Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability: Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage (Palgrave Critical University Studies) 3031349954, 9783031349959

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Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability Higher Education, Coloniality and Ecological Damage Vivienne Bozalek Michalinos Zembylas

Palgrave Critical University Studies

Series Editor

John Smyth University of Huddersfield Huddersfield, UK

Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed. The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where this is being expunged or closed down in universities.

Vivienne Bozalek • Michalinos Zembylas

Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability Higher Education, Coloniality and  Ecological Damage

Vivienne Bozalek Centre for Higher Education, Research, Teaching and Learning Rhodes University Makhanda, South Africa

Michalinos Zembylas Program of Educational Studies Open University of Cyprus Latsia, Cyprus

ISSN 2662-7329     ISSN 2662-7337 (electronic) Palgrave Critical University Studies ISBN 978-3-031-34995-9    ISBN 978-3-031-34996-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

These are difficult times in higher education; there are difficult times everywhere. Not only has the pandemic disrupted normal processes of work and life in many sectors, not only does the continuing degradation of the planet continue at an impossibly rapid rate, not only does violence happen from the scale of intimate settings to international warfare, not only do demands for justice escalate, not only does the population age and birth rates plummet, not only does the foundational belief in science shake, not only does the gap between rich and poor individuals, families, groups and countries widen, not only do some lives seem increasingly dominated by internet-enabled forms of being, not only… and I could continue on to list unsettling developments. We also seem to have lost faith in our capacity to address these problems using the habits of thought into which we in higher education have been inculcated. While in some circles only wealth and success of a shallow sort seem any longer to attract attention and followers, in other places people return to cultural modes of being that seek to reverse the advances towards treating all people with dignity and respect, holding ferociously to ideas (such as conspiracy theories) that seem out of time and place and are perhaps attractive precisely because they seem far-fetched. In higher education, the idea that inquiry is somehow a purified realm separate from these real problems of the world gives way to the new realities of academic life. Throughout the world, challenges to coloniality in the curriculum make faculty grapple with their ideas. The hard facts of economic realities force universities into aligning their priorities with instrumentally useful fields of study. Within institutions, from stunning v

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lapses of leadership to the incapacity to get an audience to attend a scholarly talk, to the unwillingness of scholars to participate in peer review, many signs point to the decline of collective life within the university. “Star” faculty salaries grow while increasingly curricula are delivered by underpaid, under-resourced provisional faculty who bear excessive burdens of teaching. From the left, students unleash anger at slow progress that gets described as “cancelling” behaviour; from the right, politicians attack the entire enterprise of higher education as left-leaning and irredeemably “woke,” pushing more universities to become committed to forms of technical knowledge and expertise that displace concerns about values and any form of self-reflection. Even “critical university studies” seeks to become a “thing,” to ensure its niche. In the United States, nationally prominent politicians dictate school curricula that cannot leave students “uncomfortable,” ignoring the discomfort that silence and distortions have created for marginalised students and communities for centuries. What has gone wrong? Have the old values of open inquiry failed? Can they be revived? Are these even the questions we should be asking? In this book, educators Vivienne Bozalek and Michalinos Zembylas offer a different way to frame our current dis-ease and a way out of it. This approach is feminist and posthuman. To some, this will seem more “woke” than “wokeness.” For those who will miss the “old ways,” read carefully. For Bozalek and Zembylas offer a much more promising, action-oriented worldview that is more humane, more caring and, I daresay, more likely to succeed than the most eloquent attempt to revive the old paradigms of so-called objective, scientific, impartial and value-free knowledge. More traditionally minded thinkers, indeed, may grow impatient by seeing a fundamental contradiction in eschewing a belief in a fixed truth and claiming to be able to make any ethical claims at all. Without a fixed standard, they might wonder, how can we make any judgements at all? Without fixed judgements, how are ethics possible? This possibility—a pluriversal world that is nonetheless infused with ethical purpose—is what this text succeeds in bringing to life. Bozalek and Zembylas start with responsibility. Why start there? We might as well ask, why not start there? As Karen Barad’s agential realism makes clear, starting somewhere is the important point because by making a diffractive cut into the world, other worlds open up. There is an amazing range of topics, literatures, areas of knowledge discussed in this text, from education to psychology, to philosophy, to animal studies, to readings of

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indigenous philosophy, to ecology, to ethics. There is a commitment to plurality and to the “pluriverse” rather than discovering a single truth or path and its concomitant “uni-verse.” There is no “how-to” guide, but members of university communities who are serious about changing their institutions will find much to appreciate and to guide their actions. Yet, to my mind, the decision to start with responsibility, privileged irresponsibility (which brings dimensions of power front and centre) and centrally, response-ability is not an entirely arbitrary point of departure. After all, a lack of responsiveness is at the heart of what is wrong with a worldview that has colonised the world and transformed everything possible into a commodity, leaving people with some nostalgic bits to fill in meaning in their lives. Once we begin to see response-ability everywhere, we are called to the ethical task of developing our own capacities for responses to others, other people, the more-than-human world and the planet. At this point, claims about the superiority of humans over non-humans become implausible. Claims for the superiority of some humans, over others who are “backward,” become implausible. Response-ability is not ordered in a neat causal path but neither is it without direction. Its direction is ethical because it necessarily involves relating to “others” who may be human or other entities of all sorts. As Bozalek and Zembylas make clear, we must approach everything with attentiveness and curiosity, resisting closures and trying to remain open to others. Indeed, response-ability imposes the ethical burden of rendering each other capable and more capable of expression and existence. This is a very different worldview than one that measures who is “up” and who is “down.” Another central dimension of response-ability that they discuss at length is the importance of affect. Not simply the responses of the intellect matter in trying to think through where we are. In two chapters that apply their ideas to central contemporary problems, they take up the questions of coloniality and ecological catastrophe. There, they show how affective solidarity can operate to reduce harms and perhaps struggle towards solutions. If the goal is not simply to get people to recognise themselves as complicit in injustices such as coloniality but to act upon that knowledge, then people need to change their feelings from individualised forms of guilt to other ways of feeling and knowing. This text points the way to such an understanding.

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In the end, Bozalek and Zembylas offer some simple propositions to enact in our lives. Nevertheless, they provide a way to escape from what Corey Walker calls an “ethics of opacity.” This opacity, this incapacity to see the ways in which “Enlightenment” obscures and divides, rather than connects and supports, is the great barrier to acting towards a different and less catastrophic set of ends. To me, there is no doubt that the world would be a better place if higher education took up the task of leading the way to this new way of thinking. Without transformational thinking, without recognising the world as fundamentally relational rather than static, there is no chance that we will escape from the current divides and old framings that now seem at entrenched impasses. Bozalek and Zembylas offer no simple solutions. But they do suggest a way for us to re-form our intelligences to meet the world in a more caring, peaceful and less extractive and exploitative way. Can we do it? This is not an easy challenge to accept. It would require changing and rethinking every feature of the institutions within which we spend most of our lives. But by the time you finish reading this text, by the time Bozalek and Zembylas have drawn upon their extensive life experiences to offer us this guidance, it becomes clear that this is a better way to live, and an offer of hope. Given the state of our world, such hope is a most precious gift. University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN, USA

Joan C. Tronto, March 2023

Acknowledgements

The idea for the book come about through a project on Doing Academia Differently, funded by the National Research Foundation in South Africa. As authors and academics, we have both for many years been interested in the notions of responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability. We locate ourselves in feminist new materialism and posthumanism and the political ethics of care, through which we consider these three concepts. The focus of a number of our projects has been on various aspects of justice and care in relation to higher education and how to do higher education differently. We have both written extensively on these topics, and this book draws on much of these previous writings as well as offering new thoughts on these issues. We have also increasingly been aware of the importance of coloniality and ecological damage. This book was written together/apart—the idea for the book was conceived during the Covid-19 pandemic where in the flesh face-to-face contact was prohibited. We wrote the book proposal on a Google Doc across many miles, planned it at Utrecht University while attending a promotion ceremony for Nike Romano, a PhD student of the NRF project on Doing Academia Differently and then began to write the book together at a project meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, and then continued in our home countries of South Africa and Cyprus. We would like to express our appreciation to the NRF for making it possible to meet at the beautiful conference venue Mont Fleur, in Cape Town, and for the support of other project members through reading groups, swimming and thinking-with each other in the pandemic period, and before and beyond that. The generosity of people on this project has ix

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been inspiring—including Rosi Braidotti, Delphi Carstens, Lieve Carrett, Lindsay Clowes, Elmarie Costandius, Daniella Gachago, Chantelle Gray-­ van Heerden, Sue Gredley, Dorothee Hölscher, Francois Jonker, Erin Manning, Veronica Mitchell, Siddique Motala, Denise Newfield, Alex Noble, Nike Romano, Tammy Shefer, Kathrin Thiele, Joan Tronto and Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton. We are deeply grateful to Joan Tronto not only for writing the Foreword, but also for her generosity and support over the years in so many ways that we cannot count. We would also like to thank the reviewers of the manuscript for their care-full reviews. As always, thanks to those who are living with us for their patience and caring, while we had to work on this manuscript. We would like to acknowledge that the following works have been reworked and expanded for this book: Bozalek, V. (2014). Privileged irresponsibility. In G. Olthuis, H. Kohlen, & J. Heier (Eds.), Moral boundaries redrawn: The significance of Joan Tronto’s argument for political theory, professional ethics, and care practice (pp. 51–72). Peeters. Bozalek, V. (2021). Rendering each other capable: Doing response-able research responsibly. In K. Murris (Ed.), Navigating the postqualitative, new materialist and critical posthumanist terrain across disciplines: An introductory guide (pp. 135–149). Routledge. Zembylas, M. (2019). Encouraging shared responsibility without invoking collective guilt: Exploring pedagogical responses to portrayals of suffering and injustice in the classroom. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 27(3), 403–417. Zembylas, M. (2022). Toward affective decolonization: Nurturing decolonizing solidarity in higher education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy. 10.1080/15505170.2022.2034684 Zembylas, M., Bozalek, V., & Shefer, T. (2014). Tronto’s notion of privileged irresponsibility and the reconceptualisation of care: Implications for critical pedagogies of emotion. Gender and Education, 26(3), 200–214. April 2023

Vivienne Bozalek Michalinos Zembylas

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Responsibility 17 3 Privileged Irresponsibility 37 4 Response-Ability 63 5 Coloniality 83 6 Ecological Catastrophe107 7 Conclusion129 References143 Index163

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About the Authors

Vivienne  Bozalek is an emerita professor in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape, and honorary professor in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. Her research interests and publications include the political ethics of care and social justice, posthumanism and feminist new materialisms, innovative pedagogical practices in higher education, post-qualitative and participatory methodologies. Her most recent co-edited books include Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education with Rosi Braidotti, Tamara Shefer and Michalinos Zembylas (2019), Nancy Fraser and Participatory Parity: Reframing Social Justice in South African Higher Education with Dorothee Hölscher and Michalinos Zembylas (2020), Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education with Michalinos Zembylas and Joan Tronto (2021), Post-Anthropocentric Social Work: Critical Posthuman and New Materialist Perspectives with Bob Pease (2021), Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-come with Michalinos Zembylas, Siddique Motala and Dorothee Hölscher (2021) and In conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism with Karin Murris (2023). She is the editor-in-chief of the open source online journal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning.

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Michalinos Zembylas  is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus, an honorary professor at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, and an adjunct professor at the University of South Australia. He has been awarded a Commonwealth of Learning (COL) Chair for 2023–2026. Zembylas has written extensively on emotion and affect in relation to social justice pedagogies, intercultural and peace education, human rights education and citizenship education. His recent books include Affect and the Rise of Right-Wing Populism: Pedagogies for the Renewal of Democratic Education and Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come (co-edited with V.  Bozalek, S.  Motala and D.  Hölscher). In 2016, he received the Distinguished Researcher Award in “Social Sciences and Humanities” from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  This chapter provides an introduction to the book, outlining the three major concepts dealt with in the book—responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability. The chapter also provides a brief introduction to the current conditions of the world which are focused on in the second half of the book, coloniality and the ecological crisis and their relationship to higher education. Importantly, the chapter provides some background to the theoretical lenses of feminist posthumanism/new materialism and the political ethics of care, which are read through each other. These approaches are predicated on a relational ontology, which holds that relationships pre-exist entities, and that entities only come into being through relationships. This introductory chapter also provides a brief sketch of each of the chapters to come, chapters on responsibility, privileged irresponsibility, response-ability, coloniality and ecological damage. Keywords  Responsibility • Privileged irresponsibility • Response-ability • Coloniality • Ecological damage • Higher education

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_1

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This book focuses on three concepts which have been foundational to our work over a number of years: responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability. These three concepts are interrelated but also distinguishable from each other. While it is relatively easy to understand how responsibility and privileged irresponsibility relate to each other, it is not as easy to distinguish responsibility from response-ability as some authors tend to use responsibility and response-ability interchangeably. However, we believe it is important to distinguish between responsibility and response-­ ability which we see as different concepts pertaining to different practices and sensibilities. In this book, we theorise these three concepts through the lenses of feminist posthuman/new materialist and political ethics of care perspectives, because these philosophies foreground, as we do, the social, natural, political, affective, discursive and material dimensions of living responsibly and ethically in our current world circumstances. We believe this sort of intellectual project is timely because the current conditions of the world—coloniality, capitalism and neoliberalism, social injustice and the ecological crisis—have dire implications for higher education and its future. Responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-­ ability are all concerned with ethical, ontological, epistemological and political understandings and implications for our world, therefore, the combined use of these concepts will shed new light on these implications for higher education. The book thinks-with theorists who have written about responsibility, privileged responsibility and response-ability from the lens of feminist posthumanism/new materialism and the political ethics of care such as Karen Barad, Vinciane Despret, Deborah Bird Rose, Donna Haraway, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Anna Tsing, Iris Marion Young, Joan Tronto and Margaret Urban Walker, among others. We build on the work of these prominent writers to think-with them not only about how higher education might be conceptualised in current conditions, but also about how academia may be done differently and reconfigured in more generative and transformative ways. Responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability are all considered from a philosophical stance of relational ontology, which both enables and constrains how these three concepts are understood in relation to higher education. A relational ontology holds that relations pre-­ exist entities, subjects and objects, which only come into being through relationships. The idea of an independent, discrete, intentional and propertied individual human subject is troubled in a relational ontology, which sees the world as inextricably entangled. Furthermore, agency is seen as a

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force existing outside individuals and entities. Agency is seen as an enactment of vitality or dynamic intensity which reconfigures the world, rather than an attribute which humans or objects possess. This book thus takes relational ontology as a starting point for considering responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability in the context of the historical violence of colonialism and ecological damage as they pertain to higher education. Why these two conditions? Because we believe that they are inextricably intertwined, and mark the fundamental predicaments of our times, having a major impact on universities and their futures. The second part of the book considers how coloniality and ecological damage, which derived from the colonial world, impact on higher education. More explicitly, the second part of the book considers how privileged irresponsibility has been important in producing coloniality and ecological damage. It also explores what can be done about this state of affairs, in terms of assuming responsibility (in the form of acknowledgement of complicity and non-innocence) as well as the ability to respond (response-ability) (being able to respond and allowing for responsiveness) to the conditions of colonialism and the damaged planet. The central question that guides our analysis is the following: How might responsibility, privileged responsibility and response-ability be conceptualised from feminist posthuman/new materialist and political ethics of care perspectives and how do they work in our current colonial, ecological and political climate in relation to higher education? The sub-questions which are addressed in the chapters are the following: • How has responsibility/complicity/non-innocence been conceptualised from political ethics of care and feminist new materialist/posthuman perspectives? • What provokes and promotes privileged irresponsibility and can anything be done about recuperating such a stance? • How has response-ability or the ability to respond and to allow responsiveness been conceptualised from political ethics of care and feminist new materialist/posthuman perspectives? • How has privileged irresponsibility played out in higher education in relation to crucial life-changing world conditions such as coloniality and ecological damage? • How might we find meaningful ways of instigating responsibility for complicity and non-innocence in the higher education sector to

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challenge deeply embedded imbalances of power and privilege that continue to bedevil the planet and that lead to ecological damage? • How can response-ability assist us to act, live, learn, research and communicate differently in higher education in the light of a colonial ecology? Our book aims to make an intellectual contribution to the emerging field of Critical University Studies. Critical University Studies (CUS) (Williams, 2015; Boggs & Mitchell, 2018) analyses how universities foster injustice or perpetuate inequalities. As a field of study, CUS advocates confrontation and opposition to the neoliberal turn in higher education. As far as we can ascertain, however, the combined analysis of colonialism and ecological damage through the lens of feminist posthumanism/new materialism and the political ethics of care has not received much attention in CUS. This book is an attempt to bridge such a gap. Decolonial critiques in higher education (Stein, 2019, 2022; Stein & Andreotti, 2017; Zembylas, 2018a, 2018b) have already highlighted the importance of resisting colonising moves. These moves are driven by dominant epistemological, ontological and ethical investments in universality, supremacy and mastery. This, in turn, has the effect of occluding the intensities of global capitalism and processes of racism, classism and sexism that have often made our current institutions unethical in their intellectual practices. We argue that CUS and decolonial critiques can be enriched from the theoretical lenses we use in this chapter to bring a sharper social justice edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education. In particular, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has forced higher education into an acknowledgement that we are living on a damaged planet, the implicatedness of this state of affairs for pedagogy and scholarship in higher education and how this has substantial consequences for the survival of higher education as a sector and for its continued relevance for the world. The planetary crises including the sixth mass extinction of species, chemical pollution, global warming and other forms of climate change have far-­reaching effects on higher education (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018; Leal Filho et al., 2021; Molthan-Hill & Blaj-Ward, 2022; Papadopoulos et  al., 2021, 2023; Pedersen, 2021; Silova, 2021; Stiegler, 2021; Verlie, 2019). In considering questions of responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability regarding the current ecological catastrophe, it is necessary to acknowledge how the greed of capitalism and the plundering and extraction of resources such as land, plants, animals and people brought about through

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colonialism are inextricably linked to the trouble of living and dying on a damaged planet, including who gets to live and die, and how they live and die. The book is divided into two parts, with three chapters in the first part and two in the second part. The first part of the book explicates the major concepts which will be put to work in the second part of the book. The chapters in Part One provide an overview of the concepts of responsibility, privileged irresponsibility (including complicity and non-innocence) and response-ability or responsiveness, drawing on the entanglement of posthuman/feminist new materialism and political ethics of care perspectives as the overcharging framework of the book. The second part of the book focuses on higher education and how privileged irresponsibility has given rise to and exacerbated such world conditions as coloniality and ecological damage. Importantly, the chapters also focus on the responsibilities of the higher education sector in relation to these issues and how these issues can best be responded to in higher education.

Theoretical Lenses of the Book The theoretical lenses utilised in this book are feminist posthuman and new materialism and care ethics perspectives. To begin, both the political ethics of care and posthuman/new materialist ethics redefine the values and practices of care, providing ways moving beyond liberal individualist approaches that are grounded in Enlightenment ideas. In this context the ‘posthuman’ is understood as that which lies beyond the classic view of human exceptionalism, to include non-human animals, substances, forces, energies, physical matter, bodies of water, soil, plants, rocks and the way in which these constantly act with and on each other and on human beings. These are vital forces which are not merely an inert backdrop to humans (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018). The political ethics of care, on the other hand, is an approach to personal, social, moral and political life that starts from the reality that all human beings need and receive care and give care to others. Some care ethicists, however, for example, Joan Tronto (1993, 2013), Kyle Whyte and Chris Cuomo (2016), and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) recognise that this is not limited only to humans but extends to non-humans and the physical and natural environment as well. These authors, therefore, seek an ethics of care that goes beyond humanism. This more inclusive political care ethics approach, we argue, provides an alternative normative framework for considering responsibility,

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privileged responsibility and response-ability in higher education through its ontological, ethical, epistemological and political positionings. Ontologically, the ethic of care focuses on vulnerability and relationality, on the ability to give and receive care for humans, non-humans and more-­ than-­humans. Ethically, democratic caring foregrounds responsibilities rather than obligations where the latter involve a more formal contractual agreement. Responsibility, on the other hand, is a consideration of how one could act to address specific identified needs. Epistemologically, responsibility from an ethics of care perspective is inclined towards what Margaret Urban Walker (2008) refers to as an ‘expressive-collaborative’ morality rather than a theoretical-juridical model. A ‘theoretical-juridical’ position sees philosophers as holding privileged and expert perspectives whereas an ‘expressive-collaborative’ morality foregrounds negotiation, collaboration, expression and agreement as important practices amongst all stakeholders. Walker (2008) calls this latter morality ‘an ethics of responsibility’. In a similar way, according to Tronto (2013), for caring to be democratic, it needs to include all the role players in a participatory process. Politically, Tronto (2013) sees democratic caring politics as a way of assigning responsibilities for care using these participatory processes. The notion of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ (Bozalek, 2014b; Tronto, 1990, 1993, 2013; Zembylas et al., 2014) foregrounds the importance of power as a political concern of the caring relationship in higher education in relation to coloniality and ecological damage. In a similar move to care ethics, new materialism and posthumanism point to the impossibility of separating epistemology (theories of knowing) from ontology (being and becoming), ethics and politics—offering instead a politico-ethico-onto-epistemological entanglement (Barad, 2017c). This combination of politics, epistemology, ontology and ethics ruptures conventional ways of doing scholarship in higher education, where epistemology is usually foregrounded at the expense of politics, ontology and ethics. Posthumanism and feminist new materialist writers on responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability build on the epistemological and political foundations of anti-humanism, postcolonialism, post-­ anthropocentrism, anti-racism and material feminisms (Alaimo, 2016, 2017, 2018; Barad, 2007, 2010, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2019; Barad & Gandorfer, 2021; Bennett, 2017; Braidotti, 2013, 2019, 2022; Despret, 2016; Haraway, 1991, 2008, 2015, 2016; Manning, 2009, 2012, 2016, 2020; Massumi, 2014, 2015; Povinelli, 2021, Rose, 2022; Stengers, 2010, 2011, 2015; van Dooren, 2019). Such writers from a critical

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posthumanist and feminist new materialist perspective embrace a critical view of a disembedded liberal humanism, with its assumptions of a society with equally placed autonomous agents and rational scientific control over others (Adams, 2014; Donovan & Adams, 2007). Here, the emphasis is shifted away from the subject and object to their co-constitution or entanglement (Barad, 2007). Responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability can therefore be fruitfully considered through an approach that brings together critical posthumanism, feminist new materialism and care ethics. These theoretical lenses share a focus on relational ontologies and relational understandings of the world; a critique of dualisms; and engagements with materiality and its consequences. Many of the scholars in critical posthumanism, such as Stacey Alaimo, Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway, Vicky Kirby, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and Isabelle Stengers, amongst others, have contributed to ideas that move beyond the centrality of discourse and Cartesian dualisms to incorporate a vision of human/non-human, body/mind, subject/object, nature/culture, matter/meaning, in their work. Similarly, many of the scholars in ethics of care such as Joan Tronto, move beyond Western subject/object dichotomies and reductive curricula and methodologies which produce packageable content, predictable measurable outcomes and deliverable products, focusing rather on relational ethical concerns such as attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust. In particular, feminist new materialism and posthumanism are predicated on a relational ontology where entities and agency do not pre-exist relationships, but rather come into being through relationships. In addition to this, space and time are not seen as determinate givens, but as coming into being intra-actively through phenomena—Barad (2007) refers to spacetimemattering as a reconfigured entanglement of space, time and matter with no pre-given boundaries between them. Barad’s (2007, 2010, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c) work provides a radical reworking of time through a diffractive reading of queer theory and quantum physics, including their understandings of the interrelated notions of hauntology, indeterminacy, dis/continuity, temporal diffraction, spacetimemattering and their views on a justice-to-come. Joan Tronto (2003) has also written about time from a political ethics of care perspective. The indeterminacy of time and space is important when considering responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability, as the past and future are always already implicated in the thick now of the present (Barad, 2017b).

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The second half of the book focuses on two specific issues which have affected and continue to affect higher education and conditions of living more generally—coloniality and ecological damage. Coloniality refers to processes that are still continuing in contemporary societies shaped by ongoing white supremacy and include knowledge and value systems that have naturalised particular conceptualisations of what it means to be human (Mignolo, 2007; Wynter, 2003). Ecological damage refers to environmental degradation in a deteriorating global context that we are living in, where humans have irretrievably damaged the earth. Although they are dealt with in separate chapters, we see coloniality and ecological damage as deeply entwined with each other. Much has been written in recent times about decoloniality, postcolonialism and higher education, as well as on concerns of ecological damage, and more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and its effects on higher education (Stiegler, 2021). Our specific focus in this volume will be on how responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability have both resulted in such phenomena as coloniality and ecological damage, how these two phenomena are entangled with each other, what might be done about living on a damaged planet and about the continuing effects of coloniality on the planet. We conclude this Introduction by providing a brief outline of each chapter.

Description of the Chapters Chapter 2 starts by providing a historical overview of how responsibility has been theorised from the political ethics of care and posthuman or feminist new materialist perspectives. Responsibility has been taken up as a serious topic by feminist writers such as Iris Marion Young, Margaret Urban Walker and care ethicist, Joan Tronto, as well as feminist posthumanist philosophers such as Karen Barad, Deborah Bird Rose and Donna Haraway. According to care ethicists, responsibility is about acting on the need for care once it has been identified. For others, mainly posthumanists and feminist new materialists, responsibility is equated with accountability for marks on bodies. Responsibility also involves providing an account of the specific agential cuts that are made, how phenomena come into being and become meaningful through relationalities and the traces or marks left on bodies as a consequence of various enactments. Finally, responsibility takes account of what is included and excluded from mattering—and what is brought into being in the process. Responsibility is discussed in this chapter in relation to these multiple dimensions which are traversed in the

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literature, that is, individual and collective/structural/political/ecological dimensions. Also, this chapter discusses responsibility in relation to complicity as political—an idea that moves us beyond the boundaries set by moral questions regarding an individual’s complicity with injustice, because this perspective considers subjective criteria (e.g. moral conscience) to be insufficient. This implies, for instance, that rather than structuring our lives in ways that focus on avoiding complicity altogether, we should recognise that this is an inevitable aspect of political, social and ecological life and we are always already complicit in all kinds of ways to unjust acts. Chapter 3 explains what is meant by the term ‘privileged irresponsibility’, where it comes from and how it has been written about in the literature to date. Privileged irresponsibility is about a refusal to acknowledge complicity and implicatedness in inequalities and unjust conditions which allow certain groups/geopolitical areas, species and so on to flourish at the expense of others. This chapter considers what is involved in the concepts of complicity, non-innocence and responsibility, and how they are related to each other. Privileged irresponsibility also involves a denial of dependency on others, for example, when the services of the other are used for one’s own benefit, but not acknowledged. The chapter identifies various mechanisms of dualism which help to initiate and maintain privileged irresponsibility. It also examines the role of wilful ignorance in privileged irresponsibility, as a form of ignorance that turns a blind eye to unpleasant truths, in social, economic, political and environmental issues; that is, wilful ignorance as a phenomenon that has contributed to the strength of white supremacy and right-wing movements. Chapter 4 is focused on the notion of response-ability, which involves responsiveness or the ability to respond. Response-ability is also about inviting and enabling a response in attunement with the specificity of the situation, and in so doing, rendering the involved parties capable. As with responsibility, the chapter provides an overview of care ethicist’s take on responsiveness or response-ability (largely Joan Tronto’s) and the more recent feminist posthuman and new materialist engagements with response-ability (Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, Astrid Schrader, Deborah Bird Rose and Vinciane Despret). Here, response-ability involves paying close attention to the tracing of entangled relationships which are co-­ constituted with human and more-than-human others in multiple temporalities and spaces. It also involves an acknowledgement that we inherit various ghostly and material presences which continue to play out in the

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present and the future and that we need to deal with the ethical and practical issues stemming from these. The chapter opens with a focus on how to cultivate such sensibilities and practices as attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter and iteration or ongoingness. These sensibilities and practices enable the ability to respond in multispecies and multidirectional relationships which has become essential for living and dying well on a damaged planet. Response-ability is not only the preserve of humans, but that it involves other species and plant life too, which come into being through intra-active relationships. This begins with the relationship of co-constitution through co-responding, instead of starting from preformed subjects and objects. Response-ability constitutes an ethical and political form of resistance against normative closures in everyday practices. This idea is particularly important for understanding coloniality and ecological damage as it pertains to higher education, in the second part of the book. Chapter 5 employs the intersecting lenses of privileged irresponsibility and decolonial theory to make a critical intervention into the terrain of ethics and politics in higher education. The chapter argues that a combined framework of ideas that pay attention to how coloniality and privileged irresponsibility are entangled, especially in affective terms, a dimension that is often ignored–so we talk about ‘affective decolonisation’—which brings a sharper social justice and decolonising edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education. Furthermore, the chapter analyses how the notions of complicity and non-­innocence can help illustrate some of the tensions and possibilities emerging in higher education decolonisation efforts. The chapter also expands on how the notion of response-ability creates affective spaces for pedagogical approaches that interrogate the affective logics of coloniality/modernity in practices and policies of higher education. The chapter proposes that response-ability not only provides ethical and political recognition to the neglected sites and repressed knowledges of marginalised and colonised peoples but also instigates ethical and political action for transformation. The chapter ends with a discussion of the implications of an ethics of response-ability for a renewed agenda in pedagogical practices and policies of higher education. Chapter 6 is centred around the concepts of the first three chapters— responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability—in relation to the university and ecological damage. The chapter examines the extent to which higher education has engaged with ecological damage and what

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it can do to take further responsibility for engaging with such issues. The first part of the chapter considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in feminist new materialist and care ethics ideas has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric which are prevalent in higher education. The second part of the chapter examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. The intertwining of ecological damage and colonialism is dependent on different forms of privileged irresponsibility arising out of mechanisms of Cartesian dualisms such as hyperseparation and instrumentalisation. This has made it possible to plunder the earth and its peoples, animals, plants and land as a resource for settler colonialists. A responsive approach to ecological damage requires higher education institutions to acknowledge their own complicity, non-innocence and involvement in their embeddedness in the global crisis. The third part of the chapter considers a number of response-­ able practices that higher education may make to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This section provides examples of three such experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation (Papadopoulos et al., 2023). The final part of the chapter thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and care ethics to develop alternative practices in academia. In Chap. 7 the conclusion of the book, we recap on how privileged irresponsibility, responsibility and the ability to respond to contemporary global issues such as coloniality and ecological damage plays out in the field of higher education and more specifically to Critical University Studies (CUS). This book expands CUS by contributing new theoretical perspectives, namely, feminist new materialism, care ethics and posthumanism, and explicates how these perspectives provide a fresh lens to the function of a future decolonial and ecologically sensitive university. In considering how best to respond to the increasing threats to global-scale crises, we develop a number of propositions for the higher education sector to consider at the levels of policy, pedagogy, curriculum and scholarship.

