Posthuman Research Practices in Education

Carol Taylor, Christina Hughes, Carol Taylor, Christina Hughes

• Editore: Palgrave Macmillan
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137453082
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Teoria e pratica della didattica

How do we include and develop understandings of those beyond-the-human aspects of the world in social research? Through fifteen contributions from leading international thinkers, this text provides original approaches to posthumanist research practices in education. Contributors respond to the following questions: What do empirically grounded explorations of posthumanism look like in practice? How can they be designed? What sorts of 'data' are produced and how might they be analysed? And, importantly, what are the social, cultural and educational impacts of empirically driven posthuman research?The contributors to this text change the parameters of research through thinking relationally with other beings/matter and recognizing their vitality and agency. Methodologically the contributors operationalize the unself, give focus to shadow stories and the entanglement of the researcher and research apparatus. They provide analytic tools such as rhizomatic readings and cartography mapping, edu-crafting, diffraction, Indigenous storywork, intra-action and affective pedagogy and rework and transform known methodologies, such as participatory research, qualitative approaches and photo-voice.

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Edu-crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education

Carol A. Taylor

Introduction: Posthumanism and educational research

Doing posthumanist research in education is a challenge. At the present time, education operates within a largely performative context, in which regimes of accountability, desires for a quick and easy relay from theory to practice, and the requirement that ‘evidence’ – the most valorized form of which often comes in the shape of large-scale randomized controlled trials – ought to inform pedagogic interventions, constitute the dominant ways of thinking and modes of inquiry. Posthumanist research practices in education engage a radical critique of some of the fundamental assumptions underpinning these dominant ways of doing educational research.

Posthumanism proposes different starting points for educational research and new ways of grasping educational experience than those afforded by humanism. Posthumanism calls into question the essentializing binary between human and nonhuman on which humanism relies; it throws anthropocentrism into doubt along with the categories and identities it underpins. These different starting points are located in a different set of epistemological presumptions about the forms of knowing that produce valuable knowledge about educational experiences, and in different ontological presumptions about the modes of being through which humans and nonhumans inhabit the world. More than that, posthumanist research practices offer a new ethics of engagement for education by including the nonhuman in questions about who matters and what counts in questioning the constitutive role played by humanist dominant paradigms, methodologies and methods in working as actualizers of normative procedures. Feminisms and post-structuralism have also, of course, long been interested in the politics of knowledge production but a posthumanist approach includes the ‘others’ that feminism, post-structuralism and postmodernism routinely excluded: nonhumans, other-than-humans and more-than-humans. Posthumanism, therefore, offers a ‘theoretical rapprochement with material realism’ (Coole and Frost, 2010, p. 6) to find new ways to engage with the immanent vitality of matter.

This chapter discusses various arrivals at the posthuman ‘now’; it maps how posthumanism undoes humanist assumptions about research methodology and methods; and it signals some of the ways in which posthumanism is currently reshaping how educational research gets done. While the chapter’s ambit is both broad and theoretical in dealing with the recasting of ontology, epistemology and ethics under the impress of posthumanism, its purpose, in illuminating how posthuman thinking can be put to work in research practices, is prac-tical. Putting posthuman theory to work is both exciting and daunt-ing. Posthumanism invites us (humans) to undo the current ways of doing – and then imagine, invent and do the doing differently. Read-ers will find many examples throughout this book of the innovative forms of doing invoked, indeed necessitated, by posthumanist thinking. This first chapter provides an initial sketch of the ground by situating posthumanism as both a reaction to humanism (Wolfe, 2010) and an activation of new practices in educational research (Snaza and Weaver, 2015). It can, therefore, be read as (a) a basic mapping of key shifts from humanist to posthumanist modes of knowing, being and doing; and/or (b) an introduction to the main contours of posthuman thought; and/or (c) an introduction to the theories and concepts dealt with in the chapters that follow.

