‘I remember the smell of darkness’ : a Deleuzean exploration of learning from secondary school negative lived experience among present day academics

De Vigne, Janet and Warin, Jo (2025) ‘I remember the smell of darkness’ : a Deleuzean exploration of learning from secondary school negative lived experience among present day academics. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

‘I remember the smell of darkness’: a Deleuzean exploration of learning from secondary school negative lived experience and failure among present day academic professionals. In this thesis, I examine, thinking with Deleuze as ‘becoming-cartographer’, the lived experience of returners to academe (RtAs). These participants self- report perceived negative experiences at secondary school, but now teach at higher education institutions in Africa and the UK. Eight HE professionals on two continents relate their non-traditional learning journeys through primary to secondary to university education. Their stories powerfully reveal human relationship in the face of the desiring machines of capitalism backgrounding education systems, in the lived experience of distributive, recognitional and associational (in)justices. Examining the (in)justices they live through using narrative inquiry, I distil their narratives into I-poems and use these to form the basis of a series of cartographs (more than maps – in the manner of Sir Grayson Perry) extending the narrative dimensionality of the poems to develop a multi- sensory affective charge for the purpose of communicating to teachers. The complexity of the participants’ experience is diffracted through the Deleuzean concepts of the rhizome, the desiring machine, affect and the cartographic imperative. The findings reveal further contributions to knowledge: I develop two concepts: a justice of luck, and a justice of affect to be taken into professional learning conversations through visual representations of the participants’ experience. My aim is to challenge the teaching profession and myself by expressing the discussion around these narratives through an arts medium in order to communicate the affective charge of this lived experience.