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References Adams, C. J. (2014). The war on compassion. In P. MacCormack (Ed.), The animal catalyst: Towards a human theory (pp. 15–25). Bloomsbury. Alaimo, S. (2016). Exposed: Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. University of Minnesota Press. Alaimo, S. (2017). The Anthropocene at sea: Temporality, paradox, compression. In U. K. Heise, J. Christensen, & M. Neimann (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities (pp. 53–162). Routledge. Alaimo, S. (2018). Trans-corporeality. In R.  Braidotti & M.  Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman glossary (pp. 435–438). Bloomsbury. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv12101zq Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Barad, K. (2017a). No small matter: Mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering. In A.  Tsing, H.  Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. G103– G120). University of Minnesota. Barad, K. (2017b). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-­ membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56–86. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017 Barad, K. (2017c). What flashes up: Theological-political-scientific fragments. In C. Keller & M.-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science and new materialisms (pp.  21–88). Fordham University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt1xhr73h.4 Barad, K. (2019). After the end of the world: Entangled nuclear colonialisms, matters of force, and the material force of justice. Theory and Event, 22(3), 524–550. Barad, K., & Gandorfer, D. (2021). Political desirings: Yearnings for mattering (,) differently. Theory and Event, 24(1), 14–66. https://doi.org/10.1353/ tae.2021.0002 Bennett, J. (2017). Vegetal life and onto-sympathy. In C. Keller & M.-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science and new materialisms (pp. 89–110). Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xhr73h.4 Boggs, A., & Mitchell, N. (2018). Critical university studies and the crisis consensus. Feminist Studies, 44(2), 432–463. Bozalek, V. (2014b). Privileged irresponsibility. In G.  Olthuis, H.  Kohlen, & J.  Heier (Eds.), Moral boundaries redrawn: The significance of Joan Tronto’s argument for political theory, professional ethics, and care practice (pp. 51–72). Peeters.

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Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture and Society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276418771486 Braidotti, R. (2022). Posthuman feminism. Polity Press. Despret, V. (2016). What would animals say if we asked the right questions? University of Minnesota Press. Donovan, J., & Adams, C. J. (2007). Introduction. In J. Donovan & C. J. Adams (Eds.), The feminist care tradition in animal ethics (pp.  1–20). Columbia University. Hamilton, J.  M., & Neimanis, A. (2018). Composting feminisms and environmental humanities. Environmental Humanities, 10(2), 501–527. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-7156859 Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota. Haraway, D. (2015). A curious practice. Angelaki, 20(2), 5–14. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Leal Filho, W., Sima, M., Sharifi, A., et al. (2021). Handling climate change education at universities: an overview. Environmental Sciences Europe, 33, 109. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12302-021-00552-5 Manning, E. (2009). Relationscapes: Movement, art, philosophy. The MIT Press. Manning, E. (2012). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press. Manning, E. (2020). Toward a pragmatics of the useless. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2014). What animals teach us about politics. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Polity. Mignolo, W. (2007). Delinking: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality. Cultural Studies, 21(2–3), 449–514. Molthan-Hill, P., & Blaj-Ward, L. (2022). Assessing climate solutions and taking climate leadership: How can universities prepare their students for challenging times? Teaching in Higher Education, 27(7), 943–952. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/13562517.2022.2034782 Papadopoulos, D., Puig de la bellacasa, M., & Myers, N. (2021). Introduction. Elements. From cosmology to episteme and back. In D.  Papadopoulos, M. Puig de la Bellacasa, & N. Myers (Eds.), Reactivating elements: Chemistry, ecology, practice (pp. 1–17). Duke University Press. Papadopoulos, D., Puig de la Bellacasa, M., & Tacchetti, M. (2023). Introduction: No justice, no ecological peace: The groundings of ecological reparation. In D. Papadopoulos, M. Puig de la Bellacasa, & M. Tacchetti (Eds.), Ecological

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reparation: Repair, remediation and resurgence in social and environmental conflict (pp. 1–18). Bristol University Press. Pedersen, H. (2021). Education, anthropocentrism, and interspecies sustainability: Confronting institutional anxieties in omnicidal times. Ethics and Education, 16(2), 164–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2021.1896639 Povinelli, E. (2021). Between Gaia and ground: Four axioms of existence and the ancestral catastrophe of late liberalism. Duke University Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press. Rose, D. B. (2022). Shimmer: Flying-fox exuberance in worlds of peril. Edinburgh University Press. Silova, I. (2021). Facing the anthropocene: Comparative education as sympoiesis. Comparative Education Review, 65(4). https://doi.org/10.1086/716664 Stein, S. (2019). Beyond higher education as we know it: Gesturing towards decolonial horizons of possibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38, 143–161. Stein, S. (2022). Unsettling the university: Confronting the colonial foundations of US higher education. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Stein, S., & Andreotti, V. (2017). Decolonisation and higher education. In M.  Peters (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 70–75). Springer. Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I. University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I. (2011). Cosmopolitics II. University of Minnesota Press. Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Stiegler, B. (2021). Bifurcate: There is no alternative (D.  Ross, Trans.). Open Humanities Press. Tronto, J. (2003). Time’s place. Feminist Theory, 4(2), 119–138. https://doi. org/10.1177/14647001030042002 Tronto, J. C. (1990). Chilly racists. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press. van Dooren, T. (2019). The wake of crows: Living and dying in shared worlds. Columbia University Press. Verlie, B. (2019). Bearing worlds: Learning to live-with climate change. Environmental Education Research, 25(5), 751–766. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13504622.2019.1637823 Walker, M. U. (2008). Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. Second Edition. Oxford University Press.

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Whyte, K. P., & Cuomo, C. J. (2016). Ethics of caring in environmental ethics: Indigenous and feminist philosophies. In S.  M. Gardiner & A.  Thompson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of environmental ethics (pp.  234–247). Oxford University Press. Williams, J. (2015). The need for critical university studies. In G.  Hunter & F. Mohamed (Eds.), A new deal for the humanities: Liberal arts and the future of public higher education (pp. 145–159). Rutgers University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. Zembylas, M. (2018a). Decolonial possibilities in South African higher education: Reconfiguring humanising pedagogies as/with decolonising pedagogies. South African Journal of Education, 38(4), 1–11. Zembylas, M. (2018b). The entanglement of decolonial and posthuman perspectives: Tensions and implications for curriculum and pedagogy in higher education. Parallax, 24(3), 254–267. Zembylas, M., Bozalek, V., & Shefer, T. (2014). Tronto’s notion of privileged irresponsibility and the reconceptualisation of care: Implications for critical pedagogies of emotion. Gender and Education, 26(3), 200–214.

CHAPTER 2

Responsibility

Abstract  This chapter brings together perspectives from political ethics of care and feminist posthumanism and new materialism to theorise responsibility as relational. To guide contemplation through this concept, we think-with prominent feminist philosophers such as Iris Marion Young, Margaret Urban Walker, Joan Tronto, Karen Barad, Deborah Bird Rose and Donna Haraway. We draw on these thinkers because they help us conceptualise responsibility as a relational concept along the lines of a relational ontology, a fundamental concept in this book, as outlined in the Introduction. The central question that drives this chapter is: How might responsibility be conceptualised as a relational ontology by diffracting the political ethics of care through posthuman ethics? And, why does this understanding of responsibility matter? Keywords  Responsibility • Political ethics of care • Feminist posthumanism • New materialism • Relational ontology

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_2

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Introduction Over the last two decades there has been a plethora of writings on responsibility and its link to matters of justice (e.g. Freeman, 2007; Kymlicka, 2002; Rawls, 1999; Scheffler, 2001; Young, 2011). The debates in political science, philosophy, sociology, and other fields in the social sciences are endless, when it comes to theorising the notion of responsibility, its conditions and related barriers, and its association with structural injustice, including environmental injustices. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to revisit all of these debates; however, it is sufficient to recognise that there are generally two different modes of responsibility—one grounded in the individual rational and moral agent, the other in collective or relational responsibility. Needless to say, the two overlap yet they differ in many respects because within each mode there are numerous conceptualisations of how responsibility is understood—especially in light of considerations about contextual conditions and demands that make it difficult to acknowledge the role of personal responsibility in structural injustice. There is also a need to move beyond a monolithic notion of responsibility focused either on the individual or social structures, as posthuman and new materialist writers put forward the idea that responsibility is ongoing and never solely located inside individual subjects, in dualistic or human relationships but rather in multidirectional relationships including other species and more-than-human partners. It is also necessary to engage with more capacious conceptions of the world than structural injustice, which incorporate the collective responsibility that needs to be taken for the damage which has been wrought on the planet as a whole. In the second chapter of the book, we bring together perspectives from political ethics of care and feminist posthumanism and new materialism to theorise responsibility as relational. To guide contemplation through this concept, we think-with prominent feminist philosophers such as Iris Marion Young, Margaret Urban Walker, Joan Tronto, Karen Barad, Deborah Bird Rose and Donna Haraway. We draw on these thinkers because they help us conceptualise responsibility as a relational concept along the lines of a relational ontology, a fundamental concept in this book, as outlined in the Introduction. Moving forward the debates on responsibility and justice in relation to contemporary realities of the world—for example, coloniality and ecological damage—requires a conception of responsibility that recognises these complexities. In the second part of the book, we put to work this relational conception of

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responsibility to think about coloniality and ecological damage in relation to higher education. The central question that drives this chapter is: How might responsibility be conceptualised as a relational ontology by diffracting1 the political ethics of care through posthuman ethics? And, why does this understanding of responsibility matter?

Responsibility as Relational Our point of departure is the last work of Iris Marion Young (2011) and especially her Social Connection Model of responsibility which offers a promising approach for linking personal responsibility with structural injustice. Young has been among the most important theorists to write about responsibility as a relational construct. In Responsibility for Justice (2011), Young presents a theory of responsibility which argues that all individuals contribute by their actions to structural injustice. To show this, she contrasts her view with traditional conceptions of responsibility—conceptions based on what she refers to as the Liability Model. The Liability Model of responsibility has three characteristic features: it assigns blame; its emphasis is on which acts count as wrong because they deviate from acceptable norms; and assumes an atomistic view of responsibility so the object of responsibility is focused on isolated individual actions or events. Young argues for a different kind of responsibility—one that does not avoid recognising that individuals ought to take responsibility for what is wrong, yet a conception of responsibility that is also able to explain one’s complicity to structural injustice. As she says: “We need a conception of responsibility different from the standard conception, which focuses on individual action and its unique relation to harm” (p.  96). Assigning blame—the Liability Model of responsibility—is not always adequate for attending to matters of injustice, according to Young, because there is no benefit which comes from the act of assigning blame. As she further explains: “…the specific actions of each [individual] cannot be casually disentangled from structural processes to trace a specific aspect of the outcome” (p.  100). The examples that Young uses to show this include buying products made in sweatshops or participating in housing markets that end up excluding vulnerable people. Structural injustice, Young 1  Reading diffractively means reading texts, theories, oeuvres through each other rather than against each other to get new understandings and insights into issues such as responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability.

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emphasises, occurs because many individuals and institutions pursue their interests; thus, all the individuals who participate in these schemes are responsible—not in the sense of direct responsibility, but in the sense of being part of the processes that cause and perpetuate structural injustice. For this reason, Young proposes her Social Connection Model of responsibility—a model which describes the complex interconnections of responsibilities that result from individual participation in large social structures. Unlike the Liability Model, this model of responsibility does not seek to assign personal blame; rather, the aim of the Social Connection Model is to highlight how indirect and cumulative participation in social structures contributes to the “production of structural constraints on the actions of many and privileged opportunities for some” (Young, 2011, p.  96). The primary reason that the Liability Model does not apply to issues of structural injustice, according to Young, is that structures are (re) produced “by large numbers of people acting according to normally accepted rules and practices, and it is in the nature of such structural processes that their potentially harmful effects cannot be traced directly to any particular contributors to the process” (p. 100). As Young explains, responsibility is not bounded by any membership in a group or a nation but it is a responsibility across borders: “Being responsible in relation to structural injustice means that one has an obligation to join with others who share that responsibility in order to transform the structural processes to make their outcomes less unjust” (2011, p.  96). The Social Connection Model, then, is grounded “neither in shared citizenship nor in common humanity but instead in the fact that we are socially connected to others around the world through a set of causal relations and social structures that bring us into reciprocal obligations of justice with them” (Allen, 2008, p. 169). The Social Connection Model has a number of unique features that make it compelling for understanding responsibility for structural injustice in current conditions of coloniality and climate crisis. First, unlike the Liability Model which seeks to identify and isolate responsible parties, the Social Connection Model identifies how each and every one contributes to injustice because accepted and expected rules and norms are followed unreflectively and uncritically. Second, in contrast to the Liability Model which is primarily backward-looking and focuses on particular actions or events, the Social Connection Model is more forward-looking and focuses on ongoing processes that are likely to perpetuate harms. As Young explains: “The point is not to compensate for the past, but for all who

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contribute to processes producing unjust outcomes to work to transform those processes” (2011, p. 109). Finally, whereas the Liability Model isolates responsible individuals, under the Social Connection Model there is shared responsibility; the notion of shared responsibility is, according to Young, “a responsibility I personally bear, but I do not bear it alone” (2011, pp. 109–110). Applying these insights to current conditions of coloniality and ecological damage, we assert that the responsible individual has the capacity to act in ways that are capable of making the future less unjust—both morally and practically—because the Social Connection Model merges collective and individual responsibility in struggling for social change. As Young tells us, Social change requires first taking special efforts to make a break in the process, by engaging in public discussions that reflect on their workings, publicizing the harms that come to persons who are disadvantaged by them, and criticizing powerful agents who encourage the injustices or at least allow them to happen. (2011, p. 150)

These individuals must offer “vocal criticism, organized contestations, a measure of indignation, and concerted public pressure” (p. 151). This account of responsibility differs fundamentally from the Liability Model and thus it offers promising ways to understand how responsibility is understood and enacted in relation to conditions of coloniality and ecological damage The advantage of Young’s Social Connection Model is that it recognises asymmetries in power relations and how those are linked to our responsibility for structural injustice. At the same time, as Schiff (2008) points out, there are two challenges that Young does not acknowledge and constitute important problems, particularly in relation to conditions of coloniality and ecological damage. One concerns the ways in which individuals and groups come to acknowledge that certain norms and practices are problematic to begin with. If, as Young says, the issue is not about evaluating harm that deviates from the normal, then “How do we bring background conditions to the foreground and subject them to critique and transformation?” (Schiff, 2008, p. 102). A second problem, continues Schiff, concerns the practical ways with which we are to experience and acknowledge social connection. For example, what does it mean in practice to relate responsibly to distant Others (e.g. victims of coloniality or

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climate crisis in the Global South) whom we might never meet? Or what does it mean to relate responsibly to such Others when we do meet, but find ourselves overwhelmed by the number in which they arrive, as in the migration movement to Europe during the last few years? By posing these questions, we hope to further exemplify Young’s model and its implications in higher education. Young’s model offers a theoretical perspective that has the advantage of a political and forward-looking view of responsibility based on capacities rather than blame. In particular, Young contends that structural injustice exists when social processes put large categories of persons under systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop their capacities, at the same time as they enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising capacities… Structural injustice occurs as a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting… within given institutional rules and acceptable norms. (2007, p. 170)

Obligations of justice exist thus for all of us who—through our social positioning, relationships, daily practices and the assumptions on which our practices are based—are woven into structural processes of injustice. Increasingly, such processes extend across the political boundaries of nation state and citizenship. In view of such complexities, Fraser (2008) expresses concern that the notion of social connection to structural injustice lacks precision, thus creating difficulties in distinguishing those kinds of connection that give rise to moral responsibility from those that do not. We agree that work is required to establish more precisely how Young’s model might be applied in specific domains (e.g. higher education) to further the ends of social and ecological justice.

Responsibility as Political Beyond the immediate relational and intra-personal interpretations presented so far, Young’s (2006, 2007, 2011) social connection model of responsibility for justice adds a political layer of understanding higher education, which enables us to explore alternatives. As mentioned earlier, Iris Marion Young (2011) articulates a conception of collective responsibility that makes an important link between the individual and the social, that is, how the individual may be responsible for the harm committed by others. To do so, Young builds on Arendt’s notion of collective responsibility to

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construct her social connection model of responsibility. In contrast to backward-looking models of standard liability which trace a direct relationship between a person or a group’s action and the harm, Young seeks to create a forward-looking model in which responsibility is derived from our social connections with others, namely, from the ways we are interconnected with others in social and political processes. Young’s model is forward-­looking because it does not aim to go back to ‘isolate perpetrators’ but “brings background conditions under evaluation” (2011, p. 105). In this sense, responsibility is shared among all those who contribute by their actions or inactions to the perpetuation of the harm committed by others; thus, everyone is involved, directly or directly, having a political responsibility in evaluating and changing the conditions that sustain harm. Although Young criticises Arendt’s conditions for collective responsibility, which say that responsibility derives simply from common membership in a group, she grounds her social connection model in Arendt’s important distinction between guilt and responsibility (Piliero, 2017). This distinction, suggests Young (2011), is important for political theory and practice, and we would also argue, it is equally important for theory and practice in higher education. For this reason, we will turn to unpacking Arendt’s understanding of collective responsibility and then explore how Young builds on this understanding to justify her own notion of political responsibility. This analysis is crucial for higher education because it suggests that a reframing of collective guilt into shared responsibility is helpful for teaching students about each and everyone’s complicity in others’ suffering. Central to Arendt’s distinction between the individual character of guilt and collective political responsibility is her understanding of political responsibility as not a juridical notion but rather a belonging to and taking responsibility for the world. As she writes: “There is no such thing as collective guilt or collective innocence; guilt and innocence make sense only if applied to individuals” (Arendt, 2003, pp.  28–29). And she further elaborates: “As for the nation, it is obvious that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors” (ibid., 27–28). In other words, for Arendt responsibility is linked to membership of a political community. One can escape this political responsibility only by leaving the community:

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[N]o moral, individual and personal, standards of conduct will ever be able to excuse us from collective responsibility. This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community. (2003, p. 158)

Insofar, then, as political community has the character of fate (one can escape responsibility only by ceasing to be a citizen), we are, on Arendt’s account, collectively responsible for wrongdoing done in our name (Ashenden, 2014). For example, German citizens who lived through the Third Reich were politically responsible for the crimes committed by the Nazis. The language of guilt is insufficient to get a hold on the harm committed during the Nazi regime, according to Arendt, because to name “the criminality of the Nazi regime requires an account that recognizes the collective culpability of groups without rendering this in metaphysical terms” (Ashenden, 2014, p.  65). Furthermore, Arendt (1963/1977) is sceptical of Germans who express guilt because she sees this as an attempt to escape from the pressure of actual problems into what she calls a ‘cheap sentimentality’. Young (2011) adopts Arendt’s distinction of guilt which is personal from responsibility which is collective and political, but she finds unsatisfying the meaning Arendt gives to political responsibility based on membership alone. As she writes: “It is a mystification to say that people bear responsibility simply because they are members of a political community, and not because of anything at all that they have done or not done” (2011, p. 79). According to Young, Arendt leaves the meaning of collective political responsibility ‘too open’ and that “simple membership in a nation [or group] is too static a meaning” (ibid., p. 87). Instead, Young argues, “To the extent that we participate in the ongoing operations of a society in which injustice occurs, we ought to be held responsible” (ibid., p. 104). In other words, she theorises political responsibility by unpacking how people are engaged in public life that supports a regime which inflicts harm. In particular, Young (2011) distinguishes four relationships that persons or agents have to the Holocaust’s crimes against humanity based on her reading of Arendt’s (1963/1977) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil: (1) those who are directly guilty of crimes; (2)

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those who are not guilty of crimes, but who bear responsibility because they participated in the society and provided at least passive support that fuelled the crimes committed; (3) those who took action to distance themselves from the wrongs either through preventing some or withdrawing; and (4) those who publicly opposed or resisted the wrongful actions (Young, 2011, pp. 81–91). These distinctions, argues Young, make possible a clearer elaboration of the complex relationships agents have towards responsibility, because it goes beyond explanations based on membership alone: the first category concerns moral and legal matters; the second political; the third moral; and the fourth political. Young suggests that the distinctions of responsibility she finds in Eichmann in Jerusalem go against Arendt’s notion of collective responsibility because they indicate that responsibility can be distributed, namely, it is shared rather than collective (i.e. similar for everyone) (Piliero, 2017). Young (2004) argues that political responsibilities derive “not from the contingent fact of membership in common political institutions [but rather] from the social and economic structures in which they act and mutually affect one another” (376). In other words, it is social connections that form responsibilities, not mere belonging or membership to a group (e.g. a nation). Belonging or membership to a group is a passive and apolitical act; belonging or membership to a group becomes active and political through public acts or failure to take action. Without a sense of collective responsibility, as both Arendt and Young emphasise, unimaginable violence becomes possible; therefore, both Young and Arendt advocate that it is right to hold people responsible for taking action or failing to do so in order to prevent harm (Piliero, 2017). As Young puts it very succinctly: One has the responsibility always now, in relation to current events and in relation to their future consequences. We are in a condition of having such political responsibility, and the fact of having it implies an imperative to take political responsibility. If we see injustices or crimes being committed by the institutions of which we are a part, or believe that such crimes are being committed, then we have the responsibility to try to speak out against them with the intention of mobilizing others to oppose them, and to act together to transform the institutions to promote better ends. (2011, p. 92, original emphasis)

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Young’s notion of political responsibility relates to Arendt’s collective responsibility more than she thinks, argues Piliero (2017). Hence, the important point here is not to highlight Young’s criticism of Arendt, but rather to focus on how collective guilt can be reframed as shared responsibility. Reframing collective guilt as shared responsibility contributes to discussions in higher education on how to constantly rethink what it is we are attempting to do when we assume responsibility for addressing the consequences of coloniality and climate crisis on our planet.

Responsibility as Caring Ethical and Political Practice Thus far, we have discussed responsibility as relational and political in rather broad terms. Next we move to Joan Tronto’s political ethics of care—a perspective that adds another layer of complexity in thinking about responsibility as caring ethical practice. From a political ethics of care perspective, care is more than a disposition; it is a practice, thus moving away from the assumption of a pre-constituted subject or object, to a process as part of a relational ontology. Caring dispositions arise in the in-between of caring processes rather than starting with caring subjects (Tronto, 2013). According to Tronto, the first phase of care involves caring about or attentiveness, which has to do with cultivating the art for the capacity to notice needs. Once the need has been noticed and apprehended through attentiveness, it moves onto the second phase of care, which pertains to how to take action towards meeting the identified need. This second phase of care involves responsibility that something should be done about this need. Tronto (1993) sees responsibility as a central moral category in the ethics of care, but is also aware of it as a concept fraught with multiple assumptions about gender, race, class and familial status regarding responsibilities for care. Unlike other political theories which focus on responsibility as obligation, which comes from a sense of duty or formal/legal ties, from an ethics of care perspective, responsibility is about the willingness to act on the need in order to attempt to address it. Similar to Young’s social connection model, such a sensibility sees responsibility as the willingness to act in order to do something about identified needs in society, and includes the acknowledgement that we are implicated in social conditions and structural injustices (Tronto, 1993, 2013).

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For Tronto (2013), democratic politics is all about how caring and other responsibilities are allocated, and who is present in the allocation of those responsibilities. She also views it as essential that democratic societies consider how best to foster democratic citizenship by not relying solely on family members to meet caring responsibilities. This is an issue which is also dealt with at length by Nancy Fraser (1994) in her considerations of gender justice and the different models of dealing with dependency in society. Historically, caring responsibilities have been assigned to subjugated others—to women, the working class, slaves and migrant workers (Tronto, 2013; Fraser, 1994). As Tronto (2013) notes, Eva Kittay (1999) and Daniel Engster (2007) also provide compelling cases for the foregrounding of caring responsibilities for democratic citizenship to be made possible. Recognising relations between those who have needs and those who meet these needs, Tronto (2013) argues that the allocation of responsibilities in terms of this is key to political life. This is because the ways in which caring needs are met and the decisions about who is allocated to meet them has direct implications for other activities that are possible. In terms of caring responsibilities, neoliberal logics assign care as a personal or family responsibility and assiduously promote the reduction of care costs for the state, arguing for the importance of individual choice and preferences in relation to care. Neoliberalism sees individuals as consumers and workers. A feminist democratic political ethic of care, on the other hand, is vigilant about how some get to be given the responsibility to care, while others escape it through getting ‘passes’ from such responsibilities (Tronto, 2013, p. 33). Generally, this is allowed to happen because those people are deemed to be doing work for society that is much more important than caring work. There are a number of justifications for such ‘passes’ which will be dealt with in more depth in the following chapter on privileged irresponsibility. The US feminist philosopher Margaret Walker joins Young and Tronto in their calls to leverage responsibility for systemic oppression by moving people to a fuller understanding of how they may be related to it. Some years ago, Walker (2008) cautioned against a full investment in masculinist and transcendent principle ethics which she described as a theoretical-­ juridical model which is a “compact, propositionally codifiable, impersonally action-guiding code within an agent, or as a compact, law-like set of propositions that ‘explain’ the moral behaviour of a well-formed moral agent” (Walker, 2006, p. 8). In this way, the theoretical-juridical model

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universalises and homogenises ethics, assuming sameness across power differentials and contexts. As an antidote to the universalising and homogenising codes of principle ethics, Walker proposed that ethics actually emanate from practices of “interpersonal acknowledgement and constraint, from which people learn that they are responsible for things and to others” (Walker, 2008, p. 5). This is what Walker (2008) refers to as an “expressive-­ collaborative” view of ethics, which focuses on understandings of responsibility, as affected through social arrangements and social practices. As Walker (2002, p. 176) puts it: “These practices show who gets to do what to whom, who is required to do what for whom, who is our business at all, and to whom we might have to account for anything made the matter of these practices”. As scholars in higher education, we need to be responsible and accountable for example, towards the issues and the phenomena we are teaching about and inquiring into. The expressive-collaborative model that Walker (2002) proposes requires detailed and situated accounts of practices in order to establish how responsibility is assigned and negotiated. In terms of scholarship and pedagogy, this would include how and whether students, tutors and respondents are included in responsibilities and giving the opportunities to participate in how responsibilities are allocated. The emphasis on how such responsibilities are allocated is bound to surface aspects of privilege where certain people are able to free themselves from responsibilities and to assign responsibilities to others. For example, it is often those who are Black and/or women in academia who are relegated to the teaching only stream, while white males have traditionally occupied research chairs and positions where they manage to escape caring responsibilities involved in teaching. In general, political care ethicists such as Joan Tronto and Margaret Walker foreground the importance of ethics more on human-to-human relationships. Feminist posthumanist scholars such as Karen Barad, as will become apparent in the section below, extend care ethics to non-human and more than human relationships. How responsibilities are assigned and negotiated is particularly pertinent to those who are not in a position to defend their own interests like non-human animals and those humans that do not have access to public means to have their issues considered, or those in positions of dependence because they are caring for others or those whose needs require intensive forms of care. It is the performance of responsibility in multispecies and other relationships which is key here.

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Responsibility as Entanglement Karen Barad, a feminist quantum physicist and queer philosopher, also sees the concept responsibility to be at the very core of their2 work on agential realism. Agential realism is the philosophical framework based on a relational ontology, which Barad developed by diffractively reading Niels Bohr’s quantum physics through critical and poststructural theorists’ work, such as Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. Similar to Walker (2008), Barad (2007) equates responsibility with accountability—and relates this to what matters and what is excluded from mattering, in detailed and specific contexts. They emphasise that responsibility is not ours alone but is about entanglements with self and other— (and not necessarily a human other)—as they put it “[l]earning how to intra-act responsibly as part of the world means understanding that ‘we’ are not the only active beings—though this is never justification for deflecting our responsibility onto others” (2007, pp. 218–219). Accountability also requires attunement to power differentials. For example, they ask the pertinent question “How can I be responsible for that which I love?” (Juelskjær et al., 2021, p. 119) in referring to their disciplinary love for quantum physics and their political awareness of how quantum physics is and has been complicit in wreaking much damage through the military-­ industrial complex, colonialism, imperialism, classism and racism. For Barad, responsibility is not something one chooses, but it precedes intentionality of consciousness (2007, p. 396). This is because responsibility is about entangled relations rather than individuals. Barad’s neologism ‘intra-action’ and how it differs from interaction is useful in order to understand how responsibility is about entanglement. Interaction assumes the prior existence of determinately bounded and propertied entities, whether they be humans or non-humans, which come into contact with each other. Intra-action, on the other hand, indicates ontological inseparability of phenomena where relata exist as a result of relations—“relata-­ within-­ phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions” (Barad, 2007, p. 140; added emphasis). Intra-actions involve “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Barad, 2007, p. 33). From this perspective, agency is not an inherent characteristic of humans or non-human entities and only emerges through intra-actions. As Haraway (2008, p.  71) puts it, 2

 Karen Barad identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they/theirs.

