Qualitative Studies Vol. 8, No. 1, 2023, pp. 250-278 ISSN 1903-7031 there, not there: (un)disciplining study off the writing tracks/tracts Cee Carter1 , Mariam Rashid2 , Benjamin D. Scherrer3 & Korina M. Jocson4 1University of Vermont, College of Education and Social Services, Department of Education, Waterman Building, 85 South Prospect Street, Burlington, VT, 05405 2Vassar College, International Studies Program, 124 Raymond Avenue, Box 270, Poughkeepsie, New York, 12604 3University of Massachusetts Amherst, College of Education 813 North Pleasant St. Amherst, MA 01003 4York University, Faculty of Education, Winters College, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J1P3 For us, “writing off the beaten track” has been propelled by collaborative study of ontoepistemological contributions that break the constraints of western knowledge-making. Black studies and women of color feminisms prompt us to pause long enough to breathe … to interrogate the ellipsis … to sit in the space between words or the dangling punctuation. What’s there (or not there) creatively points to ideas, questions, and methods that subvert the primacy of the western colonial imagination. Our collective writing has often come to us by being worked and reworked, fused and refused in an iterative process, this time with fahima ife’s Maroon Choreography. From homonyms to a wordplay on tracks/tracts, we discuss a writing praxis that has been contoured by radical study and scholarship “actively straying from” disciplined/disciplining conventions. There is always more to knowing and articulating subjects, contexts, and the pursuit of justice. . Keywords: radical study, writing praxis, poetic fragments, breaks/fractures, anachoreography, global ecologies https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1067-7774 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0354-5992 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3001-4609 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1863-9876 C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 251 there, not there: (un)disciplining study off the writing tracks/tracts the word is free but we are not - fahima ife, Maroon Choreography As part contribution to the special issue, we offer wonderings, wanderings, and provocations to illustrate how we study and write off the beaten track of disciplinarity in education. Our inquiry is guided by engagements with radical thinkers and ideas as well as aesthetic practices that support us to embolden our writing. On this occasion for sharing creative expressions and experiments in our study, we invoke fahima ife’s (2021) Maroon Choreography, with “poems, poetic fragments, and lyrical essay …” which “presuppose a way out (of captivity, indebtedness, ecological ruin) by way of minimalist errantry, by way of refusal” (p. ix). As our writing praxis unfolds, we lay bare notes, readings, questions, pauses, stories, and moments that are called up, poured out, and sometimes linger through us as we unsettle the temporal and spatial borders of the western subject’s colonial imagination in our study. We engage ife’s black method and practice of anachoreography, or “opening up to, stammering, and moving again inside our quiet, entangled, pneumatic intimacies” (p. xi). We are enlivened by the wayward possibilities.1 It is perhaps there where the word is free, even if we are not, as ife writes in we communicate together in a language that does not speak (p. 63). 1See Maroon Choreography: “Anachoreography is the feral spirit of study, waywardness, tarrying, ritual, practice, rehearsal, shoal, ceremony, series, rematriation, wake, duration, intimacy, pause, and refusal—given to us in the poiesis of black studies, ecological studies, performance studies, affect studies, and indigenous studies. If dance is the city’s mother tongue, as Fred Moten says, then what secret lives inside the city, in us, before the city, as us, before the clearing, inside air?” (ife, 2021, p. ix) See The Undercommons “But blackness still has work to do: to discover the re-routing encoded in the work of art: in the anachoreographic reset of a shoulder, in the quiet extremities that animate a range of social chromaticisms and, especially, in the mutations that drive mute, labored, musicked speech as it moves between an incapacity for reasoned or meaningful self-generated utterance that is, on the one hand, supposed and, on the other hand, imposed, and a critical predisposition to steal (away)” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 50). C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 252 Our communal writing approach suggests being moved and moving ourselves in contemplation of radical ideas that extend beyond our “fleshly limits.” Where authors’ words on a page felt intimate and inciting, almost as if you were sitting beside them. Where our togetherness altered something and is left lingering in our praxis, in our way of knowing. Where we began to follow an (im)material nudge, or spirit, or haunting, or rememory, whose presence was there. Or not there. Not there in the sense of a defined form. It is perhaps our intimacy with air, pausing to breathe, breath that animates generational storying with beloved kin. It is perhaps synergy and entanglement that can spark writing or pause writing just as we begin tracing the tracks/tracts set out for us in documenting the facts of captivity, indebtedness, and ecological ruin. So a question that guides our “minimalist errantry” (ife, 2021, p. ix) is: How do we (continue to) undiscipline study and play with our writing praxis? In this experimental endeavor, we present connective threads amongst our scholarly inquiries, which meet up with ife’s anachoreography of presupposing a way out of captivity, indebtedness, and ecological ruin by