Posthumanism, Decoloniality and Re-Imagining Pedagogy

The dead, white men that created Enlightenment pedagogy now find their posthumous legacy in need of an urgent re-imagining as ‘[t]he human, social and environmental devastations induced by economic disparities and structural injustices in the access to the benefits of the global economy and its advanced technologies add another layer of violence to the contemporary world.’¹

In response to this, how can ‘we’ pedagogues come to glimpse – through a glass darkly, perhaps – ways in which to diffract ideas about teaching and learning from across educational sectors that remain response-able to the difficult mission of reinventing notions of what (and who) constitutes the human in today’s twenty-first century world.² As Rosi Braidotti suggests:

These questions resonate across the field of posthumanities. For instance, posthuman discourses of the digital and environmental humanities, crossed with postcolonial and feminist studies, raise more urgently than ever the question of scale: how can we re-think our interconnection in the era of the Anthropocene, while re-thinking our new ecologies of belonging? The connection to the natural environment and to the technosphere of new media recasts the issue of alterity in non-human terms that cannot be adequately dealt with in the discourses and language of poststructuralist difference, let alone universalist humanism.³

Talking, thinking, moving and feeling with the urgency of Braidotti’s and other scholars’ questionings, I begin to walk in circles in my garden considering what might be involved in the creation of a ‘next step’ in pedagogy, wondering why I cannot seem to get out of this trap – literally in this moment a trap of circularity, bare feet cutting side-down into backyard grasses, marking over and over again a pathway of a borrowed shape. How performative can pedagogy be? What kinds of runway might be paved in order to take necessary and timely ‘lines of flight’ out of here and towards possible new presents and futures, towards a truly participatory approach to twenty-first century pedagogy?⁴ What can be (un)done in the practice of teaching itself, to invoke Gayatri Spivak, that might decentre the circular Vitruvian-ism of our educative heritage? How might ‘we’ Others, we teachers, we atomic and agentic ‘selves’ diffract our colonial heritages differently through pedagogy? The question is no longer simply an ‘if’ or a ‘why’ but how. Simply HOW?

By diffracting this question through myself here, now, my own heritage of performance art momentarily emerges fractally. I have burnt, broken, hung, cut and bled on stage and still been no closer to the performative justice-to-come that my own cultural inheritances have craved (as a feminist Christian-Muslim-Jew in no particular order, diffracting the prism of a material-discursive ‘identity’ endlessly in-flux) to give voice to. But perhaps this act of performing selves, performing memories, performing silent and loud agential Othernesses as I have understood them from moment to moment, has come to inform an approach to teaching and learning that focuses on exactly who and what gets a voice, right down to an atomic level. Not just, in fact a voice, but the right to be a teacher, the right to have one’s own myriad and spectral heritages heard. The right to responsibly acknowledge that ‘we’ are constituted by multiple, entangled Othernesses, including nonhuman ones that are bred in the bone. Thus, emerges a momentary territorialisation as the fault lines of all my walking questions rumble and mould into shape: Who and what teaches?

This kind of approach diffracts the Vitruvian Man out of centre stage, and thus with him, diffracts the foundations of Enlightenment pedagogies. Who or what gets to be acknowledged in the development of epistemology and its dissemination via teaching? Who or what is actually present in the creation of knowledge? How do knowledge and being, ontology and epistemology fuse in the moment of ‘learning’ to create the very world we are studying and how do we wish to participate in that?

Asking how we might come to wish to participate agentically moves fused notions of onto-epistemology towards yet another diffraction: Karen Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology. In Barad’s construction we ‘mark bodies’ as we come to know them, scoring them and ourselves into painful and pleasurable being. Can we stay with this kind of trouble long enough to (un)learn?

