In the trading zone: The eco and the techno at the limits of ‘the human’ and compulsory schooling

Abstract

This paper examines what is at stake in the trading zone, where Eco and Techno movements meet, especially in regard to the attributes generally posited as unique to “the human” and upon which compulsory schooling has been historically founded. It offers a thought experiment and investigation into how the simultaneity of Eco and Techno movements highlight what is at stake in schooling’s reliance on attributes such as consciousness and intelligence and considers how historical understandings of compulsory schooling’s projects might be reapproached as a result. Examining research, literatures and movements that frequently make appeal to signifiers like environment or Earth as a site of rescue and restoration, Including the climate strike movement, global youth surveys, EcoCrit literature and their focus on an Anthropocene (the Eco) alongside the faith placed in technological inventions, in particular those associated with artificial intelligence, the transhumanist movement, and a specific version of technofuturism, the paper maps the differential challenges to human centrism (Eco) and human primacy (Techno). Such challenges leave the field with difficult questions about the limits of intentionality, rationality and analysis and the future of violent legacies initially built around the figure of Man.

Keywords:

• Compulsory Schooling
• eco
• environment
• figure of man
• techno
• technological

Notes

1 Across the Eco and Techno, the question of “the human” repeatedly arises: who or what “says” “who” can be “seen” as fully human, super-human, not-quite-human, sub-human and nonhuman?; what is attributed to being human?; or what is posited as a uniquely human quality, capacity or characteristic? And “who” or “what” is doing the positing, the constituting or the analyzing? Such questions put previous mainstream or commonsensical borders placed around “the human” at stake in different ways. We will point to some of those challenges throughout without necessarily engaging the posthumanist literature directly because to do so would fail to note at the outset a very obvious issue that posthumanist literature often eschews: Isn’t it “humans” doing such analyses, “saying” who or what has agency, ascribing entification to “objects,” perceiving entanglements and differences that might “tap the human on the shoulder,” but nonetheless still perceiving, organizing and writing analyses of such tapping? The issue of logocentrism and in particular unique kinds of colonialist residues operate as an important kind of haunting here that has implications for education, power relations, perpetual violence, and enactments of nationhood over the next twenty years especially, implications that posthumanist literature has tended to avoid (Rekret 2016; Weheliye, 2014).

2 We draw here and below from part of Baker & Wang’s (2019) rhizomatic analysis of curriculum history in the USA and the aporia spawned by AI technology in relation to education and compulsory schooling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernadette M. Baker

Bernadette M. Baker is a Professor of Curriculum History and Curriculum Theory in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research draws upon philosophical, historical, cosmological and sociological approaches as they inform curriculum studies, educational policy, knowledge/wisdom debates, productions of difference, processes of attachment, and enactments called culture.

Jamila R. Siddiqui is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research attends to the subtle in eco-social literatures, and her latest project twists and turns the notions of affect and colonialism to break and rebuild what sits between “eco” and “social.”