Shiftings: Humanist centrings <> Posthumanist profusion

Posthumanism is a mobile term and the field of posthumanist thought in education is characterized by heterogeneity, multiplicity and profusion. Posthumanism is perhaps best considered as a constellation of different theories, approaches, concepts and practices. It includes (in no particular order): animal studies; ‘new’ material feminism; affect theory; process philosophy; assemblage theory; queer theory; speculative realism; thing theory; actor network theory; the nonhuman; the new empiricism; posthuman disability studies; object-oriented ontol-ogy; alien phenomenology; ecological relationality; decolonial and indigenous theories, plus others I don’t know about. Posthumanism in its various incarnations is resolutely interdisciplinary, post-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and anti-disciplinary, which vastly expands the range and variety of conceptual resources available to educational research. In its current state as an unsettled and unsettling terrain – as an emergent field in flux that is continually concretizing, dispersing, flowing and mutating in unforeseen ways – posthumanism opens ways of researching that seek to undo tired binaries such as theory/practice, body/mind, body/brain, self/other, emotion/reason, human/nature, human/animal, producing instead multiple and heterogeneous knowledge pathways that are radically generative for educational research. In doing so it intersects with the anti-foundational insights of feminism and post-structuralism concerning the multiplicity of identity, the mobility of meaning, and the contestability of knowledge, supplementing those earlier insights by including nonhumans, things and materialities. The chapter charts various shiftings which seek to understand the complicated process of how we got from ‘there’ (humanism) to ‘here’ (posthumanism). The first shifting circumnavigates the im/possible task of describing how we arrived at the posthuman ‘now’. The subsequent shiftings focus on subjectivity, relationality and ethics, and enfold these with discussions of ontology and epistemology.

Shifting <> Im/possible genealogies

The drawing of any single or straight line from humanism to posthumanism is tempting but probably illusory. One possible narrative begins with Foucault’s (1970) pronouncement in The Order of Things – ‘man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’ – moves through Derrida and deconstructionism, traverses post-structuralism and postmodernism, continues via the many facets of feminism, towards Deleuzian rhizomatics, interspecies interfaces (Haraway) and Massumi’s virtual-real, to arrive (perhaps) at the swirl of Stewart’s affects, Meillassoux’s post human world without us, or Downey’s neu-roanthropology, or somewhere else instead, as long as that somewhere is ‘recognizably’ posthuman. That is, somewhere where the ‘old’ certitudes regarding identity and subjectivity, binaries and boundaries, language and representation, methodology and methods have been utterly displaced. The problem, though, in tracing this narrative line is that it has no one starting place and certainly no end in sight. We are already in the middle of the posthuman condition, its forces already entangled in the humanist fibre of our lives and thinking. Being intermezzo like this troubles the concepts of ‘ends’ and ‘beginnings’ and undermines the notion of lineage.

On the other hand, we could, as Snaza (2015, p. 19) admirably attempts to do, conceptualize a genealogy of ‘the human’ through its relation to various ‘constitutive outsides: the animal, the machine, the savage, the slave, nature, the thing’. These conceptualizations arise from and are (still) tied to particular historically educative processes and located in particular educational institutional practices. Thus, we move from humanism’s putative ‘origins’ in Plato’s ‘carnophallogocen-tric’ (Derrida’s phrase) humanism, which constitutes the meat-eating, male, rational political citizen and subject as different from and innately superior to woman, the emotional and animal, to its incarnation in the medieval Trivium and Quadrivium, a liberal arts education which was a basis for the production of the educated ‘man’, through Renaissance Humanism with its focus on the development of man’s artistic, literary and moral capabilities. The Western Enlightenment built on these earlier conceptions but, via colonialism and science, generated a version of humanism grounded in the separation of, and domination by, a small-ish section of ‘mankind’ from/of the ‘rest of’ nature, humanity, and nonhuman ‘others’ in accordance with its god-given civilizing mission. Postmodern, post-structuralist and feminist theorists worked, rightly, to destabilize the origin myths of humanism and reincorpo-rate those inappropriate/d others. Much of this theorizing (although Haraway’s critique of speciesism is an exception) did not sufficiently unsettle the primacy of the ‘human’ as a central category of political privilege, thus leaving the systematic oppressions and ontological erasures that earlier forms of humanism had instituted largely intact. It is this unsettling that posthumanism seeks to accomplish for good. The aim is, as Snaza (2015, p. 27) notes, to undo the telos of humanism and its ‘humanizing project’ so that posthumanist thought can engage ‘a future politics not reducible to anthropocentric institutions and practices’. In essence, this involves replacing the idea that the human is a separate category from ‘everything else’ with an ethic of mutual relation.

