The Minor Gesture. (2013) Erin Manning. Series: Thought in the Act https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv111jhg1
This book begins in a minor key and works to create a field of resonance for the minor. It does so through the concept of the minor gesture. The minor gesture, allied to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the minor, is the gestural force that opens experience to its potential variation. It does this from within experience itself, activating a shift in tone, a difference in quality (Manning, 2013:1).
Cite as: Manning, E. (2013). The Minor Gesture. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv111jhg1
The Minor Gesture Introduction PDF: https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780822374411_A35629198/preview-9780822374411_A35629198.pdf
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Ten Propositions for Research-Creation. (2016) Erin Manning, with images by Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley.
Research-creation generates new forms of experience; it situates what often seem like disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression; it hesitantly acknowledges that normative modes of inquiry and containment often are incapable of assessing its value; it generates forms of knowledge that are extra-linguistic; it creates operative strategies for a mobile positioning that take these new forms of knowledge into account; it proposes concrete assemblages for rethinking the very question of what is at stake in pedagogy, in practice, and in collective experimentation (Manning, 2015:133).
Cite as: Manning, E. (2016). Ten Propositions for Research-Creation. In: Colin, N., Sachsenmaier, S. (eds) Collaboration in Performance Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462466_7
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The Case for Minor Gestures (2023). Danah Abdulla & Pedro J. S. Vieira de Oliveira DOI: 10.7764/disena.22.Article.6
This paper lays out the groundwork for a concept we define as minor gestures within design education. Moving away from a conversation centered around decolonization—a term, we argue, that has been co-opted to become a placeholder for equality, diversity, and inclusion, and tick-box exercises within academic institutions— we assert that minor gestures create the conditions for meaningful conversations on what it actually means to move towards decolonizing design education. Using examples from our own pedagogical practices, we sketch out and outline a proposition for minor gestures as theory-in-the-making, or an incomplete pathway towards meaningful, structural change (Abdulla & Viera de Oliveira, 2023:2).
License CC BY-SA 4.
Cite as: Abdulla, D., & Vieira de Oliveira, P. J. S. (2023). The Case for Minor Gestures. Diseña, (22), Article.6. https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.22.Article.6
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. (2013). Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf
According to Jack Halberstam in Chapter 0 of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study: “If you want to know what the undercommons wants, what Moten and Harney want, what black people, indigenous peoples, queers and poor people want, what we (the “we” who cohabit in the space of the undercommons) want, it is this – we cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part; so we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls”
Cite as: Harney, S. & Moten, M. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions
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Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy (2020) Lisa A. Mazzei & Laura E. Smithers.
These pedagogical events are at once quotidian and more than one. In this spacetime individuation falls away, and the production of qualitative research expertise becomes a function of the entanglement of human and more-than-human pedagogues (Mazzei & Smithers, 2020:1)
Cite as: Mazzei, L. A., & Smithers, L. E. (2020). Qualitative Inquiry in the Making: A Minor Pedagogy. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(1), 99-108. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800419869966
Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation (2024) Lisa A. Mazzei & Laura E. Smithers.
Given that racialized neoliberal efficiency and accountability movements have perpetuated injustice across generations, the work of educational practice that contests this must be practice that slips from these major grips to produce new, more just, worlds. Minor pedagogy produces educational justice through everyday shifts in the conditions of our collective possibility, shifts that manifest difference in ways that reject re-form in the pursuit of the not yet (Mazzei & Smithers, 2024:1)
Cite as: Smithers, L. E., & Mazzei, L. A. (2024). Minor pedagogy: Education as continuous variation. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(10), 978–987. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2024.2336021
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Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (1975 / 1985)
How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in Amerika has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits without doors. Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only for surveillance. But this is a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon. We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroads and galleries one passes through to link two points, what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modifed if one enters by another point. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1985:3).
Cite as: Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., & Maclean, M. (1985). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: The Components of Expression. New Literary History, 16(3), 591–608. https://doi.org/10.2307/468842
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Post Qualitative Inquiry Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre (2014).
Post qualitative inquiry offers a critique of conventional humanist qualitative methodology and marks a turn toward poststructural and posthuman inquiry. It also takes account of the new empiricisms emerging with the ontological and material turns in the humanities and social sciences. This inquiry is not methods-driven but informed by concepts like Karen Barad’s entanglement and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s assemblage and by conceptual practices those concepts make possible, practices that will be different in different projects. Post qualitative inquiry is an invitation to think and do educational inquiry outside normalized structures of humanist epistemology, ontology, and methodology (St. Pierre, 2014:1).
https://www.aare.edu.au/assets/documents/Elizabeth-Adams-St.-Pierre-ppt-presentationv1.pdf
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Becoming-Learner: Coordinates for Mapping the Space and Subject of Nomadic Pedagogy (2013). Rachel Fendler.
How can the process of “becoming learner” be observed, documented, and shared? What methodology could be used to discuss nomadic qualities of learning mobilities? This article argues in favor of an arts-based research approach, specifically social cartography, as a tool that can encourage young people to reflect on their identity as learners. Attentive to the deterritorializations, transgressions, and disruptions that characterize the learning process, it develops a mobile strategy for following the learner. This argument engages the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to explore a pedagogical framework that expands our social imaginary of learning (Fendler, 2013:1).
Cite as: Fendler, R. (2013). Becoming-Learner: Coordinates for Mapping the Space and Subject of Nomadic Pedagogy. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(10), 786-793. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413503797
Rachel’s PhD thesis, Navigating the eventful space of learning: Mobilities, nomadism and other tactical maneuvers, can be read here: https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/318368/FENDLER_RACHEL_PhD_THESIS.pdf?sequence=5.txt
This dissertation addresses a blindness in the field of education that renders some learning practices in visible. By problematizing how learning is both thought and reported on, this study attempts to engage with those pedagogical experiences that fall outside the realm of assessment (Fendler, 2015:i)
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Review of The Minor Gesture (2017) by Eugene W Holland
If in shorthand we can say that the minor is what varies and the major is what is fixed by social norms and standards, Manning is interested in minor gestures for the ways they introduce variation into experience that would otherwise remain fixed or captured by norms (Holland. 2017:1)
Cite as: Holland, E. W. (2017). The minor gesture. Contemporary Political Theory. Springer Nature