refusing “the choreographed apparatuses of coloniality, its methodologies, its origin stories” (2021, p. ix). Following ife’s invitation, we open ourselves up to creative expressions and inquiries beyond the colonial and plantation imagination, writing in “haltingly staccato undulation” (ife, 2021, p. 87) that is preoccupied with breaking and fracturing the ease with which colonial and plantation logics/capillaries sustain educational studies. It is a staccato that guides the rhythm in our thinking, a staccato that appears in dialogue and blends (in) fragments on the page. It is a staccato that invites the reader to pause, to ponder “where is this going?,” because the fragments may not make sense right in the moment. Instead, the staccato clings to the dangling punctuation … until the next one … only to offer a respite in the form of questions, because there is never a clean ending, only undisciplining, unlearning, unsettling. Our vignettes are informed by improvisational lived moments of quietness and stillness, written with the fragments of our delimited grounds. We offer poetic lines, living curiosities, and unanswered questions (McKittrick, 2021) to stammer through a writing praxis that is elevated by pausing, being still, getting stuck, being with air, breathing, and sharing on a continuous loop. As we share and move again inside our “pneumatic intimacies,” (ife, 2021, p. xi) we document connections and practices that oxygenate our ontoepistemological refusals in educational studies. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 253 mode of study: presupposing a way out { what } { i knew } { was pointless } { there on the river } { of some edge } -fahima ife (2021, p. 70) In a poem titled thirst is a way of knowing, not knowing, ife invites us to a moment with the river. Opening up to a longing. A way of knowing. Of being. The same poem denoted by { } guides us throughout. What if what we know can become pointless (without meaning, without effectiveness, without particular direction, without confinement) when meeting up with the river, as the poet suggests above? A lesson that might be missed as feet and flesh habituate a beaten track. Our study has been sparked by collectively meeting up with radical ideas and writing practices that unsettle what we know and what we are taught to know. Across our scholarly interests, we rethink educational equity’s policies and practices (Cee), trace how refugee resettlement policy facilitates dispossession (Mariam), disrupt disciplined climate change education (Ben), and illuminate critical pedagogical possibilities (Korina). Our interests draw on interdisciplinary scholarship, which inspires our collective study and, slowly, our experiments with (un)disciplinarity. { whose name } { i cannot speak } … { how i became } { an outpouring } { for everyone } -fahima ife (2021, p. 70) For us, wandering beyond the beaten track is prompted by collective engagements that unsettle knowledge, methods, analysis, and ideas shaped by the western canon in the neoliberal academy (Rashid et al., forthcoming). It is also, perhaps, under a global pandemic, active wars, the ever-present threat of state-sanctioned and vigilante violence, climate catastrophe, and forced displacement that we insist on curiosity and yearn for ways of knowing that presuppose a break from captivity, indebtedness, and ecological ruin. Such a historic complexity prompts us to do more than archiving ourselves as categories and objects C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 254 that are answerable to the coloniality of time, place, and labor (Carter & Jocson, 2022b; Hartman, 2008; Patel, 2016). Thus, we work toward fractures and disruptions through knowledge-making and collective sharing. Those fractures have come in our study of scholars who break with/from the reproduction of academic writing. For example, Katherine McKittrick (2021) weaves a series of stories that unsettle a deference to coloniality and urges us to venture off the beaten track: I share Dear Science [...] as a study of how we come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems. Science is present— it is tied to the curiosities noted above – but it is restless and uncomfortably situated and multifarious rather than definitive and downward-pressing. This is a book about black livingness and ways of knowing. This shift—from studying science to studying ways of knowing—has allowed me to work out where and how black thinkers imagine and practice liberation… (p. 3) Toward freeing blackness from a captive position, as always already biocentrically abject and dispossessed of the proper tools for thought and civil sociality (Judy, 2020), the stories in Dear Science fracture an academic deference to descriptively rehearsing colonial knowledge. The “asymmetrically connected knowledge systems” through which black people come to know ourselves/themselves, as well as expressive black life, are illustrated through her engagements with a radical lineage of black thinkers, multiple black creative texts (including images and music playlists), abundant footnotes, poetic looping of key points, and so much more. Her words and writing approach are aesthetically inviting as they make plain how conventions of knowing have been and can be subverted to tell expansive stories of blackness that exceed (yet are always navigating) captivity. McKittrick’s aesthetic practice has prompted our thinking with music and sound, poetry, and words that elide mere description and binary opposition. { was the alchemy } { of our existence }… { how i became } { an outpouring } { for everyone } -fahima ife (2021, p. 70) C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 255 In addition to ife’s (2021) invitation to consider the possibilities of presupposing a way out of