Pedagogy and Social Critique in the Era of Fragmentation: A Collective Writing Experiment as cadavres exquis

Abstract

This is the result of a collaborative and creative experiment, a process in which six scholars—Garcia Lazo, Locke, Rupcich, O’Connor, Yoon and Longley—agreed to co-author an article through written and/or visual pieces of work. The emphasis taken in the article is to perform a methodology of fragmentation. The article is to be read as a series of ‘folds’, where collages or fragments of text are contained and while each fold is numbered, the reader is invited to read any fold in any order. Using fragmentation as method in writing also inspired our interpretation of a body of work made up of multiple ‘folds’ from the collaborative parlour game played by the surrealist movement. Known as cadavre exquis, surrealists enjoyed the strange juxtaposition created by each artist’s contribution as they drew part of a body onto a folded piece of paper without seeing the previous drawings in each fold. While often referred to in the context of psychoanalysis, we instead emphasise the fragmentation and hybridity of this form of collaboration in order to critique of universalising narratives about education (and writing) that we consider to be at odds with the post-capitalist realities of contemporary education and life.