Towards Posthumanism in Education: Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Mappings [First Edition] 1032430982, 9781032430980

Citation preview

Towards Posthumanism in Education

This edited volume presents a post-humanist reflection on education, mapping the complex transdisciplinary pedagogy and theoretical research while also addressing questions related to marginalised voices, colonial discourses, and the relationship between theory and practice. Exhibiting a re-imagination of education through themed relationalities that can transverse education, this cutting-edge book highlights the importance of matter in educational environments, enriching pedagogies, teacherstudent relationships and curricular innovation. Chapters present contributions that explore education through various international contexts and educational sectors, unravelling educational implications with reference to the climate change crisis, migrant children in education, post-pandemic education, feminist activists and other emergent issues. The book examines the ongoing iterations of the entanglement of colonisation, modernity, and humanity with education to propose a possibility of education capable of upholding heterogeneous worlds. Curated with a global perspective on transversal relationalities and offering a unique outlook on posthuman thoughts and actions related to education, this book will be an important reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, posthumanism and new materialism, curriculum studies, and educational research. Jessie A. Bustillos Morales is Senior Lecturer in the Education Division at London South Bank University (LSBU), UK. Shiva Zarabadi holds a doctorate in Education, Gender, Feminist New Materialism and Posthumanism from UCL Institute of Education, and works as a visiting lecturer at UCL Institute of Education and University of Westminster, UK.

Routledge New and Critical Studies in Education Series editors: Cathal Ó Siochrú and Stephen Ward

This forward-looking series is designed to provide a new level of academic texts for an expanding, research-focused readership in Education Studies, responding to the need for texts which look beyond the professional orientation of improving teacher practice. The series will advance knowledge and study for those new to, and already familiar with, education studies at the scholarly level, introducing new and challenging theories and concepts, and will look towards pressing educational issues with a societally relevant angle such as: ecological education and sustainability; education for a new world of work and employment; new media technologies and digital education; affect studies in education; education and social justice; queer theory and education; and prison education. Ultimately, books in the series will be critical and challenging in nature, and look broadly to globalism, international education, and education for an unknown future world. Books can be scholarly monographs (edited or authored) that appeal primarily to a core audience of scholars and researchers, or edited/authored volumes grounded in research but relevant to a wider dual audience of researchers and practitioners/educators through practical and applied elements. Books in the series include: Student Voice, Behaviour, and Resistance in the Classroom Environment Lessons from Disruptive and Disaffected School Children Thomas Ralph Towards Posthumanism in Education Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Mappings Edited by Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi

For more information about the series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeNew-and-Critical-Studies-in-Education/book-series/RNCSED

Towards Posthumanism in Education

Theoretical Entanglements and Pedagogical Mappings Edited by Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bustillos Morales, Jessie, 1983- editor. | Zarabadi, Shiva, editor. Title: Towards posthumanism in education : theoretical entanglements and pedagogical mappings / edited by Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge new and critical studies in education | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023055936 (print) | LCCN 2023055937 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032430973 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032430980 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003365693 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Education--Philosophy. | Posthumanism. | Educationalchange. Classification: LCC LB14.7 .T68 2024 (print) | LCC LB14.7 (ebook) | DDC 370.1--dc23/eng/20231227 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023055936 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023055937 ISBN: 978-1-032-43097-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-43098-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-36569-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693 Typeset in Galliard by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of Figures vii List of Editors and Contributors viii Series Editor’s Preface xvii Acknowledgements xviii 1 Posthuman Educational Mappings: Knotting Plateaus of Care

1

SHIVA ZARABADI AND JESSIE A. BUSTILLOS MORALES

PART I

Posthuman Pedagogical Becomings

17

2 Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education: ‘There is No Thought Not Yet Thought’

19

AND PASLEY, ALEJANDRA JARAMILLO-ARISTIZABAL AND NOAH ROMERO

3 Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education: Becoming-Citizen

38

DIANNE MULCAHY, SARAH HEALY AND MARTIN AWA CLARKE LANGDON

4 Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education

54

RUTH VINZ

PART II

Posthuman Pedagogical Diffractions

69

5 A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism: Teaching Elsewhere

71

SARAH A. SHELTON

vi Contents 6 Affective Refusals, More-than-Human Identities and De-Colonisation in Early Childhood Education

85

GIOVANNA CAETANO-SILVA, ALEJANDRA PACHECO-COSTA AND FERNANDO GUZMÁN-SIMÓN

7 Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions: Reconceptualising Critical Pedagogies for More-than-Human Crisis Times 101 EVELIEN GEERTS AND DELPHI CARSTENS

PART III

Posthuman Pedagogical Matterings

121

8 Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education: Thinking-with Posthumanist and Feminist Materialist Theory-Praxis

123

NIKKI FAIRCHILD, KAREN GRAVETT AND CAROL A. TAYLOR

9 Response-Able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context: Plaiting to Re-Think Progress

137

HANNA RETALLACK AND TABITHA MILLETT

10 Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions

149

SAMIRA JAMOUCHI

11 Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment

160

ANA VICENTE RICHARDS, MARK INGHAM, LIZ BUNTING AND VIKKI HILL

PART IV

Posthuman Affective Eco-Pedagogy

179

12 Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures

181

ANNA HICKEY-MOODY AND DAVID ROUSELL

13 Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy: Staging the Climate Crisis

197

HEDWIG FRAUNHOFER AND LAURENZ VOLKMANN

Index 212

Figures

3.1 Untitled (Whakanoa) 45 3.2 Announcing the foreshore as sacred 45 5.1 Two all-purpose classrooms on the University of Texas at Arlington campus 72 5.2 A sampling of pedagogical documentation and diffractions from ENGL 2329: American Literature, Spring 2018 78 6.1 Paradi/se/sing in the school: a more-than-human assembly 87 7.1 Irruption: Diffraction 102 7.2 Irruption: The capitalist social machine 103 7.3 Irruption: Critical materialist theories 104 7.4 Irruption: Neoliberal extractive late capitalism & the Capitolocene… 105 7.5 Irruption: …& ‘Capitalist Realism’ 105 7.6 Irruption: Microfascisms 107 7.7 Irruption: Dyschronia… 109 7.8 Irruption: … or spacetimematterings 110 7.9 Irruption: The ‘Anthrobscene’ 113 7.10 Irruption: Resistance and/or refusal 114 9.1 Plait with students in the auditorium 144 10.1 Bodily and sensory engagement and entanglement with wool felting 155 11.1 The things that wink at me from the other side of the room. Showing a stage in the folding and unfolding of our love letters 161 11.2 Intermezzo Kindness: Care in folding Love in unfolding. Our love letters halfway through their journey 165 12.1 Oscar competing in the Amcross wearing a full suit composed of carbon fibre 188 12.2 Encountering the Loy Yang power station in the La Trobe Valley 190 12.3 Jordan’s digital rendering of the Pokemon carbon culture assemblage 191 12.4 A drawing of Bernard’s messy desk 192 12.5 Still video image from MASS by Zoe Scoglio 194

Editors and Contributors

Liz Bunting is an educator, researcher and creative strategist. In her role as an Educational Developer at University of the Arts London she supports colleagues in creating equitable experiences and outcomes for students, aiming to nurture educational communities where all staff and students thrive. Her research explores ecologies of belonging and compassion, entangled in institutional cultures, policies and pedagogies. She is drawn to posthumanism as a lens for considering relationality and mattering as key concepts of belonging, rooted in my teaching philosophy of education as a space for hope in resistance to injustice. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, recipient of the AdvanceHE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (2020), and co-director of the consultancy Belonging through Compassion https://www.belongingthroughcompassion.com/ Giovanna Caetano-Silva has a degree in pedagogy from the University of São Paulo and has acquired diverse teaching experiences in both primary and early childhood education in different contexts in Brazil. She completed an Erasmus Mundus Master’s degree in Play, Education, Toys and Languages at the University of Cordoba, Polytechnic of Lisbon and Marmara Uni­versity. Subsequently, Giovanna was selected to start her PhD at the University of Seville with a predoctoral FPI contract. She is currently conducting her doctoral research in the framework of the research project Improving Multimodal Literacy in childhood (3–8 years old): development of an inclusive model in Areas with Social Transformation Needs (MODALITY). Her research interests revolve around post-qualitative inquiry and literacy in early childhood education in the field of Posthumanism and New materialism. Delphi Carstens is Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at the University of the Western Cape and a member of the Orphan Drift collective. His research interests include animal studies, the new synthesis in biology, feminist new materialisms, Deleuze-Guattarian theory, uncanny speculative fiction, the relationships between humans and environments, as well as figurations of the Anthropocene/Capitalocence in contemporary culture. He has published widely on the relevance of these matters to HE (higher education)

Editors and Contributors  ix pedagogy, recently in the edited volume A human Pedagogy published by Palgrave and the journals, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the South, Ethics & Social Welfare, CriStal, Somatechnics and Philosophy Today. Hedwig Fraunhofer is Professor of French and German at Georgia College and State University (USA). She is the author of Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama (new materialisms series, Edinburgh UP, 2020) and is currently working on a new project on literature and translation beyond the human, with a special interest in the vegetal world. Nikki Fairchild is Associate Professor of Creative Methodologies and Education in the School of Education, Languages and Linguistics, University of Portsmouth where she has a research leadership role and is the coordinator for the Education REF2028 Unit of Assessment. Her research is theoretically informed by critical feminist materialist and posthumanist theory-praxis and has two bifurcations. The first is employing research-creation and creative methodologies to provide different ways to disturb and enact knowledge production in conference spaces. The second focuses on creative ways to activate and entangle relationality with gender, place-spaces, time, temporality, childhoods and education to explore these impacts on human, nonhuman and more-than-human bodies. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Posthumanism and on the Editorial Boards of Gender and Education and Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. Evelien Geerts obtained her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Evelien is an interdisciplinary philosopher, a Research Fellow (University of Birmingham, UK), and an affiliated researcher at the Posthumanities Hub and the Eco- and Bioart Lab (Linköping University, Sweden). Her work focuses on questions of identity, difference, and violence, critical posthumanist, new materialist, and Deleuzoguattarian approaches, and theorising in (post-)Anthropocenic crisis times. She previously has published in Philosophy Today, Women’s Studies International Forum, and CounterText, and co-edited special issues on “The Somatechnics of Violence” (Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power, forthcoming in 2024) and “Dis/Abling Gender” (Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 2022) – publications that can be found at www.eveliengeerts.com. Karen Gravett is Associate Professor of Higher Education at the Surrey Institute of Education at the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focuses on the theory-practice of learning in higher education, and explores the areas of student engagement, belonging, and relational pedagogies. Karen is Director of the Language, Literacies and Learning research group, a member of the SRHE Governing Council, and a member of the editorial boards for Teaching in Higher Education and Learning Media and Technology. Her work has been funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education, the Association for Learning Development in Higher Education,

x  Editors and Contributors the British Association for Applied Linguistics, the UK Literacy Association and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Karen’s work is published in leading journals including Studies in Higher Education, Teaching in Higher Education, Higher Education, Learning, Media and Technology, and  the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Her latest book is Relational Pedagogies: Connections and mattering in higher education (2023). Fernando Guzmán-Simón obtained his Ph.D. in Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Seville (Spain), where he is a senior lecturer in the Department of Language Education. He has published several research articles on the assessment of academic writing in Spanish, as well as literacy practices in early childhood and primary education. At present, his research is framed in a broader project focused on the development of multimodal literacy in childhood from a posthuman and post-qualitative approach. This project aims to analyse the literacy events of students and their families, and how they create mattering through social interaction. Sarah Healy is Co-lead of SWISP Lab (Speculative Wanderings in Space and Place), a co-laboratory of interdisciplinary practitioners working in the fields of speculative a/r/tography, affect theory, metho-pedagogy, data justice, and digital scholarship in the humanities, arts and social sciences. A  Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education, Sarah is best known for her contributions to the fields of critical affect studies, digital methods and the posthumanities. Sarah’s interdisciplinary program of research is oriented toward the idea of ‘justice’ (in all its forms) and involves research collaborations with academics, artists, practitioners, educators and the GLAM sector globally. Anna Hickey-Moody is the inaugural Professor of Intersectional Humanities in the Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Maynooth. Her work explores intersecting angles of disadvantage through philosophical and creative approaches. She came to Maynooth to develop interdisciplinary research culture exploring intersectionality across the humanities. Prior to joining Maynooth, Anna was Professor of Media and Communication at  RMIT University, Melbourne where she held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship called Interfaith Childhoods. For this large research project, Anna created a unique, responsive research design that allowed her to collaborate with hard-to-reach communities through building strong relationships with children through artmaking. She worked with schools, communities and religious organisations across Australia and the UK to collect and share stories of faith told by diverse religious and secular people. This method offered a way of developing public understandings of what belonging feels like in superdiverse, multicultural cities. You can read what the research participants had to say in the book Faith Stories: Sustaining Meaning and Community in Troubling Times (MUP, 2023). Anna also led

Editors and Contributors  xi the Creative Research in Methods and Practice (CRiMP Lab) and you can read the lab’s work in a collection coming out with Edinburgh University Press in 2024. Before joining RMIT University, Anna was Associate Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has also held positions at Goldsmiths, London and Monash University, Melbourne. Vikki Hill is Educational Developer, an artist and researcher. She has been working in arts education for over 20 years and spent over half of this teaching young people in Further Education where relationality and wellbeing are integral to the learning experience. Her work aims to develop compassionate pedagogies, practices and policies to create strategies to address racism, bias and unbelonging. Her research focuses upon compassionate assessment practices and policies and she experiences her thinking and being as a posthuman praxis. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and received the AdvanceHE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence in 2020. She is co-director of the consultancy Belonging through Compassion https://www.belongingthroughcompassion.com/ Mark Ingham is an educator, artist and researcher, his pedagogical enquiries and creative practices over the last 30 years have been entangled encounters with: images of thought and memory, rhizomatic & meta-cognitive learning theories, fuzzy narratives and virtual and physical liminal teaching spaces. https://markingham.org/ His research is an adventure into relationships between autobiographical memory and photography, Deleuzian and Guattarian ideas of ‘becoming rhizomatic’, assembling agency, nomadic thinking, active blended learning, mixed with ideas of belonging and critical pedagogies. He is a Reader in Critical and Nomadic Pedagogies, a National Teaching Fellow (2021), Co-Chair of UAL’s Professoriate, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a UAL Senior Teaching Scholar. I am the co-founder of UAL’s Experimental Pedagogies Research Group (EPRG). https://eprg.arts.ac.uk/ Samira Jamouchi lives and works in Norway. She holds a Master in Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, a second Master from the Oslo National School of Arts. She accomplished her PhD in visual arts at the University of Agder. This doctoral thesis is the first one in Norway combining visual art and scholarly research. As an artist, researcher and associate professor in visual arts, her research is inspired by craft and artistic practices, a performative approach to materiality as well as art teacher education. Her works include sculptural textile, immersive installations, artistic workshops and scientific publications. Working as both visual artist and professor creates a liminal space in which recurrent themes, as interactions and co-creation, emerge in different contexts. Samira Jamouchi’s work operates on diverse arena and with a diverse public. She uses performative approaches to explore materials together with others to see what can emerge in a

xii  Editors and Contributors collective working process. Her artistic work has been exhibited in different European countries, and in Canada, Morocco, and Vietnam. Her scholarly work and scientific papers are published in several international scientific journals. Alejandra Jaramillo-Aristizabal is an educator, researcher and amateur dancer born and raised in Medellin, Colombia. With an interdisciplinary background including philosophy, literature, psychology, education, dance and anthropology, her work and research engages with the denaturalisation of the binaries and hierarchies that constitute the colonial matrix. She is particularly interested in uplifting the epistemologies and ontologies cast away by a Modern world(s)-destroying machine. In this regard, she is committed to thinking with / standing with the peoples of Abya Yala (Indigenous Americas) and Moana Nui a Kiwa (Indigenous Pacific region) in hopeful support of the movements that push forward the possibility of the Pluriverse, ‘a World where Many Worlds can exist’ (Zapatists expression). While completing her Ph.D. at Auckland University, she works for community-oriented organisations in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Martin Awa Clarke Langdon (Kāi Tahu, Waikato-Tainui, Ngāti Whāwhākia, Ngāti Hikairo) is an artist, curator, educator and museum advisor. Langdon has exhibited and curated throughout Aotearoa New Zealand since 2011. Having also worked in museum education since 2017, he is currently the Kaitohutohu Tikanga Rua Matua/ Senior advisor Biculturalism at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. His artistic career, research interests and modes of operation lie within the duality of his upbringing with Māori and Pākehā worldviews. Langdon seeks to create artworks and projects that stem from this culturally entangled framework. These creations are intended to stimulate dialectic revelations through research, meaningful conversations and collaborative efforts amongst viewers and participants. Tabitha Millett is Assistant Professor at Cambridge University in arts, creativities and education. Tabitha specialises and current research interests are in areas of art and design education and arts-based research. Tabitha is also a practising artist who is working with galleries in London, LA, Munich, and Barcelona. Jessie A. Bustillos Morales is Senior Lecturer in the Education Division at London South Bank University (LSBU). She holds a Ph.D. in Education from University College London (UCL). She has worked in academia for over 13 years across several institutions in the UK. With an interdisciplinary background including sociology, philosophy and education, she is interested in exploring educational and social inequalities through innovative theoretical frameworks and creative methodologies, relevant to everyday educational practice. Her scholarship operates in the intersections of youth studies, methodology, philosophy and critical theory/pedagogy. She has

Editors and Contributors  xiii co-authored and co-edited several books published by Routledge, including Universal Basic Income (2019), Understanding Education and Economics: Key Debates and Critical Perspectives (2020), and Questioning Gender Politics: Contextualising Educational Disparities in Uncertain Times (2024). She has also published several book chapters and presented at national and international conferences. Dianne Mulcahy is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne, Dianne Mulcahy’s research interests centre on pedagogy, education policy and feminist materialist methodological approaches to research as examined and explored through empirical contexts. Issues of difference, disadvantage and in/exclusions are at the heart of these interests and studied chiefly using the conceptual resources of affect and critical materialist theories. Presently, Dianne is researching aspects of the ethics and politics of affect, and their implications for pedagogy and professional practice in school and museum settings. She is also currently engaged in research on the affective dynamics of citizenship and affirmative critique. Alejandra Pacheco-Costa is currently a senior lecturer in Music Education in the Arts Education Department, at the University of Seville (Spain). As a musician and educator, her research has focused on music education, informal music learning, and music, sound and literacy. She has taken part in funded research projects addressing multimodal literacies in early childhood, moving from qualitative research to a more-than-human and post-qualitative lens. She has been a guest lecturer at the Lancaster University (United Kingdom), Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Ruse (Bulgaria), the University of Costa Rica, the University Pablo de Olavide (Spain) and the Graduate Center in the City University of New York (USA). And Pasley, harking from Aotearoa New Zealand, is a Pākehā researcher and educator of Irish descent. Their doctoral research explored the responseabilities of trans secondary students’ spacetimegenderings in Aotearoa New Zealand. Versed in English literature, psychology, and education, their research and teaching has become entangled in (trans)gender studies, sexuality education, coloniality, temporalities, relational ontologies, and postfoundational methodologies. While disciplined in predominantly Western institutions, their scholarship is indebted to te ao Māori and agential realist onto-epistemologies. Since completing their PhD in 2022, And’s work has focused on trans wellbeing and intersex communication in Aotearoa, rainbow violence prevention, everyday sexisms in Australian universities, and more-than-human temporalities. Ana Vicente Richards is an artist-educator-researcher currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in the area of the body in art practice and learning at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

xiv  Editors and Contributors Her research draws on a posthuman feminist framework and concerns the body as a site of active learning in art-based practice-research with the aim to develop a new form of artistic-pedagogic practice that is founded on the reconfiguration of the body as a thinking tool in art & design. She previously studied MA Performance Making and MA Education Studies (Art & Learning) at Goldsmiths, University of London and has worked in creative education for the past fourteen years, primarily in FE, as Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Art & Design and Media. She is currently a Senior External Moderator for the University of the Arts Awarding Body supporting Centres nationwide with the delivery and assessment processes of creative qualifications. Hanna Retallack is a Lecturer in Education at UCL and specialises in issues of feminism, gender and sexualities in schools. After completing a PGCE in Secondary English at the UCL Institute of Education (2008), Hanna taught in London secondary schools for a decade including in a large comprehensive school, an academy, a hospital school, a performing arts school and a selective all girls’ school. During this time, she completed a MA in  Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck (2011). In 2014, through an engagement with a funded research project, Hanna began setting up and facilitating feminism clubs in secondary schools which prompted her PhD study Feminism in Schools? A discursive-psychosocial study of teenagers’ constitutions of feminist subjectivities. Hanna has written and published on the topic of feminisms and social activism in schools, and in the area of popular representations of girls’ sexuality. Hanna’s research is informed by intersectional feminist politics and an interest in the production of knowledge around feminism, sexuality, race and gender. Hanna leads the MA module Feminist Approaches to Knowledge and Pedagogy: Doing Education Differently? David Rousell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT, where he co-directs the Creative Agency Research Lab and serves on the executive committee of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC). His research focuses on collectively re-imagining educational cultures and environments in response to the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging technologies. This work has led to the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches at the nexus of environmental philosophy (ethics, aesthetics, politics), environmental education (pedagogy, curriculum, design), and the environmental arts (history, theory, practice). His recent books include Immersive Cartography and PostQualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021), and co-authored books, Doing Rebellious Research (Brill, 2022), and Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (Routledge, 2023). Noah Romero (Filipinx-Visaya/Ilokano) is Five College Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies at Hampshire College.

Editors and Contributors  xv His  first book, Decolonial Underground Pedagogy – Unschooling and Subcultural Learning for Peace and Human Rights examines the emancipatory potential of minority-led punk, skateboarding, and alternative education communities. Sarah A. Shelton is Senior Lecturer in and the Coordinator of Social Media for the Department of English at The University of Texas at Arlington where she teaches composition and literature. As teaching faculty, she practices and advocates for posthumanist pedagogies, particularly through her more recent work as a faculty Facilitator for experiential learning. Her research interests include the materiality of classrooms and of reading and writing processes, posthumanism, posthumanist pedagogy/education, composition and writing studies, speculative fiction, contemporary literature, feminism, fat studies, disability theory, agential realism, and postqualitative inquiry. She developed the concept of teaching elsewhere through her dissertation, ‘Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possibilities’, and her work in disability and fat studies has been published in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society. She holds a BA in English from UT Austin and an M.Ed. in Teaching and Ph.D. in English from UTA. Ruth Vinz is Morse Endowed Professor in Teacher Education and Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Ruth is the author of seventeen books and numerous articles, written over the fifty-four years of her teaching career. Vinz taught high school English and humanities courses for twenty-three years where she came to understand teaching and learning as restless cartography, journeying with students through landscapes filled with possibility, promise, and poignancy. In her 31 years at Teachers College, she continues to learn with others through coursework, collaborative (re)search/writing projects, and community engagements. She suggests that her writing is intended as an invitation to others and a reminder to herself of the need to continuously move beyond familiar boundaries and to (re)cognise that we are always in-the-making, always becoming through a process of learning, un-learning, questioning, and revising ourselves anew. Vinz calculates that she has provided feedback to at least 38,500 students’ poems, essays, stories, research reports and dissertation drafts from which she continues to learn and be thrilled by the power of imagination, combined with the resources of language, to craft writing into exhilarating and intimate portrayals of our hopes, fears, and dreams. Laurenz Volkmann is full Professor of Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany. He has published widely on teaching literature and media, inter- and transcultural learning and global issues in EFL. His publications include the standard textbook The Global Village: Progress or Disaster? (Munich, 4th ed. 2013) as well as the co-edited volumes Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse:

xvi  Editors and Contributors Linguistics and Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016) and Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures (Amsterdam, 2010). He has published widely on literature, culture and media in EFL teaching, from Shakespeare to Gender Studies to inter- and transcultural learning. He co-authored the standard textbook Teaching English (2015, sec. ed. 2021). Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender in the Department of Education at the University of Bath where she leads the Reimagining Education for Better Futures Research Group. Carol’s research focuses on the entangled relations of knowledge, power, gender, space, and ethics in higher education. Her work develops and utilises transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories and methodologies. Carol is co-editor of Gender and Education; is a member of several editorial boards, including Journal of Posthumanism, Matter, Teaching in Higher Education, and Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning. Her work has been published in qualitative research and higher education journals. Some of Carol’s latest co-authored books are Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events (2022); Transdisciplinary Feminist Research: Innovations in Theory,Method and Practice (2020), both published by Routledge and Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research (2019), published by Palgrave Macmillan. Shiva Zarabadi holds a Ph.D. in Education, Gender, Feminist New Materialism and Posthumanism from UCL Institute of Education, and MSc degree in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research interests include feminist new materialism, posthumanism and intra-actions of matter, time, affect, space, humans and more-than-humans. She uses walking and photo-diary methodologies to map relational materialities in the ordinary practices. She is the co-editor of the book Feminist posthumanisms/ new materialisms and Education (Routledge) and the author of ‘Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment’ in Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, ‘Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature’ in Australian Journal of Environmental Education and ‘The Theatre Of Everyday Debt-Cruelty: The Enfleshed Threat, Missing People and The Unbearable Strange Terrorist Machine’ in the book Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism.

Series Editor’s Preface

This book is the second publication in the Routledge New and Critical Studies in Education series. The series follows on from the successful Routledge Education Studies series launched in 2015 to provide books to meet the increasing demand for texts in non-teacher-training undergraduate courses in universities beginning in the late 1990s. The series currently includes 13 texts on the broad dimensions of Education Studies, including international and comparative education, higher education, economics, child development, inclusivity, gender and employment, new pedagogies, as well as the Psychology, Sociology and Philosophy of Education. Current publications are listed on https://www. routledge.com/The-Routledge-Education-Studies-Series/book-series/RESS Twenty-five years of Education Studies have seen the subject grow in student numbers with courses offered in most UK universities, including pre-92 and Russell Group institutions. It has also developed in academic depth with master’s, doctoral studies and research activity. Routledge has initiated the higher-level series to provide in-depth analysis in new fields of knowledge on topics in education targeted at postgraduate and research students. Rather than simply addressing the current Education Studies curriculum, the series is open to the inclusion of new theories and perspectives, ideas which broaden the scope of study at the postgraduate and research level. There are opportunities for academics to publish substantial book-length texts on their research or derived from a doctoral thesis. We are privileged to have this book on posthumanism and education by Jessie Bustillos Morales and Shiva Zarabadi at an early point in the series. It certainly lives up to our title of New and Critical Studies, for much of this text is very new, both in content and method. The contributing authors take radical approaches, not just to the ideas and concepts, but to the very means of expressing them. Of course, the book looks to the future and to a better world through the education of children and young people, something which, as educators, we all aim for in our different ways. But this book will brook no compromises, insisting on tangible action to make that better future a reality! What makes the text so convincing is the wide range of contributors from across the world, showing that posthumanism is a global initiative to which Shiva and Jessie are making such a fine addition. Cathal Ó Siochrú (Liverpool Hope University) Stephen Ward (Bath Spa University)

Acknowledgements

Our warmest and deepest thanks to all contributors to this book. Your chapters offered us so many moments of meaningful engagement and companionship throughout the editorial process. You engaged with the review process so reflexively and diligently and allowed for this book to mushroom up in a timely manner. The book pulses with so many connections, pedagogical points of departure, knots of thought and challenges to the systemic everydayness of education because of your resolutely innovative work. The book would not be possible without those years of discussions and exchanging ideas in the corridors of university, conferences, seminar rooms and pubs during the years of our PhD student-ships. As two post-PhD students, supervised by Professor Jessica Ringrose, and trying to find our ways as early career researcher we took the responsibility to become the editors of this book to bring and tie our own posthuman thinkings, affective and material moments of our PhD years with our contributors. As an organ of our moving bodies, the book took shape while Jessie was in-between changing academic jobs, and mothering two very young children and also while Shiva was in the process of another round of migration to live with and take care of her mother in Iran. We would like to thank the series editors Professor Stephen Ward and Dr Cathal O’Siochru for their guidance throughout the editorial process and our friends and families for their unfaultering support. A last very special thanks to all posthuman scholars who have taught us how to think and research otherwise, some of whom we have the privilege of including in this book.

1 Posthuman Educational Mappings Knotting Plateaus of Care Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales

Living in the times of what Rosi Braidotti calls ‘posthuman convergence’ (2021), in this book ‘we’ dare to take on the present, in the times when witnessing the Anthropocene renders more ‘thinking with care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012), responsibility and pain. This makes it difficult to pick any one or two climate change and social decline related incidents, such as, the wildfires in Hawaii, draughts in most part of the middle east, war in Ukraine, and the Bibby Stockholm marking the beginning of a new colonial era, this time to keep asylum seekers in a floating ship in Dorset (UK). All the while, hundreds and hundreds of migrants become displaced and drown off the coasts of Europe, the same news day after day, all of this after a long – social and economic – post-pandemic crisis. Under this condition, how can we not think of the hu(man), and of the ‘humanity’, ‘the human(ness) in us’ (Braidotti, 2013) and if ‘it makes sense to speak of ‘humanity’ at all?’ (Herbrechter, 2021). To open a posthuman book as an assemblage of multiplicity made of variously formed matters (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013) is an opening, and thinking with care, that as Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) suggests, is not too long for a smooth harmonious world, but to enable vital ethico-affective everyday practical doings and engaging with the inescapable troubles of interdependent existences. In introducing this book, we reflect on what an introductory act is understood as doing and its many constraints. Instead of a preamble to the whole book we want to meander around the flows and ruptures of the book, not chapter by chapter but plateaus to plateaus. When we present this book we turn to Deleuze and Guattari who propose that ‘a book is an assemblage … a multiplicity … it is made of variously formed matters and very different dates and speeds’ (2005, pp. 3–4). Embracing the multiplicity is to think with a thickly populated world, to create diffractions rather than reflections of the ‘same’ (Haraway and Goodeve, 2000, p. 193). Inspired by Haraway, all assemblages materialised in this book seek to diffract matters of fact into matters of care, concerns and ethical relationalities. It does not only give ‘a thousand tiny methodologies’ (Lather, 2013, p. 637) in how to do post-qualitative education research but also ‘a thousand tiny relationalities’ as we call it, to take, carry, make and become with educational research. Following this, this DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-1

2  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales introductory chapter is not divided into sections with subsection headings, but rather diffracted with affirmative cuts materialised and entangled by quotes, changing the tone, fonts, moods and thoughts into different known/ unknown directions. To stay attuned to the posthuman convergences, we think with the notion of transversality, cutting across oppositional binaries, including those that are nature/culture, human/nonhuman, man/woman, whiteness/blackness, us/ them, living/non-living, body/mind and more. As a response to Braidotti’s call, our book enables entries into ‘new affective transversal assemblages’ and to ‘co-create alternative ethical forces and political codes … to compose a missing people’ (2018, p. 19). It cuts across borders, bodies, spaces, times and  feelings; from witnessing occurrences in classrooms in the US, Spain, New  Zealand, London, Australia, Norway, Germany; to tracing pedagogies such as a walking curriculum in Australia, working with plaits in London, wool-felting in Norway, thinking with carbon culture in Australia and sending love letters as feedback in London. Transing enables horizontal openness and the crossing of the many socio-political practices (Van Der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022, p. 200) and transversal theories and methodologies elicit different ways of knowledge production ‘freed from any obligation to follow hierarchies (classifixations) in organising thought, objects, or living organisms (including humans)’ (p. 199). Like the mushroom collector in Tsing (2015), to think with care in curating this book we did look around rather than look ahead, to widen the transversal relationalities. Transversal relations as ‘trans-corporeal’ (Alaimo, 2010, p. 15) and trans-material (Barad, 2015) entanglements allow more tentacular and less binary (Haraway, 2016) material experiences to emerge (Taylor, 2018, Zarabadi, 2023). The education in this book as a transversal, relational, embodied and embedded moves beyond the proposition of education as a discipline, or just policy and practice organised per sector, such as early years education, primary, secondary schools or higher education. As such we have resisted those categorising hierarchies, and so the book is not led by these common markers; instead we emphasise the ‘viscosity’ and ‘slowness … acceleration and rupture’ that posthuman thoughts and doings open up in education (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005, p. 4). Instead, based on the explorations offered throughout the book, education appears as a territory beyond contexts and transdisciplinarity. Inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) urgent call to re-examine our acceptance of the category of the human, as it represents several systematised normative conventions and recognitions that are exclusionary, atomising and divisive; the book contributes to the current unravelling of the human in education by transposing it with posthumanism. This book happened through multiple ‘agential cuts’ not only by contributors in their unique and singular ‘spacetimemattering’ (Barad, 2007, p. 140), but by us as editors, to think, feel and care when reading and becoming with chapters. For Barad (2014) agential cut is not about ‘breaking apart in different directions’ (p.168) but rather a cutting-together apart, where absolute and

Posthuman Educational Mappings  3 fixed boundaries between here-now and there-then are blurred and each ‘moment’ is an open-ended infinite multiplicity and becoming (Barad, 2014, pp.168–169). We think about these cuts as affirmative and diffractive as having relationality and interdependency but also ‘cuts’ out of which heterogeneity and multiplicity can emerge. A line of becoming only has a middle … A becoming is neither one or two, nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between … Becoming is the movement by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 293–294) To think with care, we open the book with troubling posthuman thoughts and the colonialities of knowledge production, to ask how posthumanism can distance themselves from the ‘monopoly of humanity’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015, p. 66) towards embracing more-than-Western ways of knowing as Pasley, Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Romero suggest in Chapter 2. The authors took posthumanism into the material and embedded fields of education entangling us with Māori, Quechua, and Filipinx worlds to problematise various posthuman tendencies and the violence of ‘humanising’ education. They propose these vital questions: ‘how can posthumanism and a “posthuman” education enact response-ability towards their dark colonial roots and towards the worlds that continue to be threatened by modernist institutions? How can a “posthuman” education uphold multiple worldings, rather than perpetuating the ontological occupation that Modern education has advanced?’. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter (2003) and Marisol de la Cadena (2015) they examine the ongoing iterations of the entanglement of colonisation, modernity, and humanism with education to think about the possibility of an education capable of upholding plural worlds. Pasley, Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Romero remind us Zakiyyah Jackson’s (2015) call ‘to move beyond the human may actually reintroduce the Eurocentric transcendentalism this movement purports to disrupt particularly with regard to the historical and ongoing distributive ordering of race’ (p. 215). This resonates with what many scholars critiquing the Enlightenment project and its humanist education invites us to make ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti, 2018, p. 21) between the ‘politico-pedagogical projects of feminism, postcolonialism, anti-racism, and queer activism’ (Snaza et al., 2014, pp. 48–49) and to think of ‘post’ in posthumanism, as Jackson (2013) suggests ‘not as a temporal location but a geographic one’ (p. 673). This is what Pasley, JaramilloAristizabal and Romero did, materialising the geopolitics of knowledge to embrace other ways of knowing and/in being. De La Cadena (2019) calls this situation ‘the anthropo-not-seen’ where, ‘the world- making process through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make themselves through practices that ontologically separate humans (or culture) from nonhumans (or nature) […] both are obliged into that distinction (and thus wilfully destroyed) and exceed it’ (p. 40). What de la Cadena evokes resonates with what Pasley,

4  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Romero argue in their chapter to stay attuned to the violence of the onto-epistemological anthropos and the (in)visibilities that it may produce and upon which it depends. This can be a decolonising task of Posthumanism that, as Sundberg (2014) suggests, undo the sanctioned ignorance that allows those colonialities to go unchecked. Mulcahy, Healy and Langdon, in Chapter 3, take us into another embodied and embedded becoming-with in Aotearoa New Zealand and explore how a posthuman de-centring of human subjects and re-centering of human and more-than-human relations challenges received views of civics and citizenship. Through an art-based and ethnographic project they attune to the affective, relational and material experiences of becoming citizen and exercising citizen-right practices. They bring these questions forward: how is it that children become citizens in today’s entangled world and what does this becoming produce? What might be possible if we were to alter the curricular and pedagogic conditions for what we can imagine, know and do as citizens? Describing themselves as white settler Australians (Gubbah) when visiting New Zealand, they tell some of the affective intra-actions between bodies, space, belonging and historical colonialism. Attending to the embodied, emplaced and implicative nature of citizenship, Mulcahy, Healy and Langdon consider it as ‘doing’ and ‘becoming’, to problematise the understanding of citizenship as the nation-state modern institution and participatory practice ‘that people continuously do’ (Cross, 2022, p. 1). In using the notion of becoming-citizen, they think of citizenly identity as a process of becoming-more than national, rational, autonomous and right-bearing. To propose more inclusive, socially just civic pedagogies, the authors bring various invaluable details and examples of the Aotearoa New Zealand citizenship curriculum and how it continues to be parsed in terms of a disciplinary focus on the exceptionality of the human. What Mulcahy, Healy and Langdon call sustained silence ‘settler moves to innocence’, those ‘strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege’ (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p. 10) resonates with the notion of sanctioned ignorance in the chapter by Pasley, Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Romero. As teachers, the author created a walking curriculum to enable the material and pedagogical becomings with human and more-than-human bodies; objects, land, water and the affective atmosphere of the foreshore urupā, the emergence of a posthuman citizenship and different ways of thinking and doing citizenship. Similar to Mulcahy, Healy, and Langdon’s walking curriculum to decolonise land and citizenship, walking as a trans(disciplinary)mattering (Taylor, 2020) and a non-neutral enactment (Springgay and Truman, 2018), can tarns-materialise affective and material experiences of bodies, time and space (Zarabadi, 2023). Mulcahy, Healy and Langdon suggest having an affective, material and ethico-political right practice and rights to practice, we need to practise for ‘rights of care’, resonating with Haraway, to diffract a citizenship education and curriculum as a matter of fact into a matter of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011).

Posthuman Educational Mappings  5 Ruth Vinz, in Chapter 4, re-imagines writing as dynamic and generative productions of (be)coming and an entrance into terrains of ambiguities and uncertainty, the (un)FOR-see-able, that necessitates a pedagogical reorientation. Vinz un-disciplines writing as regimented, normative, and schooled practices and representations of what has been learnt into writing as an embodied and materially-mediated encounter. Writing into the unknown, as Cixous (1976) suggests, is to write ‘not about a destiny but about the adventure of trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings’ (p. 885), Vinz writes. Writing into the (un)FOR-see-able and following the embodied and material as an ‘as yet’ of inquiry, is an invitation ‘to be’, and to become ‘rest/restlessly through writing as immersive experiencing’, as she materialises some examples from her notebook when entangling with Walt Whitman’s words and Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds. Immersive experiencing, as Vinz suggests as a means for writers to dwell, gaze, and attune to the possibilities of becoming through writing, not only enables the self as ‘dispersed/diffracted through being and time’ (Barad, 2019, p. 529) to emerge but also to ‘open up to all that is possible in the thickness of the Now’ (p. 524). Vinz’s immersive experiencing in writing into the (un)FOR-see-able resonates with different and diffracted writing experiences by other posthuman scholars; ‘writing tentacularly with Haraway’s notion of string figuring and Cixous’s mode of ecriture feminine (Zarabadi et al., 2019) and ‘collaborative modes of embodied writing that moves, tags, and re-sites us elsewhere, that mis/dis/aligns self-other, and permeates various stable body(boundaries)’ (Fairchild et al. 2023; see also Otterstad and Waterhouse, 2016; Waterhouse et al., 2016; Benozzo et al., 2019; Taylor et al., 2019). Vinz draws on Barad’s notion of intra-action to pose the question, ‘How might we make visible traces of intra-actions through writing practices that entangle the emergent relata-as-flows in both the discursive and the material?’. Intra-dwelling and crossings into webs of relationalities is one answer to this question as Vinz suggests. The other is to becoming-with writing as ‘entangled kin’ (Barad, 2007) and inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) model of ‘making kin’, enabling forms of ‘kinshipping’ (Niccolini et al., 2018), not only to shift pedagogical imaginaries of relations, affects, bodies, materialities, times and things in the classroom and in writing, but also to engage different ways of recognising subjectivity and difference. The ordinary can turn on you. Lodged in habits … it can flip into something else altogether. One thing leads to another. An expectation is dashed or fulfilled. An ordinary floating state of things goes sour or takes off into something amazing and good. Either way, things turn out to be not what you thought they were … The ordinary is a thing that has to be imagined and inhabited. (Kathleen Stewart, 2007, p. 105) We enter posthuman pedagogical diffractions in the book through ordinary encounters, with non-linear and non-hierarchal attachments where differentiated

6  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and diffracted human and more-than-human entanglements emerge, when ‘something that feels like something’ happened (Stewart, 2007, p. 4). Diffraction for Barad is the study of ‘how different differences get made, what gets excluded and how these exclusions matter’ (Barad, 2007, pp. 29–30). Shelton in Chapter 5 uses diffraction and agential realism to dismantle the hierarchal and humanising structures of the classroom. Drawing on some of her empirical data, she argues that moving towards posthumanism in education can create the possibilities for what she calls teaching elsewhere, to think of the affective, material and spatial agency of the classroom. Doreen Massey’s notion of space matters (2005) is taken by other posthuman and affect scholars (Ivinson and Renold, 2013; Zarabadi, 2022a, b, c, 2023; McCormack, 2013; Taylor,  2018) to argue that diffractive and affective entanglements between space-body-material-time can open up capacities to become other, diffracted to a new and different capacity to act, decide, think and feel. As Saldanha suggests, ‘Space is quite simply that which lends things their capacities to move and to differ. Space is difference, multiplicity, change, and movement, not some separate formal realm that would frame them’ (2017, p. 3). Teaching elsewhere, as Shelton puts it, is a material and discursive apparatus, is not about teaching somewhere else but about creating a different space-time to different knowing-in-being emerge. However, she poses an ethical dilemma, that is, if moving toward a posthumanist praxis in education is sustainable and applicable to the everyday, particularly when many teachers and educators already face being underpaid, overburdened by a dysfunctional system that exploits them, buried under paperwork and professional development demands and hamstrung by a lack of resources. Making agential cuts in her pedagogical diffractive practices, through creation/ calibration/ curation she responds to Haraway’s call that ‘where we need to move is not “back” to nature, but elsewhere’ (1992, p. 313), bridging the chasm between the conventional classroom and ‘more-than-human liveliness’ (Alaimo, 2017) enable different diffraction patterns to emerge. Caetano-Silva, Pacheco-Costa and Guzmán-Simón, in Chapter 6, add another diffractive layer to thinking-with-theory in affective and material moments of a nursery in Spain. Through the materialisation of the affective refusals, silences and wilfulness, they undo the identity binaries to reflect on the ways in which belonging and becoming come to be a collective/more-than-human assemblage in the classroom. They think with posthumanism to question the colonial structures and mechanisms that binary thinking perpetuates. Attending to the child/human agency they think diffractively with posthumanism, to stay attentive to the profound differences that small and ordinary matters and intra-action enable. With diffractive readings of silences, refusals and wilfulness in Nabir (Muslim child) becoming-otherwise, Caetano-Silva, Pacheco-Costa and Guzmán-Simón trouble colonial and hierarchical majoritarian reference points: ideas of body, human and religion. They use Lenz Taguchi’s (2010) notion of ‘intra-active pedagogy’ to enable a different understanding of the co-constitution of children and other materialities and to open up the ‘fields of inquiry to respond, to not just humans’ (Murris, 2022, p. 81).

Posthuman Educational Mappings  7 The post-pandemic diffractive temporalities that we are made of reminds us of Haraway’s notion that ‘no-thing comes without its world and any-thing is always linked, connected to other entities’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 137). Can we think of how overlapping movements (waves) of post-pandemic era, and the material challenges (obstacles) to ordinary ways of ‘living’, ‘teaching’ and ‘knowing’ as a ‘human’ or ‘zoom-bies’ as Geerts and Carstens propose in Chapter 7, bend, spread, roll, push and transform our intra-actions with other human and more-than-human bodies (Barad, 2007). Such overlapping troubles of our time are what Geerts and Carstens in Chapter 7 propose to stay with: conceptual, methodological and material life-based irruptive moments as thinking-aids for responding to the disruptions that plague the present. Using a philosophical genealogy of the concept of ‘irruption’ Geerts and Carstens, weave together their (post-)pandemic critical pedagogical experiences and praxes. They consider irruption as energy-filled moments and affirmative and redirectional events that question ‘linearity and normativity’ (Mirka KoroLjungberg, 2015, p. xviii). Through some affective and material examples of post-pandemic frustration, they critically and affirmatively engage with the imperative to immediately ‘bounce back’ to adapt to the new neoliberal normal performances in HE. They pose a salient question: ‘isn’t the “post-pandemic new normal” suddenly starting to look a lot like the “pre-pandemic normal”?’, thinking of how the capitalist social machine (Deleuze, 2004) produces a new normal that is not new at all, considering the intensification of global inequalities, ecological crisis, political resentments, increased polarisations, and fascist post-truth politics (see also Dolphijn and Braidotti, 2023; Zarabadi, 2023). Geerts and Carstens use concepts presented as sticky irruption patches to make other methodological irruptions in the text, in writing, reading and thinking with their chapter. These micro-irruptions in writing resonate with Vinz’s writing as an immersive experience in Chapter 4. Another diffractive overlap they make is to use Jack Halberstam’s concept (2011, p. 3) of ‘toxic positivity’ and how positive thinking is a cure for everything and a way to engineer our own success. Geerts and Carstens consider the post-pandemic conditions of neoliberal higher education (HE) and the imperative to use positive thinking as another way to subjugate ourselves to the capitalist socio-educational machine. But what is it that happens precisely when we encounter someone we love? Do we encounter somebody, or is it animals that come to inhabit you, ideas that invade you, movements that move you, sounds that traverse you? And can these things be parted? (Gilles Deleuze, 1992, p. 17) Diffractive embodied and embedded matterings emerge when love comes to matter and when what matters is love. Thinking with care and with matters of care, the section of posthuman pedagogical matterings starts with mattering with love and kindness to enhance the power of belonging through creative and critical posthuman approaches to pedagogical practices.

8  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor in Chapter 8, drawing on what they coin as pedagogies of mattering, take six concepts-in-relation: love and kindness, belonging and power, creativity and criticality, to rethink the practice of relational pedagogy. To practise with care, for them, is to think through relational pedagogies and move beyond uncaring neoliberal, competitive and individualising higher education environments. Similar to Geerts and Carstens’ chapter, post-pandemic feelings of isolation and disconnection felt between universities, educators and students, emerge as an agential factor in Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor’s engagement with relational pedagogies. For them, thinking with pedagogies of mattering counters the neoliberalisation of HE with its dividing, atomising and human-centred practices, where individual achievements and outcomes are a measure of success. Taking a line of posthumanist flight, Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor suggest that kindness and love matter in higher education, even in short supposedly ordinary instances: a corridor conversation with a student or colleague; time taken to sit and listen at the moment needed: a positive word, glance or smile in class that works as affirmation; a hug offered when relating one’s desperation. Kindness and love as a practical tool can diffract the Cartesian dualisms and rationalism in the pedagogical practices into spatial, material, embodied and affective relations, as they suggest. Thinking with pedagogies of mattering in relation to belonging and power, particularly in times of crisis (Covid-19, Terrorism, Immigration, climate and ecological changes) is to take in what Achille Mbembe (2003, p. 15) proposes as the act of remaining wary of ‘declarations of crises and emergencies, as such declarations are often accompanied by the creation of fictionalised enemies, objects/subjects in danger, and agents ideally placed to undertake rescue’; to question, what matters, matters for who and how things matter, matter for whom, who can matter and who cannot. We think with Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor’s pedagogies of mattering to stay attentive to gendered and ‘racializing assemblages’ (Weheliye, 2014, p. 43) that any decolonising pedagogical mattering needs to matter with (Zarabadi, 2022a, b, c). As Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor suggest, creativity and criticality as agential practices for pedagogies of mattering can be enabled by thinking with relationality and paying attention to the ways ‘all knowledge is located and relies on partial perspectives allows for the inclusion of lived material realities and feelings that shape our educational experiences’ (Taylor et al., 2021, p. 1). Weaving a ‘response-able’ feminist activism in neoliberal school context is another form of working affirmatively, affectively and creatively with love and kindness. Retallack and Millett, in Chapter 9, explore the new imaginings of feminism in schools unfolding in the collective process of folding a material plait. In creating a long-folded plait, they interweave human and more-thanhuman bodies: intersectional gendered and sexualized embodied and embedded stories in schools. Similar to other posthuman educational researchers who use art-based methodologies (Renold and Ringrose, 2019; Ringrose et al. 2021; Hickey-Moody, 2013; Hickey-Moody et al. 2016), Retallack and Millett draw our attention towards how creative and arts-based practices can connect

Posthuman Educational Mappings  9 human and non-human matter to form collectively-generated knowledge. Inspired by Deleuze’s (1993) concept of the fold, the ontology of becoming with plait when folding-unfolding-refolding of development, multiplicity, continuity, and differences. Moving beyond the linear understanding of progress, in their collective folding with plaits, they created a moving matter filled with potentialities, folding-unfolding-refolding the problematic relations in schools and developing new ways of exploring intersectional tensions in neoliberal school environments. You can affectively and haptically become intertwined with wool felting in Chapter 10, feel the felting and felt with your feelings, touch, move, turn, rob, re-turn your bodies, desires and feeling with Jamouchi’s different posthuman creative pedagogical mattering. As teacher artist she troubles the practices of pedagogy and knowledge production experiences in the context of three Norwegian universities asking how one can teach, how one should teach and how affective intensities arise in their encounter with materials. Jamouchi situates her work both in artistic and scholarly landscapes as a material-discourse (Barad, 2007) when the doing with materials and the writing of texts are entangled and interdependent. Wool-felting practices as contexts-dependent, varying with space, time, participants, and materials diffractively disrupt humanistic/Cartesian thinking and a monologic teaching practice and creates transversal rhizomatic intensities between the action of felting, the writing related to felting and thinking in/while felting, as Jamouchi suggests. Resonating with Fairchild, Gravett and Taylor’s pedagogies of mattering, she poses this question of how intra-actions with wool fibres enable the material awareness and the repositioning of humans and our entangled connections with materials. Jamouchi’s photos of wool-felting in the chapter diffractively take us into those material and affective moments of intra-actions between wool, water, bodies, pine soap, space, time, voicing and movements to make us become one whole ‘thing’, part of the materials that matter. Richards, Ingham, Bunting and Hill in Chapter 11 take us into another different pedagogical matterings in HE: sending love letters as affective, affirmative form of assessment, attuning to the agential capacity of ‘care in folding, love in unfolding’ in pedagogical intra-actions. To resist traditional structures of individualisation, competition and alienation in a neoliberal system of education, they diffract assessment into a collaborative and affirmative ethical and material practice that speaks to an embodied and affective experience. Richards, Ingham, Bunting and Hill’s pedagogical and creative mattering and becoming with creating/ curating/ sending love letters resonates with Vinz’s notion of immersive different forms of writing in Chapter 4: the affective and material journey of love letters in the post, the affective time that love letters take to reach the next body, the bodies that materially mingle with love letters, the givings and takings (Niccolini et al., 2018; Fairchild et al., 2023) in each affective entanglements with letters and the care and joy that emerge each time with different intensity, the matters that matter. Using the notion of ‘assemblage’, they take a post-human approach ‘to use languages

10  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of their a priori ontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships’ (Blanco-Wells, 2021, p. 1). Drawing on Barad’s notion of intra-action, they consider mattering with love letters as a material-discursive apparatus where discourse, what is written or spoken, language and matter are entangled in a field of possibilities and impossibilities. This enables them to enact assessment as a more open-ended and material practice that is attentive to and care for the situated particularities of students’ learning journeys (Gravett and Winstone, 2022). Richards, Ingham, Bunting and Hill write, The act of posting these love letters to each other slowed us down and made gaps for us to forget and remember. To wait in expectation. What fragment of deliciousness might appear from the postie, the front door letter box, or from the end of the driveway? These journeys the letters took, our journeys to the post office, to send them, and then to collect the ever-expanding box of collaged and written letters. We ask what these movements and intra-action do to the pedagogical practices, matterings and becomings. What happens when assessment and feedback become sticky, an assemblage of feathers, string, glue, stickers, wool, and not just words and texts? What happens to learning and teaching if we affectively pull into pedagogical matterings with materials and the matters that matter? The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction … the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men. Historically, both slaves and gold have to be material and epistemically made through the recognition and extraction of their inhuman properties. (Kathryn Yusoff, 2018, p. 2) The impact of humans and technology on the environment on local, global and planetary scales brings up questions of care and response-ability (Haraway, 2008) towards environmental crises and climate change and the necessity of ecological thinking and matterings in pedagogical practices (Abegglen et al., 2021). Inspired by Guattari’s ([1989] 2000) three ecologies of environment, of society, and of mind, Van Der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, p. 87) describe

Posthuman Educational Mappings  11 ecological thinking as analytical, critical, and ethical perspectives that can bring to the fore the relational, situational and entangled principles to make the condition for specific events, meanings, and subject positions unfolding and  taking shape. Opening to critical discussions about climate change, the Anthropocene and justice in access to resources and good health – clean air, safe drinking water, nutritious food supply, safe shelter – needs an attentiveness to all intersectional, hierarchal, relational and material agential actants. As Snaza et al. (2016, p. xix) write, ‘[S]ince racism, heterosexism, and ableism are not immaterial ideologies … but economic, institutional, “biological”, and medical matters, our politics have to intervene directly in the material processes and assemblages that allow them and support their endurance’. To trouble the present and imagining different climate future (Truman, 2023) we need to interrogate the effects of environmental racism (Phillips et al., 2022) and consider racial justice as a pre-condition to climate justice (Yusoff, 2019). This is what Hickey-Moody and Rousell in Chapter 12 explore: the complex nature and affective attachments of young people’s everyday life to carbon. Drawing on their empirical material and taking the ‘living lab’ methodology, they map young people’s affective attachments to carbon within dirt-biking, car-racing, and mining communities in rural Australia. Carbon and ‘carbon culture’ as a material pedagogy forms both the basis for bodily entanglements and all forms of social imagining, fabulation and dreaming. Attending to the cultural-material dynamics of everyday carbon cultures, Hickey-Moody and Rousell materialise the intertwinement of carbon-heavy lifestyles with processes of subjectification which are often incommensurable with Western environmentalist discourses. They suggest, the material and affective intersections of social class, language, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality agentically influence the diversity of youth carbon cultures and the ways young people intra-act with carbon in their everyday lived experiences. To move beyond the political polarisation of ‘climate change debates’ and associated practices of environmental education, Hickey-Moody and Rousell in this chapter offer new ways of imagining and talking about the environment and climate that do not marginalise young people whose families are employed in the fossil fuels industry or who enjoy carbon-heavy hobbies. They believe that the acknowledegment and understanding of the deep affective attachments to carbon within diversely situated lives and communities is critically important for ecological justice as well as the debates on fossil-fuel dependency and ecocidal capitalism. At the ‘end’ Hickey-Moody and Rousell leave us with this thorough question: ‘If our thoughts, and even our dreams, are made of carbon, then what really comes to matter is how we think, feel, live, and dream with carbon in ways that are life-affirming and pluralistic rather than ecocidal and exclusionary’. ‘What am I busy doing?’ is the cosmopolitical proposal of Isabelle Stengers (2005) to ‘slow down’ and enable an opportunity for the emergence of a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations affecting us. Fraunhofer and Volkmann, in Chapter 13, inspired by Stengers, create productive moments of hesitation about the climate crisis and trans-cultural and

12  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales eco-pedagogical practices. ‘Staging’ their on-line teaching in the global collaboration of divergent fields; universities in the US and Germany with students from multiple disciplines in education, the humanities and sciences, Fraunhofer and Volkmann use Barad’s concept of ‘intra-activity’, to explore students’ engagement with the ‘environment’, to achieve an affective witnessing by pausing and taking the time to acknowledge planetary ecological degradation and to develop affective entanglements with diverse transcultural and transnational human and more-than-human others. Affective witnessing ‘centres encounter, embodiment, affect and intensities of experience’ (Richardson and Schankweiler, 2020, p. 237). Fraunhofer and Volkmann move beyond the  traditional, Enlightenment-based pedagogies of knowledge production in  the  neoliberal university by creating an innovative, eco-critical post/ transdisciplinary pedagogical approach proposing an open-ended critical and creative pedagogy based on relationality. They think, with Vivienne Bozalek: ‘Creativity is not an inherent property of individuals, it is an assemblage; a complexity of networks of human and non-human actors which give rise to creative learning rather than human intentionality’ (2018, p. 397). One of the salient points that Fraunhofer and Volkmann inspired by Stengers argue in their chapter is that humans will not necessarily decide in the name of the general interest. In a sense experience is not limited to the hu(man) Cartesian subject but rather to wider relational and agential assemblages. We would like to open/end this introduction with Saidiya Hartman (2007, p. 77): But when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back? From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the world and to imagine living and breathing again? References Abegglen, S. Blundell, D. and Bustillos Morales, J.A. (2021). Eco-Education: A Response to the Anthropocene and an Uncertain Future. Educational Futures, 12(1), pp. 31–47. Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart. Parallax, 20 (3): pp. 168–187. Barad, K. (2015). Transmaterialities, Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), pp. 387–422.

