Posthumanist Ethico-Onto-Epistemology in Educational Research
the relation is the smallest unit of analysis (Haraway, 2003, p. 20)
Posthumanism is a relatively new concept in educational scholarship that, since 2013,[1] has been the topic of lively theoretical conversations within certain educational fields of study including curriculum studies. See Appendix A. My voice in this conversation is a critical posthumanist one (Braidotti, 2016a). My position is that critical posthumanist educational research methodologies provide relational structures in which research collectives can form to iteratively find ethical[2] solutions to educational research questions. Further, that these collectives (also known as ecologies), produce critical research findings, and as such provide educational scholars with a mechanism for advancing social justice.
Posthumanism is a worldview that rejects human exceptionalism/speciesism, dualism, and humanism.[3] More specifically, posthumanism rejects the privilege that humanism bestows upon Man, the white, heterosexual, able-bodied male representation of the human, at the expense of other zoe,[4] built and natural environments, and technology (Braidotti, 2018). For educational scholars, posthumanism is generally associated with a relational epistemology (a theory of knowledge), that cannot be separated from either ethics or ontology (the nature of being), although its relational dimension is contested by some (Taylor & Hughes, 2016). If posthumanism is “as much about what knowledge is as it is [about] how knowledge comes to be” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 5) then what this means for educators and educational researchers is that knowledge cannot be separated from the matter that holds it; that knowledge is physical and that matter is intelligent, vital, and agential. For relational posthumanists, this means that matter-knowledge is situated in embedded and embodied systems of relations that dynamically interact with, learn from, and depend upon each other in what Barad (2012) calls intra-action. Intra-action, as distinct from interaction, is a key concept in understanding how ethics is integral to matter-knowledge relations, and for this reason, I offer the following analogy.
Imagine intra-action as a three-circle Venn diagram.[5] Imagine each circle is a matter-knowledge system interacting with two other matter-knowledge systems, as represented by the central overlap in the middle and the overlap between any two circles. Imagine that each overlap represents the possibility of exchange, communication, or education between at least two circles-systems. Imagine that each matter-knowledge system also has its own relationship history that can be shared in these overlapping spaces. Finally, imagine the circles stretched and skewed, and instead of three concentric circle-systems, there are thousands, even millions of skewed systems each overlapping in different degrees with at least two other systems. What you might see is a picture of earth.
As posthumanists understand matter-knowledge relations, you might also picture the dynamism of a million moving systems changing their shape to respond to and listen to the responses of other systems within the relationship. Ethics is linked to this ability to listen and respond that carries with it the responsibility of doing so. In other words, response-ability is an ethical “obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self” in all relations (Barad in Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012 n.p.). Matter-knowledge, then, is not just “a co-operative trans-species effort (Margulis and Sagan, 1995)[6] that takes place…between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 3), it is an assembly of ethical-matter-knowledge relations that take place in these attentive/responsive overlapping areas. It is in these ethically attentive/responsive spaces where systems overlap that I argue critical, social, political, environmental, and educational exchanges/changes occur.[7] I use the term critical posthumanism to mean ethical intra-action in this overlapping, haptic space and in the context of educational research, to mean ethical intra-active methodologies that take shape in this space as an attention and response to a research question. In the following sections, I provide a number of posthumanist perspectives to explain why educational researchers have turned to posthumanism and how posthumanist perspectives are framing critical relational methodologies as alternatives to humanist-based methodocentricism in educational research.Contested Posthumanist OntologiesBrown (2009) and Zembylas (2017) tell us that posthumanist epistemology is informed by two ontological positions—a relational one, as described above, and a non-relational one. The relational ontological orientation is by far the one favoured by educational scholars (Lather, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2012; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). The non-relational ontological orientation, called speculative realism,[8] has not been taken up in a meaningful way by educational scholars, in part for how it privileges “a humanist and masculinist sense of a disembodied subject” (Alaimo, 2014, p. 15; Lemke, 2017) and in part because its anti-relational position is contrary to historical educational thinking (Ceder, 2016). As Taylor (2016) frames it, “[s]peculative realism, …is a practice of enweirding [speculative realists’ term, not hers], in which…we ‘know’ about things—or think we do—because we (humans) make up stories, fictions, and narratives about them” (p. 210), and for educators, this seems to be an untenable position.
The Posthumanist TurnScholars in educational research have turned to posthumanism, in part, because a posthumanist perspective values 1) interdisciplinary thought and collaboration (Snaza & Weaver, 2015a); 2) education as an ethical-ontology-epistemology endeavour (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013); 3) new ways of conceptualizing, framing, and producing educational research (Taylor & Hughes, 2016); and 4) iterative experimental practices that produce democratic educational change (Gerrard, Rudolph, & Sriprakash, 2017).
Cole and Rafe (2017) suggest the turn represents an opposition to an educational business mentality that evaluates “new thought or discovery in learning…by its efficiency in the market” (p. 454). Gough (2017) speculates that a growing awareness of the environment and the negative effects of global warming precipitated the turn, to which I would add the implications of the 2016 announcement by the International Geological Congress (Carrington, 2016) that Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.[9] Some educational researchers (Gerrard et al., 2017) suggest that the post-humanist turn was brought on by recognition of a personal complicity as consumers in the creation of the Anthropocene. Pedersen (2012) suggests that it was a response to the commodification that created closures for social change. For example, the World Bank (2017), in supporting evidence-based job creation programs, ostensibly a good thing, in fact feeds the capitalist consumer buying cycle humanism entrenches.
Other posthumanist education scholars (St. Pierre et al., 2016; Taylor, 2017; Taylor & Hughes, 2016) suggest that the turn to posthumanism has been an expression of the exhaustion scholars feel with qualitative and quantitative research that respectively privilege subjectivity and objectivity and together privilege anthropocentricism. Pedersen and Pini (2017) see posthumanism as a “response to the pervasive ‘I, I, I’ in educational research, and the sickness of ourselves it brings about” (p. 1051).
Taken together, these reasons suggest to me a desire on the part of these educational researchers to do critical research differently in the hopes of making real changes to this world, including academia. Further, in turning to posthumanism, educational scholars are able to satisfy, on one hand, a need for a new conceptual framework within which to rethink planetary relationships, and on the other, a need to keep and evolve critical theory for social justice. What follows is an examination of critical posthumanist educational research that specifically attends to different methodological practices educational scholars took up when they turned to posthumanism.
Critical Posthumanist MethodologiesI begin by looking at how methodocentrism entrenches humanism in the academy and how research ecology formation is a critical, practical, and democratic alternative to it. Next, I look at how diffractive reading is used as a methodology for producing insights between two different discourses. After, I look at how two researchers rethink picture books and kinship respectively to de-marginalize children and animal knowledges. Following this, I look at new empiricism as a set of methodologies helpful in studying the critical effects of technology for education. Finally, I look at educational scholars who use a walking methodology to address social injustice.