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“responsibility is a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and objects come into being”. In this way, the importance of ‘[i]ntra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish’ is emphasised. This also means that justice is not something which can be ever achieved or achieved once and for all, but rather should be considered as a “justice-to-come” (Barad, 2010, 2012; Derrida, 1994)—where responsibility is an ongoing ethical practice, which is part of what Barad (2017c) calls the thick-now of the present, following Benjamin’s now-time (Jetztzeit), which incorporates multiple temporalities the future and the past in the present. Thom van Dooren’s (2019) work with crows speaks to the necessity of acknowledging entanglements with the inheritances of the past. He sees a responsible inheritance as similar to what Deborah Bird Rose (2004, p.  24) calls ‘recuperative work’, which requires that we engage with others—their histories, their relationships—to hold open a future that does not forget the past or attempt to reconstruct it but rather inherits it as a dynamic and changing obligation that must be lived up to for the good of all those who do or might inhabit it. (2019, p. 90)

This kind of recuperative work and responsible inheritance requires that we recognise our complicity and non-innocence. This entails an acknowledgement that both past and future are always already part of the thick now or present and consequently a necessity of taking responsibility for what we inherit from our entangled relationships. Barad says that one should “put oneself at risk … (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to come” (Barad, 2010, p.  264). Responsibility can better be thought of as a collective process where entangled phenomena play a part in the world’s differential becoming (Barad, 2007, p. 396). Barad is thus extremely clear in their writings that it is not possible to distance ourselves from the world of which we are a part. Consequently, ethics is not a response to an exteriorised other, but an acknowledgement of our complicity and accountability in the relationalities and entanglements that we are part of. They ask the pertinent question: What would it mean to acknowledge that the “able-bodied” depend on the “disabled” for their very existence? What would it mean to take on that

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responsibility? What would it mean to deny one’ s responsibility to the other once there is a recognition that one’s very embodiment is integrally entangled with the other? (Barad, 2007, p. 158)

This question is good to think-with in relation to both coloniality and ecological damage as it troubles the idea that the higher education sector could ever separate itself from such events and also alerts us to the importance of acknowledging that higher education is responsible for what it inherits from colonialism and how this inheritance impacts on the current damaged planet. It also alerts us to the fact that higher educators are dependent on students for their positions and are thus indebted to them. It also alerts us to the idea that identity is dispersed and diffracted through self and other and in this way complicity is shared (Barad, 2010). What is interesting in Barad’s work is their equation of objectivity with responsibility—they maintain that “objectivity and agency are bound up with issues of responsibility and accountability” (Barad, 2007, p.  184). They queer the conventional word objectivity, taken to mean in narrow scientific terms as the rational human subject’s inherent boundaries, standing in a relationship of exteriority from the world and ability not to contaminate the research environment. For Barad objectivity is a form of agential responsibility or accountability for the marks made on bodies, and the specific inclusions and exclusions which are made through agential cuts. The locus of responsibility and accountability is in the intra-active performative agency—the particular material arrangements of which we are a part (Rouse, 2004). As Barad (2007) puts it: We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because “we” are “chosen” by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe. Cuts are agentially enacted not by willful individuals but by the larger material arrangement of which “we” are a “part”. The cuts that we participate in enacting matter. (Barad, 2007, p. 178)

Haraway’s ideas about ethics (2008, 2016) are also premised on the belief that responsibility and accountability are never finished, but ongoing. Sometime before this, in her essay on Situated Knowledges, Haraway (1988) put forward the possibility of practising accountability and objectivity together. Another significant contribution that her work provides regarding responsibility is the assertion that it is never solely located in

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dualistic but also multidirectional relationships—which not only are human but can include other species, recognising as well the asymmetry of these relationships. This asymmetry needs to be borne in mind with regard to responsibility in higher education. Power differentials which are maintained through colonialism, capitalism, racism, ableism and which morph into different forms depending on the geopolitical context need to be attuned and attended to. Taking responsibility in higher education requires an acknowledgement of non-innocence in our intra-actions with others. Responsibility would benefit from what Isabelle Stengers refers to as cultivating the art of attention, which helps to trouble distinctions between inclusions and exclusions, inside/outside and what matters and does not matter. This sort of attention is not what is “defined as a priori worthy of attention, but as something that creates an obligation to imagine, to check, to envisage, consequences that bring into play connections between what we are in the habit of keeping separate” (Stengers, 2015, p. 65). Astrid Schrader, whose work is significantly influenced by Jacques Derrida, has a slightly different view of responsibility from Barad and Haraway. She does not equate responsibility with accountability as Barad and Haraway do. Schrader (2010) developed her notion of responsibility in experimental scientific practices because of the indeterminacies of the Pfiesteria’s (fish killers) beings and doings. Part of responsibility in experimentation is to be attentive to what enables the fish to be response-able— to be able to respond in experimental conditions. In an interview in the book Agential Realism conducted by Juelskjær et  al. (2021, p.  67), she says: I think my notion of responsibility deviates from accountability. I think this is one of the effects of thinking about time. What I’ve described as double entanglement between bodies and environment and past and futures can’t be resolved any more by giving a (full) account of the material circumstances. There’s no possible accounting that can resolve these entanglements; in a way then, an ontological indeterminacy becomes a “law of nature.” So I guess my notion of responsibility is more Derridian than the accounting that Barad had in mind…. [F]or Derrida, responsibility relates to a fundamental undecidability in the process of decision-making; it derives from the fundamental impossibility of deciding what a just or justifiable decision would be (Derrida, 1992). In my reading, in the Pfiesteria case, that becomes a consequence of adding another entanglement or indeterminacy, the one between past and future.

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Her notion of responsibility thus relates to Derrida’s notions of hauntology and its queer temporality, which foregrounds the importance of ontological indeterminacy, intra-action and entanglement (Juelskjær et al., 2021).

Conclusion This chapter has shown how feminist notions of responsibility have moved from Young’s social connection model, which although it brings in the structural, still locates responsibility in individual persons. Tronto’s responsibility moves on from this, locating it as emerging through the process or practice of caring efforts to meet needs, which largely remains in the human domain. Young’s notion of responsibility as located in expressive-collaborative relations is useful in that it moves away from the universalism and rule-bounded notions of principle ethics, which are the taken-for-granted go to for responsibility in human rights approaches or ethics committees in universities. One of the major issues of rights-based or theoretical-juridical code-like models of research surveillance as put into practice by research ethics committees at universities is their separation of ethics, politics, ontology and epistemology. Theorists like Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti and political ethics of care writers like Joan Tronto all see the political, ethical, ontological and ­epistemological as completely entangled—Barad thus calls her approach a politico-ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2017a, 2017b). From this perspective then, ethics can never exist on its own and pre-exists rather than coming into being after the entire research process. In this way, ­ethics can be seen as an embodied sensibility in ontological entanglements and lively relationalities and not what is right and wrong for the disembodied rational individual subject in the surveillance of traditional ethics committees. Barad’s intra-active responsibility moves beyond responsibility as an attribute of individual entities—either human or non-human into quantum entanglements where the dividing line between self and other, past, present and future, here and there, now and then is not fixed but part of the entangled relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. We are thus inextricably bound to the other, who is threaded through the self. In both Barad’s and Haraway’s notion of responsibility, difference or otherness is an important part of ethicality. Barad’s (2007, p. 396) responsibility is tied to action and to the notion that we are an entangled part of the

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world’s vitality and are ‘responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish’. Barad’s (2007) notion of responsibility is also related to concern and to considering what matters. Haraway, Schrader, van Dooren and Rose alert us to the responsibility of multispecies relations. Rather than seeing responsibility as a duty, obligation or as a set of formal rules, the ethics of care and posthuman perspectives see responsibility as a consequence of political, social and relational practices, which arise from our intra-actions with the world. Barad describes ethics as being about “responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 69). Our responsibilities are thus bound up in our relationalities with both human and non-human entities in our practice. Responsibility or accountability is about how entanglements are enacted—how and what we know, how and what we do in the context of what exists in the world of which we are part—in this case the higher education pedagogical space. As St. Pierre (2013, p. 655) notes, “if we see ourselves as always already entangled with, not separate from or superior to matter, our responsibility to being becomes more urgent and constant”. Both Haraway (2016) and Barad (2007) remind us that responsibility is ongoing and also never solely located inside disembodied subjects, in dualistic or human relationships but rather multidirectional relationships including other species and more than human partners. The asymmetrical power differentials implicit in relationships need to be borne in mind when thinking about responsibility and accountability, particularly with regard to pedagogical encounters in higher education. The recognition that difference is embodied and entangled rather than existing in abject others is important for designing ethical curricula that bring together differently positioned disciplines, institutions and the humans. Taking responsibility for dependence means a commitment to ourselves and others to avoid what has been referred to as ‘privileged irresponsibility’ where the services of another to meet one’s own needs are used but not acknowledged, which is the focus of our next chapter.

References Allen, A. (2008). Power and the politics of difference: Oppression, empowerment, and transnational justice. Hypatia, 23(1), 157–172. Arendt, H. (1963/1977). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin.

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Arendt, H. (2003). Responsibility and judgment. Schocken Books. Ashenden, S. (2014). The persistence of collective guilt. Economy and Society, 43(1), 55–82. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctv12101zq Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Barad, K. (2012). What is the measure of nothingness? Infinity, virtuality, justice: 100 notes, 100 thoughts. Documenta Series 099. Bilingual edition. Verlag: Hatje Cantz. Barad, K. (2017a). No small matter: Mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering. In A.  Tsing, H.  Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. G103– G120). University of Minnesota. Barad, K. (2017b). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92, 56–86. https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:92.05.2017 Barad, K. (2017c). What flashes up: Theological-political-scientific fragments. In C. Keller & M.-J. Rubenstein (Eds.), Entangled worlds: Religion, science and new materialisms (pp.  21–88). Fordham University Press. https://doi. org/10.2307/j.ctt1xhr73h.4 Derrida, J. (1994). The spectre of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning, and the new international. (P. Kamuf, Trans). Routledge. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. New Humanities Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/ohp. 11515701.0001.001 Engster, D. (2007). The heart of justice: Care ethics and political theory. Oxford University Press. Fraser, N. (1994). After the family wage: Gender equity and the welfare state. Political Theory, 22(4), 591–618. Fraser, N. (2008). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalising world. Polity Press. Freeman, S. (2007). Justice and the social contract. Oxford University Press. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14, 575–599. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178066 Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

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Juelskjær, M., Plauborg, H., & Adrian, S. W. (2021). Dialogues on agential realism: Engaging in worldings through research practice. Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780429056338 Kittay, E.  F. (1999). Love’s labor: Essays on women, equality and dependency. Routledge. Kymlicka, W. (2002). Contemporary political philosophy (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Piliero, E. (2017). Debating collective responsibility: Arendt and Young. Social Philosophy Today, 33, 175–186. Rawls, J. (1999). A theory of justice (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Rose, D.  B. (2004). Reports from a wild country: Ethics for decolonisation. University of New South Wales Press. Rouse, J. (2004). Barad’s natural feminism. Hypatia, 19(1), 141–161. Scheffler, S. (2001). Boundaries and allegiances: Problems of justice and responsibility in liberal thought. Oxford University Press. Schiff, J. (2008). Confronting political responsibility: The problem of acknowledgment. Hypatia, 23(3), 99–117. Schrader, A. (2010). Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science, 4(2), 275–306. St. Pierre, E. A. (2013). The posts continue: becoming. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 646–657. https://doi.org/10.108 0/09518398.2013.788754 Stengers, I. (2015). In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press. van Dooren, T. (2019). The wake of crows: Living and dying in shared worlds. Columbia University Press. Walker, M.  U. (2002). Morality in practice: A response to Claudia card and Lorraine code. Hypatia, 17(1), 174–182. Walker, M. U. (2006). Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. Cambridge University Press. Walker, M. U. (2008). Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. Second Edition. Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (2004). Responsibility and Global Labour Justice. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 12, 365–388. Young, I. M. (2006). Responsiblity and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model. Social Philosophy and Policy, 23(1), 102–30. Young, I. M. (2007). Global challenges: War, self-determination and responsibility for justice. Polity Press. Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Privileged Irresponsibility

Abstract  This chapter takes on Joan Tronto’s idea of privileged irresponsibility, which emanates from her work on caring responsibilities, and asks how it may be extended into other concerns such as coloniality and responsibility for the damaged planet. In particular, we examine Tronto’s understanding of how privileged irresponsibility allows privileged groups to excuse themselves from responsibility and Val Plumwood’s mechanisms of dualism which make it possible to maintain privileged irresponsibility. We then discuss how the notion of wilful ignorance plays a significant role in maintaining privileged irresponsibility. Understanding responsibility as relational and political, and hence privileged irresponsibility as also social and political, turns our attention to re-evaluating the ways we understand caring responsibilities for marginalised and disempowered groups of the society. Such a framework makes visible the way in which caring responsibilities—for humans and non-humans alike—are bound up with gender, race, class, ability, human-centredness and other forms of inequality and serve to reproduce privileged irresponsibility. Keywords  Privileged irresponsibility • Mechanisms of dualism • Wilful ignorance • Inequality • Humans • Non-humans

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_3

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Introduction In this chapter, we take on Joan Tronto’s idea of privileged irresponsibility, which emanates from her work on caring responsibilities and ask how it may be extended into other concerns such as coloniality and responsibility for the damaged planet. In particular, we examine Tronto’s understanding of how privileged irresponsibility allows privileged groups to excuse themselves from responsibility and Val Plumwood’s mechanisms of dualism which make it possible to maintain privileged irresponsibility. We then discuss how the notion of wilful ignorance plays a significant role in maintaining privileged irresponsibility. The chapter is structured in the following way: first, we discuss Tronto’s understanding of privileged irresponsibility and how this developed from 1990 to her more recent writings on the topic; then, we elaborate on Tronto’s phases and elements of a care ethic that have been alluded to in the previous chapter and discuss her ideas of how privileged groups are given ‘passes’ out of their caring responsibilities; next, we discuss the mechanisms which lead to and maintain privileged irresponsibility from Val Plumwood; finally, we argue that a foundational element of privileged irresponsibility that needs to be addressed is ‘wilful ignorance’.

Tronto’s Notion of Privileged Irresponsibility The concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ was first used by Tronto in 1990  in her address entitled Chilly Racists to the American Political Science Association. In this paper she wrote about the inability of white women to acknowledge or imagine the hostile climate that black women experienced in a US higher education classroom. This made it possible for white women to benefit from racism. In considering the power that racism confers on a majority group, she coined the phrase ‘privileged irresponsibility’ by which she meant the ways in which the majority group fail to acknowledge the exercise of power, thus maintaining their taken-for-­ granted positions of privilege. She associates privileged irresponsibility with institutionalised racism, which she distinguishes from personal racism. Personal racism obscures the social nature of racism by individualising and privatising racist acts. These acts are then seen as moral failings which induce guilt, thus making it difficult to recognise the ignorance necessary for privileged irresponsibility. She distinguishes between guilt, which she sees as psychological, and shame which she regards a social response. Guilt

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prevents whites from confronting the harm they inflict on others, because they are busier justifying their own behaviour and dealing with their own painful emotions regarding this than paying attention to the needs of others. Shame, on the other hand, is seen as a more productive emotion in that it is social rather than individual (Calhoun, 2004; Probyn, 2005; Probyn et al., 2019; Zembylas, 2019). The politics of shame refers to the recognition of both the collective responsibility through relationality (Young, 2011), and the potential for the undoing of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ through acknowledging historical and political circumstances. In Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Tronto (1993) further develops the notion of privileged irresponsibility. Here she starts to associate it with the ways in which caring responsibilities are unevenly balanced in society—she will continue with this in her next monograph on Democracy and Care (Tronto, 2013). In Moral Boundaries, she describes privileged irresponsibility in the following way: “Those who are relatively privileged are granted by that privilege the opportunity simply to ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face” (Tronto, 1993, pp.  120–121). In this definition, she is again foregrounding ignorance,1 which she sees as an act which prevents the needs of marginalised others either being acknowledged or noticed by the privileged. As Mary Swigonski (1996) has also stressed, privileges make people feel at home in the world and take for granted that they are the centre of their world where social, political, economic and other resources are at their disposal. Privilege has been defined by various authors as unearned social and structural advantages which benefit dominant groups or those who occupy positions of power in society, at the expense of marginalised groups. These advantages are generally taken for granted, invisible and normalised in society, and privilege is thus an unmarked status, rarely recognised, particularly by those who benefit from it. The advantages which the privileged have access to are actually those which should be enjoyed by all parties, as they would be in a just society, but which are restricted to those who are conferred with a dominant status in unequal societies (DiAngelo, 2018; McIntosh, 2019; Pease, 2021; Sholock, 2012; Sullivan, 2006; Wiggan, 2011). Those who occupy privileged positions are generally unaware of how these positions have influenced their lives (Hardy, 2001; 1  We discuss wilful ignorance and its relationship to privileged responsibility later on in the chapter.

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Swigonski, 1996; Schiele, 1996; Tronto, 1993). Privileged irresponsibility occurs, according to Tronto (1993) where the caring process and the phases of care are not seen holistically. Rather, responsibilities are divided into those who are responsible for providing resources for care and those who are responsible for doing the hands-on work of giving care. In these instances, privileged groups of people such as men or whites see themselves as only responsible for providing resources to address a problem and do not see the necessity of being involved in the actual hands-on process of giving care. In Moral Boundaries, as in her earlier work—Chilly Racists—on privileged irresponsibility, Tronto (1993, p. 121) again focuses on the example of racism. She emphasises how, in these circumstances, the advantageous position is maintained by ‘white skin privilege’, where those with these privileges do not notice the needs of blacks nor do they recognise their privilege in the first place. Through ignorance of their privileges, they remain oblivious to their own prejudice. Furthermore, they feel no need to take responsibility for their privileges or those who do not have privileges, thus perpetuating institutional racism. With privileged irresponsibility, only the needs of those who are privileged are regarded as legitimate and important, whereas the subjugated’s needs remain unrecognised and ignored (Hölscher et al., 2014). This means that the caring needs of the privileged are more likely to be adequately met than those who are marginalised or subjugated. Parochialism, which has been identified by critics of the ethic of care as a problematic consequence of care, encourages people to see their own needs or those who are close to them as more legitimate and important than those who are distant or unrelated (see Bozalek et al., 2015 for how such parochialism plays out in higher education institutions). Thus, parochialism can be seen as directly responsible for privileged irresponsibility—as Tronto puts it “a way to excuse the inattention of the privileged” (1993, p. 146). We will pick up on these forms of separation again in the section on Mechanisms of Dualism which uses Plumwood’s ideas to examine how privilege is initiated and then maintained.

Tronto’s Phases and Elements of a Care Ethic Tronto’s (1993) earlier work is important for its elaboration on four moral elements associated with the different phases of care—we have already looked at the second phase of caring for or taking responsibility to see that

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needs are met in the previous chapter. We provide a fuller description of these phases in this chapter, which can be used as a reference point throughout the book. These phases and moral elements of care have been used as an evaluative framework to make judgements about the adequacy of caring practices in social policy and other fields of practice (see Bozalek, 2011, 2014; Sevenhuijsen & Svab, 2003; Sevenhuijsen et  al., 2006; Tronto, 2010, 2012b, 2015, 2017, 2018; Zembylas & Bozalek, 2012). Tronto (2013) has added a fifth phase and element of care, which we include in our explication here of the phases and their relevance for education, especially at the higher education level. The phases and their corresponding moral elements are as follows: • Caring about—noticing people’s needs and recognising that there is a need for care to be addressed in the first place. The corresponding moral element is attentiveness. The antithesis of attentiveness would be ignorance which Tronto (1993) views as an active state, rather than a benign neglect, since the ignorance of needs serves to reproduce the status quo and maintain conditions of inequality (Tronto, 2012a). For example, in education, inequalities are maintained by ignoring the needs of differently positioned institutions and individuals (e.g. see Bozalek and Boughey (2020) for a discussion of how these forms of ignorance play out in the higher education sector in South Africa). • Caring for—once the need is recognised, then a person or group of people need to take responsibility to ensure that people’s needs are met and determine how to respond to the need. As we noted in the previous chapter on responsibility, this goes beyond obligation and duty, focusing on what is done or not done in a particular situation (Tronto, 1993). The corresponding moral element is responsibility. In her more recent work, Tronto (2012a, 2013) has given a great deal of attention to thinking about the importance of responsibility in relation to democracy and care. Other authors writing about care and social justice such as Margaret Urban Walker (1998, 2006), Iris Marion Young (2011) and Stephen Esquith (2010) have also written extensively about responsibility, and their ideas are also of relevance for education. For example, Monchinski (2010) provides a useful application of Walker’s and Tronto’s ideas in critical educational theory.

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• Care-giving—once a need has been recognised, someone has to do the actual hands-on work of caring for people. The corresponding moral element to care-giving is competence. As Tronto (2012a) points out, competence is not just a technical consideration, it is also a moral quality. Learned incompetence can be a way of avoiding menial caring tasks; for example, a man can claim incompetence at washing dishes so that it is easier for women in the household to do the task than to tolerate the incompetence. Or a male lecturer can claim or assume incompetence at dealing with feminised tasks such as engaging with student’s difficulties in higher education. Competence also assumes that the person has the knowledge and resources to do a good job. This is very important in the field of education, as it is usually those who are privileged in the first place that have access to resources, and have, for example, low staff student ratios, so that they can do their jobs competently, such as those who teach at historically white or advantaged universities (Bozalek & Boughey, 2020; Bozalek & McMillan, 2017) • Care-receiving—the ability to respond to the care that is given by the caregiver (response-ability—see the next chapter which is devoted to this). The moral element here is responsiveness. Responsiveness entails assessing whether care has been effective or not. In education, for example, it would be seeing how students respond to the educational environment and teaching they receive. Care, by its nature, is concerned with conditions of vulnerability and inequality and thus the need for care is a challenge to the notion that individuals are entirely autonomous and self-supporting (Bozalek et  al., 2014). Caring therefore entails continued responsiveness, as once a need is met the conditions are changed and there are always more needs which crop up along the way—learning is a never-ending process. • Caring with—this is the fifth phase of care which Tronto (2012a) has added. It refers to the reiteration of the process of care, where habits and patterns of care emerge through time and where the moral qualities of trust and solidarity are developed. Conditions of trust are created where reliance can be developed through the caring practices of others. The moral qualities of trust and solidarity are important in the field of education, as they can be used as points of departure for struggles against different practices of privileged irresponsibility (in Chap. 5, we specifically discuss solidarity as a response to privileged irresponsibility in higher education). Trust is always

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affected by asymmetrical power relations. Sevenhuijsen and Svab (2003, p. 186) are clear that trust requires some moral effort and that it is dependent not only on respectful attention to another’s vulnerability but also to an acknowledgement of one’s own—‘the other in oneself’ as they put it. Karen Barad’s (2007) diffractive approach based on quantum physics also alerts us to ‘the stranger within’ or the entanglement with self and other (see Chap. 2). The integrity of care involves the congruence of the whole care process in order for good care to take place. In other words, good care is dependent both upon the integration of all of the elements as a whole and the quality of each one of the elements themselves. Care involves more than good intentions. According to Tronto (1993, p.  136), “[i]t requires a deep and thoughtful knowledge of the situation and of all the actors’ situations, needs and competencies”. So in terms of addressing privileged irresponsibility, all these phases and moral elements are important, but the moral element of responsibility is what Tronto (2012a, 2012b, 2013) has turned most of her attention to in her considerations of democracy, citizenship and care. We particularly discuss the ways in which responsibility is avoided through privileged irresponsibility or what Tronto (2013) calls ‘passing’.

Tronto’s ‘Passes’ Out of Responsibility As noted in Chap. 2, both those involved in public care-giving and those involved in unpaid, often invisible care-giving in the household and within global neoliberal frameworks more broadly, are seldom recognised for their contributions to society (Bozalek, 2014; Razavi & Staab, 2012; Reddy et  al., 2014; Tronto, 2002a, 2017, 2018, 2021). Attention has been directed to the way in which normative gender roles and the gendered division of labour, intersecting with other forms of inequality markers such as class, race, ability, citizenship and age, serve in contemporary global capitalist contexts to bolster existing inequalities, within societies and in global contexts. Thus, migrant women workers from poorer countries fill the care gaps in wealthier countries (Bakan & Stasiulis 1997; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002; Fraser, 2017; Parreñas, 2001; Tronto, 2002a, 2013, 2017, 2021) and in many countries this continues to reproduce the ultra-exploitability of poor women while allowing middle-class parents to be released from their own care responsibilities to pursue more

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lucrative economic activities (Ally, 2009; Bozalek, 2010; Cock, 1980; Fish, 2006; Fraser, 2017; Jansen, 2019; King, 2007; Sevenhuijsen et al., 2006). Much of the work of care has historically, and in many contemporary contexts, been relegated to marginalised groups of people based on social markers of gender, race, class and so on (Fraser, 2017). Another way in which responsibility is avoided by powerful groups of people is by absenting themselves from discussions about responsibilities. The continued erasure of the hidden costs for certain groups of people who across global contexts carry the burden of care, often displacing responsibility from both the state and those privileged, reflects what Tronto means by ‘privileged irresponsibility’, where those receiving caring services for their needs do not acknowledge that they are dependent on these services in order to live well in the world. In her latest work, Tronto calls this getting a ‘pass’ out of responsibility, which is similar to what she means by privileged irresponsibility. Privileged irresponsibility arises from ‘the unbalanced nature of caring roles and duties in our society’ and means that “[t]hose who are relatively privileged are granted by that privilege simply to ignore certain forms of hardships that they do not face” Tronto (1993, p. 120). Another way of looking at this are situations where the services of the other are used to serve the privileged person’s needs while dependency is denied, and the contributions of the caregiver are trivialised and ignored (Bozalek, 2010). Responsibility, in the way that Tronto (1993) describes it in her second phase of care, requires that we actually acknowledge that there is a problem that must be taken care of. Privileged irresponsibility means that the needs of the other are ignored or denied. This is particularly so when it comes to the actual hands-on work of care-giving. Tronto (2012a) describes a number of ways in which privileged groups get to excuse themselves from responsibility: • Protection—this comes from a feudal view of men who see themselves as protectors of women (Young, 2002). Although the protector presents a more benign view of masculinity in protecting the vulnerable from harm, the logic of masculinist protectionism also presupposes feminine subordination and deference, as well as an inclination to service the protector’s needs. Policing can, according to Tronto (2002b, p. 141), be seen as a form of masculinist ‘non-­ caring’ care or a form a protection (Tronto, 2013). Protection can

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be seen as a form of care and is a prominent concept in social work (child protection is a large field of social work, which is generally seen as a feminised profession—see Bozalek and Hölscher (2022), for an analysis of child protection and the problems of associating with care). Tronto (2013) refers to more masculine forms of protection such as police work and maintains that by obfuscating the caring aspects of protection, one maintains the gendered hierarchy. People who are protecting others get “passes” (Tronto, 2013, p. 72) out of caring tasks because they are doing other more important work. Young (2005) alerts readers to problematic nature of the logic of masculinity—the role of the male head of the household as protector, and male leaders as protectors of the population. Rather than seeing this as benign, she shows how the male portrays himself as a protector who shields his family from risks and dangers. This results in subordination of those he protects, deference to his decision-­ making and uncritical obedience, thus greatly undermining the potential of democracy. In addition to this, as Young observes, “[i]t is only fitting that she should minister to his needs and obey his dictates” (2005, p. 18). Young (2005) applies this logic of masculinist protection or protection racket to the authoritarian state, which protects its citizens by expecting their patronage and subordination. • Production—the privileged groups are involved in the important work of acquiring economic resources and thus argue that they should be exempted from caring responsibilities. This is a more prevalent rationalisation in neoliberal times and is dependent on belief in the work ethic (Tronto, 2015). It is what Tronto (2012b) calls ‘wealth care’, which believes that growing wealth is the main purpose in society and hence should be its central activity which is rewarded. The work ethic is both individualistic and gendered and, as Tronto points out, fits in well with neoliberal ideology. The work ethic discounts such phenomena as context, emotions and relations of power, focusing only on equality of opportunity, and assumes that we are all starting off from an equal playing field. It insists that humans are autonomous beings who must work hard to get their own needs met and that one generally gets what one deserves—those who work hardest will get the most resources. The work ethic is dependent on the separation of public and private spheres, where citizen-workers are engaged in valued paid labour as part of the public sphere and care-giving, and non-citizens are involved in

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r­ eproduction to the private sphere, which is devalued. The workercitizens from a neoliberal standpoint should be as unencumbered as possible with caring burdens, and they receive a ‘pass’ from caring tasks because they are too busy doing the important work of paid labour—they are the people that count and their work is what counts (Tronto, 2021). The fact that autonomy requires a great deal of caring work to be done for an individual in this position tends not to be acknowledged. • Caring for my own—this constitutes a parochial version of care which justifies a lack of social responsibility by claiming that one’s close relatives need one’s attention first. As Tronto (2002a, p. 136) notes, privatisation or caring for one’s own “creates the conditions for an ‘epistemology of ignorance’ around the exploitation. In general, people do not like to view their activities as exploitative toward others. The only way, often, to engage in such exploitation, then is to remain wilfully ignorant of the damage one is doing to others”. Private care is similar to Tronto’s (1993) observation that parochialism encourages the view that caring for one’s own exempts one from caring for more distant others. Private care is bolstered by the separation of the public and private spheres where care is devalued. Those who are doing well competitively in society are actually dependent on others to meet their needs, but this is not acknowledged. In examining privatised care, Tronto (2013, pp. 22 and 105) uses Kari Wærness’ (1990) distinction between necessary care and personal service. Necessary care is care that one cannot give to oneself and personal service is care one could give to oneself but chooses not to. Privileged irresponsibility happens with personalised service rather than necessary care in that the recipient of care does not have to acknowledge the care they are getting—they simply presume an entitlement to this care, and it is not acknowledged or spoken about. Inequality is perpetuated by the recipients’ ignorance of these entitlements to care and the unbalanced nature of caring responsibilities that ensue from personalised service. Breaking these inequalities will require a sense of a collective social responsibility for care. Tronto (2013) reiterates the point that privileged irresponsibility allows those who benefit from being in superior positions in a hierarchical system to remain oblivious about the part they themselves play in maintaining the system. In a culture that emphasises caring for our own, husbands may continue to feel good about themselves that

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they are the primary breadwinners and their wives the primary caregivers, rich people will continue to feel virtuous about providing employment for domestic workers, even though it is an inadequate wage and barely enough for them to care for their own family member’s needs. • Personal responsibility—this assumes that we all have the same opportunities to take care or not, and if you don’t have these opportunities it is because you have not taken them up. Personal responsibility embodies the moral values of the neoliberal position as, for example, extolled by George Bush (Tronto, 2013). It holds that we are all personally responsible for the circumstances in which we find ourselves and that it is our own responsibility to care for our well-being and that of our children and our communities. Tronto (2013) sees the notion of personal responsibility as anti-democratic as it takes no account of the impact of historical inequalities and exclusions on public life. Neoliberal thinking requires one to take care of oneself and one’s own community without any regard to historical inequalities or exclusions. If one is not flourishing as a human being it is one’s own fault, as it means that one has not been able to meet one’s personal responsibility, without paying attention to the realities of people’s lives and the resources they require to flourish (Tronto, 2013, pp.  133–145). The feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (2002, p.  85), in her writings on the ecological crisis of reason in environmental culture, notes that “[b]ecause socially privileged groups can most easily purchase alternative private sources (clean water for example) they have the least interest in maintaining in generally good condition collective goods and services”. Privileged groups remain unaware of their own vulnerability as they have the means to buy services to extricate themselves from difficult circumstances. They attribute their success not to their historical advantage, but to their individual efforts to attain this success (Tronto, 2021). This insulates them from the realisation of their own vulnerabilities and of those who are marginalised and who cannot afford to buy themselves out of harmful circumstances. Because of their alienation and remoteness from ecological and other harms, privileged groups according to Plumwood (2002) are the worst groups to be allocated decision-making powers. • Charity—people claim that they are already fulfilling their caring responsibilities by giving to charities of their own choice, which is

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much better for them and if they were forced to join with others this would be a moral harm. Tronto (2013) reiterates the point that privileged irresponsibility allows those who benefit from being in superior positions in a hierarchical system to remain oblivious about the part they play themselves in maintaining the system. This ignorance or misperception of how caring is unbalanced in society will not change unless the whole nature of social caring and its centrality to our lives changes. Those who are privileged will continue to rationalise their position by maintaining that everybody is benefiting from it; wives benefit from their husbands being the primary breadwinners, domestic workers benefit from receiving a salary, no matter how paltry it is and so on. In educational settings, female teachers benefit from working with young children on the assumption that this is their vocation as women. Breaking these inequalities will require a sense of our collective social responsibility for care. In the next part of the chapter, we take a look at Plumwood’s analysis of the mechanisms of dualism, because it adds another layer of complexity in understanding how privileged irresponsibility is maintained.

