Enacting affirmative ethics in education: A materialist/posthumanist framing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018, 2019a), within the field of education. I work empirical material that ‘does’ this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze’s (1988) ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti (2019b), to gain purchase on it. Defined as a relational matter of human and non-human powers of acting in pursuit of affirmative values, affirmative ethics focuses up relations, forces and affects. It poses considerable challenges to a normalised construction of ethics as located solely within a constituted human subject with moral intentionality as its core. Affirmative ethics presents empirically as an emergent property of relational assemblages of human and more than human elements that bring ethical subjectivity into effect. Pedagogy and curriculum perform a constitutive role in these assemblages, as does pedagogic affect, showing how this ethics can be activated. A materialist affirmative ethics makes for a multi-faceted and generative practice of ethics. Oriented to collectivity and with relationality ‘built-in’, it has the potential to play a significant role in the reconstitution of individualised subjectivity which neoliberal modes of governance continue to advance in education.

Keywords:

• affirmative ethics
• affect
• subjectivity
• new materialism
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As MacLure (2018, p.94) has it, ‘Materially informed work is going on under a variety of names: material feminism, new materialism, new empiricism, posthuman studies, actor network theory, affect theory, process philosophy, the ontological turn’. Process philosophy includes the philosophical work of Deleuze.

2 Based on previously published data, this vignette extends research on the relationship between pedagogic affect and ethics as reported in Healy and Mulcahy (2020). In the present paper, the data are worked in relation to enacting affirmative ethics, its constitutive human and nonhuman elements and identity effects.

3 The practice test is available at https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/citizenship/test-and-interview/learn-about-citizenship-interview-and-test. The items in brackets constitute the ‘correct’ answers to the questions posed.

4 This vignette is based on research on teaching standards and teacher professional learning in the context of school geography as reported in Mulcahy (2012). Building on this research and bringing a lens of ethics to bear, in the present paper the data are worked in relation to enactments of affirmative ethics.

5 Matters of concern are assemblages ‘of ideas, forces, players and arenas in which “things” and issues, not facts, come to be and to persist, because they are supported, cared for, worried over’ (Neil, 2017).

Additional information

Funding

Australian Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Dianne Mulcahy

Dianne Mulcahy A Senior Lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Dianne’s research and teaching interests centre on pedagogy, education policy and materialist methodological approaches to research as examined and explored through empirical contexts. Issues of difference, disadvantage and in/exclusions are at the heart of these interests and studied chiefly using the conceptual resources of affect and critical materialist theories. Presently, Dianne is researching aspects of the ethics and politics of affect, and their implications for pedagogy and professional practice in school and museum settings. In the recent past, she has researched the introduction of new generation learning spaces to Australian primary and secondary schools and the changes to policy and practice that have ensued.