Furthermore, like posthumanism, humanism is and always has been heterogeneous. As Braidotti (2013, pp. 50–51) notes, ‘there are in fact many humanisms’. There are romantic, revolutionary, liberal, secular-ist, antihumanist humanisms (Davies, 1997); there are intellectualist, spiritualist and metaphysical humanisms (Derrida, 1972); and there are Renaissance, academic, catholic or integral, subjective, naturalistic and religious humanisms (Lamont, 1997), as well as various versions of critical humanism (Plummer, 2012). The philosophical foundations of humanism are varied, and some humanisms do away with univer-salizations and recognize the material, concrete, pragmatic and partial basis of human experience. That humanism, like posthumanism, never was (or is) singular is, according to Braidotti, part of the problem: as soon as we express the desire to ‘overcome humanism’, we very quickly realize how utterly entwined we are within humanism’s affordances and problematics, as feminists and post-structuralists already know. Any dis-entangling, therefore, has to be a continuing and incisive critical practice, not one done easily or ‘once and for all’. Yet the desire to ‘overcome’ humanism is urgent and necessary. One only has to think for a moment of the geopolitical suffering, ecological depredation, and epistemological violence that humanism, particularly in its alliance with neo-colonialism and hyper-capitalism, has given rise to, to appreciate the urgency of the task. Thinking for a moment longer, though, might bring to mind humanism’s legacy of universal human rights, commu-nitarian politics and disability equality legislation. These are things we humans would probably not want to do away with, albeit that they often work as positive guises beneath which humanism seeks to hide its wreckages. One can appreciate that the larger project of becoming posthuman is fraught with difficulty, just as inventing practices which use posthumanist frames of reference in educational research are contentious.

Shifting <> Subjectivity

Trippers and askers surround me,

People I meet . . . the effect upon me of my early life . . . of the ward and city I live in . . . of the nation [. . .] But they are not the Me myself.

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect [. . .]

Both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it.

(Whitman, 1977, extract from Song of Myself, l., pp. 58–70)

Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 3)

I stood at the entrance . . . I also stood some forty meters away, in the temple itself . . . Outside the doors of the temple I also stood in the cyanophyte-stained plaza . . . I patrolled [the upper city] as well. When I walked the edge of the water I could see myself standing in the plaza . . . That accounted for almost half of my twenty bodies. The remainder slept or worked in the house Lieutenant Awn occupied.

(Leckie, 2013, Ancillary Justice, pp. 12–15)

In 1855, Whitman wrote confidently of the ‘Me myself’ as a secure place of observation and knowledge, founded in the essentializing masculine ego of the Western Enlightenment modernist self. Song of Myself is an undoubtedly exuberant epic but one which exemplifies Descartes’ cogito, the knowing subject who stands apart from the world to observe, describe, measure and know it. This knowing figure keeps his distance from the world and aims to keep himself, his ‘essence’, intact. He sometimes paradoxically desires to consume/subsume ‘it’ (the world, woman, all those ‘others’) into ‘his’ identity, but doing so would dissolve the foundations of t/his separate knowing, thinking, feeling and seeing self, and with it the ontological and epistemological presumptions on which it is founded. This separation of self/world, the division of self/other it inaugurates, is his triumph, his tragedy, and, through postcolonial, feminist, post-structuralist or posthumanist eyes, a principal cause of his demise. Such a self-centre cannot hold as many postcolonial, feminist and post-structuralist critics have shown, and as many indigenous peoples have perhaps always known. The Enlightenment ego cannot function (or, in some modes, can only function) through repression, violence and subjection.

