Suitably Strange: Re-imagining learning, scholar-activism, and justice

Abstract

Using artworks emergent from my career as a pracademic and scholar activist, I attempt to share a ‘tactile theory’ of being and doing, that refer mainly to  response-abilities (i.e., abilities to respond in accountable ways) in scholar activist educational sociology. I aim to make visible (and tactile) the  sometimes-invisible qualities and practices needed for navigating the eroded and dying ecological relations of our generation, as well as warming up and  making pliable the heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal and anthropocentric conventions that are associated with it. In order to warm and sculpt  these normative conventions, I argue for the need for ‘suitably strange’ practice. I present six images and associated prose that aim to optimally disrupt  these conventions, towards generative rethinking and embodying learning, scholar activism and justice, and from which I explore a tactile theory, an  example and related response-ability for each. I end with a reflection of how these suitably strange artefacts can help us develop a new concept of    proactive-cognitive justice or ‘justness’.