indebtedness, we have turned to thought experiments and lessons from scholars such as Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Stefano Harney. In contemplation of Black Lives Matter, “a movement and call to respond to everyday events of racial violence (the killing of unarmed black persons by police)” (para. 2), Silva (2017) discusses the notion of value as stipulated by philosophers of modern reason, exposing the beaten track of dialectics. That is, the routine practice of resolving to one side or the opposite of an argument or concept. She also illustrates a thought experiment, which claims “a radical praxis of refusal to contain blackness in the dialectical form” (para. 43). At the heart of her experiment and her work in Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007) is an effort to expose limits of deploying “blackness as a category of difference” for our emancipatory projects. In doing so, one is loyal to a Hegelian philosophic project that depends on racial knowledge for the determining and adjudicating of the proper minds and social configurations. Yet Silva’s analytical groundwork provides an opening for moving beyond indebtedness, or seeking what’s owed as a form of justice. She asserts: For the work of blackness as a category of difference fits the Hegelian movement but has no emancipatory power because it functions as a signifier of violence which, when deployed successfully, justifies the otherwise unacceptable, such as the deaths of black persons due to state violence (in the US and in Europe) and capitalist expropriation (in Africa).” (Silva, 2017, para. 43) Silva releases the tools of the subject (post-Enlightenment concepts of self-determination, dialectical analysis, philosophic traditions, categories of difference) as a way of presupposing our way out of indebtedness, and activates “blackness’s disruptive force,” (para. 3) to fracture the imposition of modernity and its meaning-making systems. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013) make similar moves in proposing a fugitive planning and black study praxis that upends credit and debt as bases for seeking justice. Their counter expressions in study are guided by an “unpayable debt,” (p. 150) or the idea that the C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 256 continued atrocities, which allow plantocratic logics to thrive, can never be repaid. Unpayable debt prompts us to be engaged in study and justice praxes that allow debt to become a “principle of elaboration,” where owing is lost and “more generative” (p. 150) ways of being in relation to one another are explored outside the credit-debt dichotomy. Silva, Moten, and Harney’s fractures in the colonially imposed notion of indebtedness inform the ways in which our study praxis has explored how to experiment in writing, searching for ways to express ourselves beyond arguments (ife, 2021) as well as beyond financial and moral obligation. A praxis that also lends itself to presupposing a way out of ecological ruin. [W]hat unregulated qualities of air flourish in our global ecologies? What otherwise porous ecosystems emerge, or do we have access to, by way of deep listening? (ife, 2021, pp. xi-xii) In Maroon Choreography, ife asks a series of unanswered questions on air and movement. These questions move us to ponder how tracts of land, plots and demarcated geometric forms make ecological relatedness illegible. At the same time, ife gestures towards a method of deep listening that considers air, land, and water. What is still there, identifiable but in demarcation, maybe always will be there (or not there) in time and space, in but beyond binary. ife hints at a more fluid ungraspable relation. Rivers, tidewaters, and wetlands seep and flow through ife’s poetics. In sharp contrast, the steamy in-between ecosystems have been written through white anxieties as dangerous, dark, and haunted. Architect of modern settler landscape, Frederick Law Olmsted, authored a 1856 account A Journal in the Seaboard Slave States describing swamps as dangerous spaces “where social order loses its power and the lowest of creatures determine the fates of their masters” (p. 17), places where ordered landscape entangles with the mental and juridical models and distinct form of relation that conquest and extraction depend. In wetlands, paths cannot be traced and tracks dissolve in the thick waters in a ghostly temporality resisting reclamation. Mixtures of watery earth defy western ideas of purity, related distinctions in terraqueous space that are unfit for cultivation but suited instead for fugitive shelter. Fugitive rebellion denaturalizes the C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 257 colonizing qualities of whiteness that measure all other forms of life against itself (Scherrer, 2022; Wynter, 2003). In tracts that dissolve colonizing possibility, the maroon is animated, attending to forms of mixing, where fugitives and castaways vanish, without a noticeable track, what is there but not there strikes fear, contesting regulated form. Tracts that resist reclamation are the places of worldmaking, of marronage. In ecological (un)knowability, the composition of water and air in relation to the flows of sedimented land, nothing is ever still, always humming and vibrating, (in)visible currents and waves break from one medium into another. Breaking from straightjacketed arteries as capital, unknowable relations in between. Presupposing a way out of ecological ruin. