareness of the full affective presence, and agentic potential of digital materials and their ability to produce feelings and actions.

Niccolini and Lesko (2018) argued that cultivating intimacies with digital technologies help humans become conscious of how digital materials, including algorithmic forces, affect humans to influence and reimagine human–technology relations toward more affirmative and ethical futures. Recognizing the affective capacities of digital entities and the new potentials generated in these relational gatherings when humans come together in and through digital assemblages requires cultivating posthuman subjectivities. Posthuman subjectivity, an “enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or ‘earth’ others” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 48), “replace[s the unitary Humanist subject] with a more complex and relational subject framed by embodiment, sexuality, affectivity, empathy and desire” (p. 26). While “internally fractured,” Braidotti (2019) notes that “[t]he posthuman subject . . . is also technologically mediated and globally interlinked . . . engag[ing] in a web of ever-shifting relations and perpetual becoming” (pp. 47–48).

Posthuman subjectivity involves attuning to the way diverse (human, nonhuman, and animal) entities are always in flux in affecting and being affected by, increasing or decreasing the potential of, others in pursuing specific desires. This section has attempted to cultivate a posthuman awareness around how various digital technologies, having become influential presences in an increasing number of people’s everyday experiences, have altered the way humans exist and act in the world. The next section explores how qualitative methods have taken up the challenge of responding to a real and present posthuman condition that demands posthuman subjectivity more generally and in online spaces, specifically.

Qualitative Methods in a Posthuman World

Posthumanism challenges qualitative researchers toward new ways of doing inquiry in the digital age. In Ulmer’s (2017) words,

posthumanism offers different ways of thinking in and about and without methodology. By reconsidering who and what is social, posthumanism moves away from perhaps the most basic premise within social sciences research. . . . creat[ing] openings for other forms/things/objects/beings/phenomenon to know. (p. 834)

Ferrando (2012) insisted that posthuman methods must, however, not lose sight of the human and must endeavor “to acknowledge the whole of the human experience in order to be receptive to the non-human and be open to unknown possibilities” (p. 17). In her view, any posthuman methodology would use methods in a sensitive manner, adapting to the needs and nuances of particular contexts while remaining aware of the multiple sociocultural and ecological affects the research may produce. This includes resisting the pull toward written texts and pursuing performative approaches, including autoethnography, which offer ways of undoing the various dualisms posthumanism seeks to unravel. Arguing that scholars can only surface more-than-human perspectives through the human capacity for empathy, Ferrando suggested posthuman scholars can present the fullness of human experience by “quoting theorists and thinkers coming from different backgrounds and disciplines, offering alternative standpoints: from what has been historically portrayed as the human margins” (p. 13). Given the expanding presence of digital technologies and their increasing influence on everyday experience, entangling with the production of social and natural events on all levels, methodologists should also attend to new ways of knowing the intimate and complex relations these create.

Posthuman Thinking With Theory

As Ferrando (2012) suggested, many scholars seeking to employ a posthumanist perspective have done so by “thinking with theory,” a method wherein empirical data are analyzed with and through concepts. Jackson and Mazzei (2012) described the “plugging in” of theory into data and vice versa, a concept they borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, as a “constant, continuous process of making and unmaking” to “produce something new” (p. 1). Rather than reflect or represent a specific reality, the “plugging in” of theories into empirical data produced new cartographic renderings, illustrating how real events, situations, or phenomena were multifaceted, always on the move, and understood differently depending on the theoretical lens applied to it. In this way, thinking with theory is a diffractive method analogous to the physical phenomena of diffraction in which waves become bent as they pass through various materials, creating new wave patterns (Barad, 2007).

Thinking of diffraction in terms of inquiry method, Barad follows Haraway’s ethical notion of diffraction as “a critical practice for making a difference in the world” (p. 90) as well as being “a particularly effective tool for thinking about sociomaterial practices in a performative rather than representationalist mode” (p. 88). In practical and ethical terms, “diffraction becomes a prism via which we can appreciate the active processes of differencing in action and in their multiplicity” (Bayley, 2018, p. 12). Material differences create consequential diffractions of experience that lie at the heart of an affirmative ethics that maximizes critical and creative potential toward materializing more inclusive possible future worlds. Unlike reflection and reflexivity, which “holds the world at a distance” (p. 87), diffraction seeks to understand from an in-between space where the binary between subject and object falls apart. Echoing Ferrando’s (2012) insistence that posthuman methods must, above all, enact a hypersensitivity to the multiple layers and levels of context and consequences of inquiry, Barad (2007) insists that “[a]ttention to fine details is a crucial element of [diffractive] methodology” (p. 92). Thinking about diffraction and inquiry, “it is perhaps helpful to suggest that part of what posthuman and post-qualitative inquiries do is diffract” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 840) ways of pursuing a question or understanding any event.