Posthuman Educational Mappings  13 Barad, K. (2019). After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice. Theory & Event, 22(3), pp. 524–550. Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Cozza, M., Elmenhorst, C., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Taylor, C.A. (2019). Disturbing the Academic Conference Machine: PostQualitative Re-Turnings. Gender, Work and Organization, 26(2), pp. 87–106. Bozalek, V. (2018). Socially Just Pedagogies. In R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2018). A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society. DOI: 10.1177/0263276418771486 Braidotti, R. (2021). Posthuman Feminism. 1st edn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the MEDUSA (trans. K. Cohen and P. Cohen). Signs, 1(4), 875–893. DOI: 10.1086/493306 Cross, B. (2022). Citizenship Practices in School Spaces: Comparative Discourse Analysis of Children’s Group Decision Making. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. DOI: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2037689 De la Cadena, M. (2015). Earth Beings. Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press. De la Cadena, M. (2019). Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-NotSeen. In P. Harvey and U.P. Duke (Eds.), Anthropos and the Material ProQuest Ebook Central, ebook central.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5771693 Deleuze, G. (1992). Dialogues, Paris: Flammarion. Deleuze, G. (1993). The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2004). On Capitalism and Desire. In G. Deleuze and D. Lapoujade (Eds.), Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974. Translated by M. Taormina (pp. 262–273). Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2005). A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury. Dolphijn, R. and Braidotti, R. (2023). Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fairchild, N., Taylor, C.A., Carey, N., Koro, M., Benozzo, A., Hannes, K., AlbinClark, J., Maynard, E., Zarabadi, S., Caterina-Knorr, T. and Taylor, A.J. (2023). Tags, Tagging, Tagged, # – Undisciplining Organization of [academic] Bodies. Culture and Organization. DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2023.2193406 Gravett, K. and Winstone, N.E. (2022). Making Connections: Authenticity and Alienation within Students’ Relationships in Higher Education. Higher Education Research & Development, 41(2), pp. 360–374. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2020. 1842335 Guattari, Félix [1989] (2000). The Three Ecologies. London: Athlone Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. (1992). The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge.

14  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales Haraway, D. (1997). Modest Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©_Meets_On coMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. New York and London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2008). Otherworldly Conversations, Terrain Topics, Local Terms. In S. Alaimo and S. Heckman (Eds.), Material Feminism (pp. 157–187). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. and Goodeve, T.N. (2000). How Like a Leaf. Donna J. Haraway: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge. Hartman, S. (2007). Lose your mother, a Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Herbrechter, S. (2021). Critical Posthumanism, Again. Interconnections/Interconnexions, 1(1), 66–68. Hickey-Moody, A. (2013). Affect as Method: Feelings, Aesthetics, and Affective Pedagogy. In R Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hickey-Moody, A., Palmer, H. and Sayers, E. (2016). Diffractive Pedagogies: Dancing across New Materialist Imaginaries. Gender and Education, 28(2), pp. 213–229, DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2016.1140723 Ivinson, G. and Renold, E. (2013). Subjectivity, Affect and Place: Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs to Explore a Young Girl’s Becomings in a Post-Industrial Locale. Subjectivity, 6(4), 369–390. Jackson, Z.I. (2015). Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human’. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 21(2–3), pp. 215–218. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015). Reconceptualizing Qualitative Research: Methodologies without methodology. London: Sage. Lather, P. (2013). Methodology 21: What Do We Do in the Afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-­Active Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. London: Sage. Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), pp. 11–40. McCormack, D.P., 2013 Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Murris, K. (2022). A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research across Disciplines. London: Routledge. Niccolini, A.D. Zarabadi, S. Ringrose, J. (2018). Spinning Yarns: Affective Kinshipping as Posthuman Pedagogy. Parallax, 24(3), pp. 324–343. Otterstad, A.M. and Waterhouse, A-H.L. (2016). Beyond Regimes of Signs: Making Art/istic Portrayals of Haptic Moments/Movements with Child/ren/hood. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), pp. 739–753. DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1075727 Phillips S, McLean Davies L, Truman S.E. (2022). Power of Country: Indigenous Relationality and Reading Indigenous Climate Fiction in Australia. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(2), pp. 171–186. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2011). Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1), pp. 85–106. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2012). Nothing Comes Without its World: Thinking With Care. The Sociological Review, 60(2). DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-954X.2012.02070 Renold, E. and Ringrose, J. (2019). Jarring: Making phEmaterialist Research Practices Matter. MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture 4. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/ eprint/10091381

Posthuman Educational Mappings  15 Richardson, M. and Schankweiler, K. (2020). Introduction: Affective Witnessing as Theory and Practice. Parallax, 26(3) (special issue on Affective Witnessing), pp. 235–250. DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2021.1883301 Ringrose, J., Regehr, K. and Zarabadi, S. (2021). Feminist Craftivist Collaging, Remattering the bad effects of advertising. In D. Lupton and D. Leahy (Eds.), Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning (1st ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Saldanha, A. (2017). Space After Deleuze. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M.B., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J. and Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a Posthumanist Education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), pp. 39–55. Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S.E. and Zaliwska, Z. (Eds.), (2016). Introduction: ReAttuning to the Materiality of Education. Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (pp. xv–xxxiii). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Springgay, S. and Truman, S.E. (2018). Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. New York, NY: Routledge. Stengers, I. (2005). The Cosmopolitical Proposal. In B. Latour and P. Weibel (Eds.), Making Things Public. Cambrdge, MA: MIT Press. Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), pp. 33–47. DOI: 10.1177/147447401348606 Taylor, C.A. (2018). Edu-crafting Posthumanist Adventures In/For Higher Education: A Speculative Musing. Parallax, 24(3), pp. 371–381, DOI: 10.1080/13534645. 2018.1496585 Taylor, C.A. (2020). Walking as Trans(Disciplinary)Mattering. A Speculative Musing on Acts of Feminist Indiscipline In C.A. Taylor, J. Ulmer and C. Hughes (Eds.), Transdisciplinary Feminist Research, Innovations in Theory, Method and Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Taylor, C.A., Fairchild, N., Koro-Ljungberg, M., Benozzo, A., Carey, N. and Elmenhorst, C. (2019). Improvising Bag Choreographies: Disturbing Normative Ways of Doing Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), pp. 17–25. Taylor, C.A., Fairchild, N., Zarabadi, S. and Moxnes, A. (2021). The Promise of Donna Haraway’s Philosophy: Knotting Together Better Educational Futures. European Educational Research Association, Gender and Education. https://blog. eera-ecer.de/the-promise-of-donna-haraways-philosophy-knotting-together-bettereducational-futures Truman, S.E. (2023). Colonial Crises of Imagination, Climate Fictions, and English  Literary Education. Research in Education. DOI: 10.1177/0034523723 1183343 Tsing, L.A. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tuck, E. and Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonisation Is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1–40. DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2015. 1137962 Van Der Tuin, I. and Verhoeff, N. (2022). Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Waterhouse, A-H.L., Otterstad, A.M. and Jensen, M. (2016). … Anything But Synchronized Swimming/Methodologies… Artistic Movements In/With Unknown Inventions. Qualitative Inquiry, 22(3), pp. 201–209. DOI: 10.1177/10778004 15605063

16  Shiva Zarabadi and Jessie A. Bustillos Morales Weheliye, A.G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedomm: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument. New Centennial Review, 3(3), pp. 257–337. DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2004.0015 Wynter, S. and McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalelled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. In K. McKittrick (Ed.). Sylvia Wynter on Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Yusoff, K. (2019). Geologic Realism: On the Beach of Geologic Time. Social Text 37(1), pp. 1–26. DOI: 10. 1215/01642472-7286240 Zarabadi, S. (2020). Post-Threat Pedagogies: A Micro-Materialist Phantomatic Feeling within Classrooms in Post-Terrorist Times. In Bessie P. Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall and Alyssa D. Niccolini (Eds.), Mapping the Affective Turn in Education Theory, Research, and Pedagogies. UK & US: Routledge. Zarabadi, S. (2022a). The Theatre Of Everyday Debt-Cruelty: The Enfleshed Threat, Missing People And The Unbearable Strange Terrorist Machine In R. Dolphijn and R. Braidotti (Eds.), Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism Edited…. Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-deleuzeand-guattari-and-fascism.html Zarabadi, S. (2022b). Moving and Mattering with the Wall-ed Feelings: A Posthuman Movement between Possibilities and Impossibilities of Becomings in Educational Research. Cultural and pedagogical Inquiry,14(1), DOI: 10.18733/cpi29659 Zarabadi, S. (2022c). Watery Assemblages: The Affective and Material SwimmingBecomings of a Muslim Girl’s Queer Body with Nature. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 1–11. DOI: 10.1017/aee.2022.39 Zarabadi, S. (2023). Bodies of Walking: Trans-Materializing the Experiences of Racial Harassment. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies. DOI: 10.1177/153270 86221146455 Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C.A., Fairchild, N. and Moxnes, A.R. (2019). Feeling Medusa: Tentacular Troubling of Academic Positionality, Recognition and Respectability. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), 87–111. DOI: 10. 7577/rerm.3671 Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin with Chthulecene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Part I

Posthuman Pedagogical Becomings

2 Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education ‘There Is No Thought Not Yet Thought’ And Pasley, Alejandra Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Noah Romero Introduction This chapter reflects an ongoing dialogue and enriching exchange that the three authors have had over the past three years. As doctoral students, we came together through our cautious interest in posthumanisms. We acknowledged the relevance of these theories but felt resistances towards them due to their lack of accountability to Indigenous/Black people and non-Modern relational worlds, evidenced by extractivist relationships with Indigenous cosmologies, built on a sanctioned ignorance (Spivak, 1999), and the silence around race and the dehumanisation of racialised/minoritised peoples. Over the past few years, each one of us has been committed to thinking with both posthumanisms and Indigenous onto-epistemologies: te ao Māori, in the case of And; Indigenous worldings of Abya Yala, for Alejandra, and Filipinx worlds, for Noah. Sharing our wonderings, explorations, and engagements with each other has embellished our reflections and desire for an education capable of learning from and upholding Indigenous (non-humanist) worlds. Guilt or discomfort in relation to non-Western worlds often leads Western academics to refuse the complicated histories and relationships with the coloniality of knowledge (Hoskins and Jones, 2021; Quijano, 2000), yet remaining in (often uncomfortable) relation with these histories is necessary to resist complicity in academic recolonisation. Rather than appropriating these worldings (Todd, 2016), we present each of our own engagements as a means of encouraging readers to consider how they might honour different ways of knowing and/in being. Posthumanism performs a critique of the assumptions that underpin (the Modern/colonial project of) humanism: positivism, dualism, individualism, anthropocentrism, transcendentalism, temporal linearity, and the subsequent hierarchies that emerge from this order of things (Quijano, 2000; Jackson, 2016). Decolonial scholars, such as Jackson (2016) and Sundberg (2014), are optimistic about the potential for posthumanism to challenge the omnipotence of humanist thought and afford an array of questions that are not possible under humanism. Simultaneously, they remind us that it is necessary to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-3

20  And Pasley et al. attend to critiques around the extractive relationship much of ‘new’ posthuman scholarship has with Indigenous relational ontologies (Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt, 2020; TallBear, 2015; Tuck and McKenzie, 2014). For example, Watts (2013) notes a tendency for posthuman thinkers to appropriate Indigenous ways of knowing and being, incorporating them into their epistemologies, rather than taking responsibility for coming to know them on their own terms (cf. Hoskins, 2010). Likewise, Todd (2016) expresses disappointment at posthumanism’s citational politics, as Indigenous theory and theorists are left by the wayside while Western thinkers are credited with whatever nuance is extracted from relational paradigms (Cherniak and Walker, 2020; Hokowhitu, 2020). This misattribution is likely a product of posthumanism’s disavowal of entanglements with colonialities (of race, gender and being) which would require a divestment from imperialist ontologies of Enlightenment that posthuman logic and reason remains predicated on (Jackson, 2013). Furthermore, it is necessary to attend to critiques of posthumanism’s silence in relation to race, given the co-constitution of humanism and antiblackness (Wynter, 2003; Warren, 2017; Jackson, 2015, 2020). This chapter acknowledges decolonial thought’s capacity to recognise silenced or excluded agencies, such as those of blackened bodies (Jackson, 2013, 2020; Warren, 2017). Following Jackson (2020), we employ ‘blackened’ to refer to bodies that are excluded through racialisation, which resists the complicated, if not problematic, distinction between Black, Indigenous and people of colour (Daniel, 2020). It also denotes that the blackening of bodies, as a colonial project (Quijano, 2000), is something that is done to bodies, rather than an inherent quality. For example, black(ened) bodies are often excluded from humanity through association with the nonhuman (Jackson, 2020), which highlights the need ‘to interrogate the nonhuman alongside the dehumanization of Man’s human Others’ (Haritaworn, 2015, p. 213). Simultaneously, Jackson (2013) attends to the ways in which Black theorists, like Lewis Gordon, have fought for a place within humanism from which to transform it. Unlike white people, black(ened) people’s humanity (and the privileges humanity affords) are not taken for granted, and therefore posthumanism risks displacing them further. In part, this is because posthumanism has excluded black(ened) scholars from this reconstruction of legitimate knowledge. As Jackson (2013) points out, posthumanism is more comfortable with recognising ‘Man’s’ invention than acknowledging who the inventors were. Following this, the term ‘white(ned)’ is also employed to subvert any suggestion that whiteness is inherent either. Equally, following Sundberg’s (2014) critique of posthumanism positioning humanism as a necessary stage to overcome by everyone everywhere, we consider it essential to acknowledge that many communities have never adopted Modern/colonial paradigms, nurturing other (non-humanist) onto-epistemologies (Todd, 2016). Consequently, ‘post’ should not be read as yet another advancement of Western rationality, ‘moving beyond’ a now obsolete paradigm, feeding into notions of linear, progressive time that naturalises Western epistemological

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  21 trajectories (Freeman, 2010). Instead, it should operate as a paradigmatic critique of the humanist system of thought that emerged from Modern Western colonisation and its subsequent colonialities, including global capitalism (Quijano, 2000), being/power/Truth/freedom (Wynter, 2003), and gender (Lugones, 2007). We concede the impossibility of an absolute break with humanism (Jackson, 2013), as these marks of injustice cannot be erased (Barad, 2017). Therein, ‘post’ also signals the need to trace the historical and ongoing relations that produce these injustices, potentiating responses to and the reconfiguration of possibilities for justice. Following Jackson’s (2013) intuition that ‘[p]erhaps the “post” human is not a temporal location but a geographic one’ (p. 673), we also treat the ‘post’ as an effort to situate the geopolitics of knowledge and becoming open to other ways of knowing and/ in being. To challenge ‘the hierarchical distinction between philosophy/ critical theory and non-Western cosmology’ (Jackson, 2013), it is necessary to engage with these ways of knowing and/in being on their own terms and be open to being fundamentally affected by them (Hoskins, 2010). The dynamic we each noticed was that, despite the geographical separation of the worlds we became entangled with, similar patterns of extractivism and supplanting of onto-epistemologies had been enacted by colonisation and ongoing colonialities, including via the claims made by certain iterations of posthumanism. The first section of this chapter draws from Sylvia Wynter (2003) and Marisol de la Cadena (2015) to examine the entanglement of colonisation, Modernity, and humanism with education, and the ongoing iterations of this entanglement. Particular attention is drawn to the ontological implications of a ‘humanising’ and Modernising education for Indigenous peoples and their (non-anthropocentric) worldings. The section brings about questions around the possibility of an education capable of cultivating and upholding plural worlds and the role posthumanism might play in this endeavour. The following section considers the resonances between Critical Indigenous studies’ critiques of new materialism and a historical analysis of colonial education in the Philippines. This discussion is then expanded to provisionally ponder how the debilitating and pathologising logics of colonial schooling are reproduced in teacher education in the United States. Facing pressing issues like attrition, burnout, a lack of culturally sustaining curriculum, and the teacher preparation diversity gap, this section concludes with a call for posthuman theories to remain vigilant about the colonial provenance of ‘humanising education’ before washing our hands of Modernity and its ongoing violence. The final section draws on decolonial scholarship to ask what work posthumanism would have to do not to operate as a recolonising mechanism. It begins by unpacking how the twin colonialities of gender (Lugones, 2007) and race/ power (Quijano, 2000) were crucial in the institution of the Modern/colonial order, then expands this thinking through Warren’s (2017) recognition that the fungibility of black(ened) bodies is fundamental to the constitution of (white(ened)) human subjectivity.

22  And Pasley et al. Education as a Modernising and ‘Humanising’ Endeavour This section is inspired by the scholarship of two Latin American/Caribbean women: Peruvian anthropologist, Marisol de la Cadena, and Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, Sylvia Wynter. Their thinking challenges the boundaries of the Modern human, opening up the memory and the imagination towards other possible iterations of ‘humanity’. In particular, the section highlights how the emergence of the Modern human as a Rational and Political subject is co-constituted by a power-knowledge dynamic that grants to this (Western) human the (rational) supracultural knowledge. This knowledge defines the worlds and knowledges that are real (and that need to be advanced through education) and those that are irrational (beliefs) and ought to be erased (overcome). It is important to recognise that these authors do not emerge from the same traditions that have fostered posthumanism. Rather, their work emerges from a careful attention to the onto-epistemologies that Indigenous and Black people have advanced, and in dialogue with Black, Caribbean, and Latin American decolonial thinking. This genealogical distinction is integral to understanding both the roots and consequences of their work, and it is key in our wondering of how posthumanism might be potentiated by challenging the colonialities of knowledge that have kept it bound within the (onto)epistemological locus of the WWest. Sylvia Wynter (2003) attends to the emergence of the Modern Man as the rational political subject, constitutive of and by the State. Moving away from a theocentric explanatory model that organised beings (including Man) around ‘degrees of spiritual perfection/imperfection’ (p. 281), this new order of Modernity appears as a natural difference in terms of ‘degrees of rational perfection/imperfection’ (p. 281). Natural Law, as the basis of a new secular order, comes to naturalise the inferiority of those colonised and enslaved, setting the boundaries of the sub/human. The European Man is positioned as the ‘natural master’ (p. 297) of his subhuman Others, legitimising the entitlement of European settlers to the lands they dispossessed and to the enslaved labour that underpinned the emerging global capitalist order. The varying degrees of rationality, as defined by Natural Law, came to constitute a racial hierarchy: the invention of race which, together with other hierarchies, would set the foundation of a new Modern/Colonial world order (Quijano, 2000). Moreover, De la Cadena (2009, 2010) describes how the continuum of rationality/irrationality that dehumanises various peoples is co-constituted by a binary split of the realms of human and nature. The subhuman is constructed as trapped in the realm of necessity/instinct/nature, and rationality appears as the ‘humanising’ force capable of conquering agency and freedom. During the eighteenth century, the Modern continuum of rationality/ irrationality intersected with notions of linear progress-time, producing theories of human stadial evolution (Salmond, 2021; Lesko, 2012). The degrees of rationality/irrationality came to be understood as evolutionary stages

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  23 along a predetermined, incremental line, potentiating the possibility of progression for those who were ‘irrational’ and ‘primitive’. Education became a key element of the Modern/colonial project as it became the vehicle for ‘humanising’ the ‘savages’ and bringing rationality/progress/civilisation to their communities. Rather than a means for imperial domination, colonisation could be made to appear as the benevolent intent of Europeans helping incipient forms of humanity reach their full (rational) humanity. Education is evidently non-innocent, as it partakes in the very definition of the (sub)human. Ashcroft (2001), for example, recognises the paradox that literacy and education enact the very boundary that they are meant to overcome as they define the ‘separation between the civilised and the barbarous nations’ (p.39). While education appears within the Modern/Colonial project as a vehicle for ‘inclusion’, what it conceals is the very movement of exclusion that makes necessary the reformation (through education) of the Other in order to be granted the (conditional) entry ticket to the realm of humanity and history (Blaser, 2009). De la Cadena’s (2015) formulation of political ontology understands that this reformation (through education) demands ‘non-moderns’ abandon the relational onto-epistemologies that give existence to their worlds, resulting in their entrapment in the One-world ontology of Modernity where Reality (singular) is defined by Western Rationality. In this way, education operates as a tool for ontological occupation and carries out the biopolitical mission of the State: eroding the relationalities and knowledges of those who are-with-nature (‘entrapped’ in beliefs/ superstitions), so that they can be reborn as Modern citizens of the State (de la Cadena, 2015). Both Wynter (2003) and de la Cadena (2009) recognise the centrality of  politics in the constitution of the Modern Man and the expansion/ perpetuation of a Modern ontology. De la Cadena (2009, 2010, 2015) examines Wynter’s (2003) differentiation of ‘natural masters’ and ‘natural slaves’, paying attention to ‘the epistemic roots of the antagonism between those entitled to rule and those destined to be ruled’ (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 345). In particular, she highlights the ‘epistemic maneuver’ (p. 345), whereby politics is constituted as a rational (‘human-only’) affair, while Nature is relegated to a scientific ‘managerial sphere’ (p. 345). What this means is that relationships with the ‘Natural world’ are no longer available for contestation. ‘Nature’ is excluded from politics unless mediated by science (de la Cadena, 2010). This onto-epistemic move excludes both non-Modern peoples and nature from the realm of politics, assuring the hegemony of a Modern world and the disavowal of all other (ways of doing) worlds: Together these two antitheses – between humanity and nature, and between allegedly superior and inferior humans – declared the gradual extinction of other-than-human beings and the worlds in which they existed. (de la Cadena, 2010, p. 345)

24  And Pasley et al. Worlds where other-than-human beings (mountains, trees, animals, spirits, ancestors) participate in the social realm of decision-making become incompatible with the Modern practice of ‘the political’. Not only are those worlds questioned (epistemologically) and sentenced to be ‘overcome’ through education, but they are also excluded from participation in politics (due to their lack of ‘rationality’). Still today, the boundary between the literate and illiterate, the educated and uneducated, is one between the ‘proper’ and ‘irrational’ or ‘uncivilised’ way of being and behaving. De la Cadena demonstrates this in her analysis of Quechua relational ways of being/knowing/relating and the ways how these are framed from within the Modern State. Quechua understandings of Runakuna (people) as being ‘in-ayllu’ involves ways of being-with and mutual care with other (non-human) beings. Ayllu is like a weaving, and all the beings in the world – people, animals, mountains, plants, etc. – are like the threads, we are part of the design. The beings in this world are not alone, just as a thread by itself is not a weaving, and weavings are with threads, a runa [person] is always inayllu with other beings – that is ayllu. (Mariano, the Quechua interlocutor, in de la Cadena, 2015, p. 44) De la Cadena (2015) examines what possibilities and consequences ‘becoming literate’ offers Quechua people and their ‘in ayllu’ worldings. Education (to become Modern citizens) has become the only path that offers (limited) political participation, yet participation of any degree is fundamental, given the deterioration of their living conditions and the abuses they are subjected to by those who have become the legal owners of their ancestral lands. And yet, becoming literate or entering Modern rationality demands that they give up their (in-ayllu) ways of being-with and knowing-with other-than-human, as they simply have no place in the secular One-World ontology of Modernity. The possibility of inclusion in Modernity/rationality/humanity offered by education cannot be rejected, as it constitutes the only path away from dehumanisation and its nefarious consequences, yet it is a path that produces the erasure of Quechua people and the in-ayllu worldings they sustain. Education, as an enabler of Politics, enhances the power-knowledge dynamic where onto-epistemological diversity is erased and presented as ‘a cultural problem between universal progress and local beliefs’ (De la Cadena, 2015, p. 352). A concrete example of this is illustrated by de la Cadena (2015) in a Quechua land struggle that took place in Cuzco, Peru involving Indigenous opposition to the mining of Sinakara, a mountain/Apu (powerful Earth Being). In opposing the mining project, Quechua people were protecting their In-Ayllu worlding and their reciprocal relationship with the Apus: ‘rearing’ and ‘being reared’, caring and being cared for. The State, which only recognises Sinakara as a mountain, denies the existence and agency of Apus/ Earth Beings, rendering them a mere ‘cultural belief’. Because the Quechua ‘beliefs’ do not conform to Western rationality, State politics cannot take

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  25 Quechua arguments against the mining project seriously. Rationality, as a precondition for self or collective determination within the Modern State, continues to define legal systems regarding the ‘management’ of nature, which is operated in accordance with the rational, capitalist, anthropocentric foundation of the political. Consequently, other relationalities with ‘nature’ are rendered impossible, threatening the survival of all the worlds that exceed Modern rationality. In Aotearoa New Zealand, a public letter published by seven professors at a prestigious university provides a second example of how onto-epistemological unicity is fostered through Modernising education. The letter, written in the name of Universal science, questioned the proposed changes to the Māori school curriculum, which sought to achieve equity between Matauranga Māori (Knowledge, but a kind of knowledge that includes a spiritual relation with the world; Mika, 2012) and other knowledge systems. Diminishing Matauranga Māori to culture or ‘local practices’, these scholars called for (while re-enacting) European’s (colonial) ‘responsibility’ to bring progress and (rational/scientific) knowledge to those who were in lack of it, helping them overcome their ‘beliefs’ or at least allowing them to look at them with perspective/objectivity. In a book about posthumanism and education, we believe it is imperative to acknowledge the ways in which Western onto-epistemological traditions, inherited by posthumanism, are entangled with the erasure and diminishment of Indigenous relationalities with other-than-human beings. Being ‘humanised’ through Modern education has entailed for innumerable communities the shedding of their ‘beliefs’ (not knowledge) in favour of valid (rational) ways of reasoning and knowing. This has included giving up ‘superstitious’ or ‘animistic’ relationalities with other-than-humans as agentic co-producers of knowledge and care. Now that posthumanism is claiming concepts, such as non-human agency, ancient ways of being/knowing/relating that had been condemned as ignorant and ‘savage’ reappear white-washed and made digestible to Western thought/rationality. And yet, simultaneously, the Indigenous non-humanist worlds that have been fighting for survival for over 500 years continue to have to defend the legitimacy of their knowledges (as exemplified by the Matauranga Māori case) and having to fight so that the Modern State and its institutions (including education) will not continue to erode the ongoing possibility of their ways of being/knowing/relating. So, how can posthumanism and a ‘posthuman’ education enact responseability towards their dark colonial roots and towards the worlds that continue to be threatened by Modern institutions? How can a ‘posthuman’ education uphold multiple worldings, rather than perpetuating the ontological occupation that Modern education has advanced? What we suggest in this chapter is coming humbly towards what there is to learn and inherit from those worlds while upholding them. Upholding those worlds requires walking away from sanctioned ignorance (Spivak, 1999) and finding ways of reconfiguring extractivist relationships towards them. In particular, it is important to continue

26  And Pasley et al. challenging the hierarchies between non-Western cosmologies and Western science/philosophy, so that the many worlds that have been rendered invalid (‘beliefs’) can thrive and find means for their (political) recognition and ongoing existence. Teaching Difference Differently – Unsettling Colonial Humanism in Teacher Education Taking up the previous section’s call for increasing moves toward more-thanhuman ethics in education, this section considers the pedagogical possibilities potentiated by decentring colonial humanism, or Eurocentric renderings of people as atomised, self-interested beings in perpetual competition over scarce resources (Salmond, 2012). By better integrating transnational Indigenous and decolonial perspectives on schooling, posthumanism has the potential to inform the creation of relational learning environments for young people in authentic, ecological, and community-oriented ways. Critically synthesising Indigenous critiques of posthumanism, decolonial studies of compulsory schooling, and reflections on my (Noah’s) work as a teacher educator, I consider how Indigenous perspectives might inform posthuman praxes. First, we must acknowledge how the immanent relationality of Indigenous epistemology, which always already recognises the mutually constitutive kinship between human and more-than-human worlds, has been seen as tangential to the avant-garde of posthumanism (Todd, 2016). Doing so requires a teleological understanding of colonialism and coloniality, along with recognising that Euro-American imperialism has ordered life everywhere on the planet despite the resistance and survival of Indigenous peoples. Applying this provocation to teacher preparation requires that we continually indict the colonial provenance of orthodoxies that define our collective understanding of what qualifies as teaching and learning. Instead of theorising the different ways tenured professors are no different from trees, rocks, animals, water, and the cosmos, a term like ‘posthumanism’ might be recalibrated toward the hopeful possibility of a humanity that dislodges the settler logics of progress and development. Barad (2014) states that there remains a need to figure difference differently. I became cognisant of this tension while adapting an inherited syllabus for a course on social justice education for preservice teachers. This particular course’s description proclaimed teachers are important because they help children become full human beings, which insurrected spectres of colonialisms past, present and future. Reading it shone ultraviolet light on the parasitism interred in institutional efforts to educate for things like social justice, human rights, multiculturalism, and decolonisation. While these words were born out of the need for a language of freedom dreams, they survived long enough to have their radical meaning obfuscated, co-opted, defanged, and absorbed into the machinery of academic discourse before being repackaged for bourgeois consumption. New colonialisms are inevitable if we accept the idea that sovereignty and harmonious communion are acquirable competencies that must be

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  27 instilled and inculcated, rather than inherent and inherited. If the teachers of teachers believe that full personhood is something that children must be taught, they admit that humanness can also be assessed, measured, compared, categorised, dominated, and confiscated. Even if schooling is dressed in shiny vestments, bearing labels like community-responsive/learner-centred/social justice/critical pedagogy, it cannot liberate unless it is stripped of the colonial technologies of decontextualisation, and erasure that make it schooling (rather than education) in the first place (Romero and Yellowhorse, 2021). How, then, could I rewrite this syllabus, teach this course and encourage the next generation of instructional leaders to repudiate the colonial school’s obsession with grafting itself onto the corporal and epistemological cartography of the Other? How could I, and my students, embody the words of Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete (2014, p. 10) to ensure that [c]ontinual emphasis is placed on the processes of ‘being and becoming’, first within the contexts of a person’s own inner learning, then in the contexts of family, clan, community, tribe, place, and finally the whole cosmos. Working with the natural flow of this process is the intent of individual knowers. Listening and observing closely are consistently practised. In all this, teachers act as mentors and guides for learning. They never presume the role of absolute authority. My intervention proved ultimately simple, namely that ‘teachers are important because we help children become full human beings’ became ‘teachers are only important when we help’. This change, while discursive and largely symbolic, given its placement on a little-read syllabus, nevertheless changed the way I positioned myself vis-a-vis the course and the teaching candidates enrolled in it. No longer was it acceptable to compartmentalise the work as the gatekeeping of knowledge that my students, as consumers, would need to acquire to secure professional credentials. Instead, the work of training teachers became carrying out vital responsibilities. If teachers are only important when they help, the responsibility of a teacher educator is to help teaching candidates achieve their self-defined goals in ways that honour their unique subjectivities and aspirations. But such a project, especially when it is articulated and advanced from within the colonial schoolhouse, is fraught with tensions that have their provenance in half a millennium of imperial conquest and the violent imposition of colonial humanism, as outlined in the previous section. To declare this or any epoch ‘posthuman’ is to elide the fact that Indigenous, dispossessed, colonised, and racialised people are not finished naming, theorising, being terrorised by, and where possible, healing from the traumas seared into our flesh by our perceived failure to learn and adhere to schooled rubrics of humanity. In The Emperor’s New Materialisms, Ngāti Pūkenga scholar Brendan Hokowhitu (2020) implicates ‘innovative’ theoretical traditions like posthumanism, agential realism, and new materialism in the ongoing predation of

28  And Pasley et al. Indigenous knowledge. Hokowhitu takes further note of the absence of Indigenous, Black, and global South scholars in new materialism’s referential foundations to place this new movement in an old order – the necrophilic and necromantic tradition of Western intellectualism post-Enlightenment. In investigating the possible consonance between Indigenous studies and the literatures associated with the ontological turn, Hokowhitu can hear Indigenous scholars scoffing at the ‘newness’ of this idea, for the material and esoteric connection of all things (e.g., ‘mauri’; ‘all my relations’) is fundamental to the Indigenous cultures that I’m aware of and really is ‘Indigenous Cultures 101’. (p. 176) Hokowhitu goes on to surface several tensions. The first is that Indigenous thought tends to be oriented toward the survival and self-determination of Indigenous peoples, who continue to contend with development aggression, state violence, and eradicative forms of statecraft predicated on the annexation of their lands. The political onus of Indigenous scholarship thus facilitates its association (by non-Indigenous scholars) with more straightforward analytics, like class struggle or human rights. But Indigenous mobilisations – like those that stop the terroristic threats of toxic pipelines and state-sponsored mining expeditions – are moored in a deep understanding of the contingent relationality of personhood, ethics, sustainability, and the agency of nonhuman others. New materialism’s reticence (or failure) to engage with Indigenous thought (and people) accordingly situates it in a historical-intellectual continuity Tróchez (2019) notes was only made possible by Euro-American imperialism and the transatlantic slave trade: [Slavery] created an environment in which white colonists gained ‘leisure time’ through the social, economic and sustenance capital produced by slave labor. This tangible, physical freedom from having to work the land allowed white people to dedicate their time to other endeavors and technologies that began the cycle of development and, ultimately, unchecked growth through control and dominion. I suggest that this newfound reality enabled whites the time to expand their worldview and purpose (albeit, at the crack of the whip). (p. 32) A Critical Indigenous Studies reading of new materialism accordingly traces its genealogy to the White Man’s Burden, Manifest Destiny, and the Doctrine of Discovery. As they did with lands and worlds, settlers, invaders, and opportunists declare reanimated knowledge new, demand tribute for its discovery, and claim it as their own. Dena scholar Amanda Deanna Darroch Mudry Buffalo (2022) notes that this necromantic process occurs just the same in educational research. There, the ancestral commonsense, which holds that all people are

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  29 teachers and learners regardless of age, status or ability and that the meaningful transmission of knowledge is intrinsic to a life lived in community, only garners currency when it is repackaged as: reconceptualism, epistemologies of the south, legitimating lived curriculum, hidden curriculum, unschooling, decolonial education, social justice and curriculum as a cultural practice, and re-imagining. But there is no thought not yet thought…These ideas are not new, or innovative, or revolutionary – they are as old as the land+ and time – the dinosaurs learned from the land+ the same way that people do – this will never change. (pp. 117–118) Still, schooling remains an important site of analytic inquiry, given its historical and ongoing use as a colonial technology and a wartime strategy for eradicating the cultural continuity of sovereign nations to nullify their claims to territory, representation, and personhood. In a contemporary US context, this statement might be interpreted as a cynical critique of schooling; however, people racialised as Black, Indian, Aboriginal or Filipino know that this is simply a fact. To consolidate power in the US-occupied Philippines (from 1898–1948), General Douglas MacArthur (the officer overseeing US military operations in the Pacific) declared that ‘the immediate institution of a comprehensive system of education’ was ‘closely allied to the exercise of military force in these islands.’ (as quoted in Rodil, 1993, p. 15). The US summarily deployed 600 predominantly white American teachers to the Philippines aboard the USS Thomas, a warship whose armament included 13 anti-aircraft guns and three torpedo tubes. By establishing a formal, teacher-centred, and compulsory school system in the Philippines, the Thomasites sought dominion over what Gikuyu philosopher Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2005) calls the ‘the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world’ (p. 55). Official cables attest to the pressing role schooling would play in US initiatives to help Philippine peoples evolve from savages and monkeys into the US’s little brown brothers (Constantino, 1975). Gleeck (1976) notes that US colonial education in the Philippines was underwritten by a doctrine of ‘character building’ and mirrored the US government’s Indian boarding school system and its vocational school system for Black children in the American South. Both systems sought to erase Black and Indigenous life while conscripting survivors to destitution and menial labour (Coloma, 2013). American educators sought to instil a ‘character’ in their Philippine pupils that centred six values thought to be wholly foreign to the Philippine psyche – democracy, honesty, industry, thrift, sportsmanship, and patriotism – and worked to convince Americans and Filipinos alike of the supremacy of metropolitan American governance (Gleeck, 1976). US education policy in the occupied Philippines was moored

30  And Pasley et al. in what administrators and generals promoted as a humanising doctrine, albeit one which required that the soldier and teacher act in tandem to kill the Indian and save the man. Hokowhitu’s analysis, coupled with a re-reading of the educational history that, shaped by my own materiality as a displaced and deterritorialised Philippine subject, surfaces an important provocation for the literatures associated with posthumanism as they pertain to and are applied to education: instead of reforming new materialism to be more inclusive, perhaps it is more pressing to consider how empire, conquest, enslavement and racialisation make it so that oppressed peoples must prove they are human. Still, the racialised processes of abjection and social death continue to influence the trajectory of human and non-human life on every continent. The Coloniality of Gender and the Need for More-ThanPosthuman Approaches This section begins by unpacking the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007) and the ways in which (sexuality) education operates as a site for re/constituting these colonialities. Drawing on Warren’s (2017) onticide, this deconstruction of gender is expanded to the (white) human that gender helped define, unpacking the ways in which the boundaries of humanity are defined against the fungible (black(ened)) Other. Subsequently, the section questions whether posthumanism has the capacity to offer more response-able means of renegotiating the colonialities of gender that do not reproduce the (white) supremacist logics that underpin humanism. Following Jackson (2013), the section reiterates that the whiteness of (gender’s) humanistic, binary construction might find its relief in non-Western ways of knowing and/in being and other ways of thinking about what constitutes genders that do not operate in reference to the heterosexual matrix (cf. Butler, 1990). Notably, while Alejandra, Noah, our colleagues and I tell different versions of this story, they all tend to corroborate one another insofar as they recognise the multiplicitous possibilities offered when Western worlds are decentred. Lugones (2007) delineates how the imposition of binary sex/gender/ sexuality norms (i.e., endocisheteronormativities or the heterosexual matrix (cf. Butler, 1990)) was a colonial tool, designed to reify white European notions of sexual difference (based on biological essentialism) as a marker of humanity. This complemented the invention of race (Quijano, 2000), used to justify European colonisation of the rest of the world by casting whiteness as supreme and denigrating racialised Others. A critical way in which this was established was by equating colonised peoples’ lack of white European gender performativity with a lack of humanity (Lugones, 2007). In this way, the historical, present and ongoing (re)production of norms that privilege (hegemonic expressions of) cisgender, endosex and heterosexual subjectivity are part of the subsequent inheritance of these colonialities which simultaneously shape the boundaries of respectability and covertly exclude people of colour from the definition of humanity (Jackson, 2020).

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  31 (Sexuality) Education is a key site for reinscribing those norms, coercing young people into acceptable subjectivities and exposing its non-innocence and complicity in the (re)production of the colonialities of gender (Coloma, 2017). These educational colonialities of gender are evident in everything from uniforms and binary bathrooms to bullying and racialised sexual violence (Pasley, 2022a, 2022b; Pascoe, 2005; Howell and Allen, 2021). Four centuries after the invention of gender, Rahimi and Liston (2011) describe how Black girls, still marked by the colonial characterisation of voracious sexual subjectivity in comparison to their passive white female counterparts, are blamed for the sexual violence they experience in their classrooms. Their blackness, read as less than human, justifies the violence done unto them. These patterns of violence remain because, even as colonised peoples adopted Western patriarchy, from Africa (Oyěwùmí, 1997) to Aotearoa (Kerekere, 2017), coerced into becoming similes of white men and women (Lugones, 2007), the white-coded performativity of gender meant that they were never granted the same privileges that gender conformity granted white people. This is what it means to inherit the colonialities of gender. These dynamics are by no means limited to cisgender people either, as medical discourses demand that trans bodies perform their gender in conventional ways, fostering the whiteness of transsexuality that marks transnormativities (Stryker, 1994; Pasley, Hamilton and Veale, 2022). This should come as no surprise, given that the birth of the clinic was a critical component of the deployment of Modernity and the enforcement of bodily norms (Foucault, 1963). These spectres of coloniality cannot be erased but, by tracing the entanglements that produce unjust relations, they can be renegotiated in ways that offer more response-able possibilities (Barad, 2017). Warren (2017) extends Quijano (2000) and Lugones’ (2007) critiques, contending that the humanist ideology that emerged from the Modern/ colonial project constituted its (whitened) human subject against the (blackened) fungible non-human object. Blackness is the exclusion that whiteness requires to figure itself as human (cf. Britzman, 1995). Homo nullius. This is evident in the exclusion of blackness from the colonialities of (whitened) gender, construing Black performativities as less than human (Lugones, 2007). The gratuitous violence of slavery, apartheid, and ongoing structural inequalities are a matter of (whitened) humanity ‘securing the boundaries of the self against ontological assault, fixing the other in a space of alterity’ (Warren, 2017, p. 395). Warren (2017) further complicates this by exploring the im/ possibility of differentiating the monolith of blackness. The ‘genres of Man’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015, cited in Warren, 2017) – man, woman, child, worker, gay, trans and so on – can only exist in relation to blackness under erasure, as these forms of differentiation require the humanity that blackness is denied. Under erasure, or ‘ontocide’ as Warren (2017) names this attendance, the tension between humanist markers and non-human blackness is a reminder of the inadequacy of any attempt at ‘structurally adjusting’ antiblackness by humanising what humanism has cast as non-human. Warren (2017) contends that it is only by attending to this paradox – the surplus violence that exceeds

32  And Pasley et al. the matrix of humanist im/possibility – that Black suffering can be rendered intelligible. Subsequently, if posthumanism is to do justice to those that humanism deems fungible, including black(ened) and trans(gressive) bodies, it cannot reproduce the (white) supremacist logics that are entangled with the humanist principles that posthumanism seeks to critique. This would preserve the humanist ontological matrix. Therein, if posthumanism does not dismantle those Modern/colonial logics, it will inevitably reproduce the positivism, dualism, individualism, anthropocentrism, transcendentalism, temporal linearity, and subsequent hierarchies that it seeks to undermine because they are inextricable from supremacist logics. In many ways, this is why the term ‘more-than-human’ has often felt more appropriate because, in line with Jackson’s (2013) recognition of humanism’s persistence in posthuman scholarship, it makes space for the way in which Western scholarship cannot exorcise the spectre of humanism. Moreover, while acknowledging the exclusionary process of rendering ‘human’ a bounded notion, as it is understood by humanism, it makes space for relational conceptions of becoming (more-than-) human, without negating those who are still invested in humanity (see Jackson, 2013). Echoing Alejandra’s section, de la Cadena (2009) dubs this ‘making space’ a pluriversal politics, allowing for many worlds to co-exist, even if that means coming into conflict, as opposed to humanism’s one-world ontology which absolves itself of these conflicts by simply discounting the plausibility of non-Western worlds. Rather than requiring a divestment from humanity, more-than-human approaches call attention to the way the human of humanism only exists through its exclusion of the Other, denying its legitimacy, if not its existence. By highlighting the hypocrisy of humanism’s posturing as autopoietic, while requiring the Other to define itself, demonstrates that even humanism’s human is relationally defined. Furthermore, it reveals that humanism’s human is contingent, rather than universal, which renders ridiculous any sense of Man’s or humanism’s omnipotence. In terms of the coloniality of gender, a (whitened, Western) more-than-human analysis provides a means of dismantling the humanist figuration of the human, such as its reliance on positivist binary renderings of sex/gender/sexuality, dualistic distinctions between trans and cis or linear understandings of transition, individualistic notions of personal responsibility, anthropocentric understandings of agency, transcendental relationships between policy and lived experience, and so on. However, no matter how this analysis is labelled, these approaches will continue to operate as recolonising mechanisms if they rely on intelligibility within Western worlds, predicated on the humanist ontological matrix. This is a useful point to return to Jackson’s (2013) suggestion that ‘[p]erhaps the “post” human is not a temporal location but a geographic one’ (p. 673). To reconfigure the geopolitics of knowledge, more-than-human approaches must engage with more-than-Western worlds and on more-thanWestern terms. In te Ao Māori, this process of engaging with Otherness is known as kanohi ki te kanohi (Hoskins, 2010), whereby responsibility for the

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  33 Other is practised through being willing to know and be affected by them on their own terms (compare Watts, 2016). Notably, the subject of this proposition is always already more-than-human and relationally produced, appreciating the agency of nonhuman beings. Furthermore, recognising more-than-Western worlds also entails acknowledging worlds that have been rendered impossible. The void where more-than-Western impossibilities go is structured by colonisation and its ongoing colonialities (Barad, 2017; Ramirez and Pasley, 2022). In the case of gender, this requires tracing the entanglements that made particular matterings possible and others not, which in turn requires heeding Todd’s (2016) call to draw on Indigenous and other non-white(ned), non-Western ways of doing what has been bracketed as or defined in relation to the heterosexual matrix of gender, sex, and sexuality (Binaohan, 2014; Kerekere, 2017; Pasley, 2022a). By corroding the Western logics embedded in these ways of being, Western posthuman scholars take the burden off nonWestern scholars who either seek to reform the human or divest from it, because this corrosion demonstrates that the boundaries themselves are fungible and does not saddle them with the labour and cost of challenging white supremacy. Furthermore, drawing on Spivak, Sundberg (2014) illustrates how decolonisation requires undoing the sanctioned ignorance that allows those colonialities to go unchecked and doing the homework that is required to enact justice. Hopefully, this also provides space for black(ened) posthuman scholars to continue to do and be recognised for the scholarship that they have long been doing under other names (Todd, 2016). Moreover, it is not enough to recognise that whiteness/blackness is constructed (Quijano, 2000) – it is necessary to account for what those constructions have and continue to render im/possible and therein divest from the Western logics that have been naturalised in scholarship. Echoing my co-authors, such approaches proliferate questions around of how fostering (educational) relations that exceed the Modern/colonial ontological matrix might offer educators new ways of being useful to students. For example, while it exceeded the capacity of this chapter, I was inspired to consider how these ideas might be used to dismantle the colonialities of trans necropolitics in sexuality education (Pasley, in writing). Rather than providing solutions to the colonial maladies we have inherited, investing in, living, and standing with more-than-Western worlds could render such problems unthinkable. Conclusion This chapter examines the deployment of posthumanism in education, exploring how these theoretical approaches un/do the damage inflicted by Modern/ colonial humanism. The first section draws on perspectives from Abya Yala to interrogate whether and how we might entertain an education that can uphold plural worlds. The second section brings together Philippine colonialities and Indigenous critiques of new materialism to query what it would mean to un/settle colonial humanism in education. The final section engages the

34  And Pasley et al. coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007) to ask what it would take to ensure that posthuman approaches to education do not operate as a recolonising mechanism. In each case, we recognise that posthumanism’s wilful ignorance of other non-humanist worlds, in service of a pretended originality, reproduces the extractive dynamics of imperialist humanism. Rather than seeking to dismantle humanism, recognising that there are those who are understandably invested in those worlds (even if it is only to change them), this chapter seeks to highlight the possibility of nurturing plural worlds, of being useful to students, and finding radically different, perhaps more just possibilities, through other worlds. In short, posthumanism’s critique of the Modern/colonial humanist paradigm is more effectively enacted when it ceases trying to (re)possess innovation, recognising ‘there is no thought not yet thought’ (Buffalo, 2022, p.  118), and instead embracing and honouring the worlds that humanism sought to erase. References Ashcroft, B. (2001) On post-colonial futures transformations of colonial culture. London and New York: Continuum. Barad, K. (2014) Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Barad, K. (2017) 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 Binaohan, B. (2014) Decolonizing trans/gender 101. Biyuti Publishing. Blaser, M. (2009) Political ontology: Cultural studies without ‘cultures’? Cultural Studies, 23(5–6), pp. 873–896. Britzman, D. P. (1995) Is there a queer pedagogy? Or, stop reading straight. Educational Theory, 45(2), pp. 151–165. Buffalo, A. D. D. M. (2022) Kēdzéntēdé Kedzedı̨̄: Aunties, Disestablishment, and the Making of Communiversitea. EdD thesis, University of Toronto, Toronto. Available at https://hdl.handle.net/1807/125644 (Accessed 8 May 2023). Butler, J. 1990 Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge. Cajete, G. (2014) Diné perspectives: Revitalizing and reclaiming Navajo thought. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cherniak, S. and Walker, A. M. (2020) The “new:” A colonization of non-modern scholars and knowledges. Hypatia, 35(3), pp, 424–438. https://doi.org/10.1017/ hyp.2020.17 Coloma, R. S. (2013) Empire: An analytical category for educational research. Educational Theory, 63(6), pp. 639–658. https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12046 Coloma, R. S. (2017) “We are here because you were there”: On curriculum, empire, and global migration. Curriculum Inquiry, 47(1), pp. 92–102. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/03626784.2016.1254505 Constantino, L. R. (1975) A histsory of the Philippines. New York and London: Monthly Review Press.

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  35 Daniel, K. (2020) Opinion: Why BIPOC is an inadequate acronym. Toronto: Chatelaine. Available at: https://www.chatelaine.com/opinion/what-is-bipoc (Accessed 8 May 2023). De la Cadena, M. (2009) Política indígena: un análisis más allá de ‘la política’. Red de Antropologías del Mundo, 4, 139–171. De la Cadena, M. (2010) Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics”. Cultural Anthropology, 25(2), 334–370. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01061.x De la Cadena, M. (2015) Earth beings. Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1963) Birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Paris: Gallimard. Freeman, E. (2010) Time binds: Queer temporalities, queer histories. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Gleeck, L. E. (1976) American institutions in the Philippines, 1898–1941 (Vol. 28). Manila: Historical Conservation Society. Haritaworn, J. (2015) Decolonizing the non/human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2), 210–213. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/582030 Hokowhitu, B. (2020) The emperor’s ‘new’ materialisms: Indigenous materialisms and disciplinary colonialism. In Routledge handbook of critical indigenous studies. London and New York: Routledge. Hoskins, T. K. (2010) Māori and Levinas: kanohi ki te kanohi for an ethical politics. PhD thesis, The University of Auckland, Auckland. Available at https://research space.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/6089 (Accessed 8 May 2023). Hoskins, T. K. and Jones, A. (2021) Ka whawhai tonu tāua (We will continue to fight) Ka whawhai tonu tāua: A feisty conversation about Māori-Pākehā relations. (Public Talk). Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland Art Gallery. Howell, T. and Allen, L. (2021) ‘Good morning boys’: Fa’afāfine and Fakaleiti experiences of Cisgenderism at an all-boys secondary school. Sex Education, 21(4), pp. 417–431. Jackson, Z. I. (2013) Animal: New directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism. Feminist Studies, 39 (3), 669–685. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2013. 0024 Jackson, Z. I. (2015) Outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement ‘beyond the human’. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ), 21(2–3), 215–218. https://muse.jhu. edu/issue/31912 Jackson, Z. I. (2016) Losing manhood: Animality and plasticity in the (neo) slave narrative. Qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences, 25(1–2), pp. 95–136. Jackson, Z. I. (2020) Becoming human: Matter and meaning in an antiblack world. New York: New York University Press. Kerekere, E. (2017) Part of the Whānau: The emergence of Takatāpui identity he Whāriki Takatāpui. PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington. Available at https://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/handle/10063/6369 (Accessed 8 May 2023). Lesko, N. (2012) Act your age!: A cultural construction of adolescence. Abingdon: Routledge. Lugones, M. (2007) Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia, 22(1), 186–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2007.tb01156.x

36  And Pasley et al. Mika, C. T. H. (2012) Overcoming ‘being’ in favour of knowledge: The fixing effect of ‘mātauranga’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 44(10), 1080–1092. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2011.00771.x Oyěwùmí, O. (1997) The invention of women: Making an African sense of western gender discourses. Mississippi: University of Minnesota Press. Pascoe, C. J. (2005) Dude, you’re a fag’: Adolescent masculinity and the fag discourse. Sexualities, 8(3), pp. 329–346. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460705053337 Pasley, A. (2022a) Spacetimegenderings: How Trans Secondary Students Matter in Aotearoa New Zealand. PhD thesis, University of Auckland, Auckland https://doi. org/10.13140/RG.2.2.26563.48165 Pasley, A. (2022b) Trans im/possibilities. In The Palgrave encyclopedia of sexuality education (pp. 1–11). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/ 978-3-030-95352-2_87-1 Pasley, A., Hamilton, T. and Veale, J. (2022) Transnormativities: Reterritorializing Perceptions and Practice. In P. Doan and Johnston, L. (Eds.) Rethinking transgender identities. Abingdon: Routledge. Quijano, A. (2000) Coloniality of power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. Inter­ national Sociology, 15(2), pp. 215–232. Rahimi, R. and Liston, D. (2011) Race, class, and emerging sexuality: Teacher perceptions and sexual harassment in schools. Gender and Education, 23(7), pp. 799–810. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2010.536143 Ramirez, E. and Pasley, A. (2022) De/colonisation and the un/doing of critical theory. Knowledge Cultures, 10(3), pp. 150–176. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc10320229 Rodil, B. R. (1993) The Lumad and Moro of Mindanao. Minority Rights Group International Report 93/2. London: Minority Rights Group. Romero, N. and Yellowhorse, S. (2021) Unschooling and indigenous education. Humanities, 10(4), 125. http://doi.org/10.3390/h10040125 Rosiek, J. L., Snyder, J. and Pratt, S. L. (2020) The new materialisms and Indigenous theories of non-human agency: Making the case for respectful anti-colonial engagement. Qualitative Inquiry, 26(3–4), pp. 331–346. Salmond, A. (2012) Ontological quarrels: Indigeneity, exclusion and citizenship in a relational world. Anthropological Theory, 12(2), pp. 115–141. Salmond, A. (2021) Rethinking ‘race’ in Aotearoa New Zealand. News Room, July 31. Available at https://www.newsroom.co.nz/rethinking-race-in-aotearoa (Accessed 8 May 2023). Spivak, G. C. (1999) A critique of postcolonial reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present. London and Cambridge, US: Harvard University Press. Stryker, S. (1994) My words to victor frankenstein above the village of Chamounix: Performing transgender rage. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1(3), pp. 237–254. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i3-4.28037 Sundberg, J. (2014) Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067 TallBear, K. (2015) An indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2–3), 230–235. https://muse. jhu.edu/issue/31912Te Ara. (n.d.) 1945–1978 Language under threat. https:// teara.govt.nz/en/te-tai/te-mana-o-te-reo-maori-chapter5 Thiong’o, N. W. (2005) Europhone or African memory: The challenge of the pan-Africanist intellectual in the era of globalization. In T. Mkandawire (Ed.) African intellectuals: Rethinking politics, language, gender and development. London: Zed Books.

Gratuitous Posthumanism in Education  37 Todd, Z. (2016) An indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘Ontology’ is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), pp. 4–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12124 Tróchez, A. S. (2019) Cultivating justice in higher education: Simplicity as a decolonial philosophy and practice of liberation. Los Angeles: UCLA. Tuck, E. and McKenzie, M. (2014) Place in research: Theory, methodology, and methods. Abingdon: Routledge. Warren, C. (2017) Onticide: Afro-pessimism, Gay Nigger #1, and surplus violence. GLQ, 23(3), pp. 391–418. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3818465 Watts, V. (2013) Indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non humans (First woman and Sky woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), pp. 20–34. https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/ index.php/des/article/view/19145 Wynter, S. (2003) Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedomm: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. New Centennial Review, 3(3), pp. 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015

3 Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education Becoming-Citizen Dianne Mulcahy, Sarah Healy and Martin Awa Clarke Langdon Introduction Citizenship has been described as one of the most influential modern institutions introduced by the nation-state (Krasny, 2017, p. 45). It is variously defined as a status belonging to the individual, as membership of a given community (Marshall, 1950), and as a practice that is performed through ‘acts of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008). In citizenship education, it is increasingly conceived as a participatory practice, ‘something that people continuously do’ (Cross, 2022, p. 1). This participation is normally very anthropocentric. It is focused on the dualism between people or among people and institutions. Neglecting natural others, it is reliant on binary thinking. Challenging this thinking, posthumanism helps us focus on citizenship as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) which includes both human and nonhuman elements. Accordingly, our analyses are guided by the notion of acts of citizenship as shown in what follows, a white settler story of self as told by the chapter’s first author: A friend and I dropped into what we once frequented as ‘our pub’. Unbeknown to us, it had changed hands and the clientele were now predominantly Koori (Indigenous Australians). Seated at a table and enjoying a beer, the cry went up ‘Gubbah, Gubbah, Gubbah, Gubbah’ (announcing the presence of white people). Our sense of the situation was that we did not belong. Finishing our drinks, saving face perhaps, we respectfully left. In time, a process of defamiliarising (Palmer, 2020), began. The challenge of perceiving belonging anew and differently set in. In this narrative, two white settler Australians experience a challenge to their status and community membership by way of reclamation of a site (a pub) and its unceded land by the traditional owners. The focus falls on people and their negotiation of occupancy, not on natural and highly significant others, here unceded land. Regarding acts of citizenship, it can be difficult to discern where

DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-4

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  39 the focus falls. Some acts are particularly telling; they leave an affective imprint as the ‘Gubbah, Gubbah…’ callout sketched above left on author one. Here, citizenship shifts from a status category (something possessed) to participatory and ethical acts (something done). Thinking citizenship as ‘done’ rather than ‘possessed affords attention to its embodied, emplaced and implicative nature. It also dispels the idea that it is necessarily centred on people. The chapter is then a posthuman exploration of citizenship as ‘doing’. Thus, in the story above, marked bodies, entitled white would-be patrons and a pub with a particular history in a particular time, space and place assemble or come together to reveal racialised relations wrought by centuries of colonial disruption to ‘right relations’ between peoples, places, and histories. Taking issues such as the climate crisis or the recent viral pandemic as examples, it is the ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010) of climate and virus, playing into the issue and acting in relation with people, that counts. Communities (publics) form around issues such as these as they are debated in the public sphere. Politics too are present, as debates are not necessarily open to all. Constructed as the Others to the public sphere, Indigenous communities, non-whites, immigrants, women, children, the poor and more have historically been excluded (Hultgren, 2018, p. 183). For example, in Australia, full citizenship rights were not granted to Indigenous Australians until a government was held in 1967. Posthumanism helps us re-think the idea of the human as exceptional or unique. A normative idea, the masculine, white, Eurocentric, heterosexual subject has long served as the norm by which all other humans are judged. And what of the more-than-human? Regions, mountains, rivers and lakes have been ‘recognised in law as legal persons and/or living entities, with a range of legal rights and protections’ (O’Donnell, 2020, p. 643). Can naturalised entities come to count as citizens and be considered to participate in publics? A growing body of research would suggest as much (Knight, 2022; Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, Hanafin, 2018). Holding the view that a posthuman imaginary is necessary for present-day citizen-subject formation, the intent of the chapter is three-fold. It is concerned to: (i) acknowledge the condition of human-nonhuman entanglement in which we exist; (ii) investigate civic powers of action to critically engage public problems of a social and ecological kind; and (iii) explore more inclusive, socially just civic pedagogies with the capacity to turn these problems around. Initially, we review conceptions of citizenship, giving particular attention to posthuman notions of becoming. We then consider civics and citizenship in the context of education. By way of a vignette showing children participating in everyday acts of civics and citizenship, we subsequently explore how a posthuman de-centering of human subjects and re-centering of human and morethan-human relations can change conceptions of citizenship and render citizen becoming in more inclusive and transformative ways.

