Rhizomatic Assemblage: A diffractive ethnography on the geographical constitutiveness of organising

Vandeventer, James Scott (2019) Rhizomatic Assemblage: A diffractive ethnography on the geographical constitutiveness of organising. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

This thesis contributes to a narrative about the interwovenness of the sociomaterial world. To do so, I propose a new way of thinking about the collective activities that form a fundamental part of our lives: namely, I argue that organising is geographically constituted. Taking issue with existing engagements in organisation studies with geography and pointing to the lively debates about space, place, scale and territory in human geography, I draw these together by arguing for the geographical constitutiveness of organising as a conceptual framework at the intersection of these two fields. This framework incorporates a processual, relational, and sociomaterial view of the world. Further, by plugging in (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) the notion of rhizome to assemblage, I suggest that ‘rhizomatic assemblage’ serves as a useful metaphorical tool for thinking at this intersection. Building from this, the research question that this thesis seeks to answer is: How can collective activities of organising be understood as geographically constituted? To respond to this question, a methodological argument draws on new materialism and Barad’s (2007) ‘agential realism’ in favour of a diffractive ethnographic approach (Gullion, 2018), in which ‘agential cuts’ implicate the researcher’s ethics and ways of knowing with the phenomena that exist in the world. Diffractive considerations of my subjectivity as researcher and my values inform whyhe focus of empirical fieldwork was on a particular rhizomatic assemblage: the Redbricks, a housing estate in Hulme, Manchester. Findings from the fieldwork are discussed in terms of four agential cuts to the rhizomatic assemblage: genealogising, shaping, cultivating and geometabolising. Each provokes a new perspective about how collective activities on the Redbricks are geographically constituted, and how organising is a geographical accomplishment. Throughout, collective activities on the estate are (re)considered as a rhizomatic assemblage: as consequential unfoldings of geographically constituted collective activities of organising also imbued with potentiality. Thus, this thesis enlivens a narrative about the sociomaterial becomings-together that give meaning to our lives, and suggests ways that such activities should be encouraged.