What are the questions that fascinate you? What do you want to know?

Every time I feel fascination
I just can't stand still, I've got to use her
Every time I think of what you pulled me through, dear
Fascination moves sweeping near me

— David Bowie

What are the questions that fascinate you?

This question raises the very question of questioning itself and of the relation of fascination to knowledge, to the creation of knowledge, and to the material conditions of its creation. Two sorts of questioning, both practical and speculative, grip me and pull me through. Some practical questions are: What can I do as a teacher for my students? What new tools are available to renew teaching and learning experiences? How do I and we negotiate the space between technology hype and pedagogical utility in curriculum development? Also, what can I do as a senior mentor to assist other colleagues, within my institution and more generally in the profession? Finally, what can I do in my research to clarify questions that grip me so that something resembling knowledge might result? How can I negotiate the need and desire to ingest the thoughts and concepts developed by others despite the daily time limitations for reading and reflection?

And are such practical questions too mundane for this critical context? Yet what, in fact, are the valid subjects of our critical scrutiny, and how are these subjects and this scrutiny to hold a place in our lives unless they fold intimately and affectively into our daily practices?

What do you want to know?

As with the previous question about fascination, this question generates a fundamental one about desire and unknowing - how do I know what I want to know? In everything I write and study, the extent of my unknowing only becomes more poignant as the research, writing, and study unfold, and the end of any such project is only ever provisional, at best, given the unknowing produced within that process of becoming through growth and communication of knowledge.

So this question leaves me in a perpetual in-between state: the writing left in relative completion always leads to more speculative questions that pull me necessarily toward other projects, while the knowledge acquired and produced reveals new fields of understanding yet to be gleaned. In pointing to a few such fields, I can only provide hints to myself of this in-between of unknowing: how do philosophical concepts — e.g. the fold, the event, the refrain, the impersonal — translate into lived experience? How does friendship constitute folds within lived experience, and how does the power of the impersonal intersect with such becomings? How do these affective relations expand and produce new folds, new becomings, new forms of knowledge that themselves extend and incite me ever forward? How do cultural representations intersect and fold into the sociocultural practices they purport to represent? And what role might political activism play in terms of these questions, in terms of the speculative and practical concerns that assail us as academic professionals and world citizens?