Trans-forming Higher Education

Abstract

In recent years, the rise of post-humanisms and new materialisms (Barad 2007; Kirby 2011; Bennet 2010; Haraway 2004; Braidotti 2013) has produced a range of new approaches to ontology, epistemology and ethics in the arts and arts-based teaching and learning. What was once largely a domain of more humanist discourses, now by necessity includes critical terrains, such as material-discursive performativities, which entangle space, environments, objects, temporalities and hybrid identities, as notions of ‘art’, ‘performance’ and ‘spectator’ take on ever-multiplying meanings and possibilities.

This article examines ways in which current trends in post-humanism and new materialisms complicate critical and pedagogical matters in higher education institutions, rendering simple subject/object approaches to curriculum design, studio practice and embodied making, and issues of participation and impact, inherently more complex, problematic and full of possibility as we enter an age that requires that education innovate new approaches to digital, ecological and social realities.

Examining contemporary pedagogical modalities with particular reference to practice-as-research, the article identifies where teaching and learning in the academy may be falling short in its handling of such complexities, and how working notions of diffraction, material-discursivity and entanglement (Barad; Haraway; Kirby; Bennet) into the fabric of pedagogical design and practice, could enhance the way that the arts in higher education are meaningfully developed.