Rachel Holmes
Biographic Data
| ID | 3701313 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rachel Holmes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rachel |
| FAMILY NAME | Holmes |
| SIGNATURE | HOLMES R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-0472-0847 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Lucky Aesthetics: Multinatural Perspectivalism and (Divinatory) Semiosis
This essay will describe the critical importance of developing a posthuman aesthetic pedagogy capable of integrating what Eduardo Kohn (2013) has described as multinatural perspectivalism in How Forests Think . Multinatural perspectivalism describes the multiplicity of beyond-human perspectives staked on an event. An aesthetic system capable of integrating this beyond-human multiplicity poses the problem of forms of signification and semiosis whi…
Spitting open the sky: Eruptions of difference in an early years classroom
Diffracting a research project in a UK primary school, this paper concerns feminist materialist orientations to odd-ness as a relational, distributed, and affective form of “thinking-feeling”. It suggests that attuning to affect as it moves through a context resistant to disruption, involves becoming “bad researchers”; bad for composing an unruly research problem, for embracing a transgressive methodology, and for writing in willfully inconclusiv…
"The Doing and Undoing of the "Autistic Child: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-Based Empirical Materials
This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the "autistic child," drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian's key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relation…
Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening
Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill-equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy …
Flickering, Spilling and Diffusing Body/Knowledge in the Posthuman Early Years
Following Deleuze and Whitehead, we begin with a movement from without, a process, never with a ‘subject’ of a process. This page merely opens onto what Manning and Massumi describe as ‘a commotion of relational activity, each vying to be written down, to be the conduit of the field’s summing up in a determinate expression’ (2014, p. 12): Texts are traversed by a movement that comes from without, that does not begin on the page (nor the preceding…
My tongue on your theory: The Bittersweet Reminder of Every-Thing Unnameable
Across research in UK Higher Education, the most immanent demands for quality have taken the shape of the Research Assessment Exercise and the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The theorist, Martin, is cautious of the relationship academics have engendered with the process of the REF, asking are we actually creating a Frankenstein monster, becoming complicit in generating quality thresholds and standards that will become our own tormentors? I …
An interview with Robert Irwin
In this interview, conducted over email in September 2015, Robert Irwin reflects on his relationship with Andalusia and the first encounter that prompted him to write his celebrated book The Alhambra. He discusses why themes of nostalgia and exile pervade the cultural history of Muslim Spain, and how the splendours of medieval Andalusia continue to haunt modern Arabic prose and poetry. Considering how Salman Rushdie and Tariq Ali position al-Anda…
Eu(rope): (Re)assembling, (Re)casting, and (Re)aligning Lines of De- and Re-territorialisation of Early Childhood
The aim of this paper is to (re)(e)value(ate) current micro- and macropolicies and politics that shape – and are shaped by – conceptualisations of and, in consequence, practices towards young children in a range of institutions/figurations. The ‘geopolitical’ location for our investigation is Europe, understood as conceptual space(s) as well as (geographical) territory. Whilst we begin by focusing attention on events within an English context, we…
Beautiful Resistance
Fresh Kills: The Spectacle of (De)Composing Data
This article has in its flesh the question of what I, as a qualitative researcher, do, other than code, when I do something I think is "analysis." In 1850, Horne catalogs the ingredients of a huge decomposing dust-heap in Marylebone. It is described as comprising of original heterogeneous contents from all the dustbins of the London locality, as having grandeur and permanence and capable of sustaining life. Resembling the ethnographers' scrutiny …
Flesh, Wax, Horse Skin, and Hair: The Many Intensities of Data
Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child
This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that str…
Becoming a problem: Behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom
How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be , and to be recognised as , good students? Using …
A Fantastic Decomposition: Unsettling the Fury of Having to Wait
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project, which focused on the issue of " how children develop a reputation as 'naughty' in the early years classroom."1 The author draws attention to the (in)corporeal (re)formation of the line in school, undertaking a decomposition of the topological spaces of research/art/education. She attempts to decompose schoolchild iconography into the line as a product and subject of art practic…
Autobiography of Hector Berlioz: Member of the Institute of France, from 1803 to 1869; Comprising his Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England
Hector Berlioz (1803–69) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation whose music was in many ways ahead of its time. He was also a respected journalist and critic. Begun in 1848, his celebrated Mémoires were completed by 1865 but published posthumously in 1870. They are the best-known of his writings and reflect the man - passionate, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give a fascinating, first-hand, in…