40  Dianne Mulcahy et al. Citizenship and the Salience of Becoming Having established that a posthuman exploration of citizenship concerns doing, we now turn attention to a related process, becoming. An Enlightenment humanist conception of citizenship implies having political, civil and social rights (Marshall, 1950) and promotes the idea that it is people and people of a particular persuasion (e.g., white, male, and propertied) who qualify as having them. Contesting the universalising assumptions of liberal theorists, Braidotti (2022, p. 9) claims that ‘appeals to the “human” are always discriminatory: they create structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of humans, let alone between humans and non-humans’. Similarly, the notion of the public sphere was never a universal or neutral civic space. Publics, or our preferred term, issue-publics (Kallio et al., 2020), come in diverse forms and the dominant form is awash with exclusions of a gender, race/ ethnicity and class kind (Sills et al., 2016). Therefore, issue-publics emphasise issues of importance to people’s lives and offer ‘opportunities to consider people from different citizen-positions’ including children and youth, whose citizen status is often unclear (Kallio et al., 2020, p. 723). Publics cannot be specified in advance as if they pre-existed the nature of people’s engagements with them. They continuously become, albeit that in certain conditions, such as when issue-alliances present, they congeal to form an ongoing identity. The concept of ‘becoming’ presupposes that ‘all material entities are driven by the power to differ from within’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 2). Contrary to a binary logic that has difference as difference from, here, difference is an immanent category. As Murris (2016, p. 84) suggests, ‘there is no prior existence of individuals with properties, competencies, a voice, agency, etc. Individuals materialise and come into being through relationships’. As we add, so does citizenship. Children become intelligible as citizens when undertaking civic engagement through, for example, social networking, or when participating in civic publics, such as street marches and community projects. There is no citizen (e.g., doer) before the civic act (e.g., the deed). Today’s children ‘model a kind of posthuman citizenship that has been formed in direct response to the realities of climate change, a citizenship entangled with the more-than-human environment and empathetic kinship with other children and other planetdwellers’ (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, p. 134). Becoming is not only to come into existence, but also to become many and different, in Postma’s (2016, p. 322) terms, to escape from ‘the predefined categories of identity presented as an inheritance, a social order or a choice’. It acknowledges the lived, embodied, emplaced and affective experiences of citizenship and modes of being citizen. Indeed, as Postma notes, ‘the desire to become is the primary life force’ (ibid., p. 316). Thus, we can begin to think about citizenly identity as a process of becoming-more than national, rational, autonomous and right-bearing. Thinking again with the story that opens the chapter where a white settler Australian (first author) experienced a challenge to her status as a rightful citizen, rebecoming-citizen was a matter of significant identity shift and deeply felt: ‘Our sense of the situation was that we did not

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  41 belong’. The familiar was made strange. I was viscerally prompted to reconsider my majority positioning and become accountable to the traditional owners of a country to which I had blithely assumed I simply and self-evidently belonged. Becoming takes place intra-actively in human/non-human assemblages (collectivities). Intra-action is a term used by Barad (2007, p. 33) to denote ‘that distinct agencies do not precede but rather emerge’ through the intraactive process. This contrasts with ‘interaction’, which assumes ‘that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction’ (ibid.). We use the term intra-action to provide a sense of the mutual emergence among the elements that make up assemblages. Thus, a citizenship assemblage takes into account how publics are formed and these might comprise ‘bodies, things (such as money, property), collectivities (communities, nation-states), norms and values, legal and policy frameworks, and ideas (nationality, belonging, democracy)’ (Alldred and Fox, 2019, p. 690). Children lend themselves well to the study of becoming as an intra-active process. While often conceived as ‘citizens-in-waiting’, from a young age they take part in everyday processes of citizenship, exercise political agency, form civics identities and shape the public sphere (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021). They ‘do not see themselves as in “nature”, but of nature, as part of thoroughly entangled life-worlds’ (ibid. p. 164), thus being ideal subjects with regard to gaining insight into posthuman citizenship. If looking to create child citizens through educational practice, it is to pedagogic and curricular arrangements that one might look, and look ‘close-up’, attending to their constitutive capacities and conditions. In Australian and New Zealand schools, these pedagogic and curricular arrangements are shaped by shared democratic values emphasising the importance of civic participation in shaping the next generation of active and informed citizens who can engage in democratic processes and, in the case of Aotearoa New Zealand, act on issues that matter (Ministry of Education, 2022; Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2014). However, a notable difference between the curricula is that the Australian curriculum does not extend the same importance to Indigenous peoples, languages, cultures, values and histories as the Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum which centres Māori language, concepts, values and worldview while fostering an understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi, a founding document of the country (Ministry of Education, 2022). The interconnectedness of people and the environment is made explicit, with students learning how natural and cultural environments are used, valued, and cared for and the consequences of people’s interactions with these environments (Ministry of Education, 2022). This includes an emphasis on understanding the rights of the environment, the importance of environmental sustainability and the cultural significance of natural entities such as trees, mountains and bodies of water for Māori. It is arguable then that Australia, and Western countries more generally, have much to learn from the way that New Zealand approaches citizenship education, an approach that opens the door to a posthuman conception of citizenship by holding space for the more-than-human.

42  Dianne Mulcahy et al. Making Sense of Becoming-Citizen in Education

In this section, we consider some of the conditions that constitute citizenship curricula and pedagogy. Education is argued to serve social justice by providing students with ‘opportunities to become a different self’ (Postma, 2016, p. 322). Civics and citizenship curricula embed these opportunities, certainly, in our view, if structured as student learning through issue-publics that prioritise social and ecological issues. Yet, even in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand, citizenship curriculum continues to be parsed in terms of a disciplinary focus on the human with citizenship education typically turning on the primacy of the individual and human exceptionality, ‘the assumption that humans are unique’ (Zembylas, 2018, p. 254). Possessing rights and the power of reason, the perception is that people rightfully take centre stage. In the Australian civics and citizenship curriculum for example, ‘liberal democratic values … such as freedom, equality and the rule of law’ are emphasised (Australian Curriculum, 2022); Aotearoa New Zealand’s citizenship education is organised around dual themes of civic participation in a democratic society and individual rights, responsibilities and roles, even if rights are attributed to the environment (Ministry of Education, 2022). The neoliberal reform of education in which ‘individualistic, possessive, and competitive subjectivity’ is valorised (Zembylas, 2018, p. 255) plays readily into these curricula. Curriculum is highly contestable and the civics and citizenship curriculum particularly so given discourses concerning ‘culture wars’, ‘woke culture’ and the claimed existence and importance of national values. This is especially applicable in Australia where the national curriculum is undergoing redevelopment. Although Australia is culturally diverse and considered to be a secular democracy, efforts are being made at a national level to preserve its Christian and Western heritage through recent changes to the school curriculum that restore Christian and Western heritage. It is clear from debates surrounding the Australian curriculum that citizen subjectivity and the ‘make-up’ of the citizen subject (secular, religious, Christian, multi-faith, ‘western’) is the predominant concern. Grasping the opportunity to recentre human and morethan-human relations, in this chapter we reconsider the make-up of the notion of citizenship. In looking to learn what a posthuman, feminist materialist analysis might yield for the study of citizenship, and attending to conditions that constitute citizenship curricula, the empirical analysis is set within the context of the complex people-place-heritage relations of Aotearoa New Zealand, a country shaped by historic conflict between Māori (First Nations people) and Pākehā (settlers primarily of European descent). The empirical material thus demands attention to First Nations/Indigenous ways of knowing. As Hultgren has it (2018, p. 194), ‘ignoring rich indigenous traditions risks reinforcing one of the most glaring silences in orthodox citizenship studies, and also misses out on an exploration of the concrete norms and institutions within which a more

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  43 generous relationship with socio-ecological others could be cultivated’. In the Aotearoa New Zealand curriculum case, this ‘more generous relationship’ involves facing the legacy of colonisation by way of a curriculum that addresses historical racism (e.g., through social inquiry into the dawn raids and antiPolynesian racism of the 1970s) and upholds a ‘Māori-values approach’ (Ministry of Education, 2022). Exploring how this relationship might be cultivated, we ask: (i) How is it that children become citizens in today’s entangled world and what does this becoming produce? And, (ii) what might be possible if we were to alter the curricular and pedagogic conditions for what we can imagine, know and do as citizens? Data Encounters of a Posthuman Kind Working empirical material generated from an arts-based ethnographic project, we trace encounters between bodies, human and otherwise, in association with artworks. The empirical material was produced over the course of a large-scale study (2016–2019) undertaken by the second author (Healy, 2019). Data for this chapter were drawn from the situated practices of artists, audiences, and artworks set on a coastal headland of Aotearoa New Zealand as part of the biennial art exhibition, Sculpture on the Gulf. Encountered during a sculpture walk, the broader study’s focus artworks were selected for their capacity to involve children and young people in issues of significant environmental and social concern and served as an informal curriculum through which they might come to act as citizens. For a more extensive description of the site and its artworks in the context of civics and citizenship, see Mulcahy and Healy (2023). We choose for intensive analysis an artwork created in 2017 by artist, and third author, Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, and adopt a decolonialising approach to our uptake of feminist, materialist methodological resources. We provide an account of an intergenerational group of sculpture walkers encountering the artwork Untitled (Whakanoa), as part of a citizenship curriculum ‘done’ informally and experientially. Our account can be considered an ‘affective experiment’ (Knudsen et al., 2022) which, as Knudsen and her colleagues (ibid., p. 2) explain, involves three dimensions, namely: revealing unrecognised aspects of the social, engaging with unpredictable and transgressive processes, and enacting a future in the making. Our claim is that Untitled (Whakanoa), in association with the pedagogic practices that play into it, conforms to each of these dimensions. It reveals unrecognised (material, affective) aspects of curriculum as a social practice, promotes transgressive (nonnormative) cultural processes, and prompts a significant becoming in the children who engage with it. It is an affective experiment par excellence. We employ an analytic of assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) whereby the data are taken to be events which can disclose the agencies, subjectivities, affects, capacities and power dynamics within the assemblages that became salient at this particular sculpture walk site, that is the location of Untitled (Whakanoa). These subjectivities include the three author-researchers who

44  Dianne Mulcahy et al. respectively self-describe as settler-Australian, settler-Australian-Pākehā New Zealander and Māori-Pākehā New Zealander. The analytic approach involved (i) identifying the material, social and affective elements that make up curricular and pedagogic assemblages; (ii) mapping the intra-actions among these elements; and (iii) identifying the capacities and effects (consequential action) of these intra-actions (see Mulcahy and Healy, 2021, for further discussion). It afforded purposeful engagement with the qualities of the data and, in accenting affect, a felt sense of how posthuman citizen subjectivity is produced. Becoming-Citizen: Encountering Untitled (Whakanoa) The protagonists in our narrative of becoming-citizen are members of the signing Deaf community, fifteen altogether, including hearing family members, dogs and two English-to-New Zealand Sign Language interpreters. Accompanying the group on the last stretch of the sculpture walk, I (second author) understand them to be Pākehā New Zealanders, like me. Making our way slowly from the island headland to the sheltered foreshore, we encounter an unobtrusive artwork of modest proportions. It consists of multiple components, marking out a geographical area stretching from The Pavilion to the Matiatia foreshore. The Pavilion is a temporary hub close to the foreshore marking the beginning and end of the walk for most. The first component (Figure 3.1) is a somewhat formal arrangement of water running over a patterned surface (Roimata Toroa/albatross tears), stone, branch, and artillery casing. The casing connects the artwork and audience with the artist’s whakapapa (the means by which family, genealogy and cosmology along with people, place, events and objects can be understood). The further components – a modest arrangement of plastic water bottles attached to steel Y waratah posts (Figure 3.2) – are positioned at either end of the Matiatia foreshore; the foreshore, and indeed the whole bay, is thus incorporated into the artwork. Near one waratah post, a small plaque attached to a large rock requests that visitors take heed of the sacred character of the area, accentuating a message that might otherwise go unnoticed, which is that walking onto the foreshore involves walking onto an urupā, a Māori burial site. Untitled (Whakanoa) invites audiences to ‘wash stone and water over timber and contemplate the important yet unseen histories that are culturally entangled in the site’ (https://sotg.nz/gallery/martin-awa-clarke-langdon). As its maker, Martin, tells it in his artist talk, the plastic water bottles are similar to those used at his whānau urupā (family burial ground) when he was a child, towards having people engage in the ritual practice of whakanoa (acknowledging tapu relations, navigating the presence of a spiritual force). Tapu is a complex concept steeped in relationality. It acts as a multi-scalar force that regulates inter and intra-actions in Māori life. It can incorporate bodies, parts of bodies, objects and places and requires those aware of a tapu occasion to engage specific rituals or practices to look after themselves and others. Tapu functions in

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  45

Figure 3.1 Untitled (Whakanoa), Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, 2017.

Figure 3.2 Announcing the foreshore as sacred. Untitled, Martin Awa Clarke Langdon, 2017.

46  Dianne Mulcahy et al. the everyday much like principles of occupational health and safety, the purpose being to protect people from potential hazards. We are told by a tour guide that the site of Martin’s artwork is tapu (sacred), an area of urupā (burial). Marked and unmarked bones of elders are in the ground and the artwork is designed to raise awareness of both the presence of those who have passed, and of the actions necessitated by this new knowledge. The artwork’s water-filled plastic bottles invite visitors to engage in a simple act of rinsing hands, an act that emphasises ‘right practice’ when entering and departing the foreshore urupā so that a person does not bring anything untoward with them into the urupā or, conversely, something untoward does not accompany them out of it. The rinsing of hands enables a safe transition from the everyday (noa) into the sacred (tapu) and back again. As a posthuman curriculum event, the salience of material practice begins in the ritual practice of rinsing hands, pointing the way towards seeing posthuman citizenship curriculum as a participatory practice of an embodied kind. Attuning to the historical and cultural meaning of what we have heard from the guide, group members, me included, go stock-still, in what I can only describe as a visceral shock to sense. It is striking that the spiritual activity of Matiatia foreshore is not more common knowledge, and that the significance of the site has only been (re)activated through Martin’s creative intervention. Subdued, I cast about making meaning of the situation. I wonder whether the sustained silence takes in what Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 10) call ‘settler moves to innocence’, those ‘strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege’. The response made by the group to the call to rinse hands, I determine, is not strategic. The children and adults moved as one to engage this ritual practice. Vulnerable to the affecting presence of local Māori in marked and unmarked burial sites, a felt sense of injury done to an Other hung in the air. Certainly, I felt caught up in a moment of exposure as Hentschel and Krasmann (2020, p. 16) describe: Moments of exposure offer a glimpse of vulnerability when it literally surfaces and becomes palpable and tangible, but also staged. These moments assume a particular publicness: suddenly, an uncomfortable or unexpected truth comes to the fore… In their vehemence they are what we may call ‘productive’: they incite social connection and are at the core of social and political life. Moments of exposure are concrete, intense and effortful (as ‘witnessed’ in the chapter’s opening white settler narrative). And so it was for me and, I sensed, my fellow walkers. Facing the distinctly uncomfortable truth of social, material and place relations imposed on Māori people, a kind of ‘undoing’ came to pass. In tandem with the mundane practice of rinsing hands, it was for me the modesty of the water bottles artwork that propelled it.

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  47 In attuning to the willful ignorance of the foreshore as urupā, I am keenly aware of complicity in Pākehā – Māori histories, of my unwitting involvement in a collective forgetting. This history is, of course, active and ongoing (Sriprakash et al., 2022), and further complicated by my brown-skinned ‘white passing’ appearance and re-settlement in Australia. The observation that it is in ‘moments of uncertainty that ethics happens between us’ (Hentschel and Krasmann, 2020, p. 21, original emphasis) strikes home. In the case of encountering Untitled (Whakanoa), this re-assemblage work critically concerns Māori-Pākehā relations, but also relations of people-place and their inter-dependency. While appropriated for recreational activities, the foreshore urupā remains a space of ongoing community and obligation – an obligation all too easily forgotten by people and organisations whose responsibility is arguably to unforget (Shotwell, 2016). To cross the site is to share the duties that attach to it (the duty of rinsing hands, not eating on the foreshore, the duty of becoming attentive to the history of land and people, the duty to become unforgetful). Along with Untitled (Whakanoa), the foreshore addresses cultural lack in visitors, builds their capacity to act respectfully towards Māori of this place and creates the conditions for mutual respect. In other words, it is agentive, a component in a posthuman citizenship curriculum that one might learn powerfully from. It embodies a citizenly concern to address longstanding cultural and community issues centring on power and cultural difference. It, and the bay beyond, as referenced in the first artwork component (Figure 3.1) with its albatross tears, exercise affective agency, well captured in the words of an island resident and sculpture walker at interview: ‘I mean we’ve lived here almost ten years. And um we don’t eat down there … you can’t take your food anywhere further than these marquees because these all get blessed as well. So if you’re going further than that [down onto the foreshore], like I say there’s bones and all sorts of things down there, it’s just not cool’. ‘Just not cool’ is a judgement on practices that do not conform to the requirements of sacred space. This space becomes a space of non-belonging for visitors ignorant of the history under foot. Having engaged in the ‘right practice’ of rinsing hands, we gather to hear from the artist, as I (second author) report in my field notes from the day: Martin then joined the NZSL group outside The Pavilion, in front of the formal component of his artwork. The Deaf audience ask questions through the interpreter and Martin’s responses are signed back. Martin tells the group that several months ago, he had unwittingly attempted to put bamboo stakes in the ground and was stopped from doing so because the site is tapu (sacred). This led to him taking action by creating the artwork. Some of the Deaf audience were brought to tears at the end, the impromptu chat ending with the entire group clapping by wiggling their fingers in the air together. It is like a dance or perhaps the glimmer of multiple waves cresting in the sunlight.

48  Dianne Mulcahy et al. Martin too, it seems, has been subject to a moment of exposure to the hidden significance (issue) of the foreshore and it has led him to create the artwork around which our small assembled public is gathered. An act of truth-telling – unforgetting – it binds the now issue-public it attracts to the truth of systemic violence perpetrated by settler populations. It is the material, affective and relational dimensions of this act, acting mutually and emergently, that we claim creates conditions for citizen-becoming. Thus, the affective force of the artwork, in association with access by the group to the artist, brings some group members to tears and the whole group to an appreciative understanding and practice of becoming-with-Others. It is a collective, citizenly reckoning with the colonial present whereby the group becomes more and different. Becoming-with-Others, human and otherwise, is enacting citizenship and engaging a citizenship curriculum. Animating the space of the foreshore urupā and accompanying Martin’s short talk, affect becomes a civic pedagogy (Albuquerque and Pischetola, 2022, p. 3, original emphasis) and in this becoming, transmits ethics (Mulcahy, 2021). We learn that it is not only people who teach; space and place do much of the pedagogic work as described in a good amount of global Indigenous research (see for example, Rākete, 2017; Bawaka Country et al., 2022; Nxumalo and Villanueva, 2020). Pedagogic publics are produced affectively and spatially, forcing a rethink of who and what is ‘the public’ in enactments of citizenship and citizenship education. The absent-presence of Māori, the foreshore urupā and the bay beyond it generate a sense of belonging to a public populated by ancestors, spirits, histories, and bodies of land and water that are equally instructive: ‘we don’t eat down there (on the foreshore urupā) … it’s just not cool’. Negotiated and distributed, substantive citizenship (Anand, 2018, p. 166) is in play. As Rākete (2017, p. 1) writes in the context of posthumanism and when referencing ‘land-people’: ‘This is a story about us – about all of us, although it will come to trouble the notion of an “us”’. Citizenship curriculum is broad and critical in intent. It goes beyond a sense of producing child subjects socialised into membership of the nation state, rational and right-bearing, to prompt, in a naturalistic or real-life way, exposure to different and differentially valued Māori knowledge, histories and people-place relations. Knowing of an embodied and affective kind constitutes the lived curriculum experience for the children storied here and, we speculate, produces effects that last, given the difficult knowledge involved (Zembylas, 2014). Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices: Citizenship Education In the above, we explored how a posthuman de-centring of human subjects and re-centring of human and more-than-human interrelations can shift conceptions of citizenship and render the production of the citizen subject differently. Posthumanism proposes very different starting points for citizenship

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  49 (more collective, less individual) and curriculum (more ontological than epistemological) and in its recentering of human and more-than-human interrelations, brings unexpected practices into view. Thus, over the course of storying the vignette, it might be noticed that the static concept of citizenship transformed into the more dynamic descriptor citizenly, a political potential or capacity to act that forms publicly around the artwork Untitled (Whakanoa). Citizenly relations are constituted collectively and reciprocally. Children and young people become citizens through being affected by teachings regarding right practice (observing tapu) and affecting this practice, participating in it, performing it and thus consolidating it. The ‘walking curriculum’ which invites bodily encounters with objects and the many teachers on offer – the artist Martin, site tour guide, the foreshore urupā and the invitational water bottle artwork – all contribute. A glimpse presents what might be possible should we alter the curricular and pedagogic conditions for what we can imagine, know and do as citizens and citizenship education. We concur with Cross (2022, p. 3) who claims that the materialist turn invites re-engagement with the work of Dewey and his argument for ‘the importance of embodied joint action within practical investigations as crucial to the development of citizenship’ (as cited in Cross 2022, p. 3). It is the materials of pedagogy (water bottles, information resources, the affective atmosphere of the foreshore urupā) and how they are put to work (the embodied joint action of hand rinsing and collective ‘clapping’ at the close of the question-and-answer session with Martin) that prompt the emergence of a posthuman citizenship. In considering possible designs for a citizenship and civics curriculum, worldly and vital issues might lead towards attracting a public and having its members become attuned to the affective forces attaching to these issues, and harnessing these forces towards effecting social and ecological change. A becoming-citizen view concerns ‘right’ doings on the ground, being affected by Others (human and otherwise) and responsive to Others, challenging the received and individualistic, status and statist views of citizenship as simply ties to a country of birth. In investigating pedagogies as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being’ in the context of disability studies, Goodley (2007, p. 317, see also pp. 328–329) identifies aspects of a pedagogy oriented to promoting social justice. Giving selective attention to these aspects, we map them onto the intra-acts of citizenship that play into the pedagogic and curriculum assemblage that is Untitled (Whakanoa). First, the interconnection of bodies. Non/disabled and Māori/Pākehā bodies enter into relationship, as evidenced in the affective responses made by all participating. Second, these interconnections are of a mutually constitutive or interdependent kind. The presence of Māori who have passed, and the injury done to them, is palpable. It acts on children and adults alike. They in turn act on it. They serve as witnesses to this injury, participants in a project of unforgetting ancestor-spirituality-place relations. Further, new sensibilities for all involved in enacting this pedagogy are promoted, as can be claimed for

50  Dianne Mulcahy et al. members of Martin’s audience in the impromptu and collective response made to his talk, and for Martin himself in creating the artwork. Last, experimentation with a caring pedagogy, not in terms of caring for subjects, but rather caring becomings is demonstrated in the readiness of the children and adults to take part in the practice of observing tapu. As Goodley (2007, p. 329) explains, experimentation ‘may well involve elucidating those everyday happenings that constitute social justice: caring, reciprocity in the educational relationship, ordinariness, extraordinariness, intuition and personal shared understandings between the agents of pedagogy’. The children experiment with ‘caring becomings’ – increase their powers to act − through the affects and bodily habits that accompany their attention to tapu forces and the associated acts that observing tapu demands, opening them to the outside of being Pākehā. Citizenship education is more than learning about the legal rights and obligations of citizenship; ‘it requires embodied and affective immersion in and ethical commitments towards building alternative worlds and relations’ (Nxumalo et al., 2022, p. 103). We emphasise the necessity of educational responses that refuse the separation of citizen formation from current conditions such as advanced capitalism, settler colonialism and environmental precarity and acknowledge their intimate entanglement. A citizenship curriculum for the posthuman present positions humanity as entangled with ecology and technology (Braidotti, 2019). It could usefully centre issues of a social, ecological and technological kind that children and young people can investigate from the vantage point of the concepts above (eg. capital, coloniality, precarity) in a process of pedagogy as becoming. In the pedagogic encounter that is Untitled (Whakanoa), capacities to act with curriculum resources, both people and sentient entities such as land and bay and bottled water, produce a citizenship experience that is neither − while also being both – land or people, majority (Pākehā) or minority (Māori), normative or transformative. Altogether, the chapter has attempted to address the potentiality of thinkingdoing citizenship in a performative or practice-based and relational way, beyond its humanistic foundations. If ‘the desire to become is the primary life force’ (Postma, 2016, p. 316), it is affectivity, materiality and relationality that are foundational in citizen-becoming. As the empirical analyses show, affects and natural elements (land, water … ) set citizenship in motion. Immersed in material, affective and right practice, it is projected that the children involved will further form ethical subjectivities responsive to the social and ecological injustices that continue to exist. Conclusion Our main argument concerns the idea that changing the foundational narrative of citizenship and citizen subjectivity brings along with it an ethics, and potentially, an educative praxis that accents human interdependency rather than hierarchical separation. This interdependency is well illustrated in the traditional story of Roimata Toroa/albatross tears that feature in the first

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  51 component of Untitled (Whakanoa). Considering this story, we close with a kōrero which illustrates the interconnectedness of people and natural and cultural environments and the consequences of their misuse for human and planetary becoming. Its evocative meanings denote the kind of citizenship curriculum and student capacities to act in the world that are desired and desirable. A becoming-citizen story of a different knowing kind, it tells how, Pourangahua is given kumara (sweet potato) seeds in Hawaiki by Ruakapanga to bring to Aotearoa. He is also loaned two sacred albatrosses to travel there under the instruction of taking care of them via karakia. Upon arriving in Aotearoa, he sees his wife and forgets his duties and the rights of care for the birds. They fly back to Hawaiki where their caregiver Ruakapanga sees their tears and that they have been mistreated. He sends insects and diseases that attack the kumara crops in Aotearoa, which remain to this day. There are processes and karakia assigned to growing kūmara that if observed and carried out, those diseases and insects are mitigated and the wellbeing of the people can remain intact. Take shortcuts or forget, then the likeliness of less crops or destroyed crops will be the effect.1 The precarity of connectedness between human and more than human worlds, and the consequences of neglect of mutual obligation, notably not legal rights, is sheeted home. Crops, birds, tears, diseases, duties and caregivers’ remembering and forgetting entangle. Ultimately, it is the everyday, ethico-political and affective, material acts regarding right practice and rights to practice – ‘rights of care’ − that can serve as an educational guide to citizenship. Note 1 This kōrero about the Roimata Toroa is an abbreviated version, composed in conversation with Martin Awa Clarke Langdon in his capacity as artist.

References Albuquerque, P. and Pischetola, M. (2022) Affect as Future-Making Pedagogy: A PostQualitative Inquiry in Brazilian Primary Schools’. Pedagogy, Culture & Society. doi: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2046142 Alldred, P. and Fox, N. (2019) Assembling Citizenship: Sexualities Education, Micro­ politics and the Becoming-Citizen. Sociology, pp. 53, 689–706. doi: 10.1177/003 8038518822889 Anand, N. (2018) ‘A public matter: Water, hydraulics, biopolitics’. In Anand, N., Gupta, A. and Appel, H. (Eds.) The promise of infrastructure. Durham: Duke Uni­ versity Press, pp. 155–174. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2014) Australia: Civics and Citizenship. Available at: https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10curriculum/humanities-and-social-sciences/civics-and-citizenship

52  Dianne Mulcahy et al. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Bawaka Country, I., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Lloyd, K., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S. and Daley, L. (2022) Songspirals Bring Country into Existence: Singing More-Than-Human and Relational Creativity. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), pp. 435–447. doi: 10.1177/ 1077800421106 Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2019) Posthuman knowledge. Oxford: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2022) The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach. Humanities Research, 11(3), pp. 1–13. doi: 10.3390/h11030062 Cross, B. (2022) Citizenship Practices in School Spaces: Comparative Discourse Analysis of Children’s Group Decision Making. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. doi: 10.1080/14681366.2022.2037689 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York: Continuum (Original work published 1980). Goodley, D. (2007) Towards Socially Just Pedagogies: Deleuzoguattarian Critical Disability Studies. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 11(7), pp. 317– 334. doi: 10.1080/13603110701238769 Hanafin, P. (2018) ‘Posthuman rights, a micropolitics of’. In Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. (Eds.) Posthuman glossary. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Healy, S. (2019) Cracking open pedagogy: Learning ‘in’ intense environments. PhD, The University of Melbourne. Hentschel, C. and Krasmann, S. (2020) ‘Acts of exposure and their affective publics’. In Hentschel, C. and Krasmann, S. (Eds.) Exposure – Verletzlichkeit und das Politische in Zeiten radikaler Ungewissheit. Bielefeld: Verlag. Hickey-Moody, A., Knight, L. and Florence, E. (2021) Childhood, citizenship, and the anthropocene: Posthuman publics and civics. United States: Rowman & Littlefield. Hultgren, J. (2018) ‘Representing posthumans: Citizenship and the political production of bodies and technologies’. In Cudworth, E. Hobden, S. and Kavalski, E. (Eds.) Posthuman dialogues in international relations. London: Routledge. Isin, E. and Nielsen, G. (Eds.) (2008) Acts of citizenship. London: Zed Books. Kallio, K. P., Wood, B. E. and Häkli, J. (2020) Lived Citizenship: Conceptualising an Emerging Field. Citizenship Studies, 24 (6), pp. 713–729. doi: 10.1080/13621025. 2020.1739227 Knight, L. (2022) The Posthuman Census: A Citizen Cartography Project [Online]. Available: https://lindaknight.org/the-posthuman-census-a-citizen-cartographyproject/?fbclid=IwAR2ai4HT2a3a0wDctlHTC-hzABjZCNnuZVJb1ACYNV73aa U6HP_kRp57cDY [Accessed 30 August 2022]. Knudsen, B. T., Krogh, M. and Stage, C. (2022) Methodologies of affective experimentation. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Krasny, E. (2017) ‘Citizenship and the museum: On feminist acts’. In Ashton, C. J. (Ed.) Feminism and museums: Intervention, disruption, and change. Boston: Edinburgh and Boston MuseumsEtc. Marshall, T. H. (1950) Citizenship and social class. In Manza, J. and Sauder, M. (Eds.) Inequality and society. Cambridge, New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Ministry of Education. (2022) Teaching and learning guide for civics and citizenship education. New Zealand: Cognition Education. Available at: https://sltk-resources.

Towards Posthuman Pedagogic Practices in Citizenship Education  53 tki.org.nz/assets/Uploads/Teaching-and-Learning-Guide.pdf (Accessed 31 March 2023). Mulcahy, D. (2021) Enacting Affirmative Ethics in Education: A Materialist/ Posthumanist Framing. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 54(7), pp. 1003–1013. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1907744 Mulcahy, D. and Healy, S. (2021) Ordinary Affect and Its Powers: Assembling Pedagogies of Response-Ability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–18. doi: 10.1080/ 14681366.2021.1950201 Mulcahy, D. and Healy, S. (2023) Citizenship Matters: Young Citizen Becoming in the Posthuman Present. Educational Philosophy and Theory, doi. 10.1080/00131857. 2022.2161892 Murris, K. (2016) The posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. Abingdon: Routledge. Nxumalo, F., Nayak, P. and Tuck, E. (2022) Education and Ecological Precarity: Pedagogical, Curricular, and Conceptual Provocations. Curriculum Inquiry, 52(2), pp. 97–107. doi: 10.1080/03626784.2022.2052634 Nxumalo, F. and Villanueva, M. T. (2020) ‘(Re)storying water: Decolonial pedagogies of relational affect with young children’. In Dernikos, B. P., Lesko, N., Mccall, S. D. and Niccolini, A. D. (Eds.) Mapping the affective turn in education: Theory, research, and pedagogy. New York: Routledge, pp. 208–228. O’Donnell, E. (2020) Rivers as Living Beings: Rights in Law, But No Rights to Water? Griffith Law Review, 29(4), pp. 643–668. doi: 10.1080/10383441.2020.1881304 Palmer, H. (2020) Queer defamiliarisation: Writing, mattering, making strange. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Postma, D. (2016) The Ethics of Becoming in a Pedagogy for Social Justice: A Posthumanist Perspective. South African Journal of Higher Education, 30(3), pp. 310–328. doi: 10.20853/30-3-651 Rākete, E. (2017) ‘In human: Parasites, posthumanism, and papatūānuku. In Q.  Latimer and A. Szymczyk (Eds.) The documenta 14 reader. Munich, London, New York: Prestel Verlag. Shotwell, A. (2016) Against purity: Living ethically in compromised times. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Sills, S., Pickens, C., Beach, K., Jones, L., Calder-Dawe, O., Benton-Greig, P. and Gavey, N. (2016) Rape Culture and Social Media: Young Critics and a Feminist Counterpublic. Feminist Media Studies, 16(6), pp. 935–951. doi: 10.1080/1468 0777.2015.1137962 Sriprakash, A., Rudolph, S. and Gerrard, J. (2022) Learning whiteness: Education and the settler colonial state. London: Pluto Press. Tuck, E. and Yang, K. W. (2012) Decolonisation Is not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1–40. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2015. 1137962 Zembylas, M. (2014) Theorizing ‘Difficult Knowledge’ in the Aftermath of the ‘Affective Turn’: Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogy in Handling Traumatic Representations. Curriculum Inquiry, 44(3), pp. 390–412. doi: 10.1111/curi. 12051 Zembylas, M. (2018) The Entanglement of Decolonial and Posthuman Perspectives: Tensions and Implications for Curriculum and Pedagogy in Higher Education. Parallax, 24(3), pp. 254–267. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2018.1496577

4 Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education Ruth Vinz

Introduction: Writing As Restless Inquiry It may seem an unpropitious time to suggest that (re)imagining forms and purposes of writing might free us from the less-than-porous walls of disciplined classrooms where writing is considered evidence of what has been learned. More passion is aroused for advances in other technologies of transaction and transcendence, and, while I agree with these sentiments, I do not want to overlook the promise of writing as a powerful conduit for world-imagining, world-refiguring, and world-making. This chapter invites readers to re-imagine writing as a form of restless inquiry. Writing has the potential to open generative spaces for thinking/writing into (un)FOR-see-able landscapes of materiality and mattering for purposes of composing ourselves in and with the world. First and foremost, this pedagogical (re)figuring serves to un-discipline writing from its time-honoured use as a tool of exposition and representation where bracketing structures organise information in ways that truncate any traces of inquiry. Writing conceived as inquiry, as a conduit into the ‘un-FORsee-able’, challenges writings’ conventional uses. Un-FOR-see-able is an assemblage that aggregates the aboutness of writing into an ‘as yet’. Splintering the word ‘foreseeable’ into for-see-able captures the tentativeness of writing into the unknown towards purposes (FOR) being able to write into (un)certainty, the (un)known, and (un)determined. FOR inquiry itself; FOR inquiry always in-the making. Writing ‘able’ to compose in the spaces of the writing itself and (un)able to be formed in advance of the writing act. FOR spaces into which we-foresee-opportunities to un-do, un-discipline and write (other)wise. Releasing writing practices from the tight grip of exposition and representation and reconceiving writing as a generative act, as an entrance into terrains of ambiguities and uncertainty, necessitates a pedagogical reorientation. To write into the unknown, as Cixous (1976) reminds us, is to write ‘not about a destiny but about the adventure of trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings’ (p. 885). To name and inhabit a broader repertoire of approaches that resist representation and focus on relationalities, with emphasis on writing as embodied and materially mediated, will challenge current conceptions and practices. DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-5

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  55 What If? What if …writing in educational spaces serves as a portal to discover and explore relationalities (impermanence, interpenetrations, entanglements, and molecular/molar dynamics of world-in-the-making) rather than as representation? What if writing renders more attention to matter and materialities, temporal, spatial, and embodied enactments rather than to abstract reasoning? What if writing evidences complex and nuanced mind-storms that we gloss over in shorter sprints towards conclusions? What if writing into an (un)FORsee-able is valued as a pedagogical reorientation, creating new understandings into the nature of inquiry and of purposes and types of writing that demonstrate processes of inquiring? This requires un-learning if a writer has been a diligent student of both writing and research-sanctioned school practices. All that I have written thus far presents a gap between telling and showing. In the remainder of this chapter, I elucidate principles within this pedagogical reorientation through written demonstrations into an ‘as yet’ of inquiry. It takes time to un-learned schooled practices. Only through experimental and vibrant writing will we foster a broader repertoire of genre necessary to reorient writing into the (un)FOR-see-able. What does it mean to write into the unknown—to improvise pathways of thinking towards more generative modes of inquiry? Writing Beyond the Already Written Reorienting a writing pedagogy proceeds on the principle that writing is a portal to becoming, and a writer writes not to tame thoughts but to let loose ideas through words, phrases, and sentences that gesture into an unknown. I  invite myself and students to a daily writing practice from this evocation: Write Beyond the Already Written. From elementary students to doctoral students, all are invited to work against writing the known and to free themselves to write into an ‘as yet’. Here is an example from my notebook. I began with Walt Whitman’s words (1892), ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’, and simply wrote two paragraphs of errant gatherings: Belonging suggests losing self—the ‘I’ becoming ‘i’ with every ‘atom’. Atoms becoming ‘we’ and then losing pronouns as if separate cells were leaking from bodies-in-motion. The human body replaces 330 billion cells daily and takes a mere 100 days to replenish, and yet, this small part of the networks of cells decries separateness, gives way to (be)longing, every atom of an all. Each atom in the cedars of Lebanon is an atom in a swirl of frost, a tear from a mother’s cry, and the drop of rain latched to an iris petal. All are reminders of relationalities: a cog with its wheel; daylight is nightfall; falling silence has its sounding. As a bee finds flower pollen, synonym collides with its antonym. Every atom of river stone is in a single pine

56  Ruth Vinz needle. Atoms of me, of you, of the cardinal’s feather are tangled into passageways of (be)longing ad infinitum. Writing as a process of inquiry engages both writer and readers to resist the tendency towards explication of Whitman’s sentence. The first paragraph explores relational identities of ‘self’ to ‘others’ to ‘I’ and from ‘atoms’ to ‘cells’. The second paragraph moves into matter/molecular relationalities where ‘cedar, frost, tears’ are materially mediated beyond the atoms of Whitman’s (be)longing until ‘synonym collides with its antonym’, creating a brief move back to the discursive before giving way again to the material/mattering of relationalities of ‘river stone, pine needles, cardinal’s feathers’. The vibrant and lively lithic traces of inquiry—speculative, disjunctive, straining normative logics—are often relegated to the trash bin on a computer screen or overlooked as a method for inquiry/ing. Berlant and Stewart’s The Hundreds, (2019) where the authors compose in one hundred words or multiples to provoke deep attention and absorption through writing, is a marvellous example of writing into the ‘as yet’. I practise such writing and invite students to do the same—writing into, around, and through a word or sentence, allowing it to wild until on the verge of collapse. The Whitman example is also an instantiation of nomadic writing (trans)forming into what Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) identify as ‘ligne de fuite’. Lines of flight, as with lines of inquiry, feed on their own constituting energies of imagining, break through and crack open what is ‘not yet’, diffract, into multiplicities of ‘and, and, and’ (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007). These flights are thresholds to elude paradigms—between human and non-human, embodied and materially mediated, or representational and relational. My line of flight with Whitman’s statement is an envisioning of Sidorkin’s (1999) (re) cognition of the primacy of relationality: We are used to material objects, human bodies, individual selves [as] units of being, knots of existence. In fact, we might have been wrong all along, and these seemingly separate, stable, and definite objects can exist as long as they relate to each other. In turn, the invisible, elusive, and ever-changing relations between and among things—only those are real and worth paying attention to. (p. 143) Relationality rather than representation is discovered through the act of writing, (re)figuring experience and imaginings into networks and webs of relationality and intra-relationality. Writing as Immersive Experiencing Webs of relationalities are embedded in experiences from which we cannot disentangle ourselves. Writing composes us, entangles us and provides a refuge,

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  57 a resting space for deep immersion. This pedagogical principle led me to encourage myself and students to reorient our writing practices towards relationality. The invitation is ‘to be’, rest/restlessly through writing as immersive experiencing. The term ‘immersive experience’ is most often used to describe versions of augmented or virtual realities. Facilitated by technologies such as VR (virtual reality) headsets or other virtual technologies, a person’s perception is altered, immersed into an environment. An immersive experience in writing is also transporting. For example, you may be at your desk writing, but sights, sounds, and energies take you to another place entirely. Traditional pedagogical approaches teach us to fear the production of texts with slippery or frayed edges, uncertain twists and curves, and ambiguities left unexplained. We have been taught to write clean, to get to the point and to follow the path towards conclusions. Not so with immersive experiencing. From some 65 years ago an image of an old friend comes to mind accompanied by fleeting images and felt-senses. Sensations, spiky and slippery, take over and wrap my body. Sounds of a waterfall churn off cliffs. I feel bare-feet against mossy stones and hear thunder roil. The entrance of a cave comes into view, its cold breath touches my cheek, leaving me with heart beating in my throat. Sensations—an ache in the stomach, fleeting images of moss, stone, and blackbird—a blackbird hovering. This may seem a miniscule focus for inquiry, but one that demonstrates in a small but significant way how writing has the potential to compose immediacy and immersion, to create nets of feltsenses—this one from the distant past of my thirteen-year-old self. Immersive experiencing is not intended to find truth, teach a lesson, or recapture memory, but to feel again in the now. She perches on moss-covered rocks, arms fluttering to keep her upright against the waterfall biting into stone. Thunder claps unsteady her. She shimmers, slip-slides, balances on a fulcrum point. On this day Genise Lowder will learn to swim. For now, she trembles at the water’s edge, touching a toe to water, pulling back, dipping again, and then wiggling toes into the glassy surface. Genise hesitates, retreats backward. Toes dip into water. Over and again. Abel is lying in grass close to the cave’s opening. I ought to be at school. Fifth period. Ms. Kimble is taking attendance. She will call my mother as I have a tendency toward absences. A bird slides onto a ledge of rock and pecks at a trail of insects. Jason and Abel are plucking blades of grass, sucking their sweetness. The bird circles and perches one stone higher. Abel takes a rock, aims, throws. The bird startles, dives near the water’s edge. Genise turns, slips, hits the water, flat-bodied. Water surges against my face, enough to make me choke. A bird perches on a branch—a blackbird as I remember or a hawk. Blackbird, yes, the glisten of obsidian against a lightning strike. Ms. Kimble makes a note to call my mother as she stares at the empty desk. Genise is face down, water lapping around her quiet body. In a moment that seems weighted with a hundred years of sleep, the three of us rise

58  Ruth Vinz from a daze and form a triangle as a shadow of bird flits across the cave mouth and Genise, hair splayed like water-lichen, floats. The water swirls through her open fingers. Then we are shouting, ‘Genise, Genise….’ Her name echoes back. Water claps against rock. Abel jerks awake and grabs for her ankle. I dive in, catch in a tangled net of roots and flail to reach the surface. Each thrash draws the net tighter. It is too long before I can breathe, too long before I see Genise next to me on the shore. It will not be until I find the frayed diary, among stacks of discarded books, break open the lock and start reading entry by entry sixty-five years later that I discover this memory captured in my sixth-grade handwriting. A simple two sentences. No claim of fear, no image of Genise on the bank, no description of the raw feeling of lungs almost bursting with the need for air, the sensation of reeds grasping at my legs and arms, netting me in—reeds entangling legs. No—Cartesian split between mind and body, no—now and then—no unfolding iterations within the tangles and crevices and textures of experiencing—all is held through the shadow of blackbird, reeds with their rhizomatic traps, a breath drawn in so deep as not to need air. Yes—to storying the promiscuous hauntings held in a body and coming to (re)cognize and provoke the hair-standingon-end bone-deep realization that waterfall, Genise, blackbird, school surveillance, roots, lungs without air, lighting, and thunder are part of a fabric of multiple, becoming-always-in-relation, always an ongoing agitation of iterative mattering. Immersive experiencing, shimmering with sensorium and image, is a means for writers to dwell, gaze, and attune to the possibilities of becoming through writing. Immersive experiencing does not exist in telling what happened, that is, to recover a memory or determine its accuracy, but the writing creates the moment anew. Immersive experiencing might make concrete how, as Barad (2019) suggests, ‘the self is dispersed/diffracted through beingandtime’ (p. 529) to ‘open up to all that is possible in the thickness of the Now’ (p. 524). The practice expresses a key principle in how I reorient a writing pedagogy towards a posthuman emphasis, exploring affective intensities and iterative composings into an ‘as yet’ of meaning. Writing Relationalities: Being and Becoming With Start writing with the last whisps of dreams, catch the haze of morning sunlight, or begin with the hummingbird circling a double-floret of hyacinth before hover-crafting into a hydrangea blossom then skittering past the trumpet vine covered with bees burrowing deep inside for nectar. Our hummingbird, shimmering wings rotating forward, backward, downward is a life-force that displaces dew from a rose petal. In this entanglement of hummingbird, bees, three flowers, morning dew, wings rotating in figure-eight patterns at 80 beats per second, each relata and intra-action is almost too complex to nuance in writing.

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  59 Articulating a pedagogy of writing practices towards the posthuman, I began this chapter describing and demonstrating ways of writing towards the ‘as yet’, reorienting writing as a tool of inquiry rather than as representation and offered demonstrations of particular practices that emphasise writing as embodied and materially mediated inquiry. In this section, I suggest a second way of reorienting, which is to hone practices of tracing relationalities, that is, writing into bio- and zoe- graphical traces to make porous the boundaries we have created in the discursive separation of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’. IF we are to (re)place the ‘I’, into becoming and being with the all, writing makes read-able the complexities of relationalities where co-emergence of bio and zoe de-centre the ‘I’ at least to a small ‘i’ although admittedly this ‘i’ is embedded as part of trace into the temporalities, proximities, and materialities of the more-than-human. Writing as Becoming and Being with the All Barad’s (2007) conception of intra-action informs this sense of becoming/ being with the all. They draw the distinction that ‘interaction assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction [while] the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through their intra-actions’ (p. 33). How might we make visible traces of intra-actions through writing practices that entangle the emergent relata-as-flows in both the discursive and the material? Writing into webs of relationalities de-centres human subjectivity to/for achieving what Brian Massumi (2015) suggests as thinking-feeling where affect serves as a ‘point of entry into an eventful, relational field of complexity that is already active, and still open-ended’ (p. 151) and that ‘takes thinking out of the interiority of a psychological subject and puts it directly in the world: in the commotion of relational encounter’ (p. 211). Attuning to relationalities, to the ‘commotion’, through writing rather than representation requires practice, experimentation, imagination, and a willingness towards (re)figuring habitual ways of writing. Here is an example from my journal: Gusts of wind carry Spring into an open window. A moth carcass swirls, suspended mid-air as if in flight, and, with a second gust a single thread of spider silk releases moth onto the window ledge. An egg sac shimmers on the web, a womb glistening, close to the husk of moth whose scale wings are perfectly intact, diffracting light—an architecture of a thousand scales of dried veins, hardened layers of chitin. Spider sucked the moth dry and left this beautiful mummification—sustenance for Spider to spin a web, lay eggs. Egg sack hums and pulses. Spider transverses a translucent thread, slow-walking, spinning, foraging, gestating. And this thought comes to mind: I am here, moving with spider, moth, egg sac,  stabilimenta—life is death is foraging is being foraged. A wren,

60  Ruth Vinz eye following spider—tap, tap of beak on screen, brushing against my 20,000 cochlea hair, vibrating a signal of warning to spider. In this moment, a tenderness/an aftermath, a perpetually (re)figuring as wren recreates another moment of continuous becoming. What if there were no breeze through the open window, or if moth had fallen to the floor unnoticed, or if spider spun a web where no screen separated wren, spider, and egg sack, or if I did not have 20,000 cochlea hair cells? How might any change affect the relational workings of composing this moment? Consider how a breeze intra-acts in the moment with moth carcass, spider, egg sack, wren’s peck, sonics of wire screen, wings and all that remains invisible (in)being and becoming with. Through writing, I parse some of the relata by gathering a narrative assemblage that stories the relationalities. Let’s hold for a moment, lean in before leaving, in awe of this story ‘just big enough’ to notice in its architecture of relationalities what often remains invisible in our controlled ways of writing into the world. Haraway (2015) learned from Jim Clifford that ‘we need stories (and theories) that are just big enough to gather up the complexities and keep the edges open and greedy for surprising new and old connections’ (p. 161). What I have come to understand through writing is that I am at one with the spider’s pedipalps on her web or one lace thread in the wing of moth. But what of this? Why might it matter to the way we perform relationalities in writing? How might a writer consider self into the being and becoming with others? Perhaps this question manifests in the idea that we rewrite ourselves continuously, deconstructing, reconstructing, entangling, assembling and relating. And, we leave traces. In research courses, I invite students to write into these relationalities to make visible the porosity of boundedness. For example, after a class observation we might start by listing the visible relata: students, pencils, an overly loud air conditioner, a bee buzzing, a scantron sheet for a mandated reading quiz, and a hallway confrontation overheard—all entangled to compose an intra-relational felt-sense in time/space/event in this schooled space. Rematerialising relationalities is a way to think anew about varying intensities of felt-senses that influence the dynamics of intra-action. Writing as Intra-Dwelling Intra-dwelling is a phrase I coined to emphasise another practice in writing that serves for burrowing deep into linkages and crossings that connect webs of relationalities. Braidotti (2013) urges us towards ‘the invention of new concepts and new productive ethical relations’ (p. 104), and intra-dwellings serve as a transversal force that cuts across, reconnects, knots the previously separated material-discursive into ever-changing nets of relationalities. Writing entanglements—of human and nonhuman—attune us to (re)cognise the anima and reciprocities that are within and surround us. As Karen Barad (2007) suggests, ‘We are a part of that nature that we seek to understand’

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  61 (p.  67). In what follows, I attempt to re-materialise a web of relationalities through intra-dwelling: Blue of sky casts green with a tinge of rain. I peel a small rock from the river’s edge, place it to my lips and feel a hum. A shale layer breaks loose to reveal the intricate lace of a caudal fin and the suddenness of discovery shutters my body, turning the mind sky-blue and electric. A cascade of  color folds into rock’s fissure—sapphire, cerulean, cobalt, aniline— exposing a permineralized fish. I cradle Bachelard’s (1964) words in the palm of my hand: ‘For every form retains life, and a fossil is not merely a being that once lived, but one that is still alive, asleep in its form’. (p. 113) I touch the rock-dorsal fin, the calcified eye-socket and remember from 9th grade Biology that a fish can regenerate an optic nerve in less than 14 days. Tracing the dermal dentiles animates force-energy. Through touch, intra-connecting ecosystems vibrate eco-echoes that burrow into the materiality of fish-rock—a reminder of survival and persistence, traces that weave and intermingle presence and absence. A (re)figuring of the idea behind felt-sense—as a tender witnessing of fossil cupped in palm, its swirling carbon-nitrogen molecules of matter—is becoming sensory-felt mattering, touching more than my palm. The phrase ‘I feel this in my bones’ takes on new meaning. I rough up its smooth logic with an image of faint, pulsing ancestors (rock, fish, plant, spirit) constituting the marrow of bones. As if gazing back at an inscription of life through time, of transcending this fossil-fish as a present out of its pastness, re-surfacing anew as something akin to a presence and absence of life-force—as a glimpse into the scale of ecological past-present-future-perfect-ing. As Barad (2007) notes, ‘Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin: the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future…’(p. 392). An ache of release emanates from the arc of my left collarbone where the hum of lips to rock is felt anew. This rock-fish-fossil, as living presence and ‘entangled kin’, is living on, an entanglement of the intra-dependency, relationality, and embeddedness. Material, biological, and discursive traces emanate as I tender this shadow-life to a nest of silvery minnows——the word ‘endure’ tart on my tongue. This narrative is a meditation, an intra-dwelling, where rock to fossil to fish yields to a network of questions and imaginings, remembered phrases from reading, back to textures and sensations which yield to another swirl of questions, sensations and reconsiderations. The hum of rock-fossil is alive, a living presence, as if minnows were swimming. Sentences circle and curve as oneword crosses over and around others, a phrase halts in a stutter-space just before the next phrase finds a way to burrow in or leap over momentary

62  Ruth Vinz imaginaries or images. As if propositions, sensations and questions warp into pauses and gaps. Emanating from the hum when rock touches lips—a sonics of rhythms, alliteration and assonance keep the as if of thought, the mindbody storms, moving with rock-fossil-fish’s lithic textuality, its presence, its existence without me, without you, and without human intervention. I (re) member this rockfossilfish to the river and into a swarm of nesting minnows. Key to this practice of intra-dwelling is to burrow into precarity through writing. Writing loosens thinking and sensation by travelling with and through words—entering labyrinthine caverns of felt-sense, enjambing digressions into images, resting with that marvellous resource of an em dash (—) before breathing into the next as if. Consider how a simple preposition, so common as to go unnoticed, is a life-force in performing entanglements: one sensation tangles around an image, moves through an object, towards images, beyond conjecture, and takes up a connection across a gap in time before burrowing into a feeling. I wrote my way into prepositions and em dashes and came to (re)cognise their uses through the writing. What does this suggest about how we learn the resources of language conducive to wandering, burrowing, and rupturing? I could go back now and account for all the prepositions in the narrative that led to rock-fossil-fish becoming rockfossilfish. I could point to all the dashes that open spaces to wonder and wander. The dash offers time to breathe, pause, stop time, and capture a flash of thought. A dash is a temptation—risky, leaving this writer teetering onto the edge of think-air, without firm grounding to move forward. Then, there is the progressive tense—‘ing’—an almost unconscious way of creating a dynamic. These are the writing practices we must learn and teach if we are to reorient a writing pedagogy that enacts a becoming through writing. Words, resources of language, syntactic structures create a moment anew. An in-dwelling is not an attempt to represent—there is no subject, no object of study, no reality to be uncovered, no truth to be revealed. This narrative relies on resources for intra-dwelling—burrowing down, circling around, speculating, questioning, capturing sensation—writing towards a point of collapse, a (re)-evolution into rockfossilfish. And what might a collapse generate? I hope the narrative pushes through boundaries and conceptions of presence/absence, life/death, living/non-living, and finally leads to a refiguring that constitutes new becomings. In the final act, rockfossilfish, placed back into water, composes futurity and ongoing (re)evolution. While writing rockfossilfish, Barad’s phrase ‘with their entangled kin’ (re) figured another web of relationalities. And so the entanglement journey continues, begins again, and I am left pondering ‘entangled kin’ as a new focal point of entry into further inquiry on relationalities. Writing Takes a Turn: Encounters towards Kinship Writing often leads to other writing. Perhaps it was the intensity of feeling present with rockfossilfish that, in that moment, Barad’s words, ‘entangled kin’, made their way onto the page and once there only the writing knew how to

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  63 travel. The focus on Kinship began at the edges of as-yet-of thought with Barad’s words ‘entangled kin’ serving as activator to begin an encounter/inquiry. Entangled kin is best described by Barad (2007): Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one’s skin, but in one’s bones, in one’s belly, in one’s heart, in one’s nucleus, in one’s past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human. (p. 393) What I hope to accomplish in this third section is to write into an (un)FORsee-able, an inquiry on kinship, to demonstrate how the practices introduced in the first and second sections of this chapter support sustained inquiry and to offer an alternative perspective on how to rethink uses of writing towards the ‘as yet’ of inquiry. The exploration begins in a long incantation of words, of nomadic lines for trans-versing tangling and entangling relationalities of kinship. This pedagogical reorientation emphasises and encourages the practice of writing as exploration. Here is my beginning into the ‘as yet’ of Kinship: Kin. Kinship. Kindred. Kind. Kinfolk. Kin—blood, chromosomes, semen, seeds, genetics. Kin—pro-creation, semen-egg, genes-family, natal-bonds, mother’s-milk—liquid, bio-genetic. Kinship—from foodsharing to ritual-making to transubstantiation. Kinship in consanguine plants, affinal prey to breeds or genus. Kin—organic matter in life, in death to becoming again in water and soil. Entanglements of genomics, bioinformatic-lineages. Kinship—to nurture, to care for living things, to earth, planets, stars, cosmos. Kinship—composed of cultural logics and constructed practices. Kinfolk from families to alliances to transnational adoptees, and queering diasporas—new (re)figurings always in-themaking. Kinning in domesticating differences, connecting and cloning resemblances, and tying knots of relatedness. Kinship—to forge alliances and affinities. Kinship as belonging, (be)longing, mutual belonging or Haraway’s (1997) use of kinship as relational beings in a biotechnological environment. Kindness as a performative mode of Kinship. First thoughts from this riff—ego-centred/centric kinship predominates conceptions of kinship, but evolutions of configurations and patterns of belonging, in both concrete and ephemeral ways, push towards what Raymond Williams (1977) terms ‘actively lived and felt’ structures of meaning (p. 132). To explore a (re)figuring of kinship, I turn to writing again, to narratives of experience from which to re-materialise the often ephemeral and intangible kinship as lived and felt, working against the structuralist legacy of privileging certain forms of kinship and certain forms of writing.

