Swimming with sharks, ecological feminism and posthuman language politics

Abstract

The critical project the authors propose overturns the assumptions of human centrality that have underpinned much educational thought and practice, questions the ways in which the human and nonhuman are defined, and opens up new forms of engagement with the material, corporeal, and affective world. The authors ask how critical language studies can be rethought to incorporate a better understanding of the place of humans in the more-than-human world. They discuss the growing body of work that connects concern with the environment with other forms of political activism, particularly through an ecological feminist lens. Bringing this discussion back to focus on the place of language and pedagogy in human exceptionalism, the authors explore ways in which alternative understandings of human relations to the more-than-human material world can reorient the logocentricity of critical language studies toward different forms of critical engagement and entangled pedagogies.

Notes

1. An unprovoked encounter is defined as an incident in which a shark in its natural habitat attempts to bite a human not engaged in any provocative activity. A provoked incident relates to circumstances where the activities of the person—fishing, spearing or handling a shark, or attracting a shark by fishing or other activity—initiates contact with the shark.