Plumwood’s Mechanisms That Maintain Privileged Irresponsibility Val Plumwood’s (1993) analysis of the mechanisms of dualism explains how it is possible to maintain privileged irresponsibility regarding both human relationships and planetary conditions. Her work dovetails well with Joan Tronto’s in that it provides greater depth to the discussion regarding the ways in which privileged irresponsibility can be understood through various forms of justification. By dualism, Plumwood (1993, 2002) means something different from a dichotomy or a distinction, in that dualism implies a hierarchical relationship where it is not possible to have equality, but where “the culture, the values and the areas of life associated with the dualised other are systematically and pervasively constructed and depicted as inferior” (Plumwood, 1993, p. 47). In a similar vein, in order for privileged irresponsibility to occur, there must be a hierarchical relationship where one party is regarded as ‘less than’ and where there is no possibility of continuity between the two parties. Dualism, and by implication, privileged irresponsibility, is fed by processes of

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inferiorisation, interiorisation and othering. Inferiorisation is central to Val Plumwood’s (1993, 2002) definition of dualism, in which marginalised groups are constructed as mentally, physically or emotionally inferior to the accepted norm, and found to be ‘wanting’ or ‘less than’ this norm in various ways. Interiorisation happens when those who are subjugated accept, uncritically embrace and collude with the way that they have been negatively construed by those in privileged positions/dominant culture. Othering is also central to dualism. By ‘othering’, we mean the way in which those who are marginalised are illegitimated by being regarded as ‘them’ (objects) rather than ‘us’ (subjects), in other words, regarded as unimportant, different, marginal, strange or alien, and having negative qualities attributed to them (Plumwood, 1993). Thus, dualism is dependent on what Plumwood (2002, p. 101) calls a “hegemonic centrist conceptual structure”. Plumwood (1993, 2002) argues that central to the construction of dualism is the idea of two polar opposites, which are hierarchised. One pole is always inferior to the other and the other represents the desirable norm with no possibility of continuity or mutuality between these two sides (Plumwood 1993, 2002). Dualisms separate nature and culture, body and mind. They place matters of fact (science) on one side and matters of concern (humanities) on the other. Feminist new materialist and posthuman concepts such as natureculture, mindbody and transdisciplinarity indicate a continuum rather than a dichotomous Cartesian cut (Barad, 2007, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, 2019, 2022). Plumwood distinguishes five characteristics of dualisms which are discussed below—backgrounding, radical exclusion, incorporation, instrumentalism and homogenisation which may be used in conjunction with each other as mechanisms to reinforce superiority or inferiority. These characteristics are important in further understanding privileged irresponsibility because they actually show how dualisms contribute to the reproduction of privileged irresponsibility. 1. Backgrounding—this is the most similar to Tronto’s (1993) idea of privileged irresponsibility as it requires using the services of the other for the privileged group’s needs whilst simultaneously denying dependency, through trivialising and ignoring the caregiver’s contributions. These contributions would be considered “simply not ‘worth’ noticing” (Plumwood, 1993, p. 48)—the caregiver would thus be seen merely as a background to the care receivers’ foreground. Both Tronto (1993) and Plumwood (1993) surmise that

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denial of dependency happens because those in positions of privilege tend to fear, hate and deny their own dependency because, as Plumwood (1993, p. 49) notes “it subtly challenges his dominance”. 2. Radical exclusion—Here the objective is to create as much distance between those who are privileged and those who are marginalised, so that there is no possibility of identifying with the other through commonalities. In addition to this, the differences between the groups are maximised and essentialised. These perceptions are promoted through physical and geographical separation of groups, as were achieved through the Group Areas Act during the apartheid era in South Africa, which continues to impact on where people live and what resources they have access to. It also happens through institutionalising those considered to be different from what is regarded as the norm. Remoteness, or the sense of it, and irresponsibility are greatly worsened under the dominant global order. This allows privileged subjects to harbour illusions of ecological disembeddedness and invulnerability in relation to the damaged planet and species extinction (Plumwood, 2002; Rose, 2022). . Incorporation—this is where the inferior side of the dualism is 3 negated, being defined as what is missing or as inferior and the superior side as what is normal and desirable—the reference point (Braidotti, 2013, 2019, 2022). Because the other is perceived as having none of the desired qualities, there is no space for this other and no boundary for the self of the other who is then colonised and incorporated or assimilated into the self. As Plumwood (2002, p. 105) puts it, the “speech, voice, projects and religion of the colonised are acknowledged and recognised as valuable only to the extent that they are assimilated to that of the coloniser”. . Instrumentalism—this is where the other is only a means to an end 4 not an end in him or herself and where the value of the other is denied, and subsumed under that of the coloniser. For example, the extent to which indigenous populations were ecologically knowledgeable about the natural environment is denied by settlers and colonisers (Kimmerer, 2013; Simpson, 2017; Plumwood, 2002, pp. 105–106). The privileged group does not recognise the needs of those who are marginalised and doesn’t see these others as fellow kin. This forms a further justification for using the services of the other, whose role in life is only to be useful through serving the needs of the privileged group. The privileged group have no ­empathy

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for the other and feel free to treat the other as an object. However, in order to be regarded in a positive light one needs to be a virtuous good girl/mother/wife/servant/non-human animal, the identity “is constructed instrumentally” not morally as they fall outside of moral consideration (Plumwood, 1993, p. 53). . Homogenisation or stereotyping—this is where the differences of the 5 marginalised group are disregarded—they are not seen as unique but are stereotyped as all being the same. There is thus a disregard for difference in the marginalised group—they are not considered as individuals or in personal terms but just an interchangeable item or resource to be used—all women/blacks/migrants/homosexuals/ non-human animals are alike (Plumwood, 1993). The differences between privileged and marginalised groups are essentialised, and this justifies the different treatment metered out to these groups. Nature is also homogenised in the same vein, from an anthropocentric viewpoint (Plumwood, 2002). Human exceptionalism puts out the belief that humans are both at the centre of the world and distinct from all other processes, as well as living and non-living entities (Braidotti, 2019, 2022). All in all, these five characteristics show different mechanisms through which privileged irresponsibility is not only constructed but also reproduced to perpetuate differences between privileged and marginalised groups. The final section of the chapter below deals with wilful ignorance, another mechanism through which privileged irresponsibility is made possible and maintained.

Wilful Ignorance In general, epistemologies of ignorance have garnered increased interest in the social sciences and humanities in the last two decades, generating valuable insights into the various forms that ignorance can take, and especially how ignorance is produced and reproduced in social processes (Dilley & Kirsch, 2015; High et al., 2012; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). It is noteworthy that much work on epistemologies of ignorance explores issues such as: the conditions under which ignorance is constructed; the connection between privilege, responsibility and ignorance; the social processes and causes that practices of ignorance shape; and the social and political consequences of practices of ignorance.

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By raising these issues, scholars in the social sciences and humanities question the standard relationship between knowledge and ignorance, viewing ignorance not as a mere lack of knowledge, but rather as a substantive practice and part of a social process in which people actively produce and maintain ignorance; in other words, ignorance is seen as deeply implicated with race, class, gender, ideologies, social structures and climate change (Fraser, 2022; Mills, 2007; Schwartz, 2012). The belief that humans are distinct from non-human nature fuels the wilful ignorance which leads to privileged irresponsibility with regard to the damaged planet (Schlosberg, 2014). The global domination of colonialism and capitalism and its implicatedness in environmental damage is often erased by those writing about the Anthropocene (Ghosh, 2021; Malcolm, 2022). For example, nearly 99% of Australia’s native grasslands have disappeared since white settlers arrived there (Kassim, 2020). Epistemologies of ignorance are noteworthy for their feminist inspirations, invoked largely by feminist work on epistemology in the 1990s (e.g. Code, 2014; Haraway, 1991; Longino, 2002), exposing the extent to which knowing—and therefore, unknowing or ignorance—is a political activity rather than a ‘purely’ cognitive one. The recognition that ignorance is not simply a lack or absence of knowledge but rather a social, political and historical phenomenon has been forcefully put forward by Charles Mills in his well-known text The Racial Contract (1997), in which he offers an extensive analysis of white ignorance. In a frequently cited quote, Mills states: On matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. (1997, p. 18)

Mills emphasises that white ignorance is not accidental but rather a knowing ignorance of whiteness and its racist impacts. The epistemological dimensions of this ignorance involve “white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self-deception on matters related to race” (ibid., p. 19; original emphasis). According to Mills, whites are motivated to remain ignorant of the social injustices that produce and perpetuate white privilege; thus, white ignorance is much more devious and malignant than a

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product of a mere gap in knowledge. “Imagine”, Mills suggests, “an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—not at all defined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge” (2007, p.  13; original emphasis). Several important anthologies that explore epistemologies of ignorance in relation to race (e.g. Sullivan & Tuana, 2007) and other social, anthropological and political matters (e.g. Dilley & Kirsch, 2015; High et al., 2012; Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008) have appeared in recent years. Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007) examines “the complex phenomena of ignorance, which has as its aim identifying different forms of ignorance, examining how they are produced and sustained, and what role they play in knowledge practices” (p. 1). The purpose of Agnotology: The Making and Un-Making of Ignorance (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008) is “to promote the study of ignorance, by developing tools for understanding how and why various forms of knowing have ‘not come to be,’ or disappeared, or have been delayed or long neglected, for better or for worse, at various points in history” (p. vii). In The Anthropology of Ignorance (High et al., 2012), the editors write that the argument that underlies their anthology is that “anthropologists have too easily attributed to the people they study the same unambiguous desire for knowledge, and the same aversion to ignorance… with the result that situations in which ignorance is viewed neutrally—or even positively—have been misunderstood and overlooked” (p.  1). Also, in Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Re-production of Non-­ knowledge Dilley and Kirsch (2015) state that their volume wants to “tackle questions about the production and reproduction of ignorance within specific socio-cultural regimes of non-knowledge and power” (pp. 1–2). Although these anthologies represent only a small part of the growing literature being published on the phenomenon of ignorance and how it relates to knowledge and epistemology, they highlight some important themes informing our understandings about ignorance. This literature shows that the study of the epistemology of ignorance has become a social and political project in the academy, because ignorance is examined as a product of deliberate practices and a social accomplishment rather than a failure in knowledge acquisition (Michaels, 2008). The study of ignorance then reveals the multiple aspects of power relations involved in practices of

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(un)knowing and how those practices are linked to and often support phenomena such as racism, colonialism and climate crisis. In other words, the literature on epistemologies of ignorance has brought to the surface that there are vested interests in producing and maintaining ignorance, and thus the politics of such ignorance is an important element of social, political and ecological analyses of ignorance in different socio-ecological-­ political settings (Ghosh, 2021; Malcolm, 2022; Schwartz, 2012; Tuana, 2004, 2016). Wilful ignorance may also be seen as a refusal to acknowledge complicity—as in White complicity (Applebaum, 2010), implicatedness (Alaimo, 2017; Barad, 2007) or non-innocence (Haraway, 2016), which all require a recognition of one’s entanglements and as being part of the world in its relationality (Barad, 2007). As Kirsch and Dilley (2015) have pointed out, “much anthropological and sociological work has for a long time almost exclusively addressed genealogies of knowledge” (p. 22). However, as Foucault’s analyses of the reorganisation of knowledge and its interconnectedness with power show, “these processes are not just about ‘knowledge’ but also about ‘non-­ knowledge’” (ibid., pp.  22–23). Consequently, Kirsch and Dilley argue that for every ‘regime of knowledge’ there is simultaneously what they call a ‘regime of ignorance’, as certain types, modes and objects of knowing are legitimated, while others are delegitimised; these illegitimate forms determine (more or less implicitly) the space of non-knowing. A regime of ignorance then is defined as “the total set of relations that unite, in a given period or cultural context, the discursive practices and power relations that give rise to epistemological gaps and forms of unknowing that have generative social effects and consequences” (Kirsch & Dilley, 2015, p. 23). For example, several writers point out that ignorance is systematic and results from the denial of relationality and the deliberate motivation of some groups (e.g. whites or colonisers) to maintain their positions of power. Alcoff (2007), who discusses racial ignorance, argues that epistemologists have begun to view ignorance not simply as a matter of neglect in epistemic practices, but rather as “a substantive epistemic practice in itself” (p. 39) that is historically generated in relation to group identities and social structures. Similarly, Hoagland (2007) sees the denial of relationality as central to practices of ignorance; as a result, privilege (e.g. whiteness) becomes invisible to oneself because it is the norm. This ‘blindness’ is understood then as active techniques of denial that perpetuate white privilege. As Cohen (2001), whose work is followed by Mills (2007), points out:

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turning a blind eye—keeping facts conveniently out of sight, allow[s] something to be both known and not known. Such methods can be highly pathological but nevertheless ‘reflect a respect and fear of the truth and it is this fear which leads to the collusion and cover-up.’ Turning a blind eye is a social motion. We have access to enough facts about human suffering, but avoid drawing their disquieting implications. We cannot face them all the time. (2001, p. 34)

To emphasise the deliberate aspect of this phenomenon, Spelman (2007) talks about ‘wilful ignorance’—a phenomenon in which individuals are forced to manage their ignorance when faced with unpleasant truths they are unwilling to admit. As Spelman puts it, this form of ignorance is “an appalling achievement” that requires “grotesquely prodigious effort” (p.  120). Gilson also notes: “Wilful ignorance is actively cultivated, an ignorance that must be continually maintained and is maintained because it appears to be in one’s interests to remain ignorant” (2011, p. 313). Ignorance, then, has primarily an ontological status in which habit plays a central role (Sullivan, 2006). “Habits”, writes Sullivan, “are dispositions for transacting with the world, and they make up the very being that humans are” (p. 2). For instance, white privilege manifests itself as a habit in the world, whereby white people are habituated to “ontological expansiveness”, recognising only their own interests and ignoring the interests of others (p.  25). Habits and practices perpetuate ignorance by actively ignoring one’s complicity in difficult histories, “because to admit such complicity is to open oneself to features of one’s social world and one’s way of inhabiting that world that are discomfiting” (Gilson, 2011, p.  319; added emphasis). In a similar way, Stacey Alaimo (2017) draws attention to how, from a position of being outside and at a distance from that which one views, it is possible for the viewer to remain unaffected by ecological damage, where “poverty, drought, flooding, or displacement is obscured from sight and the viewer is not implicated, nor is someone potentially affected by climate disasters or slow violence” (p. 90). All in all, Mills and other writers who write about epistemologies of ignorance make an important contribution to showing how ignorance is actually based on a deeply seated epistemic resistance to know. Wilful ignorance, then, is a fundamental manifestation of privileged irresponsibility—a position of irresponsibility emerging from one’s privilege. Although there are different forms of ignorance, the persistence of this practice shows that ignorance is not always a mere neglect, not self-deception or

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simply an unwillingness to know, but rather a carefully sustained and managed form of not-knowing that is supported by an entire range of practices, habits and institutions based on privilege. It is an ignorance of one’s positionality and responsibility, constituting a social and political mechanism for safeguarding privilege and domination. This analytical angle on ignorance has important implications for the production of knowledge in higher education, because it highlights “that ‘non-knowledge’ is thought and experienced by people throughout the world to be more than just a residual category of ‘knowledge’ but something that has palpable effects in the world” (Kirsch & Dilley, 2015, p. 4).

Conclusion This chapter has shown that the idea of privileged irresponsibility is central to maintaining privilege. Privileged irresponsibility and the mechanisms through which it is consistently maintained and systematically reproduced (e.g. ‘passes’ out of responsibility, wilful ignorance, dualisms) are important to consider in examining how and why responsibility for coloniality and the damaged planet is so hard to undertake. This failure is clearly not individual but social, material-discursive and structural, and so the response-ability that is needed to address it, as discussed in the next chapter, is a capacity that is built at the social, material-discursive, ecological and political level to be effective. Otherwise the attempt to respond to coloniality, racism, climate crisis and other contemporary challenges becomes an ineffectual individual struggle. Understanding responsibility as relational and political, and hence privileged irresponsibility as also social and political, turns our attention to re-evaluating the ways we understand caring responsibilities for marginalised and disempowered groups of the society. Such a framework makes visible the way in which caring responsibilities—for humans and non-humans alike—are bound up with gender, race, class, ability, human-centredness and other forms of inequality and serve to reproduce privileged irresponsibility.

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Probyn, E., Bozalek, V., Shefer, T., & Carolissen, R. (2019). Productive faces of shame: An interview with Elspeth Probyn. Feminism & Psychology, 29(2), 322–334. Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and un-­ making of ignorance. Stanford University Press. Razavi, S., & Staab, S. (2012). Global variations in the political and social economy of care: Worlds apart. Routledge/UNRISD Research in Gender and Development. Reddy, V., Meyer, S., Shefer, T., & Meyiwa, T. (Eds.). (2014). Care in context: Transnational gender perspectives. HSRC. Rose, D. B. (2022). Shimmer: Flying-fox exuberance in worlds of peril. Edinburgh University Press. Schiele, J. H. (1996). Afrocentricity: An emerging paradigm in social work practice. Social Work, 41(3), 284–294. Schlosberg, D. (2014). Ecological justice for the anthropocene. In M. Wissenburg & D.  Schlosberg (Eds.), Political animals and animal politics (pp.  75–89). Palgrave Macmillan. Schwartz, S. A. (2012). Climate change and wilful ignorance. Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing, 8(5), 268–270. Sevenhuijsen, S., Bozalek, V., Gouws, A., & Minnaar-McDonald, M. (2006). South African social welfare policy: An analysis through the ethic of care. In M. Hamington & D. Miller (Eds.), Socializing care. Feminist ethics and public issues (pp. 69–88). Rowman and Littlefield. Sevenhuijsen, S., & Svab, A. (2003). Labyrinths of care: The relevance of the ethics of care perspective for social policy. Mirovni Institute. Sholock, A. (2012). Methodology of the privileged: White anti-racist feminism, systematic ignorance, and epistemic uncertainty. Hypatia, 27(4), 701–714. Simpson, L. B. (2017). As we have always done. University of Minnesota. Spelman, E. (2007). Managing ignorance. In S. Sullivan & N. Tuana (Eds.), Race and epistemologies of ignorance (pp.  119–131). State University of New York Press. Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indiana University Press. Sullivan, S., & Tuana, N. (Eds.). (2007). Race and epistemologies of ignorance. State University of New York Press. Swigonski, M.  E. (1996). Challenging privilege through Africentric social work practice. Social Work, 41(2), 153–161. Tronto, J. (2002a). Care as the work of citizens: A modest proposal. In M.  Friedman (Ed.), Women and citizenship (pp.  130–145). Oxford University Press. Tronto, J. (2012a). Caring democracy. Seminar presented at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa.

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Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2002b). The “nanny” question in feminism. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 17(2), 34–51. Tronto, J. C. (2010). Creating caring institutions: Politics, plurality, and purpose. Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2), 158–171. Tronto, J. C. (2012b). Democratic caring and global responsibilities for care. Paper presented at the conference Critical Care, Brighton, UK, September 13. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press. Tronto, J.  C. (2015). Who cares? How to reshape a democratic politics. Cornell University Press. Tronto, J.  C. (2017). There is an alternative: Homines curans and the limits of neoliberalism. International Journal of Care and Caring, 1(1), 27–43. Tronto, J. C. (2018). Higher education for citizens of caring democracies. South African Journal of Higher Education, 32(6), 6–18. Tronto, J. C. (2021). Ending wealth-care: The future of caring democracy. Keynote presentation at CARE: Challenges and solutions for a sustainable future. Centre for International Research on Care, The University of Sheffield. Tuana, N. (2004). Coming to understand: Orgasm and the epistemology of ignorance. Hypatia, 19(1), 194–232. Tuana, N. (2016). The speculum of ignorance: The women’s health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia, 21(3), 1–19. Wærness, K. (1990). Informal and formal care in old age: What is wrong with the ideology of ‘community care’ in Scandinavia today? In C.  Ungerson (Ed.), Gender and care: Work and welfare in Britain and Scandinavia (pp. 110–132). Harvester Wheatsheaf. Walker, M. U. (1998). Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics. Routledge. Walker, M. U. (2006). Moral repair: Reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. Cambridge University Press. Wiggan, G. (Ed.). (2011). Power, privilege and education: Pedagogy, curriculum and student outcomes. Nova Science Publications. Young, I. M. (2002). Inclusion and democracy. Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (2005). On female body experience. “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Oxford University Press. Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press. Zembylas, M. (2019). “Shame at being human” as a transformative political concept and praxis: Pedagogical possibilities. Feminism & Psychology, 29(2), 303–321. Zembylas, M., & Bozalek, V. (2012). The Council of Europe’s policy on intercultural dialogue and the ethics of care: Implications for citizenship education. In T.  Besley & M.  Peters (Eds.), Interculturalism, education and dialogue (pp. 178–191). Peter Lang.

CHAPTER 4

Response-Ability

Abstract  This chapter is concerned with the concept response-ability. The chapter focuses particularly, but not exclusively on feminist new materialist and posthuman understandings of the concept response-ability which emanate from a relational ontology. It also brings Joan Tronto’s notion of responsiveness and iterative responsibility into conversation with feminist new materialist and posthuman accounts of response-ability. Response-ability as a concept is seen as being potentiated by sensibilities and practices such as attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter, and iteration or ongoingness, which are discussed in detail. The chapter makes clear that response-ability is not only the preserve of humans, but that it involves other species and plant life too, which come into being through intra-active relationships. This begins with the relationship of co-constitution through co-responding, instead of starting from preformed subjects and objects. We end the chapter by suggesting that response-ability constitutes an ethical and political form of resistance against normative closures in everyday practices. This idea is particularly important for understanding coloniality and ecological damage in the second part of the book. Keywords  Response-ability • Feminist new materialism • Posthumanism • Relational ontology • Joan Tronto • Resistance

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_4

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Introduction Each grain of sand, each bit of soil is diffracted/entangled across spacetime. Responding  – being responsible/response-able  – to the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us, the places and times from which we came but never arrived and never leave is perhaps what re-­ turning is about. (Barad, 2014a, p. 184)

The notion of response-ability is one which has been written about by feminist new materialist scholars such as Karen Barad (2007, 2010), Donna Haraway (1992, 1997, 2016) and Vinciane Despret (2004, 2016), and by Joan Tronto (1993, 2013), in her political ethics of care. Response-­ ability, as the concept implies, refers to the ability or capacity to respond, but it is also referred to by these authors in the following ways: “inviting, welcoming, and enabling the response of the Other” (Barad interview in Kleinman, 2012, p. 81); Haraway’s (2016) “cultivating collective knowing and being” or “sympoiesis (making together)” (Davis & Turpin, 2015, p.  257); and “rendering each other capable” (Despret, 2004, 2016). Tronto’s fourth moral element of care, responsiveness, is similar to the notion of response-ability, as it entails the response to care from whatever or whoever has received the care. Response-ability rejects the metaphysics of individualism and is about collective knowing, being and doing. Barad (2017) sees response-ability as what matter is and what matter does in its touching: Matter is condensations of responses, of response-ability. Each bit of matter is constituted in response-ability; each is constituted as responsible for the other, as being in touch with the other. Matter is a matter of some intimacy, of cohabitating, of touching, of being in touch, of responses to yearnings. (p. 62)

Barad’s proposal that response-ability pertains to the material means that it is not just about ideas but rather about embodied entanglements of inseparability (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021). Yearning to be in touch as a felt sense of this entangled inseparability, and this does not only refer to human yearning. For example, Barad (2012) writes about lightning as a charged yearning for connection, where there is a “build up of energy, or rather, energy difference, or potential” (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021, p. 44). This yearning is activated when electrically charged stepped leaders gesture towards the earth, which responds with oppositely charged streamers (see

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Bozalek et  al., 2021 for more on collective responsiveness and virtual touching in Corona times). Theorising is also a form of crafting response-ability—of being responsive to and in touch with what is happening in the world (Barad, 2014b). Here again, it is not only humans who do theory—this is possible for all forms of life (Barad, 2007, 2014b). Knowing for Barad is not a matter of humanist intellect, but it is a “differential responsiveness … to what matters” (2007, p.  149). Knowing is thus about intra-acting, where even simple creatures, like brittlestars, engage in practices of knowing through differentially responding to matters of life and death. For example, when confronted by dangers, they engage in complex dynamic performances such as dropping their limbs, in order to escape predators. Differential responding is not only about knowledge-making, it is also about ethicality, which then is also not just the domain of the human, but the more-than-­ human as well. Response-ability is not about conscious intent but it comes from an ontological entanglement with the other. Academic reading and writing can also be regarded as forms of responsiveness or response-ability. Staying with a text and doing justice to it through a diffractive or care-ful reading is a response-able reading, as is the recognition that the text is creating a response and changing the reader, which changes each time the text is read. Astrid Schrader (2010) regards response-ability as a practice, which enables the objects or participants in the study to respond, whether it be in a laboratory or as part of ethnographic research in the field. She elaborates on the difficulties in coming to scientific conclusions about the behaviour of creatures such as dinoflagellates, which are aquatic algae thought to be fish killers. The problem arises if they are not seen as part of the intra-actions of larger phenomena, but are regarded as having predeterminate characteristics (e.g. as fish killers). Schrader’s situated research shows dinoflagellates only kill fish in particular contexts. Hence to discern response-ability, it is necessary to notice or cultivate attentiveness to the specificity of details in everyday practices. This chapter begins by focusing specifically on how to cultivate such sensibilities and practices as attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter, and iteration or ongoingness. We argue that it is these sensibilities and practices that enable the ability to respond in multispecies and multidirectional relationships which has become essential for living and dying well on a damaged planet. Along with the writers we think-with, we argue that response-ability is not only

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the preserve of humans, but that it involves other species and plant life too, which come into being through intra-active relationships. This begins with the relationship of co-constitution through co-responding, instead of starting from preformed subjects and objects. We end the chapter by suggesting that response-ability constitutes an ethical and political form of resistance against normative closures in everyday practices. This idea is particularly important for understanding coloniality and ecological damage in the second part of the book.

Attentiveness and Noticing Responsiveness, from a political ethics of care perspective, is the attentiveness to the type of response from the receiver of care and the discernment about whether the care given was adequate or sufficient or should be ongoing (Tronto, 1993, 2013). Attentiveness, then, means noticing, that is, paying attention to details. Attentiveness involves the cultivation of all types of noticing—visual, auditory, smell, touch, activating the “sensibility of all our embodied faculties” (Lenz Taguchi, 2012, p.  272). which leads to some form of response (Snaza, 2019). Focused forms of attentiveness are, for example, “[s]mell [that] draws us into the entangled threads of memory and possibility” (Tsing, 2015, p. 45), and listening for the response of the other with discernment, which, in turn, moves us to a response (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2014; Tsing, 2010). These forms of attention to the being/ becoming of the self and other, which include the human, non-human and more-than-human (Bussolini, 2013). In his study of crows in different contexts, Thom van Dooren (2019, p. 223) regards ethics as a form of response-ability—as a contextual process of “cultivating the capacity to see and to respond well” (our emphasis). Van Dooren (2019) argues that ethics is not only something one does but it is something one undergoes and is transformed by. Haraway uses tentacularity to figure response-ability in living and dying worlds which are useful, in that tentacles are entangling and also highly attentive to what is around them through smell, taste and touch. Doing science attentively and justly, for Astrid Schrader (2010) in her work on Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer) referred to previously, is where laboratory and other practices of response-ability enable the object of study to respond. Such just scientific practice requires attentiveness—she calls it the “enabling of responsiveness within experimental relatings” in

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“maintaining Pfiesteria’s ability to respond to their experimental probings, that is their response-ability” (Schrader, 2010, p. 277). Attentiveness is a crucial aspect of scientific practice in order for responsiveness to be enabled and to bring into view the indeterminacy of Pfiesteria’s beings and doings. Being attentive means being present in the immediacy and intensities of the moment, opening oneself up to the myriad of ways of affecting and being affected. Attentiveness is also about immersing oneself to the forces which are happening in the event. Manning and Massumi describe it in this way: A dance of attention is the holding pattern of an immersive, almost unidentifiable set of forces that modulate the event in the immediateness of its coming to expression. Attention not to, but with and toward, in and around. (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 4)

Manning and Massumi’s portrayal of attention is interesting as it becomes more than a linear process—but immersive, multidirectional and multi-focused. In her book When Species Meet, Donna Haraway writes about respect in a way which incorporates response, attentiveness and becoming-with in multispecies encounters: To hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet. To knot companion and species together in encounter, in regard and respect, is to enter the world of becoming with, where who and what are is precisely what is at stake. (Haraway, 2008, p. 19)

This notion of respect brings out the complexity of response-ability through reciprocal attentiveness, where knots of animals and people are meeting and becoming-with each other in their situated histories. According to Despret’s cosmo-ecology, a true politics of attention comes from noticing other living beings and other ways of being and becoming in the world (Despret & Meuret, 2016). Deborah Bird Rose (2017, 2022), for example, writes about the loving attentiveness certain humans show in their care-giving practices towards flying foxes who are badly injured or have been orphaned. She says: “we see beautiful modes of careful attention, and we see them as relational responses that are lured out of

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us through encounters with others and that enable us to participate in the shimmer of life” (Rose, 2017, p. G58). Attentiveness to historicity and to breaking out of binarised ways of thinking entails interrupting Cartesian cuts that separate concepts such as material discursive, here there, now then, nature culture. This requires the careful tracing of entanglements of material and historical conditions and paying attention to how to open these up to reworking, in order to reconfigure whatever is under scrutiny. For Barad (2007, p. x), justice, which entails “acknowledgment, recognition, and loving attention, is not a state that can be achieved once and for all” [our emphases]. Justice is therefore an ongoing ethical practice which is never achieved at any particular point, and is thus referred to as a justice-to-come.

Politeness and Curiosity Vinciane Despret, in her work with animals, cultivates the ability to respond politely to whatever the animal is interested in and in this way she “trains her whole being, not just her imagination, ‘to go visiting1’” and to “to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond” (Haraway, 2015, p. 5). Here politeness is not about manners, but about ethology or “manners of being, and manners of being affected” (Despret & Meuret, 2016, p. 30). It is about what scientists and researchers actually do in the field, to understand what animals or research respondents are capable of. This involves experimental ways of being in the world where one is never sure what may transpire. Doing her polite forms of research with curiosity is a consequence of Despret’s refusal to assume that the animals she encounters have pre-­ existing attributes or characteristics that simply play out during encounters, but instead taking the risk of anticipating that something unexpected and surprising might happen. This calls for a response-ability—which requires an openness with no presuppositions about what is known about the other, being surprised and intrigued through unanticipated encounters. Here, the something-happening in the event comes into being through the intra-action, where questions are asked which are interesting for the animals and unanticipated responses are received.