64  Ruth Vinz Writing as (In)Habiting In reorienting a writing pedagogy towards posthuman inquiry, I use writing as data and as interpretation of data simultaneously as replacement to typical data analysis such as coding or explication. I perform the data as meaning through (In)habitings. (In) habitings demonstrate and explain how writing serves to evoke intensity of experience, imagination, and speculation—a living inside proximity for situating, knowing-in-being. (In)habitings work against the anthropocentric assumption of a self-contained and autonomous writer as subject and gesture towards a writer entangled in the surrounding world, human, non-human, and more-than-human, in keeping with Hayles’ (2017) articulation where interpreting subjects entwine as material-discursive components and are part of the interwoven fabric of interconnectedness entangled in inquiries. Yes, it gets very knotty and messy. In the spirit of what Rosi Braidotti (2013) might propose as an ‘affirmation, not nostalgia … not the idealization of philosophical meta-discourse, but the more pragmatic task of self-transformation through humble experimentation’ (p. 150), I write (in)habitings into two sites where I felt a heightened awareness of kinship. How to re-materialise moments that oozed with inter-species kinship is the challenge. Kyoto, Japan:

In the Buddhist Temple, Jyorengein, near Kyoto, I found kinship with mountains, priests, the sonics of nightingale, creak of bamboo. Thrumming in me still is the calming resonance of the Katori-cast bell echoing across peaks and valleys, then burrowing deep into the hillside before permeating a final echo into sky. My own becoming as if a fertile land, salt of ocean, light of sky, nourished by yamatoimo potatoes with ginger sauce, shitake mushrooms, lily bulbs, laced with strips of radish; dengaku of millet, ginkgo nuts; grilled nori and wakame and each grain, every flower bud and green leaf of nabana, slurps of miso and smells of earth, matcha, pine, and snow. Practicing zazen every morning, breathing into lungs, through blood, into the heart a felt-and heightened-sense with air-spirit-energy-flow attuned me to BECOMING land-air-water-sky. Bonneville Snake River Plain, Idaho: Strapped in a four-seater plane headed into Idaho, I hear the whir of engines pulsing the insect craft. We hover along mountain ranges, blinded by morning light as we jolt and bump our way toward the late Pleistocene Bonneville Flood Plain of the Snake River. Come with me to walk the shale rock landscape of abandoned channels, spillways, cataracts at Red Rock Pass in late May where 19,000 square miles of Lake Bonneville, some 20,000 or more years ago (as indicated by a radio-carbon date for molluscan fossils associated with flood debris and relict soil preserved in flood deposits) experienced geological activity that caused it to overflow and break its natural

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  65 dam, becoming a catastrophic flood, leaving behind a drained lake. Walking this still barren channel with our group of science teachers, geologists, biologists, archeologists, one geologist remarked that the flood produced about 15 million cubic feet of water per second which is more than any river in the world carries today. We lean into one another. Silence—no breath emanating from our bodies. On this seemingly deserted landscape we ghosthear the roar of water re-sculpting shorelines. Descending lower onto the ridge shelf, Samantha, a biologist, reached down into the small pebbles to pick up the smallest of stones between her thumb and forefinger. She gestured for me to open my palm and placed what appeared a very small luminous and flat stone into my hand. ‘That is the ear bone of a crayfish’ she whispered. ‘Otolith. Ear Stone. Ear Bone,’ she chanted as she lifted it from my hand to the light. ‘You see the pattern of rings? Just like a tree trunk revealing her age, a record of this fish’s entire life. Probably caught in the flood.’ No larger than a grain of rice. ‘Just like our inner ear bone,’ Sam deposits this treasure back into my palm, ‘the otolith vibrates as the fish moves and helps maintain balance; its chemical makeup tells us its environmental history. Keep it as a reminder of the thousands and thousands of living things that are here still.’ My eyes travel the landscape as I steady myself. Sam and I lean in, arms pushing against each other as we stare at this tiny bone of ear in my palm that somehow entangles and connects us to its and our narratives—rings, balance, chemical composition, tracings of time, and such beauty in the smallness. In the tent that night, feeling the heartbeat of earth beneath the thin mattress, hearing the whisper in the soil honoring the geological histories and movements, the water, the land giving way, the cray fish and its ear bone—the air still thick with their presence and splinters—I promise to return the crayfish’s otolith to the lake edge in the morning and carry its (re) membering in my bones. (In)habitings—writing into the textures of affective relatedness—move into the body and find a place to linger. Writing from those moments of intimate and uncommon kinship with people, the earth, ear bone, sand, dengaku, lily bulbs, flood waters, I lean into the energies that flow among them—flashes that seize and hold not so much as reenactments but as felt-anew senses, silences, materiality, and discoveries. Only now, with these (in)habitings, am I beginning the ‘as yet’ of inquiry. My intention is to ‘stretch’ and reconfigure the threads of attuning, affiliating, encountering, and attending. Through writing I begin to come to a felt-sense of kinship and better understand what Haraway (2015) writes: ‘I think that the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the face that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time)’ (p. 162). To ‘make kin is to begin to (re)cognize how entities rely on one another and are agents in a network of becoming’ (p. 161).

66  Ruth Vinz I find words slipping away, caught somewhere between making kin and another image of the beautiful architecture of generative inquiry—the incessant urge to stay in the spaces of ambiguity, writing into nomadic lines of inquiry that break and rupture. I yearn to go where the inquiry leads. Instantiations and demonstrations of relationalities, of networks of becoming emanate at the heart of inquiry itself—through the exploration of relationality, intra-relationality and finally reciprocity. Looking at small moments from the spider web on the window casement, a rock-fossil-fish placed to lips, the vibration of a crayfish ear bone, or the taste of lily bulbs, I am trying to write into lived and felt networks of reciprocity/(be)longing in affect—communal, collective, organic—saturating our material and psychic lives into existence. The point is to rescue Kinship from the genealogical implications of the human and to (re)figure with other species and forms beyond the anthropological worlds where this conception most readily resides. A pedagogy of kinship might unsettle the inextricable violence, intolerances, and lack of kinship. I am not there yet—more inquiry, more writing, more gazing and noticing, more reading. Writing reorients affects and perceptions, offering affirmation for our capacities to compose in and with the world, to constitute narratives, and re-narrate anew as becoming subjects (Braidotti, 2013). A Concluding/Next/Beyond Encounter Drawing on posthuman theorising, writing into the ‘as yet’ of inquiry reorients how writing might be (other)wise than most normative conceptions and uses in schools. Notably, as reorientations continue to be performed, the possibilities for epistemological and ontological ruptures in conceptions of writing will continue to expand and overflow. The pedagogical reorientation I’ve elaborated and demonstrated throughout will be in the lost archives and the dustbin of histories of re-making, but isn’t that the beauty and mystery of imagination and desire? Where do you see the potential? Consider your ‘post’ reading of this chapter: What is next or beyond? As any writing teacher might, I invite you now, dear reader, to enter into an ‘as yet’ inquiry of your own. Visualise yourself inside spaces of writing that are polyvalent, multi-nearly-everything, places of exploration and playfulness, restlessness. At times you might be reminded of Alice’s journey of chasing the rabbit and head-body-longing into a free fall until she/you encounter and enact nearly unimaginable-scapes filled with curiosities, questions, desires, and dreads. You must cross the threshold, write one word and then another to find your way through this bumpy terrain. In the ‘as yet’ the seemingly mundane and sacred are both held in the same palm of your hand. Bold experimentation is encouraged. By liberating yourself from established ways of writing, inquiring and becoming, this space can be your temple of delight. Writing into the ‘as yet’ offers you the freedom to cross out, entangle, backtrack, halt, say ‘oops’ and move, well, you decide where.

Writing as Unforeseeable Posthuman Inquiry in Education  67 References Bachelard, G. (1964). The Poetics of Space. (M. Jolas, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantam Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2019). After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice. Theory & Event, 22(3), pp. 524–550. Berlant, L. G., & Stewart, K. (2019). The Hundreds. Durham: University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Boston: Polity Press. Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(4), pp. 875–893. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Parnet, C. (2007). Dialogues II (Rev. ed). New York: Columbia University Press. Haraway, D. (1997). The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order. Feminist Review, 55(1), pp. 22–72. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Sidorkin, A. (1999). Beyond Discourse: Education, the Self and Dialogue. New York: State University of New York Press. Whitman, W. (1892 version). Song of Myself. Leaves of Grass (final “Death-Bed” Edition, 1891–2). New York: David McKay. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part II

Posthuman Pedagogical Diffractions

5 A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism Teaching Elsewhere Sarah A. Shelton

Introduction Though the classrooms in Figure 5.1 are from my own university, they could be from anywhere. They are what Ruth Mirtz calls all-purpose classrooms: those built by designers via a ‘code of square footages and chairs sizes’ meant to ‘squeeze the most use out of the most space’ by ‘cramming as many different kinds of instructions as possible in the least amount of space possible with the least amount of furniture’ (2004, p. 21). As it is designed, standardised and assigned, normally by computer algorithms which calculate course caps and schedules, the average college classroom like those pictured here tells the story of how education, teaching and learning traditionally happen in ‘neutral,’ inert spaces in which students sit while knowledge is deposited (Freire, 1972) into them in order to ‘humanise’ them (Snaza, 2015). But when we trouble the human/nonhuman binary with something like agential realism, such classrooms are no longer inert assemblages of furniture. Instead, they are their own apparatuses, or phenomena, sedimented with the same humanist ontological and epistemological assumptions Karen Barad describes as the humanism inherent in, and perpetuated by, Newton’s classical realist founding of calculus: The universe is a tidy affair indeed … Man’s reward: a God’s eye view of the universe … unmediated sight, knowledge without end, without responsibility. Individuals with inherent properties there for the knowing … Nature and culture are split by this continuity and objectivity is secured as externality. We know this story well, it’s written into our bones, in many ways we inhabit it and it inhabits us. (2007, p. 233) (my emphasis) A quantum posthumanist universe, Barad continues, makes such tidiness impossible. Yet, Cartesian-Newtonian and humanist stories and their ontological and epistemological assumptions are not just written into educational policies and administrative initiatives but also designed into the ‘bones’ of the all-purpose classrooms designed to teach anyone anything anytime anywhere. DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-7

72  Sarah A. Shelton

Figure 5.1  Two all-purpose classrooms on the University of Texas at Arlington campus.

I argue that moving towards posthumanism in education includes creating the possibilities for different stories and different onto-epistemological assumptions. Such a move troubles the traditional story that the furniture, configurations, technology, etc., of classrooms are inert and instead takes their agency seriously. As the actants most often determining curriculum and activities for particular classrooms in particular semesters, educators adopting a posthumanist praxis can approach and work with the classroom as an ever-emerging phenomenon where all parts intra-act and knowledge-making is embedded in more than just a socio-cultural context. This move is not easy. Humanist systems are supple (Pillow and St. Pierre, 2000), and the all-purpose classroom design ‘wears us down … every class hour, we struggle to convert a … classroom setting designed for a lecture into something flexible, fluid, and interesting’ (Mirtz, 2004, p. 22). As Stacy Alaimo puts it when reviewing a collection on education and feminist materialism, such ‘conventional’ classrooms are ‘all too-human place[s] cordoned off from more-than-human liveliness … the chasm between the two suggests how intrepid and inventive we must be to teach with a posthumanist feminist materialism’ (Alaimo, 2017, p. 179). However, intrepid or inventive teaching can often feel like tall orders when treading water in the everyday classroom. Many teachers or other stakeholders are already underpaid and overburdened by a dysfunctional system that exploits them, buried under paperwork and professional development, harried into service, and hamstrung by a lack of resources and non-existent budgets. They might look at some of the inspiring and engaging work done to fill the chasm that Alaimo notes and wonder if moving towards a posthumanist praxis in education is sustainable and applicable to the everyday. They might also wonder, considering the often highly theoretical work being published, what a posthumanist praxis might look like in practical application. The shared stories, snapshots, agential cuts, artefacts, and theories that have, since the mid-2010s, proliferated into a dizzying array of actants, continually diffract an ever-emerging story of what education from a posthumanist framework might do.

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  73 Diffracted through that dizzying array, the term ‘teaching elsewhere’ is something of a two-word story – a ‘material↔discursive’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012) apparatus – that both embodies and drives the posthumanist mindset and praxis described in this chapter. Critically, ‘elsewhere’ itself is not some place somewhere else, but a different spacetime or possibility, a different way of knowing-in-being already here, even in all-purpose classrooms like those in Figure 5.1 that have the story of ‘anywhere’ written into their bones. A mindset for the everyday, ‘elsewhere’ allows us to work small and sustainably as we ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016). In this chapter, I argue that, no matter how inert or unchangeable the spaces we are assigned to teach in may seem, we can stay with our classrooms as they already are, in order to find and build on the posthumanist possibilities always-already present in them. In this chapter, I will first build a diffraction grating for that two-word story by outlining the theories teaching elsewhere diffracts from: Barad’s agential realism, Bohr’s light paradox, Haraway’s elsewhere, and Lenz-Taguchi’s pedagogical documentation. I will then offer examples and conclusions from a literature course where I developed curation↔calibration. This approach involves a continual movement between curation and calibration that allows me, as an educator, to teach elsewhere by building, creating, entangling different apparatuses and actants to create, or diffract for, different posthumanist possibilities. In Theory: A Diffraction Grating for Teaching Elsewhere In theorising and explaining their theory of agential realism, Karen Barad discusses and builds upon Niels Bohr’s solution for the ‘wave-particle duality paradox’ which describes the seemingly paradoxical occurrence of light as wave under experimental parameters that use a two-slit diffraction grating and as a particle under different parameters that use a modified diffraction apparatus (2008, p. 150). A ‘classical realist mindset’ (Barad, 1999, p. 4) can’t reconcile that light, an observable ‘thing’ out in the world, can, ontologically, exist as both wave and particle. But Bohr does not look at light as a ‘thing’. Instead, he considers light as in-relation with the whole experiment: the lab, the kind of diffraction apparatus used to make the observation, the researcher, etc. ‘Light’ from this point of view is phenomenon, where ‘light-as-wave represents a different phenomenon than light-as-particle’ (Barad, 1995, p. 60). For Barad, it is also where each iteration of light-as-phenomenon doesn’t exist outside of intra-action, their neologism for ‘the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ as opposed to ‘the usual ‘interaction’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction’ (2007, p. 33). Here, light is entangled relationships enacted when a specific apparatus is applied in a specific situation in such a way that ‘light’ matters, as in it comes into being, emerges, congeals, in a specific, determinate way that makes itself intelligible, as wave, as particle, as something yet to be imagined in the world (Barad, 2007). With agential realism, we are interested instead of disinterested observers and our ability to know light is inseparable from our existence with it.

74  Sarah A. Shelton No longer separate issues, ontology and epistemology become the inseparable and continual process of onto-epistemology, or knowing-in-being (Barad, 2007). With agential realism, then, ‘space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world’ (Barad, 2007, p. 234), making phenomenon in intra-action spacetimemattering, or the continual, entangled, enfolding, becoming of the world. With spacetimemattering, dynamics, or change, is no longer causality, or impact as cause and effect, but, instead, performativity, or mattering as iterative intra-activity (Barad, 2007). The apparatuses through which we intra-act with this continually enfolding/ becoming/emerging spacetimemattering make it intelligible to us. But they cannot create such intelligibility without making a difference, without marking, without producing space, time, and matter with us in an agential reality that was not possible without the particularly configured apparatuses that include humans and nonhumans alike. Like a diffraction grating in the light paradox, an apparatus in agential realism is not an ‘objective’ tool (i.e., a microscope assumed as a ‘passive’ or ‘inert’ tool in Newtonian scientific observation). Instead, they ‘are open-ended practices … that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings’ (Barad, 2007, p. 170). Rethinking those pictures in Figure 5.1 through agential realism, the term ‘classroom,’ comes to refer not just to the nonhuman actants and physical space we can see in the image. Now, it also refers to a unique, unrepeatable spacetimemattering where spaces, times, and matter not ‘in the room, during class’ are also enfolded into the classroom-as-phenomenon. Past, present and future administrative and pedagogical assumptions, choices, uses, and structures are sedimented out in the furniture, technology, and other features of the room. Human actants ‘bring with them’ the material↔discursive apparatuses entangled with their emergent subjectivities: not autonomous-Is, or constructed positions, but continual becomings-with the world, including times, spaces, and matterings not ‘present’ in the room during assigned class times. With agential realism, a classroom-as-phenomenon is a varied, and variable, human and nonhuman assemblage that comes to be called something like the very specific title of ENGL 2329-003, American Lit, Spring 2018. Therefore, my use of the word ‘classroom’ includes the entire range of apparatuses and actants – both in and not in Figure 5.1’s pictures of the all-purpose classrooms – that, as material↔discursive phenomena of their own, both configure and reconfigure that spacetimemattering through continual intra-action. Students, furniture, gender, texts, activities, race, supplies, discussion boards, social class, bugs, last semester’s grades, laptops, Canvas, teacher, food/beverages, illness, fear, whiteboards, assignments, acoustic tiles, the evil writing-teacher from Sally’s past, problems at home, a door that will not prop open, and the list goes on and is unique to each classroom. Through a posthumanism that uses agential realism to recalibrate our mindset about what/ where/when/how ‘the’ classroom is, we are not quite as cordoned off and contained as those conventional classroom walls might make us feel. Classroomas-phenomenon is not just the discrete, walled-in room built years ago with

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  75 inherited designs, structures, and features we cannot change, but also the dynamic, entangled intra-actions of humans and nonhumans in which the inclusion or exclusion of different actants, different intra-actions, can make a difference. In that same room designed to be an anywhere, there is always-already the possibility of a more equitable, more responsive, more ethical elsewhere. As with all of the posthumanist shifts Barad makes with agential realism, the concept of a speculative elsewhere depends on a shift from relying mostly on reflection to also using diffraction. Pulling the phenomenon into her own work disrupting humanism’s assumptions of disinterested humans separate from an inert and natural world, Donna Haraway (1992, p. 313) argues that diffraction does not ‘produce the same’ like humanist optics of representation but instead offers a new way to ‘see’ not ‘words and things’ but ‘articulations’ of the world, or phenomena, which signify. When ‘nature’ and ‘realism’ and ‘doctrines of representation and scientific objectivity’ are the narratives produced by these humanist ‘representational practices’, the world, nature, nonhumans and all the rest, Haraway argues, ‘is precisely what gets lost’ (1992, p. 313). In the face of such loss, she maintains that ‘where we need to move is not “back” to nature, but elsewhere’ (Haraway, 1992, p. 313). A ‘science fictional, speculative factual, SF place,’ elsewhere, then, is a place made of diffraction patterns and that ‘we may yet learn to see and build here’ (Haraway, 1992, p. 295). As an earlier version of her later stories of Terrapolis or the Chthulucene, elsewhere invites us to stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) and work in local and immediate ways to interrupt and interfere with the humanist stories designed into the all-purpose classrooms, like those in Figure 5.1, that we are already assigned. Diffracting Barad and Haraway’s theories through each other, anywhere and elsewhere become two different and simultaneously possible articulations of the same classroom. In the light paradox, one diffraction grating, or apparatus, produces the phenomenon light-as-particle; another type of diffraction grating produces light-as-wave. Shifting perspectives, or apparatuses, from humanist ‘classroom’ to posthumanist ‘classroom-as-phenomenon’ is like changing diffraction gratings. So, instead of walking into the Figure 5.1 classrooms and seeing only the inert and unchangeable anywhere of an all-purpose space, we also see the myriad possibilities of something else. We see the different wheres that might be possible here if we use agential realism to rethink the classroom as a phenomenon made of diffraction patterns, a spacetimemattering. Particle, wave. Anywhere, elsewhere. Yet, to tap into that classroom-as-elsewhere we first have to get to know our classrooms and their various human and nonhuman actants. We must consciously observe and better understand which apparatuses, both inherited (i.e., the kind of desk-chair combos in the specific room) and already-entangled (i.e., the various emergent ontologies of humans enrolled in the specific section), are telling the loudest stories and most actively shutting down and opening up what is or is not possible for making meaning with that particular classroom. This getting-to-know requires intentional, sustained and continual

76  Sarah A. Shelton observation and intra-action, not for the sake of ‘research’, necessarily, but as everyday inquiry that allows us to both better understand and ethically intra-act with our classrooms-as-phenomena and that actively notices the nonhuman actants entangled in their agential flows. As part of her own intra-active pedagogy, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) gets to know her classrooms by recalibrating Reggio Emilia’s pedagogical documentation, an early childhood education research tool and option for formative assessment. Created to counteract qualitative observation strategies such as observation boxes, pedagogical documentation as it was originally created still only focused on human interactions with other humans, leaving the inert-world, still considered separate from autonomous-learners, unaccounted for and unchallenged. Diffracting pedagogical documentation through Barad’s agential realism and, taking into consideration ‘the equally important encounter with things, matter, artefacts, materials, furnished environments and architecture’ (2010, p. 65), Lenz Taguchi rethinks pedagogical documentation as ‘a material discursive apparatus … and active agent in generating discursive knowledge’ (2010, p. 61). In also documenting the material intra-actions – from the technology to the classroom to the furniture and beyond – that students have with the nonhuman elements that create the class with humans, she sees pedagogical documentation as a verb instead of a noun, ‘a movement or force’ that ‘creates a space that makes our lived pedagogical practices material’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 66). As demonstrated in the next section, pedagogical documentation can take many ‘forms’: photograph, written observation, video, artefact, interview, audio recording, sketch, chart, and so on. Critical to the project of teaching elsewhere, pedagogical documentation becomes a means of dissolving the theory/practice divide by building an archive of artefacts, data, observations, etc., that we can intra-act with and do diffraction work with. This type of documenting, then, is not for the sake of collecting ‘brute data’ for a ‘case study’ to prove the success of ‘making the classroom posthuman’, but instead for the sake of engaging in a material↔discursive process, of doing, of playing, of purposefully noticing agential flows and nonhuman actants. For instance, our photos from Figure 5.1, and in subsequent parts of this chapter, are pedagogical documentation, artefacts created for and now taken from the larger archives for the classes that ran in those rooms. Through agential realism and as pedagogical documentation, the camera, the photographer, the students, the objects in the room are not relata, or discrete and stable things, words, humans, concepts, objects, etc. Instead, they are relations, phenomena, knowing-in-being. The constructed cuts of pedagogical documentation as apparatus which, also, is not a complete thing itself but rather a doing, mean that the photo is not a capturing of reality. Rather it is an agential cut of phenomenon, a negotiation of boundaries between all actors involved where the snapshot-as-boundary is determined by an invested and situated observer whose choices matter. Not in the sense that I capture what is most important or real, but in the sense that my choices determine what is included in the

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  77 frame and what is left out – what reality comes into existence – through a photo. Objectivity becomes taking responsibility for my role in the cut and recognising this as an intra-action, and not making claims about what is in the picture as if I had no hand in materialising it ‘just so’. Meaning then, material↔discursive knowing-in-being, emerges in the intra-action of the room and through the photo itself. As pedagogical documentation, the photo’s ‘job’ or work does not end in its development (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Instead, it becomes an actant itself in the experiment/class much as it has become an actant entangled in the phenomenon of this chapter, now helping us make new meaning altogether here. It is practice, theory and discourse made material so that the teacher can further intra-act with it as she continually makes plans from and with the phenomenon as it intra-acts (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). When using pedagogical documentation to get to know and intra-act with the classroom, inquiry becomes teaching, learning becomes inquiry: teaching↔as↔inquiry. Or, as I have come to call it, curation↔calibration. In Practice: The Curation↔Calibration of a Posthuman Classroom

Curate↔calibrate or curation↔calibration is a doing that creates the possibility for intervention and that intervenes with different possibilities. It is the movement, the momentum that makes resisting the classroom-as-anywhere and teaching elsewhere possible. Grounded in the diffraction grating of theories, I use agential realism to rethink a classroom as phenomenon and teaching-as-inquiry to get to know that phenomenon and the dynamic flow of agency between all actants. Using that understanding, I can respond from and with that phenomenon to build, or curate, and adjust, or calibrate, the assemblage of actants and apparatuses. This posthumanist praxis then allows me to diffract for elsewhere by interfering with the overwhelming story of anywhere so starkly told in the all-purpose classroom pictures of Figure 5.1 (Shelton, 2018b, c). The double arrows follow Jackson and Mazzei’s (2012) move with the words material↔discursive to make a feminist materialist move away from slashes or hyphens that prioritise and linearise towards something else that better emphasises intra-action, or simultaneousness. Here it also indicates continuous movement, or the responsive and restless mindset that is necessary for  resisting the standardising and incessant pull of classroom-as-anywhere. Entangled by these double arrows, the terms curate and calibrate take on more specific meanings for a posthumanist – fluid and flexible – pedagogy. Though curating still means pulling from a vast, virtual and physical archive of curriculums, strategies, texts, people, places, objects and so on, it is not just to create a certain aesthetic or experience but to make a difference – or calibrate for elsewhere, for a classroom-as-phenomenon made of diffraction patterns, a spacetimemattering. In Figure 5.2 we see a small sampling of the results of such work also demonstrating an array of different modes of pedagogical documentation

78  Sarah A. Shelton

Figure 5.2 A sampling of pedagogical documentation and diffractions from ENGL 2329: American Literature, Spring 2018.

done with a single classroom over a single semester. While the pedagogical documentation is certainly a gathering of ‘data’ in that it builds an archive of artefacts and observations, my continued use of the full archive within that same semester to curate↔calibrate the classroom made that pedagogical documentation part of that movement/momentum. A doing to produce more doing – to diffract for elsewhere – rather than a collecting to represent or

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  79 generalise. All of the images capture moments, spaces, objects entangled with, and work done in the same classroom, TH20, pictured on the left in Figure 5.1. But together, these images are not of any classroom anywhere, any time. Unlike the singular image of Figure 5.1, the curated sampling of Figure 5.2 is of ENGL 2329: American Literature, Spring 2018 (AL), a unique, unrepeatable elsewhere we built-together-there. The American Literature course ENGL 2329 was a sophomore-level, non-survey, core-curriculum literature course that began with 19 and ended with 18 humans meeting twice a week for 80 minutes in room 20 in the basement of Trimble Hall, as shown in Figure 5.2. The room had no windows, white cinderblock walls, unreliable Wi-Fi and phone service, no bathroom in the basement, 35 hard chair-desk combos that could be moved but had small work surfaces designed specifically for right-handed humans. There was one accessible desk with a wheelchair sign on it, a few free-floating chairs that came and went over the course of the semester, a computer desk with computer wired to the wall, one stool, a projector and pulldown screen, two whiteboards put together to make one large whiteboard at ‘the front’ of the room, a broken turn-style pencil sharpener on the wall by the door, a small plastic trash can beneath it, and an abandoned cosmic-like, student-project painting in blues and purples on a small canvas that caught your notice when you first walked in (see image #1 in Figure 5.2), reminding you that, despite the standardising story of TH20 in Figure 5.1, there was an elsewhere to be found here. Teaching elsewhere meant walking into that room from Figure 5.1, on day one, grounded in a posthumanist mindset and praxis, determined not to let the story of anywhere overwhelm intentions/hopes/speculations for something different. Using agential realism to view the classroom as a phenomenon, the composition of that room, as it was designed and outfitted by university decisions out of our control, became a material↔discursive apparatus itself. An apparatus that, as it was, created a certain diffraction pattern, just like the diffraction gratings in the light-paradox. With agential realism, the story of anywhere remains but becomes only one possibility among myriad others. Now an actant curated into the phenomenon, myself, I started curating from/with the phenomenon to calibrate that apparatus for different diffraction patterns – different possibilities than anywhere. I began the semester’s pedagogical documentation by taking the picture in Figure 5.1 and then immediately pushed back against the factory-style rows with the time-honoured strategy of circling desks (as seen in image #1 of Figure 5.2). Walking into the room already grounded in the mindset of teaching elsewhere because I was taking pictures for pedagogical documentation, I was more attentive to nonhuman actants and difference. And so, I did not just see the cosmic painting as an inert feature of the room, but as a co-actant already intra-acting with us. As I moved desks around and prepped for students to arrive, I rewrote the assignment for that day in my head, changing from a typical first-day-of-class writing sample activity (i.e., ‘What is American Literature?’) to having students speculate on and then share stories of where the cosmic painting came from or what

80  Sarah A. Shelton it was about, utilising the material beingness of the room to shape classroom discourse, pedagogy and culture. Everything in Figure 5.2 was part of the continual movement of curation↔calibration that kicked off there as we began calibrating our understanding of meaning as made with the classroom-as-phenomenon. The pictures that first day were part of the pedagogical documentation that remains, still years later, my most consistent everyday teaching-as-inquiry praxis: using the camera app on a smartphone to take at least a few pictures – with and without humans – of our classroom each time we meet. Though a simple daily task that results in images like those in Figure 5.1 or image #1 in Figure 5.2, over time, this builds a digital archive that I can continually reference and, more importantly for teaching elsewhere, intra-act with, in both small, immediate diffractions within the same semester like image #2 or #5 in Figure 5.2 and larger, broader diffractions between and across semesters (Shelton, 2018c). Figure 5.2’s image #2 is indicative of smaller diffractions I do after/between class meetings, activities, etc., where I pull from my digital archive, deciding what images and other arteefacts like student work or lists/sketches of actants in the room to include and not include. In other words, I curate a sample, or make and agential cut, of images to print out on regular printer paper and cut and paste, with an Elmer’s washable disappearing purple glue stick, into a large blank sketchbook with 8.5 × 11 pages that I take with me to all my classes. In such intra-actions with the larger, and ever-expanding, archive, these new agential cuts make the pedagogy material, a new apparatus of artefacts from the phenomenon to then do diffraction work with. Though the ‘doing’ isn’t visible, image #2 is the final product of a particular diffraction. I used different colour Sharpies to trace flows, connections, and happenings jumping out to me in the juxtaposition of these images now diffracting new patterns together. Such intra-action and diffractions are not meant to document/preserve but to produce difference, interfere with the recollection of  things-as-they-were-when-I-was-teaching, when I was more focused on human-to-human relations in the moment and, besides, unable to notice everything at once. While specifically curating the layout on top in image #2, the amount of white space in the room startled me as I pasted picture after picture after picture beside each other in my notebook for a diffraction. Such realisation – whether sudden or slowly unfolding – is why it is critical to create some consistent form of teaching-as-inquiry, particularly in the less ‘lively’ spaces of higher education. Flows of agency, dynamics among/with nonhuman actants, often only leave traces ‘visible’ to human actants across time/repetition. Taking pictures day after day after day of the same spaces that scream ‘inert’ and ‘invariable’ might seem pointless, but when trying to trouble our own assumptions and resist the pull of anywhere, we do not always know what we  need to notice. Or, rather, what the phenomenon needs us to notice. Consistently compiling a varied archive becomes critical to knowing what/ how to curate↔calibrate when building towards elsewhere.

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  81 The rest of the images in Figure 5.2 are various types of artefacts produced through my own form of consistent teaching-as-inquiry: diffraction through continual pedagogical documentation and intra-action with the resulting archive. Image #3 is part of the Slide Order view of a full PowerPoint that curated together photos from the entire semester to help students do a ‘Semester Story’ reflection activity. Image #4 shows a curation of student check-in cards on the left and student work on the right. Image #5 shows a typical sketch/ charting of a day’s activities on a yellow legal pad, tracking students’ and texts’ presence/movements while they worked. Image #6 tells a story that might look a little more like what people imagine when we say ‘posthuman education,’ the tale of a specific nonhuman actant, a dandelion, being brought into intra-action with the phenomenon and tracing how it mattered. How its inclusion diffracted different possibilities, or different realities, that its absence precluded (Shelton, 2018a, ‘Desk’) and inspired/helped me plan an activity that would not otherwise have happened. Conclusion The story of anywhere – and the humanist assumptions it relies on – is strong. It is not just written into the room’s bones but our own. If we look closely at my diffraction work in the bottom picture of Figure 5.2’s image #2, you can see me writing about the ‘forest o’chairs’ and realising I’d planned the activity as if it could work anywhere, not in and for AL: ‘Huh. So, how might you have incorporated your idea with TH20 so the desks, etc. aided in the presentations?’ The continual calibration and recalibration to nonhuman actants this work asks us to do – over and over again – helps us (re)calibrate ourselves too, reminding us that we’re also not working with anyone anywhere. We are intra-acting with uniquely emerging human students with(in) a uniquely curated↔calibrated apparatus meant to diffract elsewhere. This is not an easy or linear task. As Carol Taylor puts it, when we decide we want to use something like posthumanism to disrupt humanism, ‘any dis-entangling … has to be a continuing and incisive critical practice, not one done easily or “once and for all”’ (2016, p. 9). This is even harder when we consider that spaces in higher education are often the least lively of all. Lenz Taguchi’s development of a posthumanist, intra-active pedagogy using pedagogical documentation focused on early childhood education where classrooms are often (though not always) entangled with a wider variety of nonhuman actants to trace human intra-actions with (everything from class pets to crafting and hands-on-activity supplies to toys to engaging colours or art on the walls and beyond). Alaimo is not wrong about there being a disconnect between conventional college classrooms and the ‘more-than-human liveliness’ outside their walls. My time as a high school teacher privileged enough to once be assigned and housed in a single classroom that I could decorate and (re)organise to mitigate such a disconnect is evident in the larger archive for AL. The traces of that approach still entangled

82  Sarah A. Shelton with me show in things like the whiteboard-as-apparatus (image #6), one of my main strategies for AL that centred on curating in actants like posters to ‘make’ the room, if not more ‘lively,’ more colourful, varied, unique, and engaged. To write a different story for us into the white cinderblock walls of TH20 than the story of anywhere its design tells. But the latter diffractions with images like this recalibrated my understanding of what a posthumanist pedagogy ‘had to do’ or include. More than anything, and even along with any other more intrepid and inventive moves we might make in our curation↔calibration process, teaching elsewhere is staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016). And that trouble includes the very real and very entangled range of actants already in our spacetimematterings that will not appear lively to most current human conceptions. Their unliveliness, their inert and seemingly invariable presence, does not mean they do not matter – create reality with us. It is critical, then, to posthumanist education conversations and applications that we take our intra-action with them in the classroom-as-phenomenon into consideration in our planning, content creation, assessment, etc. Working to bridge the chasm between the conventional classroom and ‘more-than-human liveliness’ (Alaimo, 2017) is essential to the larger posthumanist education project and systemic change overall and over time. But even if I never brought in another poster or dandelion, or if I never again scheduled class meetings outside our assigned room, I am still teaching elsewhere when I use teaching-as-inquiry to build an archive of data on our classroom-as-phenomenon’s intra-actions and to diffract and work with it to better understand the dynamic flows of agency already happening so I can find ways to resist patterns and stories of anywhere. So I can build a more equitable and ethical diffraction for and from each unique classroom. Finally, and most critically to the realities we face, whatever teachingas-inquiry looks like for a specific teacher, it must be scalable and sustainable. I taught ENGL 2329 as a case study while teaching a 2-2 course load as a GTA and writing a dissertation. Further calibration of the posthumanist praxis outlined in the dissertation came in the semesters after my defence when I was an adjunct with a 5-5 courseload and still diffracting the archive for presentations or personal calibration across semesters. Through such work, the 2018 American Literature course’s original archive became entangled with all new material realities for me and my teaching, as well as entangled with new archives from new courses taught. Now, as a Senior Lecturer teaching a 3-3 with significant service duties, the variety and richness of the pedagogical documentation and the activities they represent in Figure 5.2 has become markedly pared down. I’m still consistent with the practice of taking pictures, building an archive, and doing diffraction work when planning and responding to each classroom-as-phenomenon via curation↔calibration. And while I continue to curate larger/complex activities specifically meant to entangle our classroom with other spaces and nonhuman actants, I do that work largely because the everyday teaching-as-inquiry keeps me in a posthumanist mindset, keeps me honed in on all actants – human and nonhuman alike – in each

A Posthumanist Pedagogical Praxis through Agential Realism  83 unique and unrepeatable classroom. I do what I can, when I can, balancing the demands of the job and university with the understanding that the doing of pedagogical documentation and diffractions keeps me calibrated to/for a posthumanist praxis, one that restlessly, vigilantly, and ethically resists the training of a lifetime – the humanist stories that inhabit us, our educational spaces, policies and assumptions. Such stories might be designed into our classroom’s ‘bones’ (Barad, 2007), but, as Haraway puts it: ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties’ (2016, p. 12). Teaching elsewhere is a story we can re-think our classrooms with. It tells us we can act now, today in our classrooms as they are to start opening up different, posthumanist possibilities for our students, ourselves, and education as a whole. References Alaimo, S. (2017) ‘Book Review: Teaching with Feminist Materialisms’. Feminist Review, 115(1): 178–179. doi: 10.1057/s41305-017-0035-1 Barad, K. (1995) ‘A Feminist Approach to Teaching Quantum Physics’. In S. Rosser (Ed.) Teaching the Majority: Breaking the Gender Barrier in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering. New York: Teachers College Press. Barad, K. (1999) ‘Agential Realism: Feminist Interventions in Understanding Scientific Practices’. In M. Biagioli (Ed.) The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2008) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.’ In S. Alaimo and S. Heckman (Eds.) Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barad, K. (2010) ‘Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/Continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-To-Come’. Derrida Today, 3: 240–268. Barad, K. (2017) ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’. Parallax, 20(3): 168–187. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Haraway, D. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1992) ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/D Others’. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (Eds.) Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2011) ‘SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far’. Science Fiction Research Association Annual Conference, Lublin, Poland. Pilgrim Award Acceptance Comments. Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Jackson, A. and Mazzei, L. (2012) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data across Multiple Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

84  Sarah A. Shelton Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy. New York: Routledge. Mirtz, R. (2004) ‘The Inertia of Classroom Furniture: Unsituating the classroom.’ In  E. Nagelhout and C. Rutz (Eds.) Classroom Spaces and Writing Instruction. New York: Hampton Press, Inc. Pillow, W. and St. Pierre, E. (2000) Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education. New York: Routledge. Shelton, S. (2018a) ‘Desk.’ Sarah A. Shelton, 28 Feb. 2018, sarahashelton.com/ 2018/02/28/desk-8/ Shelton, S. (2018b) ‘Spacetimemattering.’ Sarah A. Shelton, 5 May 2018, sarahashelton.com/2018/05/03/spacetimemattering/ Shelton, S. (2018c) Teaching Elsewhere: Curating↔Calibrating Posthumanist Possi­ bilities. Dissertation (PhD). The University of Texas at Arlington. Snaza, N. (2015) ‘Toward a Genealogy of Educational Humanism.’ In N. Snaza and J. Weaver (Eds), Posthumanism and Educational Research. New York: Routledge. Taylor, C. (2016) ‘Edu-Crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education.’ In C. Hughes and C. Taylor (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

6 Affective Refusals, More-thanHuman Identities and De-Colonisation in Early Childhood Education Giovanna Caetano-Silva, Alejandra Pacheco-Costa and Fernando Guzmán-Simón Introduction This chapter refers to a scene that took place in the framework of a research project carried out between September 2021 and June 2022 in a state school located in the low-income neighbourhood of Polígono Sur in Seville (Spain). The children attending this school come from different heritage cultures, namely Spanish, Roma and second-generation migrant families from Morocco and South America (especially Nicaragua, Argentina, Bolivia and Peru). It is also important to mention that this is a secular school that welcomes students from different beliefs. Nevertheless, this institution offers elective Catholic courses. Most of the families of these children (aged four and five years old) have not completed secondary education and have precarious jobs or are unemployed; in some cases, this leads them to resort to applying for social assistance to cover their children’s basic needs. The school is very attentive to the needs of these families and their children in relation to hygiene, food and school attendance. As we discuss throughout this chapter, the academic curriculum of this institution often assumes an ideological framework that determines a large part of school activities based on humanistic and humanising practices (Snaza, 2013; Truman, 2019). These practices recall Humanism and its model of hu(man) as a white, European, able-bodied being (Braidotti, 2013) whose (adult) age also counts (Murris, 2021, 2022). In our research we argue how binary configurations of what is (not) to be a human, a child, a Christian, etc. are reinforced through these curricular dynamics. Binaries, as discussed by Murris (2021), create/perpetuate colonial mechanisms and a de/colonising movement should take this into consideration (Murris, 2022). Therefore, we draw on posthuman thinking to question these (neo)colonial structures (Nxumalo, 2019), long present also in educational research (Patel, 2016). More specifically, Posthumanism allows us to re/consider the educational idea(l) of the human (Szana, 2013), and the tendency to think representationally (Barad, 2007). As expressed by Murris and Peers (2002), thinking diffractively with Posthumanism is not about erasing the child/human, but rather DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-8

86  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. about responding to the ‘profound difference small matters make’ (p. 352). That said, in this chapter Posthumanism has led us to think with affective refusals, silences and willfulness. We see them as important matters to re-imagine how children’s identity come to be a more-than-(human)-identity, non-binary, ‘a contingent interactive performativity’ (Barad, 2014, pp. 173–174). ‘My Mom Teaches Us about Paradise’: A More-Than-Human Vignette Writing (with) vignettes allows us to bring the affective moments of phenomena (Truman et al., 2020). We see them as a way to map both the human and non-human assemblages (Zarabadi, 2022). Most importantly, for us they do not refer to something that happened in the past, as the past is always becoming with the present and the future in a non-linear entanglement (Barad, 2007), which allows an open questioning (Murris and Peers, 2022). That said, we start our re-turnings (Barad, 2014) by introducing the reader to the following more-than-human vignette: Monday morning. The children are seated in a circle on the floor around Marta, their teacher, who sits on a bench by the digital whiteboard. I grab a classroom chair and sit next to this circle, not fully integrated but also not completely on the outside. In the usual routine at the beginning of the day, Marta encourages the children to explain something about themselves: how they got to school, what they did at the weekend, how they feel, etc. They raise their hands and wait for Marta’s indication before they speak. At one point Nabir looks directly at Marta and says to her: ‘The demons fear me, because Allah protects me’. He thinks a bit more and adds: ‘Allah protects us all’. Marta looks at him and asks: ‘Nabir, is your mother teaching you Islam again?’ Marta addresses the rest of the class: ‘Nabir’s mother teaches him about his religion at home. And she also teaches your father and brothers, right?’ Nabir nods: ‘She teaches us about paradise’. One of the children, Danny, stands up and begins to bring me paperclips from Marta’s table. He blocks my vision of the group. The children listen silently to the conversation. ‘But do you know what your classes are about, Nabir?’ He shrugs. ‘I can’t remember’. ‘Nabir’s religion is different, that’s why his mother teaches it to him’, Marta explains to the other children. I pay attention to the class despite Danny’s comings and goings from the table to me. Nabir sits separated from the rest of the children, legs crossed, his back to me. There is a silence. Marta goes on: ‘Many of you also go to classes after school in the afternoon, right?’ Some children nod. ‘What are your classes about?’

Affective Refusals  87 Nabir sits silently. The children explain their classes to Marta: writing sessions at home, football, English, sports, homework … ‘You see? Many of you go to classes in the afternoon. Nabir’s classes are different. What do you do in your classes?’ A boy, I can’t see him, says: ‘I draw in my classes’. ‘I draw, too’, says Nabir. ‘Really? In a class about religion? What do you draw, Nabir?’, asks Marta. I think she doubts that Nabir draws in his classes. Nabir looks at Marta and says ‘Cars’. No one answers. Isabel, one of the most popular girls in the classroom explains how she plays teacher at home with her sister and puppets. The children get closer to her. Danny continues to bring me paperclips. I notice now that Nabir is sitting alone, cross-legged, swaying back and forth, cupping his face with his hands, gazing at floor, silent. I feel a pang, and I wonder how we ended up here. Marta shifts to the first task of the day. (Alejandra’s field notes) This vignette was chosen because of my (Alejandra’s) affective encounter with Nabir’s swaying, silence and isolation from the rest of the children (Figure 6.1). At a certain point, I realised that something had happened in the classroom, something that I wasn’t fully aware of. This encounter left us (Giovanna, Alejandra and Fernando) with the sour feeling of not knowing how to help Nabir, how to avoid this isolation, or how to read this vignette enacting

Figure 6.1 Paradi/se/sing in the school: a more-than-human assembly.

88  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. ‘response-able pedagogies’ (Murris, 2022, p. 81). We made use of field notes, photographs, and recordings taken in the school in order to do data engagement (Ellingson and Sotirin, 2020; Gullion, 2018). A diffractive reading of the phenomenon enabled us to focus on the relationships of the more-thanhuman elements such as space, bodies, time, and objects (Hackett, 2021). We think of these relationships as ‘intra-actions’ in the way described by Barad (2007), where agents do not pre-exist the actions, but become in them, and where the subject/object binarism is absent. Barad’s (2007) diffractive methodology, as highlighted by Mazzei (2014), is ‘not just about bodies, nor just about words, but about the mutual production of both subjectivities and performative enactments’ (p. 745). This diffractive analysis takes on a rhizomatic nature and is related both to ‘think-with-theory’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) or to a ‘tool to think with’ (Van der Tuin, 2019), and to the way in which the researcher constructs the data (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure and Ulmer, 2018). Diffractive analysis emerges in/through the intensity of the intra-actions and the materialisation of affect in the researchers’ analyses (St. Pierre, 2021). All these elements end up forming a ‘research-assemblage’ (Fox and Alldred, 2017, p. 152) which may help us to reconsider the children’s identities as more-than-(human)-identity and build an ethic-onto-epistemological perspective (Kuby and Zhao, 2022; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Embodied Refusals: A Material-discursive Assemblage in the Classroom As we went back to our recordings and field notes, our perception of the vignette was centred on the memory of Nabir on the floor, swaying back and forth, alone (see Figure 6.1). From a qualitative research perspective, the logics of causality could give way to consider this image as the consequence of a group of actions in which Nabir is the agent or the result. However, Murris and Reynolds’ (2018) description of the posthuman child has discussed how children are not to be considered as subjects or objects, but as phenomena. In fact, linearity never existed in this assemblage, as our perception of it, as active agents, was merged with Danny going to and from Marta’s table carrying paperclips. What could have been a lineal and ‘logic’ sequence is a set of disconnected shots. It is we, as human beings, who create the causal relations in them (Murris, 2022), in the same way our mind creates movement through the ‘persistence of vision’ phenomenon. The ‘persistence of vision’ phenomenon leads the human mind to create a moving sequence from single images, the researcher may tend to establish causal relationships connecting separate events. In this section we pay close attention to Nabir’s emergence as part of a  more-than-human entanglement, where humans/children should not be taken as the sole cause or result of the event. Karen Barad (2007) has argued against the creation of these causal relationships based on an anthropocentric logic. She has called into question whether any kind of matter (and human) is

Affective Refusals  89 a pure cause or pure effect. Therefore, we acknowledge the impossibility of tracing a cause-effect sequence in our vignette, and we rather take it as a starting point for our diffractive reading, in which ‘causality as a linear and traceable series of effects between isolated objects has to be rethought as a material practice in which who/whatever makes an agential cut […] generates ongoing and continually differentiating interconnections that constitute the mattering of the world’ (Taylor, 2016, p. 14). These interconnections form an assemblage in which more-than-human agents emerge in affective and embodied intensities and cannot be considered just as objects or subjects (Jackson and Mazzei, 2016). As stated in Barad’s agential realism, none of these agents precede the phenomenon, and the agential capacity of the more-than-human implies decentring the human (Murris, 2022). Therefore, in this assemblage it is not possible to dissociate people, objects, and spaces (Buchanan, 2021), and its more-than-human elements -the researcher and the researched are ontologically inseparable and part of it. According to our position as researchers-in-the-phenomenon, we acknowledge our role in the construction of data/empirical material (Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure and Ulmer, 2018). In our data, Nabir’s swaying is not a consequence in this assemblage, nor is Nabir a subject. In his movement, his body becomes a material-discursive intra-action with the other children, the floor or the morning sun-light that comes through the window. Nabir thinks with his body (Hackett and Somerville, 2017), and this embodiment involves not only the experience of what is taking place in the classroom but also, as Snaza (2020) points out, the records of gender, race, religion and skills of teachers and pupils, connected in unpredictable and emergent ways. Nabir’s swaying, cupping his face with his hands, are bound to his past and present, and at the same time are being created in this unique phenomenon (Lenz Taguchi, 2011). Embodiment in early childhood may involve attending to its material-discursive intra-actions, in which ordinary affects converge with the intensity of vibrant matter flowing between spaces, people and things (Hackett, 2021). Nabir hiding his head in his hands and swaying his body are the materialisation of his discursive production (Murris, 2016, p. 12). The gaps between the different groups of children intra-act with the classroom, the children and their teacher. The phenomenon emerges in them, where memory and space are also matter intra-acting with the more-thanhuman (Guzmán-Simón and Pacheco-Costa, 2022). In our vignette, these gaps between the different groups of the children, and between Nabir and his teacher, emerge unpredictably. We cannot see the children moving, but they cluster in tight groups with void spaces sprouting in-between, as knots in an imaginary thread. Nabir’s isolation emerges in the contrast with these groupings in which affective forces connect bodies and words, as happens when Isabel explains her playing with her sister and puppets. Affects circulate between the embodied memories, the marks traced by intra-actions on the more-than-human bodies (Juelskjiaer, Plauborg, and Adrian, 2021), including the researcher, and become attached to them (Dernikos et al., 2020).

90  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. Nabir, as a posthuman child, is a boundless part of this set of relational affects (Murris, 2016) that configure his own be(com)ing. Drawing on Barad’s (2003) posthuman performativity, the analysis of the vignette highlights the materialisations of children’s space, (Western) culture and memory as we focus on their positions on the cork floor. The teacher’s questions have also an affective potentiality, shaping a normalising worlding where out-of-school activities find their place. These conversation on the cork floor underscores the power of language in the assembly, and its ability to perpetuate a Western/ white/whitenessed worldview. As Liebel (2020) states ‘like colonized people worldwide, children are obliged to see themselves with the eyes of those who have control over them’ (p. 48). Silence intra-acts with the rest of agents in this entanglement. Our vignette’s silence should not be depicted as meaning, but as an agent in this phenomenon. Thus, we consider that ‘These silences confound interpretation and manifest, intolerably, the illusory status of speech as full “presence,” as living voice’ (MacLure et al., 2010, p. 495). What Nabir’s silence does is rooted in the bodies’ agential capacity, where ‘silences carry traces of voices that have the power to affect us, precisely, because they exceed the limits of the spoken word’ (MacLure et al., 2010, p. 498). Silence is a ‘performative alternatives to representationalism’ (Barad, 2003, p. 802) that questions the hegemonic character of the adults’ verbal discourse. The children’s voice is built through ‘a material-discursive practice that is inseparable from all elements (human and non-human) in an assemblage’ (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017), where unsaid stories find their place. Performativity appeals, in Nabir’s silent swaying back and forth, to hiding as connected with shame (Probyn, 2005). Nabir feels ‘by and on the body’ (Ahmed, 2014, p. 103) in his covering and silences, and in his adding (‘she teaches us about paradise’) as an answer to the teacher’s inquiry (‘is your mother teaching you Islam again?’). Shame and silence attach bodies and movement, affects and intensities, in an entangled network involving ‘the transformation of others into objects of feeling’ (Ahmed, 2014, p. 11). As pointed by Martín-Bylund (2018), ‘silence has the power to affect’ (p. 355). The silent soundscape of the classroom connects us with the material agency of sound (or its absence) (Ehret and Leander, 2019; Gershon, 2016); in other words, silence becomes a materialisation of refusal (Truman et al., 2020). This is the case when Nabir, being asked about his classes, says ‘I can’t remember’. In his refusal, Nabir lets Marta and other children take his voice, when Marta explains that his mother’s lessons are different, and the children provide examples of their out-of-school classes. These questions, intended by Marta as a means of connecting Nabir’s classes with those attended by the other children, end up otherising Nabir. In the sequence of analogies between his mother’s lessons and those of the other children, boundaries emerge, recalling how the promises of diversity and inclusion seldom discuss colonial mechanisms (Patel, 2016). Silence as agentic force in the vignette’s entanglement becomes an affective refusal to this otherising in Nabir’s reluctance to answer. Refusals are

Affective Refusals  91 also embodied in Nabir’s covering, hiding and swaying, and his movements are entangled with (other) bodies, space or imagination (Daniels, 2021). Nabir’s silent body, in this sense, voices (Mazzei and Jackson, 2017) the untold ‘No’, confronting the school’s ‘humanizing assemblage’ (Snaza, 2019, p. 8). Affective refusal moves this relationality and affect to answers beyond the expected (Miller, 2019). Under this lens, ‘affect circulates through, between, and around the refusal to comply with normative understandings of literacy practices, which, in many instances, remain tethered to a humanist, Westerncentric, and patriarchal logic’ (Truman et al., 2020, p. 224). The affective refusals in our vignette, embodied, voiced and silent, confront children with legitimated colonial practices in the classroom (Zembylas, 2021) that they, as children, have no other way to overcome. ‘No’, in consequence, is an affective moment (Truman et al., 2020), where refusals can be shaped as stories (Thiel and Dernikos, 2020). Refusals, emergent and materialised in affective forces and intensities, are linked to the idea of willfulness, which Ahmed (2012) associates with persistence: ‘This persistence, in turn, might be read as a means of disobedience, of refusing the stasis or conclusion offered by the status quo’ (Kuntz, 2019, p. 70). Ahmed (2012, p. 5) has described how the idea of ‘will’ can be associated with a whole body whose parts surrender to this whole’s will. In opposition to it, willfulness threatens the whole’s order, rebelling against its ‘will’. In our vignette, Nabir says that he draws during his mother’s classes. As an answer to Marta’s question in disbelief (‘Really?’), he looks at her and says ‘Cars’. In Nabir’s words and gaze, willfulness persists and defies Marta’s initial reluctance to admit car drawings in a class of religion. Being an affective refusal on its own (refusal to adhere to a normalised understanding of what a religion lesson is), Nabir’s willfulness is a part of a system that, in its persistence, defies the whole and extends towards the yet-to-know (Kuntz, 2019). Nabir’s unknown is that of cars in a religion lesson, that forces a reconceptualisation of what a lesson is made of. His disturbance of the binary possible/impossible is parallel to the disturbance of real/unreal at the beginning of the vignette, when he persists in affirming Allah’s protection (‘Allah protects us all’). In this moment, Nabir’s willfulness is the part that confronts the globality of the rational, enlightened and humanistic concept of the school as a space free from the shadows and uncertainties of religion. Silence and movement materialise the challenge to those moments in which children feel the pressure of colonisation in the school (Dernikos, 2018), and in which words are too restricted/ restricting. Affective refusals become a form of rejection and, at the same time, they unearth inequities often hidden from the adult’s eyes. As Ahmed (2012) explains, we know which way things are flowing by not going that way – the flow in a crowd, for example. In our vignette, awareness of the institutional model of education (rational, logical, binary) emerges in the refusals, in those affective forces confronting the institutional ‘flow’. Nabir’s material-discursive practice fails to incorporate the colonising/colonised model of the school, based on a Western monoculture, agnostic and belonging to a curriculum

92  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. inspired by a rational concept of reality (Truman, 2019). In Nabir’s refusals, the complexity of the classroom as de/colonising institution has come to light. More-than-(Human)-Identities: Mapping Opportunities for (not) Be(com/long)ing In our phenomenon, the diffractive readings of silences, refusals and willfulness allow us to trouble majoritarian reference points, such as idea(l)s of human or religion. According to Lorraine (2008), who draws on Deleuze, ‘organising reference points’ limit one’s ‘personal identity’ (p. 74) by allowing just one/some to fit and matter. They are parameters that put into question Nabir’s classes in relation to the other (accepted) ones. For this reason, we can think of them through Ahmed’s (2000) discussion on how strangers come to be strangers/aliens. She states that ‘strangers are not simply those who are not known in this dwelling, but those who are, in their very proximity, already recognized as not belonging, as being out of place’ (Ahmed, 2000, p. 21, original emphasis). Thus, Nabir-cars-paradise are strangers not because others (adults, white, cis, able-bodied, mostly European, etc.) do not know anything about these/their worlds, but rather because their pre-knowledge is sedimented in human-led, euro-centric and colonising mechanisms. Based on reference points, they assu/re/me that Nabir-cars-paradise do not fit in the main (human/ist/ising) world. Hence, they become strangers before they become and belong to any/one/thing else (Ahmed, 2000). With this, Nabir experiences what Ahmed (2010) describes as ‘affect aliens’ since he does not connect with others’ expectations. The intra-actions of Allah, paradise, demons, cars and Nabir face a series of difficulties to belong and matter in that (human/ist/ising) spaces. When more-than-human agents were evoked, Nabir’s ‘strangeness’ had already been linked to a cause-and-effect relationship, to his (different) identity: child and Muslim. From this moment, every dis/connection was attributed to his identity features, and simultaneously not to the expected/major norm. Referring to labels such as race, gender, ethnicity, etc., Kuby and Rucker (2020) use the term ‘identity markers/labels/categories’ (p. 32). Different research points out that these categories are followed by oppressing and imbalanced dynamics in educational systems (Dernikos, 2020; Zarabadi, 2021). More specifically, Kuby and Rucker (2020) indicate that identity markers – as cartesian cuts – build a wall between some and others (Nabir versus adults, Muslims versus non-Muslims, humans versus cars). They are cuts ‘too small’ (Kuby et al., 2019, p. 3) that rely on a representational logic in which subjects are (arbitrarily) defined/judged before their relational (more-than-human) encounters (Ahmed, 2000). They dismiss the entanglements of knowing, being, and ethics (Barad, 2007), and draw on binary configurations of the world (Murris, 2021). The consequence of such an assumption is an infinitude of actions that blur certain bodies into a singular common (human/ist/ising) world (Truman, 2019), a world in which the assemblage of Nabir, affects, movements, cars, demons, and paradise has no saying/place.