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 258 fragments, vignettes, and storying tracks/tracts We turn now to undisciplining study, to show experiments in our writing. Through play, we “write rebelliously”2 (Lopez, 2022). In the writing fragments that follow, we offer our living curiosities, unanswered questions, and poetic lines. We draw on notes. We revisit previous writings. We grapple with what can be said or not said. We contemplate what happens when we write and get stuck. We welcome air that pushes us off the beaten track. We allow the dangling lines to cross pollinate (ife, 2021). We show a writing praxis that is humbled by our attempts at undisciplining study. The fragments make explicit our staccato writing rhythm. They offer up connections between us (social and geographic locations, languages, pasts-presents-futures). The staccato animates. Lines meet up, hang, exchange. They go back and forth with one another. The nodes come together to communicate in a language that does not speak. A method in process. A methodological approach in an unfolding present. Coming together in itself, not by itself, not by ourselves. To create potential openings, breaks, and fractures if we allow the coming together, if we allow ourselves to be open, to stay open (ife, 2021). We learn from that which is not spoken while communing (and communicating) together, to accentuate lessons from our experimental writing. The lessons we take with us teach us about fracturing as a way of knowing. *** Brick by brick. We build ideas. We lay down words. Sometimes, we pause long enough to breathe … to interrogate the ellipsis … to sit in the space between words, to wonder about the dangling punctuation. We close our eyes and take a deeper breath to see what else might 2 In Curriculum Inquiry’s Writing Fellowship and Writers’ Retreat, Licho Lopez Lopez’s workshop on “writing rebelliously” centers play as a “form of rebellion” and shares inspiration about “writing and writing otherwise.” Highlights from the workshop were generously made available on social media (#CIWF22). C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 259 come. But nothing comes. What does one do? When the pen refuses to touch paper, or when the cursor stops dancing on the page, what does one do in the moment? Stuck. Every writer has been here. It is a familiar place of growth, of learning. Or of struggle. Of coercion. Of collusion with academic productivity. Though we do not know if we can get away from it as academic writers, we seek something other than productivity in our study. For us, we have looked to each other. We have asked off-the-cuff questions, even devised thinking prompts to get (back) into a flow. Again. We have turned to poetry, music, and visual art to spark our cognitive synapses in new ways. We have adjusted the volume and jammed to sonic rhythms. We have enlivened our walks, to add a strut, a beat to each step, to go in directions never been. Unafraid of what various terrains might bring. On concrete. On dirt trails. On grasslands. On the sand. That moment arrives and we find ourselves open to possibilities. Unstuck. We explore where the possibilities have taken us. Brick by brick. The path forms. The tracks come into view. There is something there, not there. We pause. Again. This time to interrogate what is beneath the tracks that seem to be repeating in pattern. Legacies of colonial logics. Like railroads of manifest destiny. We are conditioned to do just that. And we are exhausted. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 260 How do we break from everyday tracks, plantation tracts, routines for colonial thinking, to reimagine everyday practice? How do we undo the violence from hierarchy, racialization, and imperialism? How do we live through the violence, and still (re)make the world? We write. We undiscipline study. We cultivate writing off the beaten path, the everyday tracks and plantation tracts of/in our lives. *** Part of our collective aim is to invite a conversation about naming stories and the entangled messiness in digital storytelling. McKittrick’s (2006) discussion of black women’s geographies is integral to ‘thinking about the production of space as unfinished, a poetics of questioning’ (p. xxiii). With this thinking exercise comes many possibilities for critical discussions with space, place, and landscape as a way to open up analysis of our own geographies, the locations we share, where we are always entangled, where we depart, and where we meet again. (Jocson et al., 2022, p. 147) *** Track (noun) 1. a footprint whether recent or fossil 2. a. detectable evidence (such as the wake of a ship, a line of footprints, or a wheel rut) that something has passed b. a path made by or as if by repeated footfalls; TRAIL c. a course laid out especially for racing d. the parallel rails of a railroad Track (verb) 1. a. to follow the tracks or traces of b. to search for by following evidence until found C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 261 2. a. to follow by vestiges b. to observe or plot the moving path of 3. a. to carry mud (or other material) on the feet and deposit b. to make tracks upon (from Merriam-Webster) Imperial tracks. Geographies. Entanglements. Migrations. Movements. iron snake ===/=== train tracks ===/=== ghost towns: a vignette C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 262 Figure 1: Uganda Railways, Theodore Roosevelt3 In rememory, we partly turn to folklores gifted to us about railroads and train tracks folklores passed from generation to generation about prophetic visions of Mekatilili wa Menza Samoei Arap Koitalel and Mugo wa Kibiru to explore how colonial and imperial tracks animate and reproduce different tracks that re-emerge, mutate, and take on different formations and configurations4 3President Theodore Roosevelt and traveling companions (1909) mount the observation platform in Kenya on the Uganda Railway at the start of a game hunt. Retrieved from: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uganda_Railways_-_Theodore_Roosevelt.jpg 4The prophecy of the iron snake in Imperial