1  This is a reference to Hannah Arendt’s and Virginia Woolf’s injunction to let the imagination go visiting in order to develop an enlarged mentality.

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Unlike conventional research, which uses reductive and standardised tools which may have little interest for the animals, Despret’s research takes as its point of departure a genuine interest in the animal and a curiosity about what may transpire in the response (Despret, 2015). “Visiting is a subject-and-object making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster” (Haraway, 2015, p. 6). In intra-actions, there are no pre-existing subjects and objects—they come into being through relationships. In recognising the willingness of research participants to work with those who are asking things of them, Despret emphasises the reciprocity called from researchers to themselves inhabit politeness or courtesy and show an interest and a curiosity in what matters to the other. Finding an interest in the other means not assuming one knows this in advance from the authority of the discipline, but rather, being open to the multiplicity of ways of knowing the world, in a mode of collective experimentation. Research works well where the researched are able to shape what matters to them. Karen Barad, in her interviews with Adam Kleinman (2012) and Daniela Gandorfer (Barad & Gandorfer, 2021), is also interested in how response-ability is an important aspect of asking questions: The range of possible responses that are invited, the kinds of responses that are disinvited or ruled out as fitting responses, are constrained and conditioned by the questions asked, where questions are not simply innocent queries, but particular practices of engagement. (Kleinman, 2012, p. 81)

In Tsing et al. (2017) edited collection on Ghosts and Monsters in the Arts of living on a damaged planet, Haraway neatly summarises her conception of a feminist ethic of response-ability: A feminist ethic of ‘response-ability’ … in which questions of species difference are always conjugated with attentions to affect, entanglement, and rupture; an affective ecology in which creativity and curiosity characterize the experimental forms of life of all kinds of practitioners, not only the humans. (Haraway, 2017, p. M.32)

This highlights the importance of not making the mistake of attributing politeness and curiosity to humans, but to all as entangled kin, who are differentiated in the process of becoming-with each other. Experimentation

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is also central to the practice of politeness and curiosity in response-able research.

Openness to Encounter Subjectivity happens in relation with the other. We are all co-constituted in response-ability—for Haraway (2016) it is about becoming-with—we become-with each other or not at all; for Barad (2014b) it is becoming together/apart in the indeterminacies of non/being (no/thingness), that gifts us with the ability to reach out and to enable response, to welcome the stranger within. These conceptions lead us to understand how the taken-for-granted notion of the possessive individual, with its determined boundaries and pre-existing characteristics and properties, must be eschewed, as this is the wrong starting point. Ethics is an embodied, preconscious sensibility which comes from receptivity and openness to a proximal other, of touching the other, which calls us to respond to the other (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008; Levinas, 1998; Rose, 2022; Young, 2011). This is not something which is chosen, but which happens through “having-the-other-in-one’s-skin” (Barad, 2007, p. 392). Levinas refers to the ‘face’ of the other, but as Barad (2007) and Rose (2022) point out, that face is not limited to a human other. Rose notes that non-human creatures, even rivers and other elements of the biosphere, can be understood to have a face in Levinasian terms, and thus to “call us into ethics” (2022, p. 65). In her book Shimmer, Rose (2022) writes about how some humans and also some flying foxes care for injured flying foxes, It is not only that a human addresses the subjectivity of another being, but also that sometimes the other responds. From subject to subject, back and forth, across creatures who give and receive, a truly intersubjective dynamic encounter arises. (Rose, 2022, p. 67)

This example of flying foxes alerts us to the responses which this form of thick care evokes in the other—both a giving and a receiving (Tronto’s (1993, 2013) third and fourth phases of care). Care giving and receiving is also not a dualistic relationship. All bodies come to matter and matter is always already entangled with the Other in a posthumanist ethics of worlding (Barad, 2007).

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Brian Massumi (2014), in his book What animals teach us about politics, focuses on animal play, which he sees as revolving around difference, or as he puts it “reciprocal imbrication of differences” (Massumi, 2014, p. 4). When animals ‘play’ fight, they are gesturing at combat, bringing in “acts belonging to different arenas together in their difference” (p. 4). We would not know the difference on the basis of definitions, but on the enactment or the practice. Haraway notes how animal play involves taking chances with each other. It is joyful and propositional, risky, making “possible futures out of joyful but dangerous presents” and “new abstractions, new lures” (Davis & Turpin, 2015, p. 260). Humans can also enact this paradoxical vital gesture when they engage in expressive play, which is improvisational and inventive. Barad alerts us to the importance of being responsive to indeterminacy and to open ourselves the ghosts of the past—to condensations of thick ‘now-time’ where past, present and future are entangled: To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, [to] … be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to-come. (Barad, 2010, p. 264)

Our openness to being exposed to and in touch with the other, whether a human or more-than-human (including ghostly) other, is important for response-ability to happen—as Anna Tsing (2015) puts it: “response always takes us somewhere new; we are not quite ourselves anymore—or at least the selves that we were, but rather ourselves in encounter with another” (p. 46). The realisation that the other always already resides in the self—there is no inside or outside, makes it more possible to be open to the process of response-ability. Barad (2014b) diffractively reads the work of Alphonso Lingis with Emmanuel Levinas through the following passage from Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg’s book The Murmuring Deep to show how the encounter or being in relationship rests on elemental otherness—other-than-human forces which are communicated to each other, sustaining our contacts with each other: We do not relate to the light, the earth, the air, and the warmth only with our individual sensibility and sensuality. We communicate to one another the light our eyes know, the ground that sustains our postures, and the air

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and the warmth with which we speak. We face one another as condensations of earth, light, air, and warmth, and orient one another in the elemental in a primary communication. (Zornberg as cited in Barad, 2014b, p. 163)

Stacey Alaimo calls such a sensibility of encountering the other ‘trans-­ corporeality’ (Alaimo, 2016, p. 77; Alaimo, 2018, p. 435), where humans or any other creatures can never be regarded as separate from the dynamic material world, but which crosses through them, transforming composing, recomposing and decomposing them. This sort of sensibility, of being in touch with the transversality of more-than-human forces, rather than seeing the human as bounded, disembodied and at a remove from the world, is a necessity for ways of dealing with wilful ignorance, as discussed in the previous chapter regarding privileged irresponsibility. An antidote to wilful ignorance would be an ongoing practice of being open to the specificity of material entanglements by using our ability to respond, and to enable response in the other to bring about new possibilities for living and dying well on our damaged planet—as Donna Haraway puts it—“…learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-­ ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016, p. 2).

Rendering Each Other Capable Rendering each other capable involves creating experiments with rather than on animals or research participants—making or becoming-with each other, learning from the event without using pre-existing scripts. The participants in such experiments are in dynamic relationships of attunement, where they are adding to each other’s ongoing competencies. All parties are changed in the process and each partner “even comes to exist in a different mode than before the meeting” (Despret, 2015, p. 156). However, the partners do not pre-exist the meeting, but come into being and are rendered capable through the meeting, developing a shared co-created embodied communication with each other. Identities are co-constituted and transformed through rendering each other capable, in an ecological relationality. Rendering each other capable is similar to Tronto’s third phase of care—caregiving—with its related moral element of competency, but in this case it is not only the caregiver’s competency that is focused on, but also that of the care receiver’s, as they are doing with rather than for, enlarging each other’s worlds. Response-ability is located in

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multidirectional rather than dualistic relationships (Haraway, 2016). Encounters are not pre-arranged, but happen through straying off beaten paths where unexpected meetings happen which enhance the thinking, being and doing of all parties. This is what Haraway (2015, p. 8) refers to as cultivating response-ability. Response-ability then is not just about living as well as possible, it is about dying as well as possible too, as the pandemic brought home to humans when dying, who lived and who died, and attending to those who were dying became a fraught issue, as the dying were not able to be with their close kin and did not receive responses which are normally available in such circumstances.

Iterative Response-Ability Joan Tronto’s fifth phase of care, caring with, which she added to her original four phases of caring about, caring for, caregiving, care receiving, requires that response-ability is iterative—it is never finished or achieved, but is ongoing. The moral elements that are associated with this fifth phase are trust and solidarity. We become with others or in relation to others and in the process create trust, learning to hold possibilities open and discovering what we might become capable of together (Despret & Meuret, 2016). Trust refers to the duration of care and what Haraway (2016) has referred to as learning how to “stay with the trouble” (p.  2). Caring through and across time and space is where the ethical dimensions of trust and solidarity are made possible through the establishment of reiterative patterns of care. Trust assumes an attunement with the other and a willingness to be vulnerable, with the expectation that the other will perform actions on a continuing basis which are important for flourishing to happen. Creating a trusting relationship through allowing the other to respond is crucial for parties to differentially become-with each other. Here ‘differential’ is not about separateness but about being together/apart in an agential cut (Barad, 2007). Despret and Meuret (2016, p.  32) explain how shepherds in France compose with space, place and time—it is “an ongoing process. There is a flock, a collective memory, because a human became shepherd in relation to these ewes and because the ewes had become a character in relation with that shepherd”. Haraway calls this form of cultivating response-ability ongoingness, by which she means “nurturing, or inventing, or discovering, or somehow cobbling together ways for living and dying well with each other in the tissues of an earth whose very habitability is threatened” (2015, p.  9). The process of earthly

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companionship and knowing how to inhabit a multispecies world requires patience for long or iterative experimentations and an ability to “stay with the trouble” on our damaged planet (Haraway, 2016). Such experiments would hold open possibilities for response, of affecting and being affected, in order to discern what we might be capable of together.

Response-Ability as a Form of Resistance to Closures The sensibilities that we have discussed so far—namely, attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter, and iteration—as manifestations of response-ability also function as a form of resistance against normative closures in everyday practices. In the last part of this chapter, then, we want to suggest that understanding response-­ ability as a form of resistance creates openings for seeing resistance—for example, to coloniality or ecological damage, to mention our foci in the second part of the book—as a form of ethical and political responsibility. Resistance is a central concept of the social sciences—a concept that has been widely used in feminist, cultural, poststructural, postcolonial and critical theories (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). Despite its extensive use, however, there is considerable disagreement and ambiguity as to what exactly it denotes (Hollander & Einwohner, 2004, p. 549). In their frequently cited review of the origin and status of the concept in the social sciences, Hollander and Einwohner point out that resistance has been used in diverse, imprecise and contradictory ways. In their summary of the sociological uses of resistance, Hollander and Einwohner identify two ‘core elements’ of resistance: the first element is a sense of action, namely, the idea that resistance includes some kind of activity; the second element is a sense of opposition, that is, how activity occurs in opposition to someone or something. Hollander and Einwohner develop a typology of resistance by which one can decide if the act is recognised as resistance and if the act is intended as resistance, by target, agent and observer. By calling attention to these elements of resistance, Hollander and Einwohner illustrate the complexity and ambivalence involved in deciding what constitutes resistance. In general, they conclude that even while resisting power, individuals or groups may simultaneously support the structures of domination, because acts of opposition do not automatically ‘translate’ into subversion of domination. Although Hollander and Einwohner’s (2004) attempt to conceptualise resistance has been highly praised and frequently cited in the literature

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over the years, there have also been critiques. One of the major critiques raised has to do with how Hollander and Einwohner’s typology limits the scope of resistance. This critique, which concerns Hollander and Einwohner’s typology, suggests that this typology “contradicts their simultaneous emphasis of resistance as a complex and ongoing process of social construction. Furthermore, their typology privileges consciousness as ‘recognition’ by or ‘intention’ of actors, which dramatically limits their scope” (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016, p. 418; see also, Kärki, 2018). In other words, resistance is somewhat psychologised in the sense that a focus on consciousness and intention limits the scope of what can be defined as resistance within processes of negotiation between different agents of resistance and agents of power. Here we build on these debates to suggest two ideas. First, we reframe resistance as a ‘practice’ and second, we theorise response-ability as a practice that constitutes a form of resistance. To do this, we use the lenses offered by Michel Foucault and James Scott in their theorisations of resistance, and argue that the use of Foucauldian and Scottian insights enable us to do two things: first, to expand the scope of resistance and look at it as an everyday practice that is historically entangled with power relations, rather than limiting it within the frame of consciousness (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016); and, second, to understand response-ability as a form of resistance against normative closures in everyday practices. Our point of departure is Foucault’s famous observation that “[w]here there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (1990, p.  95). Foucault’s observation is useful in helping us look at the act of resistance as such: “there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt…Instead there is a plurality of resistances…and the points, knots, or focuses of resistance are spread over time and space at varying densities” (ibid.). This means that one should look at the mundane, ordinary, everyday or ‘routine’ forms of resistance that are less visible and often unplanned, rather than merely limiting their attention to the obvious, collective resistance such as strikes, sabotage or sit-downs (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). For example, such routine or mundane acts of resistance in teaching and learning situations may emerge in small decisions, when educators design a classroom activity that challenges a normative expectation by the system or when students express their disagreements with the celebration of colonial symbols and histories.

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To capture resistance as acts against normative expectations, Foucault (2009) used the term counter-conduct which refers to forms of resistance or refusal whose aim is to invoke new practices that escape normalised practices of conduct. As Odysseos (2016) observes, counter-conducts do not always take the form of rejection or refusal of conduct, but rather they are manifested “as a questioning, reworking and elaboration of pastoral power”, while at other times, they may reinforce, redirect or improve the mechanism of conducting power (pp.  183–184). Foucault suggests the notion of counter-conduct “to conceptualize the multiple dimensions and inter-relationalities of both practices of resistance and practices of governance” (Rossdale & Stierl, 2016, p. 159). In other words, Foucault’s concern is the practices—rather than the ideologies—through which counter-conducts are variably expressed. It is precisely this interest in practices that makes Davidson (2011) suggest that Foucault’s notion of counter-­conduct adds an explicitly ethical and political component to the notion of resistance. Conceptualising resistance through counter-conduct shifts attention to the everyday practices through which the subject resists power configurations at the micro-level, that’s why resistance often becomes ‘invisible’ (Odysseos, 2016). Scott (1985, 1989, 1990) offers perhaps the best-known anthropological and historical analyses of everyday and invisible forms of resistance, and may be seen as developing many insights afforded by Foucault on the ‘micro-physics’ of power and resistance (Anderson, 2008). Scott’s work turns our attention to everyday forms of resistance—‘weapons of the weak’, as he calls them in his anthropological study of peasants in a Malay village—to describe routine resistance, that is, acts that are often invisible such as false-compliance, feigned ignorance and gossip. These are usually forms of material and physical resistance that are used to resist power and domination exercised by the ‘powerful’, but they are an integral part of the behaviour of the relatively powerless groups (Scott, 1989). As he explains: The various practices that might plausibly be claimed to represent everyday forms of resistance are legion. To an outside observer it might appear quixotic to assemble them under the same heading. Their variety is nothing more than a mirror image of the variety of forms of resistance devised to thwart that appropriation. (Scott, 1989, p. 37)

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Hence, Scott (1990) argues that everyday forms of resistance should not be seen as unimportant ways which divert energy from ‘real’ resistance, but rather as legitimate behind-the-scenes attempts to enact a low-­ profile resistance that involves the use of tactics “born of a prudent awareness of the balance of power” (p. 183). In this sense, resistance never ends, but rather is an ongoing process and practice; therefore, it would be problematic to limit resistance to consciousness or ideology. According to Hollander and Einwohner (2004), Scott was the first to recognise that powerless people have the resources and opportunities to resist openly. In particular, Scott has emphasised that everyday resistance can be the chosen method of resistance in situations in which open defiance might be impossible or entails dangers. Through a careful study of their understanding of everyday dealings, oppressed people can make their methods of resistance more effective. It is in their responsiveness—their ability to respond to such everyday dealings that such forms of resistance occur as a response to these everyday dealings. All in all, Scott’s conceptualisation of everyday resistance widens the scope of how resistance is perceived in the social sciences by demonstrating how hidden, unarticulated and unofficial forms of resistance as forms of response-ability matter, both ethically and politically, in resisting power and domination exercised by the ‘powerful’. Clearly, there are important differences between Foucault’s and Scott’s accounts. Whereas Scott looks mostly into individually deliberated acts, which are often masked as something else and are enacted in low-profile ways, Foucault looks more into institutionalised and officially legitimated practices of response (e.g. asceticism) to define his notion of resistance as counter-conduct. Also, from a Foucauldian perspective, power and resistance are involved in a complex interplay with one another, emphasising a more ongoing and open process in which there is always “a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible inventions” (Foucault, 1982, p. 220), whereas in Scott’s model certain acts of resistance are viewed as mechanical responses to certain forms of domination (Johansson & Vinthagen, 2016). Despite these differences though, Scott’s work on everyday resistance aligns well with Foucault’s concept of resistance as counter-conduct in the sense that both highlight the ‘invisible’ acts of resistance that are usually overlooked by the ‘powerful’. More importantly, both accounts challenge the tendency towards psychologising the concept of resistance by asserting that what is at stake in resistance is not so much a matter of subordinates’

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‘intention’ in acts of resistance. Rather what seems to be at stake is the actual manifestation of resistance in/through specific everyday actions and practices that are not merely “susceptible to the influences of the fleeting psychological statuses of particular individuals” (Ho, 2011, p. 48), but are shaped by different configurations of power relations. With the help of Foucault’s and Scott’s lenses, then, this chapter highlights the idea that response-able acts may form resistances towards systems of domination (e.g. neoliberalism, coloniality, ecological damage) using different techniques of power in everyday life and ‘invisibly’ challenge modes/forms of power such as surveillance, normalisation and regulation. Foucault’s and Scott’s lenses enable us to further enhance theorisations of response-ability as a form of resistance in new ways. Hence, the sensibilities we have discussed throughout this chapter— namely, attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter, and iteration—can work out forms of resistance against tendencies to provide closures in everyday practices.

Conclusion This chapter looked at different ways that response-ability might be cultivated or enabled as a form of resistance through attentiveness and noticing, politeness and curiosity, openness to encounter, rendering each other capable and iterative response-ability. It foregrounds the idea that all phenomena are co-constituted in response-ability—as being in touch with the other. Since the other is in, rather than outside the self, each individual can be seen as a multitude of possibilities for response. We cannot anticipate in advance what might be produced or come to be generated for the world in its dynamic and lively indeterminacy. Response-ability involves tracing and following entanglements across times and spaces, in order to be responsive to the uncanny hauntological condensations of past, present and future. This chapter emphasises how crucial cultivating the ability to respond and to allow the other to respond is for collective flourishing, in terms of living and dying well on our damaged planet. In this way all become transformed and modified—including elemental, more than human forces. Response-ability also reminds us that we cannot anticipate what might happen. Response-ability also assists us to work for some worlds rather than others, as we will discuss in Chap. 6. The next two chapters of the book deal with coloniality and ecological catastrophe and how higher education is taking up these issues and how it

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may engage further with them. The chapters make use of the concepts developed in the Chaps. 2, 3 and 4—responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability, as a way of reviewing how coloniality and the ecological catastrophe have both affected higher education and how higher education has responded to these critical issues in complex political, economic and ecological relations.

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Davidson, A. (2011). In praise of counter-conduct. History of the Human Sciences, 24(4), 25–41. Davis, H., & Turpin, E. (Eds.). (2015). Art in the anthropocene. Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. Open Humanities Press. Despret, V. (2004). The body we care for: Figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 111–134. Despret, V. (2015). We are not so stupid … animals neither. Angelaki, 20(2), 153–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1039855 Despret, V. (2016). What would animals say if we asked the right questions? University of Minnesota Press. Despret, V., & Meuret, M. (2016). Cosmoecological sheep and the arts of living on a damaged planet. Environmental Humanities, 8(1), 24–36. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-­3527704 Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2014). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Open Humanities Press. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp.  208–226). The University of Chicago Press. Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality, vol. 1: An introduction. Penguin. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–1978 (Vol. 4). Palgrave Macmillan. Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inapproporiate/d others. In l. Grossberg, C. nelson, & P. A. Treichler (eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). New York, NY: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.Femaleman_Meets_ Oncomous: Feminism and Technoscience. Routledge. Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota. Haraway, D. (2015). A curious practice. Angelaki, 20(2), 5–14. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (2017). Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art science activisms for staying with the trouble. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. M25–M50). University of Minnesota Press. Ho, W.-C. (2011). James Scott’s resistance/hegemony paradigm reconsidered. Acta Politica, 46(1), 43–59. Hollander, J.  A., & Einwohner, R.  L. (2004). Conceptualizing resistance. Sociological Forum, 19(4), 533–554. Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2016). Dimensions of everyday resistance: An analytical framework. Critical Sociology, 42(3), 417–435. Kärki, K. (2018). Not doings as resistance. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 48(4), 364–384.

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Kleinman, A. (2012). Intra-actions. Mousse, 34, 76–81. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2012). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data. Feminist Theory, 13(3), 265–281. Levinas, E. (1998). Otherwise than being, or, beyond essence. (A.  Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minnesota University Press. Massumi, B. (2014). What animals teach us about politics. Duke University Press. Odysseos, L. (2016). Human rights, self-formation and resistance against disposability: Grounding Foucault’s ‘theorizing practice’ of counter-conduct in Bhopal. Global Society, 30(2), 179–200. Rose, D. B. (2017). Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed. In A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts (pp. G51–G64). University of Minnesota Press. Rose, D. B. (2022). Shimmer: Flying-fox exuberance in worlds of peril. Edinburgh University Press. Rossdale, C., & Stierl, M. (2016). Everything is dangerous: Conduct and counter-­ conduct in the Occupy movement. Global Society, 30(2), 157–178. Schrader, A. (2010). Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer): Phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology. Social Studies of Science, 4(2), 275–306. Scott, J. (1985). Weapons of the weak—Everyday forms of peasant resistance. Yale University Press. Scott, J. (1989). Everyday forms of resistance. Copenhagen Papers, 4, 33–62. Scott, J. (1990). Domination and the arts of resistance. Yale University Press. Snaza, N. (2019). Animate literacies: Literature, affect and the politics of humanism. Duke University Press. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press. Tsing, A. (2010). Arts of inclusion, or how to love a mushroom. Manoa, 22(2), 191–203. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41479491 Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. Swanson, H. Gan, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.) (2017). Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. University of Minnesota. van Dooren, T. (2019). The wake of crows: Living and dying in shared worlds. Columbia University Press. Young, I. M. (2011). Responsibility for justice. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Coloniality

Abstract  This chapter considers an aspect that is usually neglected in discussions of coloniality, namely, the ‘coloniality of the affects’, and explains how affective decolonisation is a crucial dimension of efforts to dismantle privileged irresponsibility. The chapter also focuses on the notions of complicity and non-innocence, as discussed in the first part of the book, to illustrate some of the tensions and possibilities emerging in affective decolonisation efforts in higher education. In particular, the chapter analyses how nurturing ‘decolonising solidarity’ in higher education responds to the challenge of working in solidarity with others across multiple communities and socio-political settings; we argue that decolonising solidarity entails possibilities that reframe the affective practices and habits emerging from and associated with privileged irresponsibility in knowledge production, research and pedagogies. To show an example of this reframing at the level of pedagogy, the chapter discusses what a public pedagogy of decolonising solidarity might look like at a university in the Global North. We propose that the deployment of such a pedagogy pays explicit attention to affective decolonisation and works to create teaching and learning environments in higher education that challenge affective practices of privileged irresponsibility.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_5

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Keywords  Coloniality • Affective decolonisation • Complicity • Non-innocence • Decolonising solidarity • Higher education

Introduction European colonialism is the process of forced rule that took place in countries across Africa, Asia, the Americas and Oceania from the late fifteenth century onward and was characterised by appropriation of land and resources, dispossession and enslavement. The dire effects of European colonialism, including the extinction of indigenous populations in many of these places, endure into the present, hence the use of the term coloniality (Grosfoguel, 2007; Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2007; Quijano, 2000). As Maldonado-Torres (2007, p. 243) explains: Coloniality is different from colonialism. Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus, coloniality survives colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of peoples, in aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. In a way, as modern subjects we breathe coloniality all the time and every day.

Similarly, Grosfoguel (2007, p. 219) writes that coloniality refers to “the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern/ colonial capitalist/patriarchal world-system”. In this sense, then, coloniality is understood as an enduring process of established patterns of power between coloniser and colonised—what Quijano (2000) refers to as “the coloniality of power”—that not only shapes our understanding of culture, labour, relationality and knowledge production, but also reproduces hierarchies of race, gender and geopolitics, which were used as tools of colonial control and expansion (Maldonado-Torres, 2007).

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Decolonisation is a contested term that entails at least two dimensions, according to Mohamed et al. (2020): first, a territorial decolonisation that is achieved by the dissolution of colonial relations and the transfer of power to indigenous local governments; and, second, a structural decolonisation that seeks to dismantle colonial relations of power and Eurocentric forms of knowledge, values and norms that are present in all dimensions of social and political life and are responsible for reproducing racial, gender and geopolitical hierarchies in the contemporary world from economics and language, to culture and thinking. As coloniality is entangled with capitalism and patriarchy, decoloniality is the undoing of the “colonial matrix of power” (Quijano, 2007)—the epistemic, cultural, political and economic discourses and practices through which colonial, capitalist and patriarchal oppression is constituted and reproduced (Grosfoguel, 2007). In the context of higher education, this means, according to Mbembe (2016), the need to decolonise all features of the modern university from curricula and practices to policies, organisational structures and technologies. Consequently, decolonial theories and decolonial thinking more generally consist of various critiques of colonialism and coloniality—the coloniality of power and knowledge, land appropriation, racial, gender and geopolitical hierarchies, and claims of universality rooted in Eurocentric knowledge and values (e.g. Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Mignolo, 2011; Quijano, 2007; Wynter, 2003). These manifestations of colonialism and coloniality are essentially expressions of privileged irresponsibility, because race, power, gender, knowledge and so on are used by privileged groups to excuse themselves from responsibility to change the conditions of oppression and injustice against marginalised groups (see Povinelli, 2021). This chapter, then, employs the intersecting lenses of privileged irresponsibility and decolonial theory to make a critical intervention into the terrain of ethics and politics in higher education. We argue that a combined framework of ideas that pay attention to how coloniality and privileged irresponsibility are entangled brings a sharper social justice and decolonising edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education. In particular, we focus on two general contours which constitute the framework that is proposed here for an ethics of response-ability in higher education: first, decoloniality as a strategy for the radical transformation of privileged irresponsibility into both responsibility and response-ability, as this is manifested in different ways in the policies and politics of higher

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education institutions; and, second, decoloniality as a practice of articulating new affective, political and material infrastructures that replace the ethics and rationality of privileged irresponsibility in the various practices of higher education institutions (e.g. curricula, evaluation methods, pedagogical practices etc.). These two contours—namely, decoloniality as both strategy and practice—will provide the theoretical grounding for decolonial strategies that challenge the ethics of privileged irresponsibility and nurture response-ability in higher education in pedagogical practices and policies. We briefly discuss these two contours. First, decoloniality as a strategy emphasises the idea that decolonisation is a situated critical response to the particular form of colonial power at work within a specific context such as a higher education institution. Drawing from Scott’s (1999, 2004) notions of “strategic criticism” and “strategic critical praxis”, we understand strategy here as the demands that criticism (towards coloniality, in this case) “has to meet, what its tasks are supposed to be, what target ought to make a claim on its attention, and what questions ought to constitute its apparatus and animate its preoccupations” (Scott, 1999, p. 5). For example, calls for decolonising the curriculum will require different strategies at a South American university compared to an African university (and even within South Africa and South America depending on the institutions), while both of these places emphasise the need to radically transform the privileged irresponsibility emerging from Eurocentric order of knowledge. The challenge for decoloniality, therefore, is how to be strategic in “delinking” knowledge production from the colonial matrix of power in ways that legitimate different ways of knowing and being in the world (Mignolo, 2007). As Mignolo explains: Decoloniality, then, means working toward a vision of human life that is not dependent upon or structured by the forced imposition of one ideal of society over those that differ, which is what modernity/coloniality does and, hence, where decolonization of the mind should begin. The struggle is for changing the terms in addition to the content of the conversation. (2007, p. 459, added emphasis)

“Changing the terms”, to use Mignolo’s expression, requires from decolonial approaches to be strategic and find the most effective ways of not only exposing privileged irresponsibility as manifested in the racial and other hierarchies of Western knowledge traditions, but also offering viable

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alternatives that advocate for pluriversalism, that is, recognising that there are values emerging from dialogue across multiple places, cultures and visions about the world (Dussel, 2013; Mignolo, 2011; Santos, 2014; see also Chap. 6). Decolonial approaches are strategic, then, when they challenge manifestations of privileged irresponsibility at all levels of higher education from the choice and delivery of teaching and evaluation methods to university leadership, the curriculum, research priorities and funding and so on. Second, decoloniality as a practice entails taking action that decentres whiteness, privileged irresponsibility and racial oppression in everyday life—for example, the everyday life of a university. Decoloniality as a practice draws attention to the everyday operations of whiteness, privileged irresponsibility and racial oppression through actions that engage in “epistemic disobedience” by denouncing the unilateralism of the universal (Mignolo, 2011). For example, this means inventing decolonising practices that not only recognise the harms (epistemic, social, affective, political etc.) caused by privileged irresponsibility as manifested in the everyday functions of a university, but also take specific actions that respond to these harms—for example, by cultivating networks of solidarity. The proposed conceptual framing of decolonial thinking in terms of strategy and practice theorises coloniality more broadly as a complex set of affective, political and material assemblages of privileged irresponsibility that first need to be identified in order to begin their dismantling. Dismantling privilege irresponsibility, then, has to happen at several levels simultaneously–affective, political and material. The proposed conceptual framing of decolonial thinking offers a new epistemology, ontology and ethics that rejects the domination of Western rationality and dualism as those are manifested through various expressions of privileged irresponsibility in higher education. The chapter is structured as follows. First, we consider an aspect that is usually neglected in discussions of coloniality, namely, the ‘coloniality of the affects’, and explain how affective decolonisation is a crucial dimension of efforts to dismantle privileged irresponsibility. Second, we focus on the notions of complicity and non-innocence, as discussed in the first part of the book, to illustrate some of the tensions and possibilities emerging in affective decolonisation efforts in higher education. Third, we analyse how nurturing ‘decolonising solidarity’ in higher education responds to the challenge of working in solidarity with others across multiple communities and socio-political settings; we argue that decolonising solidarity entails

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possibilities that reframe the affective practices and habits emerging from and associated with privileged irresponsibility in knowledge production, research and pedagogies. To show an example of this reframing at the level of pedagogy, the last part of the chapter imagines what a public pedagogy of decolonising solidarity might look like at a university in the Global North. We propose that the deployment of such a pedagogy pays explicit attention to affective decolonisation and works to create teaching and learning environments in higher education that challenge affective practices of privileged irresponsibility.