Methodology as Dynamic, Critical, and Political Ecology FormationSnaza and Weaver (2016) analyze the methodocentric bias in university research to point out the critical effects this bias has on the kinds of research that gets sanctioned, funded, and done, and how methodocentricism ultimately reifies a humanist value system. The most important thread of their larger argument is that methods planned in advance of data collection prevent research participants, human and nonhuman, from forming organic research ecologies necessary for addressing research questions. They argue that methodocentricism, because it is a humanist construct designed to enforce humanist concepts of research rigor, cannot produce research results that reflect anything other than humanist values. I would add that Research Ethics Boards (REBs), in conceptualizing research participants and indeed REBs themselves as objective others separable from the research, is another example of how methodocentrism entrenches humanism in academic research and how REBs are entrenched in humanist methodocentrism.
A research ecology, conversely, forms in response to a research question/problem by interested others (participants and researchers). It takes the form of an open system embedded in the research project whose embodied members relate with each other, but also relate as a unit with other systems to find a collectively satisfying answer/solution (Snaza & Weaver, 2015a; Sanza 2015, 2016). A research ecology may be as simple as a collaborative partnership, but often research ecologies are larger assemblages, also known as democratic collectives (Weaver & Snaza, 2016, p. 4). In an imaginary collective described in Departments of Language (Snaza, 2015), a group of scholars from many disciplines are forced into a single university department and “charged with articulating both research agendas and programs of study toward degrees” (p. 205). To accomplish their task (research question), they must work together and put aside any notions of a discipline-specific right way of doing things, to find an answer that works for all disciplines. This ecology must puzzle out an answer (research result) by iterative experimenting with possible solutions knowing that they are likely to get it wrong a few times before finding a satisfactory solution (Latour, 2004). As in this example, a problem-oriented and iterative approach to solving a complex research problem is key in ecology-based educational research. The methodological assumptions important to attend to here are 1) that posthumanists understand collectives can and do form organically and often dynamically, and 2) that only such collectives can produce democratic, representative solutions/results.
Methodocentrism has ethical implications as well, as it relates to the consequences of research, or what I term material effects, because educational research is used as a basis for public educational policy (Weaver & Snaza, 2016). As Latour warns, “[i]n research, ‘we are speaking of what is produced, constructed, decided, defined’ as truth, and this truth comes to delimit the parameters of constructing legitimate public policy” (in Weaver & Snaza, 2016, p.4). In analyzing the material effects of educational research, I see that methodocentricism can foreclose democracy. Without a research process that allows ecologies to form organically first to decide on the best methods to use, the resulting research (apart from producing humanist-based results), cannot be representative enough of real populations to form the basis of public policy. An extension of this analysis is that classrooms, as sites of such humanist public policy enactment (Brown, 2009), are very resistant to reform because of the loop between humanist methodocentric research practices and school policy production. I conclude that without changing the humanist methodocentric research process, educational inquiry will remain imprisoned by the humanist privilege that allowed colonialism, sexism, racism, and ageism to take hold in university institutions to begin with.
Diffractive Reading as both Method and Methodology for Seeing What Matter MattersPosthumanist educational researchers often use a diffractive reading methodology to juxtapose discourses from different sources or disciplines to produce insights about one through the other and to identify overlaps between them, or as one of several methods in a larger research methodology (Bayley, 2018; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; De Freitas & Walshaw, 2016; A. Gough & Gough, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; Taylor, 2016). The methodology, as articulated by both Braidotti (2016) and Barad (2007, 2014a, 2014b), researches the intersection of ideas, and how like diffracting wave patterns that amplify crests and troughs, or cancel each other out when they meet, to identify points and patterns of either positive or negative difference. This is a useful posthumanist methodology for identifying paths that can maximize positive and negative change for critical social/zoe action or as a minimum identify questions for further collective experimentation.
Picture Book Methodologies to Resist Marginalization of ChildrenMurris’ (2016) critical picture book research methodology thinks of children differently—as posthuman beings. Murris’ research with classroom ecologies shows that children are also capable of understanding complex philosophical ideas and are capable of demonstrating this knowledge in multi-modal ways. As a reaction to humanist assumptions about children, which I discuss later, she takes a critical posthumanist position and assumes instead that posthuman children have full agency and therefore can pose their own questions about a story, formulate answers to them, and relate their answers to their classmates so long as it is free of any judgement by the teacher. She insists that children, like most other living organisms, can learn to rely on a “community (of enquiry) that regulates itself over time by regularly practicing democratic being and thinking together” (p. 136). In other words, her research methodology allows both children and teachers to find out what it means to “think-for-yourself-through-thinking-with-others” (p.132) within a community.
Apart from what her research positively demonstrates about children’s capabilities, her posthumanist research methodology is a critical comment on how humanist-based education systems marginalize students and is therefore a mechanism for her to advance social justice for children. She contends, and I agree, that children are marginalized and denied on “three counts: ethically for being wrongfully excluded, epistemically for being wrongfully mistrusted, and ontologically for being wrongfully positioned as a lesser being” (Blyth 2015, p. 145 [thesis] in Murris, 2016, p. 78). First, children are marginalized ethically, which accounts for why they have been “excluded from practices and many decision-making processes” in their own education (Murris, 2016, p. 78). Second, because adults and educators trust adult knowledges more than a child’s knowledge, children are marginalized epistemologically. Third, relying on Fricker’s (2007) notion of identity prejudice, prejudices of deficit, such as immaturity assigned to children, devalue them and positions them as lesser beings ontologically (Murris, 2016).
I conclude that children are marginalized because we adults do not engage with children ethically. That is, we do not listen or respond to them as beings that deserve both. This unethical behavior extends to teachers who reify humanist marginalized conceptions of the child, perhaps because of their teacher training, which prescribes what counts as content knowledge and prescribes assessment criteria that often judge children’s knowledge “by their ability to express themselves linguistically” (p. 80) particularly, in written form.
Methodologies of Companionship and KinshipMorris (2014) also recognizes children’s ability to produce different and sometimes more sensitive knowledges than adults. Morris, however, extends this line of thinking to animals as well. Her research methodology of kinship and companionship adapted from Haraway’s (2007) work on companion species shows that other species have interiorities and with interiorities come unique knowledges. One of the conclusions she draws from her research and that of others is that when beings (humans and nonhumans) form relationships with each other, they not only share experiences and emotional connections, they also share knowledge. Another conclusion is that not only should a “humanist education…built on binaries,” be transformed to a posthumanist education “built on hybridities” (p. 45), but that a posthumanist education should create opportunities in the curriculum for children to relate with other species. While I completely agree with Morris, I would emphasize ethical relationships more than she does. Children need to understand that an ethical relationship with a nonhuman means attentive, reciprocal listening and responding; not a master-animal relationship where the human commands and the animal obeys. Providing opportunities for children to engage with animal knowledges also means teaching them that it is not silly to do so; that “[a]nimals are our teachers. Sometimes…our best teachers” (p. 52) and we can learn from them.
