Transmaterial walking with student video dartaphact: a diffractive encounter with gender matterings of school spaces

This chapter brings transmaterial walking into relation with one student video dartaphact in diffractive encounter to consider the gendered materialities of school structures, spaces and affects. Short video dartaphacts were created by senior secondary students in filmmaking workshops designed to explore gendered experience through an emergent feeling-making-thinking process. Thinking with Barad, I suggest this process, that I'm calling affective filmmaking, is a practice of affective-material intra-action with school worlds. Diffractive encounters as a method of analysis recognise data as phenomena in which meaning is dynamic and relational; what is made possible and what is excluded shifting with each encounter. Transmaterial walking operates as a diffractive grating that attends to relational forces of matter, affect and intensity produced in the movement through school spaces with the student dartaphact. This encounter unsettles and ruptures normative hierarchies and binaries embedded in school structures (and policies) that welcome some bodies as they destabilise and erase others. Insights into specific sites and experiences resonate beyond in their entanglement with forces of power, policy and practice.