Affective Refusals  93 The constant affective refusals point out the need of re/thinking both Nabir’s (assumed) identity and the colonising mechanisms of school systems by attending to more-than-children, more-than-teachers and more-than-Muslims (Zarabadi, 2021). Barad (2014), for instance, foregrounds that ‘identity is not  essence, fixity or givenness, but a contingent interactive performativity’ (p.  174). This idea supports deconstructing representational/fixed logics of identity, of what it is to be Nabir, a Muslim, or of what classes of religion are/ should be (see Murris and Zhao, 2022). They make us re/consider Muslims, children, Nabir, and ourselves through ‘complex becomings’ (Zarabadi, 2021, p. 35), or knots (Fullagar and Taylor, 2022), located ‘in the planning of the not-yet’ (Manning, 2016, p. 217). From this perspective, identities are never static, but always changing and more-than-humanly intra-acting (Barad, 2007), and impossible to be (arbitrarily) determinate, like rhizomes. Therefore, if we think through Deleuze’s discussion on affect, understanding identities should be more about understanding bodies’ affects with other bodies (including ours) than bodies’ meanings (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). It has to do with letting go of majoritarian identities that tend to ask ‘what is this? / why?’ and to consider the ones that Lorraine (2008) coins as ‘resistant’, which are ‘rooted in fluxes of living that continually vary from the dominant norm’ (p. 68). Hence, we embrace the fact that not all (strange) identities will fit discourse, meaning, and understanding (Ahmed, 2000), but will certainly provoke ‘contamination’ and, consequently, shift our common agendas (Tsing, 2015). They will require a different type of ethics in which doing justice to identities is about responding to what is ‘beyond’ and ‘before’ the taken-for-granted Nabiras-Muslim, as-a-child, and/or cars-outside-religion (Ahmed, 2000, p. 138). Encounters with more-than-(human)-identities and/or more-than-Nabir entail a new configuration of Nabir-with-the-world, despite representative/ normative/humanist thinking, historically prevalent in educational contexts (Snaza, 2013). For this reason, it refers to a way of be(com/long)ing that (re) configures our doing of identities (Barad, 2014), with attention to subjectivities (Kuby and Rucker, 2020) and deterritorialisations from the norm (Lorraine, 2008). Subjectivities entail more-than-human experiences that are not dissociated from the affective and material world -they are ‘nomadic subjectivity-becomings’ (Zarabadi, 2021, p. 41). Hence, we propose morethan-(human)-identities as a moving away from identity as a fixed (in/ humanising) label. Nabir’s more-than-(human)-identity comes into being in-between affects, silences and embodiments, or ‘paradising’ with the world, despite and above human control. It is, then, ‘a verb rather than fixed categories of Othering’ (Kuby et al., 2022, p. 12). In this assembling-wor(l)d of Nabir, cars, paradise and bodies, be(com/long)ings are always be(com/ long)ing-with and not ‘to’. For this reason, paradis/e/ing necessarily involves all sorts of agents and cannot be put into words – nor boxes – but rather felt through the body, through an assemblage of affects (refusals), paradise’s protection, fear of demons, and drawings of im/possible cars. Nabir’s more-than-(human)-identity is therefore a material-discursive worldling (Juelskjiaer, Plauborg and Adrian, 2021).

94  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. De/colonising Intra-actions: Becoming-Nabir, Becoming-with, Becoming-otherwise Human/ist/ising ways of doing and becoming through education focus on human as the centre, as ‘both a beginning and an end’ (Snaza, 2013, p. 39). As we discussed earlier, this human is not a mere human being, but the (adult) (Murris, 2021) white, European, able-bodied hu(man) (Braidotti, 2013). Hence, bodies that do not fit this category are easily left aside or unvalidated (Dernikos, 2020; Zarabadi, 2021). They are seen as a project for ‘a practice of humanisation’ (Snaza, 2013, p. 38), which aims at making them be(come) in a certain way: ‘into school-ways of knowing and being, often from a middle-class, white, abled bodied perspective’ (Kuby and Rucker, 2020, p. 15). Referring to colonialising childhood, Murris (2021) discusses that this follows ‘the logic for the exclusion of the irrational, wild and immature’ (p. 65). Under this categori/organi/sation, some get to judge, subjugate, and even discard others. Murris (2021) points out: ‘coloniality remains when colonial administrations have left but continue to dictate long-standing everyday hierarchical patterns of power’ (p. 65). Diffracting through embodied and embedded entanglements of de/colonising affective moments sheds light on how representational/non-representational binaries (Murris and Zhao, 2022) perpetuate colonising relationships (Murris, 2021). It maintains the childNabir distance without acknowledging its entanglements as a posthuman child (Murris, 2016). In our case, these binaries undermine the complexity of being a Muslim-child (Zarabadi, 2021) by looking at Nabir through binaries of non-Muslim (normative, representational) or Muslim (strange, outsider), his lessons as human (without cars, representational) or more-than-human (not classes at all, non-representational) and knowledge as belonging to adults’/ educational systems (representational/valuable) or to assemblages (non-sense, affective, material-discursive, bodymind). Affective moments trouble the human/ist/ising, and so colonising, rationale on which education is based (Snaza 2013; Thiel and Dernikos, 2020). They are an opportunity to consider that ‘everyday banalities might be a site at which to notice and thereby create interruptions in (neo)colonial relations’ (Nxumalo, 2019, p. 43). Murris (2022) explains that through diffractively looking at this phenomenon we can discuss ‘whose knowledges count, the material conditions, and which concepts are assumed’ (Murris, 2022, p. 81). We get to know how other elements intra-act co-creating new meanings and im/possibilities. We respond to other (colonised) agents in this assemblage such as the paradise, the car, the children, Nabir’s movements, the affective flows, etc. Engaging with these other matters allows Nabir to become otherwise (Zarabadi, 2022). With this, we get to a posthuman-Nabir as a site of relationality, and not of exclusions. We recognise that in order to engage with Nabir-becoming-otherwise we need to attend to an ‘intra-active pedagogy’, as coined by Lenz Taguchi (2010), in which children and other materialities co-construct each other. Attending to these materialities reveals ways for an

Affective Refusals  95 intra-active de-colonisation, ‘allowing fields of inquiry to respond, not just humans’ (Murris, 2022, p. 81, original emphasis). An important discussion in becoming-otherwise and decolonising educational systems is how we (re)think differen/t/ce throughout this phenomenon. When we think about more-than-(human)-identities, differences are not to be taken as distinct categories for (not) be(com/long)ing, otherwise we would again enter a plan of binaries (Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Differences are ‘differences-in-the-(re)making’ (Barad, 2014, p. 175), they are not differences under comparison or anterior to intra-actions, but differences within intra-actions in which one ‘becomes anew in its or her transformative process, like waves of diffraction’ (Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 58). Referring to diffractive waves, Murris (2016) stresses the infinitude and lack of borders in this differentiating force: ‘a wave differentiates from itself in every intra-action. The Wave is forever becoming’ (p. 16). By the same means, Nabir refuses to be colonised by the differences that are imposed on him and becomes otherwise through his more-than-(human)-identity as a ‘differencing’ force (Barad, 2014, p. 175) that entangles silence, affects and moving bodies. Nabir as otherwise entails more-than-a-different-religion and more-than-a-child, he is part of a powerful assemblage of materials, discourses, silences, and affective refusals. (In)Conclusion The diffractive reading of this vignette troubles linearity, causality, and binary understandings such as real/unreal, or adult/child. The material-discursive intra-actions give place to a set of more-than-human agents unfolding in this assemblage (Buchanan, 2021), where affect connects (unexpected) silences, refusals, embodiments, and willfulness. They disturb the dominant logics of the school system (Truman et al., 2020; Dernikos, 2018) and materialise otherwise possibilities yet-to-know (Kuntz, 2019). Nabir is no longer the immature or irrational being, but the relational posthuman child (Murris, 2016, 2021) who bodily refuses taken-for-granted school assumptions. Ahmed (2012, p. 5) has highlighted the relation between the (will) whole and the (willful) part, and how being part requires participation. Refusals, stubborn and embodied, deny this participation and leave marks on the bodies: in Nabir’s body movement and silence, in the children’s bodies, in Isabel’s talking about her playing teacher, in Marta’s bench, in Danny’s paperclips, in the researcher, in the cork floor and the sunlit morning, in the stillness of the expectant children, in the gazes. The marks on these bodies show the aim of the refusals, the (challenged) whole. They trace the boundaries of (just) one way of being Nabir, usually taken as opposite, strange (Ahmed, 2000) from the major: white, European, human/ist/ising. Attending to the affective refusals and the intra-actions among Nabir, demons, cars, paradises, we pose the need to (re)consider identity in a way that is response-able to knots and stories, in the present, in the unknown trouble (Haraway, 2016). This identity-as-doings

96  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. (Kuby et al., 2022, p. 12) leads to Nabir’s identit/y/ies taken as a continuous, conceived not about be(com/long)ing to a specific group/label but be(com/ long)ing with. Refusals have shown us ways in which de/colonising flows move and affect the more-than-human in a classroom. The impossibility of meeting Nabir from the start or from the end is dismantled in our attempt to provide a conclusion. We are rather staying from where we started, in the ‘halfway’ (Barad, 2007) where things assemble beyond our (human) expectations and dictate new routes in which ‘justice is an ongoing open-ended practice’ (Barad and Gandorfer, 2021, p. 47). Attending to how ‘knots knot knots’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) opens up response-able possibilities for de/colonising practices in childhood education, where the ‘stories of stories’ and the ‘worlds of worlds’ find their place. This diffractive reading has provided ways to understanding how decolonisation connects to ‘response-able pedagogies’ (Murris, 2022, p. 81) that commit to an ‘attentive and affective shift from analysing Man’s horrors to affirming ways of becoming otherwise together’ (Snaza, 2020, p. 118). Response-able pedagogies should draw on a constant negotiation with migrant families, their cultures and beliefs, where they should have a space and time based on respect (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015). Nabir, from the pedagogy of listening (Dahlberg and Moss, 2021), could be able to entangle in different morethan-(human)-identities, questioning the concept of multiculturalism as a ‘views of culture based on the assimilationist idea that children acquire success by becoming more like the mainstream population’ (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., 2015, p. 60). Also, teachers should acknowledge agentiality within a morethan-human classroom, open to complexity, to what is not rational or understood (Snaza, 2013). This acknowledgement would allow teachers to break away from binary and discriminatory relationships generated in Western cultures, that perpetuate ‘conventional language pedagogy’ (Hackett et al., 2021, p. 925). Ultimately, a respons-able pedagogy underlines the constant need to de/colonise childhood and build a fairer onto-epistemology in/among children (Murris, 2016), based on thinking together and questioning power and discrimination. Acknowledgements The authors disclosed receipt of financial support for Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI) within the framework of the Grant PID2019104557GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, Grant PRE2020-094747, and Grant Recualificación del Sistema Universitario Español funded by the European Union - NextGenerationEU. We thank the children, parents and teachers who have taken part in this research, for their collaboration and trust, and Dr Hilary McQueen for her careful review of the text. We express our gratitude to the educational cooperation agreement between the Regional Council of Education and Sport and the University of

Affective Refusals  97 Seville for the development of interventions in the field of innovation and research in non-university public schools of the Regional Ministry of Education. References Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. New York: Routledge. Ahmed, S. (2010) ‘Feminists Killjoys (and Other Wilfull Subjects).’ The Scholar & Feminist Online, 8(3), pp. 1–8. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/ahmed_ 08.htm Ahmed, S. (2012) ‘A Willfulness Archive’. Theory & Event, 15(3), pp. 1–21. muse.jhu. edu/article/484421. Ahmed, S. (2014) The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2nd edition). Edinburgh University Press. Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter Comes to Matter’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp. 801–831. doi: 10.1086/345321 Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014) ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting together-apart’. Parallax, 20(3), pp. 168–187. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Barad, K., and Gandorfer, D. (2021) ‘Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently’. Theory & Event, 24(1), pp. 14–66. muse.jhu.edu/article/780766. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Buchanan, I. (2021) Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Dahlberg, G. and Moss, P. (2021) Introduction to the First Edition (2006): Our Reggio Emilia. In C. Rinaldi (Ed.), In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia. Listening, Researching and Learning. London: Routledge. Daniels, K. (2021) Movement, Meaning and Affect and Young Children’s Early Literacy Practices. International Journal of Early Years Education, 29(1), pp. 41–55. doi: 10.1080/09669760.2019.1701998 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dernikos, B. P. (2018) ‘“It’s Like You Don’t Want to Read It Again”: Exploring affects, trauma and ‘willful’ literacies’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, pp. 1–32. doi: 10.1177/1468798418756187 Dernikos, B. P. (2020) ‘Tuning into ‘Fleshy’ Frequencies: A Posthuman Mapping of Affect, Sound and De/Colonized Literacies with/in a Primary Classroom’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20(1), pp. 134–157. doi: 10.1177/1468798420914125 Dernikos, B. P., Lesko, N., McCall, S. D., and Niccolini, A. (2020) ‘Feeling Education’. In B.P. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S.D. McCall and A. Niccolini (Eds.) Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research and Pedagogies. New York: Routledge. Ehret, C., and Leander, K. (2019) ‘Introduction’. In K.M. Leander, and C. Ehret (Eds.) Affect in Literacy Teaching and Learning: Pedagogies, Politics and Coming to Know. New York: Routledge. Ellingson, L. L. and Sotirin, P. (2020) Making Data in Qualitative Research: Engage­ ments, Ethics, and Entanglements. Abingdon: Routledge.

98  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. Fox, N. J., and Alldred, P. (2017) Sociology and the New Materialism: Theory, Research, Action. Los Angeles: Sage. Fullagar, S. and Taylor, C. A. (2022) ‘Knots’. In K. Murris (Ed.) A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines. Abingdon: Routledge. Gershon, W. (2016) The Sound of Silence: The Material Consequences of Scholarship. In N. Snaza, D. Sonu, S.E. Truman, and Z. Zaliwska (Eds.), Pedagogical Matters. New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies. London: Peter Lang. Gullion, J. S. (2018) Diffractive Ethnography: Social Sciences and the Ontological Turn. New York: Routledge. Guzmán-Simón, F., and Pacheco-Costa, A. (2022) ‘“Like, I’m Playing, But With This”: Materialization and Affect in Early Childhood Literacy’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1177/14687984211068117 Hackett, A. (2021) More-Than-Human Literacies in Early Childhood. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Hackett, A., MacLure, M., and McMahon, S. (2021) ‘Reconceptualising Early Language Development: Matter, Sensation and the More-Than-Human’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 42(6), pp. 913–929. doi:10.1080/ 01596306.2020.1767350 Hackett, A., and Somerville, M. (2017) ‘Posthuman Literacies: Young Children Moving in Time, Place and More-Than-Human Worlds’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), pp. 374–391. doi: 10.1177/1468798417704031 Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Cathlene. Durham: Duke University Press. Jackson, A. Y. and Mazzei, L. A. (2016) ‘Thinking with an Agentic Assemblage in Posthuman Inquiry’. In C.A. Taylor and C. Hughes (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, A. Y., and Mazzei, L. A. (2023) Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge. Juelskjiaer, M., Plauborg, H., and Adrian, S. W. (2021) Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging with Worldings through Research Practice. Abingdon: Routledge. Koro-Ljungberg, M., MacLure, M., and Ulmer, J. (2018) ‘D…a…t…a…, Data++, Data, and Some Problematics’. In N.K. Denzin and Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.) The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th ed). Los Angeles: Sage. Kuby, C. R., Price, E. and Gutshall Rucker, T. (2022) ‘Frictional Matterings: (Re) thinking Identity and Subjectivity in the Coming-to-be of Literacies’. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, pp. 1–16. doi: 10.1177/14639491221117550 Kuby, C. R., and Rucker, T. G. (2020) ‘(Re)Thinking Children as Fully (In)human and Literacies as Otherwise through (Re)etymologizing Intervene and Inequality’. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 20(1), pp. 13–43. doi: 10.1177/1468798420904774 Kuby, C. R., Spector, K., and Thiel, J. J. (2019) ‘Cuts too Small: An Introduction’. In C.R. Kuby, K. Spector and J.J. Thiel (Eds.) Posthumanism and Literacy Education: Knowing/Becoming/Doing Literacies. New York: Routledge. Kuby, C. R. and Zhao, W. (2022) ‘Ethic-Onto-Epistemology’. In K. Murris (Ed.) A  Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines. Abingdon: Routledge. Kuntz, A. M. (2019) Qualitative Inquiry, Cartography, and the Promise of Material Change. Abingdon: Routledge.

Affective Refusals  99 Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010) Going Beyond the Theory/practice Divide in Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2011) ‘Investigating Learning, Participation and Becoming in Early Childhood Practices with a Relational Materialist Approach’. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), pp. 36–50. doi: 10.2304/gsch.2011.1.1.36 Liebel, M. (2020) Decolonizng Childhoods: From Exclusion to Dignity. Bristol: Policy Press. Lorraine, T. (2008) ‘Feminist Lines of Flight from the Majoritarian Subject’. Deleuze Studies, 2 (Suppl), pp. 60–82. doi: 10.3366/E1750224108000366 MacLure, M., Holmes, R., Jones, L., and MacRae, C. (2010) ‘Silence as Resistance to Analysis: Or, on Not Opening One’s Mouth Properly’. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(6), pp. 492–500. doi: 10.1177/1077800410364349 Manning, E. (2016) The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke University Press. Martín-Bylund, A. (2018) ‘The Matter of Silence in Early Childhood Bilingual Education’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(4), pp. 349–358. doi: 10.1080/ 00131857.2017.1361820 Mazzei, L. A. (2014) ‘Beyond an Easy Sense: A diffractive analysis’. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), pp. 742–746. doi: 10.1177/1077800414530257 Mazzei, L.A. and Jackson, A.Y. (2017) ‘Voices in The Agentic Assemblage’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), pp. 1090–1098. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2016. 1159176 Miller, S. (2019) ‘Gender IdentityWOKE: A Theory of Trans*+ness for Animating Literacy Practices’. In D.E. Alvermann, N.J. Unrau, M. Sailors and R.B. Ruddell (Eds.) Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy (7th ed). New York: Routledge. Murris, K. (2016) The Posthuman Child: Educational Transformation Through Philos­ ophy with Picturebooks. Singapore: Routledge. Murris, K. (2021) ‘The ‘Missing Peoples’ of Critical Posthumanism and New Materialism’. In K. Murris. (Ed.) Navigating the Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Terrain Across Disciplines: An Introductory Guide. London: Routledge. Murris, K. (2022) Karen Barad as Educator: Agential Realism and Education. Singapore: Springer. Murris, K. and Peers, J. (2022) ‘GoPro (Blem) s and Possibilities: Keeping the Child Human of Colour in play in an Interview’. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 23(3), 332–355. doi: 10.1177/1463949122111721 Murris, K. and Reynolds, B. (2018) A Manifesto Posthuman Child: De/colonising childhood through reconfiguring the human [Video]. Youtube. Available at: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=ikN-LGhBawQ (Accessed: 12 October 2022). Murris, K., and Zhao, W. (2022) ‘Non/representational’. In K. Murris (Ed.) A Glossary for Doing Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research Across Disciplines. Abingdon: Routledge. Nxumalo, F. (2019) Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education. New York: Routledge. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Nxumalo, F., Kocher, L., Elliot, E., and Sanchez, A. (2015) Journeys: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Practices through Pedagogical Narration. North York: University of Toronto Press. Patel, L. (2016) Decolonizing Educational Research. New York: Routledge. Probyn, E. (2005) Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

100  Giovanna Caetano-Silva et al. Snaza, N. (2013) ‘Bewildering Education’. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), pp. 38–54. doi: 10.1080/15505170.2013.783889 Snaza, N. (2019) Animate Literacies: Literature, affect, and the politics of humanism. Durham: Duke University Press. Snaza, N. (2020) ‘Love and Bewilderment: On Education as Affective Encounter’. In B.P. Dernikos, N. Lesko, S.D. McCall and A.D. Niccolini (Eds.) Mapping the Affective Turn in Education. Theory, Research, and Pedagogies. New York: Routledge. St. Pierre, E. A. (2021) Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New. Qualitative Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 3–9. doi: 10.1177/1077800419863005 Taylor, C. A. (2016) ‘Edu-Crafting a Cacophonous Ecology: Posthumanist Research Practices for Education’. In C.A. Taylor and C. Hughes (Eds.) Posthuman Research Practices in Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thiel, J.J. and Dernikos, B.P. (2020) ‘Refusals, Re-turns, and Retheorizations of Affective Literacies: A Thrice-Told Data Tale’. Journal of Literacy Research, 52(4), pp. 482–506. doi: 10.1177/1086296X20966317 Truman, S. E. (2019) ‘Inhuman Literacies and Affective Refusals: Thinking with Sylvia Wynter and Secondary School English’. Curriculum Inquiry, 49(1), pp. 110–128. doi: 10.1080/03626784.2018.1549465 Truman, S.E., Hackett, A., Pahl, K., McLean Davies, L., and Escott, H. (2020) ‘The Capaciousness of No: Affective Refusals as Literacy Practices’. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(2), pp. 223–236. doi: 10.1002/rrq.306 Tsing, A. L. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Van der Tuin, I. (2019) ‘Deleuze and Diffraction’. In R. Braidotti and S. Bignall (Eds.) Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process After Deleuze. New York: Rowman & Little Field. Zarabadi, H.S. (2021) Racialising Assemblages and Affective Events: A Feminist New Materialism and Posthuman Study of Muslim Schoolgirls in London (Doctoral dissertation, UCL (University College London). Available at: https://discovery.ucl. ac.uk/id/eprint/10131948 (Accessed 16 October 2022). Zarabadi, H.S. (2022) ‘Watery Assemblages: The Affective and Material SwimmingBecomings of a Muslim Girl’s Queer Body with Nature’. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 38(3–4), pp. 451–461. doi: 10.1017/aee.2022.39 Zembylas, M. (2021) Refusal as Affective and Pedagogical Practice in Higher Education Decolonization: A Modest Proposal. Teaching in Higher Education, 26(7–8), 953– 968. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1900816

7 Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions Reconceptualising Critical Pedagogies for More-than-Human Crisis Times Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens Introduction: Critical Perspectives and the ‘(Post-) Pandemic New Normal’ United by our shared interests in critical posthumanist and new materialist philosophies, while immensely frustrated by the pandemic’s impact on our critical pedagogical praxes, the two of us set up monthly Zoom meetings between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2022. At the start of the pandemic in March 2020, one of the authors all of a sudden found themselves stuck in Belgium, having to lecture online to groups of students from various disciplines at a large international-oriented Dutch research university, while transitioning into a research-based post at a UK institute of higher education. The other author continued lecturing at the same underprivileged students-catering South African university where they have been teaching on a contract for almost 20 years. This particular author was also forced to go fully digital – a sudden transition that engendered different yet surprisingly similar irruptions for both authors, as will be discussed later. Our monthly conversations, during which we talked through the effects of this more-than-human pandemic crisis on an already highly neoliberalised and corporatised academic environment, motivated us to ‘keep going’. This painfully demonstrates that we, as pedagogues critical of the ongoing neoliberalisation of higher education, have also managed to interiorise a neoliberal work ethic and type of resilience that prioritises working 24/7, together with the commitment to immediately ‘bounce back’ after illness, personal matters, or other disorienting events. Packed with our own lived experiences translated into critiques of the justmentioned neoliberalisation process, this co-authored essay is shaped by an irruptive methodology – partly comparable to a diffractive approach (see Figure 7.1). Aside from experimenting with the idea and methodology of irruption (also see Gray et al., 2021), we were also strongly influenced by what the multidisciplinary Matsutake Worlds Research Group calls an ethos of ‘strong collaboration’: Our concept of collaboration requires a reflexive methodology for working across and with difference. Our collaboration is not data gathering DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-9

102  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens

Diffraction As specified in Geerts and van der Tuin (2021), diffraction has been put on the map as an optical metaphor by feminist science studies scholars Donna J. Haraway (1997) and Karen Barad (2007). In these feminist new materialist oeuvres, diffraction stands for thinking and theorising otherwise about the coming into being and production of differences and the interactions between worldly beings and their environments. Although diffraction, irruption, and strong collaboration do not completely overlap with one another, as irruption is more of a spatiotemporal metaphor for queering and reorientation, these methodologies are all equally critical of reflection – a Western scientific and philosophical method that, as Haraway (1997, p. 16) puts it, ‘only displaces the same elsewhere’ and that tends to reduce differences to a negative “differing-from”.

Figure 7.1 Irruption: Diffraction.

under a common theoretical umbrella. Instead, our collaboration requires negotiation across epistemologically diverse terrains and partially ‘articulated knowledges’ (Choy, 2005); this is collaboration with friction at its heart (Tsing, 2005). Following Sandra Harding’s (1993) term ‘strong objectivity’, we call this strong collaboration. The methodological work of collaboration should not be hidden; the knowledge we gain depends on it. (Choy et al., 2009b, p. 198) This collaborative research and co-writing model focuses on multiperspectivism, learning to attune oneself to more-than-human and non-human agencies, enacting a slower, more attentive mode of knowledge production, and building ‘connections across different geographical sites’ (Choy et al., 2009a, p. 399). The latter aspect in our case refers to our differently situated – and for at least one of us regularly shifting – academic environments and geopolitical positionalities: Both authors are equally committed to critical pedagogical praxes of emancipatory co-learning but because of their specific intersecting identities, the concrete materiality of their own bodies, their students’ bodies and environments, and the particular embeddedness of their academic institutions, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a different impact on their teaching philosophies and praxes. To give one example: It is of course a lot easier to go fully online when most of your institution’s students are privileged enough to have access to computers or smartphones, a stable Internet connection at home, nutritionally adequate meals, and a safe, private environment in which to study. When recently talking through the specificities of how the countries where we live(d) and work(ed), tackled the pandemic, we kept coming back to the idea of the (post-)pandemic. The prefix ‘post-’ here refers to a process of working through and beyond, meaning a continuity with the past (here the pandemic past, which is still very much haunting the present) is carried over. This echoes Freudian (1950) Durcharbeitung or the therapeutic process in which a patient learns to move beyond the resistance they initially had towards their own consciousness. This process also plays a role in postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Re-Writing Modernity’ (1987), where Lyotard conceptualises

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  103 ‘post-’modernism as a (re)working of the narratives of and on modernity. The ‘post-’ prefix can also indicate a ‘returning to’, however, much in the same way as postmodernism styled itself as a return to ‘reality’. We must be extremely wary, though, of framing such a return to reality nostalgically. While conceptualising the future in utopian terms, as modernism did, was unrealistic, dismissing the future, as happens in certain types of postmodern thinking, is not only irresponsible but dangerous. As critical posthumanist and new materialist philosophies teach us, we must search out grounded and messy future dreams, hopes being generated by people, living beings and other agents. It is actually quite shocking to see how the COVID-19 pandemic already has been crafted into something of the past. International consultancy agencies, such as Ernst & Young and McKinsey, in tandem with leading American newspapers like the New York Times, in fact started speaking of ‘a post-pandemic future’ and ‘the era of post-pandemic freedom’ as early as 2021. Predictions ranged from the New York Times’ forecast of ‘a post-Covid boom’ (Casselman, 2021, n. p.) resembling the Roaring Twenties to McKinsey’s dossier on post-pandemic higher education best practices (see McKinsey, 2021). While the forecast boom abruptly came to a halt due to war-driven global inflation and new COVID variants disrupting the labour market and higher education, McKinsey’s best practices conveniently left out the pre-pandemic damage already done by neoliberal marketisation. Judging from these and other examples, it seems that the sloganesque ‘post-pandemic new normal’ is not that ‘new’ at all. Consider the reality on the ground for a moment: we are confronted with an intensification of global inequalities (see Butler, 2020), all-encompassing ecological destruction, extreme funding cuts in an already heavily workforce casualisation-driven higher educational landscape, and, to make things even worse, interlinked increases in vaccine nationalism, populist post-truth politics, and distrust in Western modern science. Taking all of the foregoing into account, isn’t the ‘post-pandemic new normal’ suddenly starting to look a lot like the ‘pre-pandemic normal’? To reformulate the foregoing in philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (2000) words: We seem to be more enslaved to the capitalist social machine than ever before (see Figure 7.2).

Or as Deleuze (2004, p. 263) put it:

The capitalist social machine

‘Perhaps it’s that, in capitalism, desire and interest, or desire and reason, are distributed in a totally new way, a particularly “abnormal” way. Capital, or money, has reached such a stage of delirium that there would be only one equivalent in psychiatry: what they call the terminal state’. The capitalist social machine reproduces and channels the entirety of individual and social value as well as labour into extraction, production, and consumption. By deterritorialising or freeing up everything from objects and activities to individuals and social institutions from their previous functions, this machine redirects – or reterritorialises – them to the production of purely economic ends. Deleuze and Guattari (2000) see this as a form of schizophrenic becoming with pathological consequences for individuals and social units, not to mention dire consequences for the planetary environment’s continued functioning.

Figure 7.2 Irruption: The capitalist social machine.

104  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens This ‘machine’, propelled by a dangerous combination of late capitalist extractivism, the hyper-commodification of living and non-living matter, and algorithms-driven neoliberal governmentality has found its way into both our public institutions and private lives and is currently dominating ‘all aspects of existence’ (Brown, 2015, p. 17). The all-encompassing forcefulness of neoliberalism has also been underlined by critical pedagogue Henry A. Giroux in Against the Terror of Neoliberalism (2008, pp. 10–11), where he states the following: Neoliberalism has indeed become a broad-based political and cultural movement designed to obliterate public concerns and liquidate the welfare state, and make politics everywhere an exclusively market-driven project. But neoliberalism does more than make the market ‘the informing principle of politics’ […]; its political culture and pedagogical practices also put into play a social universe and cultural landscape that support a particularly barbaric notion of authoritarianism, set in motion under the combined power of a religious and market fundamentalism and anti-terrorism laws that suspend civil liberties, incarcerate disposable populations, and provide the security forces necessary for capital to destroy those spaces where democracy can be nourished. When it comes to higher education, the neoliberal capitalist social machine is at least co-responsible for the hollowing out of academic institutions through excessive budget cuts, the creation of overpaid management positions and promoting educational consumerism. And it is the schizophrenic operations of this machine – manifesting itself more clearly than ever in these (post-) pandemic times – that critical pedagogical (Freire, 1970; hooks, 1994; Giroux, 2008 and 2022), posthumanist (Braidotti, 2013), and new materialist (Barad, 2007; Puar, 2007; Cooper, 2008; Chen, 2012; Alaimo, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Yusoff, 2018; and Geerts and Carstens, 2019) perspectives are call into question (see Figure 7.3).

Critical materialist theories These three sets of critical theories – namely, critical pedagogical, critical posthumanist, and critical new materialist – are rooted in the critical tradition of the Frankfurt School, which mainly revolves around dissident Marxist thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt, founded in the 1920s in Germany. Because of this link, these theories are also materialist in nature, as they emphasise the importance of analysing the material world together with its structural macro- and microleveled power imbalances and relations. This is particularly the case for critical new materialist philosophies (see Geerts, 2021), as they are propelled by feminist, queer, and critical race studies perspectives that zoom in on processes of mattering and non-mattering – that is, how certain embodied beings are made to (not) matter, and why.

Figure 7.3 Irruption: Critical materialist theories.

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  105

Neoliberal extractive late capitalism & the Capitalocene... The destructiveness or neoliberal extractive late capitalism is also underlined by Braidotti (2020, pp. 467-468) who uses Moore’s (2013) and Haraway’s (2016) notion of the Capitalocene to point at the Anthropocenic capitalist causes of the current pandemic crisis, while demonstrating the need to analyse it by focusing on the entanglements between the human, non-human, and more-than-human: ‘If it is undeniable that the “Capitalocene” – the greed of consumers’ society – is responsible for the abuse of animal life that produced the infections of the bats and generated COVID-19, it is equally true that neoliberal governance has laid the foundations for the spread of the contagion by exacerbating socio-economic power differences’.

Figure 7.4 Irruption: Neoliberal extractive late capitalism & the Capitolocene…

In addition to hammering on the necessity of analysing the root cause of the ongoing more-than-human COVID-19 crisis – that is, neoliberal extractive late capitalism (see Figure 7.4) – these critical materialist theories are all broadly invested in the Frankfurt School-praxis of emancipatory, worldly action-provoking critique (see Horkheimer, 2002) or ‘troublings’ (see Haraway, 2016; Zarabadi et al., 2019). Critical pedagogues Paulo Freire (1970) and bell hooks (1994) have long criticised the capitalist machine-driven banking model of education that downplays ‘[e]ros […] as a [pedagogical] motivating force’ (hooks, 1994, p. 194) and the importance of strong collaborative, slow scholarship (see Choy et al., 2009a and 2009b). Critical pedagogue Henry A. Giroux (2008, p. 114) has expanded on the foregoing by claiming that such a banking model of education is in fact guilty of reproducing a neoliberal type of authoritarianismengendering public pedagogy that is not only antithetical to critical thinking but by now has moved far beyond the confines of the classroom thanks to ‘unprecedented electronic technologies that include high-speed computers, new types of digitized film, and the Internet’ (see Figure  7.5). And all the foregoing is clearly driven by neoliberal extractive late capitalism.

... & “capitalist realism” Braidotti’s comments with regards to the Capitalocene and Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of the capitalist machine resonate with critical theorist Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism”. With this notion, Fisher (2009, p. 16) points at the existence of a ‘pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action’. The irruptions created by neoliberal extractive late capitalism and the (post-)pandemic echo the capitalist realist ones: For a long time already, neoliberal bio-/necropower has been infiltrating the web of life, exposing individuals, societies, and the earth itself to a process of ‘terraformation’ as ‘capitalist relations’ invest themselves in every facet of ‘biological production’ and social reproduction (including education), seeking to overcome all ‘limits to growth’, to put it in the words of new materialist Melinda Cooper (2008, pp. 41-42).

Figure 7.5 Irruption: …& ‘Capitalist Realism’.

106  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens Yet, looking at our own (post-)pandemic lived experiences as critical pedagogues and teachers, this neoliberalisation of higher education (also see Geerts, 2019) seems to have really reached its apex over the past two and a half years, and thanks to the affective combination of pandemic despair, pre-existing political resentment, increased polarisation and fascist post-truth politics. The type of pandemic, post-truth-countering crisis mode-teaching (see Carstens, 2019, 2020) that we were forced to take on, created multiple ‘neoliberal (post-)pandemic irruptions’ or violently disorienting breaks with our pre-pandemic teaching praxes. It is from this set of challenging, but seen through our critical theoretical viewpoints simultaneously revitalising, irruptive moments that we then map out a situated critical pedagogy fit for morethan-human crisis times. While examples of such disorienting, and, eventually, reorienting, breaks are woven into the text, we must first examine the intriguing philosophical genealogy of irruption. The Neoliberal (Post-)Pandemic University: The Power of Irruption Irruption stems from the Latin irruptiō, referring to a sudden bursting in or an attack, and therefore is often compared to the act of interruption – from the Latin interruptionem; breaking into something or interrupting someone. Yet, irruption comes across as a more forceful phenomenon, and not just because of its military connotations: Irruptions in fact seem to queer the spatiotemporal, forcing us to pause in the here and now and reflect upon where we were going. This queering aspect becomes apparent when unveiling irruption’s philosophical genealogy: Although often philosophically attributed to Deleuze and Guattari, irruption as a concept already pops up in the works of proto-existentialists Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas: Whereas irruption for Heidegger (2008) points at the revealing of Dasein’s – or the embedded subject’s – authenticity vis-à-vis other beings, Levinas in Totality and Infinity (2015) uses it to refer to the crushing feeling that falls over us when we come face-to-face with the wholly vulnerable Other. Levinas’ interpretation underlines the doubleness of irruption quite well: Being confronted with the Other halts us in our tracks, but it at the same time points to the affective push to take concrete action by responding to – or blatantly ignoring – the Other’s call. Philosopher Jacques Derrida in Writing and Difference (2001, p. 131) discusses this Levinasian ‘irruption of the Other’ as well, while connecting irruption to his own project of deconstruction that signifies a radical break with the Western philosophical tradition. As a binaries-unravelling methodology, deconstruction disorients, while reorienting the theorist and reader alike towards something new that came into being via the deconstructive process. Philosophically speaking, one could say that Derridean deconstruction is not that far removed from Harawayan-Baradian diffraction or the irruptive methodology experimented with in this essay: These methodologies, each in their own way, zoom in on the creation – and potential destruction – of meaning, and do so by taking into account the role power has in processes of meaning-making. They also share an investment in the ethico-political: The unravelling of

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  107 dichotomised binaries – or the challenging of crisis-ridden events (irruption) and the rethinking of knowledge-producing practices (diffraction) – in the end forces us to reimagine the world and everything in it. The most affirmative meaning attributed to the phenomenon of irruption can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2000): Linked to their schizoanalysis-based critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis and world that is in the process of becoming more exploitative and fascist through the late capitalist socio-political regulation of desire, Anti-Oedipus touches upon irruption in the context of desire and revolution. Led by the May ’68-inspired question where ‘the new irruption of desire [will] come from’, Deleuze and Guattari state the following: Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other. Never an individual exile, never a personal desert, but a collective exile and a collective desert. […] The actualization of a revolutionary potentiality is explained less by the preconscious state of causality in which it is nonetheless included, than by the efficacy of a libidinal break at a precise moment, a schiz whose sole cause is desire which is to say the rupture with causality that forces a rewriting of history on a level with the real, and produces this strangely polyvocal moment when everything is possible. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000, pp. 377–378) Schizoanalysis is intended both as a critique of and remedy to the normative models of capitalist society and its schizophrenic socio-political and eco-social pushes and pulls. As Guattari (1996, p. 132) writes, schizoanalysis is not about promoting ‘a didactic program’; instead, it is about ‘escap[ing] the systems of modeling in which we are entangled and which are in the process of completely polluting us, head and heart’. Desire in Deleuzoguattarian philosophy is not connected to lack; desire is seen as a pure, positive reality, consisting of multiple crisscrossing flows – which does not exclude desire from having or receiving ‘a fascist determination’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 215), as also explained in A Thousand Plateaus when referring to macro- and microfascisms (see Figure 7.6).

Microfascisms For Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 10) microfascisms – or the more ephemeral but certainly not less powerful flows of fascist desire, ideological beliefs, and power operating behind more macro-entities, such as nation-states – are everywhere; ‘just waiting to crystallize’.

Education and critical pedagogies thus have an important role to play, if we were to transport Deleuzoguattarian philosophy to this post-truth digital day and age: By carefully unpacking the complexity of the digital information realm in the classroom and focusing on the transference of digital critical literacy skills, the formation of these microfascisms could be halted – or at least unpacked and criticised.

Figure 7.6 Irruption: Microfascisms.

108  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens Like the Levinasian irruptive appeal of the Other, desire according to Deleuze and Guattari always announces itself through irruption, and each new irruption of desire always comes from within desire itself, so that what ‘irrupts’ causes disorientation, while at the same time carrying the potential actualisation of revolutionary change. The above interpretation of irruption as affirmative and redirectional is central to post-qualitative thinker Mirka Koro-Ljungberg’s (2015, p. xviii) understanding of irruptions, which for her are energy-filled moments and events that ‘question linearity and normativity’. This queering aspect becomes clearer if we think of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as a more-than-human irruptive event, propelled forward by neoliberal extractive late capitalism: When the first lockdowns were introduced, it soon sank in that the pandemic crisis was not merely interruptive. The assumption that things would go back to normal, that is, as they were before, by simply travelling back in time, instantly became non-sensical. The scale of this event, together with its speed, was almost unfathomable: A zoonotic disease provoked by the non-human SARS-CoV-2 virus latching onto as many hosts as possible to survive, whether animal hosts, humans, or unventilated spaces, dirty doorknobs, and other surfaces; exponentially spreading because of late capitalism’s global infrastructural grasp. A viral disease that eventually also re-impacted the environment due to the mass production of protective discardable face masks, new global supply chains needed to deal with the online shopping demands, and the brutal culling of infected mink colonies in various countries. In this sense, the pandemic, as well as the ‘post-pandemic’, was characterised by a specific more-than-humanness, or as critical posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2020, p. 468) so aptly describes it, the ‘(post-)pandemic’ has emphasised ‘the agency of non-human forces and the overall importance of Gaia as a living, symbiotic planet’. Because of its environment-destroying origins and ditto effects, the more-than-human COVID-19 pandemic proved to be more than a brief interruption of normalcy; it was irruptive in the sense that it disorientated us by taking away the actual and even imaginary places we could go to. The pandemic moreover also forced us to think about the paths we were – individually and collectively – walking down, and that as part of an assemblage of human, more-than-human, non-human, and dehumanised beings. And it is the above self-reflexive aspect that adds a doubleness to irruptive disorientation, as can also be seen in the following passage from critical theorist Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Moments of disorientation are vital. […] Disorientation as a bodily feeling can be unsettling, and it can shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable. (Ahmed, 2006, p. 157) At the same time, Ahmed (2006, p. 5) also shows us how we ‘must first experience disorientation’ ‘to become orientated’ or reorientated. Irruptions, such as the neoliberal (post-)pandemic irruptions we as critical pedagogues and

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  109 practitioners have been – and still are – experiencing, then, do not just immobilise us; they create spacetime for new directions by queering the perceived linear progression of time and taking us out of our spatial environments, how uncomfortable of a process that may be… The Neoliberal (Post-)Pandemic University: Teaching-with(in) More-Than-Human Crisis Times If anything, the irruptions that the neoliberal (post-)pandemic represents and engenders, should serve as a wake-up call for higher education to catch up with the most alarming of these disturbances, that is, the earlier discussed ‘environmental catastrophe’ – which, as Fisher (2009, p. 18) observes, ‘feature[d] in late capitalist society’, including in classrooms and syllabi, ‘only as a kind of simulacra’. This catastrophe’s ‘real implications’ (p. 18) – appearing as a thousand tiny-yet-all-encompassing, interlinked catastrophes, and, at this stage, multiple entangled permacrises – have been too traumatising to discuss. Until now, when it is almost too late. ‘Playing Catch Up’, ‘Slowing Down’ and Dyschronia within the Neoliberal Academic Landscape

Combining the two aforementioned meanings of the prefix ‘post-’ as a working through and beyond process, plus a type of ‘returning to’, the notion of the (post-)Anthropocene possesses a similar doubleness: It, on the one hand, articulates how the assemblages of humans, non-humans, the dehumanised, and the more-than-human are currently still very much embedded in the permacrises engendered through and by human extractive capitalist endeavours, while simultaneously making space for what could await these assemblages beyond the current Anthropocenic crisis situation. The post-Anthropocene, then, could be best compared to Haraway’s (2016, p. 2) idea of the Chthulucene, or the more-than-human times in which the just-mentioned assemblages are potently ‘[l]iving-with and dying-with each other’.

Dyschronia... Dyschronia or “time-out-of-joint” describes a kind of cultural exhaustion; a situation of cultural stasis disguised behind the continuous push to achieve “newness” and accelerate productivity. Neoliberalism’s slow cancellation of the future, as Fisher (2014) explains, is responsible for the dyschromic exhaustion we all increasingly are feeling. Time feels out of joint when we are labouring under increased neoliberal bureaucratisation and hyper-productivity mantras, yet have lost faith in institutional transparency or the promise of upward career mobility (such as is the case in the corporatised academic landscape). Increasingly, we have less faith in institutional politics, let alone in the all-encompassing power of institutional knowledge.

Figure 7.7 Irruption: Dyschronia…

110  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens The idea of an almost (post-)Anthropocentric apocalyptic ‘lateness’ guides us towards our first co-experienced neoliberal (post-)pandemic irruption, that is, the weird ways in which we, together with our students, lived through pandemic time. Pandemic time in fact caused quite a shock to our system. Right before the crisis hit, there was never any time to spare, meaning it was already tricky to contemplate upon our lived experience of time – time’s successive flows or our individual day-to-day doings – and the conceptualisation of temporality – or time as a collectively shared historical past, present, and future. Both lecturers were already drowning in work in the pre-pandemic era; a situation that worsened as the crisis hit and then intensified. When you are constantly trying to ‘play catch up’ with the ridiculous temporalities-shattering speed of neoliberal academia, designing and practising slow pedagogies, unfortunately, seems unrealistic (see Figure 7.7). Combine this with the fact that neither lecturer had a permanent position at the time (or have one presently) and both were, like most academics, haunted by the forced cultivation of what queer theorist Jack Halberstam (2011, p. 3) calls neoliberal ‘toxic positivity’, it should not come as a surprise that we were already long drained before being forcibly transformed into ‘Zoom-bies’. As Halberstam (2011, p. 3) explains it in more detail in The Queer Art of Failure: Positive thinking is offered up in the U.S. as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, and a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to Americans than recognizing that their success is the outcome of the tilted scales of race, class, and gender.

...or spacetimematterings? When further reflecting upon the (post-)pandemic, the (post-)Anthropocene, and our lived and, in particular, pedagogical experiences with dyschronia, another notion comes to mind, that is, the agential realist idea of “spacetimemattering”. Spacetimemattering according to Barad (2010, p. 261) points at how the past, present, and future are ‘iteratively reconfigured and enfolded through the world’s ongoing intra-activity’, meaning time, through the lens of spacetimattering, can no longer be seen as the simple ‘succession of evenly spaced individual moments’ (2007, p. 180), but is actually queered through the becoming of the universe and put into a relationality with space, the material world, and processes of (re)materialisation and remembering. ln posthumanist agential realist philosophy, time is always already out of joint, or dychronically experienced. Conceptually, spacetimematterings is a tad more interesting than dyschronia, as it can help us unravel how haunting, lingering memories throw us back into the past via the present.

Figure 7.8 Irruption: … or spacetimematterings.

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  111 This underlines how neoliberal capitalist realism focuses on the hyper-responsibilisation of individual subjects and not structures of oppression, discrimination and privilege that equally – if not more – impact subjects’ lives. Interestingly, Halberstam with this book goes against the American mantras of social mobility and eternal optimism, and by doing so, opens up a queer(ing) space to rethink the interconnected values of reproductivity, productivity and normalcy (see Figure 7.8). The disorienting shock that the pandemic administered to us, also revealed a weird dyschronia: The ever-accelerating speed of neoliberal academia – pushing towards a faster service (never a better service), more bitesize ways to deliver course materials (never more high-quality ways of delivering materials),  more students as consumers (never more teachers and students as co-learners),  … – clashed with the ‘slowing down’ that was said to be all around us during the pandemic and its first lockdowns. Neither of us personally noticed this ‘slowing down’ gesture, however, in fact, many of us were forced to ‘keep on going’, while creating hybrid lesson plans and being forced to take on twice as much care and emotional labour than before. Fully aware of the painful fact that for many – mostly already underprivileged folks – time had in fact completely stopped, the critical pedagogical question of whether we can ever ‘slow down’ within the context of a neoliberal academic landscape still needs to be asked. Who has the bargaining power within these institutions of higher education to actually ‘slow down’ and turn the extra time received into produced goods with the goal of eventually taking themselves higher up the faculty ladders? A Thousand Tiny-Yet-All-Encompassing Catastrophes and Solutions

Looked at from a critical pedagogical perspective infused with critical posthumanist and new materialist thought, multiple individual, social, and environmental catastrophes have an affirmative irruptive side to them; an ability to guide our critical pedagogical praxes in new directions. In both authors’ praxes, the catastrophic components of the (post-) Anthropocene have in fact been mobilised into creating novel teaching situations. Whereas one lecturer teaches modern Western political philosophy by means of an open-ended syllabus that makes space for the dehumanised, the non-human, and the more-than-human, plus the students’ own situated input, the other lecturer uses the environmental register plagued by the catastrophic as a starting point for their introductory liberal arts course: Exposing students to the importance of the environmental register is of course relatively easy in a country such as South Africa where extreme water shortages, catastrophic flooding, droughts, wildfires, and a burgeoning energy crisis exacerbate perilous social and economic divides – although these issues are of course also currently noticeable on a global scale… Another example that stresses this, but less visibly so, is the (post-)pandemic attention to the burgeoning mental health crisis and accessibility issues:

112  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens Connected to the rise of the neoliberal capitalist social machine hyper-responsibilising individual subjects, adolescent mental health became a hot topic at the start of the pandemic, and that mostly in countries were higher education students’ basic needs are, on average, met. As higher education went online in 2020 (when infrastructurally possible), educators all over the world found themselves encountering the affective disorders of capitalist realism even more than usual; ‘an invisible plague of psychiatric and affective disorders’ that haunt the black mirrors of smartphones, Zoom meeting spaces, and digital discussion boards; a reflection of capital’s own bipolar ‘lurching between hyped-up mania and depressive come-down’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 35). Both lecturers noticed the gradual absence of a significant percentage of students from online pedagogical spaces – the pandemic and its lockdowns made them feel rendered surplus on so many levels. Online spaces, surrounded by such rising levels of economic and environmental precarity on the ground, have amplified capitalist realism’s pre-existing mental health pandemic. This appears to have led to privileged students isolating themselves in bubbles of technological addiction and echo chambers, while simultaneously exposing the precarity of students with no or interrupted access to the Internet and social media. Critical pedagogies that focus on more holistic analyses through critical posthumanist and new materialist approaches have to make this particular precarity more visible. At the same time – and this is where we see an affirmative reorienting glimpse appearing in this irruptive moment – the combination of more online lecturing and attunement to mental health issues, turned accessibility and inclusion into hot topics. The reason for that was nonetheless partly perverted: There were of course many critical pedagogues that became even more invested in accessibility and inclusion praxes, yet the attention did also increase because many able-bodied and able-minded folks were suddenly demanding more accessible ways of participating academically (also see Geerts et al., 2020). Some strategies, such as taped and live video materials (that are now more and more automatically captioned), as well as digital and hybrid conferences, have nevertheless increased overall accessibility and inclusion – although taped materials also run the risk of being used by the political extreme right to harass and intimidate lecturers and by the university, as an easy replacement for ill or striking lecturers. While online teaching and conferencing spaces do indeed open up new territories for learning and teaching, we need to be aware of the fact that there is no green post-industrial space for online education to occupy. Jussi Parikka has playfully reconceptualised the (post)Anthropocene as the ‘anthrobscene’ (2015, p. 5), connecting what has been termed the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ (4IR) to the myriad of crises currently haunting us (see Figure 7.9). The harmful residues of 4IR capitalist realism are driven by processes of racialised (post)colonial-capitalist accumulation, extraction, and expulsion (also see Chakravartty and da Silva, 2012). Online spaces cannot be separated from

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  113

The “Anthrobscene” Or as Parikka (2015, pp. 5-6) later on explains: ‘In short, the addition of the obscene is self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks. [ ... ] To call it “anthrobscene” is just to emphasize what we knew but perhaps shied away from acting on: a horrific human-caused drive toward a sixth mass extinction of species’.

Figure 7.9 Irruption: The ‘Anthrobscene’.

the despoiled environments, the sweatshops, and sinister resource supply chains that keep them running, or the mountains of leaking e-waste quietly dumped in the derogatorily labelled ‘Third World’ backwaters. Once we as co-learners grasp the interconnectedness of these thousand tiny-yet-all-encompassing catastrophes, irruptions bring about a true ‘Aha!’-moment: If the economic and ecological, macro and micro, and hyper-individualised and collective levels are in the end all entangled, then a path towards critical theoretical, pedagogical and activist resistance becomes clear. Education has a duty to make the nature of the multitiered crisis we are living through more visible, as is also underlined in educational thinker Sandra Abegglen et al. (2021) piece on eco-pedagogies. And as ecofeminist new materialist Stacy Alaimo also puts it in Exposed (2016, p. 188), the ‘incommensurable grids’ of more-than-human ‘vulnerability, culpability, responsibility and concern’ that attend to late capitalism’s vast economic maldistributions, displacements and disturbances must be revealed before putting those eco-pedagogies into practice. For critical theorists and pedagogues, this means making the connections between the micro and macro more visible and mapping out links between the three ecological registers – the individual, social and environmental. We must moreover grapple with and teach about the ethico-political problematic of the unhinged world that the COVID-19 pandemic made partially visible, and that ongoing climate change and socio-economic and geopolitical disturbances have borne out. We need new methodologies that complicate, deepen, and enrich our learning and teaching in the light of these ongoing disruptions, incorporating insights from a diversity of fields and perspectives. In resisting the grey curtain of capitalist realism and following the more hope-filled lines of flights carved out in the air by some of the aforementioned irruptions, a pedagogy of refusal must be embraced; an endlessly irruptive methodology that refuses to subordinate itself ‘to a predetermined and predefined goal or endpoint’ (Snaza, 2013, p. 49).

114  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens

Resistance and/or refusal The question that remains, of course, is whether we as critical pedagogues, teachers, and practitioners, can actually cultivate what queer thinker Mari Ruti (2017) calls an “ethics of opting out”. Do we really have the power to step out of the contemporary neoliberal university’s day-to-day operations? Can we fully refuse to partake in this system that is guilty of upholding neoliberal extractive late capitalism, and is equally rooted in ongoing colonial violence, cultural imperialism, and processes of racialisationsexualisation-gendering? And if so, who is in the privileged position of being able to afford such radical (but sometimes also selfserving) acts of opting out? Or are more micropractices of resistance – highlighted irruptively in this essay – also an option? What is sure is that a posthumanist Deleuzoguattarian take on this matter urges us to cultivate a different mode of attention through schizoanalysis; a mode of attention that is not limited to the human subject and the current crises created/experienced, but one that zooms in on post-Anthropocenic potentialities-to-be-actualised.