New Empiricism as Experimental MethodologyPosthumanist experimental inquiry is called new empiricism. While Braidotti (2017), and St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) have written that now, more than ever, is the time to heed Delueze and Guatarri’s (1987) imperative to experiment, posthumanist educational experimental inquiry is not often found in educational literature, but where it does appear, it is usually related to educational technologies. In education there is a prevailing tendency to think of technology as something to use for some educational end. Conceiving of use in this way is a slippery slope that has, in other contexts, justified slavery, animal abuse, kidnapping, and other forms of commodification. While such comparisons seem overly dramatic at first glance, it is sobering to realize that they all share an assumption that objectification is at times justifiable. For critical posthumanists it never is. Post-humanist educational researchers under the banner of new empiricism are finding new ways to work with technologies as relational entities to subvert such concepts of use (de Freitas, 2018).
de Freitas’ (2016) research with new haptic bio-sensor technologies in and for education critically troubles conceptions of normal. Of teachers interpreting bio-sensor data from biopedagogies to assess students, she asks what is a normal reading? de Freitas has a critical concern that data produced by these technologies objectify children as well as the technological devices. Her research seeks to repurpose this data and the devices to teach students about relationships instead. Where de Freitas’s research focuses on the critical implication of educational technologies already deployed in classrooms, Lenz Taguchi and Aronsson’s (2018) research focuses on the critical implications of technological data not reaching the classroom. Although both de Freitas’s and Lenz Taguchi’s methodologies differ from each other, both measure the effects of quantifiable data produced by technologies to generate critical knowledge. Lenz Taguchi (2018) uses a Deleuzo–Guattarian cartographic methodology to map concepts that emerge when preschool teachers, trained in social constructivism, encounter neuroscientific research made possible by technology.
In one way or another, new empirical methodologies engage with Barad’s (2007) notion of apparatus. The concept of apparatus draws on Bohr’s quantum mechanical thought experiments, a practice used in physics when the technologies needed to conduct actual experiments are not yet sufficiently developed to do so. In one such thought experiment, Bohr, who was later proven correct (Barad, 2007), showed that “the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus” (Kaiser & Thiele, 2014, p. 106). In terms of methodology for education researchers, the implications of this are as follows: 1) The apparatus has agency and is an important factor in determining what experimental outcomes can be sensed (observed, heard, felt, etc); 2) The apparatus is a specific agential assembly, arrangement, or cut that always leaves something out and is, therefore, nondeterministic; 3) The apparatus is part of the outcome; 4) The apparatus includes the researcher; 5) There is no objective knowledge or subjective participant knowledge that stands outside the research event. For deFrietas, the apparatus is the repurposed data. For Lenz Taguchi and Aronsson, the apparatus is a set of conceptual maps. In understanding how apparatus, as part of any methodology, conditions research findings, I would suggest that educational researchers of any stripe, like posthumanist research collectives, carefully consider the apparatus they use and evaluate its potentially critical effects on research outcomes.
Walking MethodologiesA walking research methodology, generally understood, uses an apparatus of journey to frame and convey knowledges (literacies) as stories that are inseparable from a kinetic relationship they share with the people and environment as one walks from place to place. Springgay (2017b), Irwin (2013),[10] and Somerville (2017) all use a walking methodology in this way to connect place to movement and pedagogy, and in the case of Somerville, to Australian Indigenous song and ceremony (2012). For Irwin (2013) a walking methodology is about putting educational research into motion to ask what does art “set in motion do?” (p. 198 my emphasis) rather than ask what does art mean. For Springgay and Truman (2017a), a walking research methodology is also a learning and teaching methodology, in which the critical—political and historical—aspects of place become known as they are walked. Highlighting a project from their Walking Lab, Springgay and Truman (2017a) think trans theory to experiment with walking as a sonic art performance. The Walking to the Laundromat project is interested in “transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities” (p. 27) that queer posthumanist concepts of corporeality, speciesism, and materialities. Through parody, it critically examines the laundry business as “gendered labour” (p. 14) while walking in the neighborhood between wash cycles and listening to an audio tape. This posthumanist methodology, in coupling acts of walking and washing with the mediated effects of the audio tape parody, is a mechanism through which a voluntarily and dynamically assembled research collective can contemplate how many women earn their living doing laundry all day every day.
Somerville et al.’s (2011, 2012) research with walking methodologies is a critical and ethical response as educators to literacies of place that the state educational system ignored. Their research looked at Australian Indigenous stories and linked them to physical places to remap disused and sometimes forgotten ancestral walking trails that now often run through settler-populated areas. The routes marked the places and recorded the stories where significant events happened in the creation stories as told by Indigenous ancestors who travelled across the land for ceremony. The purpose of this research was first to remap these trails, then to reactivate Australian Indigenous literacies, histories, and knowledges by walking the routes. The choice of a walking methodology by the research collective recognized that Australian Indigenous story lines are still “ontologically and epistemologically connected to the land as walking trails” (Somerville, 2012, p. 10.) Enacting a literacy of place as movements with the landscape and all its zoe, also meant performing stories along the way for the benefit of land and people. For posthumanists, who ascribe agency and vitality to what humanists call inanimate objects, when a story is told, the characters, place, and surrounding zoe are sung into being in a process of mutual literacy.
For Somerville (2012), understanding that “[t]he storyline of these walking trails is the larger plot or narrative outline of the story that connects all the smaller stories of each place like beads on a string” (p.14) connects walking to a place to literacies to be learned. From a critical posthumanist perspective, Somerville’s research helped the research collective to re-territorialize Indigenous literacies despite state-run education. It also encouraged other educators to intra-act ethically not only with Indigenous people and a land by listening and responding to both, but with literacies produced by historical and cultural relationships of a people with a land.
Limitations of Posthumanism and Educational PosthumanismThe most serious criticism of posthumanism comes from inside the circle of posthumanist researchers. Hayles (2017), in pushing the envelope of educational posthumanism to a place where she can have a conversation about the power of the cognitive unconscious, says there is a growing need to expand our ideas of unconscious cognition to open up posthumanist research possibilities to “the cognitive capabilities of technical systems” (p. 11). She uses terms familiar to posthumanists, such as assemblages, but in new ways to show how privileging consciousness has limited posthumanist research as a field of study. In reminding us that open systems are often “precisely structured by sensors, perceptors, actuators, and cognitive processes of the interactors” (p. 11) and that cognition (knowledge) is subject to its material composition, she identifies a limitation of posthumanism as an emphasis on the creative emergent forces operating in open systems to the exclusion of hemostatic forces also operating. She surmises that posthumanists grounded in Deleuze and Guattari often forget this although Deleuze and Guattari themselves did not (pp. 69-71).