Autobiography of Hector Berlioz Vol. 1: Member of the Institute of France, from 1803 to 1806, Comprising His Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England
Animating classroom ethnography: Overcoming video‐fear
This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunte…
Cinemaethnographic Specta(c)torship: Discursive Readings of What We Choose to (Dis)possess
This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with 'what is worth looking at' when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author…
Documenting classroom life: How can I write about what I am seeing
The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4- 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as 'naughty' within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for 'authenticating' data we the…
Risky Pleasures: Using the Work of Graffiti Writers to Theorize the Act of Ethnography
Graffiti artists who deface and vandalize also highly aestheticise and politicize landscapes marking boundaries that are both territorial and ideological. Similarly, the privileged "I" within reflexive research seems to subvert a process of territorialisation of the (un)authored research text with a kind of repetitious "tagging." This article will consider how the idea of graffiti tagging might be used to theorize acts of ethnography (and ethnogr…
Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One's Mouth Properly
The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance-as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utteranc…
The communication of emotion via touch
The study of emotional communication has focused predominantly on the facial and vocal channels but has ignored the tactile channel. Participants in the current study were allowed to touch an unacquainted partner on the whole body to communicate distinct emotions. Of interest was how accurately the person being touched decoded the intended emotions without seeing the tactile stimulation. The data indicated that anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitu…
Theatre of the self: Autobiography as performance
This paper grapples with the notion of ‘autobiography as performance’, specifically in relation to classroom narratives around Lather’s ‘ontological stammering’ and Cavarero’s ‘the necessary other’ played out under the practitioner‐researcher’s gaze. The paper interrogates the shifting landscape of higher education (HE), fraught with tensions as discourses of economic rationality circulate around the sector’s ‘widening participation’ agenda and s…
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman Born 1789 - Buried 2002
Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty had made the headlines and become the talk of the social season of 1810, hailed as 'The Hottentot Venus' for her exquisite physique (not least her shapely and irresistible bottom) and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late-Georgian and…
Reading Route Maps in United States Road Trip Books
Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One's Mouth Properly
The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance-as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utteranc…
Animating classroom ethnography: Overcoming video‐fear
This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunte…
Becoming a problem: Behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom
How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be , and to be recognised as , good students? Using …
Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening
Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill-equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy …
Flesh, Wax, Horse Skin, and Hair: The Many Intensities of Data
"The Doing and Undoing of the "Autistic Child: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-Based Empirical Materials
This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the "autistic child," drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian's key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relation…
Fresh Kills: The Spectacle of (De)Composing Data
This article has in its flesh the question of what I, as a qualitative researcher, do, other than code, when I do something I think is "analysis." In 1850, Horne catalogs the ingredients of a huge decomposing dust-heap in Marylebone. It is described as comprising of original heterogeneous contents from all the dustbins of the London locality, as having grandeur and permanence and capable of sustaining life. Resembling the ethnographers' scrutiny …
Documenting classroom life: How can I write about what I am seeing
The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4- 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as 'naughty' within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for 'authenticating' data we the…
My tongue on your theory: The Bittersweet Reminder of Every-Thing Unnameable
Across research in UK Higher Education, the most immanent demands for quality have taken the shape of the Research Assessment Exercise and the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The theorist, Martin, is cautious of the relationship academics have engendered with the process of the REF, asking are we actually creating a Frankenstein monster, becoming complicit in generating quality thresholds and standards that will become our own tormentors? I …
A Fantastic Decomposition: Unsettling the Fury of Having to Wait
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project, which focused on the issue of " how children develop a reputation as 'naughty' in the early years classroom."1 The author draws attention to the (in)corporeal (re)formation of the line in school, undertaking a decomposition of the topological spaces of research/art/education. She attempts to decompose schoolchild iconography into the line as a product and subject of art practic…
Spitting open the sky: Eruptions of difference in an early years classroom