Figure 7.10 Irruption: Resistance and/or refusal.

In this process of refusal and the subsequent reclaiming of a better destiny, we need to be continually on the lookout for new weapons by which we might ‘bore holes’ in conceptual ‘space instead of keeping it smooth’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 413). Resistance means always experimenting with new ways of becoming, but while doing so, keeping our attention on the entangled lines of relationality by which new subjectivities and new social collectives might grow and emerge (see Figure 7.10). Irruptively working with critical posthumanist and new materialist philosophies might enable us ‘to recognize and implement new narratives that were previously masked by anthropocentric conceits and haughty Enlightenment-based notions of supposedly all-encompassing progress and linear progression’ (Geerts and Carstens, 2019, p. 924). Conclusion: Irruptive Pedagogies in-the-Making for More-Than-Human Crisis Times Félix Guattari in Chaosmosis (1996) writes that education’s primary function is to cultivate futurity – the jubilant purpose of which is to rethink, amongst other matters, subjectivity, agency, intentionality and relationality. We are thereby prevailed on to heed Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘vitalist’ call to construct a futurist pedagogy of ‘mutual trans-species interdependence’ around principles of ‘ecosophy’ – a pedagogical praxis seeking to make connections between ‘the multiple layers of the subject, from interiority to exteriority and everything in between’, as Braidotti notes it in The Posthuman (2013, p. 92). Simultaneously, there seems to be a need for education to move beyond ‘anthropocentric’ and humanistic ‘modes of navigation’ that never seem to leave the loop of the ‘sexed, raced, sexualised, economic, labouring human’ (Gardner and MacCormack, 2018, p. 1). In refusing the educational production of the predetermined

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  115 human(ised) subject, we move towards a critical pedagogical and posthumanist educational praxis that is fully cognisant of ‘how the very idea of ‘the human’ has led us to misrecognize ourselves and our relations to the world’ (Snaza, 2013, p. 50). Such a more-than-human education embraces irruptive bewilderment, refusal and resistance; opening itself up to ‘strangeness and learning out of bounds’ as it works to realise ‘our real relation to other beings in the world,’ and embrace those ‘relations that humanism has taught us to disavow’ (p. 51). Critical new materialist and posthumanist philosophical turns, together with affect theoretical and hauntological ones, have encouraged scholars and pedagogues to pay attention to how the human is intertwined with a morethan-human world of pre-individual affects and affordances, bacterial, viral, plant, and animal assemblages, meteorological cycles, and geological processes. We are urged towards critical pedagogical praxes that recognise how mental lifeworlds are enmeshed with sociological and environmental ones, and that take seriously the scale of environmental and other disasters engendered by neoliberal extractive late capitalism. Education, in short, needs to come to terms with what has turned out to be anything but a temporary disturbance. In this text, we have suggested an array of conceptual-methodological irruptions and real-life-based irruptive moments as thinking-aids for responding to the disruptions that plague the present and that block access, both conceptually and literally, to the future. While the general tone of this essay might appear bleak at first, our argument is in effect affirmative and charged with hope: Affirmation, after all, does not entail a passive acceptance of the existing state of affairs, but rather a negation of what is clearly not working, thereby initiating a movement towards what could instead be possible. By activating critical irruptive thinking, the first important steps towards necessary transformation are taken. Or, as Deleuze (1992, p. 4) also reminds us, ‘there is no need to fear […], but only to reach for new [conceptual-methodological] weapons’. More-than-human crisis times, together with neoliberal and (post-) pandemic irruptions, demand that we reject the toxic positivity of neoliberal extractive late capitalism, as well as the progressive manufactured nationalistic ideologies of modernist reason, and return to a more-than-human reality of embodied, embedded, situated, affective, and messily entangled existence – basically a grounded ‘staying with the trouble’ (also see Haraway, 2016). Affirming our role as active agents of change, resisting and refusing, requires us to make our critical teaching practices alive to the world’s indeterminacy and interconnected natures. The machinic – the impersonal and intra-personal resonances or ‘inter-connections’ that make all living beings, not just humans ‘tick’ (Braidotti, 2006, n. p.) – is our final irruption; one that suggests that there are a multitude of tiny solutions inherent in everyday practices, pedagogical irruptions, and new forms of attentiveness. Thinking of the machinic (versus thinking in terms of the mechanical), is a wake-up call to take up the queer affirmative weapons of plasticity, uncertainty, and radically fluent identities that assure us that nothing – least of all social constructions – are fixed, stable, or cast in stone. This weapon could furthermore be

116  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens mobilised as a continuously irruptive force, to be used against the deadening facticity of capitalist realism. Instead of being brought low by capitalist realism – which is clearly here to stay until it has annihilated itself and everything and anyone involved – we must look to countercultural expressions that are freed from stereotypical humanist plots, the ‘aberrations and discontinuities’ of minoritarian artistic, intellectual and literary expression that ‘may be therapeutic to the extent that they can condition the body and mind to endure a more profound existence, one that is closer to the multiplicity of discontinuous durations of which life is composed’ (Ramey, 2012, p. 150). To circumvent the many paranoias, anxieties, and depressions of capitalist realism, we could pedagogically mobilise the therapeutic acts of imaginative action undertaken by radical artists and activist groups, engaging in ‘a production sui generis’ that irruptively hijacks and reappropriates the ‘diverse possibilities’ that the mental ailments of capitalism offer us ‘for recomposing existential corporeality’ (Guattari, 1995, pp. 6–7), all while cultivating dissident subjectivities of like-mindedness and moving towards experimental modes of being and becoming rather than fixed and stratified modes of humanistic thought. Whether we as critical thinkers and pedagogues let ourselves be reoriented through irruptions, diffractions, strong collaborations or a combination of all three, the goal remains the same: theorising and teaching within the ruins created by neoliberal extractive late capitalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the myriad of permacrises erupting right now, while working towards a world whose more-than-humanness is respected and (at)tended to. References Abegglen, S. Blundell, D., and Bustillos Morales, J. A. (2021) ‘Eco-education: A response to the Anthropocene and an uncertain future’. Educationalfutures, 12(1), pp. 31–47. Available at: https://educationstudies.org.uk/journal/ef/volume-12-12021/eco-education-a-response-to-the-anthropocene-and-an-uncertain-future (Accessed: 27 January 2023). Alaimo, S. (2016) Exposed: Environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010) ‘Quantum Entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come’. Derrida Today, 3(2), pp. 240–268. doi: 10.3366/drt.2010.0206 Braidotti, R. (2006) ‘Affirming the affirmative: On nomadic affectivity’. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledges, 11/12. http://www.rhizomes.net/ issue11/braidotti.html Braidotti, R. (2013) The posthuman. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  117 Braidotti, R. (2020) ‘“We” are in this together, but we are not one and the same’. Bioethical Inquiry, 17, pp. 465–469. doi: 10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8 Brown, W. (2015) Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Butler, J. (2020) ‘Capitalism has its limits’. Verso, 13 March. https://www.versobooks. com/blogs/4603-capitalism-has-its-limits Carstens, D. (2019) ‘New materialist perspectives for pedagogies in times of movement, crisis and change’. Alternation, 26(2), pp. 138–160. doi: 10.29086/25195476/2019/v26n2a7 Carstens, D. (2020) ‘Navigating apocalyptic affects: Generating posthuman cartographies of resistance to capitalist realism’. Somatechnics, 10(1), pp. 95–114. doi: 10.3366/soma.2020.0302 Casselman, B. (2021) ‘On the post-pandemic horizon, could that be … a boom?’. The New York Times, 21 February. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/ 02/21/business/economy/pandemic-economic-boom.html (Accessed: 10th November 2022). Chakravartty, P. and Ferreira da Silva, D. (2012) ‘Accumulation, dispossession, and debt: The racial logic of global capitalism—An introduction’. American Quarterly, 64(3), pp. 361–385. doi: 10.1353/aq.2012.0033 Chen, M. Y. (2012) Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham: Duke University Press. Choy, T. K., Faier, L., Hathaway, M. J., Inoue, M., Satsuka, S. and Tsing, A. (2009a) ‘A new form of collaboration in cultural anthropology: Matsutake worlds’. American Ethnologist, 36(2), pp. 380–403. doi: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01141.x Choy, T. K., Faier, L., Hathaway, M. J., Inoue, M., Satsuka, S. and Tsing, A. (2009b) ‘Strong collaboration as a method for multi-sited ethnography: On mycorrhizal relations’. In Falzon, M. A. (Ed.) Multi-sided ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 197–214. Cooper, M. (2008) Life as surplus: Biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Deleuze, G. (1992) ‘Postscript on the societies of control’. October, 59(Winter), pp. 3–7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828 Deleuze, G. (2004) ‘On capitalism and desire’. In Deleuze, G. and Lapoujade, D. (Eds.) Desert islands and other Texts: 1953–1974. Translated by M. Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 262–273. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translation and foreword by B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2000) Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Translated from the French by Hurley, R., Seem, M., and Lane, H. R., with a preface by Foucault, M. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. (2001) Writing and difference. Translated, with an introduction, and additional notes by Alan Bass. London – New York: Routledge Classics. Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? London: Zero Books. Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of my life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures. Winchester: Zero Books. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. Translated by Ramos, M. B. New York: Continuum.

118  Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens Freud, S. (1950) ‘Remembering, repeating, and working-through’. In J. Strachey (Ed.) The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12. London: Hogarth Press, pp. 145–156. Gardner, C. and MacCormack, P. (2018) ‘Introduction.’ In MacCormack, P. and Gardner, C. (Eds.) Ecosophical affects: Art, ethics and ecology with Guattari. London: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 1–28. Geerts, E. (2019) ‘Re-vitalizing the American feminist-philosophical classroom: Transformative academic experimentations with diffractive pedagogies’. In Taylor, C. and Bayley, A. (Eds.) Posthumanism and higher education: Reimagining pedagogy, practice and research. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 123–140. Geerts, E. (2021) ‘Nieuw Materialisme: Een kritische cartografie [New materialisms: A critical cartography]’. Wijsgerig Perspectief, 61(2), pp. 34–41. Geerts, E. and Carstens, D. (2019) ‘Ethico-onto-epistemology’. Philosophy Today, 63(4), pp. 915–925. doi: 10.5840/philtoday202019301 Geerts, E., Hoegaerts, J., Blackie, D., and Hens, K. (2020) ‘Editorial: Dis/abling gender in crisis times’. Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 25(1), pp. 1–18. doi: 10.5117/ TVGN2022.1.001.GEER Geerts, E. and van der Tuin, I. (2021) ‘Diffraction & reading diffractively’. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(1), pp. 173–177. doi: 10.1344/jnmr.v2i1. 33380 Giroux, H. A. (2008) Against the terror of neoliberalism: Politics beyond the age of greed. Boulder – London: Paradigm Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (2022) Pedagogy of resistance: Against manufactured ignorance. London – New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gray, C., Carstens, D., Geerts, E., and Eloff, A. (2021) ‘Deleuzoguattarian thought, the new materialisms, and (be)wild(erring) pedagogies: A conversation between Chantelle Gray, Delphi Carstens, Evelien Geerts, and Aragorn Eloff.’ Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 1(2), pp. 200–223. doi: 10.1344/jnmr.v2i1.33383 Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Translated by P. Bains and J. Pefanis. Paris: Power Institute. Guattari, F. (1996) ‘Institutional practice and politics: An interview by Jacques Pain’. In G. Genosko (Ed.) The Guattari reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 121–138. Halberstam, J. (2011) The queer art of failure. Durham: Duke University Press. Haraway, D. J. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: Femaleman©_meets_ oncomouse™. Feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Heidegger, M. (2008) Being and time. New foreword by T. Carman. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial. hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, M. (2002) ‘Traditional and critical theory’. In Critical theory: Selected essays. Translated by M. O’Connell and others. New York: Continuum, pp. 188–243. Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2015) Reconceptualizing qualitative research: Methodologies without methodology. London: Sage. Levinas, E. (2015) Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lyotard, J.-F. (1987) ‘Re-writing modernity’. SubStance, 16(3), pp. 3–9. doi: 10.2307/ 3685193

Neoliberal and (Post-)Pandemic Irruptions  119 McKinsey (2021) ‘Higher education in the post-COVID world’. McKinsey Themes, 15 April. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/themes/boardsdigital-transformations-and-more-from-mckinsey-global-surveys (Accessed: 10 November 2022). Moore, J. W. (2013, May 13), ‘Anthropocene, capitalocene, and the myth of industrialization: Part I’. World-Ecological Imaginations. https://jasonwmoore.wordpress. com/2013/05/13/anthropocene-or-capitalocene Parikka, J. (2015) The anthrobscene. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Puar, J. K. (2007) Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Durham: Duke University Press. Ramey, J. (2012) The hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and spiritual ordeal. Durham: Duke University Press. Ruti, M. (2017) The ethics of opting out: Queer theory’s defiant subjects. New York: Columbia University Press. Snaza, N. (2013) ‘Bewildering education’. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), pp. 38–54. doi: 10.1080/15505170.2013.783889 Yusoff, K. (2018) A billion black anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., and Rigmor Moxnes, A. (2019) ‘Feeling medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability’. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), p. 87–111. doi: 10.7577/rerm.3671

Part III

Posthuman Pedagogical Matterings

8 Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education Thinking-with Posthumanist and Feminist Materialist Theory-Praxis Nikki Fairchild, Karen Gravett and Carol A. Taylor Encountering Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education Relational pedagogies that position relationships at the forefront of higher education are becoming increasingly necessary and prevalent. Relational pedagogies encourage a focus upon connections and care within learning and teaching as a means to thinking beyond uncaring neoliberal, competitive and individualising higher education environments. Relational pedagogies have come to the fore as educators seek to explore a different kind of educational engagement with their students, more so after the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated feelings of isolation and disconnection felt between universities, educators and students. In previous work we re-conceptualised relational pedagogies and care in higher education as pedagogies of mattering (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild, 2021; Taylor, Fairchild and Gravett, 2022). We define pedagogies of mattering as ‘a broad conception which encompasses relational pedagogies within understandings of higher education, and of the world, as a more-than-human concern’ (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild, 2021, p. 6). This has enabled us to disrupt human-centric notions of relational and caring work in higher education (Bozalek et al., 2018; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Taylor, 2018) to instantiate what new matterings are disclosed when we think in this way. In our earlier paper we employed the term ‘mattering’ to highlight the active and material nature of higher education environments. Pedagogies of mattering are not brut and immutable, they are becomings and doings that are immanent, lively and relational (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild, 2021). Our conceptualisation of pedagogies of mattering has enabled us to consider the impact of a broader range of actors, and to tune into the objects, bodies and spaces that constitute the material mattering of learning and teaching as an in-situ practice of relationality. This is an important move to counter the products of the neoliberalisation of higher education that separates and atomises students, where individual achievement and outcomes are a measure of success. Throughout this chapter we propose that pedagogies of mattering are an ethical and response-able approach to teaching and learning that recognises DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-11

124  Nikki Fairchild et al. the multiple nature of ‘truth’ and the value of positional perspectives in developing different understandings of the ways in which life becomes materialised. Haraway’s (2016) neologism response-able provides a conceptual framing for pedagogies of mattering where practice is attuned to the individual and collective relationality between bodies, it considers the ways humans impact and influence each other and their environments, and also how environments influence human bodies. Thinking relationally is more important and essential than ever as higher education has become neoliberalised and marketised, where students are seen as consumers, and where metrics become entangled in everyday institutional life. Matthews et al. (2019) explore how universities can be understood as places where discourses of neoliberal rationalism dominate, and where students are frequently constructed as customers. Similarly, Deem (1998) examines how techniques of new managerialism have radically reorientated the ways in which universities operate, reshaping institutional cultures. Preston and Aslett (2014, p. 503) describe some of the consequences of neoliberalism in universities as ‘promoting an uncritical acceptance of market values as fundamental to social progress’, and as creating an ‘unwavering confidence in managerialism and economic rationality as “best practices” for any organizational setting’. It is in this context that further developments of pedagogies of mattering become a pressing concern for both educators and students as a means to resist and push back against the forces that shape and surround higher education. This chapter expands upon our original focus on curriculum, teaching and learning, and assessment to explore six concepts and practices which undergird and shape relational pedagogies: kindness and love, belonging and power, and  creativity and criticality. These are not stand-alone concepts but are concepts-in-relation. We acknowledge we have enacted agential cuts (Barad, 2007) in choosing to focus on these concepts and enact a cutting together-apart (Barad, 2014) in grouping them for the purpose of this chapter. We are not suggesting they are separate or can be separated. The six new concepts emerge from and build on our earlier work on pedagogies of mattering where we considered learning, teaching and assessment (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild, 2021). Here we deploy them to provide new instantiations which exemplify how pedagogies of mattering can provide a more expansive conceptualisation of higher education pedagogy and practice. In doing so, the chapter develops a theorypraxis that demonstrates the way posthumanist and feminist materialist theory provides ‘alternative techniques to think and do research by focusing on the relationality and materiality in/of the world’ (Taylor and Fairchild, in press). Kindness and Love Kindness and love have been mostly absent from the mainstream literature on teaching and learning in higher education. As indicated above, the neoliberalised ‘consumerist turn’ (Woodall, Hiller and Resnick, 2014) has increasingly

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  125 geared higher education to market-driven logics in which students are positioned and shaped as consumers more interested in their degree studies as an ‘output’ for ‘buying’ an opportunity for future employment than in the pleasures and pains that come from learning as a deep engagement with issues that trouble, irk and provoke. These shifts further entrench hierarchical cultures and abuses of power, while performative metrics and accelerationist competitiveness across the higher education system add more demands on academics’ time, energy and performance, and produce greater stress, worry, shame and burnout (Breeze, 2020; Taylor and Lahad, 2018). Pedagogies of mattering have the potential to challenge the effects these shifts are having. They urge us to decelerate, to slow down, and, in focusing on what matters in pedagogic relations, to contest the practices that drive ever-increasing work intensification. Pedagogies of mattering are vital in providing an alternative values, theory and praxis basis for attending to the fact that universities place unequal gendered burdens on women (Taylor and Fairchild, 2020), people of colour (Bhopal, 2018) and precariously employed academics (Courtois, 2019), who are the staff groups most often expected and required, through invisible institutional practices such as workloading (Barrett and Barrett, 2011), to assume student-facing roles and to do the largest amount of emotional labour within universities. When universities are in pursuit of intensely competitive national and global ratings and rankings for student engagement, employability and teaching (Ashwin, 2020), it is no wonder that such little consideration is given to kindness and love. Kindness, as Clegg and Rowlands (2010) point out, is unremarked and undervalued, despite it being a part of many educators’ everyday micropractices. Rocha (2020, p. 4) asserts that ‘the magic of the always dislocated University … dwells, like everything else in existence, within and because of love’. Taking a line of posthumanist flight with these insights, we suggest that kindness and love matter in higher education, and see both as central to a conceptualisation of pedagogies of mattering: they constitute the heart and pulse of relational pedagogies and they animate what matters in pedagogic relations. Kindness and love matter too much in the practical and ontological process of being and becoming that pedagogy ushers in – the changes which come with engagement with knowledge through learning and teaching – for them to be designated as hauntological remainders or mere ghosts of a ‘better’ or ‘previous’ state of existence of higher education that has now disappeared. Those working in higher education know that kindness and love, while not appearing in any metrics, animate our values and materialise daily in pedagogic instances and relations: a corridor conversation with a student or colleague; time taken to sit and listen at the moment needed: a positive word, glance or smile in class that works as affirmation; a hug offered when relating one’s desperation. Such instances matter. Kindness and love shape pedagogy as a spatial, material, embodied and affective relation that moves beyond Cartesian dualisms and rationalism. Kindness and love counter cognitive capitalism

126  Nikki Fairchild et al. (Boutang,  2012) by creating pockets in which small acts of generosity and unremarked instances of friendly consideration are felt and take hold – in which their ‘magic’, to use Rocha’s (2020) word, materialises. A posthumanist and feminist materialist orientation urges more nuanced attention to how and where kindness and love appear, come to matter, materialise and take hold as timely instances that gather a range of actors (or agencies, to use Barad’s (2007) term) in human-non-human assemblages of objects, bodies and spaces. For instance, a tissue ready to wipe away a tear, a cup of coffee placed in the hand without the asking, a chair pulled closer to better sync and orientate bodies, alt-text added to images in course materials, space for shared laughter, a student question (‘can I talk to you for a moment?’) and educator’s response (‘of course, I have time’), gifts such as snacks and biscuits with a ‘free, please take’ label in an anonymous institutional kitchen. Such instances matter in bringing to the fore how love and kindness are enacted in daily pedagogic relations. But more than that, the appearance, effects and affects of love and kindness, however fleeting, work as ethico-onto-epistemological propositions of/for response-ability to usher in different ways of being, thinking and doing relational pedagogies – they are propositions (and encouragements) for experimenting with how to bring in more love and kindness into pedagogic relations through materially embodied practices which enfold affective relations with/in the non-human physical, material and spatial in higher education. Karen Barad’s posthuman, materialist concept of spacetimemattering is useful here. Spacetimemattering, Barad (2007, p. 234) explains, is a dynamic, iterative becoming: Space, time, and matter are intra-actively produced in the ongoing differential articulation of the world. Time is not a succession of evenly spaced intervals available as a referent for all bodies and space is not a collection of pre-existing points set out as a container for matter to inhabit. A focus on spacetimematterings indicates that kindness and love are not abstract metaphysical qualities. They occur in material places and spaces of university classrooms, corridors, atriums, cafes. The daily matterings of kindness and love are both enfolded within the inimical, dislocated spaces, performative exigencies and exclusionary conditions of neoliberal higher education, and work to disturb and undermine those inimical conditions and spaces as possibilities, potentialities, capacities and relationalities that materialise an otherwhere and otherwise. In the enfolded heterotopias produced by kindness and love lines of flight, new differentiations and nomadic becomings emerge which generatively re-shape pedagogic relations, producing them as different, as other, as an undoing of performative business-as-usual. Barad (2007) says that every intra-action matters. In this case, kindness and love in pedagogies of mattering may offer a practical and hopeful counterbalance that allows new and unpredictable flourishings which rupture neoliberal relations.

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  127 Matterings of kindness and love are also temporal. They materialise in the here-and-now as doings, affects and bodily relations that offer a potential to think time differently. Thinking-with Taylor and Fairchild’s (2021) feminist materialist theory-praxis invocation to ‘walk the now to reimagine the future’, draws attention to how temporal instances of kindness and love that underpin relational pedagogies can help us consider how to dwell in, deepen, and expand the ‘now’ through slow relationalities. Bozalek (2017, p. 41) proposes ‘slow practices as those which encourage hesitation, thoughtfulness and new ways of relating’. Slow is a praxis oriented to relationality and reciprocity; it inheres in a pedagogy that cultivates considerate, non-competitive and carefull approaches. Slow relationalities support pedagogic practices which nurture ways of working together against damaging conditions. Thus, the timespacematterings of kindness and love can help reimagine and bring into being better futures outside the destructions of anthropocentrism and knowledge extractivism prevalent in contemporary education and modern life more generally (Taylor and Fairchild, in press). The word ‘kindness’ can be etymologically traced to kin, kindred and kind (‘type’). Haraway’s (2016) notion of kin shifts away from an anthropocentric centring in humankind into a multispecies direction, where kin is a composting of multiple species and types, in which ‘our differing/different positionalities’, whether human or nonhuman, ‘are a making of kin which opens to the “patterning of possible worlds”’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 31). Practising pedagogies of mattering as kin-shipping aligns with contemporary spatial shifts towards university campuses being ‘re-wilded’, of the need for degree curricula to have compulsory climate change components, and of recognition of shared earthwide vulnerabilities that the viral contaminations of Covid-19 have brought. Pedagogies of mattering, in foregrounding the possibilities of thinking kindness as making kin beyond the ecocidal necropolitics of the anthropocentric Euro-American white, male hu/Man and ‘his’ exclusionary practices, challenge taken-for-granted humanist boundaries between self/nature/ microbes/built environment. Love can do the same. Pedagogies of mattering are undergirded by the relationalities that emerge from and inhere in kindness and love. Exploring how kindness and love materialise in higher education contributes to a deeper understanding of how bodies are made and remade in relational matterings between students, colleagues, objects, bodies and spaces, and how these emerge, are co-constitutive and come to matter within the material, spatial and temporal specificities that condition the ‘now’ in higher education. Two recent examples of pedagogies of mattering and the relationalities of kindness and love include a discussion of ethical moments in the context of a classroom space (Taylor, 2017) and a project with a colleague during the Covid-19 lockdown in which we considered how ‘entangled aimance’, that is love that enacts ‘relations of obligation … indebtedness … a diffraction/dispersion of identity’ (Taylor and Gannon, 2021, p. 120), can work as a practical tool to support pedagogic enactments of love as posthumanist feminist materialist praxis in contemporary higher education.

128  Nikki Fairchild et al. Belonging and Power Thinking with kindness and love highlights its integral relationship to belonging and power. Working with the notion of belonging and its connection to ideas of mattering, we suggest that educators seek to understand the nuances of what it is to belong, and to not belong, in higher education: how and in what spaces we belong to, and how belonging flickers and fluctuates over time. Entangled with these ideas are notions of power, as durable and wholly integrated in learning and teaching relationships, communities and environments. We ask: what can thinking with these concepts offer us in an expanded exploration of pedagogies of mattering? Belonging can be defined as to ‘have an affinity for, a specified place or situation’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2022). Understanding this ‘affinity’ has become an important focus within higher education research and practice in recent times (Ahn and Davis, 2020; Gravett and Ajjawi, 2022; Guyotte, Flint and Latopolski, 2021). As student populations have expanded and become more diverse, and as the pressure to ensure retention and progression becomes acute, questions surrounding how institutions can foster a sense of belonging have risen to the fore. For example, Bhopal (2018) examines how students may often feel like outsiders within the white middle-class environments that dominate higher education. Challenges of inclusivity and connection have gained even greater momentum in our not-yet-post-Covid times. The ‘pivot’ to remote learning following Covid-19 lockdowns reorientated the ways in which teaching and learning happened across institutions. Students were forced to learn remotely, and students and educators to blur the boundaries of work and home. This destabilisation of normative conceptions of where and what the university is, and how learning happens, has generated new and transformative questions for educators. With digital learning now a part of our everyday experiences, where are the specified places we might associate with belonging, and how might we develop an affinity to them? Or, as Moten and Harney (2013) explore in their work examining the possibilities of the underground of the university – the ‘undercommons’ – what power might exist in spaces of connection and disconnection, and what role might academics have in navigating the tensions between recognising the neoliberalisation of higher education and becoming part of the system? How and where can students and educators experience a sense of belonging? And why might belonging matter? These provocations can be viewed as intricately entangled with notions of mattering. We know that, for students, experiencing a sense of belonging often matters greatly to their sense of well-being and academic achievement (Ahn and Davis, 2020). We also know that students value those connections with educators where they are made to feel that they are noticed, valued, and that they matter (Gravett and Winstone, 2022). Relational pedagogies that promote opportunities to foster these connections are important in enabling a sense of mattering and belonging. Crucially, relational connections can also

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  129 encourage educators to notice when students may experience a sense of non-belonging and to consider the complexities of belonging, mattering, and engagement. For example, Mbembe (2016) argues powerfully that attending to the intersections of space and belonging can enable us to better understand the need for decolonisation practices, and how too often institutional spaces perpetuate exclusions and a sense of who does not matter. Pedagogies of mattering can therefore help us to surface and problematise the inequalities that underpin concepts of belonging and engagement, as well as to explore enriched ways of enacting relational pedagogies. The notion of mattering is then both who matters – who should be considered and valued – and matter as a material substance (materialities) and materialising force. Our conceptualisation of pedagogies of mattering enables us to tune into the objects, bodies and spaces that constitute the material mattering of learning and teaching as an in-situ practice of relationality. Matter includes all the spaces, objects and ‘things’ of education: laptops, classrooms, pens, desks, campuses, textbooks, teaching resources, assessment briefs, worksheets, buildings, time, quiet, financial support. This has important implications for our thinking about the significant area of belonging. Belonging then is deeply interrelated to notions of power, inclusion and exclusion. Recent research has suggested ways in which we might understand belonging as a processual, situated and sociomaterial experience (Gravett and Ajjawi, 2022). Rather than being a fixed, finite experience that can be achieved − for example, belonging ‘to a university’ − belonging may be more helpfully understood as a process that flickers, fluctuates and flows in certain times, relationships, cultures and spaces. We also know that students may be excluded from experiencing a sense of belonging in certain situations. For example, Winstone et al. (2020) detail how extra-curricular activities can become exclusionary sites of power, as particular individuals, for example, more introverted students or students with caring responsibilities, may be inhibited or unable to engage in activities and communities. There are other potential exclusionary sites of power that became more apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, digital poverty and access to online sessions, and the materiality of spaces and objects and how these do not always facilitate inclusion (Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild, 2021). In addition, the lack of inclusive spaces for non-white academics and students has been well documented (Bhopal, 2018). Belonging and inclusion may be understood as an ‘accoutrement of privilege’ (Slee, 2019, p. 910) with problematic exclusions for those situated outside specified places or situations. Certainly, with regards to assessment in higher education, assessment practices can be currently viewed as ‘a vehicle for individualisation, comparison and exclusion’ (Nieminen, 2022, p. 16) that fail to meet the needs of diverse students, and, rather, demonstrate ‘ableism in practice’ (Nieminen, 2022, p. 2). As Probyn (1996) explores in her work Outside Belongings – a desire to belong is complex, unstable, perhaps impossible; for Probyn, thinking about how we might exist outside belonging is as important as thinking about belonging.

130  Nikki Fairchild et al. Certainly, in relation to digital education, belonging is also about access. Internet connections, private digital spaces, students’ socio-economic backgrounds, machines, geography, and social networks all give access to digital spaces. We saw during lockdown periods that students sharing spaces with many other students and/or family members might struggle to engage with their university work, or they may be forced to work late through the night when there might be some peace and quiet. Access to the internet at home, where the loss of library and café spaces typically commandeered for study then also becomes an important issue. These factors serve as multiple forms of exclusion and disadvantage, reminding us of the need to appreciate the continuing significance of social class in relation to educational performance and participation (Ball, 2021), and that digital education is not immune from such issues. Access challenges, potential loss of income, renegotiation of what it means to be a university student, and shifts in student identities, all intersect with students’ belonging and are intertwined with issues of power and equity. For educators too, material access to quiet spaces to work free from familial responsibilities, and the erosion of the boundaries between work and home, are all fundamental to questions of how we experience equity, power and belonging within the digital university. As Mbembe (2016, p. 30) argues, we need to think about the democratisation of access, and to ‘decolonize the systems of access and management insofar as they have turned higher education into a marketable product’. We suggest, then, that attending to matter, in both definitions of the word, is helpful to our understanding of learning and teaching in higher education and disruptive to our ways of thinking too. Thinking about the key concepts of belonging and power as pedagogies of mattering can be helpful in encouraging us to notice more deeply the situated experiences of students. Relations and connections are both human-to-human relationships, the interconnection between self and others, and the relations we have to and within a much broader, material, world. Creativity and Criticality Building on kindness, love, belonging and power, we consider how morethan-human dimensions of pedagogies of mattering can offer different and more expansive conceptualisations of both creativity and criticality. This allows for a redefining of what is meant by the rational educated human subject and subjectivity (Braidotti, 2022; Fairchild et al., 2022) prompting a move towards a more relational, affective and expanded form of the subject and subjectivity. Here assemblages and constellations of human and non-human bodies and materialities provide new purchase on what creativity and critical thinking become when seen as a more-than-human concern. Creative approaches to pedagogy can facilitate deeper student engagement, particularly with recent debates about the suitability and function of lectures (Matthews, 2022). There are already examples of creative practices in higher education,

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  131 for example, Niccolini, Zarabadi and Ringrose (2018) where a posthuman pedagogy activated affect theory and feminist craftivism to encourage a stringing of relational objects brought into the classroom during a gender studies lecture. The outcome of this work explored how objects and humans were in relation with each other to craft more affirmative and livable worlds in higher education classrooms. In tandem with creativity, scholarship has identified that employing posthumanist and feminist materialist theory demands a new way to think about criticality and critical thinking that moves beyond humanist Enlightenment logics of the erudite man (MacLure, 2015; Danvers, 2016). Critical thinking can be connected to Braidotti’s (2019) theorisation of affirmative ethics which develops non-anthropocentric understandings of the relationality present in more-than-human encounters. Developing creative pedagogies can be enhanced by thinking with relationality. This can allow for educators and students to make connections between theory, practice and real-world experiences to deepen understanding of lecture content. Connecting to the real-world issues provides students with opportunities to think differently and to develop an understanding that include objects, matter, spaces and places as part of the learning process. An example of this is designing teaching and learning activities in the physical classroom that includes discussions of relationality and how this can support more nuanced understandings of the ways students understand the activities. The next steps in course and module design is to take the learning from these activities outside of the classroom; this could include walking, thinking and talking around the local area, a visit to a particular location or a field trip. Scholars of environmental education, indigenous pedagogies and methodologies have already made these creative pedagogical moves (see for example Acharibasam and McVittie, 2022; Pacini-Ketchabaw and Nxumalo, 2015). These kinds of approaches help students to map connections between the classroom theory and the place they visit, so they develop broader, more material understandings of particular topics, problems and issues. While earlier we mentioned the focus on ‘re-wilding’ and climate change components as parts of degree programmes, there is also a drive to include links to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations, n.d.) in teaching and research. Creative pedagogies and thinking relationally are ways to develop an expanded form of more-than-human subjectivity that displaces the human as the sole focus point. This allows for a move beyond the human subject imbued with ‘human exceptionalism’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 86) to the subject-in-relations characterised by ‘interconnection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 49). Thinking with more sustainable and civic practices ensures ‘bodies are conceived as not passive, objective perceivers, they are the practices of senses and feelings that inform us, teaching us about current but also past place/world’ (Page, 2018, p. 5). Pedagogies of mattering help articulate which situated stories matter (Haraway, 2016) and how this mattering produces student and academic bodies in affective relations with objects, matter, space, place and bodies.

132  Nikki Fairchild et al. These expanded forms of more-than-human subjectivity are also produced when creative practices in pedagogy and research are developed where pedagogy, spaces and places are experienced in person, and also via online tools, such as discussion boards and virtual learning environments. For example, Kerry Chappell facilitated a number of projects that questioned, ‘How do different materialities and spatialities matter within innovative higher education practice, and how do they shape and create responses, subjectivities, and learning for all involved?’ (Chappell, 2022, p. 500). Providing a move beyond some of the traditional constructs of blended learning she employed experimental creative artistic practices which were enacted in both digital and physical spaces. These physical/online spaces provided ‘online and workshop spaces where materially-driven dialogue could happen’ (Chappell, Natanel and Wren, 2021, p. 5). Here, entangled matterings allowed for students to be part of module design processes, uploading material artefacts that were made as part of the teaching, learning, and assessment processes. Students were encouraged to be response-able when reviewing the online artefacts as they included other students’ personal experiences. These types of creative practices require a commitment to relational and affirmative ethics that encourage the ‘the pursuit of affirmative values and relations’ (Braidotti, 2019, p. 136), and a response-able pedagogy which is an ethico-political practice that can extend the ‘transformative potential’ of teaching and learning (Bozalek and Zembylas, 2017, p. 64). Criticality as a concept has been associated with erudition, scholarship and thinking – all properties of the learned human. Scholars such as Maggie MacLure (2015) have questioned whether the traditional notion of criticality can be ‘applied’ to posthumanist and feminist materialist theory that aims to decentre human subjects/subjectivity, and where agency and consciousness are not solely the primacy of humans. She asserts that, in some cases, traditional notions of critique can close down thinking, particularly when representational logic, which reinforces dominant power circulations, is ‘applied’ to work using ‘post’ theories. To counter this shutting down of possibilities she reframes criticality as a ‘clinical practice’ (MacLure, 2015, p. 107) that attends to flows of affect and discourse to give new insights into the social and material world. In a similar vein Emily Danvers highlights the affective dimensions of critical thinking where students ‘did not simply do critical thinking; they felt it’ (Danvers, 2016, p. 285). Therefore, critical thinking becomes material, discursive and affective where bodies in wider assemblages experience the outcomes of thinking critically in very different ways. Criticality becomes more of a theory-praxis where ‘embodied learners entangled with the world and [are] produced through its affects’ (Danvers, 2016, p. 295). The link between critique and creativity has also been proposed by Gilles Deleuze who highlights that critique and creation are concepts that are always becoming (Deleuze, 1994). Bruno Latour (2004) questions whether new forms of critical understandings are needed to move beyond doxa to deeper understandings of criticality. The focus on new forms of critique is also developed by Rosi Braidotti (2006) where she provides post-anthropocentric

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  133 nomadic ethics as a conceptually creative alternative to rational humanism, conservatism, liberal individualism and techno-capitalism. Pedagogies of mattering provide an alternative response to human-centred perceptions of criticality. By reimagining critical thinking as a situated and response-able practice (Haraway, 2016), students and educators take into account the local conditions in which they find themselves, and pay attention to the ways ‘all knowledge is located and relies on partial perspectives allows for the inclusion of lived material realities and feelings that shape our educational experiences’ (Taylor et al., 2021, n. p.). They understand the situated nature of knowledge and consider the local, geographical and historical contexts of lectures, modules, teaching, and learning and how this can include or exclude bodies. Pedagogies of mattering response-able theory-praxis see educators and students open up new articulations of criticality. This provides possibilities for different ways of knowing and understanding that pay attention to response-ability and the entangled nature of human, non-human and morethan-human bodies. Conclusion This chapter extends our original theorisation of pedagogies of mattering to include six further aspects: kindness and love; belonging and power; and creativity and criticality. Each section articulates the theories we have used to develop these six concepts, and offers some practical examples of how these can be put to work. The chapter demonstrates the deeper potential and applicability of pedagogies of mattering for developing more affirmative relations in higher education which contest and move outside and beyond the strictures and conditionings of neoliberal higher education. We frame the six additional concepts as feminist thinking-doing practices which offer the potential to think otherwise about relational pedagogies in higher education. We argue that it is imperative to consider the importance of relationships and relationality between educators and students, along with non-human and more-thanhuman bodies. By extending our original theorisations of pedagogies of mattering, the examples we have provided create spaces for alternative ways to think differently about higher education pedagogy that illuminates how relational, affirmative and caring relationships can be fruitful for both educators and students and wider society. References Acharibasam, J. B. and McVittie, J. (2022) ‘Connecting children to nature through the integration of indigenous ecological knowledge into early childhood environmental education’. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, pp. 1–13 (published online ahead of print 11 August) doi: 10.1017/aee.2022.37 Ahn, M. Y. and Davis, H. H. (2020) ‘Four domains of students’ sense of belonging to university’. Studies in Higher Education, 45(3), pp. 622–634. doi: 10.1080/03075079. 2018.1564902

134  Nikki Fairchild et al. Ashwin, P. (2020) Transforming University Education: A manifesto. London: Bloomsbury. Ball, S. (2021) The Education Debate. London: Policy Press. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2014) ‘Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart’. Parallax, 20(3), pp. 168–187. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623 Barrett, L. and Barrett, P. (2011) ‘Women and academic workloads: Career slow lane or Cul-de-sac?’. Higher Education, 61(1), pp. 141–155. doi: 10.1007/s10734-0109329-3 Bhopal, K. (2018) White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Bristol: Policy Press. Boutang, Y-M (2012) Cognitive Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Bozalek, V. (2017) ‘Slow Scholarship in Writing Retreats: A diffractive methodology for response-able pedagogies’. South African Journal of Higher Education, 31(2), pp. 40–57. doi: 10.20853/31-2-1344 Bozalek, V., Bayat, A., Gachago, D., Motala, S. and Mitchell, V. (2018) ‘A pedagogy of response-ability’. In Bozalek, V., Braidotti, R., Shefer, T. and Zembylas, M. (Eds.) Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 97–112. Bozalek, V. and Zembylas, M. (2017) ‘Towards a response-able pedagogy across higher education institutions in post-apartheid South Africa: An ethico-political analysis’. Education as Change, 21(2), pp. 62–85. doi: 10.17159/1947-9417/2017/ 2017 Braidotti, R. (2006) Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2019). Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2022) Posthuman Feminism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Breeze, M. (2020) ‘Editorial’. Gender and Education, 32(7), pp. 839–842. doi: 10. 1080/09540253.2020.1805143 Chappell, K. (2022) ‘Researching posthumanizing creativity: Expanding, shifting, and disrupting’. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), pp. 496–506. doi: 10.1177%2F107780042 11065802 Chappell, K., Natanel, K. and Wren, H. (2021) Letting the Ghosts In: re-designing HE teaching and learning through posthumanism. Teaching in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1952563 Clegg, S. and Rowland, S. (2010) ‘Kindness in pedagogical practice and academic life’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(6), pp. 719–735. doi: 10.1080/ 01425692.2010.515102 Courtois, A. (2019) ‘Falling through the cracks? Gender inequality, precarious work and higher education research’, Centre for Higher Education Studies (CHES), 6th November, UCL IOE London. Danvers, E. C. (2016) ‘Criticality’s affective entanglements: Rethinking emotion and critical thinking in higher education’. Gender and Education, 28(2), pp. 282–297. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2015.1115469 Deem, R. (1998) ‘“New managerialism” and higher education: The management of performances and cultures in universities in the United Kingdom’. International Studies in Sociology of Education, 8(1), pp. 47–70. doi: 10.1080/0962021980020014 Deleuze, G. (1994) Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pedagogies of Mattering in Higher Education  135 Fairchild, N., Taylor, C. A., Benozzo, A., Carey, N., Koro, M. and Elmenhorst, C. (2022) Knowledge Production in Material Spaces: Disturbing Conferences and Composing Events. Abingdon: Routledge. Gravett, K. and Ajjawi, R. (2022) ‘Belonging as situated practice’. Studies in Higher Education, 47(7), pp. 1386–1396. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2021.1894118 Gravett, K., Taylor, C. A. and Fairchild, N. (2021) ‘Pedagogies of mattering: Reconceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education’. Teaching in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1989580 Gravett, K. and Winstone, N. E. (2022) ‘Making Connections: Authenticity and alienation within students’ relationships in higher education’. Higher Education Research & Development, 41(2), pp. 360–374. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2020.1842335 Guyotte, K. W., Flint, M. A. and Latopolski, K. S. (2021) ‘Cartographies of belonging: Mapping nomadic narratives of first-year students’. Critical Studies in Education, 62(5), pp. 543–558. doi: 10.1080/17508487.2019.1657160 Haraway, D. J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Latour, B. (2004) ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’. Critical Inquiry. 30(Winter 2004), pp. 225 – 248. doi: 10. 1086/421123 MacLure, M. (2015) ‘The “new materialisms”: A thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry?’. In G. Cannella, M. Perez and P. Pasque (Eds.) Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. Left Coast Press, pp. 93–112. Matthews, A. (2022) ‘Death of the lecture(r)?’. Postdigital Science and Education, 4(1), pp. 253–258. doi: 10.1007/s42438-021-00239-3 Matthews, K., Dwyer, A., Russell, S. and Enright, E. (2019) ‘It is a Complicated thing: Leaders’ conceptions of students as partners in the neoliberal university’. Studies in Higher Education, 44(12), pp. 2196–2207. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2018.1482268 Mbembe, A. J. (2016) ‘Decolonizing the university: New directions’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), pp. 29–45. doi: 10.1177/1474022215618513 Moten, F. and Harney, S. (2013) The Undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study. Minor Compositions. Niccolini, A. D., Zarabadi, S. and Ringrose, J. (2018) ‘Spinning arns:y affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy’. Parallax, 24(3), pp. 324–343. doi: 10.1080/ 13534645.2018.1496582 Nieminen, J. H. (2022) ‘Assessment for inclusion: Rethinking inclusive assessment in higher education’. Teaching in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021. 2021395 Oxford English Dictionary: The Definitive Record of the English Language (2022). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. and Nxumalo, F. (2015) ‘Raccoons and troubled educators: Nature/culture divides in a childcare centre’, Environmental Humanities, 7(1), pp. 151–168. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3616380 Page, T. (2018) ‘Teaching and learning with matter’. Arts, 7, pp. 1–12. https://doi. org/10.3390/arts7040082 Preston, S. and Aslett, J. (2014) ‘Resisting neoliberalism from within The academy: Subversion through an activist pedagogy’. Social Work Education, 33(4), pp. 502– 518. doi: 10.1080/02615479.2013.848270 Probyn, E. (1996) Outside belongings. London: Routledge.

136  Nikki Fairchild et al. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rocha, S. D. (2020) ‘Love and the University’. In V. de Rijke, A. Peterson and P. Gibbs (Eds.) Higher Education and Love: Institutional, Pedagogical and Personal Trajectories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–16. Slee, R. (2019) ‘Belonging in an age of exclusion’. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(9), pp. 909–922. doi: 10.1080/13603116.2019.1602366 Taylor, C. A. (2017) ‘Ethically important moments in the higher education space of appearance: Renewing educative praxis with Arendt’. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(3), pp. 231–241. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1214807 Taylor, C. A. (2018) ‘Each intra-action matters: Towards a posthuman ethics for enlarging response-ability in Higher Education pedagogic practice-ings’. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, T. Shefer, and M. Zembylas (Eds.) Socially Just Pedagogies: Posthumanist, Feminist and Materialist Perspectives in Higher Education. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 81–96. Taylor, C. A. and Fairchild, N. (2020) ‘Towards a posthumanist Institutional ethnography: viscous matterings and gendered bodies’. Ethnography and Education, 15(4), 509–527. doi: 10.1080/17457823.2020.1735469 Taylor, C. A. and Fairchild, N. (2021) ‘Walking the now to reimagine the future: ‘Arts of noticing’, the somatechnics of bodily engagement and trans(disciplinary)mattering’. British Sociological Association 70th Anniversary Annual Conference, 13th 15th April, https://www.britsoc.co.uk/media/25511/ac2021_conf_prog_d1_ 130421.pdf date accessed 8.6.2023. Taylor, C. A. and Fairchild, N. (in press) ‘Feminist post-humanisms and new materialisms in education research’. In Winn M. T. and Winn, L. T. (Eds.) Bloomsbury Ency­ clopedia of Social Justice: Education: Gender and Sexuality Volume (Dr M-P Moreau – volume editor). Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N. and Gravett, K. (2022) ‘Posthuman pedagogies in higher education’. SRHE LTA network event. 9 February. SRHE. https://srhe.ac.uk/ civicrm/event/info/?civiwp=CiviCRM&q=civicrm%2Fevent%2Finfo&reset= 1&id=582 date accessed 8.6.2023. Taylor, C. A., Fairchild, N., Zarabadi, S., and Moxnes, A. (2021) The promise of Donna Haraway’s philosophy: Knotting together better educational futures. https:// blog.eera-ecer.de/the-promise-of-donna-haraways-philosophy-knotting-together-bettereducational-futures Taylor. C. A. and Gannon, S. (2021) ‘Hailing love back Into view: Working towards a feminist materialist theory-practice of entangled aimance in pandemic times’. In V. de Rijke, A. Peterson and P. Gibbs (Eds.) Higher education and love: Institutional, pedagogical and personal trajectories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 111–135. Taylor, Y. and Lahad, K. (2018) Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. United Nations (n.d.) Do you know all 17 SDG’s? Available at: https://sdgs.un.org/ goals (Accessed 6th September 2022). Winstone, N., Balloo, K., Gravett, K., Jacobs, D. and Keen, H. (2020) ‘Who stands to benefit? Wellbeing, belonging and challenges to equity in engagement in extracurricular activities at university’. Active Learning in Higher Education, 23(2), pp. 81–96. doi: 10.1177%2F1469787420908209 Woodall, T., Hiller A. and Resnick, S. (2014) ‘Making sense of higher education: Students as consumers and the value of the university experience’. Studies in Higher Education. 39(1), pp. 48–67. doi: 10.1080/03075079.2011.648373

9 Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context Plaiting to Re-think Progress Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett

Introduction: Hanna, Tabitha and the Neoliberal School Context This chapter will explore how an attempt at a ‘response-able’ feminism was enacted with a group of young people at a national ‘feminism in schools’ conference through applying arts and participatory methods. To conceptualise this, we work with Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of ‘response-ability’ which foregrounds the researchers’ entanglement in the research, the agency of non-human matter, as well as ethical concerns around opening up to and engaging with the response of the Other (Renold et al., 2021). Our work is located in emergent Phematerialist work which seeks to embed feminist-posthuman-new materialism perspectives in education through creative pedagogies and artful knowledge creation; our chapter is also in dialogue with other feminist-educational researchers in this field (Taylor and Ivinson, 2013; Zarabadi et al., 2019; Ringrose et al., 2020; Renold et al., 2021). Various posthuman and new materialist feminist theories destabilise the rational agentic human male subject, and understand reality to be composed of networked human and non-human capacities (Ringrose et al., 2020). This exploration draws attention towards how creative and arts-based practices can connect human and non-human matter to form collectively generated knowledge. We position the chapter as an illustration of Phematerialist work in education, particularly since the methodology used to work with the young people was participatory-based and knowledge was a collaborative process, harnessing the material, discursive and cultural dimensions of learning about gender inequalities in schools. Therefore, we attempt to merge aspects of theory and practice in the example of experimental pedagogy explored in this chapter. We begin by situating the authors in relation to this research encounter. We do this to highlight the imbrication of the authors in the research to account for the posthuman concern with ‘the embodied and embedded nature of knowledge-production activities’ (Strom et al., 2019, p. 7) that aims to avoid reproducing the ‘god trick’ (Haraway cited in Strom et al., 2019, p.7) in which researchers perform an objectivity and neutrality in relation to their research. Both authors are concerned with the ways that feminism is dealt with DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-12

138  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett in schools, partly because as educators and researchers we are aware of the plethora of inequities facing girls and gender non-conforming young people in schools. These include statistics at the time of writing including 22 per cent of girls in the North of England blaming fear of sexual harassment for holding back in school, and 26 per cent saying that gender stereotyping affects their schooling, with the rate being much higher for LGBTQ+ girls at 37 per cent (Girlguiding Survey, 2022). In these oppressive school cultures that exclude formalised feminist curricula through which to address these issues, both authors want to further understand the ways that teachers and school leaders navigate informal in-school feminisms with young people. At the time the conference took place, both authors were teachers working in schools and in higher education institutions and, through these roles, they both co-organised the feminism-in-schools conference. At the same time, the authors undertook research with some of the self-identified ‘feminism’ collectives from across Southern England who took part in the feminism in school conference. The feminist collectives that were researched helped to facilitate parts of the conference, and include a co-educational academy in London, a large inner-city comprehensive and a rurally situated all-boys boarding school. The chapter explores the complex dynamics through which feminism is taken up and negotiated in and around school spaces, and findings from this research suggests teachers are increasingly encouraged to support feminism in their schools in response to the wider educational backdrop of neoliberalism (Retallack et al., 2016; Retallack, 2023). That is to say, teaching practitioners are incited to perform a marketised neoliberal feminism in response to tickbox targets (Ball, 2003), which means students ‘convert gender inequality from a structural problem into an individual affair’ (Rottenberg, 2018, p.3). The conference included over 100 young people from schools across London and beyond, including private, comprehensive and academy schools, who joined together with scholars, teachers, activists and NGO groups. The focus of the event was to discuss how we might ‘press for progress’, the International Women’s Day slogan that year (2018), which was also adopted by the school to frame the conference. We recognise that the term ‘progress’ is problematic since there are critiques by scholars problematising the ontology and politics of the notion of progress and how it has been used by the neoliberal educational system (Goodley and Perryman, 2022). However, for this feminist event to go ahead, the conference had to be framed within these terms. In the afternoon session of the day, and in conscious defiance of the school’s neoliberal framing of the event, the authors focused on applying artsbased participatory methods that would enable the students and adults taking part in the conference to collectively think through new and ‘response-able’ feminisms in schools. They did this through the development of a ‘plaiting for progress’ activity; a collective weaving together of feminist-activist ideas into one interconnected plait, the significance of which is discussed below. When we discuss neoliberalism in school contexts, we connect this to the production of postfeminist femininities in education. As Gill discusses (2007),

Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context  139 neoliberalism’s construction of individuals as ‘self-regulatory’ means that they are expected to bear full responsibility for their lives and choices, ‘no matter how severe the constraints upon their action’ (p. 26). It is this that promotes the idea that it is not structures of oppression but individuals who need to change (Negra, 2014), and forms what Gill (2007) terms a ‘postfeminist sensibility’ (5). Postfeminism is deemed by scholars to combine a simultaneous recognition and rejection of second-wave feminism in that the gains of feminism through the decades of the ‘70s and ‘80s are recognised but concurrently ‘undermined’ (McRobbie, 2004, p. 255) through a belief that the politics of feminism are no longer necessary. Within a neoliberal climate, women and girls are said to be under pressure to perform a ‘postfeminist masquerade’ in which they continue to operate under patriarchal control, but do so under a discourse of compulsory ‘choice’ (McRobbie, 2001 in Ringrose and Renold, 2012, p. 461). This approach has important consequences for forms of feminism that attempt to resist societal structures of oppression, as collectivity becomes replaced by what McRobbie calls an ‘aggressive individualism’ (p. 5). Rottenberg (2017) argues that these effects have formed a feminism of its own in which a convergence of feminism and neoliberalism produces ‘an individuated feminist subject’ (p. 331) who is understood to be feminist in the sense that she remains aware of gendered inequalities, but is simultaneously neoliberal, as she understands these as individuated issues that she must deal with alone. The chapter emerged from the first author’s (Hanna’s) own experiences as a schoolteacher and feminism club facilitator pointed towards this neo-liberalisation of feminism in schools. For instance, at the time of conference, the feminist work that the first author had been doing freely for two years at the school where she worked had recently become line-managed by the deputy head teacher, a move that meant her feminist work simultaneously became authorised by the school and fell under its control. An example of this manifested during the planning stages of the conference when the first author was told by this line manager that the school wanted this conference to work as a ‘marketing opportunity’. Therefore, the conference’s focus became managed so as not to involve discussion of resistance or struggle, since the school would rather approve a more celebratory model which highlighted the achievements of women. In these neoliberal cultures, it also suits schools to individuate issues of gender and sexuality onto particular individuals, rather than encourage students to see the structural issues at the root of these inequalities (Ringrose, 2007). For instance, rather than addressing the patriarchal and capitalist roots of girls’ shame and hatred around their bodies, the first author has observed schools only encouraging girls to be ‘body confident’, therefore, passing the responsibility to negotiate these inequalities to individual teenagers (Retallack, 2023). It is also evident that, within neoliberal educational contexts in which examinations reign supreme and achievement is primarily measured through testing, if feminism is to be discussed in classrooms, it is down to teachers willing to undertake unpaid labour (Kim and Ringrose, 2018).