Artful Inquiry and the Posthuman

Artful modes of inquiry present ways posthuman scholars have sought to employ diffraction as well as inspire qualitative researchers toward creative ways of collecting, creating, and analyzing data and sharing findings. Flint’s (2021) study on the complex ways histories of racialization unfold and remain embedded in one college campus in the southern United States led to audio compilations that enabled “exploring entanglements with materialities beyond human bodies and . . . new ways of imagining our futures together differently” (p. 3). This artful analysis method, sculpting digitized sound data in a digital audio work station, allowed for the more-than-human while enacting “an ethic of care,” committing to “representing students’ stories in their complexity and nuance” beyond the merely textual (p. 9).

Many posthuman scholars have turned to other artful ways of pursuing inquiry as a way of engaging complex and fluid relationalities between materialities and human bodies in digital contexts. Bayley (2018) suggests that “[i]ntroducing the affective, the embodied and the creativity espoused by working with and through the arts . . . create[s] new reflective and diffractive approaches to knowledge-making” that are ethical for the new possibilities and visions they offer (p. 10). Guyotte et al.’s (2018) small group of women academics, for example, used a variety of artmaking methods to explore their affective intra-actions with the more-than-human phenomenon of “the tenure clock.” Gathering these artifacts in a shared Tumblr as well as in physical gallery spaces, they found that “artmaking nurtured a space where we could clothe our embodied experiences through artful materiality and create spaces for our individual pieces to dialogue differently with one another” (p. 121). This “enfleshment,” or transmutation and extension of embodied experience into a digital-material form, of affective intra-actions with the more-than-human phenomenon of the tenure clock enabled an expression of posthuman relation and illustrated the affective potentials these newly created objects also carried. The next section delves further into the ways scholars have specifically attempted to translate posthuman concepts to methods that apply in online spaces cocreated with and through digital technologies.

Posthuman Digital Inquiry

Adams and Thompson (2016) contended that “[p]osthumanism asks: What is transpiring in the human–nonhuman relational hyphen? And what are the hybrid creatures and cyborg figures created in these diffractive melds?” (p. 6). In Researching a Posthuman World: Interviews with Digital Objects, they offer numerous heuristics enacting posthuman concepts in intra-action with digital objects and in digital spaces. These heuristics recognize the affective capacity of digital objects. In addition to troubling the human/nonhuman binary, they offer significant entryways into challenging the related dualisms of the offline/online, material/digital, and so on, that break down in our posthuman world.

Online learning scholars have deployed diffractive readings as a method of data analysis in both formal (Hilli & Tigerstadt, 2020) and informal digital settings (McKnight et al., 2017; Renold & Ringrose, 2017). Rather than using diffraction as an after-the-fact analytical tool, Mitchell (2017), an educator of medical students online, applied posthuman concepts to design and deploy an online posthuman pedagogy. She found that “[t]he intra-active materiality and agency of Google Docs expanded possibilities for mapping different experiences and insights, producing deeper thought and dialogue across the previously bounded reflective process” (p. 177) that unfolded in traditional online discussion boards. In other words, Mitchell is experimenting with using technology to diffract student’s reflections of their clinical experiences by placing them in closer proximity and different relation to the alternate perspectives and diverse experiences of their peers. Although questions remain about the level of intra-active engagement using this online tool produced, student’s expression of appreciation for encountering their peers’ experiences in this way produced “a circulation of affect” (p. 177) that Mitchell deemed significant. These studies illustrated the attention posthuman scholars in digital spaces should pay to the affordances of digital platforms to affect users in specific ways and open up new intra-active potentials, including between humans.