British East Africa emerged from stories, oral histories, and folklore gathered and passed on to different generations. These forms of knowledge can be argued are relational to and are embedded within the black radical tradition. Mekatilili wa Menza, a freedom fighter https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uganda_Railways_-_Theodore_Roosevelt.jpg C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 263 tracks that spewed violence, caused harm and damage as shown in the ghostly white silhouettes of the photograph in 1909 U.S. President Roosevelt paid a visit to East Africa guest of the British East Africa Company, front row seat to the project of opening up tracts in the so-called hinterland we interrogate these recurring patterns patterns that play out in classrooms, study writing, knowledge construction etcetera our memories, our lives take us (back) to those moments moments we sat under trees listening to folklores from wise folks in community stories and narrations about a vicious metal snake and foreigner /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\:> a snake that would eat and eat and eat and eat a snake whose belly would never know enough /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\:> In the hills, as narration goes, lived a famous Nandi prophet Koitale Arap Samoei Samoei prophesied the coming of a vicious snake, a metal snake that would make its way across the savanna, the hills, the rivers the mountains, and head towards the big lake and prophetess from the Agiriama community resisted the British and prophesied the coming of the iron snake. Similar prophecies were made by Koitalel Arap Samoei of Nandi Community, and Mugo wa Kibiru of the Agikuyu. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 264 this vicious snake would devour and destroy anything it came across both human and more than human people, wildlife, water, land, name it accompanying this vicious snake a ghost never seen before it would take over and rule the land, the water, the people and everything else as we put pen to paper, we remember this folklore and many others gifted to us folklores that give us possibilities to point out the ghosts that linger in our minds and social realities waiting for us to follow the tracks derailed with our own curiosities, we move away /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\:> More colonial tracks. Taking land and water. A(nother) taking through language. Because language is a colonizing tool. <:/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ Unquestioned phrases in daily conversations. We push back (and take back) the power of language. In multilingual multigenerational households, it is not uncommon to hear the elongated rolling of Rs and double diphthongs sliding out to greet each day. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 265 Magandang umaga (good morning), kain na tayo (let’s eat), tayo na (let’s go), buenas noches (good night), sueños dulces (sweet dreams), and cierran los ojos (close your eyes) have been part of purposeful engagements. By association, sueños and ojos have given rise to “me despierto…me elevo” (I wake up…I rise) in rhyming occasions with books like Maya Christina Gonzalez 's (2014) Call Me Tree / Llámame Arbol. Gradually, over time, we have talked more and read more together to underscore the relationship between land/islands, languages, and cultures in the Philippines through a series of books that features folk songs musically edited by Felicidad Prudente (2019) such as Ed-Eddoy (Ifugao). Pakitong-Kitong (Cebuano), and Kaisa-Isa Niyan (Maguindanon). Each story tells of regional customs and traditions in the Philippines. Each story also extends a popular book, Bahay Kubo, meaning nipa hut, which is based on a song of the same name. The song version in Filipino/Tagalog has been hummed in our household many times… Today, my daughter knows the song in its entirety and can identify many of the vegetables named in the Bahay Kubo lyrics. (Jocson, 2021, p. 358) C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 266 A lesson of care. Living together. Using language to see and be in the world. *** realms: a vignette thirst is a way of knowing, not knowing { what } { i knew } { was pointless } { there on the river } { of some edge } { whose name } { i cannot speak } { was the alchemy } { of our existence } { inside our body } { a hollowness } { an aloofness } { so devout } { i began to call it } { holy } { how i glistened } { for no one } { other than myself } { how i became } { an outpouring } { for everyone } { a cool drink of sorrow } { laced with gold } -fahima ife (2021, p. 70) *** Pausing long enough, we/they commune beyond fleshly limits. We/they see one another. A moment of pausing with. In the middle. Before. Respite. A moment that arrives through stillness, through contemplation, through letting go and being mutually dispossessed of knowing and knowledge that contains, that archives debt and ruin. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 267 the word is free Is it a portal to writing, running, walking off the beaten track? Choosing to be at odds with the world5 as we commune with air? Getting lost in the possibility of another world? the word is free but we are not Feeling stuck in the limits of “locations and languages” (Nagar, 2019, p. 7)? Pause in consideration, in contemplation of word choice, in contemplation of saying the oft unsayable yet thinkable. Sit. Question the use of terms that work for the verifiable, the fixed, the housed, the positioned (Harney & Moten, 2013). That respite … undisciplines study. Being with each other. Still. Being with sound. Enraptured. Being with words. Tongue tied. Being with sorrow. Lost. Being with air. Wild. Pointless. Flowing. Reanimates straying. Tapping into those who carry the message, “inequitable systems of knowledge can be, and are, breached by creative human aesthetics” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 153). Heard and read and practiced in various iterations. the word is free but we are not Thirst as a way of knowing. Not quenchable. Thirsting for what provokes and lingers— announcing its possibility. Find yourself meandering to engage with what is difficult to put into words. Stammering as to not repeat the harms. Stammering to unstick. Communing with what is beyond here or there. Live and breathe outside of linear time and formalized space. Let virtuality guide the imagination of our existence (Silva, 2014; Silva, 2016). Searching for a way out by communing with airy movements. 