Posthumanist Movement Art Pedagogy: Geolocative Awareness and Co-Figurative Agency With Mobile Learning

Abstract

Mobile learning from a posthumanist critical perspective is the co-figuration of learner with geolocative mobile devices that blurs boundaries of the networked body. In this study, four art education researchers explore geolocative co-figurative possibilities of mobile learning. The authors theorize co-figurative agency and heighten awareness of the importance of sociospatial relationships afforded by the current milieu of networked geolocative knowledge to arts pedagogy. Through analysis of case studies of art practice, a new theoretical concept called posthumanist movement art pedagogy is developed to investigate movement as a posthumanist art practice, enacting agency through mobile data co-figuration within spaces of geolocative awareness. Case studies concentrate on mobile new media art utilizing photography, gamification, Global Positioning System drawing, and data collection/broadcasting. Impacts on the field of art and education focus on movement as being co-figured with the body and geolocation data as sites for potential transformation, embodiment, play, and data-identity constructions.

Notes

¹ According to the International Organization of Standards (2008; https://www.iso.org/standard/50718.html), geolocation refers to the creation, identification, and use of geographic coordinates (e.g., latitude and longitude) to mark meaningful locations.

² Curriculum studies theorist Stephanie Springgay (2016) looks to contemporary art (i.e., Diane Borsato’s Your Temper, My Weather, a 5-hour performance with 100 beekeepers) to consider the pedagogy of movement as “space-time-matter configurations” (p. 61).

³ AnaLouise Keating (2013) defines post-oppositionality as a theoretical and political stance that moves beyond oppositional reactions such as anti-racism and anti-sexism positions, which are against dehumanizing, to positions that are aware of and challenge dehumanizing practice. Yet in doing so, they should focus on strategies that embrace the differences in what it means to be posthuman as interconnected with the world (human and nonhuman).

⁴ Started in 1973 by the U.S. Department of Defense, GPS is a space-based radio navigation system providing geolocation data in real-time worldwide. It is now an important part of military, civilian, and commercial activities (National Research Council, 1995).

⁵ It should be noted that the Electronic Disturbance Theater was started in 1997, and the group has used the 2.0 marker to reflect changing membership.