Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher education for posthuman times

ABSTRACT

The future viability of the humanities in higher education has been broadly debated. Yet, most of these debates are missing an important consideration. The humanities' object of study is the human, an object that some would argue has been replaced in our onto-epistemological systems by the posthuman. In her 2013 book, The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti addresses and furthers this posthuman shift by explicating both her critical posthumanism and how the humanities curriculum can use it to restyle itself in its time of “crisis.” In this paper, I put Braidotti's text in conversation with John Dewey's 1929 Experience and Nature, prompting a reconsideration of the nature of experience as it manifests in a posthuman vital materialist form, and how posthuman empiricism may require a return to a new kind of sense experience; a reconsideration of the embodiment of subjectivities, and how they are to be articulated in a posthuman curriculum; and, correspondingly, a reconsideration of how one might come to enact and experience a “posthuman humanities.” I conclude that, along with this imperative to restyle the humanities for posthuman times comes a need to reconfigure the institution of higher education into an expanded posthuman network, perhaps one that reaches outside its present bounds.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• curriculum studies
• posthumanism
• humanities
• onto-epistemology

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Jamila R. Siddiqui

Jamila Siddiqui is a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also advises at the Center for Educational Opportunity. Her current research interests include posthumanism, higher education, digital humanities and digital pedagogy.