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Abstract
My dissertation analyzes the interplay of justice, art museum education, and posthuman theory in the context of single-visit 4th grade school tours at an art museum. Using a post qualitative approach (St. Pierre, 2017; 2021), my inquiry explored how guided school tours in an art museum created unplanned, minor gestures of justice. Grounded in posthuman theory, particularly the work of Rosi Braidotti (2013, 2019a), and a conceptualization of the art museum as an assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987), my study moved beyond humanist social justice frameworks to consider how guided school tours might function as transversal sites of becoming, where justice is not imposed but, instead, realized as part of immanent, embodied, and emergent processes. My goal with the writing of my dissertation was to meld experience and thinking, echoing the way theory influenced what I thought and knew and did and felt while entangled in my study. I explored ideas of the partial, fragmentary (MacLure, 2013), and speculative in my writing process. As a cartography, a mapping of both record and speculation that politically and epistemically documents “the production of alternative knowledges” (Braidotti, 2018, p. xvi), my dissertation experiments with conveying the ways that an art museum assemblage, students, educators, objects, and spaces converged unpredictably during my inquiry. My writing charts school tours forming collective transversal assemblages (Braidotti, 2018) that temporarily unsettled normative museum structures. Instead of asking “How do we change the museum?” my dissertation asks “How can we move differently with/in it?” Inspired by the thinking-writing-doings of Manning (2016), Rousell (2021), and Ellsworth (2004), my study suggests an anomalous pedagogy of small justices made of slight shifts and little turns and a collection of propositions for justice-in-the-making.