Another limitation of posthumanism is seen in Murris’ (2016) work. The influence of Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1989) is unmistakable not only in how she conceives of the learning collective but also in how she conceives of the subjective “I” as multiple subjectivities. There is, however, an unresolved tension in her work between Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1987) concept of multiplicities and Barad’s (2007) concept of a singular intra-actional configuration at a specific moment of measurement. Similar tensions exist for Lenz Taguchi (2012) and St. Pierre (2016). Whether the “I” is multiple and rhizomatic or intra-active, posthumanist educational researchers do agree that the “I” and the subject-to-subject interactions that characterize qualitative research should be abandoned. As such, the tension does not cause a problem so much as it draws attention to an invisible intellectual divide between posthumanist educational scholars (Davies, 2018) who prefer thinking either with Deleuze and Guatarri or with Barad and Haraway.
Although I have not discussed Deleuze and Guatarri at any length in this essay, many educational scholars rely on Deleuze and Guatarri’s, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), for interpretation of some posthumanist and educational concepts. St. Pierre (2017b) criticizes some posthumanist educational scholars for their inappropriate application or uninformed use of certain Deleuze and Guatarri concepts, saying a concept “vanishes if thrust into a new milieu…the concept rhizome disappears if it is taken from the milieu of Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism and plopped down in the milieu of a qualitative interview study” (p. 695). She is, of course, correct, but some of the fault for this must be laid at the feet of Deleuze and Guattari whose writing is difficult to read. In so much as she made understanding Deleuze and Guattari a prerequisite for joining educational posthumanist conversations, this is a criticism I level against her as being counterproductive and exclusionary rather than inviting.
ConclusionIt matters what matters we use to think other matters with… (Haraway, 2011)
Becoming posthuman…is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social, psychic, ecological, planetary…[as] ecologies of belonging (Braidotti, 2016a, p. 25).
In this essay, I discussed educational posthumanism scholarship informed primarily by a relational ethico-onto-epistemology. I discussed how educational posthumanist methodologies address topics of critical concern for educational researchers studying posthuman children in posthuman times. Within an overarching theme of a critical posthumanism, I have shown that educational research methodologies provide relational intra-active structures in which collectives/ecologies can form to iteratively address educational research questions. I have shown that intra-active ecologies are ethical systems because they oblige members to listen and respond. As such, the research they produce is critical and provides educational scholars with a mechanism for advancing social justice.
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Appendix A: Tracing/Mapping the Posthumanist Turn in EducationPosthumanism’s genealogy to pedagogy can be mapped and traced using many routes. As a recent arrival to posthumanist thinking, educational scholarship has had to forge connections to scholarship from many disciplines and thus is in a unique position to broker cross-disciplinary relationships. The following verbal diagram summarizes the relational histories and relational potentialities of educational posthumanist scholarship.
From Hayles (1999), posthumanism can be traced to Wolfe (2009) by way of their common work as professors of Literature, and from there, to Pederson (2010), an educational scholar involved in teaching animal care professionals who shared a common interest in animal rights activism with Wolfe. Similarly, a genealogy can trace Haraway (1987) to Barad (2007) via feminist philosophy and their training as scientists, to educational new material feminists, such as Sommerville (2015) and Taylor and Hughes (2016). Post qualitative educational scholar, Lather (2016) maps to Foucault (1981), as does Davis (2018). Lather and St. Pierre (2017) together map to Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) via Manning and Masumi (2014) are found in the educational walking scholars Springgay and Truman (2017) and in early childhood educational scholar, Lenz Taguchi (2016). Lenz Taguchi (2017; 2018) educational research maps directly to concepts drawn from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and indirectly to Varela (2012). Bennett (2009) and DeLanda (2016) also trace to Deleuze and Guattari’s but in a less theoretical way than the educational scholars just mentioned. Instead, they map concepts of vitality and dynamic assemblages found in built or cultural materiality, such as political system and urban architecture; they in turn can be traced in Ceder’s (2016) recent work in vital educational relationality.
It is probably obvious from the maps and tracings provided so far, how pedagogy began to emerge and engages with posthumanism and has relied on the scholarly work of other disciplines to help educational researchers come to grips with what posthumanism means for doing education. However, I will make a few more genealogical connections to illustrate how cross disciplinary differences (Weaver, 2010) produce a diffractive movement (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992, 1997) that gets read into educational posthumanist concepts, theory, and research methodologies.
To continue, drawing on Whitehead (1919), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Prigogine, Stengers (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) engages Latour (2011) who wrote an introduction to her book on Alfred North Whitehead’s mathematics and philosophies. Latour then engages Snaza (2015), Gough (2015), and Cole and Rafe’s (2017) in the production of conceptual ecologies for education. Snaza and Weaver (2015), Weaver (2005, 2010), Gough and Gough (2017), de Freitas, Elizabeth (2018), and Søndergaard’s (2016) attend to digital technologies and how they extend the human, the curriculum, and educational research. These educational scholars have drawn on and continue to draw on Hayles (2012, 2017), Haraway (1987, 2016), and Barad (2017).
Footnotes
[1] A search of the uOttawa library on the terms “posthumanism + educational research” for the period between 1990 and 2000 yielded two results; for the period between 2001 and 2010 it yielded another two results; 2011/2012 added four more including two more from the same scholar in both previous periods.
[2] Ethical, not in how it is conceived by Ethics Research Board as “radically exteriorized other[s]” but instead as attentive and responsive relations with human and nonhuman others (Barad in Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012 n.p.).
[3] Humanism has been defined as: “A discourse which claims that the figure of ‘Man’…naturally stands at the centre of things; is entirely distinct from animals, machines, and other nonhuman entities; is absolutely known and knowable to ‘himself’” (Badmington, 2004).
[4] An ancient Greek word meaning life.
[5] This image is of a three circle Venn diagram.
[6] See instead (Margulis & Sagan, 1986).
[7] De Freitas (2018) would describe this as “a haptic theory of contiguous relationality, [and] a way of studying life as it contracts and expands across a continuum of mind-matter”.
[8] A branch of speculative realism known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) (Harman, 2007) is mentioned occasionally in educational literature (Snaza & Weaver, 2015b).
[9] An epoch in which the dominant influence on climate and environment are humans.
