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“Humans are part of the world-body space in its dynamic structuration.”

(Barad 2003: 829)

“The future is not google-able.”

(Gibson 2003)

The word prologue has its roots in the Greek πρόλογος prologos. πρόλογος combines πρό pro meaning ‘before’ with λόγος logos meaning “word” or “reason.” This subsequent information is provided before words strive to create reason and argue for one truth or another. The prologue exists outside of this book as a polished piece and yet it is the heart of it, as it invites the reader behind the curtain before the show. It shows wounds and inequalities. It removes illusions and articulates some of the pragmatic yet seemingly banal conditions under which this research had to work.

Between 2000 and 2018, components of this study have been stored in or on: nine countries, two storage units in the United States and Germany and a green Buick traveling north to Canada, two shipping containers (the first traveling from the US to Iceland and the second traveling back from Iceland to the US), twenty-eight recording tapes, seventy-two floppy disks in three colors, eight external hard drives, nine USB sticks, my mother’s under bed drawer, two filing cabinets (one of whose key broke off), one iPad, one Wal-Mart Tracfone, fourteen paper notebooks, an expensive Moleskin book (the kind Picasso would have used), eight drawing pads, seventeen basements (one which flooded twice), two attics, four MacBook Air laptops, five PC netbooks, and three institutional desktop PC computers that displayed six alphabets on their keyboards over all, accordingly to the six majority languages of the countries where the computers had been purchased. Each chapter of this study went missing or was lost once or twice at some point, was drafted in at least two languages, one in my brain and one on my fingertips. Currently in the US, my PhD paper copy library contains 204 books in English, German, French, Danish and Italian. The overall weight of these books is 168 pounds, which is more than one and a half times my body weight. All of these books have touched bookshelves that sat next to my desk in different countries. 143 of them came with me across the ocean, making it close to impossible to take many clothes during my travels. This list of storage locations is a selection. The list points to the material life of a PhD dissertation, which in Barad’s words is part of the world-body space of creation and thus a crucial part of what cultivates scholarly inquiry. The list provided above also points to the fact that while English [11] literature was available to me throughout this research, given my locations and furthermore the emerging field of my studies, publications in German were limited at the time of writing. Moreover, my institutional access to German publications was and is restricted even today. While residing in an Englishspeaking academic environment fostered the global nature of this study and schooled my English skills as a scholar, living in the western world and writing in a language that empowered colonialization hurt and limited this study. Furthermore, while I added to the German literature in the field with, for instance, with my 2005 publication titled Verdeckte Spielräume biomedizinischer Forschung, my international professional engagements in Europe, such as being a bioethics expert voice for the European Commission, had to be performed¹ in English, which is the majority language used in Europe to discuss the development of legal frameworks as they regard biomedical practice.

This study in various ways has become the skin I am wearing, the voice I am speaking, and the space that’s always taken up when I need it. It is part of the reason for people to trust that I am an academic. I am a thinker and maker, discoursing – in the sense of walking – between languages, countries, institutions, homes, disciplines, people, voices, media, and fears; not always by free will. This study has literally ingrained itself in my body through the movement of my fingers on keyboards, the hesitant in-breath I take before speaking about this study, the hundreds of kilometers I carried the oftentimes too heavy material components of this study (including a metal sculpture), through airports, up and down mountains to writing retreats, to and from cars and trains, between lives I’ve lived ever since I started to have first a “PhD-companion” and later on, a book companion. Since September, 2000, when I spoke little English – insufficient to my thinking and to conversing – I’ve not spent a single day without this study in one way or another. When submitting the study this book is based upon as a PhD, I was still uncertain what a PhD was. This is also the case as not only what signifies a PhD study in process and appearance differs between countries, but also at German universities there are crucial differences. Having carried components of this study through discussions and reviews in colleges and universities in Germany, England, Cyprus, Iceland, Canada, Belgium, France, and the US, the only overlapping information I could identify was that a PhD dissertation introduces something that is new to the (scholarly) world. Introducing something new is a complex responsibility.

[12] The duration and journey the PhD that this book is based on took is unusual. During the last fifteen years, this study was exposed to collegial feedback from various disciplines. In parallel, aesthetic education (Ästhetische Bildung) and thus practice-led research strengthened and solidified its position in pedagogy and education. Stephanie Springgay, who is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto at the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning, and Rita L. Irwin, who is the head of Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia in Canada, emphasize that “Aesthetic inquiry is an ongoing active process that lingers in the sensual spaces of experience, simultaneously creating and disrupting meaning, being and becoming. Residing in-between and in the midst of these acts is not only an aesthetic experience, but more importantly, is an aesthetic inquiry of experience” (Springgay and Irwin 2004: 82). Thus with aesthetic education and aesthetic inquiry having strengthened their academic recognition in pedagogy and in related disciplines such as social work and educational sciences, scholarly contributions made (and this includes PhD studies) also may change the form of engagement required. This is so as scholarly engagement in the field of aesthetic inquiry includes the “aesthetic inquiry of experience,” especially sensory and embodied experience for readers of scholarly works as well (ibid).

Both the scholarly feedback that this study received over a long period in time, during which crucial developments in Reproductive and Genetic Technologies (RGTs) took place and the strengthened position of aesthetic education within pedagogy act as resources for the development of scholarly explorations this study can introduce. How these are introduced is a crucial component to the last chapter of this study, the conclusion, as it includes practical tools to engage various populations in an investigation of Leib² through embodied encounters and thus joins the canon of scholarly activities that strengthen the academic standing of aesthetic education in pedagogy. In doing so, this book offers components to engage with knowledge production processes that are beyond reading and thus thrive to investigate diverse ways of including populations who cannot access the possibility of expressing themselves through language.