140  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett We are interested in questioning how this neoliberal feminism manifests in school environments which are increasingly encouraged to understand themselves in relation to the market and concerns with performativity; in other words, to be seen to be feminist rather than engaging meaningfully with the deeper work of changing their approaches, policies and systems, as well as how this can be disrupted (Shamir, 2008 cited in Ball, 2016). At this time of the conference, the second author’s (Tabitha) research was developing her thesis in relation to her artistic work with young people around queering their secondary school art classrooms. Through this, the second author (Tabitha) was interested in participatory forms of feminist art that could queer heteronormative and neoliberal norms. The authors worked together on developing the conference’s afternoon session as a way to response-ably resist the individualised and marketised modes of feminist doing in schools, and form something collective, material and creative with and for the young people involved. Plaiting Posthuman, New Materialist and Creative-Participatory Theories Together To move away from the poststructuralist analyses of power embedded only within the human subject in discourse and language, this chapter is informed by Karen Barad’s (2007) notion of agential realism to suggest there is no separation between objects, human bodies, discourses, and language. Aligning with new materialist concepts, it is an effort to trouble and overcome patriarchal and Cartesian dualist understandings such as human/nonhuman, mind/ body, logic/affect, and to draw attention to the multiplicities and blurred boundaries of mutual constitution. Barad’s (2007) agential realism is the understanding that all matter is constituted through immanent entanglements of intra-actions which are different from ‘interaction’, as this suggests two pre-existing objects colliding together, whereas ‘intra-action’ accounts for no pre-existing objects or bodies. Instead, the objects/bodies are constituted through the intra-action and do not exist without the other meaning that all matter is entangled within a large body of objects, smells, movements, language, affects, virtual and discourses, which Deleuze and Guattari (1988) call ‘assemblages’. Similarly, for Barad (2007), it is within these entanglements of matter, or assemblages, where agency is located, as no matter has priority over the other as all are affecting and constituting one another; ‘agency is not an attribute whatsoever – it is “doing”/ “being” in its intra-activity’ (Barad, 2003, pp. 826–827). Therein, this ‘doing’ is an important characteristic of posthumanism and paramount to our work as we are interested in the co-production of knowledge which aims to re-orientate knowledge based solely on the researched vs researcher divide, to knowledge being an active agent. Our chapter illustrates how knowledge as ‘a doing’ is inseparable from human and non-human entities as the researcher and research respondents are entangled in the making. Moreover, as we are making a collective artwork, granting agency to all matter is pertinent. This is because

Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context  141 material agency and the intra-actions of non-human and human matter engender a collective thinking through making. We also draw on Barad’s (2010) concept of ‘responsibility’ in which she discusses the importance of being a response-able researcher. Within this conceptual frame, it is ultimately the researcher who makes the ‘agential cut’, meaning what becomes known as ‘data’ is researcher-led. This ‘cut’ can be understood to be problematic as how that data becomes known or ‘cut’ is always embedded within ethical issues of the researchers’ power and status. Therein, Barad (2010) asks us as researchers and activists to respond ethically to the Other, whether the Other be human or non-human, and questions how we do this. Therein, Barad (2007) refers to responsibility as an ethics in which we take account of the ‘entangled materializations of which we are part’ (7). We are interested in how this concept can help us explore how we as educators and activists might ‘respond well’ to neoliberal school cultures through forming entangled material and creative feminist activisms. Entangled Meanings and Materialities Around the Plait When working out the specific shape of the collective material craft we wanted the young people to make, the idea of making a participatory plait was formed. One aspect of the plait’s significance is that as a method it can entangle us with a rich genealogy of feminist art practice in education (Niccolini et al., 2018; Renold 2018). Domestic handicrafts such as weaving, embroidery and quilt making have all historically been considered women’s work due to their associations with and location within the domestic sphere, a stereotypical feminine space. Consequently, these artistic mediums were deemed as inferior to other artworks such as painting or sculpture, typically associated with men (Tate, n.d.). In the 1970s, during the Women’s Liberation Movement in the USA, feminist artists such as Miriam Schapiro, Sandra Ogel and Judy Chicago challenged this aesthetic hierarchy and pushed to reclaim women’s work and craft as worthy art forms through their work with performance, textiles, and installations (Tate, n.d.). Linguistically, the term ‘plait’ is a loaded word that has connotations with racial inequalities between women. Whilst plaiting is usually associated with women’s hairstyles, the attention it garners is different depending on whether the plaits sit on white or Black women’s heads. When Black women’s hair is plaited into ‘cornrows’ these have been deemed unprofessional by white people (Payne, 2021). It is also worth noting that this demarcation of Black women tends to be in stark contrast to white celebrities like Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry, who when wearing braids are often praised for their cool and subversive looks (Payne, 2021). Therefore, the intersectional feminist histories and tensions that surround the plait have been woven into its foundations long before this particular plait’s creation in the conference. These intersectional herstories also wove into the discussions the young people had at the conference about misogynoir, the particular misogyny experienced by the young Black women taking part who discussed their bodies and hair as a

142  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett central site of this oppression. Etymologically, the word ‘plait’ connects to the Latin pilcare ‘to fold’. Here, we are compelled by Deleuze’s (1993) concept of the fold, whereby he discusses an ontology of becoming, one that operates as a folding-unfolding-refolding of development, multiplicity, continuity, and differences. This concept undoes notions of linear ideas of progress, because the fold does not have a specific aim or objective. It is instead a moving matter filled with potentialities. Rather than the plait attempting only to progress in this neoliberal frame, our collective plaiting works to fold-unfold-refold the problematic relations in schools and to develop new ways of exploring intersectional tensions in neoliberal school environments. We propose that this is more response-able than neoliberal progress narratives since this responds to students through enabling making and un-making; rather than expected outcomes of success as defined by school leaders. Since we are concerned with going beyond anthropocentric notions to advocate for social change, we transgress linguistic engagements into matters that entangle humans and materials (Ringrose, Regehr, and Zarabadi, 2021). The materiality of the plait is therefore important to our arts-based action at the conference. The strips of material the students wrote upon were carefully selected based on texture and colour. The plait needed three strands of fabric for its creation and, borrowing from Millett (2019, 2021), the aim was to read stereotypical masculine and feminine identities into the materials as a  way of escaping and abstracting the body through making. The thicker, darker and rougher strips of fabric represented more stereotypical masculine identities, the thinner lighter fabric strips represented stereotypical feminine identities, whilst the more ambiguous fabric, neither light nor dark nor rough nor smooth aimed to represent gender expressions that were more fluid and outside of the binary. The significance of attaching genders to the non-human matter aimed to disrupt the restrictions that the human form holds. In other words, as the body is culturally marked by regulatory norms through which gender and sexual identities are made legible, this leads to regulation through binaries such as male/female and gay/straight (Getsy; 2015; Millett, 2019, 2021). Therefore, the aim was to create an artwork that resisted intelligible representations, (that of human-centred forms) and to disrupt the regulations through which people are categorised (Getsy, 2015; Millett, 2019, 2021). Drawing on Phematerialist thinking (Ringrose, Regehr and Zarabadi, 2021) which interweaves feminist theories of pedagogy with Barad’s concept of response-ability, we worked with materials that intra-act with and through our bodies in sensory and memory-based ways to unlock tacit knowledges that can mobilise co-constructive agency between non-human and human matter. Therefore, the plait holds the potential to enable students to materially and affectively engage with the tensions that arise in their school lives and thus ‘stay with the trouble’ of challenging oppressive cultures and understanding inequalities (Haraway, 2016). Note here a different pedagogy is created; instead of a problem that needs resolution, much like neoliberal structures of

Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context  143 end goals, outcomes and targets, the tension of their school lives is seen as agentive, whereby an intra-action between non-human and human matter matters as there is a re-folding of tension non-linguistically, opening new avenues of becoming. As Haraway (2016) states, ‘it matters what matters we use to think other matters with’ (p.12); in other words, the plait works as a collaborative story-making material practice for students to become differently when thinking through gender and sexuality in their schools. Thus, whilst the conference was framed around ‘progress’, we disrupted the linear understanding of this notion through emphasising a material-discursive-affective activity where students could ‘unfold’ through sharing their experiences, yet ‘fold’ and ‘re-fold’ physically and materially together against regulatory norms. The Plait in Action All students and teachers taking part in the feminism conference wove together their ideas for change around issues of gender and sexuality in schools by forming one participatory artwork; a large plait that, once woven together, became over 20 meters in length. In line with the International Women’s Day slogan of ‘press for progress’, we called the plait activity ‘plait for progress’. Whilst, as discussed, we see the issues with the neoliberal progress narrative, we enjoyed the play on the IWD term and the move from ‘press’ with its associations with individuated pressure, to ‘plait’ which has connotations with weaving, connectivity and femininity. In what follows, we explore how the plait worked in action and argue that it offered new and affective-material spaces to engender change-making practices that opened up students’ engagement with collective, creative and response-able feminisms. The morning session of the conference consisted of the students engaging with other feminist activists and scholars on issues of gender and sexuality in schools. This part of the day brought together scholars of gender and education: artists interested in diversifying the curriculum; a boys’ organisation advocating for the teaching of positive masculinities and sexuality organisations on the need for formalised education that is inclusive and sex positive. This session also heard from young people from a range of schools who discussed their ideas for a new compulsory ‘social justice’ subject for 11–15-year-olds. Some of the suggestions presented by the young people included: the need to connect LGBTQ and feminist collectives in schools; forming inclusive and safe environments for marginalised students and overhauling sex education to include all forms of sexuality. In the afternoon, all of the young people taking part in the day formed groups and went into classrooms to reflect and respond to the ideas discussed in the morning. However, rather than just engaging discursively with one another’s thoughts, they wrote their reflections in pen on the strips of fabric as they talked. As the strips were written on, each group then folded them together to create one collectively formed group plait. Amongst the action, long strips of material covered the chairs and floor as the plait travelled back and

144  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett over the tables, and as each student plaited together their ideas with another, their stories became entangled and folded and refolded with one another. With their conjoined plaits, the groups of students then returned from the classrooms to the main auditorium to weave together their plaits into one conjoined and much larger and longer plait. This formed a five stranded 50 feet plait that filled the space and wove in and around the students as we all continued to discuss our ideas for change (see Figure 9.1). How the plait occupied the auditorium space is significant, as Millett stated during the conference: ‘Plait for Progress takes craft associated with the private and domestic space and makes it public. The deconstruction of the public/private binary is essential for women’s liberation, therefore Plait for Progress aimed to reclaim public space through its material agency’. Unfolds of violence, unfolds of shame, folds of resurgence, folds of resistance, refolds of becoming, all moving around the auditorium, sprawling with student bodies, material strands, shared memories and collective struggle. The temporal plaited arrangement allowed for play to think through tensions and problematic relations of genders, sexuality and schools. Even though the plait was folded tightly, affectively embodying those tensions felt, there was

Figure 9.1 Plait with students in the auditorium.

Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context  145 still movement and more importantly ‘give’. Research by Niccolini et al., (2018) reminds us that ‘give is a form of encounter between bodies’ (p.335), as give is the process of responding to bodies – the ability to respond ethically – response-ability. Therein, this entanglement of human and non-human intra-acting blurred the boundaries that plaited together student, school, gender and materials to constitute a mutual becoming. Thus, the conference became a co-constructed body, as the situated material and affective intensities captured a sculptural installation of a remixed feminist activism within a school space. In other words, the plait folded us to collectively stay with the tensions. We propose that Plait for Progress ‘cuts’ (Barad, 2007) into neoliberal expectations of feminism in schools. The group weaving of the plait focused on collaborative feminist work which disrupts the individualised modes of saleable and resolvable feminism that the school encouraged. Not only this, but in keeping with feminist approaches to pedagogy and praxis, the plait was about process rather than outcome with the focus on the students’ writing of their ideas onto the fabric, the collective weaving together and the discussion about ideas for change, rather than what the piece meant in its eventual form. Here, the participatory artwork re-imagines and re-assembles feminist school futures through a material-discursive arrangement. It is important to note that the process of forming the plait is not suggesting that those regulatory norms which engender intersectional oppressions in school were fully resolved in a short-afternoon art-based workshop; as Niccolini et al., (2018) write, we are ‘moving away from a progress narrative that sees tension as stable, individualised, and/or ever fully resolvable’ (p.328). This was evident in many instances, including what was written and discussed by the students remaining open-ended with rhetorical questions written on their folded plaits: ‘when will we be heard?’ or ‘trust us’. The tensions shared were very much present and lingering. Once the conference was over, the authors asked the school to display the large material plait to show the collective and artistic feminist work to other students who might be interested or activated by the collective and crafted piece. However, the school rejected the plait from being displayed due to its loose and hanging tendrils being deemed to pose a ‘health and safety hazard’ since they might cause ‘a fire’. It is relevant that the words plaited into the materials that called for and gave some ideas for progress around issues of gender and sexuality in schools (and therefore implicitly stated that schools were not doing well enough) were not allowed to be materially incorporated into the school environment due to their ‘risk’, as it could discredit the school. We argue that this supports a reading of the plait representing a cut through traditional subject/object - observer/observed art as the plait had enabled a collectivity and connectivity that posed a risk to individualised modes of neoliberal separability. A phematerialist reading suggests that schools are not able to take on different ways of exploring feminism that they do not recognise; a sprawling multiplicitous plait response being unintelligible within their neoliberal progress-oriented structure.

146  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett Conclusion: Unravelling the Tangles of Neoliberal Feminism in Schools In this chapter, we have explored an attempt at a ‘response-able’ feminism with a group of young people at a national feminism in schools conference through applying arts and participatory-based methods. As discussed, we tried to disrupt neoliberal approaches to feminism through collective artmaking that phematerialised the students’ ideas for how to explore ideas of gender and sexuality in their schools. We have argued that this participatory and creative model enabled new imaginings to unravel in the process of folding and unfolding the material plait. Yet, it is important to note, this creative work of the young people at the conference is only an attempt at ‘responding well’ to the neoliberal appropriation of feminism in schools, and in no way suggests that the harmful discourses were resolved in one afternoon, partly since this narrative would fall back into linear and neoliberal outcome cultures. However, what we argue is that the formation of the plait tried to make a small cut into the performative and target-oriented expectations of the school and, as Barad states ‘even the smallest cuts matter’ (2012, p.69). With Barad’s (2007) statement in mind, that responsibility is about ‘taking account of the entangled materializations of which we are part, including new configurations, new subjectivities, new possibilities’ (p.7), the process of creating the plait allowed for all those participating in the conference to make a small disruption to individualised marketisable forms of in-school feminism as they materially entangled their own ideas for new possibilities around gender and sexuality in schools. References Ball, S.J. (2003) ‘The teacher’s soul and the terrors of performativity’. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), pp. 215–228. doi: 10.1080/0268093022000043065 Ball S.J. (2016) ‘Neoliberal education? Confronting the slouching beast’. Policy Futures in Education, 14(8), pp. 1046–1059. doi: 10.1177/1478210316664 Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist perfomativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes tomatter’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp. 801– 831. doi: 10.1515/9783839403365008 Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010) ‘Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come’. Derrida Today, 3(2), pp. 240–268. doi: 10.3366/E1754850010000813 Barad, K. (2012) ‘Interview with Karen Barad’. In Dolphijn, R., Van der Tuin, I. (Eds.), New materialism: Interviews and cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, pp. 48–70. Deleuze, G. (1993), The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1988) A thousand plateaus. London: Athlone. Getsy, D. J. (2015) Abstract bodies: Sixties sculpture in the expanded field of gender. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Response-able Feminist Activism in a Neoliberal School Context  147 Gill, R. (2007) ‘Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility’. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), pp. 147–166. doi: 10.1177/136754940707 Girls Attitude Survey (2022) Girlguiding UK. https://www.girlguiding.org.uk/girlsmaking-change/girls-attitudes-survey (Accessed: 15 January 2024). Goodley, C. and Perryman, J. (2022) ‘Beyond the “Terrors of Performativity”: Dichotomies, identities and escaping the panopticon’. London Review of Education, 20(1), pp. 20–29. doi: 10.14324/LRE.20.1.29 Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making kin with Chthulecene. Durham: DukeUniversity Press. Kim, C. and Ringrose, J. (2018) “Stumbling upon feminism”: Teenage girls’ forays into digital and school-based feminisms’. Girlhood Studies, 11(2), pp. 46–62. doi: 10.3167/ghs.2018.110205 McRobbie, A. (2004) ‘Post-feminism and popular culture’. Feminist Media Studies, 4(3), pp. 255–264. doi: 10.1080/1468077042000309937 Millett, T.V.P. (2019) ‘Queering the art classroom: Queering matters’. The International Journal of Art and Design Education, 38(4), pp. 809–822. doi: 10.1111/jade.12276 Millett, T.V.P. (2021) Queering the art classroom. PhD. Thesis. University College London. Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10130350/1/Millett_ 10130350_Thesis_redacted.pdf (Accessed: 13 October 2022). Negra, D. (2014) ‘Claiming feminism: Commentary, autobiography and advice literature for women in the recession’. Journal of Gender Studies, 23(3), pp. 275–286. doi: 10.1080/09589236.2014.913977 Niccolini, A.D., Zarabadi, S., and Ringrose, J. (2018) ‘Spinning yarns: Affective kinshipping as posthuman pedagogy’, Parallax, 24(3), pp. 324–343. doi: 10.1080/ 13534645.2018.1496582 Payne, T. (2021) Kim Kardashian West responds to the backlash over her braids. Available at: https://www.glamour.com/story/kim-kardashian-braids-explanation (Accessed: 13th October 2022). Renold, E. (2018) ‘feel what I Feel: making da(r)ta with teen girls for creative activisms on how sexual violence matters’. Journal of Gender Studies, 27(1), pp. 37–55. doi: 10.1080/09589236.2017.1296352 Renold, E.J., Ashton, M.R. and McGeeney, E. (2021) ‘What if?: Becoming responseable with the making and mattering of a new relationships and sexuality education curriculum’. Professional Development in Education, 47(2–3), pp. 538–555. doi: 10. 1080/19415257.2021.1891956 Retallack, H. (2023) ‘Feminism in schools? A psychosocial-discursive study of teenagers’ constitutions of feminist subjectivities’. PhD Thesis. University College London. Retallack, H., Ringrose, J., and Lawrence, E. (2016) ‘“Fuck Your Body Image”: Teen girls’ Twitter and Instagram feminism in and around school’. In Coffey, J., Budgeon, S., and Cahill, H. (Eds.) Learning bodies. Perspectives on children and young people, vol 2. Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-0306-6_6 Ringrose, J. (2007) ‘Successful girls? Complicating post-feminist, neoliberal discourses of educational achievement and gender equality’. Gender and Education, 19(4), pp. 471–489. doi: 10.1080/09540250701442666 Ringrose, J., Regehr, K., and Zarabadi, S. (2021) ‘Feminist craftivist collaging. Remattering the bad affects of advertising’. In Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (Eds.) Creative approach to health education: New ways of thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning. London: Routledge, pp. 105–122.

148  Hanna Retallack and Tabitha Millett Ringrose, J. and Renold, E. (2012) ‘Slut-shaming, girl power and ‘sexualisation’: Thinking through the politics of the international SlutWalks with teen girls’. Gender and Education, 24(3), pp. 333–343. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2011.645023 Ringrose, J., Warfield, K. and Zarabadi, S. (2020) Feminist posthumanisms, new materialisms and education. London: Routledge. Rottenberg, C. (2017) ‘Neoliberal feminism and the future of human capital’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(2), pp. 329–348. doi: 10.1086/688182 Rottenberg, C. (2018) ‘3 Neoliberal Futurity and Generic Human Capital’. In The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, Heretical Thought. New York: Oxford Academic (online edn). doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190901226.003.0004 (Accessed: 15 January 2024). Shamir, R. (2008) ‘The age of responsibilization: On market-embedded morality’. Economy and society, 37(1), pp. 1–19. doi: 10.1080/03085140701760833 Strom, K., Ringrose, J., Osgood, J. and Renold, E. (2019) ‘PhEmaterialism: Responseable research & pedagogy’. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), pp. 22–37. doi: 10.7577/rerm.3649 Tate. (n.d.) Feminist art. (online) Retrieved from: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artterms/f/feminist-art (Accessed: 13th October 2022). Taylor, C.A. and Ivinson, G. (2013) ‘Material feminisms: New directions for education’. Gender and Education, 25(6), pp. 665–670. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2013. 834617 Zarabadi, S., Taylor, C.A., Fairchild, N. and Moxnes, A.R. (2019) ‘Feeling Medusa: Tentacular troubling of academic positionality, recognition and respectability’. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology, 10(2–3), pp. 87–111. doi: 10.7577/rerm.3671

10 Rethinking Pedagogy as MaterialDiscursive Intra-Actions Samira Jamouchi

Introduction This chapter develops performative approaches that interrupt or suspend for a moment, a routine use of pre-existing and dictating research methods. The chapter emphasises the distinctions between how one can teach and how one should teach. The former question of how one can teach opens for a creative and exploratory interpretation of teaching and learning in the curriculum, allowing an education that emerges from the experiences of the not-known (Atkinson, 2015). Moreover, the latter question on how we should teach is used to delineate how we understand the expectations of curriculum to meet the demands and standards, reproducing dominant thinking and doing in pedagogy, or what Atkinson (2015) calls a prescribed pedagogy. Looking for alternative ways in how one can teach resists following pre-given models or being identical to what has been done before. Moreover, the chapter narrates how a performative approach to teaching art through wool felting contributes to considering how experimental pedagogies focus on education as process rather than a finished product. Therefore, I research my teaching practice by questioning not only what we do in our universities, but also how we do it. I am interested in the implications that teaching has on the students on a personal level and in relation to the world. They are implications that are not necessarily only related to a predefined goal as defined in the school curriculum. Students’ learning at a personal level is not only about what it means to students, but also how the materialities in classroom pedagogies can produce learning encounters that go beyond the usual educational expectation of teaching as a transaction. The feedback from Norwegian and international teacher students I collected in three Norwegian Universities during visual arts classes (Jamouchi 2019, 2020) are the referential material of my research. Their feedback reveals intensities that arise in their encounter with materials. This stimulates the choice of my theoretical approach and my teaching practice. My work is situated both in artistic and scholarly landscapes as a material-discourse (Barad, 2007) when the doing with materials and the writing of texts are entangled and interdependent. Thus, doing and thinking wool felting are reciprocally generative processes. DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-13

150  Samira Jamouchi This chapter starts by introducing some concepts from the theoretical framework in which the text evolves. Those are rhizome, material-discursive practices, and related concepts. This is followed by a short introduction to performance art, performative research and wet wool felting. They are some short verses that I wrote as poetical entryways to introduce different aspects of a felting process. Toward the end I present and discuss a performative approach to wool felting drawn from the experience of my entangled practices. Questioning Narrow Art Education Practice and Research A narrow approach to education, teaching and learning brings stagnation and simplification of the worlds we inhabit. Looking for answers to known questions engenders no new knowledge, it gives no further solutions, nor new understanding. A posthumanist material-discursive analysis of pedagogy gives saliency to a recognition of what goes beyond the dialectic humanist interactions associated with teaching. To this effect, Sandvik (2015) depicts two main aspects of post-humanist theory and method. One is the refutation of the human as the only subject with the capacity to think, and the other is the refutation of the human as detached from the world one studies. Post-humanist perspectives question the sovereignty of humans upon non-human and the independence of the human from the world. Descartes’ philosophical proposition ‘I think therefore I am’ puts a dualistic relationship between the one that studies and the thing that is studied. The researcher (a human subject) having the capacity to think constitutes the subject. Following such logic, the human is something other than nature or animals and is apart from the world being studied. Thus, the human holds a particular position because ‘man is separated from the world and superior to it, even if man relates to the world’ (Sandvik, 2015, pp. 47–48). Experience is not restricted to the Cartesian subject; it is always relational and involves becoming with others. Moving away from Cartesian ideas, Deleuze speaks of ‘paideia’, stating that for the Greeks, ‘thought was not based on a premeditated decision to think: thought originates in the real experience by virtue of the forces that are exercised on it in order to constrain it to think […], to critically reflect on itself’ (1980, p.138). A narrow approach to research is equally unfruitful when it promotes simplified regulation. Education practice and research has become increasingly regulated, monitored and surveilled, a process criticised by Rhedding-Jones (2007) who states that ‘the proclaimed blessing in simplified and controllable research methods seems to be invading academia at the expense of methods that open up for complexity, contradictions and disorder’ (Rhedding-Jones, 2007, as cited in Sandvik, 2015, p. 45). Therefore, drawing a parallel between a humanistic/Cartesian thinking and a  monologic teaching practice, solidifies the position of the teacher-artistresearcher as an instrument, detached, and reduced by humanistic rationalities. On the other hand, the rhizomatic relationship between teacher-artist-researcher,

Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions  151 materials and non-human, enables us to see wool felting as a phenomenon offering intra-actions for teaching practice. This is not in opposition to teaching practices focusing on skills. This is an attempt to broaden an understanding of what wool felting can be. For Barad, ‘phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of observer and observed, or the result of measurement; rather, phenomena are ontological inseparability/entanglement of intra-acting ‘agencies’ (Barad, 2007, p. 139; emphasis in original). Following an agential realism thinking, the dualistic opposition between the researcher and the world is obsolete. When I teach visual arts, create art projects and reflect through artsbased research, I am not upon the world but of the world (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). The pronoun ‘I’ needs to be understood in relation to the world. Rhizomatic Connections of an Artist-Teacher-Researcher The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1980) differentiate the rhizome from a tree. They describe the tree as an independent entity that goes from its own roots to its leaves, with no further connections to its context or a broader environment. They use the term rhizome as an ontological concept that is understood as a multitude of connections, to its environment and other components, also components of a different nature (1980, pp. 9–37). My practices as artist, teacher and researcher, subvert and challenge each other. They simultaneously inform me in my practices and make me evolve in a rhizomatic pattern. This rhizomatic nature to teaching as performance brought me to engage more actively with my role as an artist-teacher-researcher. However, writing scientific papers and disseminating my work with written words does not come down to a written abstraction or the ablation of reflecting in/during/on the making of wool felting. It fits naturally and felt natural to engage with my artistic practice, when questioning art education and enquiring it through arts-based research. Working as an artist-teacher-researcher creates a creative and on-going synergy. Like a rhizomatic network, the phenomenon of wool felting infiltrates artistic, pedagogical, and research contexts. The phenomenon of wool felting is contexts-dependent, varying with space, time, participants, and materials, as it creates more or less rhizomatic intensities between the action of felting, the writing related to felting and thinking in/while felting; in other words it enhances the teacher-student presence in teaching and learning. Unlike a structure defined as a set of static points and positions, the rhizome is made of lines in motion. Deleuze and Guattari describe lines of flights as ‘movements engendered by moments of energy that escape a rigid or pregiven system through its cracks or by an asignifying rupture’ (1980, p. 16) and reach the limits of what exists. Teaching as a rhizomatic practice can infiltrate and alter settled power dynamics in the classroom, such as imbalances of teacher-student participation, the silencing of students’ voices and the disembodying of teaching and learning. Instead, this chapter theorises conceptually and more practically through a material-discursive pedagogy the cuts, ruptures and

152  Samira Jamouchi cracks that can emerge and create moments of potentialities, friction and intensities, if teaching and learning are opened up as rhizomatic happenings. A couple of examples of such lines of flight, which are explored later in the chapter, are the transitions from giving most attention to the visual aesthetical elements of a product, to paying close attention to the processual enactment of an artwork, in order to include a performative approach that values the creative process. Another transition is resisting the planning of a teaching session with definite procedures for students to follow, to attuning the phenomenon of wool felting together with the students. The movements of lines of the flights create open spaces to be filled out by new/other/displaced practices. Lines of flights are the irruptions, shifts and transitions we undergo whilst exploring a performative approach to wool felting. Material-Discursive Intra-actions In the framework of agential realism proposed by the philosopher-physicist Karen Barad (2007), intra-action is essential to explore the idea that something materialises in a process of becoming in a given context and in connection to what happens in this context. Intra-action is the mutual constitution of entangled elements, which brings a new way to think about relationships. We become co-constituted within the relationship, emerging from the relationship, not prior to it. Intra-action starts with phenomena rather than isolated objects. For Barad a phenomenon is the smallest/primary ontological unit (Barad, 2007, p. 141). In my research, this means that a performative approach to the phenomenon of wool felting does not necessarily seek to explain what students or materials are, as if they had a fixed identity. It rather reveals relationships that emerge between students and materials. Further, in the framework of agential realism, material intra-actions reveal agency (the ability to act), which is no longer the privilege of a single entity or human. Agency emerges from the intra-action between the diverse components of a phenomenon (Barad, 2007, p. 214). In other words, intra-action transforms us and our understanding of ourselves, of each other and our surroundings. Cocomponents in a teaching session with a performative approach to wool felting are for instance student, teacher, materials, scent, temperature, humidity, sounds, time and space. All these aspects of wool felting are also in a close relation to the writing of this chapter. Material-discursive practices underline the reciprocal relationality between matter and meaning. Materiality and discourse are neither articulate nor are articulable in the absence of the other: ‘matter and meaning are mutually articulated. Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained in terms of the other. Neither has privileged status in determining the other’ (Barad, 2003, p. 822). This means that, in addition to an intra-active relationship to materials, one does not assume that the researcher exists as a separated knowing individual who constructs knowledge about other people or other things.

Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions  153 Teachers, as performance artists, are not playing a fictional role as in a theatrical representation, teachers are embodied and emergent in the materialdiscursive life of the classroom. The border between the scene on one side and a sitting audience on the other vanishes for the performance artist, as much as the separation between teacher and students diminishes when we re-conceptualise teaching and learning as participatory, entangled, not just through human interactions, but also with materials. The phenomenon of wool felting through performative approaches and meeting each participant’s differences, similitudes and singularities, helps challenge the idea that teaching and learning is a process which is best understood as an individualised, atomising or introspective. Pedagogically, ‘the performative approach to wool felting neutralises technical and recipe-like (teacher) formation to accomplish other forms of transformation’ (Jamouchi, 2020, p. 61). Students and wool fibres are given a substantial place. We all are involved actively in the process, neither the teacher nor the goal achievement concerning exclusively manual skills as described in the curriculum pull back our active and creative encounters with the materials. For instance, encounters between water, touch and movements; Layers of fibres Water layers Connecting water Waves of flow Wool is touched Skin is touched Touching connections Other-less Feel felting Strength and soft Forth and back Water makes its way As the drama teacher and researcher Brad Haseman writes, a performative research does not necessarily start with a problem but with an interest (Haseman, 2006, p. 100). For me, it is my curiosity, grounded in my rhizomatic practices, that generates wonder and questioning. Therefore, I wonder: how can material awareness and the repositioning of humans reveal intra-actions with wool fibres in our entangled connection? I explore the materiality of craft felting and see what agency emerges between teachers’ and students’ performative encounters with wool fibres. A performative approach to wool felting is process-oriented, durational, explorative and experimental. It is, as mentioned above, a desire to meet each participants’ differences, similitudes and singularities. It is not a pedagogy of sameness, but of difference. The empirical materials of my investigation come from teaching sessions in the subject of visual arts with students to whom I taught in several Norwegian Universities. I have collected their written feedback and I wrote short poetic

154  Samira Jamouchi texts that are like reverberations of my co-making with others, both human and non-human. Wool, water, sounds, space, time, voicing, movements, etc., are the co-components that create the phenomenon of wool felting; The material is dense and chaotic The material moves and dances The material swells other materials Water enters wool Wool encounter water Slowly swelling Slowly moving Slowly merging Materials infiltrate other materials Feeling the Felting and Felting the Feelings Wool is a natural material from animals that have inhabited the world together with humans since ancient times. There are traces of domestication of sheep in Palestine from 9000 BC (Bomsel, 2022). The sedentarisation of humankind and cohabitation with sheep makes it natural to develop a craft with materials close at hand. Wool in textile making has co-evolved with humans and has always been a substantial part of human life, in various ways. Not much is needed to felt wool. It is a low technology, both in terms of materials and energy. It is a malleable material that can be transformed in direct contact with the body, no intermediary tools are necessary. This absence of utensils allows a direct bodily and sensory relation to the wool. The touch with hands or feet give an intuitive approach to the material. The material wool, so to speak, works itself, on itself, when it is in intra-action with warm water and frictions. Since wool felting requires little technical means one can intra-act with the whole felting process from raw material to felted textile. This gives the opportunity to develop a complex and/or creative approach to the material. Which is different from fragmented industrial productions without an overview or understanding of the whole working process. A performative approach to wool is therefore an invitation to/from the material to a natural, intuitive, low-tech, and direct carnal encounter. Surfaces of animal and human skins are touching, and both are responsive. Bodily engaged, sensory aware More than the hand, more than the eye Engaging with material(ties) Engaging with i-materialities Irruption of engaging skins A human-animal encounter Woven textiles involve a regular repetition of perpendicular intersections by threads crossing the weft and the chain. Felt is a non-woven textile made of fibres

Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions  155

Figure 10.1 Bodily and sensory engagement and entanglement with wool felting.

that have been meshed together: loose fibres becoming entangled when displayed by layers, one on top of the other, which intertwine under pressure and frictions. Warm water, moving hands and feet, as well as the rolling and throwing of the mass of wool turn the fibres into a dense and robust material. Wet wool felting offers unique sensory experiences, it enables non-predictable moments to occur and allows iterative but non-identical learning processes to happen collaboratively. The senses are engaging with tactile, visual, olfactory, hearing, haptic, and touch. Wool felting in my research emphasises the durational relationship between the human, the animal fibre, natural materials, water, pine soap and space. The relationship between the components determines the phenomenon and its unity, rather than separated units independent of each other (see Figure 10.1). Considering Other Ways of Teaching I propose a performative approach to wool felting as an exploration and experimentation in visual arts within teacher education. To explore and propose other forms of teaching is also a way to care about how one meets others. To engage critically with a dominant pedagogical attitude practice means also to doubt, interrogate, re-examine, explore, experiment, make, think, try, parttake, share, and continually be in motion. Normative procedures or established norms do think for the students. Because of the explorative and experimental approach to material, the student can experience a dialogical relationship to it. This is how one student expresses it: The material seems so fragile but during the working process I’ve experienced how strong and flexible the wool can be. What I also appreciate

156  Samira Jamouchi is the ‘surprise effect’ during the felting process! You never know exactly what the outcome might look like! Because the felting process is quite long you somehow start building up a kind of ‘relationship’ (I don’t find another word for it) with your artwork – that makes you even more proud when you’ve finished your project. (Jamouchi, 2020, p. 71) When I seek to unveil what can emerge from a teaching practice using a performative approach to wool felting, it is through dialogue and experimentation with the students and fibres, rather than the execution of the felted object. That can help to reveal what is yet to come. This is how another student expresses the encounter with wool felting: This creates a unique and new situation. We sensed in a completely new way. Walking on bubble wrap and walking on our soapy wool while hearing music was something completely new for everyone. We support each other and use our sense of balance. We are physical. The process created something more than just a simple felting product. I think that the intention here has to be that in addition to learn felting and make a product, something more will happen. Experiences for the individual and for the group. Maybe in a greater extent than with a regular group exercise. Perhaps this approach may give a different result. Maybe it can be used with students who have difficulties, or with adults from different cultures. You become a little ‘naked’ and harmless when you do this task, not only yourself, but also the others. Perhaps the participants are left with experiences that go a little further and deeper than just solving a given traditional task. (Jamouchi, 2020, p. 69) A long tradition of teaching, mostly based on technical skills, might take time to evolve toward less anticipated and more creative forms of knowledge production. A teaching session is not only related to the written words in the curriculum of a school subject. It is also connected to the teachers’ educational views and worldly concerns behind the doors of the classroom or the walls of the school. A crucial question is how we understand students’ skills, knowledge, understanding and thinking. By using a performative approach to pedagogy, we involve ourselves in a relational way to material and immaterial components. We perform wool felting as we evolve between each other movements, and share the common space we create. When we felt wool together, we experience a feeling of togetherness (Jamouchi, 2020). We use our bodies to communicate with each other, to intra-act with the material under the ongoing process. ‘With regard to teaching, this means that relationships, moods, feeling and communication between teachers and students are created in a bodily way and have a direct impact on learning’ (Østern et al., 2019, p. 51). Learning is a consequence of bodily involvement.

Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions  157 Østern et al. (2019) have a critical approach to an understanding of learning that neglect the role of the body. They present and advocate for a learning theory that turns the traditional learning theory upside down, where both feeling and intellect are very deeply involved, where cognition is not what forms the basis for understanding and action, but what comes as a result of a bodily involvement (Østern et al., 2019). Performative Approach to Wool Felting I have experienced moments of uncertainty and doubts when I introduced new teaching forms to my students that include a performative approach to the subject of visual arts. I could not be sure about the responses of the students, about how we would experience it, and what we could gain from it. The outcome of a teaching session does not only rely on the teacher’s intentions. A  teaching session is an entangled experience, in which the students play a determinant role. When I invite students to performative teaching processes, I invite the students to experiments and to experimentation. To propose experimentation with wet felting wool is different from proposing experience of wet felting wool that ends in a foreseen product. When the students are given the opportunity to play with material when they encounter the wool with their whole body, together with other, and in a spirit of discovery, we undergo experimentations that allow the unexpected. Deleuze invites us to refrain from what we call common sense and give space to experimentation: In order to engage in experimentation, we would abandon the idea that common sense ought to be our guide. Deleuze uses the term common sense in a technical fashion, to refer to the identity that arises when the faculties (in the Kantian sense) agree with one another. We must disrupt our common sense with problems that do not yet yield answers as some univocal solutions but invite a free flow of thought in a critical and self-reflective manner within a mutual and reciprocal relation between ourselves and others. (Semetsky, 2011, pp. 140–141; emphasis in original) When questioning the norms of traditional teaching practices, I resist standardisation. That logic of thinking, making and disseminating implies something else than identical, repetitive, and mechanical procedures that lead to predetermined products. That logic implies that felting wool becomes a phenomenon in which we evolve creatively, following the becoming of the materials, time, space and our relationship to the material and immaterial surroundings. The continuous feedback from the students on the teaching sessions using a performative approach to the subject of visual arts express how the process become intensities, growths, moments of affective togetherness and intra-action (Jamouchi, 2020).

158  Samira Jamouchi When I invite the public to felt a large amount of wool together with me during a performance in artistic institutions, I experience similar moments of intensities. We/I/they/it let the process of felting wool bring us further in the process of becoming with others. Bodies and fibres are in action. Legs walk on multiple layers of wool displayed on the floor, arms extend, movements elongate and broken up, hands spread out before collecting massive wool. Warm water and wool fibres meet, the fibres open up, entangle, and become robust. We become together. Material and meaning are interdependent. We are in a flow that brings us elsewhere, as our understanding of the moment develops under a sensory perception of our doing and thinking. In many ways, I see the vitality occurring in my artistic and pedagogical practices are likewise relevant to each other and to the material-discourse (Barad, 2007) of my research. When I think with Barad, I acknowledge that we are with/within/in the world and the world is not a static given. Each felting project/session is a repetitive act with infinite variations. I know the materials, I am familiar with the moments under and between the metamorphoses of the fibres. Still, I have to re-adjust, to re-compose with the present instant that is similar in its dissimilarity with previous sessions of wool felting. I know the material, I know the transformation, and I feel the familiarity of coming back to something known. Still, I have to become acquainted to both the material and the people co-making the event of felting wool. Whether it is in educational or artistic institutions. Concluding Remarks A dialogue with post-structural perspectives and agential realism contributes to map my practices by including human bodies, non-human components as animal fibres for an intra-active pedagogy. My rhizomatic practices reveal how my different professional roles question, influence and entangled with my teaching. This text is an invitation to the reader to position her/his self in a performative approach to her/his practice(s) and consider the philosophical and theoretical perspectives framed here to understand the self as a part of a broader context. This chapter has narrated and explored one of the myriad processes of creation that can arise when pedagogy is expanded as a material-discursive practice, which goes beyond the usual humanisms of teacher-student relationships. The invitation to bring posthumanism into the role of pedagogy can provide insights into how the classroom’s materialities and its everyday material life can expand how we think of pedagogy. Whilst not all teachers might use the specific artistic approaches used here, the material life of teaching and learning, if explored more amply, can expend our pedagogical imagination. With education becoming more regulated and streamlined to meet specific targets, it is important to revitalise the notion of pedagogy to continue to create creative encounters in everyday teaching and learning.

Rethinking Pedagogy as Material-Discursive Intra-Actions  159 References Atkinson, D. (2015) The adventure of pedagogy, learning and the not-known. Subjectivity, 8(1), 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2014.22 (Accesses: 20 February 2023). Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(1), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Bomsel, M-C. (2022) “Mouton” Encyclopædia Universalis [en linge], Available at: https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/mouton (Accessed 22 October 2022). Deleuze, Gille and Guattari, Félix (1980) Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux. Les éditions de minuit. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2008) The Transformative Power of Performance. Routledge. Jamouchi, S. (2019) Exploring a performative approach to felting wool. An autoethnography for two? European Journal of Philosophy in Arts Education, 4(01). http:// www.ejpae.com/index.php/EJPAE/article/view/27/23 (Accesses: 29 October 2022). Jamouchi, S. (2020) Affective togetherness in arts education: Lingering on a performative approach to wool felting. In Matter. Journal of New Materialist Research, 1(2). https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/matter/article/view/31840/32140 (Accesses: 29 October 2022). Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going Beyond the Theory/Practice Divide in Early Childhood Education: Introducing an Intra-Active Pedagogy. (Contesting Early Childhood). Routledge. Østern, T. P., Dahl, T., Strømme, A., Aagaard Petersen, J., Østern, A.-L. Selander, S.  (2019) Dybde//læring – en flerfaglig, relasjonell og skapende tilnærming. Universitetsforlag. Sandvik, N. (2015) Posthumanistiske perspektiver. Bidra til barnehageforskning. In Otterstad, A. M. and Reinersten, A. B. (red.) Metodefestival og øyeblikksrealisme – eksperimenterende kvalitative forskningspassasjer. Fagbokforlag.

11 Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment Ana Vicente Richards, Mark Ingham, Liz Bunting and Vikki Hill

Introduction: A Cartography Care in folding Love in unfolding

Our chapter is an entanglement, sometimes a scattering, sometimes a stammering, of multiple modes of writing, researching and thinking to ‘…expose power [relations in assessment practices] both as entrapment (potestas) and as empowerment (potentia)’ (Braidotti, 2019a. p. 33). In some places we describe what happened and what we thought and felt about the processes of sending and receiving love letters. In others we reflect on our own values as educators and how other thinkers and practitioners have helped us construct our individual and collective ideas. In some instances, we want to show you the affective processes we went through by creating a woven rhythm of different writings that hopefully helps recreate the joyfulness of our experiences with these letters of love. We map how ‘A post-human approach […] allows us to use languages and methodologies that do not restrict the emergence of assemblages under the assumption of their a priori ontological separation, but rather examine their reparative potential based on the efficacy of situated relationships’ (Blanco-Wells, 2021. p. 1). We attempt to use the notion of ‘assemblage’ in its pre-translated form as ‘agencement’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 4-5) which ‘is an arrangement or layout of heterogenous elements’ and is ‘the rejection of unity in favour of multiplicity, and the rejection of essence in favour of events’ (Nail, 2017, p. 22). In embracing the notion of ‘assemblage’ we hoped to model an approach to relational assessment that creates mutuality, is nourishing and affirming. Our work becomes a map, continuously folding and unfolding, nomadically. Inspired by Waterhouse, Otterstad, and Jensen (2016) artistic movements in/with unknown inventions, our Sent with Love experimentation, ‘invites the reader to think and do research differently by unfolding the conditions of what is not yet thought of to come in research’, and in our case assessment practices. Following Waterhouse et al., ‘…we challenge. written language by DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-14

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  161

Figure 11.1 The things that wink at me from the other side of the room. Showing a stage in the folding and unfolding of our love letters. Photograph by the authors.

bodily surfacing haptic technology that interfaces through vibrations and sensations in with us/them/you’ (2016, p. 201). In our art and design Higher Education Institution (HEI) multiple materials and multiple concepts are given to us to evaluate and give feedback on. We argue that these materials could be assessed in ways that are more-than written or spoken forms, but as objects that can be made sense of beyond the normalised articulations that we tend to associate with regimes of assessment. These non-verbal (more-than-human verbal language) articulations offer more sensorial types of feedback. We suggest that our multimedia love letters can enable more compassionate, more-than-human, types of assessment and pedagogical encounters (see Figure 11.1). An ‘Emergent Collectivity Sited in the Encounter’ Dear Reader, We are a group of four people who work across different departments at the University of the Arts London – Ana, Mark, Liz, Vikki (AMLV) – who are drawn to using posthumanism to harness relationality and mattering as ecologies of belonging and care, and to consider the entangled complexity of institutional assessment policies and pedagogies. As educators and creative

162  Ana Vicente Richards et al. practitioners, we enact social justice in higher education with the aim of assembling agency in nurturing educational communities where all staff and students thrive, feel valued and accepted for who they are. We started this project with conversations about our entanglement with assessment in our multiple roles as educational developers, lecturers, external moderators, supervisors, and post-doctoral students. Assessment in art and design in higher education often involves an encounter with the materiality of the bodies of work that are being assessed. But how does this encounter play out in the pedagogic relation that is formed through the assessment process? What kinds of possibilities and impossibilities emerge in the mattering of assessment and how can we inhabit such fields of emergence? Our ‘Sent with Love’ project aims to reframe this encounter by taking on the invitation by Gravett et al. (2021, p.12) to look at the pedagogic relation of assessment as a ‘material-discursive apparatus’ and an ongoing, affective, embodied and relational intra-action. The material-discursive apparatus is offered by Karen Barad (2007) as a posthuman performative account of mattering, where discourse is not simply referred to as what is written or spoken but as a practice where language and matter are entangled in a field of possibilities and impossibilities. In other words, the material-discursive apparatus acknowledges the ability of all bodies to have entangled agencies. In Barad’s quantum thinking, reality is nonbinary: there is no separation between bodies and things. Reality, the world, is something that is not outside of ourselves, Barad argues that ‘“We” are not outside observers of the world’, but we are part of it and in relationship with it, materialised in intra-activity (Barad, 2003, p. 828). We asked the research question ‘What kind of assessment might emerge if attention is paid to the posthuman and collaborative pedagogies?’ To contemplate this question, it was necessary to imagine otherwise. In Sent with Love we developed a praxis that fostered resistance and thrived in the potentia of thinking-doing otherwise, of exploring alternatives. We resisted maintaining the status quo of the educational frameworks, such as assessment, that hinder collaboration because relationships are formed through individualisation, competition and alienation that serve the capitalisation of knowledge. We wanted to ‘enact assessment as a more open-ended, material practice that pays better attention to the situated particularities of students’ learning journeys and takes better care of their developing subjectivities as learners’ (Gravett and Winstone, 2020, p. 12.). We wrote and we also drew, made collages and objects, collected objects, detritus, smells, and ephemera – many things. We corresponded with each other as we packaged and re-packaged our responses to send back to one another. A process of being-with the many folds, extensions, pockets and fissures of an evolving material collaborative conversation. What emerged from our relationship was the mapping of a praxis of care grounded in affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018), a praxis of transforming the negativity associated with assessment into something workable. And, as Braidotti (2018)

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  163 also suggests, ‘a praxis of composing a people that aims at actualizing affirmative alternatives’ (p.180). We asked ourselves what if we reframed assessment as meaningful and material intra-actions centred on care for the cultivation of a caring and just society? Assessment could offer a space for hope. As Rosi Braidotti (2013) writes, ‘Hope constructs the future by opening up the spaces to project active desires onto; it gives us the force to process the negativity and emancipate ourselves from the inertia of everyday routines’ (p.38). Our conversations about our experience of assessment – both as students and as educators – highlighted our need and desire for collective, collaborative and co-produced practices that disrupt the individualistic, neo-liberal and normative structures that are so difficult to transform. In our letters, which moved into something beyond that, we explored ways to be reciprocal, generous and compassionate in how we might think and be when creating and receiving feedback and our assessment practices. We were guided by Rosi Braidotti’s work on affirmation and joy. Braidotti writes that ‘A joyful ethics rests on an enlarged sense of a vital interconnection with a multitude of (human and nonhuman) others by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism and anthropocentrism on the one hand and the barriers of negativity on the other’ (Braidotti, 2018. p. 221). As a collective, we began a process of ‘plunging’ – what Carol Taylor (2016) explains as a ‘messy’ and ‘ungainly’ practice of freefall (p. 20). To plunge into posthuman research would be to dive into the unknown and to resist the safe comfort of methodological norms. We embraced our ‘potentia’ (Braidotti, 2019b) to explore the complex web of our interconnectedness through the writing of ‘love letters’ to one another. We drew on potentia to provoke radical experimentation and to embrace our ethico-onto-epistemological exploration. We thought of the ‘love letter’ as a way of writing feedback to each other: holding that person close and thinking about what we value about them and their contributions. The challenges they have shared with us. The joy we’ve felt in our collective journey. We agreed that ‘relational pedagogies position meaningful relationships as fundamental to effective learning and teaching and  explore ways of fostering connections, authenticity and responsiveness’ (Gravett and Winstone, 2020). We created a space for exploration of collaborative writing as a non-hierarchical cacophony of multiple voices, entangled, with no one being intentionally louder than the other. The act of posting these love letters to each other slowed us down and made gaps for us to forget and remember. To wait in expectation. What fragment of deliciousness might appear from the postie, the front door letter box, or from the end of the driveway? These journeys the letters took, our journeys to the post office, to send them, and then to collect the ever-expanding box of collaged and written letters, contrast with the ubiquitous digital assessments that our students receive and are given. We started to see the value in the personal thoughts that each entangled letter brought to us. They stopped us from

164  Ana Vicente Richards et al. skimming over what had been given to us and made us want to dive even further into the correspondences we had been offered. The most recent letter/collage/bricolage had been joined on to all the other previous manifestations, so we could look back on all the others. They resonated with us in different ways. They became valuable. They were invaluable. We thought, could this be a way of making assessment and feedback ‘sticky’ (Orr and Shreeve, 2017), inviting and helping motivations to learning? Our differences matter. What does it mean for us to think and feel differently about assessment, to ‘think thought and being differently, to think difference itself’ (St Pierre, 2021, p. 166)? What do we understand the embodied and relational collective to be for us? Can we care for each other as we work together? When we write our letters on paper made from trees and fill our packages with earth and flowers from the places we live, will this connect us in ways we have not yet experienced? (See Figure 11.2.) As Anna Tsing (2015, p. 20) says, ‘precarity makes life possible and it ‘is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves … we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others … everything is in flux, including our ability to survive. We became voyagers without maps, creating new maps along the way. In our multimedia letters to each other, we wrote texts, questions, statements that created a non-linear narrative. Each iteration of our collaged/bricolage/ written letter was joined in some way to all the previous ones. String, glue, stickers, wool, all were used to join the letters together to each other. Where one ended and another began became an adventure. They could be started wherever we wanted them to. The paths we took each time we unfolded each new offering created new paths for us to explore. As Gilles Deleuze (1998, p. xviii) writes, ‘We have to see creation as tracing a path between impossibilities …Without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have a line of flight’. We started our mapping of paths by sending hand-written mixed media, letters to each other. Creating fragments of a love letter to be continued by the recipient and re-sent to each other again and again and again. Collaging a text from the fragments that appear (see Figure 11.2.). We came to feel that we were ‘part of an entangled material-discursive formation collectively producing’ (Strom, Mills, and Ovens, 2018). We are deterritorialising ourselves from the normative structures and boundaries of educators and assessors. Becoming, instead, nomadic visionaries driven by desires of resisting hierarchical, mechanical, and competitive norms of assessment. Together we are messily reimagining assessment as relational through affective means. Attempting to reveal that which is embodied and ordinarily goes unnoticed. Compassionately yours Ana, Mark, Liz, Vikki. (AMLV)

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  165

Figure 11.2 Intermezzo Kindness: Care in folding Love in unfolding. Our love letters halfway through their journey. Photograph by the authors.

Bumpy Journeys: Research Creation An imprint exchanging. being-with. handling reading touching making feeling smelling caring. writing to and with each other. a creation through correspondence and things growing as it was sent back forth and around. paving the way of time feeling the days of space. the waiting and anticipation the not knowing and the revealing. the curiosity of the cats and the dogs and the postperson. what is left behind what spills out and the dilemma of what to do with it. the walking to the post office the weight of the package. the forgetting and remembering in between. the emptying stuff onto the floor the surprises and finding little pockets of things. quiet words in between under inside. sentences that touch and cuddle other sentences echoes of words and feelings. care in folding and love in unfolding. the not being able to fold it back together into the box. the wanting to control the object and organise it and not being in control. the touching of other’s making. the worrying the overwhelm-ness the

166  Ana Vicente Richards et al. love and the care. it will be ok. a cacophonous messy growing complex collection of gentleness and tenderness. We adopted a research-creation approach. As Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman propose, ‘Research-creation can be described as the complex intersection of art practice, theoretical concepts, and research. It is an experimental practice that cannot be predicted or determined in advance. Research-creation is attuned to processes rather than the communication of outputs or products.’ (Springgay and Truman, 2016). We adopted the format of the love letter and its associated process of exchanging correspondence as a creative practice. This practice involved writing letters and also drawing, making collages, collecting objects, gathering detritus, smells and ephemera; things. All of which we packaged and re-packaged in a postal box we ‘Sent with Love’ to one another in turns. Care in folding Love in unfolding Unfolding onto our tables or onto our floors, ‘Sent with Love’ became an expanding field resisting staying put for too long, off on many bumpy journeys from South London to North London, Scotland, Essex and back. Resisting confinement to a set shape or form, as each of us received ‘Sent with Love’, it had changed. The box had become bigger as its contents grew. Accumulated over time, contents had been expanded on, re-organised and reshaped. While it felt different each time it was passed around, as things were added, there was also a familiarity to it similar to re-encountering ‘old friends’. Yet entangled with the wonder and surprise of finding new ones in-between and in the interstices of the many things. Both nomadic and mutant, could this postal-boxturned-assemblage-of-things be itself thinking as it moved around? Could it have been thinking-with us in cradling foldings and unfoldings? Thinking happened in the encounter with the unrecognisable and it was very much felt-with the contents of this ever-changing postal box as they announced themselves to us. In doing so they gained a presence amongst each of us, making a difference in our ‘world’. Thinking lingered in a multilogue, always with the many. The many things which built over the course of our postal exchanges emerged from an ethos of spontaneous acts of relation arising from the affective encounters. Love was not the subject of our letters, but it was used as a method to affect how we might build posthuman and collaborative pedagogic relations. The correspondence of letters and things loosely acts as an analogy for assessment and rather a ‘love ethic’ (hooks, 2000, pp. 87-101) as a dimension from which to think about it. In hooks’ words, a dimension encompassing ‘care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge’ (p. 14). Our evolving material collaborative conversation does not seem to have a trackable clear beginning and end, it does not follow a linear chronological narrative. Rhythm, direction and connection were created at the point of encounter with the object-in-becoming. In this sense, our conversation formed as a rhizome because it followed principles of connection and heterogeneity.

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  167 As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘In a rhizomatic structure, any point can be connected to anything, other, and must be’ (1988, p. 5). Our collective rhizomatic experience allowed us to gather in a place beneath the normative institutional curriculum control. A place where we created our own meaning with each other arising from the affect of the encounter. Our correspondence was always to the many, the whole, the collective. Creating, therefore, as an ‘undercommons’ (Harney and Moten, 2013), and an ‘emergent collectivity sited in the encounter’ (Manning, 2016, p. 8), enabled an unspoken energy, a field of relation and a praxis of care. Our choice to approach our question via a creation process was so that it immediately placed us in this field of relation not only with one another as humans, but also with the materialities of the many things that we made: the words and light blue wool, pebbles, oval stickers, feathers, brown paper, numbers, crumbling stones, dry leaves, woof-woof, wool, tracings, origami, little square book, betty’s red ribbon, orange plasters, dried flowers, envelopes, hold up to the light, pinecone, striped table cloth, rug, Harry the dog, fragile, cat paws, fish stickers, brown paper bag, white paper bag and words. Collected and exchanged while we became more attuned to our/ each other’s physical and geographical environments. This process resembles that of researchcreation, as described by Erin Manning (2016, p. 27) as a process conducive to being generative of new forms of experience and forms of knowledge that are ‘extralinguistic’, not bound to the confines of language. Research-creation as an activity conductive of new processes that emerge from the entanglement between theory and practice. Manning argues that the hyphenation of research with creation proposes an approach where the art process is generative of thought, connecting the thinking through making to a writing practice (p.  240). Manning further elaborates that research-creation ‘tremulously stages an encounter for disparate practices, giving them a conduit for collective expression’ (2016, p. 27). The nomadic and mutant postal box and its contents act both as the platform for these encounters, as well as being a heterogeneous assemblage of disparate practices, the collective expression itself. In-Between-ing Delights

In this section we describe our feelings and thoughts about the processes of receiving and sending our generative bricolage love letters to each other. Care in folding Love in unfolding

Joyful Wilding

We, with our love letter postal telehaptic entanglements, challenge forms of assessment practices through collective and collaborative processes of sending each other hybrid bricolage love letters. Through their journeys in-between,

168  Ana Vicente Richards et al. Tolleshunt Major and Bridge of Allan and Enfield and Woodside South Norwood, the letters grew into multiple rhizomatic assemblages of joy. As Deleuze and Guattari (2005), explain …there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories, but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or, on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture. All this, lines and measurable speeds constitute an assemblage. (pp. 3–4) They grew: being collaged – becoming bricolage – vitally assembled – drawn on – collecting objects – entwined plants – floating fur – seeds scattered. Sometimes glued or stitched together, sometimes loosely rattling around in the boxes they came to us/me sporadically. The joy each parcel of ‘love letters’ brought was immense. We did become voyagers without a map, creating new maps, new directions, new thoughts, new connections. In Dereck Walcott’s Nobel prize speech (1992), The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory, he says, ‘Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape’. Our broken vases are what assessment has become, and the fragments we created in Sent with Love are pieced back together to create more loving ways of assessment and feedback. Every time we opened a new package of love letters it felt like we were creating something new, vibrant and vital. As queer theorist Sara Ahmed (2013) has also aptly put it, The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part (n. p.). Non-reflexive disciplinary and other forms of knowledge get reiterated through the praxis of citing, as Ahmed also writes here, therefore fortifying problematic hegemonies of knowledge production and authority. These actions, this praxis, was a becoming in answering the question, what kind of education might emerge if attention is paid to the posthuman and collaborative pedagogies? Care in folding Love in unfolding We thought that joyful wildness is not only ‘committed to mis/readings, refusals, dreaming, fugitivity, insurrection’ (Halberstam, 2019, n.p.), but also to seeking out new intimacies, joys, pleasures, and affirmations (Geerts and Carstens, 2021). We felt this is what we were doing. Putting a collective idea into a collective practice; a co-praxis if you like. Could this be a model of how compassionate peer-led feedback can be produced? With each other and for each other in a creative process that was joyful and productive.

