Chapter Black Blood Matters: Moving Human and Non-human Bodies from ‘Question & Answer’ to a ‘Pedagogy of Questioning’

This chapter tells a story of a pedagogy of questioning enacted during one session at a research seminar with Karen Barad in South Africa in 2017. Inspired by the Community of Enquiry pedagogy of Philosophy for Children, we re-turn to the video-data and our memories of the ‘event’ and disrupt the power-knowledge dispositive practised in a Question & Answer (Q&A) pedagogical setting. Michel Serres’ notion of paidagogia and the figure of a wandering child helps us move human and other-than-human around the conference space. We move, we err, we question – allowing the ‘other’ to respond through other stories that can be told starting from the questions we ask and are asked of us.

Childlike questioning is not a method but a way of inhabiting educational settings differently. Troubling the politics of academic conversations and inspired by Paulo Freire’s philo-sophical questioning, we propose a different – loving – relationality between ‘question and answer’ that disrupts the logic of business, consumerism and self-promotion. Diffracting through a question posed by participants, Karen Barad introduces us to the remarkable poem Zong!, reconstructed by Nourbe Se Philip from the silence left by some 130 Africans thrown into the sea and drowned in 1781: black blood matters. We ‘end’ by diffracting through the poem and connecting the notions of re-membering, mourning, response-ability and the educational value of silent questioning. But childlike questioning never stops. Our chapter is an invitation to join us in further questioning.