Diffracting a research project in a UK primary school, this paper concerns feminist materialist orientations to odd-ness as a relational, distributed, and affective form of “thinking-feeling”. It suggests that attuning to affect as it moves through a context resistant to disruption, involves becoming “bad researchers”; bad for composing an unruly research problem, for embracing a transgressive methodology, and for writing in willfully inconclusiv…
Cinemaethnographic Specta(c)torship: Discursive Readings of What We Choose to (Dis)possess
This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with 'what is worth looking at' when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author…
Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child
This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that str…
Risky Pleasures: Using the Work of Graffiti Writers to Theorize the Act of Ethnography
Graffiti artists who deface and vandalize also highly aestheticise and politicize landscapes marking boundaries that are both territorial and ideological. Similarly, the privileged "I" within reflexive research seems to subvert a process of territorialisation of the (un)authored research text with a kind of repetitious "tagging." This article will consider how the idea of graffiti tagging might be used to theorize acts of ethnography (and ethnogr…
Beautiful Resistance
Queer Comrades: Winnie Mandela and the Moffies
La nouvelle constitution de l'Afrique du Sud assure, entre autres, la non-segregation des homosexuels. Cet article montre que l'homophobie demeure importante dans ce pays comme l'indiquent les discours violents qui ont accompagne le proces de Winnie Mandela en 1991
Selling Sex for a Living
The body of the prostitute has often been used as a metaphor for the state of society, but the images overlook the real connections between prostitution and its economic and social context. Rachel Holmes offers post-apartheid reflections on the politics of prostitution in South Africa
Queer Comrades: Winnie Mandela and the Moffies
La nouvelle constitution de l'Afrique du Sud assure, entre autres, la non-segregation des homosexuels. Cet article montre que l'homophobie demeure importante dans ce pays comme l'indiquent les discours violents qui ont accompagne le proces de Winnie Mandela en 1991
Reading Route Maps in United States Road Trip Books
The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman Born 1789 - Buried 2002
Saartjie Baartman was twenty-one years old when she was taken from her native South Africa and shipped to London. Within weeks, the striking African beauty had made the headlines and become the talk of the social season of 1810, hailed as 'The Hottentot Venus' for her exquisite physique (not least her shapely and irresistible bottom) and suggestive semi-nude dance. As her fame spread to Paris, Saartjie became a lightning rod for late-Georgian and…
The communication of emotion via touch
The study of emotional communication has focused predominantly on the facial and vocal channels but has ignored the tactile channel. Participants in the current study were allowed to touch an unacquainted partner on the whole body to communicate distinct emotions. Of interest was how accurately the person being touched decoded the intended emotions without seeing the tactile stimulation. The data indicated that anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitu…
Theatre of the self: Autobiography as performance
This paper grapples with the notion of ‘autobiography as performance’, specifically in relation to classroom narratives around Lather’s ‘ontological stammering’ and Cavarero’s ‘the necessary other’ played out under the practitioner‐researcher’s gaze. The paper interrogates the shifting landscape of higher education (HE), fraught with tensions as discourses of economic rationality circulate around the sector’s ‘widening participation’ agenda and s…
Animating classroom ethnography: Overcoming video‐fear
This article addresses the use of video in classroom research. Influenced by the work of Deleuze on cinema, it challenges the mundane realism that continues to regulate video method, and its role in perpetuating what Deleuze calls the ‘everyday banality’ that produces and conceals the ‘intolerable’. In failing to interfere with the everyday banality of the normal child, research colludes with the production of exclusion, disadvantage and a stunte…
Cinemaethnographic Specta(c)torship: Discursive Readings of What We Choose to (Dis)possess
This article examines critical methodological issues emerging from the interstices of applied educational research, social science research, and arts-based research, bringing criticality into the field of childhood. The author aims to question how she might w(rest)le (un)comfortably with 'what is worth looking at' when studying children. Maneuvering between observations of children in classrooms and representations of children in film, the author…
Documenting classroom life: How can I write about what I am seeing
The article is located within a UK based ethnographic research project where the central aim is to understand the processes by which 4- 5 year-old children begin to develop an identity as 'naughty' within school. This article considers certain practices that are embedded within the act of documenting data and how these relate to and are connected with identity. Having foregrounded what could be regarded as tactics for 'authenticating' data we the…
Risky Pleasures: Using the Work of Graffiti Writers to Theorize the Act of Ethnography
Graffiti artists who deface and vandalize also highly aestheticise and politicize landscapes marking boundaries that are both territorial and ideological. Similarly, the privileged "I" within reflexive research seems to subvert a process of territorialisation of the (un)authored research text with a kind of repetitious "tagging." This article will consider how the idea of graffiti tagging might be used to theorize acts of ethnography (and ethnogr…
Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One's Mouth Properly
