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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Subjectivity in the folds : education, media practices, and environmental activism amongst more-than-human pleats Piotrowski, Marcelina

Abstract

This study examines everyday media practices in environmental movements, activism campaigns, claims to education, and their relation to subjectification through various contortions of the verb ‘fold.’ Thinking with different types of folds (e.g., pleats, inflections, twists), it proposes concepts for investigating subjectification as a series of shifting spatial and temporal arrangements between a) environmental non-governmental organizations’ (ENGOs) campaigns and their educational intentions, b) residents’ media practices in ecological conflicts, and c) more-than-human forces and events of the Anthropocene. The project reconsiders media practices and environmental movement learning in ecologically perturbed times through the thought of Gilles Deleuze (1988, 1993), especially his concept of ‘the fold’ and its quadripartite architecture of subjectivity, comprising folds of knowledge, matter, force, and ‘the outside’ or death/extinction. I argue that subjectivity is produced through media and knowledge practices in ecological conflicts—not as a ‘being’ or the bounded contours of a human entity, but as an event and a process of folding inflected by more-than-human pleats. Situated within darker hues of ecological thought, this study engages with and problematizes the media practices of 24 residents in anti-oil pipeline movements in British Columbia, Canada (e.g., tracking online petitions, following (or not) ENGOs’ social media feeds, engaging in online news comments, photographing themselves at protests, writing letters to editors), and their ambivalent encounters with activism campaigns, digital strategies, and especially claims to knowledge and education made by six ENGOs in attempts to contrive ‘political subjects.’ The collection of chapters invites a textured and geometric reading, privileging proliferation over coherence. Subjectivity is folded and refolded in relation to media practices and education through a fieldwork in textures: a) an approach to research for thinking and ‘experimenting’ with subjectivity as concomitantly folded in multiple ways, and b) a mode of inquiry that examines how concepts and fieldwork inflect each other. I develop ‘folded concepts’ emerging from methodological conundrums, mapping the limitations of human thought, conflicting claims to education, media practices, and the more-than-human forces that affect them. Moving away from effects or what campaigns represent, the study focuses on what campaigns and practices do and affect.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International