Open Space - November 2026 : Posthuman Adeventuring

2 November 2026 
Overview
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Open Space - November 2026 , Posthuman Adeventuring
5.30 - 7.00pm UK time To attend, please email melissa@melissadunlop.com for the zoom link. You don't need to be a member to attend Open Space sessions.

Posthuman Adventuring

 

with Helen Bowstead, Ken Gale & Mary Garland

 

Inspired by Erin Manning's presentation at the Adventures in Posthumanism reading group in 2022, we - Helen, Ken, Mary - began to write together. The words flowed between the three, rarely in the same rhythm and often ‘out of step’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002, p. 13), but always in an ‘already absent collaboration’ (St. Pierre, 2014).

 

This invitation to contribute to a Cani-Net Open Space session has provoked us into revisiting these collaborative writings that made their way into a book: 'Posthuman Adventuring: Moments, Movements, Encounters' (chapter 6). Working with Manning’s concept of 'anarchiving', we explore together-apart the generative potential of writing on the move. As Manning suggests, the anarchive needs the archive from which to depart and through which to pass. Thus, the chapter becomes a springboard creating possibilities for “formative tendencies; compositional forces seeking a new taking-form; lures for further process” (3 Ecologies, n.d.).

 

With "writing only really know[ing] what it's after once it has begun to make its way into the world" (Manning, 2016, p. ix), we are looking forward to seeing and sharing this new writing with you. We are even more excited about the collaborative writings that will emerge on the day!

 

Biographies

 

Helen is an Academic Developer within the Centre for Teaching Enhancement and Innovation at the University of Plymouth. She is interested in the generative potential of collaborative and post-qualitative approaches to writing and educational research.
 
Ken has been working in education for over 50 years. Now, as an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth, he writes, thinks in the act, and creates concepts freely and wildly in affirmatively critiquing and actively challenging what he perceives to be the formalities, constraining lassitudes and neoliberal intentions and practices of contemporary higher education. To this end, his recent books Madness as Methodology (2018), Writing and Immanence (2023) and his forthcoming book, Creating anarchy in the archive: differentiating thinking, acting and inquiry in pedagogy and research (2027) are written as, 'parapedagogies of resistance' (Manning, 2025) with the intention of creatively disrupting, troubling and problematising existing research and pedagogical practices in higher education at the current time.
 
In her recent book, 'Post Qualitative Inquiry in Academia' (2024), Mary uses post qualitative inquiries to challenge discursively constructed structures and conventional academic writing practices in the academy. She continues to write experimentally and speculatively, welcoming glimmerings of the unexpected and the not yet known.