Envisioning a Posthuman Virtual CI

In this section, I map how I began reimagining CI, an established qualitative action inquiry method steeped in various humanist traditions, for technologically mediated posthuman times. Turning to the literature on studies connecting posthuman philosophies with small online learning groups proved useful for thinking through how I might enact posthuman concepts in a virtual CI. I refer to these studies after briefly introducing some of the resonances I found between CI and posthuman concepts to show how others have found posthuman affect, intra-action, and diffraction at work in experiences of online small group learning.

Theoretical Resonances

CI is a traditionally physically colocated action research method developed out of transpersonal psychologist Heron’s (1992) whole person theory. Despite possessing roots in various humanist philosophical traditions, whole person theory and CI’s processes also resonate with posthumanism in various ways. Heron’s concept of personhood and what makes a whole person moves beyond the stable, unitary subject of Enlightenment humanism and toward a fluid and relational self-in-process. This self comes into being only in and through connections with diverse others, and Heron provides numerous exercises and protocols for attending to material and subtle realms inclusive of diverse more-than-human others. This conception of self resonates strongly with the posthuman characterizations of self as an assemblage of constant becoming.

Despite Heron’s (1992) training in psychology, a field in which affect is typically synonymous with embodied emotion, he conceptualizes affect more similarly to posthuman scholars. While seeing emotion as the more ego- and body-bound side of affect, he described feeling as affect’s boundless and relational aspect,

the capacity of the psyche to participate in wider unities of being, to become at one with the differential content of a whole field of experience, to indwell what is present through attunement and resonance, and to know its own distinctness while unified with the differentiated other. (p. 16)

The extended epistemology that lies at the root of whole person theory and, by extension, CI, setting it apart from other action research methods, sees affective knowing in direct experience as the supportive root system on which all other ways of knowing depend.

Whole person theory posits that artful practices tap into humans’ capacity for expressive knowing and present the best way to access affective experiential knowing. The more familiar and privileged conceptual (including the cognitive activities of reflection and critical thinking) and practical ways of knowing are supported by, and come into being through, the foundation that affective and expressive knowing provide. Affective knowing grounds and calls into existence all other ways of knowing. CI situates expressive knowing as a bridge to unlocking often unconscious affective experience (Heron, 1992), thus sharing with posthuman philosophies an emphasis on creative experimentation and artful meaning-making practice (Braidotti, 2019). CI’s whole person focus on affect relates to a shared posthuman concern with micro-perception and cultivating deep and wide attention to the potentialities and embodied sensations involved in present-moment experiences to open up possibilities for what may unfold next (Vannini, 2015).

Reading posthuman concepts through whole person theory reasserts the human as vibrant material with capacities to consciously engage affective phenomenon, a notion some posthumanists seem to reject (Clough, 2009). Posthuman concepts also diffract CI, suggesting ways its traditional in-person unfolding may be extended through digital technologies that do more than dampen affective experiences, participating also in directing and enhancing affects and intra-actions in certain directions. Posthuman lenses emphasize digital technologies’ fundamental role, beyond facilitating or mediating human communications, as collaborative actors, affecting and being affected within the learning assemblage. From this view, the very nature of collaboration widens to include various more-than-human others.

Learning the Posthuman From Small Groups Learning Online

Beyond the theoretical considerations that whole person learning and posthuman concepts brought to my thinking about how I might initiate a virtual posthuman CI, I found much inspiration from a body of literature that used posthuman concepts to understand the experiences of small groups in online learning spaces. These studies helped me think through the many speculative questions thinking posthuman concepts together with CI’s whole person theory opened up: How might the agentic aspects of digital materials be emphasized? How might digital platforms’ collaborative and intra-active potentials be enhanced or put to maximum use? How might methods for diffraction be productively incorporated into CI’s action-reflection cycles? How could digital technologies be used to enhance the embodied and relationally embedded nature of whole person experiences online? How does one plan a posthuman approach when thinking and doing with posthuman concepts entails letting go of certainty and learning to accept the uncontrollable complexity of any given event, the agency of others, and the limits of researcher control (Warfield, 2019)?

Experiencing Affective Embodiment Online

Three studies of online learning groups in particular, all involving academics seeking to understand their own experiences and professional practices through posthuman concepts, most helped me think through my posthuman virtual CI. Strom et al. (2018) came together for the purpose of collaborating through self-study of shared teacher educator practices. Bozalek et al. (2021) convened to stay in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic by sharing the labors and joys of reading Barad together. Finally, Pillay et al. (2021) gathered, also in response to the pandemic, to experiment with using memory work to build solidarity online. All three studies focus on what posthuman concepts helped reveal about how learning alone together online (Cox, 2018) unfolded and how their groups experimented with various methods for deepening collective inquiries and senses of posthuman intra-action.

