How theory matters in feminist posthumanist new materialist research

Educational researchers and doctoral students are expected to have and/or use a conceptual or theoretical framework. From a FPNM perspective, this presumption presents some concerns: one, concepts and theories are not pre-existing things, ‘out there’, waiting for us to ‘apply’ them to a pre-existing question or problem; and two, it tends to hide how frameworks shape, define and mould research and researchers in particular ways. However, some researchers have worked with theory as a means to disrupt and defamiliarize dominant practices and categories (Ball, 1995; Lather & Smithies, 1997; Cannella, 1997; Butler, 1990/2006). In FPNM research, theory is an emergent material, practical, political, and relational practice entailing a socially engaged and situated mode of producing knowledge (Coole & Frost, 2010). Taking inspiration from the philosophy of immanence in which concepts are ‘invented’ and continually ‘created anew’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), from posthumanist work which emphasizes the pluralization of ontology beyond the human (Braidotti, 2019; Bennett, 2016), from post-species work (Haraway, 2016), and from reconceptualizations of theory as a material-discursive practice (Barad, 2007; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012), FPNM puts theory to work as a move against human-centric objective mastery. In FPNM, theory is an emergent, embodied, processual practice of knowledge-ing (Taylor, 2021) where theory always materializes in entangled acts of living-researching-becoming.