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“ma·trix

/mātriks/

late Middle English (in the sense ‘womb’): from Latin, ‘breeding female,’ later ‘womb,’ from mater, matr- ‘mother’”

(Google.com 2018: online source).

“Ali, ono je ne to i govorilo:

tela nema, ali tragova ima, tragovi moraju biti uklonjeni.

To je nemogua misija. Oni uvek

negde preostaju, oni uni tavaju savr enstvo teksta,

svrsishodnu celovitost kompozicije, jasnu

usmerenost poruke. Tragovi tragaju za jasno

om i tako, postaju garant neispunjenja. Tragovi se

bri u, ostaje trag gumice, izrabljenost podloge,

urez, mikroskopski urez”¹⁴ (Stevanović 2001: online source).

By tradition, this chapter, as a gateway to the analysis chapters, would present a literature review examining the existing research and publications on the topic of this study. The following chapter is not a literature review in the traditional sense. It is not a literature review as materials engaged with analytically differ in their materialized appearance, such as written text, visuals, artwork, and such. Creating a literature review focusing on literature in the field of my studies would have been a challenging task as until towards the end of this study “my field” as such, did not exist. Thus, this chapter creates connections to work conducted and theories developed in various related fields and it introduces embodied ways of engaging with a field in which developments change at a fast pace. In this chapter, I will explain the overall conceptual approach of the study as it relates to various theoretical frameworks and concepts.

Inputting the term “matrix” into the Google search function produced the first opening quotation. When doing so, I recognize that in some instances Google is a powerful mechanism and structure that organizes knowledge distribution globally, yet excludes those who lack access to the gadgets and technologies [32] needed to access Google. Google is a way of breeding (hierarchical) knowledge. It is the environment in which knowledge is served (now). Knowledge served through Google is ephemeral, as, by the way, to a certain degree all knowledge is. Google knowledge changes in Planck time. The second quotation is translated from Croatian; so Google informs the reader that the text I inserted to be translated is translated from Croatian to English using the Google translate function. The translation can be found in the footnote provided. However, suspecting that the source is not Croatian, I presented my Croatian colleague Petar Jandric with the text and he confirmed that it is “Serbian language and Serbian text”¹⁵ (Jandric, private email exchange with the author, June 18, 2020).

The two opening quotations stand in for, and open a discussion of, the wing-spread (Spannweite) of issues dealt within this study and of nuances being of matter. When flying, the wingspread, as in the Spannweite, is crucial to the performance of flying. “Larger wings produce greater lift than smaller wings. So smaller-winged birds (and planes) need to fly faster to maintain the same lift as those with larger wings” (Science Learning Hub n.d.: online source). Birds with a large wingspan (that communicates well with their body’s design, are capable, such as in in the case of the hawk with its large wingspan, “of speed and soaring” (ibid). “Soaring is an effortless way to scout out a large territory for food by using little energy” (Falcon Environmental Services 2018: online source). This knowledge is presented using Google sources. As will be laid out in the methodology chapter, the wingspread (Spannweite) of issues included in this study is wide. While this creates an unavoidable lack of in-depth analysis for this study in some places, it, at the same time, allows the combination of speed and soaring, in the sense of keeping up with developments, looking at them from a distance, and if they look full of flavor, catching them “in flight or ‘on the wing’ as we say” (ibid). This study is the work of many years of cross-Atlantic and cross-disciplinary engagement/flight. Also, for this reason, maintaining and permitting a great wingspread (Spannweite) of issues was important in the sense that soaring using a great wingspread allows “support [for] its multi-year voyages at sea” for the albatross or, in my case, my multi-year journey across the ocean and “through” a variety of issues (ibid).

Soaring, in terms of energy consumption, is effortless. Thus, if reading this study, if engaging with the messiness of developments is consuming more energy than available, I suggest soaring as a mode of engagement. With this suggestion, [33] I introduce the first theoretical approach to my research, namely practice-led research. In my last departmental location, this means moving to think.¹⁶ Finishing my writing, I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Dance at Smith College, located in the United States. How can one soar in a study and how can that foster theoretical engagement? I suggest choosing an image, any image, included in this study and looking at it from above (not on the screen in front of the eyes), but leaning over it (leaning forward – feel what your toes are doing?), literally changing the body’s location and spatial relationship to the image. Do so for some time, and investigate whether some details of the image became more important than others, or whether color nuances become apparent. Sense what changes in your body. Soar over the image until you are ready to move on, with new insights that are informed by both theoretical engagement and embodied engagement with this study. What you see, looking at the image, no one else can see and thus I can’t analyze it (for you).

Soaring with/over this study could also mean looking at something from a more distant perspective, for example, by choosing a word and looking up its origins, meanings, and translations. I applied these two ways of soaring as a means to conduct practice led research in a direct engagement with the study. More often than not, soaring introduced me to surprising details. For example, the word “matrix,” meaning womb, was not a meaning I was at all familiar with, yet it opened up new ways of thinking through how to introduce theoretical matters in this chapter.