The Coloniality of Affects and Affective Decolonisation One of the best-known and most widely cited examples of colonial affect is Fanon’s (1967) description of the encounter between the colonised Black body and a young white child on the train. “Look, a Negro!” It was an external stimulus that flicked over me as I passed by. I made a tight smile. “Look, a Negro!” It was true. It amused me. “Look, a Negro!” The circle was drawing a bit tighter. I made no secret of my amusement. “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. (pp. 111–112)

In this remarkable example, Fanon shows the powerful impact of sociohistorical forces on bodily experiences, reinforcing not only how ‘we’ feel but also what ‘we’ are capable of feeling and with whom (Guilmette, 2019; Hantel, 2018; Wynter, 2003; Wynter & McKittrick, 2015). Affectivity is central to Fanon’s account of the Black colonised consciousness as well as his theories of decolonisation (Khanna, 2020). Importantly, Fanon rejects the idea of human affects as a biological phenomenon, but rather argues that affectivity operates within histories of racism, colonialism and other fears of bodily difference (Guilmette, 2020). Drawing on Fanon, Ahmed (2004, 2006) also argues that what bodies tend to do are the effects of history; there are no universal human affects and emotions, because affects and bodies are always situated in specific sociohistorical settings. Ahmed writes of the ways in which the circulation

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of affective value shapes bodies and worlds, demonstrating how affects and emotions construct racial recognition. In this sense, affects are inscribed within particular relations of power, that is, the violence of colonial power and difference. For example, the emotional expressions of those perceived as different from the white coloniser’s have historically been deemed as reactive, impulsive and exaggerated, often in racialised ways (Guilmette, 2019; Million, 2008, 2009; Palmer, 2017). Ngai’s (2005) landmark analysis of ‘animatedness’ shows how racialised representations of emotional expression are rooted in normalised views and values of the society about Black bodies. Similarly, Schuller (2018), who extends Ngai’s analysis, shows that there is a racialised affective code that is laid upon Black bodies—a code that is already bound up in networks of colonial power, energising or draining subjects with an affective dynamic vibrating between them that binds them. This is why making visible the coloniality of affects and its various manifestations is crucial in finding ways to interrupt their social and political reproduction—and along with it, the reproduction of privileged irresponsibility. In particular, Khanna (2020) argues, “The visceral offers a materialist analytic that recasts the scene of racialized affect through the energetic dynamic that vibrates between two bodies, animating and activating racialized repositories in automated response” (p. 7). It is within such racialised affective scenes that we need to reimagine the potentialities of decolonisation, according to Khanna. However, as she rightly points out: “The visceral logics orchestrating this scene cannot, however, simply be disrupted or overturned by a psychic intervention, even as they are intimately linked with a condition of consciousness” (Khanna, 2020, p. 7). In other words, interventions that simply aim at a ‘change of heart’ without accompanied by specific actions or structural changes will not take the process of decolonisation very far. For example, adding in the curriculum sentimental narratives about the sufferings of racialised others, in response to the empathy-desiring norms of the hegemonic ethnoclass (e.g. the norms of white privilege), is not only inadequate to break up the racialised affective norms of privileged irresponsibility, but also provides the false illusion that it has an important effect, when in reality it is a tokenistic intervention (Patel, 2022; Zembylas, 2018a, 2018b, 2021a, 2021b). We argue, then, that a crucial move to enrich existing decolonisation efforts is recognising how affective repositories of colonised and racialised experiences–such as privileged irresponsibility–continue to be reproduced in everyday encounters (Khanna, 2020). What an affective dimension of

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decolonisation adds to the broad political project of decolonisation is enabling scholars and educators to ask two fundamental questions about how we may identify and interrupt the incessant reproduction of privileged irresponsibility through the coloniality of affects. In the context of higher education, these questions may be formulated as follows: How do universities in the Global North (re)inscribe ‘structures of feeling’ that reiterate normative processes of privileged irresponsibility through their everyday mechanisms of teaching, learning, evaluation and management (see Mbembe, 2016)? In which ways can contemporary universities engage in the affective decolonisation of privileged groups’ complicity and non-innocence? These rather broad questions provide scholars in higher education a guide of working towards a decolonial praxis that recognises the fundamental impact of affective decolonisation in efforts to challenge manifestations of privileged irresponsibility. Attempts by researchers, educators, students and administrators and leaders in higher education institutions to address these questions will create openings for raising ‘difficult’ issues such as how privileged academics and students may be incentivised to engage in decolonial dialogue and praxis or how it is possible for university administrators and leaders to disinvest affective energies in privileged irresponsibility, but rather build university systems that are equitable, response-able and decolonising. Beginning from exposing the complicity and non-innocence of privileged groups, as we argue in the next part of the chapter, might be a good point of departure for challenging privileged irresponsibility. At the same time, it is important to emphasise that a crucial goal is to create new ways of feeling as a site of radical transformation that reimagines a different human collective, one that undermines normative affective ways of colonisation and racialisation (Khanna, 2020). This vision, writes Khanna, “could be a site of radical relearning. These emotive and embodied repositories of the body must be the sites of revolution precisely because empire has already monopolized them” (p. 13). For this reason, argues Indigenous scholar Dian Million, it is important to include in decolonisation efforts the lived experiences of Indigenous (and other disempowered) peoples, “rich with emotional knowledges”, namely, “what pain and grief and hope meant or mean now in our pasts and future” (2009, p. 54). It is exactly this emotional knowledge, she points out, that fuels the real discursive, affective and eventually political shift around the painful histories and stories of Indigenous populations.

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To break the monopoly of the empire and the privileged irresponsibility of those who benefit from coloniality, then, there has to be significant work done at various levels, including the level of affective decolonisation—not only to recognise the ways in which affect serves as a ‘racialising technology’ in everyday encounters (Ngai, 2005), but also to invent new affective practices through which privileged irresponsibility can be disrupted. For example, in the context of higher education institutions this means investing in affective practices—for example, in the context of teaching, learning, administration and management—that work towards a decolonial praxis and politics within the university such as practices of advocacy, accountability and political commitment to Indigenous, Black and marginalised people’s struggles. Consequently, the notion of affective decolonisation invokes an attempt to think affect and decolonisation in tandem and to make visible the visceral logics of decolonisation that undergird everyday encounters in the context of higher education. The point here, as Palmer (2017) points out, is not to bemoan the lack of recognition of Black affectivity, but rather to argue what it would mean to ‘feel new feelings’, to borrow Khanna’s (2020) expression, that create new affective relationalities, that is, relationships that undo the emotive lessons in the habits of mind and memory that continue to sustain the legacies of empire in various sites, including higher education. Affective decolonisation “opens up a new pathway for thinking through the critical problematics of decolonization by exploring a dense and knotted set of relations between embodied experience and political feeling” (Khanna, 2020, p. 1); this is a set of new affective practices and relations that contributes to the dismantling of the enduring legacies of coloniality. In the next part of the chapter, we analyse how the notions of complicity and non-innocence can help illustrate some of the tensions and possibilities emerging in affective decolonisation efforts in higher education.

The Affective Decolonisation of Complicity and Non-innocence One of the challenges identified in recognising privileged irresponsibility is the resistance of individuals and groups to acknowledge their contribution to wrongdoing—that is, the violent oppression of groups of people such as racism, colonialism, the apartheid and the like. Applebaum’s

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(2010) seminal work on white complicity in social justice education documents the pedagogical challenge of dealing with white students’ denial and resistance in the classroom. Applebaum advocates for the need to develop what she calls ‘white complicity pedagogy’ that encourages white students to acknowledge their complicity and unearned privilege as members of a group regardless of their personal circumstances or individual relationship to white privilege. Existing scholarship in social justice education identifies and problematises the fact that students use ‘distancing strategies’ to dissociate themselves from individual culpability (Applebaum, 2010, 2013, 2017). Students’ denials of complicity and non-innocence can be motivated by various affects and emotions—for example, shame, guilt, anger—that are inextricably linked to personal, political or ethical commitments as well as students’ broader social, historical and political lifeworld (see also Chap. 3, where we discuss shame and guilt; guilt is seen to be individualised and shame more collective in Tronto’s privileged irresponsibility). Hence, it is suggested that it is not sufficient for educators to simply make students aware of their potential complicity, but rather they should actively encourage students to take moral and epistemic responsibility for their learning (Whitt, 2016). We argue that for this to happen, it is necessary that educators navigate students through the affective and political dynamics of complicity and non-innocence in both critical and strategic ways. Handling students’ denials of complicity, then, requires strategic pedagogical approaches that consider not only how to engage students critically with the affective and political complexities of complicity, but also how to invent pedagogical spaces that inspire students to undertake anti-­ complicity praxes. In other words, careful, thoughtful and stepwise strategies are needed to move the focus away from what we do not want (i.e. more complicity) towards anti-complicity—what we call anti-complicity pedagogy. Unless educators grapple with the affective dynamics of complicity and non-innocence and act to draw out the complex interrelationships between colonial pasts and present coloniality, we are afraid that our pedagogical interventions will be unable to challenge the deeply affective roots of privileged irresponsibility in higher education. In this part of the chapter, then, we argue that the recognition of complicity and non-innocence as affective and embodied practices, and the potential for anti-complicity, expand our decolonising efforts to dismantle privileged irresponsibility in terms of making more capacious visions and acts of political responsibility

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become possible through pedagogic work. We want to discuss now how this all bears on the issue of handling complicity and non-innocence pedagogically in higher education teaching and learning. More often than not, what starts out as a pedagogical effort to teach students how to acknowledge their complicity and non-innocence in coloniality turns out to be a deeply affective and political process that has criticism at its heart. In general, complicity tends to be treated as a disempowering imposition to individuals (McCarty, 2018), including classroom situations. In most cases, explains McCarty, “the individual did not actively choose to become complicit […]. The complicit individual lacks power because they cannot wholly control—or sometimes even know about—the injustice for which they are being held responsible” (2018, p. 4). For this reason, we can reasonably expect some students in the classroom to perceive pedagogical efforts to make them admit their complicity as a form of criticism that creates moral and emotional distress to them. Hence attempts to instil guilt and moral taint as much as to assuage such feelings of discomfort in students by pampering them (see Applebaum, 2017) will most likely fail, not only because students will be made to feel that the problem is personal, when it is actually a political one. Most importantly, these attempts will fail because they are often disguised as efforts to bring about real change in the world, when in fact they are stuck in a psychologised approach that simply tries to deal with the emotional aftermath of criticism (Bekerman & Zembylas, 2018; McCarty, 2018). What is needed, then, is a form of criticism of complicity and non-­ innocence in the classroom that neither validates privilege nor does it attempt to assuage discomforting feelings of complicity and non-­ innocence. As educators, we do not want students too preoccupied with their personal moral status; rather, our insistence on complicity should be primarily concerned with the injustice at hand and how we can contribute both individually and collectively to address it (McCarty, 2018). Handling complicity and non-innocence in the classroom should not end up being a matter of moral narcissism, but rather focused on achieving specific outcomes directed at opposing a perceived injustice. For example, if the issue is how to handle white students’ denial of complicity, the pedagogical question at hand is not “What can I, as an educator, do to reaffirm students’ moral agency so that they admit their complicity and non-­ innocence?” but rather, “How can I, as an educator, move my students to take action in their everyday lives to refuse being complicit to social harm?”, which encourages Young’s collective responsibility (see Chap. 2).

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This, of course, does not imply that the moral or emotional experience of being complicit is undermined; on the contrary, this would be impossible, given that complicity is deeply affective. However, handling complicity and non-innocence through the lens outlined in this book would not look to burden students with the moral weight of structural injustice or to have them share the guilt involved in the name of “a self-liberatory therapeutic confessionalism” (Pfister, 2006, p. 138). Rather, it would require educators to cultivate criticism of complicity and non-innocence in the classroom in a critical and strategic manner. For example, an educator who faces white students’ denial of complicity has not only to be concerned with whether or not students acknowledge their complicity and non-innocence, but with how to make students understand complicity and non-innocence as situated. Some questions towards this direction would be, for instance: In which ways are we, students and educators in our community, complicit in the impoverishment of the poor and the vulnerable that follows from limited budgets or cuts in public spending? What specific actions can we take to relieve poverty in this community? How can we think and feel differently about those who suffer, without losing track of the origins of our own (undeserved) privilege? In other words, complicity, non-innocence and their implications will be different in one context of coloniality (e.g. a university in a rural area in western Canada, which might be differently placed from another university in the same region) compared to another context of coloniality, racism or sexism (e.g. a university in Johannesburg, S.  Africa, which might be differently placed from another university in the same city). Such an approach, suggests Andreotti (2014), can shed light on how issues of complicity and non-innocence emerge in response to contingent problems rather than being universal and canonical. If educators aim at teaching students to understand their complicity and non-innocence in specific rather than universal terms, the success of their approach will depend on their strategic understanding of how to enter this historically constituted field of ongoing moral argument in ways that calculate the stakes, namely: […] (what might stand and what might fall as a result of a particular move), of ascertaining the potential allies and possible adversaries, of determining the lines and play of forces (what might count and what might not as a possible intervention), and so on. […] It is only by understanding criticism in

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this way that we can determine the contingent demand of—and on—criticism in any conjecture. (Scott, 1999, p. 7)

These conjectures are in effect affective-political infrastructures that are generative of complicity and non-innocence as embedded in its temporally and structurally complex constellations. This is where strategy in our pedagogical approach becomes crucial. In particular, we suggest that our pedagogical approach requires a strategic practice of criticism towards complicity that makes two important moves. First, it does not fall into the seductive trap of rationalism, namely, the assumption that if students acknowledge their (conscious or unconscious) complicity and non-innocence, then the ‘problem’ is solved. In line with Applebaum (2013), we would argue that continuous attentiveness (vigilance) as a response to complicity is needed, but we would further expand this idea by suggesting that reinterrogating the affective-political contingency of complicity and non-innocence should also reorient students away from the assumption that the future can be guaranteed by the pasts accumulated in the present (cf. Scott, 2004). The second move we suggest has to do with how to engage students in actions that are anti-complicit, namely, actions that actively resist social harm. Scott (2004) proposes a form of strategic critical praxis that is conceptualised as a reading of the past, present and future imaginaries in ways that invent new vocabularies of transformative possibilities. If we are all acting-in-complicity in today’s world and are therefore responsible in complicity (Sanders, 2002), then it follows that vigilance itself is not enough, as being critical does not suspend the fact that we are implicated in the world (Ahmed, 2013). From Scott’s perspective, what needs to be emphasised is the ‘difference’ that specific actions can make in reimagining and refashioning the future. The critical strategic praxis that Scott proposes can take the form of anti-complicity pedagogy, when students are actively engaged to be defiant in the face of structural injustice and resist social harm in their everyday lives. It is therefore important that educators first identify the specific affective-­ political complexities around complicity and non-innocence, before encouraging students to engage in anti-complicity actions. Such a pedagogical approach involves espousing Scott’s notions of strategic criticism and strategic critical praxis, namely, cultivating in students an anti-­ complicity attitude of one who interrogates whether or not the questions or concepts they are currently preoccupied with (e.g. moral responsibility,

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guilt) still have any purchase to address their present affective-political habitat. Educators can model their own engagements with strategic criticism by using conceptual tools that do not blame the individual for their complicity and non-innocence in coloniality, but rather outline specific acts that show when and under what circumstances this becomes a process of refusing to allow ongoing systems of racist and/or colonial violence to continue harming other people. In the next part of the chapter, we discuss how a particular affect, namely, ‘decolonising solidarity’, as a response-­ able practice can help educators’ efforts to challenge privileged irresponsibility.

Affective Solidarity as Decolonising Solidarity Solidarity is generally a concept that expresses a “standing with” (TallBear, 2014) others based upon the recognition of a common experience: a common humanity, a common ideology, a common political agenda, a common moral vision and so on (Markham, 2019). Hence, there are different kinds of solidarities: political (e.g. leftist solidarity), rights solidarity (e.g. focused on human rights violations), material solidarity (e.g. disaster aid) and global solidarity, which is defined as “a form of solidarity that emphasizes similarities between physically, socially and culturally distant people, while at the same time respecting and acknowledging local and national differences” (Olesen, 2004, p. 259). Solidarities also vary in their manifestations and motivations; they can be expressed at the macro-level (e.g. by voting for a political party that supports a leftist agenda) or they can be expressed at the micro-level by taking individual or group action in response to an injustice or oppression (Scholz, 2008). As Lynch and Kalaitzake (2020) clarify, then, solidarity “is simultaneously an object or goal of politics, a set of socio-political practices realizing such politics, and a disposition towards practice” (p. 242). The concept of ‘affective solidarity’ (Hemmings, 2012) is a manifestation of solidarity that has been initially grounded in feminist politics against neoliberalism’s attempts to individuate and isolate us (Vachhani & Pullen, 2019). As Hemmings (2012) argues, the basis for affective solidarity is ‘affective dissonance’, that is, a range of affects (e.g. anger, frustration, rage) that provide a productive grounding for a sustainable politics of transformation. In other words, affective solidarity is “not based in a shared identity or on a presumption about how the other feels, but on feeling the desire for transformation out of the experience of discomfort,

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and against the odds” (ibid., p. 158). Hemmings suggests that affective dissonance can be processed in different ways; one may suppress the experience, whereas someone else might use it to demand change in interpersonal relationships or utilise it to justify political action. As Hemmings writes: [I]n order to know differently we have to feel differently. Feeling that something is amiss in how one is recognized, feeling an ill fit in social descriptions, feeling undervalued, feeling that same sense in considering others; all these feelings can produce a politicized impetus to change that foregrounds the relationship between ontology and epistemology precisely because of the experience of their dissonance. (2012, p. 150, added emphasis)

Hemmings, then, positions embodied knowledge at the heart of affective solidarity. This has important political implications, “as the impetus for change comes from the affective response to something that is not right, such as a perceived injustice or a rights violation” (Johnson, 2020, p. 184). Although affective solidarity cannot change the world, as Vachhani and Pullen (2019) rightly point out, it demonstrates that a politically significant affective dissonance can generate solidarity through the recognition of shared emotions about oppression and injustice. Building on these ideas, we explore here how reframing affective solidarity as decolonising solidarity makes a contribution to the argument that we are making in this chapter concerning the affective decolonisation of privileged irresponsibility in higher education. In particular, we are interested in examining ways that researchers, educators, students and administrators within and across universities in the Global North and Global South may nurture affective practices of decolonising solidarity “even if their own experiences and relationships to various webs of power are widely divergent” (Johnson, 2020, p.  184). Decolonising solidarity is understood here as an affective practice involving the dismantling of the apparatuses of colonial violence as those are manifested in various mechanisms of the university—from teaching and learning practices to research production and administration systems. The task of decolonising solidarity requires work along two trajectories: the re-centring of the settler as “a site of uncomfortable change” (Boudreau Morris, 2017, p. 469); and an affective politics and praxis of advocacy, accountability and political commitment to Indigenous, Black and marginalised people’s struggles against colonisation. These two trajectories, which are clearly entangled, are discussed below.

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Boudreau Morris (2017) conceptualises decolonising solidarity as a practice that includes nurturing a habit of discomfort “first with ourselves as a basis from which we can then engage in specific, contextualised, and contingent conversations with and listening to others” (p. 464). In this sense, decolonising solidarity is not a superficial sentimental practice for white settlers to ‘feel good’ about standing together with Indigenous peoples, but rather it requires constant and uncomfortable engagement with the persistent effects of coloniality “such as an active challenging of epistemicide, settler superiority, capitalism and the darker sides of modernity” (Kluttz et al., 2020, p. 55). In other words, this is not an abstract intellectual exercise for white settlers to do, but rather an everyday attitude and practice of challenging, resisting and refusing the legacies of colonialism (Grande, 2018; Tuck, 2018). In the context of higher education institutions, for example, this means that to make a contribution to the decolonisation of their university, privileged white academics have to sever their affective attachments to the practices of epistemicide (i.e. practices that devalue Indigenous or marginalised groups’ knowledges) and Western intellectual superiority manifested in university curricula, pedagogies and knowledge production. In other words, settlers’ feelings of discomfort must be engaged with critically and productively as part of the difficult work of decolonisation. Along similar lines, Land (2015) suggests that there are two important elements in the hard work of decolonising solidarity: first, solidarity must be directed towards decolonisation and, second, solidarity itself has to be decolonised. As Land writes: “Interrogating and reconstructing non-­ Indigenous people’s interests emerge as key to decolonizing solidarity” (ibid., p.  228). Therefore, working towards decolonisation is a discomforting and unsettling process for everyone involved. As Kluttz et  al. (2020) note, “It is work that unsettles the possibility of fully reconciling settler guilt and disallows the continuing denial and ignorance of complicity in colonization” (p. 55). This understanding of decolonising solidarity highlights, in our view, that decolonising solidarity has to be understood as an affective practice and politics that requires a process of advocacy, accountability and political commitment to Indigenous people’s struggles against colonisation. In other words, decolonising solidarity is a deeply affective process that entails refocusing its goal on the affective practice of working against colonisation, namely, on relationship-building between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, between former coloniser and colonised peoples, between privileged and marginalised communities. In

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this sense, decolonising solidarity requires “a shift in mindset” (Simpson in Klein, 2013) that is also a shift in the affective practices and embodied knowledges of white settlers. For example, in the context of higher education institutions in the Global North, this understanding of decolonising solidarity suggests that privileged white academics take specific actions along various forms of university life, where solidarity is premised on “working for, towards a vision of struggle with” (Koopman, 2008, p. 296) Indigenous, Black and other marginalised peoples. From this perspective the role of the privileged white academic is to engage in decolonising solidarity, or the unmaking of their privilege in academia, by actively participating in Indigenous-led and Black-led struggles against racism and colonialism. The question, of course, is what would sensitise or incentivise privileged academics, researchers, students and administrators to engage in decolonising solidarity? In the last part of the chapter, we discuss how we envision a ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux, 2003; Sadlin et al., 2010) of decolonising solidarity that would create openings for such sensitisation in the context of higher education institutions in the Global North.

Nurturing Affective Practices of Decolonising Solidarity in Higher Education Given that the concept of solidarity functions in the sociohistorical context of coloniality, there is always the danger that the concept reinscribes colonial logics to obscure complicity and continued colonisation (Gaztambide-­ Fernandez, 2012; Patel, 2022). At the same time, argues Gaztambide-Fernandez (2012), there is a possibility to articulate solidarity relations through which to construct new ways of entering into relations with others. In fact, as he explains, the failures of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism as responses to the problem of human difference point to decolonisation as a process that provides new openings for solidarity relations. For this to happen though, it is important to theorise the concept of solidarity as decolonising, that is, as a process that dismantles colonial logics. As we have also pointed out earlier, the visceral logics of decolonisation enrich the efforts to articulate a pedagogical engagement of solidarity as both a decolonising and affective practice and process. In this last part of this chapter, then, we will argue that it is possible to nurture a

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decolonising solidarity that supports efforts to dismantle privileged irresponsibility. Our attempt here though is not to provide a ‘how to’/‘to do’ list for decolonising solidarity in higher education, but rather to describe and analyse the conditions under which a public pedagogy of decolonising solidarity, enacted by academics, researchers, students and administrators would take into account the complexities of the affective decolonisation of privileged irresponsibility. For this reason, it is impossible to know exactly what this process would look like besides the fact that it will be deeply unsettling and discomforting, as mentioned earlier (Boudreau Morris, 2017; Grande, 2018; Kluttz et al., 2020; Zembylas, 2021c). Writing about a decolonising pedagogy of solidarity, Gaztambide-­ Fernandez (2012) suggests that it shifts “the focus away from either explaining or enhancing existing social arrangements, seeking instead to challenge such arrangements and their implied colonial logic” (p.  49). Hence, we understand ‘public pedagogy’ here as a form of politics and praxis, that is, as a social, affective and political practice and intervention rather than a form of teaching methodology. If the pedagogical encounter in general is understood as a process through which those involved are transformed (Biesta, 2012; Todd, 2009), then a decolonising pedagogy is by definition a social, affective and political process of transformation. In this sense, for instance, settler students or educators engaged in a public pedagogy of decolonising solidarity—for example, as part of a public event that requires them to do challenging emotional work that exposes their position of privilege—are essentially asked to negotiate new relationships and practices with marginalised colleagues that are not based on self-­ interest but rather on unsettled affective relations. Gaztambide-Fernandez (2012) discusses three intertwined modes for a pedagogy of solidarity that is committed to decolonisation: relational, transitive and creative. Pedagogy of solidarity is relational because it makes a deliberate commitment to a relational stance. Pedagogy of solidarity is also transitive in the sense that the verb form of solidarity—to solidarise with—is a transitive verb; in other words, solidarity “points directly to an active orientation towards others that, in its transitivity, rejects a static position and embraces contingency” (ibid., p. 54), namely, it is a praxis. Finally, pedagogy of solidarity, according to Gaztambide-Fernandez, is creative in that it involves creative engagement with others in unexpected ways that might challenge and rearrange the colonial logic embedded in everyday encounters. The term ‘creative’ involves engaging with others in ways that might rearrange and reinvent our relationships in the

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classroom—such as, for example, using art or poetry to rethink encounters with others as a family rather than as ‘strangers’. In addition to these three modes for a pedagogy of solidarity, we would also like to highlight a consideration of the coloniality of affects and how affective decolonisation can make a crucial contribution to reimagining a different human collective that nurtures decolonising solidarity as a response-able practice. As Boudreau Morris reminds us, “Solidarity work is emotionally fraught with challenges to and modification of one’s identity, particularly when engaging with difference, but it is the deployment of difference and the uncomfortable accompanying emotions that nurtures decolonizing solidarity relationships” (2017, p.  468). This means that privileged academics like Michalinos visiting S. Africa to do research on higher education decolonisation have considerable emotional and political work to do to fully understand how to solidarise with his Black colleagues in academia. He can certainly empathise with some of their decolonial struggles, as his parents and ancestors in Cyprus have been colonised subjects with histories and roots of traumas and inequalities; yet, he should keep in mind that this emotional work is done at the moment from a position of privilege that cannot be compared to the historical and contemporary plights of his Black colleagues in S.  Africa. Engaging in public pedagogies of decolonising solidarities, then, means examining how this emotional work can practically lead to deep, authentic, decolonising solidarities with Michalinos’ academic colleagues in the Global South—for example, through engaging in practices of advocacy, accountability and political commitment to Black colleagues’ struggles in the S. African universities that he does research or teaching. A public pedagogy of decolonising solidarity in higher education, therefore, requires emotional experiences and embodied learning through specific affective dissonance, action and change that create new ethical and affective relationships with others. To do this work, privileged academics and students must listen to the stories and especially the demands of Indigenous, Black and marginalised colleagues, namely, we “must learn to balance waiting around for direction in social action, while taking action consistent with Indigenous leadership” (Kluttz et al., 2020, p. 63). Critical reflection and dialogue are valuable tools, yet they are not enough to challenge the coloniality of affects. Doing the emotional labour of affective decolonisation in higher education means learning to challenge colonial structures of feeling to not only ‘see’ how coloniality becomes naturalised in everyday privileges, but also take action that challenges one’s privileged

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positionality and affectivity on a constant basis. Needless to say, it cannot be determined a priori what kinds of actions might be effective at a given moment to undo the emotive lessons of coloniality, because this depends on the particularities and complexities of local desires and needs (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2012). However, in whatever form a pedagogy of decolonising solidarity takes, working with Indigenous, Black and marginalised peoples and their struggles means taking responsibility and commitment for reinventing our relationships and affective practices in the university classroom and beyond to become witnesses of affective decolonisation. Importantly, learning to be in a space that is discomforting and affectively ‘difficult’ depends on motivation, note Kluttz et al. (2020), reminding us once again the significance of paying attention to the affective aspects of solidarity in higher education settings: “[I]f one is working towards a decolonizing solidarity based on a mutual interest in deconstructing a system of oppression that is doing irreparable damage to the Earth and all of its creatures” (ibid., p. 63), then it becomes easier to unite settler and Indigenous peoples across their differences in solidarity struggles (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2012). In other words, the strategic goal is to cultivate a commitment in privileged academics and students so that they realise the common interests of decolonisation, that is, how deconstructing a system that oppresses most/all of us and is doing irreparable damage to the Earth is beneficial to all, not only to Indigenous people (Kluttz et al., 2020). The process of coming to this understanding as a process of reconstructing self-interest is, of course, not easy, emotionally and politically (Land, 2015). Yet, as noted earlier, it is a process that forces us to reconnect with each other and the Earth on a daily basis (Walia, 2012).

Concluding Remarks This chapter has argued that given the different forms of decolonisation in higher education, it is crucial to consider how work at the level of affective decolonisation may complement other efforts to dismantle privileged irresponsibility. Our analysis has sought to provide some recommendations that would support affective decolonisation in higher education. These are summarised as follows: (1) to recognise the complex and ‘difficult’ emotional histories of colonisation and privileged irresponsibility in higher education institutions in the Global North and explore how they impact everyday life at universities; (2) to nurture affective practices of

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decolonising solidarity in higher education institutions in the Global North and Global South that bring together Indigenous with settler educators, researchers, students and administrators in renewed encounters; and (3) to inspire actions in everyday encounters that create new affective conditions which challenge the coloniality of affects, particularly complicity and non-innocence. The decolonising solidarity that can emerge from public pedagogies in which privileged academics and students come together with less privileged ones and become witnesses of affective decolonisation is a promising practice and strategy. Future empirical research and activism in higher education institutions across different communities and socio-­political settings will provide further clarifications about the effectiveness of particular affective practices towards affective decolonisation and the specific contribution of decolonising solidarity to higher education teaching, learning, research and administration.