The term onto-ethico-epistemology may be as much a mouthful to swallow for some pedagogues as it is to say, but the point is perhaps interesting and provides a challenge to current modalities shaping pedagogic practice. How might ‘we’ pedagogues interested in both decoloniality and posthumanism and where and how they might diffract practice when held together, conceive of an entanglement of ontology, epistemology and ethics? Moreover, could an understanding of teaching and learning via such an entanglement produce a state of affairs where pedagogy becomes a site for the re-casting of the world away from Vitruvian-isms? Where justice is marked by the response-ability of a host of material-discursive phenomena finally given their agentic ‘voice’/‘space’/‘time’/‘self’. Where these become teachers of new practices, new knowledges, new performativities of human and nonhuman, new practices of decolonisation that unravel the barbarisms of ‘Man’ and how ‘he’ has waged violence not only on minds, histories, genders, cultures and presents, but also on possible futures?

The essays that make up this Special Issue (SI) diffract pedagogy through such posthuman prisms, speaking to and with decoloniality, vital materialism, affectivity, post-qualitative research and a host of ambitions that come together to trouble the theory/practice divide in education from a position of decentring Vitruvian notions of the human. In this spirit, rather than remain solely at the level of critique each essay offers positive formulations of possible alternatives grounded in practice. In such urgent times, theory itself is not enough. We need to find practices to stay with the trouble stirred up by late capitalism in the anthropocene moment – a moment where ‘scholarship committed to the refusal if not the undoing of a world riven by new kinds of warcraft, injustice and exploitation’ requires the courage of action.⁵

‘Beginning somewhere’ in the spirit of ‘one must begin somewhere’ with such a project requires that ‘we’ lay our first action carefully and thoughtfully. Indeed, as Gayatri Spivak states:

If the ‘somewhere’ that one begins from is the most privileged site of a neo-colonial educational system, in an institute for training teachers, funded by the state, does that gesture of convenience not become the normative point of departure? Does not participation in such a privileged and authoritative apparatus require the greatest vigilance?⁶

Thinking through this with Donna Haraway, one might say: it matters what matters we use to think matters with.

Thus, in order for this SI to respond response-ably to ‘our’ current moment with all its violence and creativity, how might it responsibly begin?⁷ Perhaps, in truth it has already begun, bound in a bright and colourful paper cover, in an edition of a journal known for its radical approach to critical theories, peer reviewed by a host of largely white, tenured academics, edited by two Western(ised) editors filtrated through years of being located, if not quite within then at least closer to, the Vitruvian position of The Academy. In a sense, in order to critically contemplate all this, this SI in actual fact, starts from somewhere in the middle with a powerfully constructed argument offered by Michalinos Zembylas. Zembylas argues for the entanglement of decoloniality and posthumanism in developing approaches to teaching and learning that ‘open up radical possibilities for both cultivating an ethics of relational ways of being and knowing and giving priority to the task of decolonisation.’⁸

Zembylas suggests throughout that re-thinking a posthumanist form of education must involve a tenacious awareness of just how easy it is to inadvertently ‘replac[e] one form of humanistic Higher Education with another’. Instead of falling into this trap, the author suggests a critical vigilance ‘that pays adequate ethical and political attention to the complex task of dismantling the systematic and widespread linkages between humanist knowledges with coloniality’. The article goes about this by combining the work of Sylvia Wynter and her consideration of reconstructions of curricula from a decolonial perspective with the work of Rosi Braidotti in her challenge to ‘the ethics, politics and epistemology of western humanism embedded in university curricula and pedagogies’, and how her approach ‘creates openings to resist the neoliberal order of higher education’.⁹

Zembylas’ tone is one of impassioned caution, raising questions that are arguably vital to the creation of fully aware, posthuman approaches to pedagogy – namely, can we pedagogues aiming to work with posthumanism to disentangle the academy from the proliferation of humanist Vitruvianism in all its exclusive and exclusionary guises. Can we find ways to commit responsibly to such a project via a vital awareness of just how easy it is to slip back into humanism when decoloniality is not close to the heart of our endeavours? In service of this aim, Zembylas suggests that the two fields entangle together to ‘pluraversalise’ the task ahead.¹⁰ This challenge acts as an important cautionary tale of sorts and in the spirit of bold and critically aware beginnings (albeit from the middle – as mentioned earlier), aims to start the reader of this SI off on an important critical note: beware what you wish for – for who or what is wishing.