[10] I am not sure if Irwin would self-identify as a posthumanist, but she draws on the writings of Delueze and Guatarri in ways like Springgay who does identify as posthuman.
the relation is the smallest unit of analysis (Haraway, 2003, p. 20)
Posthumanism is a relatively new concept in educational scholarship that, since 2013,[1] has been the topic of lively theoretical conversations within certain educational fields of study including curriculum studies. See Appendix A. My voice in this conversation is a critical posthumanist one (Braidotti, 2016a). My position is that critical posthumanist educational research methodologies provide relational structures in which research collectives can form to iteratively find ethical[2] solutions to educational research questions. Further, that these collectives (also known as ecologies), produce critical research findings, and as such provide educational scholars with a mechanism for advancing social justice.
Posthumanism is a worldview that rejects human exceptionalism/speciesism, dualism, and humanism.[3] More specifically, posthumanism rejects the privilege that humanism bestows upon Man, the white, heterosexual, able-bodied male representation of the human, at the expense of other zoe,[4] built and natural environments, and technology (Braidotti, 2018). For educational scholars, posthumanism is generally associated with a relational epistemology (a theory of knowledge), that cannot be separated from either ethics or ontology (the nature of being), although its relational dimension is contested by some (Taylor & Hughes, 2016). If posthumanism is “as much about what knowledge is as it is [about] how knowledge comes to be” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 5) then what this means for educators and educational researchers is that knowledge cannot be separated from the matter that holds it; that knowledge is physical and that matter is intelligent, vital, and agential. For relational posthumanists, this means that matter-knowledge is situated in embedded and embodied systems of relations that dynamically interact with, learn from, and depend upon each other in what Barad (2012) calls intra-action. Intra-action, as distinct from interaction, is a key concept in understanding how ethics is integral to matter-knowledge relations, and for this reason, I offer the following analogy.
Imagine intra-action as a three-circle Venn diagram.[5] Imagine each circle is a matter-knowledge system interacting with two other matter-knowledge systems, as represented by the central overlap in the middle and the overlap between any two circles. Imagine that each overlap represents the possibility of exchange, communication, or education between at least two circles-systems. Imagine that each matter-knowledge system also has its own relationship history that can be shared in these overlapping spaces. Finally, imagine the circles stretched and skewed, and instead of three concentric circle-systems, there are thousands, even millions of skewed systems each overlapping in different degrees with at least two other systems. What you might see is a picture of earth.
As posthumanists understand matter-knowledge relations, you might also picture the dynamism of a million moving systems changing their shape to respond to and listen to the responses of other systems within the relationship. Ethics is linked to this ability to listen and respond that carries with it the responsibility of doing so. In other words, response-ability is an ethical “obligation to be responsive to the other, who is not entirely separate from what we call the self” in all relations (Barad in Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012 n.p.). Matter-knowledge, then, is not just “a co-operative trans-species effort (Margulis and Sagan, 1995)[6] that takes place…between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past” (Braidotti, 2018, p. 3), it is an assembly of ethical-matter-knowledge relations that take place in these attentive/responsive overlapping areas. It is in these ethically attentive/responsive spaces where systems overlap that I argue critical, social, political, environmental, and educational exchanges/changes occur.[7] I use the term critical posthumanism to mean ethical intra-action in this overlapping, haptic space and in the context of educational research, to mean ethical intra-active methodologies that take shape in this space as an attention and response to a research question. In the following sections, I provide a number of posthumanist perspectives to explain why educational researchers have turned to posthumanism and how posthumanist perspectives are framing critical relational methodologies as alternatives to humanist-based methodocentricism in educational research.Contested Posthumanist OntologiesBrown (2009) and Zembylas (2017) tell us that posthumanist epistemology is informed by two ontological positions—a relational one, as described above, and a non-relational one. The relational ontological orientation is by far the one favoured by educational scholars (Lather, 2016; Lenz Taguchi, 2012; St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei, 2016). The non-relational ontological orientation, called speculative realism,[8] has not been taken up in a meaningful way by educational scholars, in part for how it privileges “a humanist and masculinist sense of a disembodied subject” (Alaimo, 2014, p. 15; Lemke, 2017) and in part because its anti-relational position is contrary to historical educational thinking (Ceder, 2016). As Taylor (2016) frames it, “[s]peculative realism, …is a practice of enweirding [speculative realists’ term, not hers], in which…we ‘know’ about things—or think we do—because we (humans) make up stories, fictions, and narratives about them” (p. 210), and for educators, this seems to be an untenable position.
The Posthumanist TurnScholars in educational research have turned to posthumanism, in part, because a posthumanist perspective values 1) interdisciplinary thought and collaboration (Snaza & Weaver, 2015a); 2) education as an ethical-ontology-epistemology endeavour (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013); 3) new ways of conceptualizing, framing, and producing educational research (Taylor & Hughes, 2016); and 4) iterative experimental practices that produce democratic educational change (Gerrard, Rudolph, & Sriprakash, 2017).
Cole and Rafe (2017) suggest the turn represents an opposition to an educational business mentality that evaluates “new thought or discovery in learning…by its efficiency in the market” (p. 454). Gough (2017) speculates that a growing awareness of the environment and the negative effects of global warming precipitated the turn, to which I would add the implications of the 2016 announcement by the International Geological Congress (Carrington, 2016) that Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.[9] Some educational researchers (Gerrard et al., 2017) suggest that the post-humanist turn was brought on by recognition of a personal complicity as consumers in the creation of the Anthropocene. Pedersen (2012) suggests that it was a response to the commodification that created closures for social change. For example, the World Bank (2017), in supporting evidence-based job creation programs, ostensibly a good thing, in fact feeds the capitalist consumer buying cycle humanism entrenches.
Other posthumanist education scholars (St. Pierre et al., 2016; Taylor, 2017; Taylor & Hughes, 2016) suggest that the turn to posthumanism has been an expression of the exhaustion scholars feel with qualitative and quantitative research that respectively privilege subjectivity and objectivity and together privilege anthropocentricism. Pedersen and Pini (2017) see posthumanism as a “response to the pervasive ‘I, I, I’ in educational research, and the sickness of ourselves it brings about” (p. 1051).
Taken together, these reasons suggest to me a desire on the part of these educational researchers to do critical research differently in the hopes of making real changes to this world, including academia. Further, in turning to posthumanism, educational scholars are able to satisfy, on one hand, a need for a new conceptual framework within which to rethink planetary relationships, and on the other, a need to keep and evolve critical theory for social justice. What follows is an examination of critical posthumanist educational research that specifically attends to different methodological practices educational scholars took up when they turned to posthumanism.
Critical Posthumanist MethodologiesI begin by looking at how methodocentrism entrenches humanism in the academy and how research ecology formation is a critical, practical, and democratic alternative to it. Next, I look at how diffractive reading is used as a methodology for producing insights between two different discourses. After, I look at how two researchers rethink picture books and kinship respectively to de-marginalize children and animal knowledges. Following this, I look at new empiricism as a set of methodologies helpful in studying the critical effects of technology for education. Finally, I look at educational scholars who use a walking methodology to address social injustice.
