Junky arts: at the threshold of depravity and wonder in education research

This paper is an argument for the use of the arts of the junky in educational research. Junky arts connect the Deleuzian writing machine, the MacLurian baroque, and William Burroughs’ Junky in machinic flow, transcorporeality, hypercorporeality, disruption of hierarchy and categorisations, irreverence, and material/immaterial wonder. Junky arts are required in research in education contexts, as they work in a paralogic sense to challenge the dominant and reductive narratives of neo-positivism and the audit culture, by bringing forth the destabilising and the shocking. Junky arts do so not to create more grotesquery in the world free from regard for consequence, but to remind us of and to enable the wonder and possibility of the uncategorisable, the non-consensus and the dismissed in the world, the objects and the terms which are lost from the narratives.