5 See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: "Felicity Street" (On Tom Dent, fahima ife, and New Orleans) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 268 the word is free Black study confronts knowing. It does not dare to know as Kant (Badley, 2021). Refusing post-Enlightenment words, logics, antics, self-assuredness. It opens up multiple ways of knowing. Revisiting and tending to pulsing words. Singing words that provoke and create anew. Daring to undiscipline freedom as we know it (Walcott, 2021). Welcoming another existence. Stepping into another realm. A persistent reminder: the word is free but we are not *** S t a c c a t o. Fragments. A rhythm in writing. Breaks/fractures, in thought, in writing. We rebel. We write rebelliously. Why not? C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 269 Breaks/Fractures ====/\/\/\/\====/\/\/\/\==== Break to disrupt the order or compactness of to make ineffective as a binding force to stop or bring to an end suddenly (from Merriam-Webster) Fracture to damage or destroy as if by rupturing to cause great disorder in to break up to go beyond the limits of (something, such as a rule) (from Merriam-Webster) We look back on our own writing tracks. Digital storytelling. Pláticas. Kuwentos. Relational poetics. Sonic engagements. We have experimented with writing and are (still) inclined to experiment some more. What do we notice when looking back at our own writing tracks? There are traces of methodological openings. To push boundaries here and there. The crevices lead us to deeper curiosities and enter unfamiliar terrains where disciplines collide or diffuse into new(er) inquiries. Altered ways of knowing. Sometimes, the break is in the conversation before writing touches the page. In between the lines. In between the spaces between lines. In the revisions. The many revisions. The changes upon changes within revisions. Fracturing western episteme and letting the tongue-pen go C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 270 wildly. Remembering. Rememory. Because colonization and colonial histories haunt us. So, we remember and prepare for another story. Writing a poem has become for me, at least in part, an attempt to find out some things and to try to work through some things intellectually, emotionally, and musically… That process is a struggle toward language that tries to struggle toward things; it is movement in preparation. (Fred Moten in an interview with Charles Henry Rowell, 2004, p. 956) Elsewhere, we have shown how we write between and across poetic lines. What is (not) said lingers on the page, from left to right, lines-becoming-arms stretching out toward one another. *** My mother tongue What is my mother tongue? Kinubi? Luo? Kiswahili? Which one is mine? *** *** The hair down my back used to shine Dance in the easterly breeze But now it hides twisted in a bun *** (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 406) At that moment, we asked, why us, why now? We noted what came to us: C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 271 There is something in rememory. That something may not be readily visible, but it is felt. As Rhee (2021) notes, rememory is in space and time, a place we have known even through the lens of Others. The haunting is an ever- present reminder seeping through the cultural memories of living in and out of colonial and postcolonial worlds, across various spaces and times…The disruption in our lives – along with dislocation and disconnection from place, from home – simply cannot be explained away. (Rashid & Jocson, 2021, p. 406) Still, questions insisted on untameability as illuminated by another past exchange. To unleash a domesticated practice and surge with “a wild tongue” (Anzaldúa, 1987, p. 53). Speaker1: What is an untameable tongue? Something that has been captured or attempted to be captured but finds itself beyond capture? When we release our tongues from being tamed, what are we (or our tongues) attempting to do? What are we escaping from? Freeing ourselves from? Becoming? Unbecoming? Perhaps we find each other beyond the colonial, neoliberal expressions of the university. We find each other in writing, in becoming, in readings, in questions. Perhaps untameability signals the nonlinear, signals a space of coming togetherness without formal determinacy as also echoed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. Even if only briefly, in moments where we connect beyond what is set out for us. Untameability presses against the institution and its scientific, economic, racial exploits. It holds sense-making in contention, welcoming the refusal. Speaker2: What else can happen when we release our imagination from complicity and form? What else might be said when we untame our tongues? (Carter & Jocson, 2022a, p. 236) The questions persisted, only to be embraced in our current practice. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 272 What creates or shapes a beaten track? What is left by the wayside or simply discarded in making space for the track to be beaten? What are other forms of pressure in the weathered terrain? What frictions and tensions erode the tracks? What of fire, wind and ice? What of tracks and space where one cannot follow? The unknowable. We wander/wonder … and go where the air flows. Tracks as in sky as in constellations. Tracks without light. Tracks with sound as in music as in trees rustling in the night. Tracks as in paths as in roads, far far away. Tracks as in water as in wakes as in swamps as in wetlands. Tracks as in sand as in the bottomless sea. Multiple tracks … ttrraacckkkss that form fractals and traces that remain (or don’t remain). How do we desire new ones? Or disrupt the patterns to set off (more) new ones? To create breaks and unleash the potential of connections. What breaks and fractures will it require to think and write off the beaten track? What forms will conversations take? What will untameable tongues bring about when we think beyond tracks, old tracks, colonial tracks, plantation tracts? C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 273 For us as educators, the implications are many. We want to break free from tracking in schools, the carceral tracks that do nothing but undermine creative and playful expression. *** … we have been inspired to enter conversations about schooling inequities where we come together to explore the geographies already contoured by our journeys, what these geographies indicate about K-20 education, and the ways we have contemplated the possibilities and limits of our ongoing work in this seemingly concrete, yet unfinished, educational system. Furthermore, it is this opportunity to consider where we are, or what McKittrick (2006) and Glissant (1997) suggest as our ‘place,’ in a relational poetics of questioning. (Jocson et al., 2022, p. 147) *** Our writing praxis makes plausible questions and connections. Returning to stories from our youth, communicating together in a language that does not speak. Revisiting what has been said or not said. Reminiscing to unravel ghostlines and hauntings, joys and pleasures. Unsettling requires constant un/doing. (Un)tracking our minds. The word track—tract—is layered with history. We cannot help but think of track/tract in relation to the colonial logics of/in transportation. Intercontinental. Roads. Railways. Indentured labor. Servitude. The Oregon Trail. The Gold Rush. Immigration. Zoning. Redlining. Covenants. Highways. Noise. Excavation. Commemoration. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 274 What more is there on the page6? What else resonates? 6 Living Curiosities, (Un)Answered Questions Today. A daily routine. A ride on the bus, metro, subway, tube, train. Track as in (race)track. Old money. Plantation money. Track and Field. Competition. Domination. Racialization. Track as in music tracks. Industry. Entertainment. Production. Copyright. Old money. New money. Track as in ability tracking. Schools. Factories. Prisons. Reproduction. Segregation. Desegregation. Corporatization. Track as in tracking footprints. Indigeneity. Lineage. Generations. Track as in fracking. Pipelines. Resources. Dispossession. Desecration. Track as in tract in relation to plantation logics. Tractors. Traction. Extraction. Land. Water. Wetlands. Landmarks. Parklands. Attraction(s). Present day amusement. There are many others. At this juncture, what is expanded when we break tracks? Or when we think relationally about tracts? What happens when a detonation of ideas seizes the moment? Where are the lines of flights? To pick up speed away from tracks of western modernity. What happens when there isn’t a lot of friction to keep steady? What happens when there is too much friction? Velocity. Viscosity. What new(er) lines of flight and inquiries are created? Waveforms. Wavelengths. What happens in schools? What does this look like inside schools? In everyday life? To shape how we think and study and write. C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 275 References Anzaldúa, G., 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Badley, G. F. (2021). We must write dangerously. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(6), 716-722. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800420933306 Carter, C. & Jocson, K.M. (2022a). Untaming/untameable tongues: Methodological openings and critical strategies for tracing raciality. International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 45(3), 232-245. https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2022.2043843 Carter, C. & Jocson, K.M. (2022b). Where the repetition fades: black feminist lessons and (sonic) critiques beyond critical whiteness studies. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2061729 Harney, S. & Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. New York: Minor Compositions. Hartman, S. V. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe, 26(12), 1-14. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115 ife, f. (2021). Maroon choreography. Duke University Press. Jocson, K.M., Carter, C., Correa, O., McIntee, K., Rashid, M., Scherrer, B. D. & Smith Jean-Denis, A. (2022). Plateaus, puzzles, and PhDs: Un/making knowledge differently through digital storytelling. Educational Studies, 58(2), 141-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2021.2010081 Jocson, K.M. (2021). Mama, let’s read!: Critical race perspectives and the centrality of language in everyday literacies. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 65(4), 355-359. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1209 Judy, R. A. (2020). Restless flying, A black study of revolutionary humanism. boundary 2, 47(2), 91-118. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-8193257 Lopez, L. L. Curriculum Inquiry [@CI_Editors]. (2022, June 16). Opening her "writing rebelliously" workshop this afternoon, @licholopezlopez invites #CIWF22 to play, which she notes is a form of rebellion [Tweet]. Twitter. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077800420933306 https://doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2022.2043843 https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2022.2061729 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2021.2010081 https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1209 https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1209 https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-8193257 https://twitter.com/licholopezlopez https://twitter.com/licholopezlopez https://twitter.com/hashtag/CIWF22?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/hashtag/CIWF22?src=hashtag_click C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 276 https://twitter.com/CI_Editors/status/1537494639791448064 McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Durham: Duke University Press. Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Break. 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Toward a Black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of Blackness https://twitter.com/CI_Editors/status/1537494639791448064 https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fracture https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/track https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12399 https://doi.org/10.1177%2F15327086211028675 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300986 https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2022.2041977 C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 277 toward the end of the world. The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research, 44(2), 81-97. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690 Silva, D.F.D. (2016). “On difference without separability.” In D. Ferreira da Silva and A. Neuman, 4 waters: Deep implicancy [Accompanying Reading]. 4 waters: Deep implicancy Art Exhibition, Toronto, ON, Canada. April 18. https://canadianart.ca/reviews/denise-ferreira-da-silva-and-arjuna-neuman/ Silva, D.F.D. (2017). 1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞-∞ or ∞/∞: on matter beyond the equation of value. E-flux, 79. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond- the-equation-of-value/ TheLabSF. (2022, May 5). Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: "Felicity Street" (On Tom Dent, fahima ife, and New Orleans) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU Walcott, R. (2021). The long emancipation: Moving toward Black freedom. Duke University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257 – 337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. Acknowledgments We are grateful to UC2 for generating foresight, support, and intellectual practice in relational ways. This writing is dedicated to unlearning, and doing so through a space sustained by care. We are especially grateful to reviewers and editors of the special issue for their thoughtful engagement. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690 https://canadianart.ca/reviews/denise-ferreira-da-silva-and-arjuna-neuman/ https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/ https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-on-matter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswqI-SG4DU https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 C. Carter, M. Rashid, B. Scherrer & K. M. Jocson: there, not there Qualitative Studies 8(1), pp. 250-278 ©2023 278 About the Authors: Cee Carter applies black feminist methodologies to trace the limits of educational equity in law and policy. As a queer black feminist scholar, gardener, educator, and music lover, Cee’s work draws on an array of creative texts to inform liberatory shifts in teaching, learning, and inquiry. Cee enjoys writing as the quiet night dances into early morning … after thoughts have had a chance to rest. Once resting thoughts enliven through songs, quotes, pens, fingers, pauses, and more, Cee’s writing becomes a space for learning, unlearning, relearning, and revising. Mariam Rashid is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Vassar College. Her research interests are in global refugee resettlement policies and practices, coloniality of displacement, and issues of statelessness within minority peoples in East Africa. Mariam’s current research draws on black studies, black feminist thought, and forms of diasporic feminism to explore racialized, gendered, and colonial policies informing refugee resettlement in the US. Mariam’s writing is animated by quotidian knowledge-making praxis of black women in the diaspora. She enjoys engaging with poetics and storying. Benjamin D. Scherrer is a PhD candidate in education and W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work draws from black studies, river and wetland ecologies, and critical cartographic practices. Through archival study, his current project works towards disrupting disciplined climate change education by deciphering colonial flooding and catastrophe. He is interested in practices located materially outside or outdoors, in aesthetic engagement with affective elements that enliven what is put on the page. Korina M. Jocson is an associate professor of education at York University. Her scholarship draws on the humanistic social sciences to help illuminate theoretical and pedagogical possibilities through forms of writing, including poetic and visual texts. She embraces moments of respite and the stillness in random walks. She is the author of award-winning Youth Media Matters: Participatory Cultures and Literacies in Education, and a forthcoming book on race, gender, and technology at the school-work nexus.