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CHAPTER 6

Ecological Catastrophe

Abstract  This chapter considers how higher education is entangled with ecological damage and elaborates on how this entanglement plays out in relation to responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and responsiveness. The first part of the chapter considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in feminist new materialist and care ethics ideas has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric which are prevalent in higher education. The second part of the chapter examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. The third part of the chapter considers a number of response-able practices that higher education may make to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This section provides examples of three such experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation. The final part of the chapter thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and care ethics to develop alternative practices in academia.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_6

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Keywords  Ecological catastrophe • Ecological damage • Colonialism • Mechanistic worldview • Reparation • Black and Indigenous worldviews • Critical animism

Introduction The global coronavirus pandemic had a massive impact on higher education across the globe from 2020 to 2022. The pandemic almost brought the universities to a standstill in attempts to lessen the spread of the virus through national lockdowns and other social distancing measures. Universities found themselves paralysed, scrambling to find other means to communicate with students and academic staff (Stiegler, 2021). Online platforms and videoconferencing software such as Zoom became the major forms of communication both to maintain the administration of the university and for pedagogical purposes to keep in touch with students. The pandemic revealed deep structural inequalities as well as many forms of privileged irresponsibility around the world, especially in light of the fact members of minority and poor communities were dying and suffered from severe health issues at a disproportionately higher rate from Covid-19 (e.g. see Bozalek & Pease, 2021). Students who did not have the means to gain access to computers and the internet were disadvantaged by this process—especially those living in rural areas and townships in Global South countries such as South Africa. Due to the loss of fees from foreign students, many Australian universities cut back on contract staff and many lost their jobs. There were also major cutbacks in universities across other parts of the world, leading to job loss and, in some cases, threat of closure. Other phenomena such as water scarcity, fires, floods and lack of access to electricity have also impacted on higher education’s ability to function under such conditions. Universities globally are gradually beginning to recognise their responsibility to prepare their students for ecological damage by developing curricula, pedagogical and research processes to educate students, and to produce useful knowledge about it. Some higher education institutions are also working towards adopting carbon neutral practices (Leal Filho et al., 2021). Other authors interested in ecological

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issues such as climate change perceive higher education to be in a unique position to lead transformation regarding such issues, in terms of reassessing the land on which they are located and engaging in research, knowledge creation and curriculum development which focus on ecological harms (e.g. see Molthan-Hill & Blaj-Ward, 2022). The discipline of architecture has already made such moves in making climate literacy a compulsory requirement in architectural education. Molthan-Hill and Blaj-Ward (2022) are of the opinion that ecological damage issues should be mainstreamed into core curricula and taught from an interdisciplinary perspective. However, there is still a great deal of (wilful) ignorance or denial about the extent to which the earth is damaged, including the part that colonialism, politics and globalised consumer capitalism and culture have played in this and what they can do to intervene in this (see Chap. 5). As Deborah Bird Rose (2022, pp. 6–7) has observed: There are many reasons why we do not hear others. Geographical distance may be a factor, but in the media-saturated social matrix of our lives we may also be overwhelmed by the numbers and diversity of calls. And there are certainly other reasons too - we may not know what is happening, or our ignorance may be strategic. Perhaps these numerous factors lead to the atrophy of our ethical sense - disrupting our ability to attend and relate to the natural world.

Because the environmental crisis is largely hidden and happens through gradual accretion, it makes it hard to discern and respond to this. This is the case especially when impact occurs in slow violence which appears spatially and temporally distant and might happen intergenerationally (Jones et al., 2020). Acknowledgement of ecological damage tends to engender feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed by its massive scale and temporal urgency for those in higher education who are used to the illusion of being able to control the future, causing a disruption to a sense of privileged entitlement (Verlie, 2019). Pedersen (2021, p. 164) identifies institutional anxiety “as one possible barrier against radical educational change” when human exceptionalism is challenged, even in subtle ways, in omnicidal times. Most curricula and programmes at universities are steeped in

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neoliberal individualism, anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism, with assumptions of humans as special and separate from other species deeply ingrained in them, and environmental and non-human issues backgrounded and marginalised. As Val Plumwood aptly puts it: the “hyperseparation of humans as a special species and the reduction of non-humans to their usefulness to humans, or instrumentalism” (Plumwood, 2009, p. 116). Most curricula studies focus on human issues such as child development, student-centred learning, with little attention to other species or ecological issues (Silova, 2021). However, as Hamilton and Neimanis (2018, p. 517) remind us: Fields of study, like species, are not natural categories with predetermined boundaries. They are made through patterns of reproduction and composted as intra-actions with an outside. These makings are not neutral, but are always caught up in operations of power.

It is not possible to extricate such fields out of power relations, but it is possible to be more vigilant about where the agential cut is made in the disciplinary boundaries and in the process, what gets included and what is excluded. For example, there is little recognition in curricula of affective dimensions such as grief and sadness which accompanies ecological degradation (Jones et al., 2020; Silova, 2021; Verlie, 2019). The toxic effects of the globalised consumer culture are also barely addressed in higher education curricula, perhaps with the exception of the environmental humanities (DeLoughrey, 2015; Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018). According to Pedersen (2021), most higher education institutions, being embedded in the animal-industrial complex and being part of market economies driven by neoliberalism, are “quite far from implementing interspecies sustainability policies” (p. 166). Universities need to develop a sense of urgency about the role that they have to play in shaping possible futures for the Earth, human and more-than-human beings (Papadopoulos et al., 2021). The response-able sensibilities and practices of attentiveness, politeness and curiosity, rendering each other capable, openness to encounter, and iteration or ongoingness would be useful points of departure for learning to live and die on the planet in alternative ways. Such learning might for example involve an appreciation of the entanglement, becoming-with and acting-­ with the wider ecological world attuning to the relational composition of the world and thus the self; mourning desirable relationships that are lost as the planet warms; and responding

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to these conditions in ways that may foster more liveable worlds. Collectively, these processes enrol people in practices of bearing worlds: enduring the pain of the end of the world they have known, and labouring to generate promising alternatives. (Verlie, 2019, p. 751)

This chapter focuses on the contribution that relational ontologies emanating from the political ethics of care and feminist new materialism/ posthumanism, as well as Black and Indigenous cosmologies, might make towards alternative ways of thinking about ecological damage. The chapter is centred around the concepts of the Chaps. 2, 3 and 4—responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability—in relation to the university and ecological damage. The chapter considers how higher education is entangled with ecological damage and elaborates on how this entanglement plays out in relation to responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and responsiveness. The first part of the chapter considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in feminist new materialist and care ethics ideas has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric which are prevalent in higher education. The second part of the chapter examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. The third part of the chapter considers a number of response-able practices that higher education may make to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This section provides examples of three such experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation (Papadopoulos et al., 2023). The final part of the chapter thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and care ethics to develop alternative practices in academia.

Responsibility—Entangled University and Ecological Damage Universities need to recognise their temporal and spatial entanglements with ecological damage in order to be equipped to acknowledge their responsibility for and responding to a deteriorating global context, and to

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those whose lives have been most affected by ecological damage and loss (Dawson & Paik, 2023; Papadopoulos et al., 2023). The Anthropocene refers to the new geological era that comes after the Holocene, in which human activities have become a major force impacting the Earth’s ecosystems in lasting ways. The Anthropocene is a concept that was made popular by Paul Crutzen from the Netherlands who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The concept ‘Anthropocene’ has however been objected to and seen as problematic by feminist new materialists, posthumanists and Indigenous writers for a number of reasons, which include the dualisms as outlined above. One such critique comes from the Caribbean author Malcolm Ferdinand: With the concept of the Anthropocene, Crutzen and others promote a narrative about the Earth that erases colonial history, while the country of which Crutzen is a citizen, the kingdom of the Netherlands, is a former colonial and slaveholding empire that stretched from Suriname to Indonesia via South Africa, and now consists of six overseas territories in the Caribbean. (Ferdinand, 2022, p. 8)

Revisiting Val Plumwood’s mechanisms discussed in Chap. 3 which are used to maintain dualisms, the concept Anthropocene makes use of homogenisation to conceal many differences. For example, concepts such as nature, planet, environment associated with the Anthropocene mask diversity of ecosystems such as kelp forests, mountains and veld. Homogenisation also conceals diverse geographic locations which are not focused on in relation to ecological concerns such as informal settlements, and plantations, thus erasing colonial history. Anthropocentric logics also hierarchise and eulogise domesticated and wild animals, which are given special attention and placed above animals which are farmed. Such logics remain human-centric in that they continue to fetishise the importance of the human, entrenching hierarchical oppositions between human and non-human forces (Papadopoulos et al., 2021). Anthropos as man masks categories such as gender, race, class, religion and ability and as such is insufficiently political (Colebrook, 2016; Ferdinand, 2022; Sharpe, 2016; Stengers, 2015; Yusoff, 2018). As the undifferentiated ‘anthro’ focuses on an abstract human, ‘ocene’ refers to a geological period, focusing on rocks and thus occluding other alterations of the planet such as aquatic ones such as the imperilled ecosystems of the

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ocean, due to acidification and pollution, as well as chemical and biological changes on the earth (Alaimo, 2016). The discourse of sustainability in universities has become a more palatable one than environmentalism, as it often does not question the expansion of capitalism and its implication in the ecological crisis. Both the notions of sustainability and conservation can be seen as apolitical as they have implicit in them the desire to keep things going in the same way, in a denial and avoidance of the co-imbrication of economic growth on the environmental catastrophe. The sustainability and conservation discourses at universities have as their focus rendering the world as a resource for human beings. We need to interrogate what needs to be sustained and for whom, in the context of extractivist coloniality and its effects on the disparities between the Global North and South. As Alaimo (2016, p. 173) notes, “[s]ustainability proceeds with the presumption that human agency, technology, and master plans will get things under control”. This comforting sense of an objective and scientific distancing approach denies the fact that environmental damage is already present, often difficult to detect and impossible to escape, as activists and writers about the sixth great extinction have made clear (Jones et al., 2020; Rose, 2022). However, as posthumanist and feminist ecomaterialist scholars make it clear, our permeable and porous bodies are already the Anthropocene (i.e. the Anthropocene is existing inside bodies) (Kirby, 2021). Alaimo’s (2016) concept “trans-corporeality” stresses the inseparability of humans and the world, with a radical openness in constant becoming-with the environment through intra-action. This means that it can be “composed, re-composed, and decomposed by other bodies” (p. 77). This is a different view from the Cartesian finished product which assumes an individualised fixed and finalised identity. Alaimo’s trans-corporeality is a useful concept for pedagogies and scholarship in higher education as it shows how it is impossible to separate flows of substances and the “economic, political, cultural, scientific, and substantial” from an “ostensibly bounded human subject” (Alaimo, 2016, p.  111). Posthuman and feminist new materialist scholarship is thus important in troubling taken-for-granted notions in academia such as the anthropocentric rhetoric of sustainability and conservation. The political ethics of care, feminist new materialist and posthuman perspectives provide us with ideas of how to ‘stay with the trouble’ of living and dying on a damaged planet and how to maintain and repair the world in as best way possible, seeing humans as inseparable from a world that is not inert but lively. Barad’s (2007, p. 393) alternative vision

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of responsibility which counters the tendency to externalise the issues is pertinent here; “it is not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part”. Tracing the historicity of intra-­ actions across times, spaces, substances and bodies enables a revelation of harmful and benign practices and enables accountability and responsibility for such practices, and an openness to the indeterminacy of the world and to whatever arrives (Watson, 2014). Such a form of responsibility would eschew the static form of the human implicit in human exceptionalism and focus on what Brian Massumi, following Édouard Glissant calls an ‘aesthetics of the earth’: The point for the aesthetics of the earth is that there is no human being, only an open-ended becoming of the human animal body and its capacities that takes place in intricate co-composition with the earth and its emergent strata of all kinds: viral, bacterial, vegetal, animal, human, technological – not to mention social, cultural, and economic. The motto of the aesthetics of the earth is a call for inventive practices of care of this extended relational field and its constitutive phyla. (Sünter, 2022, p.  285, interview with Brian Massumi)

Coloniality and Privileged Irresponsibility: Implications for Higher Education In the previous chapter, we considered how privileged irresponsibility and decolonial theory can make a critical intervention into the terrain of ethics in higher education. This chapter continues from there, showing how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply intertwined— which calls for thinking-with the notion of a decolonial ecology (Ferdinand, 2022). Generally, ecological studies are seen as separate from decolonial studies both in the university and in social movements (Ferdinand, 2022). This happens because of the dualistic divide which was discussed in Chap. 3, and to which we now return in Chap. 6 as an important part of relational ontology’s contribution to the relationship between higher education and ecological damage. The colonial mechanistic and Cartesian worldview to which Amitav Ghosh (2021) refers in his book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis is deeply entrenched and taken for granted in everyday life, including higher education institutions and its disciplines. In a mechanistic

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view, nature is seen as a resource for humans, who use it for their own ends and benefits. Ghosh (2021) uses the history of the nutmeg and Dutch colonialists’ exploitation and omnicide (killing of humans, animals, plants etc.) to acquire it, to show how a mechanistic worldview made it possible to exploit, extract and expropriate in order to acquire spices as resources. This mechanistic viewpoint is saturated with dualisms—us and them, human and non-human, nature and culture and so on. By troubling dualisms inherited from transcendental and humanist assumptions, it is possible to unravel the sedimentations of the mechanistic view made hegemonic through colonialism. This mechanistic and Cartesian worldview based on dualisms provided a normative justification and the technological means needed in colonisation for conquest, subjugation and control. Categorical naming systems in science, for example, reinforce the inertness of matter, rather than seeing it as part of the sentient world (Ghosh, 2021; Kimmerer, 2013). Povinelli (2021) refers to the privileged irresponsibility of colonialism. This is made possible through a massive machinery which disavows the structural violence of vicious extraction of human and more-than-­ human labour and the violent dispossession of human and more-than-­ human worlds. Through this process, colonial histories hide deep inequalities which continue unabated through what she calls disavowal, but which can also be seen as a wilful ignorance which protects the ongoing privileges of those who have benefited and continue to benefit from colonialism and racialised capitalism. As she puts it, “the colonial catastrophe knotted and continues to knot together a multiplicity of worlds even as it concentrates wealth and well-being in some places and bodies and destitution and toxicity in others” (Povinelli, 2021, p. x). Here the privileged lives of those in the Global North are built on colonial and capitalist violence through forms of disavowal by naturalising systemic social harms. In order to understand privileged irresponsibility emanating from settler colonial logics, it would be necessary to make explicit and interrogate the master narrative of dualisms and its accompanying mechanistic worldview. Ferdinand (2022) and other authors such as Silova (2021) blame such dualistic oppositions separating nature and culture, environment and society, mind and body, self and other, human and non-human animals, and the hierarchising of humans as Man above nature on the “great divide” of modernity (p. 4). This divide is evident in the mastery of nature through modernisations and the building of separate disciplines such as natural sciences, humanities, economic and management sciences etc. This divide makes possible privileged irresponsibility in relation to pollution,

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global warming, extinctions of non-human animals and plants as well as ungrievable and disposable lives of certain humans (Ferdinand, 2022). Bearing this in mind, a useful transdisciplinary project in higher education would be to interrogate what facilitates expropriation and exploitation in colonial ecology. Here, the legacies of colonial acts of possessing land, people, animals and fauna as resources that can be used for the settlers’ own privilege and satisfaction (i.e. the mechanistic worldview) would need to be examined (Ghosh, 2021; Jones et al., 2020; Povinelli, 2021; Simpson, 2014, 2017; Sterling & Harrison, 2020; Tuck & Yang, 2014a, 2014b; Yusoff, 2018). Such transdisciplinary projects would be a useful step for higher education institutions to bring together the projects of decolonisation and the damaged earth on which we are now living and dying. Stephen Esquith (2010, p. 27) believes that this sort of responsibility is important for those who have benefited from the “suffering of heterogeneous subaltern populations at the hands of severe violence” in which he includes hunger, poverty, wars, genocide and pandemics. He sees the necessity of “correcting the myopic self-understanding” of those who have benefitted in this way (Esquith, 2010, p. 27). Universities might also examine how as institutions they have come into being and benefited from such violence.

Response-Able Practices in Higher Education Institutions Malcolm Ferdinand (2022) and Kathryn Yusoff (2018) note how the invisibilisation of colonialism and histories of racism make it a White Anthropocene and a Western imaginary of the ecological crisis. Ferdinand (2022) points out, universities in the Global North and in many Global South contexts are dominated by white middle-class men “gazing out over what is then referred to as ‘nature’” (p. 6). In this case, nature is seen as existing outside of socio-political and economic conditions or as entangled with racism. Some feminist ecocriticism has not paid sufficient attention to racial and colonial issues (Ferdinand, 2022). In relation to oceanic studies, DeLoughrey and Flores (2020, p. 133) also note how most of the maritime scholarship has tended to focus on male transoceanic agents and their mobility across the inert background of the ocean which is portrayed as “a feminized fluid space”.

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Higher education curricula can redress this through studies of how slavery and plantations have contributed to ecological damage and to enduring racialised inequalities. Moreover, creativity and arts-based research-creation practices (Manning, 2016) can be used for activist purposes in this regard. For example, some universities have introduced visual redress processes which involve changes to universities visual built environments and culture in order to promote restitution for past injustices, such as land from which Indigenous populations have been forcibly removed, on which some universities are built (e.g. see Fataar and Costandius (2021) who address the apartheid and colonial visual culture, architectural design and spatial arrangements in a South African university). Universities can also become involved with the restitution of art objects and human body parts which were put into galleries or museums in Europe from colonial powers. The poet Diana Ferrus from the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, on an exchange programme at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 1998 wrote a poem about Sarah Baartman, an Indigenous Khoi South African woman who was taken to Europe in the nineteenth century under false pretences where her body was displayed as a curiosity for public scrutiny. Ferrus’ poem “I’ve Come to Take You Home” was a catalyst for returning Sarah Baartman’s remains to South Africa after 192 years from France. The poem was published in French Law which made it possible for her remains to be returned. Such acts of creativity and response-ability reinforce the recognition of omnicides, enslavement and colonisation which wrought violence on the earth, certain peoples, animals and plants and continues to impact on living and dying on a damaged planet. A third example of creative practices which address past injustices is that of counter-surveying and walking-with affected participants, which was developed by Motala and Bozalek (2022) in relation to the destruction of District Six, a central area in Cape Town, where valuable land was claimed by the White South African state and residents were forcibly removed to remote areas. On this land, Cape Technikon, a White higher education institution which later became the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, was built. Motala has taken many university employers, international conference attendees and family members of residents who were forcibly removed through District Six, to inform them of what existed there before the removal (see Zembylas et al. (2020) for more details of the history of District Six). The counter-surveying project mapped out the layout and position of the houses of people who had been forcibly removed

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and allowed their family members to experience this terrain. Family members were also invited to walk through District Six, and point out significant memories associated with the place. Counter-­surveying was not only significant for those family members who accompanied Motala and Bozalek on their works and Motala’s marking out of their relative’s houses but as is conveyed in the article on this process: Many of the societal problems that South African society faces today can be hauntologically connected to places like District Six whose social and material fabric was torn apart. By attending to the ghosts of District Six, we explore different ways of interrogating issues of land, curriculum, education, recuperation, and giving space to Otherness. The counter-surveying and walking make such presences felt, seeping into the thick now of present time, revealing aspects of the effects of hidden social, environmental and systemic structures (Gordon, 2008). We feel that the embodied transdisciplinary and transgenerational activism allowed by counter-surveying should be ongoing. (Motala & Bozalek, 2022, p. 255)

Experimental practices such as counter-surveying and walking as research-creation might be useful examples for developing response-able curriculum and scholarship processes in higher education institutions. As well as historicising the locations of universities, they could encourage other academics and activists to engage in similar alternative practices, using their disciplinary knowledge, such as surveying and geomatics. Counter-surveying and walking-with family members of forcibly removed residents also alerts participants to the entanglement of ecological and coloniality. As is further noted in the article, District Six …has always been haunted by the ghosts of many - the ancient Khoi, the colonizing Dutch and British, the working class and enslaved settlers from India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Madagascar, East Africa, the imported flora (some still stand defiant), the critically endangered endemic plants and animals of the shrinking biodiverse Cape Floral Region, and the people who were forced away from here. (Motala & Bozalek, 2022, p. 255)

These three examples of creative responses to various issues arising from histories of apartheid and colonialism and its effects on the land and Indigenous peoples are in universities that are located in a particular country in the Global South. In these universities, the colonial heritages are perhaps more perceptible. However, Northern universities have benefited

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a great deal from colonial exploits, but such connections are not obvious though. The absence or acknowledgement of colonial connections to higher education institutions in the Global North is, as Karen Barad points out, a well-worn tool used in the service of colonialism. For Barad, the void is far from nothingness or emptiness but full of the murmurings, The fact that the void is not empty, mere lack or absence, matters. The question of absence is as political as that of presence. When has absence ever been an absolute givenness? Is it not always a question of what is seen, acknowledged, and counted as present, and for whom? The void—a much-­ valued colonialist apparatus, a crafty and insidious imaginary, a way of offering justification for claims of ownership in the “discovery” of “virgin” territory—the notion that “untended,” “uncultivated,” “uncivilized” spaces are empty rather than plentiful, has been a well-worn tool used in the service of colonialism, racism, capitalism, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and scientism. (Barad, 2017, p. G113)

Acknowledging how universities in the Global North might be implicated in and have benefited from expropriation, extractivism and exploitation of colonialism and racialised capitalism is thus an important project for dealing with what Barad (2019) refers to as a-void-ance or wilful ignorance. It is also about refusing innocence by acknowledging such past, present and future damages (Haraway, 2008, p. 92). Enlisting inventive, artistic and creative processes, and transforming professional practices such as geomatics and surveying for re-turning to colonial hauntologies are ways of developing response-able pedagogies and scholarship for higher education. Such experimental practices are recuperative ways of responding to the thick present, which as we noted in Chap. 2, always already incorporates the past and the future. Touching and being in touch with the void, and its entangled sense of time, inhabiting each moment which is in superposition with all other moments is a useful way of taking responsibility for how past acts of violence continue to affect the present and future of higher education. As the ecological crisis deepens, the necessity for response-able and creative pedagogies and scholarship become more urgent (Vetlesen, 2019). In this way, new questions about the responsibilities of universities regarding their entanglement with colonialism and the ecological damage might be catalysed, keeping alive the ongoing necessity of composing new ways of responding to a damaged earth (Papadopoulos et al., 2021). As Ferdinand (2022, p. 14) aptly puts it:

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The urgency of the struggle against both global warming and the pollution of the Earth is intertwined with the urgency of political, epistemic, scientific, legal, and philosophical struggles to dismantle the colonial structures of living together and the ways of inhabiting the Earth that still maintain the domination of racialized people, particularly women, in modernity’s hold.

This would require major efforts on the part of higher education institutions and their programmes to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This is a difficult task in higher education as it is in many instances culturally saturated in taken-for-granted ways, just as the human-nature dualism which justifies seeing the non-human or nature as a resource for human’s benefits. Subaltern environmentalisms, for example, are important considerations for attending to the entanglements between the destructive impact of colonialism and capitalism, particularly in the Global South (Dawson & Paik, 2023). What matters for reconfiguring and rethinking academia is not only the content of what is researched or taught in universities but how this is done (Wolfe, 2021). For example, Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (www.decolonialfutures.net; see also Stein et  al. (2022)) is an arts/research collective in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people collaborate to challenge colonial habits of being that damage the planet, and gesture towards decolonial futures. There are also a number of projects in early childhood education which experiment with attunement to common worlds and which see justice as a more-than-human issue, which higher education pedagogies and scholarship can learn a great deal from. For example, Merewether et al. (2022) examined how attentiveness might be cultivated by attunement to sounds and smells in order to listen at multiple registers, as a response to the planetary crisis. Rooney and Blaise (2023) in another early childhood project on “doing, walking, writing, making and becoming with weather as an example of environmental learning” in order to “work with children to imagine and speculate in ways that are generative of responsiveness and responsibility in a climate change context” (p. 9). Such “minor acts of care and repair” (Papadopoulos et al., 2023, p. 3) are important examples for what might be done in embedded, emplaced and embodied pedagogical projects and scholarship in higher education. Such projects would assist in the move away from top-down hierarchised and large-scale technocratic interventions which see humans endowed with agency and reason and nature as passive and mute. These

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projects would also help to move away from the neoliberal individualist logics which assume the separation of humans and nature where humans occupy a central place in the world, managing nature for economic progress (Silova, 2021).

The Contribution of Black and Indigenous Worldviews The impetus to develop alternative ways of doing and thinking in academia could come from feminist new materialist, posthuman and care ethics perspectives, but also from Black and Indigenous writings who were and are working to dismantle an understanding of power, knowledge and Being that has been inherited from colonial modernity and its racial categories. Katherine McKittrick, in an interview with Makonnen (2021), for example, describes Black human geographies as “a black sense of place draws attention to geographic processes that emerged from plantation slavery and its attendant racial violences yet cannot be contained by the logics of white supremacy” (p. 252). This Black sense of place reconfigures and reinvents knowledge as a location ‘of difficult encounter’; it is collaborative and collective rather than individualised, in touch with other ways of being, through curious and creative works and conversations. Alternatives to the human-nature hierarchical dualism, such as critical animism, have also been proposed by scholars such as Conty (2022), DeLoughrey (2015) and Yoneyama (2021). Conty (2022), Plumwood (2002), Viveiros de Castro (2017) and Yoneyama (2021) describe a form of environmental orientalism, where animism is associated with primitivism, inferior, lacking in human reason and therefore part of exploitable nature: Equating animistic cultures with nature, such moderns saw animists as virtually sub-human, since they assigned social roles to the non-human world. Along the arrow of progress, such primitive peoples could be subjugated and expropriated just as natural resources were, or else educated to r­ ecognize the separation of nature from culture, and thereby enter the domain of humanity proper. (Conty, 2022, p. 129)

Critical and Indigenous animism presents a critique of such modernist Eurocentric views where human-nature dualism/anthropocentrism are prevalent, which as we have emphasised, are deeply embedded in academic

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disciplines and fields such as the social sciences. It is oriented to a politics of place where the local “is seen to be openly connected with multitudes of places to constitute ‘translocal alliances’” (p. 260), destabilising capitalist forms of monopolisation of place and economy. This would be useful for connecting emplaced local and diverse understandings of the world, which include embodied and embedded non-human existences. This focus on the local will expose the damage that the ‘god’s eye view’ of mechanistic and Eurocentric modernism has done in perpetuating dualisms. Similar to a Spinozist view of the world evident in feminist new materialism and posthumanism, critical animism is also based on a relational ontology, where in an animistic world “the life-world and spiritual-­ world exist as one vitalistic force”, as is evidenced in Miyazaki’s animation films like Spirited Away (Yoneyama, 2021, p. 260). This view provides an alternative to the hegemonic Anthropocene imaginary, where nature is seen to be able to be controlled and domesticated through scientific reason and technological interventions. As we noted in the section on critiques of Anthropocentric discourses, this also fails to account for the disparities between the Global North and the Global South as well as other inequalities, such as the significantly different carbon footprints between the Global North and South. Similarly, such a dispassionate neutralised view of humans in the climate crisis discourse has been “paved, historically, on unequal and exploitative social, economic, and political systems such as slavery, colonialism, and imperialism” (Yoneyama, 2021, pp. 260–261). Indigenous communities have been involved in processes of reparation and articulating relational ontologies and justice issues of colonialism and environmental racism which affect natural cultural and multispecies belongings and ecological losses and damages through displacement and dispossession (Papadopoulos et al., 2023). Critical new animism, feminist new materialisms, care ethics, Indigenous and Black Studies can help us attune to new directions for the social and natural sciences in academia, rupturing them and opening up possibilities for transdisciplinary studies, which stimulates the academic imagining to an entirely different way of viewing lifeworlds by incorporating a diffractive reading of ecological damage through thinking-with such relational multispecies ethico-­ politico-­onto-epistemologies (Ghosh, 2021; Makonnen, 2021; Simpson, 2014, 2022).

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Conclusion This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that there is no such thing as neutrality in relation to ecological damage. It has emphasised the urgency of the need for academic disciplines and universities to unlearn Cartesian dualities, intrinsic essences and mechanistic worldviews implicit in human exceptionalist Eurocentric and individualist neoliberal logics which are deeply ingrained in higher education, in order to develop meaningful ways of making sense of living and dying on our ailing planet. Thinking-with feminist new materialist, care ethicist, Black Indigenist and animist relational ontologies and worldviews connects academia to social, political and material worlds and the uneven ways in which ecological damage is experienced. These politico-ethico-onto-epistemologies all recognise the primacy of relations where entities only come into being through relations, thus troubling the hyperseparation of self and other, human and nature, which Plumwood (1993) identified as one of the mechanisms of dualism. Responding to ecological damage is certainly not about individualised human efforts. It is also not about privileging the human experience, but co-flourishing and rich relational exchanges, with an appreciation of how different worldings come to matter in different contexts for earth others (Jones et  al., 2020; van Dooren et al., 2016). This would entail throwing out “some lures that draw attention to the fleshy particularity, the beauty and responsiveness, of earth others—many of whom are in peril” in order to “cherish the world of life in its own terms” (Rose & van Dooren, 2021, p. 32). If there is no existence outside of the damaged planet, staying with the trouble of living and dying on it is the only alternative. This would require a deep attunement to temporal diffraction where the past, present and future are in superposition with each other, so that past injustices like expropriation, extraction and exploitation of the earth, human and non-­ human animals, plants, oceans and other materials can be connected. This recognition will be a step towards taking responsibility for learning to listen to how ecological damage has come about and how to do academia in a radically different and care-full way. In higher education we need transdisciplinary response-able pedagogical projects and scholarship to cultivate the arts of noticing and of rendering each other capable—it is not merely an intellectual task but an ethical, political and ontological one to find creative and collective ways of being open to co-becoming in encounters with the indeterminacies of the world

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and the complex dynamics of the pressing demands of our time in a more-­ than-­human world of imperilled earth others. It is also about cultivating attentiveness to the unexpected—conducting inquiries through what Despret and Haraway call ‘polite questioning’ as a political and situated practice, in order to be surprised by what we discover by the lively responsiveness of the world (Barad, 2007; Despret, 2016; Denis & Pontille, 2023; Haraway, 2016; Rose & van Dooren, 2021; Stengers, 2015). Such a focus in academia could contribute to cultivating imaginative thinking and experimenting about alternative modes of existence on earth and how best to collectively flourish on a damaged planet. Tronto and Fisher’s definition of care is of relevance here, as it pertains to “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Fisher & Tronto, 1990, p.  40). Reparation as a form of response-ability has no end. It is about cultivating a plural and collective art of attentiveness for how to craft new ways for flourishing as well as possible for all lifeforms. We also need to remember the importance of developing alternative ways of caring for both life and death on the planet and to be able to attend to mourning for the ecological damage, and for life forms which are already altered.

