What is an inaugural professorial lecture? Exploring academic practices through diffractive listing

This chapter presents the (abbreviated) manuscript prepared for an inaugural professorial lecture, which explored the academic practice of the inaugural professorial lecture. 1 As a way of refusing to settle for one definition of practice or one account of this particular practice, this chapter both presents and enacts diffractive listing. The ‘juxta’ text below the line is a writing story (Richardson & St. Pierre 2008), which is part of the diffractive exploration. 2 As will be elaborated below, diffractive listing is a technique that brings together Law and Mol’s (2002) notion of listing (in composition) as a methodology for studying the complexity of practice and Haraway’s (1992) notion of diffraction (in reception/effect/affect), and combined they provoke us to think about and explore practice in nonreductive ways.