Following Zembylas comes the offering from Asilia Franklin-Phipps and Courtney Rath. It is rare, perhaps, to find an article – and a short one at that – that truly gets one up off one’s chair with excitement. Viewpoints are designed to be just that, to offer a glimpse of the world(s) from within someone else’s vision of what justice-to-come might look like, and this article does just that with tenacity, humour and boldness. Franklin-Phipps and Rath’s polemical account urges us to stay with the trouble¹¹ of ‘keep[ing] educational spaces safe from the corporatizing forces of neoliberalism, forces that insist inclusion is a remedy for oppression, forces that insist learning outcomes are the equivalent of knowledge, forces that insist the intellectual freedom of scholars is less important than the comfort of those they challenge, in the classroom and in the public.’¹²

The dangers of ‘remaking children in the image of an educated (white, male, economically stable person)’ are discussed as a means of replicating/providing salvific futures. In contrast to this, Donna Haraway’s notion of making kin is turned to as a form of practice, not just a theory. Indeed, the authors state unequivocally that ‘we cannot theorize teacher education differently, whilst teaching as we always have’, calling into question the separation between teaching and research in order to upend the violence that uncritical forms of pedagogy does by virtue of simply paying lip service to the idea of decoloniality. Ontological possibilities, challenges to humanist notions of progress, widening the domain of what counts as competency, all these things are considered brightly, passionately and urgently in the aptly titled: How to Become Less Deadly.¹³

Posthumanism as a burgeoning field owes much of its current form to a heritage that is positioned within the tradition of the sciences – an inheritance which Karen Barad has taken up, calling for a (re)configuration of its founding epistemological principles. Speaking with and to the work of Barad, Marc Higgins and Sara Tolbert address the kinds of violence inflicted on epistemologies that fall outside of the European Enlightenment – a violence that emanates inherently from within the discipline of science and its pedagogical formulation – particularly in terms of the Nature/Culture divide. Again, the article is framed around practice, starting with an invocation of Barad’s questioning call: ‘what kind of (curriculum and) pedagogy help students (and teachers) to learn about practicing response-able science?’ The authors go on to discuss how ‘science education’s (pre)dominant conceptualization of Nature(-Culture) makes palatable and possible the on going dispossession and devastation of Indigenous Land’.¹⁴

Critical evaluations of response-ability become the key iterative framework of the article’s consideration – and this is cleverly (and excitingly) approached via a structuring of a new curriculum. The proposed curriculum is sorted into a series of ‘topics’, ‘purposes’ and ‘further driving questions’, each ending with a short reading list. These structuring terms and fields of pedagogic inquiry are created here to reconfigure ideas of responsibility/response-ability through practices that are ‘informed by Indigenous, post-colonial, and post-humanist theories’ and offer not only a critically robust questioning of what science education does to indigenous others, but that also offers a map of practices, if you will, that the reader can effect immediately. Thus, the authors actually do what they discuss – teaching and research, theory and practice, and, of course, via discussion, Nature and Culture are entangled to offer ‘A Syllabus for Response-able Inheritance in Science Education’.¹⁵

Moving from the entanglement of Nature and Culture as a mode of resistance to the colonial scoring of science pedagogy, to a questioning of who and what has agency in collaborative art making, Aaron Knochel describes a practice-based arts project where ‘developments in the cultural framing of technologies within posthuman bodies provided an opportunity to construct new pathways to thinking outside of ‘Western logos’ by questioning the subject's autonomy within human-technological hybrids’.¹⁶

In this practice-based investigation, Knochel works with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the assemblage to discuss distributive agencies that reframe social action, particularly when understood via posthumanist perspectives. Constructing drawing machines of different size, shape and weight and then drawing together with these machines, participants become part of a human/nonhuman assemblage that allows for critical notions of collaboration in and of art-making. Knochel argues for a ‘[f]eminist technoscience critique [which] highlights trajectories meant to decentre the humanist subject as an important backdrop to understanding a distributed agency within the assemblage’.¹⁷ In this mode, the project-based approach to teaching and learning becomes such a trajectory, not only in terms of investigating distributive power, but for understanding transdisciplinarity as a phenomenon that both describes and allows for complex human and nonhuman inter- (and I would argue, intra-) actions.