I started this chapter with two quotations taken from Google. I chose to do so, also because Google has changed the way scholarship is performed and changed the ways in which I, as a researcher and teacher, engage with younger colleagues in the pedagogical sense of meeting in the middle or meeting them where they are. I understand this study to also have the function of preparing me for future researching engagements. The Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) Project, which was a two-year study of the student research process, had the goal “to understand how students do research, and how relationships between students, teaching faculty and librarians shape that process” (Erial Project 2018: online source). The project found that “many university students use scholarly databases like they would Google” (Creagh 2011: online source). This, in turn, changes the way I can engage with younger generation researchers and it indeed changes the way in which libraries of the future are designed and built. In my understanding, a literature review is in a way a subject specific library. Walk in and see who is there, and who says what from which position/through which medium.

[34] Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, is currently building a new library designed by Maya Lin.¹⁷ One main goal of this new library is to provide “state-of-the-art digital technology to enhance the creation of new knowledge” (Fliss 2017: online source). Therefore, in this example, libraries are understood to no longer mainly store, preserve, and provide books, but also to foster technologically supported and enhanced knowledge production processes. Thus, while extracting information using Google is problematic in many ways, I acknowledge Google as a technological feature that can trigger thinking and enhance playing with “low threshold” access routes to knowledge, but also can create networks between researchers. For example, the second opening quotation is taken from an online journal called Teorija koja Hoda (Walking Theory). I introduce the concept of walking theory as a means to engage theoretically in the last analytical chapter, which focuses on art. I first came across the notion or expression of walking theory in a book, and then much later I found the eponymous journal. Having found the online journal, and having Google translate, with all its limitations, I will be reading the journal and potentially reaching out to the editors.

This chapter is meant to provide an invitation to certain readings of theories as they were applied to the open field of this study. It aims to ease the entry for all people, regardless of disciplinary backgrounds, into reading the analysis chapters of this study. I will continue. laying out the overall conceptual approach of the study as it relates to various (theoretical) frameworks. Remember, this chapter is called “on the matrix of this study.” “Matrix bedeutet im Lateinischen Muttertier, Gebärmutter, also eine Hülle/Schutz, in dem sich etwas entwickeln kann”¹⁸, so Hanne Seitz (Seitz 2013: 149). It is, in this sense, that I chose the term matrix, in order for analytical processes to take place within a sheltering framework. Such framework allows for thinking out loud, for including yet unfinished thoughts, which from my perspective provides a good seeding ground for developing/introducing something “new.”

This chapter supplies an initial insight into theories and notions that informed this research. It provides information on the bilingual approach to language, and offers initial insights into how stories and data studied relate to the expanding field examined. It presents a first understanding of some of the causes that affected the choice of inviting considerations on the interrelatedness between body and Leib into the analysis. The relationality between body and Leib, as theorized by, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, provided a theoretical matrix and an “atmosphere” for the analysis within this study as it [35] evolves from chapter to chapter inviting additional theoretical frameworks in to assist and inform the analysis (Merleau-Ponty 2012 and 2001).

Theoretically speaking, designing this study began with an interest in the multi-layered social, cultural, and political implications of RGTs and biomedicine. At the beginning, it was my concern to pay specific attention to the various “makings” and social meanings of the relationship between the embryo/fetus and women in contemporary biological, medical, and socio-medical discourses, including art. Later, it became crucial, due to the rapid ethical as well as political challenging technological developments in the field of RGTs, to include wider developments in the field of biomedicine into the analysis of this study in order to allow for the establishment of a thorough analytical picture of the complexity of issues in the field of RGTs and biomedicine. Or, saying it differently, it became important to enhance the wingspread.

During the first decade of the new millennium, social science research within and about the biomedical sciences increased extensively. Funding bodies, such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), and the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Germany, invested significantly in research that explores the social implications and public perceptions of developments in biomedical and genetic research. In addition to research that addresses broadly conceptualized topics (such as biotechnology or genetic testing), during the period in which much of the primary research for this project was conducted (2003 – 2007) specific funding streams were implemented to support research specifically on emerging technologies (such as stem cell research and medical imaging technologies). The amount and foci of the funding which has been made available, highlight on one hand, that topics such as biomedicine and genetics are not considered easy to grasp from either a public or a social scientific perspective and, on the other hand, that it is in the interest of society (and science) to acquire a grasp on new developments.

This introduction to the theoretical considerations of the study includes stories of events, which took place during my fieldwork. In recounting these stories, I pull in “still images” of the cultural background of this study, and place the frameworks that I am applying into an interactive relationship with these stories. Some of these will be expanded further in the analytical chapters.