Ana Paula Lafaire, Doctoral researcher, Aalto Business School, Department of Management Studies: “Tinkering encounters as artistic interventions in the business school” , Thursday 28th September 2023
Abstract :
I examine the affirmative potential of ‘tinkering’, the act of intervening in a fluid and adaptative way through the ongoing enactments of everyday life, as an explorative mode artistic intervention. I propose tinkering to ‘disobey’ masculine notions of knowledge production in business schools by creating encounters to engage with knowledge rooted in embodied experience and attuning to materiality. Inspired by feminist and queer scholars that invite us to experiment with artistic practices to challenge normative learning and organizing in the business school I direct attention towards artistic interventions that emerge in spontaneous ways, even if for a fleeting moment. I mobilize the concept of tinkering to explore the performative aspect of fostering spaces to release our capacity for knowing differently as a form of artistic intervention in the business school. I discuss how such open-ended encounters, beyond instrumental ends, enable to hold the complexity and uncertainty of our experiences, rather than ‘resolve’ reality into coherent explanations. In particular, how tinkering can nurture the capacity to act and foster vulnerable relational knowing in academia rooted in our embodied experience.