Thinking posthuman with mud: and children of the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of writing the posthuman in educational research. Confronted by our own failures as educational researchers within posthuman and new materialist approaches, it seeks a more radical opening to Lather and St Pierre’s question: ‘If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?’ We do this to enable different lives for the planet in all of its manifestations, including its children of the Anthropocene. We begin with the insistent presence of mud in our deep hanging out in an early learning site and ask: what is mud, what does it do, where can mud lead us in its oozing at Grey Gums Preschool. From these explorations we include a scripted dialogue that was performed at a conference against a background of rolling images of the proliferation of mud’s play with children. We consider this scripted dialogue, and its performance, as data read in relation to the recent special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory on ‘Educational epistemologies in a more than human world’ (2017).

Keywords:

• Posthuman
• Anthropocene
• mud's play
• early learning

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge Naming the World collective whose ideas have shaped our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Naming the world: Enhancing literacy and sustainability in early years learning, was funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Scheme. ARC Project ID: DP160101008. HREC Approval Number: H11590.

Notes on contributors

Margaret Somerville

Margaret Somerville is a Professor of Education at Western Sydney University. She is interested in alternative and creative approaches to research and writing, with a focus on our relationship to place and planetary wellbeing. She is leader of an international ARC funded study, Naming the world, involving collaboration with very young children and their extraordinary capacities in world naming in NSW, Queensland and Victoria, Australia, and in Oulu, Finland.

Sarah J. Powell

Sarah is Lecturer in Creative Arts (Music & Dance) in the Department of Educational Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. She studied Music Education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and has taught music across school and tertiary settings. Sarah has recently collaborated on the research project, Naming the World, and is interested in the way children engage with music and the world, the embodied nature of music, and its integral part in all aspects of our lives.