From a humanist perspective, ‘collaboration’ is an anthropocentric affair, but when the borders between who or what gets to be seen as having agency across the assemblage gets blurred, new conceptions of communication, collaboration and disciplinarity emerge. Knochel argues that this kind of decentring is necessarily transdisciplinary, but that furthermore, transdisciplinarity itself is a ‘falling-apart’, a ‘null-discipline’ that, amongst many things, productively decentres ‘matters of fact’, turning them to ‘matters of concern’. Thus, what was an empirical matter of fact, becomes a complex agency, which disrupts disciplinarity, ideas of social action and human and nonhuman collaboration. Indeed: ‘What becomes critical for learning in activating matters of concern is the recognition of posthumanity within the dynamics of art and social practice are the materialities and translations of relation that come to endure and what we do about it’.¹⁸ In Knochel’s wonderfully conceived art project, art and science become collaborators, social action and ethics become entangled, and human/nonhuman othernesses draw together and fall apart as part of an unfolding assemblage of multiple constructive and destructive agencies.

Continuing from Knochel’s questionings, Jamie McPhie ‘knock[s] at the stone’s front door’ to enquire, ‘if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?’ Through McPhie’s approach to posthumanism, pedagogy itself becomes an agentic phenomenon, seen as (along with Barad) ‘a living organism’. Engaging university students in a psychogeographic project, McPhie asked students to ‘interview’ spaces and places, moving towards a final task of interviewing a building: the Liverpool ONE (UK). Requiring students to undertake such a seemingly impossible task, project participants began to problematize subject/object, humanist forms of ethnography and their ‘Occidental Enlightenment stories’ and intellectual inheritances via practice, generating complexity-driven approaches to teaching and learning that required students invent new approaches to listening in and beyond the ethnographic frame.¹⁹

It is perhaps hard to overstate the potential in this kind of teaching and learning, particularly in relation to the forming of new critical approaches to the complexity of living, entangled as part of the world-as-assemblege, comprising of multiple, distributive agencies. McPhie starts out by raising the impact of this, where:

things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand and India, stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California, an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District.²⁰

In this kind of pedagogical formulation, securely bound phenomena – including things such as political rhetoric and action, become deterritorialised. ‘Students start to witness agency and structure intra-mingle’. This points to what Barad might call a posthuman performativity, and McPhie indeed states that, ‘agency has its uses as concepts are performative. There is an inorganic life to agency. As such, the concept of a distributed posthuman agency can be very useful as a pedagogic tool to think with.’ Destabilising ‘securely bound’ concepts via paying attention to the performativity of complex agents/agencies provides a thoroughly heightened form of critical engagement not only with a subject but moreover, with the method of inquiry itself.²¹

Thus, pedagogy becomes performative. This is the backdrop via which McPhie leads us as readers through a guided tour of his main, psychogeographic pedagogical project – finding ways to interview Liverpool ONE, which they subsequently diagnose with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Ascribing human qualities/labels to a space beyond skin, directional flows of causality and effect are made blurry. Is the space merely a metaphor, or is it an active agent? This kind of questioning creates a pedagogic space for critical engagement with the way ‘we’ as researchers of an occidental persuasion ‘see’ things. Indeed, ‘[p]erformative (inorganic) posthuman pedagogies can lead to rewarding consequences when applied to higher education and co-create the potential to support a flatter ethico-onto-epistemological awareness’.²²

In the article that follows, Alyssa Niccolini, Shiva Zarabadi and Jessica Ringrose discuss a pedagogical project in the context of a postgraduate course on gender and education that used the simple, everyday object of unwound yarn to highlight issues of relationality, processes of kinshipping and critical tensions of identity. Acknowledging the profound affective impact that courses on race and gender can have on students and teachers alike, the essay goes on to consider feminist pedagogy from a phematerialist perspective – that is, via entangling feminist activations with posthumanist theories. Indeed, ‘As phematerialists we seek to take seriously the affective-material life of the spaces we teach and research in, both how materialities activate thought and how thought activates materiality’.²³ As with the preceding essay, here the flow of causality is problematized, however this time, the inquiry is shaped with yarn, and perhaps it is (not only) the change of pedagogic material that produces such different diffractions.

