Diffractive Questioning and Working with Fragments? Researching Creativity in 21st-Century Higher Education

This article is developed from a presentation given at the 4th International Conference of Possibility Studies. In the context of a doctoral project in higher education, it explores how students, lecturers and materialised learning environments participate in creative work in interdisciplinary settings. In a series of walking ‘intra-views’, the intra-actions of humans, more-than-humans and disciplines, are conceptualised within an agential realist framework. The article contributes two methodological strategies which strive to implement Karen Barad’s proposal of a diffractive methodology. These two strategies, diffractive questioning and working with text fragments, are presented in the specific context of interdisciplinary modules taken by students in their second year of undergraduate study at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. For each strategy, I clarify how theoretical concepts were used, and share excerpts from materialised conversations about experiences of creative learning and teaching. The final section considers questions emerging from the post-presentation discussions at the conference. Consistent with agential realism, this article does not claim to provide a fixed ‘formula’ for diffractive analysis. Rather, its purpose is to offer specific examples of analysis, for further diffraction by researchers interested in using an agential realist framework.