The article engages with the problematic nature of silence and its tendency to trouble qualitative inquiry. Silence is frequently read as resistance-as an impediment to analysis or the emergence of an authentic voice. Rather than seeking methodological remedies for such impediments, the article dwells on, and in, the recalcitrance of silence. The authors read silence, via Derrida and Freud, as the trace of something Other at the heart of utteranc…
Autobiography of Hector Berlioz: Member of the Institute of France, from 1803 to 1869; Comprising his Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England
Hector Berlioz (1803–69) was one of the most original and colourful composers of his generation whose music was in many ways ahead of its time. He was also a respected journalist and critic. Begun in 1848, his celebrated Mémoires were completed by 1865 but published posthumously in 1870. They are the best-known of his writings and reflect the man - passionate, imaginative, idealistic, opinionated and witty - and give a fascinating, first-hand, in…
Autobiography of Hector Berlioz Vol. 1: Member of the Institute of France, from 1803 to 1806, Comprising His Travels in Italy, Germany, Russia, and England
Limitless provocations of the ‘safe’, ‘secure’ and ‘healthy’ child
This paper arose amongst the making and showing of a film and questions whether there are possibilities for interrupting powerful discursive frames that work at producing ‘the normal child’. Traditionally there has been a lack of interest in the use and critique of visual culture in educational research. Perhaps this lack of interest provides fertile opportunities to know something of the structure of education as a discipline, the rules that str…
Becoming a problem: Behaviour and reputation in the early years classroom
How does it happen that some children acquire a reputation as a ‘problem’ in school? The article discusses some findings of a qualitative study involving children in the Reception year (ages 4–5). The research focused on problematic behaviour as this emerged within, and was shaped by, the culture of the classroom. A key question for the research was: what makes it difficult for some children to be , and to be recognised as , good students? Using …
A Fantastic Decomposition: Unsettling the Fury of Having to Wait
This article draws on data from a single element of a larger project, which focused on the issue of " how children develop a reputation as 'naughty' in the early years classroom."1 The author draws attention to the (in)corporeal (re)formation of the line in school, undertaking a decomposition of the topological spaces of research/art/education. She attempts to decompose schoolchild iconography into the line as a product and subject of art practic…
Flesh, Wax, Horse Skin, and Hair: The Many Intensities of Data
Eu(rope): (Re)assembling, (Re)casting, and (Re)aligning Lines of De- and Re-territorialisation of Early Childhood
The aim of this paper is to (re)(e)value(ate) current micro- and macropolicies and politics that shape – and are shaped by – conceptualisations of and, in consequence, practices towards young children in a range of institutions/figurations. The ‘geopolitical’ location for our investigation is Europe, understood as conceptual space(s) as well as (geographical) territory. Whilst we begin by focusing attention on events within an English context, we…
Beautiful Resistance
Fresh Kills: The Spectacle of (De)Composing Data
This article has in its flesh the question of what I, as a qualitative researcher, do, other than code, when I do something I think is "analysis." In 1850, Horne catalogs the ingredients of a huge decomposing dust-heap in Marylebone. It is described as comprising of original heterogeneous contents from all the dustbins of the London locality, as having grandeur and permanence and capable of sustaining life. Resembling the ethnographers' scrutiny …
Flickering, Spilling and Diffusing Body/Knowledge in the Posthuman Early Years
Following Deleuze and Whitehead, we begin with a movement from without, a process, never with a ‘subject’ of a process. This page merely opens onto what Manning and Massumi describe as ‘a commotion of relational activity, each vying to be written down, to be the conduit of the field’s summing up in a determinate expression’ (2014, p. 12): Texts are traversed by a movement that comes from without, that does not begin on the page (nor the preceding…
My tongue on your theory: The Bittersweet Reminder of Every-Thing Unnameable
Across research in UK Higher Education, the most immanent demands for quality have taken the shape of the Research Assessment Exercise and the Research Excellence Framework (REF). The theorist, Martin, is cautious of the relationship academics have engendered with the process of the REF, asking are we actually creating a Frankenstein monster, becoming complicit in generating quality thresholds and standards that will become our own tormentors? I …
An interview with Robert Irwin
In this interview, conducted over email in September 2015, Robert Irwin reflects on his relationship with Andalusia and the first encounter that prompted him to write his celebrated book The Alhambra. He discusses why themes of nostalgia and exile pervade the cultural history of Muslim Spain, and how the splendours of medieval Andalusia continue to haunt modern Arabic prose and poetry. Considering how Salman Rushdie and Tariq Ali position al-Anda…
Listening differently: A pedagogy for expanded listening
Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill-equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy …
"The Doing and Undoing of the "Autistic Child: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-Based Empirical Materials
This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the "autistic child," drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian's key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relation…
Sociology (18 works) · Art (16 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · History (7 works) · History (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works)