Invoking Donna Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble, students brought in objects meaningful to their gender and education research. These were entangled with yellow string to create literal and critical tensions between them, which students needed to navigate the class with (both in terms of the critical, discursive traditions invoked, and simultaneously – or indeed material-discursively – in terms of physical space). Rather than try to resolve the tension, the aim of this was to find new ways to stay with the trouble of tension:

We see this as a posthuman pedagogy that worked, rather than worked through or resolved, tension as an agentic and material co-presence in the classroom. Opposed to a humanist progress narrative that views tension as something to be overcome or eradicated, we see tension as an activating force that here intra-acted with the human and non-human bodies opening spaces for maneouvering within difference.²⁴

The pedagogical moment discussed in this elegantly conceived project investigates the intersectionality of material-discursive phenomena, and tension, between, within and as a phenomenon itself. Moreover, the project includes a critical threading-through of a keen, affective awareness of how the location of learning from within the university is woven with damaged and troubled life worlds. The university is understood a space that is ‘an (un)evenly and never fully safe space’ itself, and this positioning is critically discussed/enacted as part of the course.²⁵ The notion of kinshipping thus becomes a highly critical enactment within the material-discursive classroom, diffracting the course material, the materiality of the yarn and the self-as-material-discursive phenomena entangled in a performative pedagogy that emerges from within contested and troubled performativities of higher education.

With much of the SI’s focus thus far being on finding new ways to trouble Western, Enlightenment inheritances by thinking-with and as part of multiple, distributive and affective agencies, Delphi Carstens’ essay now follows to provoke readers with the idea that, ‘[p]edagogy that is appropriate to these ruinous times needs to trouble us’, and importantly that ‘while we cannot escape our humanity, there is a pressing need to redefine it; to venture beyond the narrow confines of how the ideality and materiality of our “humanness” has been taught, thought and practiced’.²⁶

Carstens’ attempts to engage pedagogy via what I can only describe as kind of pedagogic defibrulation, creating a new diffraction of Romanticism designed to provide a counter-revolution of affective intensities, ‘one that must, in terms appropriate to the challenges we face today, be onto-ethical, affective, orientated to social and environmental justice as well as cognisant of the affective poisons of nostalgia and ennui’. Pedagogues, Carstens argues, must as a matter of urgency, come to address apocalyptic agencies in all their guises, encouraging human agents and a ‘heterogeonous series of actants to wake up, and this must be done via taking an affective turn that generates active intensities and vitalities’.²⁷

Literature is the primary means here, and ‘we’ readers are taken on a journey through the Romantics, to science fiction, to a politics and pedagogy of zoe that is as darkly ecstatic as it is instructive on the notion of trouble. Texts come alive, spectral matterings emerge, materialities are haunted by multiple agencies and are discussed in service of waking pedagogues up to our response-abilities:

If left undiagnosed, untreated and unaddressed, the larger-than-human horrors of extinction, historical inevitability and trouble without end induce dangerous nostalgic fantasies of idealised pasts (socio-politically, spiritually and economically) and bring on a deadly kind of affective numbness/amnesia.²⁸

Carstens’ article requires a robust desire to find ways to do this as ‘we’ are transported, darkly, across a field of literary, pedagogic intensities.