Methodology as Dynamic, Critical, and Political Ecology FormationSnaza and Weaver (2016) analyze the methodocentric bias in university research to point out the critical effects this bias has on the kinds of research that gets sanctioned, funded, and done, and how methodocentricism ultimately reifies a humanist value system. The most important thread of their larger argument is that methods planned in advance of data collection prevent research participants, human and nonhuman, from forming organic research ecologies necessary for addressing research questions. They argue that methodocentricism, because it is a humanist construct designed to enforce humanist concepts of research rigor, cannot produce research results that reflect anything other than humanist values. I would add that Research Ethics Boards (REBs), in conceptualizing research participants and indeed REBs themselves as objective others separable from the research, is another example of how methodocentrism entrenches humanism in academic research and how REBs are entrenched in humanist methodocentrism.
A research ecology, conversely, forms in response to a research question/problem by interested others (participants and researchers). It takes the form of an open system embedded in the research project whose embodied members relate with each other, but also relate as a unit with other systems to find a collectively satisfying answer/solution (Snaza & Weaver, 2015a; Sanza 2015, 2016). A research ecology may be as simple as a collaborative partnership, but often research ecologies are larger assemblages, also known as democratic collectives (Weaver & Snaza, 2016, p. 4). In an imaginary collective described in Departments of Language (Snaza, 2015), a group of scholars from many disciplines are forced into a single university department and “charged with articulating both research agendas and programs of study toward degrees” (p. 205). To accomplish their task (research question), they must work together and put aside any notions of a discipline-specific right way of doing things, to find an answer that works for all disciplines. This ecology must puzzle out an answer (research result) by iterative experimenting with possible solutions knowing that they are likely to get it wrong a few times before finding a satisfactory solution (Latour, 2004). As in this example, a problem-oriented and iterative approach to solving a complex research problem is key in ecology-based educational research. The methodological assumptions important to attend to here are 1) that posthumanists understand collectives can and do form organically and often dynamically, and 2) that only such collectives can produce democratic, representative solutions/results.
Methodocentrism has ethical implications as well, as it relates to the consequences of research, or what I term material effects, because educational research is used as a basis for public educational policy (Weaver & Snaza, 2016). As Latour warns, “[i]n research, ‘we are speaking of what is produced, constructed, decided, defined’ as truth, and this truth comes to delimit the parameters of constructing legitimate public policy” (in Weaver & Snaza, 2016, p.4). In analyzing the material effects of educational research, I see that methodocentricism can foreclose democracy. Without a research process that allows ecologies to form organically first to decide on the best methods to use, the resulting research (apart from producing humanist-based results), cannot be representative enough of real populations to form the basis of public policy. An extension of this analysis is that classrooms, as sites of such humanist public policy enactment (Brown, 2009), are very resistant to reform because of the loop between humanist methodocentric research practices and school policy production. I conclude that without changing the humanist methodocentric research process, educational inquiry will remain imprisoned by the humanist privilege that allowed colonialism, sexism, racism, and ageism to take hold in university institutions to begin with.
Diffractive Reading as both Method and Methodology for Seeing What Matter MattersPosthumanist educational researchers often use a diffractive reading methodology to juxtapose discourses from different sources or disciplines to produce insights about one through the other and to identify overlaps between them, or as one of several methods in a larger research methodology (Bayley, 2018; Bozalek & Zembylas, 2017; De Freitas & Walshaw, 2016; A. Gough & Gough, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; Taylor, 2016). The methodology, as articulated by both Braidotti (2016) and Barad (2007, 2014a, 2014b), researches the intersection of ideas, and how like diffracting wave patterns that amplify crests and troughs, or cancel each other out when they meet, to identify points and patterns of either positive or negative difference. This is a useful posthumanist methodology for identifying paths that can maximize positive and negative change for critical social/zoe action or as a minimum identify questions for further collective experimentation.
Picture Book Methodologies to Resist Marginalization of ChildrenMurris’ (2016) critical picture book research methodology thinks of children differently—as posthuman beings. Murris’ research with classroom ecologies shows that children are also capable of understanding complex philosophical ideas and are capable of demonstrating this knowledge in multi-modal ways. As a reaction to humanist assumptions about children, which I discuss later, she takes a critical posthumanist position and assumes instead that posthuman children have full agency and therefore can pose their own questions about a story, formulate answers to them, and relate their answers to their classmates so long as it is free of any judgement by the teacher. She insists that children, like most other living organisms, can learn to rely on a “community (of enquiry) that regulates itself over time by regularly practicing democratic being and thinking together” (p. 136). In other words, her research methodology allows both children and teachers to find out what it means to “think-for-yourself-through-thinking-with-others” (p.132) within a community.
Apart from what her research positively demonstrates about children’s capabilities, her posthumanist research methodology is a critical comment on how humanist-based education systems marginalize students and is therefore a mechanism for her to advance social justice for children. She contends, and I agree, that children are marginalized and denied on “three counts: ethically for being wrongfully excluded, epistemically for being wrongfully mistrusted, and ontologically for being wrongfully positioned as a lesser being” (Blyth 2015, p. 145 [thesis] in Murris, 2016, p. 78). First, children are marginalized ethically, which accounts for why they have been “excluded from practices and many decision-making processes” in their own education (Murris, 2016, p. 78). Second, because adults and educators trust adult knowledges more than a child’s knowledge, children are marginalized epistemologically. Third, relying on Fricker’s (2007) notion of identity prejudice, prejudices of deficit, such as immaturity assigned to children, devalue them and positions them as lesser beings ontologically (Murris, 2016).
I conclude that children are marginalized because we adults do not engage with children ethically. That is, we do not listen or respond to them as beings that deserve both. This unethical behavior extends to teachers who reify humanist marginalized conceptions of the child, perhaps because of their teacher training, which prescribes what counts as content knowledge and prescribes assessment criteria that often judge children’s knowledge “by their ability to express themselves linguistically” (p. 80) particularly, in written form.
Methodologies of Companionship and KinshipMorris (2014) also recognizes children’s ability to produce different and sometimes more sensitive knowledges than adults. Morris, however, extends this line of thinking to animals as well. Her research methodology of kinship and companionship adapted from Haraway’s (2007) work on companion species shows that other species have interiorities and with interiorities come unique knowledges. One of the conclusions she draws from her research and that of others is that when beings (humans and nonhumans) form relationships with each other, they not only share experiences and emotional connections, they also share knowledge. Another conclusion is that not only should a “humanist education…built on binaries,” be transformed to a posthumanist education “built on hybridities” (p. 45), but that a posthumanist education should create opportunities in the curriculum for children to relate with other species. While I completely agree with Morris, I would emphasize ethical relationships more than she does. Children need to understand that an ethical relationship with a nonhuman means attentive, reciprocal listening and responding; not a master-animal relationship where the human commands and the animal obeys. Providing opportunities for children to engage with animal knowledges also means teaching them that it is not silly to do so; that “[a]nimals are our teachers. Sometimes…our best teachers” (p. 52) and we can learn from them.