Echoing common themes of disembodiment, lack of presence, and diminished affect in online learning discourse (Bayne et al., 2020; Yoon, 2021), Strom et al. (2018) described their Google Hangouts gatherings as an “often disembodied experience” (p. 143), which I hoped to avoid in my own CI. Here “technology constrained [their] interactions in emphasizing the disembodied images of [them]selves, creating a barrier to [their] understanding of [their] embodied emotions” (p. 150). Having moved to online gatherings after previously conducting colocated meetings, the group felt their online gatherings lacked the affective spark that produced embodied learning when participants occupied the same physical place. Contrast this with words from Denise, a participant of Bozalek et al.’s (2021) Barad reading group:

I now see [Viv] looking straight at me, as I look at her. I see her blonde ringlets shining in the shaft of sunlight, sometimes wet after her daily sea swim. I see her thinking eyes look upward as her lips mouth words and ideas. I hear her voice undisturbed by ambient sound. I feel close to her, as if I can touch her, closer than if I was with her. (p. 847)

Similarly, Pillay et al. (2021) described their Zoom meetings as spaces where “relationships flourished,” with affectively enhanced spaces “permitting silences and negotiating the spaces of in-betweenness, where new understandings co-emerged. These spaces invite trust to grow. They enabled solidarity to strengthen from Zoom to Zoom and, with it, a sense of solace” (p. 3).

Hoping to create highly affective spaces wherein participants felt deep connections to each other in the virtual CI I hoped to initiate, I wondered at the stark differences in experience described by these groups. What accounted for Strom et al. (2018) finding affectivity and embodiment hopelessly diminished and Bozalek et al. (2021) and Pillay et al. (2021) finding it delightfully enhanced in the digital space? It must be remembered that both COVID-instigated Zoom groups occurred during a time of worldwide pandemic lockdowns that limited individuals’ physical movements and choice of activities. As Bozalek et al. (2021) note, “[I]t is in this non-presence of life as we knew it that we felt compelled to meet each other halfway in the void” (p. 850). Therefore, global “offline” happenings influenced their online group cultures. Of greater methodological significance seems to be the fact that Strom et al.’s (2018) online gatherings preceded the others by several years. The technological affordances of their Google Hangouts, lacking some of the collaborative tools of the other group’s 2020 versions of Zoom, and slower internet connections, undoubtedly constrained participant interaction toward less multisensorial collaboration and more verbal and text-based ways of communicating.

Group processes also mattered. Strom et al. (2018) describe adhering to individualistic and text-based ways of doing established before they began meeting online. Although their engagement with posthuman concepts led them to consider the agency of the more-than-human, they stopped short of exploring ways to collaborate with digital tools to cultivate affectivity and embodiment in this space. In other words, they did not position the digital platform as a collaborative participant in their learning together. This illuminates the posthuman perspective, in accordance with sociomateriality theory, that affordances do not reside in digital tools and objects themselves, but rather emerge as a co-constitutive relation in which the “[n]atural, artificial, and cultural environments cannot be separated” (Paulus & Lester, 2021, p. 9).

Meeting every day for hours, Bozalek et al. (2021) not only pursued a fluid approach to reading Barad together, but also flattening previous ways of relating, for example, between student and advisor. They also considered the posthuman relationship between participants and the ecology of digital tools employed to facilitate their group learning, cultivating affordances, and creating new group processes and ways of interacting. They experimented with sharing feelings and memories, slow reading out loud, pursuing the potential of tangential wanderings, and pushing digital platforms to novel uses. Furthermore, Bozalek et al. (2021) moved beyond synchronous Zoom meetings with the more mobile and asynchronous WhatsApp platform. This enabled them to engage “at all times of the day and night, extending and expanding connections from one machine to another and one time and place to another, one intra-action to the next, inextricably entangled” (p. 848). Their report suggests that the affective potential of digital gatherings may increase when allowed to flow across multiple platforms and devices, becoming more entangled and embedded with other aspects of everyday life and activity.

