Chapter 9 The Zoom Room Rebels
Worlding and Writing a Diffractive Ethics with Performance of Research in the Zoom-I-Verse
In: Doing Rebellious ResearchSearch for other papers by Naomi Lee McCarthy in
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Abstract
What are the rebellious worlding potentials of the Zoom Room in higher education? Live, situated and embodied research dissemination is part of the cultural ethos of institutions of higher learning. This ethos also contains unwritten laws and ethics, such as the self-enclosed subjectivity of the researcher and the formal roles and rules of performer and audience, which are rarely challenged. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–21, traditional live presentations of research quickly migrated to virtual platforms, creating entanglements of embodied performances with the more-than-human technologies of online video platforms. Utilising our experiences of online performing research events, we think through the potentialities and pitfalls of the Zoom Room as a site of rebellion against the performance of neoliberal subjectivities in research production and dissemination. We reconceptualise the Zoom Room as a diffractive aperture into a Zoom-I-Verse, a temporal site of rhythmic, refraining re-worldings of research dissemination within a video-conferencing space. Written performatively as an imagined Zoom Room event, the voices of performers (musical, poetic, and filmic) are accompanied by a counterpoint of metanarrative from an invited interlocutor, who carries out an imagined conversation with feminist writer and philosopher, Helen Cixous. We explore how the virtual platform with its possibilities and limitations can create conditions for porosity, breaking through boundary spaces of the academy, blurring public and private, academic and non-academic life, and disrupting performer–audience dualities.