New Empiricism as Experimental MethodologyPosthumanist experimental inquiry is called new empiricism. While Braidotti (2017), and St. Pierre, Jackson, and Mazzei (2016) have written that now, more than ever, is the time to heed Delueze and Guatarri’s (1987) imperative to experiment, posthumanist educational experimental inquiry is not often found in educational literature, but where it does appear, it is usually related to educational technologies. In education there is a prevailing tendency to think of technology as something to use for some educational end. Conceiving of use in this way is a slippery slope that has, in other contexts, justified slavery, animal abuse, kidnapping, and other forms of commodification. While such comparisons seem overly dramatic at first glance, it is sobering to realize that they all share an assumption that objectification is at times justifiable. For critical posthumanists it never is. Post-humanist educational researchers under the banner of new empiricism are finding new ways to work with technologies as relational entities to subvert such concepts of use (de Freitas, 2018).
de Freitas’ (2016) research with new haptic bio-sensor technologies in and for education critically troubles conceptions of normal. Of teachers interpreting bio-sensor data from biopedagogies to assess students, she asks what is a normal reading? de Freitas has a critical concern that data produced by these technologies objectify children as well as the technological devices. Her research seeks to repurpose this data and the devices to teach students about relationships instead. Where de Freitas’s research focuses on the critical implication of educational technologies already deployed in classrooms, Lenz Taguchi and Aronsson’s (2018) research focuses on the critical implications of technological data not reaching the classroom. Although both de Freitas’s and Lenz Taguchi’s methodologies differ from each other, both measure the effects of quantifiable data produced by technologies to generate critical knowledge. Lenz Taguchi (2018) uses a Deleuzo–Guattarian cartographic methodology to map concepts that emerge when preschool teachers, trained in social constructivism, encounter neuroscientific research made possible by technology.
In one way or another, new empirical methodologies engage with Barad’s (2007) notion of apparatus. The concept of apparatus draws on Bohr’s quantum mechanical thought experiments, a practice used in physics when the technologies needed to conduct actual experiments are not yet sufficiently developed to do so. In one such thought experiment, Bohr, who was later proven correct (Barad, 2007), showed that “the nature of the observed phenomenon changes with corresponding changes in the apparatus” (Kaiser & Thiele, 2014, p. 106). In terms of methodology for education researchers, the implications of this are as follows: 1) The apparatus has agency and is an important factor in determining what experimental outcomes can be sensed (observed, heard, felt, etc); 2) The apparatus is a specific agential assembly, arrangement, or cut that always leaves something out and is, therefore, nondeterministic; 3) The apparatus is part of the outcome; 4) The apparatus includes the researcher; 5) There is no objective knowledge or subjective participant knowledge that stands outside the research event. For deFrietas, the apparatus is the repurposed data. For Lenz Taguchi and Aronsson, the apparatus is a set of conceptual maps. In understanding how apparatus, as part of any methodology, conditions research findings, I would suggest that educational researchers of any stripe, like posthumanist research collectives, carefully consider the apparatus they use and evaluate its potentially critical effects on research outcomes.
Walking MethodologiesA walking research methodology, generally understood, uses an apparatus of journey to frame and convey knowledges (literacies) as stories that are inseparable from a kinetic relationship they share with the people and environment as one walks from place to place. Springgay (2017b), Irwin (2013),[10] and Somerville (2017) all use a walking methodology in this way to connect place to movement and pedagogy, and in the case of Somerville, to Australian Indigenous song and ceremony (2012). For Irwin (2013) a walking methodology is about putting educational research into motion to ask what does art “set in motion do?” (p. 198 my emphasis) rather than ask what does art mean. For Springgay and Truman (2017a), a walking research methodology is also a learning and teaching methodology, in which the critical—political and historical—aspects of place become known as they are walked. Highlighting a project from their Walking Lab, Springgay and Truman (2017a) think trans theory to experiment with walking as a sonic art performance. The Walking to the Laundromat project is interested in “transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities” (p. 27) that queer posthumanist concepts of corporeality, speciesism, and materialities. Through parody, it critically examines the laundry business as “gendered labour” (p. 14) while walking in the neighborhood between wash cycles and listening to an audio tape. This posthumanist methodology, in coupling acts of walking and washing with the mediated effects of the audio tape parody, is a mechanism through which a voluntarily and dynamically assembled research collective can contemplate how many women earn their living doing laundry all day every day.
Somerville et al.’s (2011, 2012) research with walking methodologies is a critical and ethical response as educators to literacies of place that the state educational system ignored. Their research looked at Australian Indigenous stories and linked them to physical places to remap disused and sometimes forgotten ancestral walking trails that now often run through settler-populated areas. The routes marked the places and recorded the stories where significant events happened in the creation stories as told by Indigenous ancestors who travelled across the land for ceremony. The purpose of this research was first to remap these trails, then to reactivate Australian Indigenous literacies, histories, and knowledges by walking the routes. The choice of a walking methodology by the research collective recognized that Australian Indigenous story lines are still “ontologically and epistemologically connected to the land as walking trails” (Somerville, 2012, p. 10.) Enacting a literacy of place as movements with the landscape and all its zoe, also meant performing stories along the way for the benefit of land and people. For posthumanists, who ascribe agency and vitality to what humanists call inanimate objects, when a story is told, the characters, place, and surrounding zoe are sung into being in a process of mutual literacy.
For Somerville (2012), understanding that “[t]he storyline of these walking trails is the larger plot or narrative outline of the story that connects all the smaller stories of each place like beads on a string” (p.14) connects walking to a place to literacies to be learned. From a critical posthumanist perspective, Somerville’s research helped the research collective to re-territorialize Indigenous literacies despite state-run education. It also encouraged other educators to intra-act ethically not only with Indigenous people and a land by listening and responding to both, but with literacies produced by historical and cultural relationships of a people with a land.
Limitations of Posthumanism and Educational PosthumanismThe most serious criticism of posthumanism comes from inside the circle of posthumanist researchers. Hayles (2017), in pushing the envelope of educational posthumanism to a place where she can have a conversation about the power of the cognitive unconscious, says there is a growing need to expand our ideas of unconscious cognition to open up posthumanist research possibilities to “the cognitive capabilities of technical systems” (p. 11). She uses terms familiar to posthumanists, such as assemblages, but in new ways to show how privileging consciousness has limited posthumanist research as a field of study. In reminding us that open systems are often “precisely structured by sensors, perceptors, actuators, and cognitive processes of the interactors” (p. 11) and that cognition (knowledge) is subject to its material composition, she identifies a limitation of posthumanism as an emphasis on the creative emergent forces operating in open systems to the exclusion of hemostatic forces also operating. She surmises that posthumanists grounded in Deleuze and Guattari often forget this although Deleuze and Guattari themselves did not (pp. 69-71).
