Letting the ghosts in: re-designing HE teaching and learning through posthumanism (original) (raw)
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Journal of posthumanism, 2021
This lively, innovative book makes a strong case for how we might, and must, engage multimodally with more-than-human co-students/researchers/pedagogues in Higher Education (HE) in ways that attend to urgent matters of social justice and sustainability. It builds capacity for ethical responses to neocolonial HE systems where human exceptionalism is taken for granted. It explores posthuman creative research and pedagogical practices that "push-back against the panopoly of neoliberal measurement technologies" (2). Carol A. Taylor and Annouchka Bayley have carefully edited this collection to take readers on a provocative wander with posthuman education practices that embrace the material world as affective and inseparable from knowledge-making, deploying diffractive methodologies that widen ideas about what data are and how data are produced. The 21 chapters investigate novel ways of attending to and valuing material-discursive learning with posthumanist frameworks to advocate for responsible, affirmative pedagogy and research. In the first chapter, Taylor resists a linear act of "introducing" and instead invokes an
Review Essay: Propositions for posthuman teaching and research: a diffractive re-view of three books
2017
Review essay: Propositions for posthuman teaching and research: a diffractive re-view of three books Snaza, N. & Weaver, J.A. (eds). 2015. Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-138-78235-8. Hbk, 203 pp. Taylor, C.A. & Hughes, C. (eds). 2016. Posthuman Research Practices in Education. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN: 978-1-137-45307-5. Hbk, 272 pp. Vannini, P. (ed). 2015. Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research. New York and London: Routledge. ISBN: 978-0-415-71301-6. Hbk, 194 pp.
Embedding posthumanism in higher education
2019
young people according to working life needs and expectations, which are usually based on market economy requirements (Sahlberg 2006; Tervasmäki & Tomperi 2018). This is why the educational system needs reforming. According to the latest IPCC report (IPCC 2018), we have only 12 years to make changes in order to restrain the climate change remarkably. This raises the question whether there is still time to start changing education from day-care and primary schools, or should education be able to wake up the young people in secondary and higher education as soon as possible. This article aims to discuss how to embed the posthumanistic approach into higher education, its values, structures and processes, including its curricula. This involves changes on a strategic level, such as changes in strategic decision-making, commitment at the administrative level and the value basis, as well as changes on the operational level, such Introduction
2014
The text of our manifesto will introduce posthumanism to a curriculum studies audience and propose new directions for curriculum theory and educational research more broadly. Following a description of what is variously called the “posthuman condition” or the “posthuman era,” our manifesto outlines the main theoretical features of posthumanism with particular attention to how it challenges or problematizes the nearly ubiquitous assumptions of humanism. In particular, we focus on how posthumanism responds to the history of Western humanism’s justification and encouragement of colonialism, slavery, the objectification of women, the thoughtless slaughter of non-human animals, and ecological devastation. We dwell on the question of how posthumanism may alter our understanding of the claim “education is political,” since humanism has shaped our very notions of “education” and “politics.” After outlining posthumanist discourse generally, and detailing the conceptual challenges it poses fo...
Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies
2020
As critical feminists, how can we still teach and learn in the neoliberal university? This is the overarching question that our chapter grapples with. Without romanticising the classical-in other words, colonial, Western, Eurocentricuniversity, its neoliberal conditions today imply what we want to articulate here as an end of trust. What current epistemic and economic conditions in the educational sector do to us globally has led to a foundational loss of trust in the very structures in which we work, both as teachers and as students. Yet, as we ambivalently decide to stay within academia, in this chapter we want to explore how we actually do this. What does it take for us to work in these increasingly suffocating conditions? What we have learned from our collective reflections is that a continued desire for care and trust drives our teaching and learning practices. This desire holds on to hope and commitment in academic spaces and aims to counter neoliberal patterns of exclusion (the continuation of the unequal and colonial framework of the university), indifference ("it's nobody's responsibility") and carelessness ("there is no alternative"). Yet, we must stress here that at the very beginning of the chapter, working for trust and care isn't about purity or innocence-pretending that we can overcome the conditions of neoliberalisation and epistemic injustice simply by using the right pedagogical tools. Rather, what we aim for in this chapter is to carefully sense out what it means to teach and learn "in the ruins" (Tsing, 2015) of the university, and how, inspired by Bracha Ettinger, we learn to find "trust after the end of trust" (2015, p. 344; cited in Kaiser & Thiele, 2018). Our critical intervention into the current conditions of teaching and learning in higher education is situated in the current state of our own institution, Utrecht University, where it has become common practice-as in many other academic institutions-to present education as a tool for acquiring transferable skills while the value of critical thinking as a form of social engagement is decreasing. We witness our institution disciplining students to become outcome-oriented rather than enabling them to experience education as a learning process of wondering, which includes getting lost and being surprised by one's own curiosity. With
THE POTENTIAL FOR POSTHUMAN INSIGHTS TO EFFECT SOCIALLY JUST PEDAGOGIES
In the South African higher education context, which is fraught with inequities and where many feel uncomfortable, the focus on socially just pedagogies and the positioning of teachers in relation to this is not just timeous and relevant, but crucial. In this article we share what we believe a posthumanist view has to offer researchers and educationists. The article revisits data from a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) research project, in which 23 audio-recorded interviews were conducted with academics from a variety of faculties and units for academic development. We discuss two discourses which emerged from our reading of the data: the first concerns lecturers and students having fixed racial identities that influence how learning does or does not take place and the second concerns students learning in a developmental and teleological manner. We discuss ideas culled from the literature on posthumanist ontologies that helped us to respond to these discourses, and which we believe, could be shared with academics and researchers who wish to advance a socially just pedagogy in higher education. We reflect briefly by way of conclusion on what, as researchers, our responses and responsibility towards the data and the complexities of our time could or should be.
Re/thinking Curriculum Inquiry in the Posthuman Condition: A Critical Posthumanist Stance
Education as Change
In the reconceptualisation era of curriculum studies, scholars drew on a range of theories such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminism, poststructuralism, and especially critical theory. They used critical theory as a lens to examine the influence of social and political forces on curriculum, in particular the role of dominant ideologies on schooling and higher education in capitalist societies. In this article we explore some of the limitations this has, especially with regard to the current posthuman condition, without repudiating all the benefits that it has offered. Then we re/think curriculum studies in the posthuman condition, drawing on insights from a particular strand of posthumanism, critical posthumanism. We experiment with the real, as well as with what a reconceptualised subject (one that is ecological) might mean for curriculum inquiry in South Africa. In our exploration, we re/think the curriculum concepts: curriculum-as-lived, curriculum as compli...
Cutting Through Water: Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality
2016
Based on an ongoing debate—academic as well as public—regarding the roles of the teacher and the student in education, this thesis explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, I localize anthropocentrism and subject-centrism (teacher/student) as two problematic aspects of the aforementioned approaches. These aspects are deeply connected with various humanistic ideas. Instead, I turn to posthuman philosophy and more specifically, I propose post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality as a theoretical framework. Diffraction is hereby suggested as an appropriate posthuman methodology that reads texts and memory stories relationally in order to develop new ideas. The theory and methodology used are mainly inspired by posthuman feminist philosophers Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.The main contribution of the thesis is introducing and developing a posthuman theory of ...