Barbara Grant’s essay focuses on pursuing a ‘politics of hope’ in and for the academy, investigating the changing life of the academy in particular relation to doctoral supervision. Grant discusses how academics are tethered, impressed and impelled by objects, by regulations and new practices and how these may be embraced and resisted through posthuman, academic activism where, ‘we don’t necessarily need new methods: rather we need to imbue our procedures with new forms of alertness and new forms of representation that “make felt the unknowability within the unknown”.²⁹

Grant argues that the potential transgressive nature of knowledge-making in the context doctoral research is becoming systematically overwritten as doctorates become steadily more like training grounds tailored for the garnering of economic value. Thus, she focuses her ‘intellectual and practical energies on finding ways to think about our everyday work as offering possibilities for activism such that we might interrupt the flow of business as usual in an increasingly competitive, performative and individualising academic environment’.³⁰ Beginning with a project that rapidly turns into an investigation on how stuff – human and nonhuman – assembles to create a state of becoming-supervisor (as one never fully is but always in the process of becoming), the article looks at how attention paid to the small everyday of objects in the life of student-supervisory relationships enact, and therefore offer potential sites of resistance to the construction of a doctoral imaginary.

Here, the identity of academic as supervisor, responsible for the journey and final award of a student’s doctorate, is understood as processual, even though ‘rigid lines of stratification and sedimentation are at work to normalise and standardise the becoming-supervisor’. Grant’s project, undertaken with eleven female doctoral supervisors unfolds via the assembling of supervisors with objects they associate with the identity and action of ‘supervising’. These assembleges, considered critically, expose/create a state of performativity where the agency of the doctoral supervisor is co-produced across a spectrum of human and nonhuman phenomena. ‘She is linked to documents, other humans, affects, bodiliness, tools, both known and unexpected’. Greetings cards, tears, pens, handbooks, leafy plants, cast into the consideration of the assembling of identity allow for thinking differently about the practice of doctoral supervision, where, ‘[t]hinking about becoming-supervisor as an assemblage directs attention towards the political, practical and ethical complexities of our work and the way that work is shaped and ordered by much more than the inner values, beliefs and desires attributed to the humanist subject’.³¹

The final essay by co-editor Carol A Taylor, Edu-crafting Adventures, acts not as a conclusion, but as an ‘out-tro’ of sorts. As editors of this SI, Carol and I have gone on to extend the call for papers into a further edited book entitled Posthumanism and Education. There is so much to say on this burgeoning field, so many ways to diffract socially engaged, critically aware pedagogy that considers its own performativity in the marking of bodies – the marking of the world through the making of knowledge. We hope you will be moved to offer your own diffractions of this journey with us.

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Annouchka Bayley

Dr. Annouchka Bayley has published several works on Posthumanism, Education and Practice-as-Research pedagogies. In 2014 she won the Warwick Award for Teaching Excellence. She is also a practicing performance artist and an emerging director with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Braidotti and Gilroy, Conflicting Humanities, 1.

2 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

3 Braidotti and Gilroy, Conflicting Humanities, 33–4.

4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

5 Braidotti and Gilroy, Conflicting Humanities, 7.

6 Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 64

7 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

8 Zembylas, “The Entanglement of Decolonial and Posthuman Perspectives,“ 255. Zembylas’ emphasis.

9 Ibid., 261.

10 Ibid., 254.

11 Haraway, Staying With the Trouble.

12 Franklin-Phipps and Rath, “How to become less deadly,” 246.

13 Ibid.

14 Marc Higgins and Sara Tolbert, “A Syllabus for Response-able Inheritance in Science Education,” 273. Parenthesis in original.

15 Ibid.

16 Knochel, “Drawing Together and Falling Apart,” 299.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., 303.

19 McPhie, “I knock at the stone's front door,” 307.

20 Ibid., 306.

21 Ibid., 309.

22 Ibid., 307.

23 Niccolini, Zarabadi and Ringrose, “Spinning yarns,” 324.

24 Ibid., 325.

25 Ibid., 328.

26 Carstens, Cultivating a dark haecceity 344.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 352.

29 Grant, “Assembling Ourselves Differently?,” 359.

30 Ibid., 358.

31 Ibid., 366.