Another limitation of posthumanism is seen in Murris’ (2016) work. The influence of Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1989) is unmistakable not only in how she conceives of the learning collective but also in how she conceives of the subjective “I” as multiple subjectivities. There is, however, an unresolved tension in her work between Deleuze and Guatarri’s (1987) concept of multiplicities and Barad’s (2007) concept of a singular intra-actional configuration at a specific moment of measurement. Similar tensions exist for Lenz Taguchi (2012) and St. Pierre (2016). Whether the “I” is multiple and rhizomatic or intra-active, posthumanist educational researchers do agree that the “I” and the subject-to-subject interactions that characterize qualitative research should be abandoned. As such, the tension does not cause a problem so much as it draws attention to an invisible intellectual divide between posthumanist educational scholars (Davies, 2018) who prefer thinking either with Deleuze and Guatarri or with Barad and Haraway.
Although I have not discussed Deleuze and Guatarri at any length in this essay, many educational scholars rely on Deleuze and Guatarri’s, A Thousand Plateaus (1987), for interpretation of some posthumanist and educational concepts. St. Pierre (2017b) criticizes some posthumanist educational scholars for their inappropriate application or uninformed use of certain Deleuze and Guatarri concepts, saying a concept “vanishes if thrust into a new milieu…the concept rhizome disappears if it is taken from the milieu of Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiricism and plopped down in the milieu of a qualitative interview study” (p. 695). She is, of course, correct, but some of the fault for this must be laid at the feet of Deleuze and Guattari whose writing is difficult to read. In so much as she made understanding Deleuze and Guattari a prerequisite for joining educational posthumanist conversations, this is a criticism I level against her as being counterproductive and exclusionary rather than inviting.
ConclusionIt matters what matters we use to think other matters with… (Haraway, 2011)
Becoming posthuman…is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world, a territorial space: urban, social, psychic, ecological, planetary…[as] ecologies of belonging (Braidotti, 2016a, p. 25).
In this essay, I discussed educational posthumanism scholarship informed primarily by a relational ethico-onto-epistemology. I discussed how educational posthumanist methodologies address topics of critical concern for educational researchers studying posthuman children in posthuman times. Within an overarching theme of a critical posthumanism, I have shown that educational research methodologies provide relational intra-active structures in which collectives/ecologies can form to iteratively address educational research questions. I have shown that intra-active ecologies are ethical systems because they oblige members to listen and respond. As such, the research they produce is critical and provides educational scholars with a mechanism for advancing social justice.
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Appendix A: Tracing/Mapping the Posthumanist Turn in EducationPosthumanism’s genealogy to pedagogy can be mapped and traced using many routes. As a recent arrival to posthumanist thinking, educational scholarship has had to forge connections to scholarship from many disciplines and thus is in a unique position to broker cross-disciplinary relationships. The following verbal diagram summarizes the relational histories and relational potentialities of educational posthumanist scholarship.
From Hayles (1999), posthumanism can be traced to Wolfe (2009) by way of their common work as professors of Literature, and from there, to Pederson (2010), an educational scholar involved in teaching animal care professionals who shared a common interest in animal rights activism with Wolfe. Similarly, a genealogy can trace Haraway (1987) to Barad (2007) via feminist philosophy and their training as scientists, to educational new material feminists, such as Sommerville (2015) and Taylor and Hughes (2016). Post qualitative educational scholar, Lather (2016) maps to Foucault (1981), as does Davis (2018). Lather and St. Pierre (2017) together map to Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) via Manning and Masumi (2014) are found in the educational walking scholars Springgay and Truman (2017) and in early childhood educational scholar, Lenz Taguchi (2016). Lenz Taguchi (2017; 2018) educational research maps directly to concepts drawn from Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and indirectly to Varela (2012). Bennett (2009) and DeLanda (2016) also trace to Deleuze and Guattari’s but in a less theoretical way than the educational scholars just mentioned. Instead, they map concepts of vitality and dynamic assemblages found in built or cultural materiality, such as political system and urban architecture; they in turn can be traced in Ceder’s (2016) recent work in vital educational relationality.
It is probably obvious from the maps and tracings provided so far, how pedagogy began to emerge and engages with posthumanism and has relied on the scholarly work of other disciplines to help educational researchers come to grips with what posthumanism means for doing education. However, I will make a few more genealogical connections to illustrate how cross disciplinary differences (Weaver, 2010) produce a diffractive movement (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1992, 1997) that gets read into educational posthumanist concepts, theory, and research methodologies.
To continue, drawing on Whitehead (1919), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), and Prigogine, Stengers (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984) engages Latour (2011) who wrote an introduction to her book on Alfred North Whitehead’s mathematics and philosophies. Latour then engages Snaza (2015), Gough (2015), and Cole and Rafe’s (2017) in the production of conceptual ecologies for education. Snaza and Weaver (2015), Weaver (2005, 2010), Gough and Gough (2017), de Freitas, Elizabeth (2018), and Søndergaard’s (2016) attend to digital technologies and how they extend the human, the curriculum, and educational research. These educational scholars have drawn on and continue to draw on Hayles (2012, 2017), Haraway (1987, 2016), and Barad (2017).
Footnotes
[1] A search of the uOttawa library on the terms “posthumanism + educational research” for the period between 1990 and 2000 yielded two results; for the period between 2001 and 2010 it yielded another two results; 2011/2012 added four more including two more from the same scholar in both previous periods.
[2] Ethical, not in how it is conceived by Ethics Research Board as “radically exteriorized other[s]” but instead as attentive and responsive relations with human and nonhuman others (Barad in Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012 n.p.).
[3] Humanism has been defined as: “A discourse which claims that the figure of ‘Man’…naturally stands at the centre of things; is entirely distinct from animals, machines, and other nonhuman entities; is absolutely known and knowable to ‘himself’” (Badmington, 2004).
[4] An ancient Greek word meaning life.
[5] This image is of a three circle Venn diagram.
[6] See instead (Margulis & Sagan, 1986).
[7] De Freitas (2018) would describe this as “a haptic theory of contiguous relationality, [and] a way of studying life as it contracts and expands across a continuum of mind-matter”.
[8] A branch of speculative realism known as object-oriented ontology (OOO) (Harman, 2007) is mentioned occasionally in educational literature (Snaza & Weaver, 2015b).
[9] An epoch in which the dominant influence on climate and environment are humans.
[10] I am not sure if Irwin would self-identify as a posthumanist, but she draws on the writings of Delueze and Guatarri in ways like Springgay who does identify as posthuman.