Pillay et al. (2021) and Bozalek et al. (2021) both report experiencing a transformation of an online space to an intimate place of safety, familiarity, and flourishing where participants felt present, connected, and capable of touching and being touched. Both reject closeness as resulting from physical proximity and proclaim the potential for generating flows of affective intra-action in online spaces, pointing to methodological choices, especially for those attempting to cultivate posthuman consciousness and subjectivity in online spaces. They demonstrate that doing so requires going beyond engaging posthuman concepts to enacting them through experiments that treat nonhuman digital technologies as affective collaborators with whom we intra-act. These groups that experienced strong senses of affective intra-action and becoming together online shared another similarity: they engaged in artful practices for enfleshing embodied experiences and creating multisensorial virtual places out of online spaces (Pink, 2012).

Enacting Multimodality and Collaborative Artmaking Online as Posthuman Method

Various collective arts practices provided ways of doing differently online, enhancing the affectivity and embodiment experienced in Bozalek et al. (2021) and Pillay et al.’s (2021) small learning groups. Bozalek et al. (2021) described how “photograph[ing their] machines and their appendages” (p. 849) led to an “animated process of ‘cutting and pasting’ [a] photomontage . . . [that] drew [participants] together and in so doing redrew [them]” (p. 850). Pillay et al. (2021) reported that sharing their individual artful memory work, which included visual and narrative vignettes were “embodiment[s] of [their] ideas, fears, and desires” that “enable[d them] to draw funds from the self and help from each other–as enfleshments of solidarity” (p. 9). Inspired by Guyotte et al.’s (2018) projects of enfleshment, Pillay et al. (2021) engaged their own process of expressing and extending embodied feelings through playful intra-actions with materials.

Enacting enfleshment acknowledges “the relationship between our corporeal being and the cultural forms that we inhabit” (Pillay et al., 2021, p. 6) and that bodies extend to various materials, including digital materials, manipulating, shaping, and creating new and further entanglements. Artful inquiry is defined here as a method for exploring, through “a process of enfleshment” (p. 4), the more invisible and immersive aspects of online intra-actions to surface aspects of what might be impossible or difficult to express by attending to what is said or seen on screen. Enfleshment reveals the posthuman nature of expressive artifacts by emphasizing these as imbued with the feelings, ideas, and embodied entanglements of all participants, human and more-than-human, as they are formed and re-formed (Guyotte et al., 2018).

Both groups also go beyond merely sharing individual artistic expressions and reach “toward a more performative arrangement that enacted rather than represented our ongoing entangling web” (Bozalek et al., 2021, p. 849). Pillay et al.’s (2021)

drawings were an embodiment of our ideas, fears, and desires. They opened up a space for the reader to become entangled in the creative moment. The creative freedom of this encounter enfleshed the memory work in a visceral participatory experience and invited readers into further entanglements. (p. 9)

Going beyond just showing personal expressions, then, invited collaborative intra-actions and responses transformed individual pieces into collective enfleshments of group experience, including with potential readers.

The literature reveals that many online CI groups also mention arts-based activities as crucial for creating environments characterized by participatory engagement, multiple ways of knowing, and solidarity across differences, inclusive of the binaries posthumanists are concerned with complexifying (Crowther et al., 2021; Duenkel et al., 2014). These groups documented their individual actions through multimedia storytelling, journaling, drawing, collaging, curating images, writing poems, and other artful methods (Feller et al., 2004; Hanlin-Rowney et al., 2006). Similar to the small online learning groups using posthuman concepts in various ways, these CIs found artful practices helpful in materializing experiences and creating affective virtual places that recognized participants’ embodied selves and relational embeddedness (Perry, 2023).

While CI processes already build in, during their collective reflection phases, space and time for analyzing individually produced reflections of actions performed in action phases, posthuman-informed online group studies helped me think about moving beyond a mere show and tell of participant-produced artifacts. Despite whole person theory’s emphasis on expressive knowing, most CIs still fail to engage in artful practices for surfacing participants’ affective experiences (Heron, 1996). CI’s collective reflection phase has the potential to move in more posthuman directions by engaging participants in further entangling their individual artifacts, diffracting them with others to produce even more complex intra-actions and understandings, and becoming conscious of digital tools as collaborators in this process.