Deleuze and Guattari (1997, pp. 3–4) play with the Enlightenment ‘I’, throw its basis for producing truth, facts, knowledge, into doubt, plu-ralize it, and multiply it. They do so, they say, ‘not to reach the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I’. The I they posit is immanent to the social field, world and nature. This I is an intensity, an affective meld, a convergence of forces, always unstable, mobile, emerging, becoming. There is no cogito to centre and stabilize this I as it gets plugged into temporary assemblages, themselves composed through heterogeneity and multiplicity. This I does not reproduce itself by constituting binaries, divisions, hierarchies or any distinctions that separate out human/other. This I is, instead, detachable, reversible, open and connectable. It makes maps not tracings of the terrain; that is, it does not seek to copy and reproduce what is already there but works via creative ‘experimentation in contact with the real’ (ibid., p. 13). The knowledge this I produces does not require succour from a system of logical, objective rationalism with its linear and root-based presumptions that the ‘right’ research methodology and methods will disclose the ‘truth’ of the subject under inquiry. Instead, it unpicks the Enlightenment package of teleology, progress and development, operating instead with an idea of knowledge as a machinic network for knowing, replacing arborescent, lineage-and root-based images of thought with rhizomic modes of knowing characterized by non-linearity, multiplicity, connectivity, dimensions (rather than a pivot), flatness (rather than depth) and ruptures which may (or may not) tie unforeseen things together so that they work. The rhizome as a-centred image of thought shifts the focus from knowledge ‘about’, procedures for producing knowledge, and concerns about what knowing ‘is’, to questions about what knowledge does, how it works, and how its effectivity may generate more (not less) of life.

The voice of the third extract above belongs to One Esk Eleven, AI ancillary and former human, who inhabits multiple bodies, and is also materially manifest as the troop carrier ship Justice of Toren who/which has a taste for antique choral and folk songs. Over 2,000 years old, Justice of Toren has more than five senses, vast memory powers, and a tact, cour-tesy and sensitivity which make her communicative powers exemplary. One Esk is called ‘she’ for convenience because the Radchaai, the ‘race’ that colonized her, don’t recognize gender difference. She is a complicated more-than-human entity with a conscience, a consciousness and multiple identities. She is the cyborg we (humans) all already are, as Haraway (1991, pp. 150–151) reminded us a while ago: we are ‘theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism’ which operate with ‘partiality, intimacy, irony and perversity’ to undo any origin stories that institute difference. Cyborgs, as oppositional and utopian entities, signal the breakdown of the three boundaries which have held in place our ‘last beachheads of [human] uniqueness’: human/animal; animal-human organism/machine; physical/non-physical. The posthuman possible the cyborg heralds and institutes works through alliance, coalition, relationality.

And yet. The dispersals, possibilities and polymorphous becomings offered by posthuman identities are not equally available to al...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Edu-crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education
• 2. Rethinking the Empirical in the Posthuman
• 3. Deleuzo-Guattarian Rhizomatics: Mapping the Desiring Forces and Connections between Educational Practices and the Neurosciences
• 4. Thinking like a Brick: Posthumanism and Building Materials
• 5. A Mark on Paper: The Matter of Indigenous–Settler History
• 6. Thinking with an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry
• 7. Flickering, Spilling and Diffusing Body/Knowledge in the Posthuman Early Years
• 8. ‘Local Girl Befriends Vicious Bear’: Unleashing Educational Aspiration through a Pedagogy of Material-Semiotic Entanglement
• 9. Decentring the Human in Multispecies Ethnographies
• 10. Girls, Camera, (Intra)Action: Mapping Posthuman Possibilities in a Diffractive Analysis of Camera-Girl Assemblages in Research on Gender, Corporeality and Place
• 11. Decolonizing School Science: Pedagogically Enacting Agential Literacy and Ecologies of Relationships
• 12. Student Community Engagement through a Posthuman Lens: The Trans-corporeality of Student and Sea
• 13. Cows, Cabins and Tweets: Posthuman Intra-active Affect and Feminist Fire in Secondary School
• 14. Theorizing as Practice: Engaging the Posthuman as Method of Inquiry and Pedagogic Practice within Contemporary Higher Education
• 15. A Femifesta for Posthuman Art Education: Visions and Becomings
• Index