Diffracting the Special Issue: The Co-Emergence of Response-Able Collaboration

In this introduction to the special issue, we (a) describe the unconventional and iteratively constitutive processes by which this special issue came into being and (b) provide a brief overview of how the body-focused research “nodal points” featured therein contribute to the fields of education, social theory, arts, gender studies, and sport and physical cultural studies. We outline a process whereby, in seeking to “diffract the special issue,” contributors to this project engaged in an ongoing process of creating more affirmative, response-able, generative relations between academic texts, people, places, ideas, and bodies. The purpose in so doing, and potential benefit to the reader, is to foreground not only the contents of the special issue but also to map out the ethico-onto-epistemological foundations of the diffracted special issue and to provide some detail as to how ethico-onto-epistemologies surfaced in the praxis of the special issue’s becoming.