Suspended Animation: Attuning to Material-Discursive Data and Attending via Poesis During Somatographic Inquiry

What possibilities for thinking and expression lie suspended between what we say is a “something” or a “someone” and the forces, multiplicities, intensities, and uncanny relations that effect and constitute its naming—its sedimentation as such? How do we engage in analysis practices that help hold open identitarian thought’s press so that we might learn from the embodied register of previously un-thought forces and creative rhythms; the material-discursive passageways of a life becoming a life? In this essay, the author introduces somatographic analysis as a practice of deeply attuning and attending via poesis, or creativity, to material-discursive data and the subjective emergences they enact. Following a description of somatographic analyses’ practical features and aims, a Working-Class Academic Zombie as figuration gets assembled. This figuration functions as both an illustration of somatographic analysis practices irrupting in the fold of inquiry and an alternative material–theoretical tool marking the limits of classificatory systems for understanding first-generation college students and their paths to becoming women academics.