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CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

Abstract  In our conclusion to the book, we emphasise the new theoretical, political and ethical openings for higher education internationalisation by utilising Corey Walker’s (Transmodernity, 1(2), 104–119 (2011)) notion of the ‘ethics of opacity’ as an approach that interrogates the dominant logics of neoliberalism and coloniality/modernity and along with them the perpetuation of privileged irresponsibility. We suggest that the ethics of opacity, as a form of decolonial ecological ethics, provides ethical and political recognition to the opaque sites of colonised humans and more-than-human species, thus providing a viable opening for response-­ ability. We discuss the implications of the ethics of opacity for a renewed agenda in internationalisation practices and policies of higher education. We develop eight propositions which can be enacted in higher education, with specific attention to coloniality and ecological damage. Keywords  Higher education internationalisation • Ethics of opacity • Privileged irresponsibility • Decolonial ecological ethics • Propositions

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6_7

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This book has built around three concepts that have been central in our intellectual work over the years: responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and response-ability. In the first part of the book, we theorised these concepts through the lenses of feminist posthuman/new materialist and political ethics of care perspectives, while in the second part we ‘applied’ these ideas to reconceptualise higher education, focusing in particular on coloniality and ecological damage—two conditions that mark the fundamental predicaments of our times, having a major impact on universities and their futures. Reading coloniality and ecological damage through feminist posthuman/new materialist and political ethics of care perspectives allows scholars in higher education to gain new insights into the practices of research, teaching and learning, and in this way, opening up possibilities of doing academia differently. More particularly, collective experimenting, solidarity and collaborative risk-taking as entangled beings, with the sensibilities of response-ability and responsibility can be seen as alternative ethical practices in academia. The combined use of the three concepts discussed extensively in this book offers a new ethics of worlding in higher education. ‘Worlding’ is a generative concept used by both Donna Haraway (2008) and Karen Barad (2007) in reference to becoming and being part of a collective human and more-than-human world. This ethics of worlding calls into question the notion of the autonomous human subject, stressing instead, the interdependence and the concerns of attentiveness, responsibility and responsiveness to all bodies, including but not exclusive to human bodies (Barad, 2007) that care ethics foregrounds. Donna Haraway (2008, p. 92) refers to the ethics of worlding, involving the richness and responsiveness that comes from species interdependence as a “refusal of innocence and self satisfaction with one’s reasons and the invitation to speculate, imagine, feel, build something better”, while Barad (2007, pp. 392–393) considers worlding to be “about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part”. Through the lens of feminist posthuman/new materialist and political ethics of care perspectives, academic practices in higher education—curricula, evaluation methods, teaching practices, policies, organisational structures—can be seen as a matter of accountability/responsibility to contesting and reworking what matters and what is excluded from mattering in the world, as well as enabling response-ability—a cultivation of differential responsiveness in higher education, especially under the current pressures for internationalisation of higher education in many parts of the world.

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Internationalisation has become an increasingly important phenomenon for higher education around the world, as it has been positively presented as a means to enrich university curricula and teaching methods, increase mobility of students and staff in and out of universities, build partnerships and increase capacity building (Robson, 2011). For example, some universities attempt to make their (formal and informal) curriculum more relevant and engaging to international students or include student exchange possibilities for domestic students to live and work in other countries. In this sense, the universities aim to develop in students ‘intercultural competences’ or an “internationalised mindset” (Robson, 2011). In general, internationalisation is regarded as the process of integrating an international, intercultural or global dimension into the rationale, benefits, activities, stakeholders and outcomes of higher education (Knight, 2004). However, a growing number of voices have expressed concerns that internationalisation in higher education is being driven by neoliberal and corporate interests (Brandenburg & de Wit, 2011; Gyamera & Burke, 2018; Silova, 2021; Stier, 2004) not to mention neo-colonial agendas (Stein, 2016, 2019). As it is argued, this trend risks reproducing already uneven geopolitical relations and ultimately contributes to expanding social and economic injustices and furthering coloniality in the world (Dawson, 2020; Luke & Heynen, 2021; Shahjahan, 2011, 2016). In particular, our analysis in this book raises many ethical and political questions about the consequences of internationalisation in higher education, particularly in relation to reproducing ideals of Eurocentric epistemologies and ideas of market expansionism that damage the planet (Guion Akdağ & Swanson, 2018; Hughes-Warrington, 2012; Pashby & Andreotti, 2016). While ethical questions have increasingly come to the fore in public discussions about the internationalisation of higher education (Stein, 2016; Stein et al., 2019), there is a paradox that hovers over the ‘ethics of internationalisation’: “the same Eurocentric categories and commitments that reproduce the highly uneven global higher education landscape may also shape many of our efforts to address these inequities” (Stein, 2016, p. 1). This paradox reveals that a fundamental problem with internationalisation is that it lacks critical orientation towards its own ethical and political consequences. To this end, an interrogation into the question of ethics and politics may help us to come to grips with the tensions of rising ‘academic capitalism’ and, most importantly, to invent new ethics

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approaches that interrupt dominant ethical frames in higher education internationalisation (Silova, 2021). As noted in the second part of the book, decolonial critiques in higher education (Stein, 2019; Stein & Andreotti, 2017; Zembylas, 2018a, 2018b) highlight the importance of resisting colonising moves that are driven by dominant epistemological, ontological and ethical investments in universality, supremacy and mastery, while occluding the intensities of global capitalism and processes of racism, classism and sexism that have often made our current institutions unethical in their intellectual practices. We have argued that a combined framework of ideas from decolonial theory and feminist posthuman/new materialist perspectives will bring a sharper social justice and decolonising edge to debates on how to disrupt dominant ethical frames of action in higher education internationalisation, including that of ecological damage. Our analysis enriches discussions in the field of Critical University Studies by bringing attention to the problematic ethical and political consequences of neoliberal and neo-colonial trends in higher education. In our conclusion to this book, we emphasise the new theoretical, political and ethical openings for higher education internationalisation by utilising Corey Walker’s (2011) notion of the ‘ethics of opacity’ as an approach that interrogates the dominant logics of neoliberalism and coloniality/modernity and along with them the perpetuation of privileged irresponsibility. We suggest that the ethics of opacity, as a form of decolonial ecological ethics, provides ethical and political recognition to the opaque sites of colonised humans and more-than-human species, thus providing a viable opening for response-ability. We discuss the implications of the ethics of opacity for a renewed agenda in internationalisation practices and policies of higher education.

The Ethics of Opacity The prospect of a decolonial ethics in pursuit of a critical project in higher education internationalisation creates openings for unmasking the colonial and neoliberal logic of the contemporary organisation of Westernised universities. Moreover, the recourse to ethics reminds us that the issue of internationalisation “cannot be approached without critical attention to the question of ethics, particularly for those projects that claim to be emancipatory” (Walker, 2011, p.  108). While universities around the world take up a trend towards a vague but strong imperative to

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internationalise, ethical issues cannot be stepped over for long (Pashby & Andreotti, 2016). Our point of departure for discussing ethics here is Badiou’s (2001) statement that “ethics does not exist just by itself; ethics is always the ethics of something—of politics, of love, of science, of art” (24)—because there is not a single subject, but “as many subjects as there are truths”, and “as many subjective types as there are procedures of truths” (28). This understanding of ethics proposes a conceptualisation of ethics and truth in a processual manner, namely, as a critical material-discursive practice that goes beyond the Kantian categorical imperative (see Kant, 2015). For example, a decolonial ecological ethics in higher education internationalisation is rendered as a critical practice that interrogates normative assumptions about disciplinary categories and politico-onto-epistemological demands of the modern/colonial organisation of knowledge practices in universities. The ethics of opacity is proposed by Corey Walker (2011) as “a critical intellectual posture that disrupts the dominant logic of coloniality/modernity in exploring the hidden and unknown, the repressed and submerged narratives, histories, and epistemologies—the sites of opacity that are the conditions of im/possibility of the contemporary world” (109–110). The ethics of opacity, then, may be seen as a critical space within which repressed and suppressed knowledges, that is, knowledges and ways of being/becoming that have been hidden and unknown, are articulated and disseminated. As Walker explains, “the ethics of opacity establishes a critical movement, indeed produces an ethical demand, that speaks to and is founded upon a responsibility to interrogate hegemonic epistemological production” (2011, p. 109). It is important to acknowledge here Glissant’s (2010) work in this area and note some of the similarities in his approach compared with Walker’s (2011) theorisation. Glissant defines opacity at a material and ontological level, namely, he understands opacity as an alterity that exceeds known and taken-for-granted categories of difference. Glissant’s definition of opacity, then, exposes the limits of hegemonic representations of the world that prevent understandings of multiple perspectives and ways of being in the world. “To understand these [opacities] truly”, writes Glissant (2010, p.  190), “one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components”. In other words, one must experience the materialities and ontologies of the world rather than approach opacities epistemically through existing categories concerning their nature or essence.

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Glissant’s (2010) understanding of opacity has broad implications for decolonisation, because he explicitly acknowledges the material and ontological consequences of coloniality. The ethics of opacity, therefore, calls into question formulations of higher education internationalisation that affirm the modern/colonial global imaginary. In this sense, the ethics of opacity interrogates the ethical presuppositions of internationalisation policies and practices. The ethics of opacity also enables higher education policymakers and scholars to dismantle those mechanisms that perpetuate cognitive injustices—from the systems of access and management in universities, the systems of authoritative control, standardisation, classification, commodification, accountancy, and bureaucratisation reflected in the organisational structures, the teaching methods and assessment mechanisms of students and faculty alike, the research practices and publishing norms, to the curricular content and design of courses (Mbembe, 2016). As Stein (2019) argues, the continued hegemony of higher education “in the form of the modern uni-versity precludes other educational possibilities, because it posits itself as uni-versal” (149). For the university to become pluriversity, the hegemony of the modern university has to be dismantled (Boidin et al., 2012), therefore, a decolonial ethics approach such as the ethics of opacity that welcomes the ‘opaque ones’ as fundamental partners in the quest for knowledge is important. Key, then, in making ‘pluri-versities’ possible is constructing ‘global’ or ‘internationalised’ understandings in a different way—a way that does not involve the one-way diffusion of locally produced knowledges into a universal global design (Dunford, 2017). It is here that the idea of pluriversality is useful. Pluriversality refers to recognising that there are plural values and ways of knowing across cultures rather than only Western ones (Mignolo, 2006; Santos, 2014; Viveiros de Castro, 2017). A value is pluriversal, explains Dunford (2017), “insofar as it is constructed in a manner that takes seriously, shows respect for, and emerges from communication and exchange across multiple places, cultures and cosmovisions” (390). As Dunford suggests further, a particular policy or institutional practice “is compatible with a pluriverse, if it allows other worlds to survive and thrive, and incompatible if it inevitably involves the destruction of other life-worlds” (ibid.). In this sense, then, one may ask: To what extent do internationalisation policies and practices in higher education pluriversalise knowledge traditions and enable curricula to better capture the experiences of different populations? What might pluriversal dialogue look like across higher

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education institutions? Does intercultural dialogue have any limits or constraints, when it comes to institutional policies or practices in higher education? The idea of pluriversality of knowledge-making in higher education has repercussions for the internationalisation paradigm in that it re-orients the civic role of higher education institutions as spaces for critical debates about the ethical investments of contemporary universities as public institutions. A move towards an ethics of opacity in higher education, then, means reimagining the contemporary university by opening up “potentially emancipatory possibilities for a critical theory of knowledge in the interests of those on the underside of modernity” (Walker, 2011, p. 110). Such a critical theory of knowledge, for example, would constantly raise the question: “what do we teach, how do we educate, in what languages, and in what systemic conditions” (Odysseos, 2017, p. 466)? As calls to develop a decolonial ecological ethics in higher education internationalisation grow louder, we may choose to ignore them; or we may decide to engage with the sort of pluriversality discussed above and begin to challenge more systematically and persistently the mechanisms by which universities continue to circumscribe what counts as knowledge. We may do so, suggests Odysseos (2017), in order to participate in the struggles for epistemic justice and contest the ethico-political ‘consciousness’ of coloniality/neoliberalism that may be entailed in internationalisation policies and practices. Engaging in an ethics of opacity in higher education internationalisation would essentially amount to working towards abolitionist praxis in the university, as noted earlier (Luke & Heynen, 2021; Harney & Moten, 2013)—that is, practices that dismantle “the structures of admission, ways of teaching and researching, compensation for university employed, patterns of land dispossession and occupation, and other measures that operate through racialized notions of difference” (Luke & Heynen, 2021, p. 419). Abolition, in this sense, is a part of the ethics of opacity and consists in a new kind of engagement with higher education institutions that promise to break from the conditions that make possible the colonial production of knowledge (Zembylas, 2018a, 2018b). Chapters 5 and 6 in this book have indicated that there is little doubt that higher education needs to engage in a great deal of change in order to respond to colonialism and ecological catastrophe. As a field generally, higher education needs to engage in a radical shift of its taken-for-granted assumptions in many different aspects with regard to the extractivism, expropriation, dispossession and exploitation which has engendered

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coloniality and ecological damage and extinction (Silova, 2021). In order to be responsible for this state of affairs, higher education would need to move beyond a mechanistic worldview of Cartesian dualisms, through an understanding of the dynamic indeterminism of the world. For example, this would require a decolonising of time—inhabiting multiple temporalities in order to discern the entangled effects of the past on the thick-now of the present and future. Furthermore, a relational ontology brings attentiveness to the fact that subjects and objects or any entities do not pre-exist but come into being through relations. This acknowledgement of the intra-activity of the world makes it clear that nothing can exist on the outside—we are all already part of the world, including the ecological damage that has been wrought. Human exceptionalism from this worldview is no longer possible, nor is the separation upon which other forms of dualism are based—“humans are not the only agents terraforming Earth” (Papadopoulos et  al., 2021, p.  6). Higher education would need to acknowledge its a-void-ance of attention to absent, subjugated and threatened human and more-than-human others, including those who are absent in the built and earthly environment. This would require changes in policies, practices, curricula, pedagogies and scholarship. There would also be a need to develop transdisciplinary studies, traversing disciplinary boundaries. This would involve cultivating close attentiveness to the complexities and intertwinement of coloniality and ecological damage, a disruption of them as separate fields, as a number of scholars such as Ferdinand (2022), Hamilton and Neimanis (2018), Sharpe (2016) and Yusoff (2018) have suggested. We also need to remember that ethical responsiveness or response-­ ability is both context-specific and relational. What is good for responsiveness in one situation is not necessarily so in another. This is why curiosity and openness are important sensibilities for response-ability to happen. Van Dooren (2019, p. 223) writes about how important it is “to understand and respond in ways that are never perfect, never innocent, never final, and yet always required”. Responsibility for ecological damage that is already with us. All in all, we have sought to suggest a distinctive form of decolonial ecological ethics in higher education internationalisation in response to the ethical dilemma related to the epistemic dominance of Eurocentric and human exceptionalist thinking. The ethics of opacity creates possibilities at the most fundamental level—the level of knowledge production— to contest and confront what the university does on an everyday basis to

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perpetuate Western ways of knowing as a superior way of producing universal knowledge. Moving a step further, the ethics of opacity also creates openings in which past, present and future ‘opaque’ others can be welcomed and disturb our sense of the world. Taking the ethics of opacity seriously opens avenues for further work judging whether, how and why given policies and practices in higher education internationalisation are compatible with pluriversality (cf. Dunford, 2017). Insisting on the notion of the ethics of opacity, we view this as an incessant and unfinished project in higher education that constantly poses the question (cf. Walker, 2011): What sorts of institutional arrangements and intellectual projects in higher education internationalisation would such an ethics of opacity entail? In response to this question, we recognise that even an attempt rooted in critical and decolonial ecological ethics is not exempt from the risk of reproducing neoliberal and neo-colonial imperatives of internationalisation. However, we must not settle on a response, but rather insist that the question of decolonial ethics in higher education internationalisation is a move “that encourages a fundamental decolonial questioning of the language, praxis and figures of ethics” (Odysseos, 2017, p.  471). If this book encourages others to explore this question further, then it would have made its small contribution to the construction of an ethics in higher education that can foster a new culture that embraces epistemic justice as a necessary means to achieve social justice and decolonisation in an age of ecological catastrophe.

Propositions for Responsibility and Response-Ability in Higher Education Propositions are speculative ideas which help think about possibilities of how responsibility and response-ability might contribute to changing or reconfiguring the way higher education is currently being conducted. Propositions have been developed by philosophers such as Erin Manning and Brian Massumi following the work of Alfred North Whitehead (1978). According to Whitehead, propositions are different from rules, but rather are “theories in the making” and are developed from experiences in which there is a “flash of novelty” which comes into being through appetition or desire (Manning, 2009, p. 226). Propositions can be viewed as inflections or forces that influence what may come to be expressed in the process and how an incipient situation becomes open to be changed, intensifying or

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inhibiting it (Manning, 2012). It is never outside the occasion or the event, but developed within it. It is important to bear in mind that propositions do not assume a volitional and intentional human agent, rather it is in events and relationships, and more particularly, in the in-between or interstices of what happens that potentials come into being. Propositions also do not make normative claims or judgements, and are not necessarily true; they move something into action (Manning, 2012). Propositions don’t produce concrete solutions, instead they offer suggestions for what Erin Manning (2009, pp. 226–227) refers to as “enabling constraints” for “thinking-in-action”. As Sarah Truman and Stephanie Springgay (2016, p. 259) explain, “Propositions do not give information as to how they function in concrete instances but gesture to how they could potentialize…”. Propositions can be thought of as worldings—“a serial iteration of the world’s complexing and re-complexing, of its own relational potential” (Manning & Massumi, 2020, p. 8). To summarise, propositions help us discern how responsibility and response-ability, in conversation with feminist posthumanism and new materialism and the political ethics of care, could be enacted in higher education, with specific attention to coloniality and ecological damage. What are interesting alternative potentialities that relational ontologies could activate, make possible and move higher education to doing things differently? In what follows, we outline ten propositions or enabling constraints which such relational ontologies might offer for responsibility and response-ability for a decolonial ecological higher education. Proposition 1  Reconfigure higher education by unlearning and disrupting current imaginaries of Western metaphysics and human hyperseparation from more-than-human living worlds. This would mean acknowledging our entanglements and mutual dependencies, attuning to animism and the vitality of other earth beings as kin for reimagining common worlding futures. Bringing into focus relational ontologies involving intra-actions that matter can help to produce new practices of imagination through crafting an art of attentiveness in higher education. Attentiveness involves cultivation of all types of noticing—visual, auditory, smell, touch which can be used to enhance response-ability in scholarship and pedagogies. Proposition 2  Engage with relational ontologies for learning and scholarship. Diffract pluriversal and indigenous cosmologies with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and political ethics of care to engage in

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response-able pedagogical and scholarly creative experiments which involve the relational practices of sympoiesis (making together) for becoming-­with earth others in co-presence as kin for alternative worlds. Proposition 3  Render each other capable through multispecies encounters to enhance recuperation through the ability to respond to the other and allow the other’s response in return. Such an orientation would change extractivist, intrusive and exploitative research practices as well as disrupt the focus of research on solely human-human encounters. Non-­extractivist lively experimental multispecies research encounter, where all participants are rendered capable as entangled phenomena, requires collective and engaged ways of doing scholarship in academia, not individualised or privatised ones. Proposition 4 Move beyond responsibility as an attribute of individual entities. Practice responsibility as an ongoing collective ethical intra-active process, which is never ending and is attuned to power differentials in detailed and specific contexts of worlding. Such responsible practices incorporate complicity and non-innocence in relation to the colonial, animal and military-industrial complex, imperialism, classism, racism and the associated practices of extractivism, dispossession, exploitation and extinction. This includes a responsibility in higher education for the inheritance of such practices and their effects on a damaged earth—the thick now— the superposition of the past, future and present. Proposition 5  Face our complicity in coloniality, oppression, violence and ecological damage and constantly examine its implications in higher education by cultivating anti-complicity practices that connect us with the pain and suffering of minority and Indigenous populations around the world. Proposition 6  Recognise and take responsibility for our harmful colonial habits of being and create spaces for response-­abilities and deeper affective connections with all species. This involves teaching and learning a decolonial ethics of being with others in everyday life that identifies and challenges privileged irresponsibility in all of its forms.

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Proposition 7  Refuse the reproduction of colonial forms of knowledge and recognise Indigenous and other forms of knowledge that bring new ways of being and living in the world. Dis-invest in affective or other attachments that perpetuate unjust, oppressive and colonial addictions. Proposition 8 Nurture an ethics of opacity to question formulations of higher education that affirm the modern/colonial global imaginary. An ethics of opacity in higher education interrogates the ethical presuppositions of internationalisation policies and practices. The opaque is a critique of the (supposed) transparency of Eurocentric knowledge, hence to cultivate an ethics of opacity in higher education would mean to challenge the colonial roots of the modern university.

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Index1

A Accountability, 8, 29–32, 34, 91, 97, 98, 101, 113, 130 Affect affective, 2, 10, 69, 86–96, 99–103, 110, 139, 140 affective solidarity, vii, 96–99 Agency, 2, 3, 7, 29, 31, 93, 113, 120 Agential cuts, 8, 31, 73, 110 Alaimo, Stacey, 6, 7, 54, 55, 72, 113 Animism critical animism, 11, 111, 121, 122 Indigenous animism, 121 Anthropocene, 11, 52, 111–113, 116, 122 Anthropos, 112 Arendt, Hannah, 22–26, 68n1 Attentiveness, vii, 7, 10, 26, 41, 65–68, 74, 78, 95, 110, 120, 124, 130, 136, 138

B Backgrounding, 49 Barad, Karen, vi, 2, 6–9, 18, 28–34, 29n2, 43, 49, 54, 64, 65, 68–73, 113, 119, 124, 130 Bennett, Jane, 6, 7 Body/mind, 7 Braidotti, Rosi, 6, 7, 33, 49–51 C Capitalism, 2, 4, 11, 32, 52, 85, 98, 109, 111, 113, 115, 119, 120, 131, 132 Care care-giving, 42, 67, 70 care-receiving, 42, 73 caring about, 26, 41, 73 caring for, 41 caring for my own, 46

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, Responsibility, Privileged Irresponsibility and Response-ability, Palgrave Critical University Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-34996-6

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INDEX

Care (cont.) caring with, 42–43, 73 democratic caring, 6 integrity of care, 43 Cartesian dualisms, 7, 11, 136 mechanisms of dualism, 9, 38, 40, 48, 123 Charity, 47 Colonial, 3, 4, 11, 75, 84–86, 88, 89, 92, 96, 97, 99–101, 111, 112, 114–121, 132–135, 139, 140 Colonialism coloniality, v, vii, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 18–21, 26, 31, 38, 56, 66, 74, 78, 79, 84–103, 113–116, 118, 130–136, 138, 139 decolonial, 4, 10, 11, 85–87, 90, 91, 101, 114, 120, 132–139 decolonisation, 10, 85–103, 116, 134, 137 decolonising solidarity, 87, 88, 96–103 settler colonialists, 11 Competence, 7, 42, 131 Complicity, 3, 5, 9–11, 19, 23, 30, 31, 54, 55, 87, 90–96, 98, 99, 103, 139 Conservation, 113 Counter-surveying, 117, 118 Covid-19 pandemic, 4, 8 Critical University Studies (CUS), vi, 4, 11, 132 Curiosity, vii, 10, 65, 68–70, 74, 78, 110, 117, 136 D Despret, Vinciane, 2, 6, 7, 9, 64, 67–69, 72, 73, 124 Diffraction diffractive, vi, 7, 43, 65, 122 temporal diffraction, 7, 123 District Six, 117, 118

E Ecological crisis, 2, 11, 47, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119 Ecological damage, 3–6, 8, 10, 11, 18, 19, 21, 31, 55, 66, 74, 78, 108, 109, 111–114, 117, 119, 122–124, 130, 132, 136, 138, 139 Ecology decolonial ecology, 114 ecological catastrophe, vii, 4, 78, 108–124, 135, 137 Enlightenment, viii, 5 Enslavement, 84, 117 Entanglement, 5–7, 11, 29–34, 43, 54, 64, 65, 68, 69, 72, 78, 110, 111, 118–120, 138 Environmental crisis, 109 environmental degradation, 8 Epistemological, 2, 4, 6, 33, 52, 54, 132, 133 Ethics of opacity, viii, 132–137, 140 Expressive-collaborative, 28, 33 Extraction, 4, 115, 123 extractivist, 113, 139 F Fanon, Frantz, 88 Feminist new materialism, 5, 7, 11, 111, 122 material feminisms, 6 Feminist posthuman, 2, 3, 5, 9, 130, 132 Ferrus, Diana, 117 G Glissant, Édouard, 114, 133 Global North, 88, 90, 97, 99, 102, 103, 113, 115, 116, 119, 122 Global South, 22, 97, 101, 103, 108, 116, 118, 120, 122

 INDEX 

Guilt, vii, 23, 24, 26, 38, 92–94, 96, 98 H Haraway, Donna, 2, 6–9, 18, 29, 31–34, 52, 54, 64, 66–74, 119, 124, 130 Hauntology, 7, 33, 119 hauntological, 78 Higher education, v, vi, viii, 2–6, 8, 10, 11, 19, 22, 23, 26, 28, 31, 32, 34, 38, 41, 42, 56, 78, 79, 85–88, 90–93, 97, 99–103, 108–111, 113–116, 123, 130–140 higher education institutions, 11, 40, 85, 86, 90, 91, 98, 99, 102, 103, 108, 110, 114, 116–121, 134–135 Homogenisation, 49, 51, 112 Human exceptionalism, 5, 51, 109, 110, 113, 136 Humanism anti-humanism, 6 liberal humanism, 7 Human/non-human, 7 more-than-humans, vii, 6, 18, 28, 34, 65, 72, 78, 110, 115, 120, 124, 130, 132, 136, 138 Hyperseparation, 11, 110, 123, 138 I Incorporation, 49, 50 Indeterminacy, 7, 30, 32, 33, 67, 70, 71, 78, 113, 123 Indigenous, vii, 11, 50, 84, 85, 90, 91, 97–99, 101–103, 111, 112, 117, 118, 120–122, 138–140 Individualism, 64, 110 Inferiorisation, 49

165

Instrumentalism, 49, 50, 110 Intra-action, 29, 32–34, 65, 68, 69, 110, 113, 138 J Justice justice-to-come, 7, 30, 68 social injustice, 2, 52 social justice, 4, 10, 41, 85, 92, 132, 137 structural injustice, 18–22, 26, 94, 95 K Kirby, Vicky, 7, 113 L Liability Model, 19–21 M Manning, Erin, 6, 7, 67, 117, 137, 138 Marginalised, vi, 10, 39, 40, 44, 47, 49–51, 56, 85, 91, 97–101, 110 Massumi, Brian, 6, 7, 67, 71, 113, 114, 137, 138 Matter/meaning, 7 Mechanistic worldview, 11, 111, 115, 116, 120, 123, 136 N Nature/culture, 7 Neoliberalism, 2, 27, 78, 96, 110, 132, 135 neoliberal logics, 27, 123, 132 Non-human animals, 5, 28, 51, 115, 116, 123 Non-innocence, 3, 5, 9–11, 30, 32, 54, 87, 90–96, 103, 139

166 

INDEX

O Objectivity, 31 Omnicide, 115, 117 Ongoingness/iteration, 10, 65, 73, 78, 110, 138 Ontological, 2, 4, 6, 29, 32, 33, 55, 65, 123, 132–134 Openness to encounter, 10, 65, 70–72, 74, 78, 110 Othering, 49 P Pandemic, v, 4, 8, 73, 108, 116 Participatory, 6 Pedagogy pedagogy of solidarity, 100, 101 public pedagogy, 88, 99–101, 103 Planetary crisis, 4, 120 damaged planet, 3, 4, 8, 10, 31, 38, 50, 52, 56, 65, 72, 74, 78, 113, 117, 123, 124 Plumwood, Val, 38, 40, 47–51, 110, 112, 121, 123 Pluriversality, 134, 135, 137 Politeness, 10, 65, 68–70, 74, 78, 110 Political, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 14, 18–25, 29, 34, 51–54, 56, 63, 74, 76, 77, 79, 83–87, 89–93, 95–97, 111–113, 116, 119, 120, 122–124 Political ethics of care, 2–5, 7, 8, 18, 19, 26, 33, 64, 66, 111, 113, 130, 138 Politico-ethico-onto-epistemology, 6, 33, 123 Post-anthropocentrism, 6 Postcolonialism, 6, 8 Power, vii, 6, 21, 28, 29, 32, 34, 38, 39, 43, 45, 47, 53, 54, 74–78, 84–86, 89, 93, 97, 110, 117, 121, 139

Privilege, 28, 38–40, 44, 50–52, 54–56, 75, 87, 89, 92–94, 99–101, 115, 116 Privileged irresponsibility, vii, 2–11, 19n1, 27, 34, 38–56, 72, 79, 85–92, 96, 97, 100, 102, 108, 111, 114–116, 130, 132, 139 Production, 20, 45–46, 53, 56, 84, 86, 88, 97, 98, 133, 135, 136 Propositions, viii, 11, 27, 137–140 Protection, 44–45 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 2, 5 R Racism, 4, 29, 32, 38, 40, 54, 56, 88, 91, 94, 99, 116, 119, 122, 132, 139 anti-racism, 6 Radical exclusion, 49, 50 Recuperation/recuperative, 30, 118, 119, 139 Relational ontology/ies, 2, 3, 7, 11, 18, 19, 26, 29, 111, 114, 122, 123, 136, 138 Rendering each other capable, vii, 10, 64, 65, 72–74, 78, 110, 123 Resistance, 10, 55, 66, 74–78, 91, 92 Response-ability, vii, 2–10, 42, 56, 64–79, 85, 86, 111, 124, 130, 132, 136–140 Responsibility as caring, 26–28 collective responsibility, 18, 22–26, 39, 93 as entangled, 29–33, 64, 111–114, 130 passes out of responsibility, 38, 43–48, 56

 INDEX 

personal responsibility, 18, 19, 47 as political, 22–26 as relational, 19–22 Responsiveness, vii, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 30, 34, 42, 64–67, 71, 77, 78, 111, 120, 123, 124, 130, 136 Rose, Deborah Bird, 2, 6, 8, 9, 18, 30, 34, 50, 67, 70, 109, 113, 123, 124 S Scholarship, 4, 6, 11, 28, 92, 113, 116, 118–120, 123, 136, 138, 139 Schrader, Astrid, 9, 32, 34, 65–67 Sensibilities, 2, 10, 26, 33, 65, 66, 70–72, 74, 78, 110, 130, 136 Shame, 38, 39, 92 Sixth mass extinction, 4 Social Connection Model, 19–23, 26, 33 Space, 7, 9, 10, 34, 50, 54, 73, 75, 78, 92, 102, 113, 116, 118, 119, 133, 135, 139 Spacetimemattering, 7, 64 Stengers, Isabelle, 6, 7, 32, 112, 124 Subject/object, 2, 3, 7, 10, 18, 19, 21, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34, 49–51, 54, 65, 66, 69, 70, 76, 84, 89, 96, 101, 113, 117, 130, 133, 136 Sustainability, 11, 110, 111, 113 Sympoiesis, 64, 139

167

T Temporality thick-now, 30, 136 time, 136 Tentacularity, 66 Theoretical-juridical, 6, 27, 33 Trans-corporeality, 72, 113 Transdisciplinary, 116, 118, 122, 123, 136 Tronto, Joan, 2, 5–9, 18, 26–28, 33, 38–49, 64, 66, 70, 72, 73, 92, 124 Trust and solidarity, 42, 73 Tsing, Anna, 2, 66, 69, 71 V Vital forces, 5 W Walker, Margaret Urban, 2, 6, 8, 18, 27–29, 41 White supremacy, 8, 9, 121 Wilful ignorance, 9, 38, 39n1, 51–56, 72, 109, 115, 119 Worlding, 70, 123, 130, 138, 139 Wynter, Sylvia, 8, 85, 88 Y Young, Iris Marion, 2, 8, 18–27, 33, 39, 41, 44, 45, 70, 93