The careful balance struck by Bozalek et al. (2021) and Pillay et al. (2021) in presenting collective products of artful analysis alongside individuals’ particular creative artifacts created greater transparency about how affects flowed within the groups. Collective development becomes more visible when individual expressions are allowed to provide examples of how participants wove personal perceptions, feelings, and memories of others together with their own across myriad differences in geography, history, and other material conditions. Artful methods, then, seem to offer potent ways of maintaining the affective engagement of participants of small online inquiry and learning groups through the processes of analyzing and presenting research. One not insignificant reason for this may be their ability to draw together individual and collective posthuman experiences in compelling ways that diffract experiences while honoring the multiplicity of differences emerging from the complex material reality of what happens in a gathering.

Collective artful analyses present a way to portray the vibrant material and processual nature of virtual CI, revealing the embodied and embedded complexities and multiple hidden realities often left out of analyzing and presenting data. They also introduce the potential for further diffracting experiences toward new affirmative and ethical understandings and configurations of self and other phenomena. The unique affordances of collaborative online tools may facilitate these posthuman intra-actions, as it did for Bozalek et al. (2021) who found in the process of collective digital collaging new ways of conceiving of their collective that, in turn, changed them as individuals. Similarly, McKnight et al. (2017) experienced engaging in collaboratively authored poetic analysis using Google Docs as a way of forging collective sensibilities, of creating the new “we” formations of solidarity across difference that Braidotti’s (2019) posthuman vision calls for.

Ultimately, artful participant intra-actions re-visioned digital objects as agentic, embodied digital materials, “restor[ing] them to the currents of life” (Ingold, 2013, p. 19), and, in so doing, transforming online space into something more-than. Artmaking practices in online small group learning contexts present methodological opportunities for engaging and enacting posthuman concepts in online spaces. They possess the potential to awaken participants to posthuman subjectivities involving their intimate co-creative relationships with digital tools and spaces (Perry, 2021, 2022) as well as the often invisible intra-active relationships that exist between humans.

An Additional Heuristic for Inquiring in Posthuman Worlds

To conclude, I want to propose an additional heuristic to join the eight proposed by Adams and Thompson (2016). Their original eight invited researchers in posthuman digital contexts to (a) Gather anecdotes, (b) Follow the technological actors, (c) Listen to the invitational quality of things, (d) Study technological breakdowns and anomalies, (e) Notice the full diversity of human–technology–world relations, (f) Apply the laws of media, (g) Unravel transitions, and (h) Trace responses and passages. By starting from the embodied experience of inquirers, the heuristic I propose may productively plug into all of their suggested heuristics for encountering digital objects. It also takes seriously Braidotti’s (2018) contention that auto-forms of research (e.g., autoethnography, self-study research, and first-person inquiries) have a significant role to play in cultivating inclusive and ethical posthuman subjectivities, toward the creation of more-than-human worlds. Finally, the following heuristic encapsulates this article’s argument for artful methods as ways to begin, in online human experience, to

Disrupt the material/digital binary by emphasizing the materiality of the digital, which, through practices of enfleshment, trouble a further binary of place/space;

Challenge the embodied/disembodied binary embedded in the notion that physically colocated interactions are an embodied, unmediated mode while online activities are necessarily disembodied and affectively diminished through technological mediation; and,

Collapse the self/other binary by creating new connections and configurations that express complex material entanglements between all participants in digital worlds.

Thus, it recognizes that, in seeking to understand affective more-than-human intra-actions and imagine affirmative and ethical ways forward in a posthuman world, we humans can only ever begin from our embodied experiences and in recognizing how our bodies and their embedded locations matter (Braidotti, 2018).

Heuristic 9: Enacting Artful Diffractions

Pay attention to your personal embodied experience of being, thinking, and doing with digital materials in an online space, within virtual platforms.

You might ask,

Are particular posthuman concepts resonating with my embodied experience? If so, how?

How do the complex digital intra-actions in which I am embedded reveal themselves in my imagination?

How do I feel the virtual potential of these digital materials?

How might vibrant digital materials diffract my experience in different ways?

How am I affecting? How am I being affected?

How might this digital assemblage be expressed?

What might an artful expression of this experience make possible?

What might happen next?

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Shannon A. B. Perry

Author Biography

Shannon A. B. Perry is a doctoral candidate in Learning, Leadership, and Organization Development at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on knowing through affective experiencing, learning in communities of creative practice, and arts-informed methods for cultivating relational subjectivities in diverse higher education spaces.

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