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  169 Where assessment and creation were entangled into the process. Not seen as separated, but one and the same thing (Strom and Mills, 2022). Ana Tsing (2015) refers to ‘the art of noticing – noticing assemblages, synched and un-synched rhythms, polyphony, and various world-making processes around us (both human and non-hu-man)’. The processes and assemblages we went through in experimenting with love letters as possible forms of assessment practices felt that we were tuning into different forms of communication, beyond the verbal and beyond the written. This collective act of making a work that was about, for assessment and in assessment, made us feel these acts became one and not separate. This resonates with her idea that Opening Unfolding Sensing Contemplating Looking Reading Feeling Unfolding Thinking Tinkering Plunging Tele-hapticing Collaborating De-making Re-making Re-writing Constructing Collecting Taping Re-folding Re-packaging Sending Waiting Re-anticipation… Braidotti (2019a, pp. 43–44) argues that ‘There are at least two ways to go about assessing the proliferating discourses of the critical posthumanities. The first approach takes them as expressing new meta-discursive energy on the part of the disciplines. […] In so doing they also re-assert their institutional power and renew their profiles.’ We have tried to avoid this approach in ‘Sent with Love’ and have used what Braidotti (ibid) calls, ‘a nomadic expansion of multiple practices and discourses. […] which is likely to continue releasing hybrid offspring and new heterogeneous assemblages. The next section looks more closely at the possibilities of releasing these diverse types of hybrid assemblages.

170  Ana Vicente Richards et al. Affirmative alternatives

In this section we offer alternatives to assessment ‘to undo the current ways of doing – and then imagine, invent and do the doing differently’ (Taylor, 2016, p. 8). We are reflecting on what we have learnt and the aspects of our collaborative assessment practice that can be taken into a learning context as a transformative tool for both students and staff. Assessment as a collective act

We loved the idea of collaborative assemblages in education. We want to break away from ideas of learning being an individual process, an only-human process towards collective and cooperative forms of learning that create affective posthumanist relations in education. There is a generosity in the sharing of wisdom within our letters. These are acts of community. As Kimmerer (2013) posits, ‘What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together’ (p.15). We feast! The collectivity of our endeavour brings an abundance of intellectual, spiritual and emotional nourishment. We guide one another, noticing what might otherwise have gone unexplored in an individual endeavour: Letter 3rd September 2022 Dear Ana, Liz and Mark I’ve been thinking a lot about affirmative ethics and what this means for our collective collaborative coproduced practice. Prof Rosi Braidotti talked about ‘transforming negativity – extracting knowledge from pain without drowning in the sorrow’. This is what we are doing, making, thinking and becoming. What practices can work as transformation, as healing? I have been thinking about our practice as a form of potentia – as relational and positive. With much love Vikki Letter 11th September 2022 Dear Mark, Ana and Vikki My heart lifted as I read Vikki’s letter, thinking about the prospect of learning from our more than human teachers about moving assessment practices to collective acts. I was immediately reminded of Prof Robin Wall Kimmerer who posited that; ‘The trees act not as individuals, but somehow as a collective. Exactly how they do this, we don’t yet know. But what we see is the power of unity. What happens to one happens to us all. We can starve together or feast together.’ I love the idea of assessment as a feast with our companions! A feast of reciprocal learning and wisdom. A nourishment full of joy and love.

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  171 Taking this notion towards the concept of kinn-ing, what if we considered assessment as an ethical responsibility to share wisdom within a ‘constellation of companions’. A process led with intention and gratitude for connection. Where might this notion of assessment lead us? I wonder about assessment and feedback centring on what we learn together in our tangle of relations. Of it being an experimental, active and reciprocal process. What if as a ‘constellation’ we collectively envisioned what feedback is. What if we co-created when and how it happens, what it looks like, and how multitudes of knowledges manifest within it? If kinn-ing requires slowing down so we can listen more deeply with our entire bodies, might we be able to foster HE cultures that welcome slowing down in assessment processes? Robin attests that kinn-ing is fighting for what you love, out of love. As a group our cup of love and potentia is overflowing. I keep this hope close to my heart. With love, Liz Ideas swarm from our exchanges. How might assessment practices mirror our co-created voyage of discovery? Our letter-writing was an enactment of working alongside each other collectively as partners to unearth and share wisdom. This prompted us to think about how assessment processes are traditionally reinforced and our judgement as academics are the only ones that matter. Fiona Blaikie, Christine Daigle and Liette Vasseur (2020) challenge us to consider learners and teachers as co-creators of knowledge rather than inferior and superior beings. Paulo Freire promotes dialogue rooted in horizontal power relations that disrupt the student teacher contradiction so that, ‘the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, the one who is himself, but taught in dialogue with the students’ (Freire, 1970, p.3). In the process of writing our love letters, we explored negotiating assessment by asking our co-authors for their feedback. We relied on collective knowledges to resist binary power relations. We wrote and responded to each other in our feedback in a way that centred relationality as a form of potentia. These different experiences of assessment informed our thinking about what a relational pedagogy of assessment might feel like. We can reframe relationships by giving students a voice and agency in assessment whereby they mould assessment into a personally meaningful act. We can embody this in all aspects of our assessment practices: from the project briefs we write, to the feedback we offer, and the way that we mark (Bunting and Hill, 2023). We can enable students to work on topics that relate to personal interest and goals through the form of negotiated assessment or flexibility within assessment briefs. We can collectively co-create learning outcomes, discuss and agree grades in dialogue to redistribute power. This turn to relational ontology demands intentionality: a conscious designing-in of sociality for learning climates of interconnectedness and interdependence to flourish.

172  Ana Vicente Richards et al. In our quest for reciprocity, could we recreate the natural moments for pausing from our letters? The in-betweening. The continual unfolding of ideas that ebbed and flowed at their own pace through our letter chain was delightful. The slowing down embedded in waiting for the letters to journey back and forth from Scotland to London to Essex was an embodiment of care, a welcome invitation to rest, renew, contemplate. With each round there was an opportunity to be replenished. We found comfort in our time being shared. Slowness and assessment might feel alien, as assessment is time bound, pressured and can increase stress and anxiety for staff (Hill, 2023). But need it be? Pauses can be scaffolded into the assessment process. We can build in moments of stillness and silence to contemplate how far we have come. We can share the labour of assessment as an act of social justice for both students and staff as a collaborative act, away from the institutional separations that characterise educational institutions. Rather than creating a race to the finish line, a finished product, we can intentionally design assessment to distribute and disperse ‘doing’ with ‘being’ together, fostering cultures of nurturing and deceleration. This collective, posthuman approach to assessment practice relies upon trust. Trust of our students, but also trust in ourselves. As Gravett, Taylor and Fairchild (2021) posit, ‘The question for us as teachers is – do we trust ourselves enough to pass the job of assessment over to students and do we trust our students enough to do it properly?’ (p. 12). The dismantling of humanist power legacies requires us to engage in a continual questioning of whose ideas and practices are valued, whose are not, and bravely resist the status quo in hopeful affirmation. Assessment as Healing

Throughout the process, we have thought about how healing this collaboration has been, but have also been conscious of multiplicity and how, at times, the pressure to respond became overwhelming when already experiencing anxiety from work, family and health pressures. We have created an embodied, embedded and compassionate practice that creates joy, healing and connection – how, then, do we offer this as an approach for educators as we enmesh relational assessment within the curriculum? Our letters delve into tangles of tensions and hopeful pursuits of change: Letter 16th July 2022 Dear Liz, Ana and Mark I’m on the floor of my bedroom sitting amongst all these ideas. Ideas as text and image and object. Once again, I struggle to capture inwards how this feels, but I wanted to share something important that Ana wrote to me in her quote from Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. She connected compassion and healing. We’ve been thinking about how we can change assessment practices by holding the ethical principle of do no harm at the heart of our work and

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  173 we’ve talked about being trauma informed. I’m wondering if we can think of assessment as a form of healing? Can feedback be this emergency blanket? Could it bring safety, security, belonging, care, understanding? Is it love? I’m going to explore this a bit more and can’t wait to hear your response. With love, Vikki Letter 23rd July 2022 Dear Mark, Ana and Vikki Vikki posed whether we could think of assessment as a form of healing. It immediately takes me to the words of bell hooks that teaching is caring for the souls of our students. This goal of education as a soul-based act to support healing is close to my heart. The wake-up call of current collective traumas make this an urgent need, do they not? Trica Kress and Christopher Edmin argue it requires us to tackle the causes of ‘dis-ease’ in society rather than focus on white eurocentric and patriarchal wellness narratives. This seems like life work without a clear path, but might we be brave enough to take a small step and linger in liminal spaces of uncertainty? If we adopted radical love as a value, might this offer movement towards it? Mays Imad talks about the importance of hope and purpose in healing. But how much space do we hold for this within assessment? And is this even possible within a graded framework that encourages the pursuit of self-esteem over self-compassion and becoming? I am brought back to my own experiences of non-human wisdom guiding and supporting healing. Of the feathers that land in my path reassuring me I’m heading in the right direction. And the butterflies that sit beside me during painful moments symbolising beauty in transformation. How might we apply this wisdom in feedback? What if we go beyond words, activate other senses and consider symbolic feedback? Might we learn from the gentle nudges of nature and offer micro-feedback that supports students in finding strength and perseverance? I think of nods of encouragement, smiles of reassurance, a doodle left to fire an idea. What do you think? With love, Liz We sense the process of sending and receiving love letters might be what Yusef Waghid (2019, p.71) calls ‘rhythmic caring’. That is, of caring with. Of mutually enriching ‘back-and-forth fluctuations’ (Waghid, 2019, p.vi) which recognise our interdependence as both givers and receivers of care. The letter exchanges did not feel like a familiar paternalistic form of care, but rather like reciprocal intra-actions that nurture feelings of togetherness and connection. We appeared entwined. Entwined not only through the physicality of our ribbon-tied bundles of love letters, but by the shared vulnerability and intimacy of sharing parts of ourselves. There is a felt intention and gratitude, which is

174  Ana Vicente Richards et al. so powerful. The process surfaces affective, sensorial dimensions and leaves us pondering that which is often not ordinarily considered valid knowledge. We agree that ‘…the challenge is to push this further to enable an assessment to become an intra-active mattering – to move beyond assessment as something which is considered as primarily cognitive, rational and technical toward a more complex understanding of affective, embodied, and relational processes’ (Gravett and Winstone, 2020, p. 12). The process of our love letters highlights a way to rethink approaches to a pedagogical practice that is plural, heterogeneous and caring, resisting what Dennis Atkinson referred to as the ‘umbilical authority of control curriculum orders’ in his paper entitled Practices, Interstices, Otherness and Taking Care (35:17, 2021). Writing as caring. Feedback as caring. Assessment as caring. There is a felt transformative power of this ethics of care. Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher (1990) describe care as a ‘species activity’ for repairing the world. We recognise the complexity and stickiness of care within higher education cultures. It is problematic to assume there is adequate support and capacity for sustainable caring relationships to be enacted. Yet we call for a reframing and rethinking of care to that of ‘mutuality’, of reciprocal trusting relationships that equally recognise one another’s achievements and value as an act of mutual healing. It is vital we connect with the multiplicity of our feelings and consider in our own contexts how we might plant these seeds of care within assessment. Conclusions: Re-imaginings, Towards Posthuman Forms of Assessment We tried to ‘make a map’ not ‘a tracing’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005), to critically and nomadically question the sometimes-stubborn thinking about assessment practices in higher education. At the start of this adventure, we proposed thinking through the question, ‘What kind of assessment might emerge if attention is paid to the posthuman and collaborative pedagogies?’ This was by a process of collaborative writing using the form of love letters. Our chapter emerged from the exchange, movement and duration implied in the sending/ receiving/ re-sending letters to each other by post. We saw this as an ‘affirmative alternative’ to the business-as-usual approach, or the tinkering around the edges of making assessment better for learning. This process may not even be recognised as an assessment practice as it avoids value judgements. What we wanted to show is that we can help each other learn from each other in ways that are not harmful or that create false hierarchical positionings in education. As bell hooks argues in Love as the Practice of Freedom (1994), ‘Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed’ (p. 1). We agree with her that ‘the moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others’ (p.5).

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  175 References Atkinson, D. (2021, Decembeer 14). Practices, Interstices, Otherness and Taking Care. [video] Goldsmiths University, Centre for Arts and Learning, Ecologies of Practice Symposium. https://www.gold.ac.uk/cal/events Bainbridge-Cohen, B. (2022). Embodiment is the cells’ awareness of themselves [Instagram] 30th June 2022. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cfb3z3UlBNE/ Bali, M. and Zamora, M. (2022). The equity-care matrix: Theory and practice. IJET, 30(1). doi: 10.17471/2499-4324/1241 Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp. 801–831. doi: 10.1086/345321 Barad, K.M. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Blaikie, F., Daigle, C., and Vasseur, L. (2020). New pathways for teaching and learning: the posthumanist approach. Canadian Commission for UNESCO. Blanco-Wells, G. (2021). Ecologies of repair: A post-human approach to other-thanhuman natures. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, p. 633737. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021. 633737 Braidotti, R. (2013). Posthuman relational subjectivity and the politics of affirmation. In Rawes, P. (Ed.) Relational architectural ecologies. Routledge, pp. 21–39. Braidotti, R. (2018). Affirmative ethics, posthuman subjectivity, and intimate scholarship: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti. Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship, Advances in Research on Teaching (Vol. 31), Emerald Publishing Limited, pp. 179–188. doi: 10.1108/S1479-368720180000031014 Braidotti, R. (2019a). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), pp. 31–61. doi: 10.1177/0263276418771486 Braidotti, R. (2019b). Posthuman knowledge. Polity Press. Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. (Eds) (2018). Posthuman glossary. Bloomsbury Academic. Calvino, I. (1974). Invisible cities. Harcourt Brace & Company. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1998). Essays critical and clinical. Verso. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (trans. B. Massumi). Uni­ versity of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2005). A thousand plateaus. University of Minnesota Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder. Geerts, E. and Carstens, D. (2021). Pedagogies in the wild: Entanglements between Deleuzoguattarian philosophy and the new materialisms: Editorial. Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(1), pp. 1–14. Gravett, K., Taylor, C.A. and Fairchild, N. (2021). Pedagogies of mattering: Reconceptualising relational pedagogies in higher education. Teaching in Higher Edu­ cation. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1989580 Gravett, K. and N. E. Winstone. (2020). Making connections: Alienation and authenticity within students’ relationships in higher education. Higher Education Research and Development. doi: 10.1080/07294360.2020.1842335 Halberstam, J. (2019). Female masculinity. Duke University Press.

176  Ana Vicente Richards et al. Haraway, D. (2016). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late 20th century. University of Minnesota Press. Harney, S. and Moten, F. (2013). The undercommons: Fugitive planning & black study. Minor Compositions. Hill, V. (2023). Enacting compassion during the pandemic: Academic staff experiences of a no detriment policy on pass/fail assessment. In Carrigan, M.A., Moscovitz, H., Martini, M., and Robertson, S.L. (Eds), Building the post-pandemic university: Imagining, contesting and materializing higher education futures. Edward Elgar Publishing. hooks, b. (1994/2006). Love as the practice of freedom in outlaw culture: Resisting representations. Routledge. hooks, b. (2000). All about love. Harper Perennial. Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Penguin. Kimmerer, R. W., Hausdoerffer, J., and van Horn, G. (2021). Kinning is a verb. Orion Magazine. https://orionmagazine.org/article/kinship-is-a-verb/ Kress, T., Emdin, C., and Lake, R. (2021). Critical pedagogy for healing: Paths beyond ‘wellness’, toward a soul revival of teaching and learning. Bloomsbury. Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press. Matthews, K, et al (2021a). Transgressing the boundaries of ‘students as partners’ and ‘feedback’ discourse communities to advance democratic education. Teaching in Higher Education. doi: 10.1080/13562517.2021.1903854 Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. University of Minnesota Press. Munro, I. and Thanem, T. (2018). The ethics of affective leadership: Organizing good encounters without leaders. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28(1), pp. 51–69. doi: 10. 1017/beq.2017.34 Nail, T. (2017). What is an assemblage? SubStance, 46, pp. 21–37. Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2017). Art and design pedagogy in higher education: Knowledge, values and ambiguity in the creative curriculum. Routledge. Springgay, S. and Truman, S.E. (2016) Research-creation. Available at https:// thepedagogicalimpulse.com/research-methodologies/ (Accessed: 20/3/2023). St. Pierre, E. A. (2021). Why post qualitative inquiry? Qualitative Inquiry, 27(2), pp. 163–166. doi: 10.1177/1077800420931142 Strom, K. and Mills, T. (2022). Enacting posthuman ethics to do academia differently: Toward an affirmative peer reviewing practice. Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, Summer 2022, 14(1), pp. 9–22. SSN 1916-3460. University of Alberta. Strom, K., Mills, T., and Ovens, A. (2018). Introduction: Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship. Advances in Research on Teaching, pp. 1–8. doi: 10.1108/ S1479-368720180000031002 Taylor, C. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology. In Taylor, C. and Hughes, C. (Eds), Posthuman research practices in education. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 5–24. doi: 10.1057/9781137453082_2 Taylor, C. (2022). Flipping mentoring: Feminist materialist praxis as quiet activism. Taylor, C. and Bayley, A. (2019) Posthumanism and higher education reimagining pedagogy, Practice and Research. Palgrave Macmillan. Tronto, J. C. and Fisher, B. (1990). Toward a feminist theory of care. In Abel, E.K. and Nelson, M.K. (Eds), Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives. State University of New York Press, pp. 36–54.

Love Letters as Relational Pedagogies of Assessment  177 Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press. Waghid, Y. (2019). Towards a philosophy of caring in higher education. Palgrave Macmillan. Walcott, D. (1992). The antilles: Fragments of epic memory. Nobel Lecture. https:// bit.ly/3IR0H8c Waterhouse, A.-H. L., Otterstad, A. M. and Jensen, M. (2016). ‘…anything but synchronized swimming/methodologies… artistic movements in/with unknown inventions.’ Qualitative Inquiry, 22(3), pp. 201–209. https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/10.1177/1077800415605063

Part IV

Posthuman Affective Eco-Pedagogy

12 Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell

Introduction The chapter’s premise, and primary argument, is that a feasible and just transition to a low-carbon society requires sensitivity to existing attachments to carbon within diversely situated cultures and communities (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021). Built on and of the body of capital, carbon-based materials and surfaces now cover the planet. The athletic shoes that people run in, the motorbikes they ride, the cars they drive, the laptops and phones they carry, are all made from carbon fibre. The ways these surfaces wear on the earth are a material pedagogy that leaves its mark on the planet (Gabrys, 2011), resurfacing the Earth with residues of carbon which are produced by affective desires for lightness, speed, energy, intensity, status, and belonging (Northcott, 2016; Sheller, 2014). The forms that carbon takes within this resurfacing of the earth are extraordinarily diverse, as are the values which become attached to different forms and instantiations of carbon. For instance, unlike plastics, petroleum and coal (which are typically cast as ‘bad’ carbon), carbon fibre is often prized for generating lighter, faster, more capable and resilient lives and mobilities (Hickey-Moody, 2015, 2019; Sheller, 2020). The desire and value that adheres to particular forms and uses of carbon present a cultural-material expression of key contemporary issues which connect everyday life practices with questions of climate justice and the current transition to low-carbon economies. Our work pivots on an understanding that existing gender systems and practices, everyday cultures and scientific knowledges rely on, and contribute to, particular experiences and understandings of carbon and energy cultures (Bell et al., 2020). This chapter responds to the need for research which attends to the cultural-material dynamics of everyday carbon cultures, and specifically, how carbon-heavy lifestyles are bound up with processes of subjectification (identity formation) which are often incommensurable with Western environmentalist discourses. While activist groups such as SchoolStrike4Climate and Fridays4Futures have engaged millions of urban, largely white, middle-class young people in action for climate justice internationally, many young people remain deeply invested in carbon-heavy cultures that reflect a plurality of DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-16

182  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell affective attachments and cultural values. Material inscriptions of social class, language, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexuality all feature in the diversity of youth carbon cultures, and inform young people’s everyday attachments to carbon. In particular, young people’s carbon-heavy mobility choices often involve distinctive aesthetic styles and sensibilities (Stefanoff & Frederick, 2011), and are bound up with varying affective investments in belonging, differentiation, self-expression, pleasure, vitality, hope, and overall, a shared sense of ongoingness and what it takes to get by (Berlant, 2011). In many cases, Western environmentalist discourses both threaten and exclude subjectivities which derive a strong sense of cultural meaning and value from carbon-heavy activities, including popular youth investments in custom car and dirt bike cultures both within and beyond the urban centres. Methodologically, we draw on empirical material from our current pilot studies in the Carbon Cultures Living Lab we have co-developed at RMIT in which we investigate young people’s affective attachments to carbon within dirt-biking, car-racing, and mining communities in rural Australia. Adopting a ‘living lab’ methodology which brings together approaches from cultural studies and creative ethnography (see Hjorth, Harris et al., 2019), our method involves a practice of writing ‘scenes’ which stage encounters between different carbon cultures across scales of production-consumption and spheres of analysis. We see our ‘carbon cultures living lab’ as a mobile research event which is looking to understand established and emergent carbon cultures across diverse fields of encounter and engagement. Each scene in this chapter works to dramatise our encounters with carbon cultures in ways that value plural perspectives and attachments, weaving together interview and workshop data with analyses of cultural artefacts, artworks, memories, and immersive accounts of particular social contexts and environments. Many of the young people and families we speak to in rural communities consider themselves demonised by urban environmentalist ideology, even though they are highly sensitive to changing weather patterns and the value of renewable energy technologies within their local environments. Our scenes draw on interview and photographic data generated in conversation with young people who have been immersed in carbon-heavy cultures from a young age, and derive a strong sense of identity and belonging through these cultural-material practices. By focusing on the investment of affect and desire within diversely situated youth carbon cultures, we hope to open critical discussions about climate change and the Anthropocene to a wider range of life experiences and situated positionalities. What is a Carbon Culture? A low-carbon economy will be difficult to achieve and maintain if communities remain substantively divided on the existence and impacts of climate change. This disagreement is exacerbated by a lack of mutual understanding, geographic, class and cultural politics. We are inventing the concept of carbon

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  183 cultures (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021) through ethnography with diverse low socio-economic status (LSES) youth as an original way to understand and discuss the positive and negative attachments young people have to large-scale carbon emissions. This concept is designed to help young people and their wider communities think about carbon lifecycles, production and consumption, without focusing the conversation on the politically contested idea of climate change. Through ethnography, media analysis, participatory digital animations and co-design, we take an original approach to studies of energy transitions by understanding young people’s attachment to carbon in areas which have historically relied on carbon-heavy industries. We adopt the concept of ‘attachment’ from affect theory to explain relationships that are constitutive of subjectivity and belonging; an attachment is ‘part of who you are’ (Hickey-Moody, 2013). We bring this multidisciplinary approach to the problem of reducing carbon emissions through rethinking relationships to carbon because the social, cultural and economic values embedded in young people’s everyday attachments to carbon are complex. These attachments are geographically distinct while also reflecting differences in class, gender, race, sexuality, and educational attainment (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021). A just and inclusive transition to a low emissions economy requires multidisciplinary sensitivity to existing youth carbon cultures within diversely situated communities. A multidisciplinary approach to the study of carbon cultures is therefore central to our approach, and builds on Hickey- Moody’s (2015) research into the gendered and classed economies of carbon production and consumption through extending the concept of economies of carbon into young people’s daily lives. Collin’s work has shown that young people’s everyday and cultural practices shape their political concerns and identities (Collin, 2015). Extending this, our pilot research has further demonstrated that systems of cultural value are central to how carbon use becomes part of daily life for young people. Thus, in order to begin to change economies of carbon production and consumption we need to understand young people’s investments in existing socio-cultural economies. These insights form the basis for our diverse approach to environmental education which acknowledges the multiple perspectives on carbon cultures within diverse communities. This approach avoids the binarisation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ relationships with carbon that are embedded within existing curriculums and typically alienates those who do not position themselves within environmentalist discourses and identities. Rethinking Environmental Education The concept of a carbon culture (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021) offers a way to move beyond the political polarisation of ‘climate change debates’ and associated practices of environmental education. The concept enables us to establish a platform for developing and working with inclusive understandings of young people’s diverse attachments to carbon. Our focus on carbon cultures facilitates new ways of imagining and talking about the environment and climate

184  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell that do not marginalise young people whose families are employed in the fossil fuels industry or who enjoy carbon-heavy hobbies. Through developing shared understandings of carbon as a precious resource we encourage a broad cross-section of young people to think about the impacts of carbon emissions on the atmosphere. In this respect, the concept of carbon cultures looks to provide an alternative to approaches to environmental politics, education, and communication which speaks largely to and for white, Western environmentalist discourses. It reflects growing concern that environmental education’s historical focus on environmentalist identities is insufficient to prepare diverse young people for the unequally distributed impacts of climate change and the transition to low-carbon energy systems (Jorgenson, Stephens and White, 2019, p. 160). Existing environmental education and communication initiatives have largely overlooked migrant, rural and impoverished communities which do not identify with Western environmentalist discourses on climate change, and yet remain especially vulnerable to the effects of extreme weather, drought, and economic transitions away from fossil fuels (Sarrica et al., 2018). Environmental education’s continued focus on Western models of thought has the potential to exacerbate political tensions over climate change, effectively ‘privatising’ environmental action and neglecting intercultural conversations which could lead to more equitable outcomes for diverse stakeholders (Jorgenson, Stephens and White, 2019, p. 164). These tensions have been exacerbated by Australian media coverage of youth climate strikes, which variously reinforce popular images of primarily white, middle-class young people as being manipulated by adults (Collin and Matthews, 2021), or worse, as ‘zealots’, ‘rebels’, and even ‘pawns’ of radical environmentalist groups (Mayes and Hartup, 2021). Such representations forcibly exclude subjectivities and attachments which are not recognisable as ‘environmentalist’ from the field of environmental politics, effectively closing down pluralist conversations, understandings, and modes of participation in critical political arenas such as energy system transitions. As such, knowledge is now needed to bring about more pluralistic approaches to environmental education and communication in order to build new forms of carbon literacy across the wider public sphere. This shift will need to incorporate the perspectives and knowledges of diverse LSES young people, and bring their perspectives into public debates in ways that support diverse LSES youth in participating in civic life and acting as empowered citizens and environmental custodians during a period of energy transition. Carbon Cultures and the Capitalocene

As we introduced above, our project is invested in developing and experimenting with the concept of ‘carbon cultures’ as a pluralistic theoretical and analytic framework for understanding carbon as a primary element in what makes young people and communities who they are. We believe this work is critically important in informing more just and equitable transitions away from fossil

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  185 fuel dependency and ecocidal1 capitalism by acknowledging and understanding the deep affective attachments to carbon within diversely situated lives and communities. Building on feminist new materialist scholars, Elizabeth Wilson (2015) and Samantha Frost (2016) who look to politically reclaim the biochemical relationality that undergirds social and ecological life, our research explores how carbon not only forms the elemental building blocks for physical embodiment but also infuses all forms of social imagining, fabulation, and dreaming. This perspective makes the possibility of a so-called ’post-carbon’ future or imaginary untenable, offering instead different ways of thinking and relating with carbon which equally acknowledge its biochemical, speculative, and affective agency (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021). We argue that it is precisely the affective imaginaries that spring from – and become attached to – carbon that have determined our varied pasts and presents, and will inevitably also determine the trajectories of our futures. Importantly, this means acknowledging capitalism as a system of collective fabulation rather than an outcome of biological, social, and technological evolution. In other words, recognising that capitalism is a fiction which both forms and is formed from carbon. As Jason Moore (2015), Elizabeth Povinelli (2016), and Brian Massumi (2018) have variously argued, the Capitalocene names a time when capitalism has accelerated to earthly proportions, detaching itself from human labour to become a geo-ontological power operating at the scale of a ‘world-ecology’. Carbon is the creative fuel and biochemical lifeblood that powers this systemic capture of Earthly life through (and as) the inhuman body of capital (HickeyMoody et al., 2021). While governments and industries scramble to tax, trade, capture, or otherwise reduce global carbon emissions in a race to slow the catastrophic advance of climate change, such schemes remain entrenched within capitalist fictions of use-value and calculability. At the same time, they ignore the affective force of capital itself as an ‘onto-power’ (Massumi, 2018) which algorithmically perverts and deploys carbon in ways that are increasingly dissociated from the whims of human decision-makers. We read the Capitalocene as a system of fabulation which encodes particular (in)human values of carbon into the Earth’s ecologies and lifeways, while exploring possibilities for post-capitalist carbon imaginaries and modes of existence. Not only do the values attached to these capitalist fictions ignore the significant amount of environmental value that is destroyed in the emission of carbon, they also reductively imagine carbon as an inert substance with no intensive, processual, or affective properties. Building on Massumi’s (2018) revaluation of value for post-capitalist futures, we argue that creativity is crucial for re-imagining carbon beyond economic value and calculability to embrace its affective intensity or ‘onto-power’ as agentic matter. It is the affective allure and surplus value generated by carbon that must be reappropriated if we are to survive the Capitalocene (Rousell, 2020). This effectively means turning the creative powers of speculative fabulation (or what Deleuze called the ‘powers of the false’) against capitalism in order to revalue the value of carbon from the inside of living processes (Goodman and Manning, 2022).

186  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell Scenes from Carbon Cultures

In the text that follows we offer a series of vignettes that illustrate scenes from our carbon cultures living labs. These vignettes have been written to ‘bring to life’ experiences, people and places from our ethnography and co-design, offering an experiential lens that brings carbon cultures as embedded desires, attachments and passions to life. As carbon cultures are largely driven by the psychological experience of desire (desire to belong, pleasure, desire to make change, desire for lifestyle) we have chosen to explore them through an affective media (creative ethnography) in an effort to convey this desire. The voices employed to narrate these vignettes change depending on the perspective being offered, so tone and tense are considered part of the method here. The vignettes tell stories of life in a brown coal-mining area, of digital animation workshops we ran with children from the coal mining area that explored the theme of carbon cultures, and a live artwork that explores car cultures as forms of ‘geology in motion’. Anna Gets to Know Hazelwood Pondage My first tenured teaching position was in Australia at a regional university campus adjacent to a large power station. This position began my interest in what I now call ‘carbon cultures’ because it moved me into the middle of one of the largest brown coal-mining areas in Australia. The power industry had populated the area for generations. Migrants had moved from England and Wales to permanent jobs in the mines, and had built families there. Later in their lives, the mine paid for the oxygen needed by some of the older workers I got to know, who had left work due to lung health issues. Generations of families lived in the shadow of the mines, both virtually and literally. These families were bound to the working-class region by the only employment opportunities for miles, by poverty and by geography. The large power station nearest to my home was cooled by a large dam called the Pondage. The Pondage had been built to serve a practical function (cooling) in the production of power generated by burning brown coal to make power, but it also sat at the centre of community life. The water was heated to 22 degrees by the power station, so it was warm fresh (if somewhat muddy) water to swim in, and play on, all year round. This warmth attracted locals and tourists to the surface and the shores of the water: floating on large blow-up toys, speeding in boats, on jet skis, drinking alcohol at the side of the Pondage. At various stages of the year the surface of the Pondage was televised: the regional speed boat racing championships were broadcast live by the local television station. I watched in surprise from my living room as men raced each other in their speedboats on the local oversized dam that emitted steam on cooler mornings. The human race is strange. Having discovered the Pondage through urban myth and television broadcast, I took myself down for a swim. The Pondage was a spectacle of performative masculinity upon

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  187 which men raced each other in a range of vehicles into which they jumped from swinging tyres, jetties, boats, and next to which they got drunk. I discovered the Pondage was home to a range of tropical fish: people released their tropical pet fish from aquariums into the heated climate of the Pondage and they thrived: continuing to live on, to breed and cross-breed in the temperate water. An entrepreneurial local released Barramundi into the Pondage, where they multiplied rapidly in the warm fresh water. They were enjoyed as a fishing sport and a local delicacy. In 2017 Hazelwood Power Station began closing down. As a result, the Pondage no longer cooled the power production process and water temperatures dropped radically from 22 degrees to 11 degrees Celsius, even cooler in winter. The Barramundi, along with the other tropical fish, perished. As the smoke stopped rising from the concrete stacks of the power station, bodies of dead fish bobbed to the surface and washed up along the shoreline. What a starkly different scene from the wild motor sports, men racing each other, people getting drunk in blow-up, floating plastic rings. The social and biological life of Hazelwood Pondage had been profoundly shaped by the power station, the people who worked in it, their passions and pleasures. The fish they liked to keep as pets, along with the fish they loved to eat, had filled the waters. Their identity performances of hard, fast masculinity literally ‘racing each other off’ finished as the Pondage was closed. The stories we tell below come from surrounding areas. Riding with Oscar I love the smell, the sound, the feeling of the vibration that runs through my body. Moving at that speed. Feeling the wind in my face. The chase. The focus where everything comes into one point, and you have to stay on it or you will come off your bike. I like to win and to always push myself to do better.

We are sitting with 13-year-old Oscar in his family home in regional NSW. It is a very neat and well-kept grey weatherboard home with a large garage. Oscar’s Dad runs a successful Auto Repair business. Oscar and his mum look at the photographs of Oscar on bikes laid out on the table as he tells us about his love for dirt bike racing, how he first got into it, what exhilarates him about it. ‘I guess I just grew up around parents that were always on bikes’, he says. ‘I started racing since I was little and I just loved it from then on … I do love the motorbike’s sound, like the actual sound of a motorbike. It’s just like a heart-warming thing … I just love the sound of them’. Oscar’s mother brings over a photograph from a prized place on the mantle (Figure 12.1). The photo shows Oscar riding a small motorbike over a turf jump, the wheels suspended about five centimetres above the ground. His head and body are completely covered by a reflective helmet and a black motorcycle jumpsuit, gloves, and boots. We ask about the gear, what it’s made of and how it feels to wear it from a very young age. ‘Yeah, now that I think

188  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell

Figure 12.1 Oscar competing in the Amcross wearing a full suit composed of carbon fibre.

about it, everything I’m wearing in the photo is made of carbon fibre. And I’ve been wearing it since I was 3 or 4 years old. So I guess carbon is like a big part of who I am.’ ‘This was Oscar’s first time competing in the 85 CC class at the Amcross’ his mother tells us. We ask about Amcross and what it means to them. ‘So instead of people putting jumps in place and stuff it’s just natural terrain’ Oscar says. So like they put markers out on a grass, big grass paddock and you just follow those markers. It’s just natural terrain … It’s just one of those things … like when you’re riding through a corner or a jump or something. The whole environment just goes past you and you’re just thinking about what’s going on right now, not the past or the future. Oscar’s story speaks to how children become intimately entangled with carbon cultures from a very young age. While the physical sciences tell us that our bodies are 18 per cent carbon and that we exhale carbon dioxide molecules with every breath, Oscar helps us understand how carbon is also a critical element in the production of subjectivity and the communities of belonging that sustain life. Transitions to a low-carbon economy have particular implications for young people living in regional communities with a history of dependence on carbon-heavy industries like mining and agriculture. We are interested in how

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  189 children develop affective attachments to different forms of carbon, and how these attachments become part of who they are and how they relate to the world. Oscar has grown up wearing carbon fibre motorcycle gear from a very young age, and has formed complex systems of attachments between the feeling of lightness, speed, power, and protection that this carbon fibre affords. Oscar and his family are not just avid motorbike riders, they are competitively successful bike racers and this gives them a sense of belonging as a family within the wider community. It is part of their social and cultural identity. They are sensitive to the impacts of their love for motorbikes and value racecourses that have minimal impact on the terrain, flora, and fauna of their local environments. Oscar’s mum makes the point that actually having more racecourses for bikes can help limit environmental damage. And yet both Oscar and his mum describe feeling excluded, even demonised, by environmentalist climate change discourses coming primarily from middle-class, urbanised cultures in densely populated areas with much higher detrimental impacts on lands, waters, and biodiversity. On a global scale, blockchain makes more carbon emissions than bike racing, even though there is a blockchain regenerative finance movement, designed to trade carbon, and much less visible ‘green’ bike racing movements. There are some environmental biker organisations, but they are not prolific. Perhaps bike racing is green enough already? Certainly, in comparison to blockchain, it is. Oscar’s attachments to carbon are bound up  with diverse investments in individual and group expression, identityformation, belonging, pleasure, vitality, hope, imagining, and perhaps most significantly, what it simply takes to get by in the world in which his family lives: a world filled with cars, racing and social events at bike meets. Cars are the economic mode of survival for the family and bikes are the fun, fame and identity of the family unit. Carbon Dreaming In the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s recent documentary Carbon: An unauthorised biography, passionate scientists extoll carbon’s extraordinary ability to compose life out of the ancient remnants of dead stars, while carbon’herself’ is anthropomorphised and voiced as a playful and promiscuous element who parties and bonds with just about anything it encounters (see HickeyMoody, 2019). But about halfway through the film, carbon’s party girl persona transitions into an agent of genocide. ‘I was the enabler of life until you chose to make me a weapon of death’ carbon’s raspy voice mourns over images of industrialised military annihilation. ‘I fuel your histories and your shames … your horrors … I also feed your dreams’. A few weeks after Carbon: An unauthorised biography premiered on the ABC, we find ourselves driving from Melbourne to the town of Sale in East Gippsland to run a workshop on carbon cultures at the regional gallery. As we approach Sale the road passes into the La Trobe Valley, an area which contains

190  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell

Figure 12.2 Encountering the Loy Yang power station in the La Trobe Valley.

one of the largest coal reserves in the world and supplies around 70 per cent of Victoria’s power. The open cut mine yawns on the horizon like a black scar that runs for miles. The coal deposit here is estimated to be between 15 and 50 million years old, which is still relatively ‘young’ in geologic terms. The road drops steeply into the valley, curves, and then rises slightly to reveal the hulking mass of the Loy Yang Power station (see Figure 12.2). It looks otherworldly, an image closer to science fiction than any logistical feat of engineering. This power station alone generates more than 14 million tons of greenhouse gases every year to provide power to homes and business across the State of Victoria. Just a few months ago, the power company announced that it would close the power station in the following year in an effort to pursue decarbonised energy strategies. If the Capitalocene fabulated this power station into existence according to the logic of a particular carbon dreaming, new fabulations are now rerouting those affective investments in order to secure a livable future. The children attending our workshop in Sale all come from communities that have historically relied on carbon-heavy industries as the basis for economic security, recreational enjoyment, and social cohesion. The closure of another of the local power stations will put many of their families and community members out of work, and radically transform the affective and material infrastructures that shape and sustain their lives. For the workshop, we asked young people to bring along an object or image of something made from

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  191 carbon that really matters to them. The old family piano; a set of pokemon cards; the backyard trampoline; a karate outfit; a wooden desk; a very cute dog. One child shows us a photo of her wooden bed; it has her name carved into the wood and she says it’s her favourite thing in the world. As the children begin to use digital drawing tools to animate the carbon stories of their favourite things, her iPad screen fills with drawings of elves with long, drooping ears. ‘This is the carbon dreaming I see when I’m sleeping in my bed, she whispers to us. Jordan and Bernard’s Digital Carbon Assemblages Figure 12.3 is a still from an animation made by Jordan, which shows the earth as a carbon molecule, alight and burning because of climate change. The centre of the carbon molecule also resembles a red and white Pokemon ball which is featured on a prized set of Pokemon cards which Jordan brought to the workshop. Orbiting the earth are children creating animations on iPads in colourful plastic cases. This is a creative interpretation of the situation that Jordan was in – a digital animation workshop in a regional gallery. Jordan’s digital media assemblage brought together different forms of gendered and culturally specific knowledge that were effectively connected in how he understands carbon. While his imagery centres the cultural play practices associated with Pokemon card games, the main kind of knowledge that Jordan values in his narrative about carbon cultures is scientific knowledge.

Figure 12.3 Jordan’s digital rendering of the Pokemon carbon culture assemblage.

192  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell Jordan draws on as much science as he can in explaining what carbon is and how carbon pollution works. Science is a ‘legitimate’ knowledge of expertise, gendered masculine in many popular cultural formations and, broadly speaking, it is taken seriously. Scientific discourses are imbued with authority. They are also the main context in which carbon is discussed. Jordan was surely not alone in being asked for the first time to make artwork about carbon. Jordan’s Pokemon imagery and science-y narrative are accompanied by a ‘heavy metal’ soundtrack he made himself on the application ‘Garage Band’. This choice of sound media was important because it was performatively masculine: it situated Jordan as a young man and heralded the issue of climate change as both melancholy and overwhelming. Jordan’s narrative emphasises the role that multinational corporations play in creating climate change. Jordan was adamant that plastic production and waste were the result of multinational corporations and that this was a major driver in climate change. Bernard made a much shorter animation about his ‘very messy’ desk that was made from trees (see Figure 12.4). He drew the process of the trees being cut down and carbon (which he drew as grey and gaseous) being released from the tree. This wood, Bernard explains, is then used to make things like his desk. Bernard is about five years younger than Jordan, and this comes through in the difference in the depth of their voices, the focus of their work (global multinationals vs personal desks), the length of the animations (five mins versus less than one minute) and the background music. Bernard chose not to make background music. However, both animations show intersections of young masculinity with discourses of carbon and offer initial investigations into their own enmeshment in carbon cultures. These are two of many examples in which young participants examined their feelings, associations and knowledges about carbon through digital animation and created soundtracks that explained the story of their

Figure 12.4 A drawing of Bernard’s messy desk.

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  193 animation. Real and imaginary worlds, scientific and emotional worlds were combined through digital animation practices, descriptive voiceover and music. MASS: A Requiem for the Capitalocene Over the past year we have extended our digital media Living Lab that produced the two animations discussed above, as well as many more, through collaborations with contemporary artists who engage with the affective dynamics of carbon in a variety of critical and regenerative ways. Staged at dusk, performance artist Zoe Scoglio’s 2015 project MASS begins with the arrival of approximately one hundred people who park their cars in a circle and silently ascend the mountainous terrain of Calder Park raceway. Led by silent facilitators carrying LED light sticks and wearing wireless headphones, the humans form a solemn, ritualised procession simultaneously resembling a funeral train or spiritual pilgrimage. A series of cars then enter the arena. They are driven by professional car racers, their faces entirely obscured by reflective carbon fibre helmets. Each car articulates an elegant series of choreographic curves, stops, and starts, raising up clouds of black dust into the darkening sky. As night sets in, the humans return to the tight circle of cars before pulling off and driving away one by one. Scoglio describes MASS as ‘a ceremonial gathering tracking the revolutionary potential of people, planets and automobiles … A car gazing trip charting deep time, deep space and deep ecology under the full moon. An invitation to consider ourselves as geology in motion – from the metal in our cars to the minerals in our bodies and the iron at our earth’s core’. MASS mobilises the aesthetic allure of carbon-heavy car cultures, connecting the deep pleasures of muscle cars, V8 engines, and smoke-drenching burnouts with much deeper flows and formations of carbon across geological and cosmological time-scales. It provides an intimate choreography of human cultures and technologies as elemental formations of the Earth in motion, inseparable from the planetary forces, multi-layered histories, and playful material agencies of carbon that give life to matter. And yet MASS can also be read as a ritualised funeral which marks the end of petro-capitalism as the dominant system and culture of the current planetary age (see Figure 12.5). MASS effectively dramatises the Capitalocene as an epoch powered by the geologic affects of carbon in motion, but in doing so, it exposes the Capitalocene as a fiction which masquerades as a naturalised and inevitable reality. In other words, it demonstrates how capitalism generates ecologies of fabulation that bind us to particular stories about who we are and what matters to us. In this sense, MASS offers a kind of requiem for the Capitalocene which acknowledges the vertiginous pleasures and dependencies that bind us to carbon, while gesturing toward counter-practices of fabulation that can and might arise from within the dominant powers of capitalist fictions.

194  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell

Figure 12.5 Still video image from MASS by Zoe Scoglio. (used with permission).

Conclusion We connect Braidotti’s (2022) call for diverse posthuman knowledges and feminisms which ‘speak’ to both everyday and global concerns about carbon/energy futures (Gabrys, 2011). If our thoughts, and even our dreams, are made of carbon, then what really comes to matter is how we think, feel, live, and dream with carbon in ways that are life-affirming and pluralistic rather than ecocidal and exclusionary. Our Living Lab looks to collectively assemble stories and scenes of encounter which take the fabulatory capacities of carbon into account, while also acknowledging the quotidian (but no less constitutive) attachments to carbon which sustain everyday experiences, dependencies, and sites of belonging. In the various scenes and surfaces that we have explored in this chapter, we try to offer windows into various carbon assemblages: both how carbon is experienced and understood by humans but also the cultural-material formations that are brought to bear through carbon cultures. Bodies connected by carbon surfaces and carbon cultures have radically different understandings of how carbon works and why it matters, and the diversity of these perspectives needs to be more broadly understood. Digital media, ethnography and art practice all offer perspectives that are different from the mainstream discourses of carbon. If we are to change the way that carbon is made and distributed, perhaps we first need to change how we understand, what and how we think about carbon. Broadening the forms of knowledge to include experiential, creative and ethnographic narratives is a starting place for such a change.

Affective Attachments to Carbon within Youth Cultures  195 Note 1 The term ‘ecocidal’ is derived from the word ‘ecocide’, which combines ‘eco’ (referring to ecology or the natural environment) and ‘cide’ (meaning to kill or destroy). ‘Ecocidal’ is an adjective used to describe actions, practices, or behaviors that cause severe harm or destruction to the natural environment, ecosystems, or the overall ecological balance of a particular area or the planet as a whole. In essence, when something is labeled as ‘ecocidal’, it means that it is causing such extensive and irreversible damage to the environment that it is comparable to an act of ecological destruction or devastation. This term is often employed in discussions related to pollution, deforestation, habitat destruction, over-exploitation of resources.

References Bell, S. E., Daggett, C. and Labuski, C. (2020) ‘Toward feminist energy systems: Why adding women and solar panels is not enough’. Energy research & social science, 68, 101557. Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel optimism. Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2022) Posthuman feminism. Cambridge: Polity press. Collin, P. (2015) Young citizens and political participation in a digital society: Addressing the democratic disconnect. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Collin, P. and Matthews, I. (2021) ‘School Strike for Climate: Australian students renegotiating citizenship’. In J. Bessant, A. M. Mesinas and S. Pickard (Eds.) When students protest. Secondary and high schools (pp. 125–144). Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Frost, S. (2016) Biocultural creatures: Toward a new theory of the human. Durham: Duke University Press. Gabrys, J. (2011). Digital rubbish: A natural history of electronics. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. Gabrys, J., Hawkins, G. and Michael, M. (Eds.) (2013) Accumulation: The material politics of plastic. Abingdon: Routledge. Goodman, A. and Manning, E. (2022) ‘Social dreaming: Fabulating ecologies’. Qual­ itative Inquiry, 28(5), 578–585 doi:10778004211065799 Hickey-Moody, A. (2013) ‘Affect as method: Feelings, aesthetics and affective pedagogy’. In R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (Eds.) Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 79–95). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. (2015) ‘Carbon fibre masculinity: Disability and surfaces of homosociality’. Angelaki, 20(1), pp. 139–153. Hickey-Moody, A. (2019). Deleuze and masculinity Basingsoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hickey-Moody, A., Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Rousell, D. and Hartley, S. (2021) ‘Children’s carbon cultures’. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 21(3), pp. 214–224. Hjorth, L. Harris, A. Jungickel, K and Coombs, G. (2019) Creative practice ethnographies. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Jorgenson, S. N., Stephens, J. C. and White, B. (2019) ‘Environmental education in transition: A critical review of recent research on climate change and energy education’. The Journal of Environmental Education, 50(3), pp. 160–171. Massumi, B. (2018) 99 theses on the revaluation of value: A postcapitalist manifesto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

196  Anna Hickey-Moody and David Rousell Mayes, E. and Hartup, M. E. (2021) ‘News coverage of the School Strike for Climate movement in Australia: The politics of representing young strikers’ emotions’. Journal of Youth Studies, 25(7), pp. 994–1016. Moore, J. W. (2015) ‘Putting nature to work. Anthropocene, capitalocene, and the challenge of world-ecology’. In C. Wee, J. Schönenbach and O. Arndt (Eds.) Supramarkt: A micro-toolkit for disobedient consumers, or how to frack the fatal forces of the capitalocene (pp. 69–117). Gothenburg: Irene Books. Northcott, M. (2016) ‘The desire for speed and the rhythm of the Earth’. In S. Bergmann and T. Sager (Eds.) The ethics of mobilities. Abingdon: Routledge. Povinelli, E. (2016) Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rousell, D. (2020) ‘Doing little justices: Speculative propositions for an immanent environmental ethics.’ Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), pp. 1391–1405. Sarrica, M., Richter, M., Thomas, S., Graham, I. and Mazzara, B. M. (2018) ‘Social approaches to energy transition cases in rural Italy, Indonesia and Australia: Iterative methodologies and participatory epistemologies’. Energy Research & Social Science, 45(1), pp. 287–296. Sheller, M. (2014) Aluminum dreams: The making of light modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sheller, M. (2020) ‘Mobility justice in urban studies.’ In O. Jensen, C. Lassen, V. Kaufmann, M. Freudendal-Pedersenand and I. Gotzsche Lange (Eds.). Handbook of urban mobilities. Abingdon: Routledge. Stefanoff, L. and Frederick, U. (2011) ‘Emerging perspectives on automobilities in non-urban Australia: A context for cruising country’. Humanities Research, 17(2), pp. 1–16. Wilson, E. A. (2015). Gut feminism. Durham: Duke University Press.

13 Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy Staging the Climate Crisis Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann

Introduction You start with the in-betweenness … If there is one key term, that’s it: relation. When you start in-between, what you’re in the middle of is a region of relation […] we’re in affect, affect is not in us. It’s not the subjective content of our human lives. It’s the felt quality of a relational field that is always ‘more than’ […] and always more-than-human. (Massumi, 2015, pp. 48, 124) As an open-ended and relational process, witnessing can be mediated, communicated, shared, experienced and recomposed by others who become co-witnesses across fluctuating temporalities, making and binding witnessing communities around truths that, though shared, remain open to contestation. (Richardson and Schankweiler, 2020, p. 238)

As recently as 2014, Snaza et al. in their article ‘Toward a Posthumanist Education’, observed ‘how resolutely humanist almost all educational philosophy and research is’ (2014, p. 40). The authors name ecology, on the other hand, as one of several recent critical approaches that challenge ‘the ways humanism has restricted politics and education’ (Snaza et al., 2014, p. 41). In their new book, Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities (2022), new materialist/posthumanist cultural theorists Iris van der Tuin and Nanna Verhoeff note that ecology is a ubiquitous topic in contemporary art and popular culture and the focus of many recent publications in the environmental humanities and beyond. New academic curricula attest to the currency of this topic, while also calling for ‘transdisciplinary debates, interdisciplinary approaches, and methodological and conceptual innovations’ (van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, p. 88). Ecology, in short, forms an easy alliance with posthumanist work which is transdisciplinary and pedagogically innovative. Snaza et al. as well identify intersectionality as one of the defining traits of posthumanist work in education (2014, p. 41), emphasising that posthumanism requires ‘wide-ranging and radical changes in how we perceive of educational practices and institutions’ (2014, p. 43). Nina Lykke argues specifically that ‘posthumanist conceptual frameworks make postdisciplinary DOI: 10.4324/9781003365693-17

198  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann transgressions of disciplinary boundaries necessary (2018, p. 333). Recent publications on posthumanist work use both the terms ‘transdisciplinary’ and ‘postdisciplinary’ and the present chapter also uses both terms (for detailed differentiation between the two terms, see Lykke, 2010 and 2011). ‘Postdisciplinary’ is, of course, the more utopian term, given that academic structures on both sides of the Atlantic are often still largely based on disciplinary divisions. In our work, however, we would indeed like to respond to Lykke’s call for postdisciplinarity which ‘requires new modes of organising as well as new methodological tools’ (2018, p. 33). This contribution presents our recent border-free class, ‘Climate Crisis: Teaching Fiction and Philosophy at the End of the World’, as an example of a methodologically innovative, eco-critical post- or transdisciplinary and transnational virtual exchange. Having started in the North American humanities, ecocriticism as a multidisciplinary alliance has in recent years taken not only a transdisciplinary, but also a transnational turn (for instance Oppermann, 2012 or Heise, 2013). While ecocriticism is traditionally concerned with humancultural representations of natural environments, its impetus to ‘restore significance to the ontology of the land’ (Oppermann, 2012, p. 405), by analysing texts in which the land plays a pivotal role, is non-anthropocentric and lends itself to posthumanist education. Initially a product of the educational zoom moment that was the pandemic summer of 2021 – a time that brought renewed focus to questions of community, connectedness and (closed) national borders – our (upper-level) course has, at the time of this writing, now been taught twice, with students from both our universities, in the US and in Germany, and from multiple disciplines in education, the humanities, and the sciences. The course has established an integrative conversation co-assembling the science of global warming, philosophy, cultural, media, film and literary studies, foreign language pedagogy and teacher education, ecocriticism and eco-pedagogy across national and institutional paradigms. In the context of the Anthropocene, so named for our species’ devastating effect on the planet’s ecosystems, the present chapter explores how posthumanist, post-anthropocentric or new materialist philosophy can engage our teaching and our daily pedagogical practices. Our own contribution questions traditional, Enlightenment-based pedagogies of knowledge production in the neoliberal university where acceleration and education as a product have become accepted rationalities. While conventional education based on the transmission of pre-existing, fixed bodies of knowledge, skills, and attitudes is outcome-oriented and reinforces the status quo, we here propose an open-ended critical and creative pedagogy based on process and relationality. In his ‘Dying to Learn: Teaching Human-Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction’ (2022, p. 77), the German educational theorist Roman Bartosch also questions outcome- or competence-based education whose ‘compulsory optimism’ concerning what education can achieve on an individual or social level is based on anthropocentric, Enlightenment notions of progress and

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  199 mastery. We concur that this focus on pre-defined outcomes runs counter to more recent work in education inspired by posthumanist process philosophy, just as relentless optimism runs the risk of denying the realities of ecological decline and mass extinctions. Replacing, or at least mitigating, the pedagogical focus on individual competition and rationalist, human-centred mastery of nonhuman objects, our class aims to foster kinship and ‘communities of practice’ (Bartosch, 2019, p. 77) through group work in transnational and transdisciplinary student teams in which all members of the group receive the same grade. Together with assignments that ask students to establish and reflect upon affective relations with more-than-human individuals, such projects recognise agency across national-cultural, disciplinary and ontological (human and more-than-human) lines. As Vivienne Bozalek writes: ‘Creativity is not an inherent property of individuals, it is an assemblage; a complexity of networks of human and non-human actors which give rise to creative learning rather than human intentionality’ (2018, p. 397). Since the students in our class were not only enrolled at institutions on different sides of the Atlantic, but were, moreover, also from different disciplines, as well as at different stages of their educational journeys, from highly motivated rising sophomores to graduating seniors, the course provided a classroom of students with diverse interests and skill sets. As it turned out, this mix proved highly productive: students easily engaged in lively in-class discussions and produced thought-provoking collaborative presentations that approached topics through multidisciplinary and multicultural lenses. In addition, several well-known experts gave guest lectures in eco-literacy/ecopedagogy as well as science. Given our (the instructors’) own backgrounds as scholars in literature and culture, the course integrated multiple textual modes or genres – both fictional and non-fictional, in literature, theatre, documentary and feature film, and advertising – with our expertise in posthumanist philosophy and education. Transversal Affective Eco-Pedagogy and Place-Based Learning We conceptualised the course, in short, as post- or transdisciplinary as well as transnational (transatlantic) and transcultural. As cultural theorists van der Tuin and Verhoeff observe, the prefix trans-, from Latin ‘across’, ‘is used in countless words and concepts today’ (2022, p. 199). The authors summarise the various examples they give, from transcorporeal to transspecies, by referring to the term ‘transversality’, a concept used in philosophy and cultural theory and first coined by the French psychiatrist-philosopher Félix Guattari. As van der Tuin and Verhoeff point out, transversality elicits theories and methodologies freed from any obligation to follow hierarchies (classifixations) [sic] in organizing thought, objects, or living organisms (including humans). […] Most importantly, the concept of transversality connects movements in thought, science,

200  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann and engineering; social movements; and arts and culture in transdisciplinary ways and it fights the reductive tendencies of canonical, dualist and linear orderings. (2022, pp. 199–200) Challenging all hierarchical orderings, including, most importantly, the nature-culture distinction, our course methodology used transversality, enmeshment or entanglement, and lived, generative relationality as its guiding concepts. The post-anthropocentric eco-critical (fictional, documentary, and theoretical or philosophical) texts and films that we selected for our course transverse the conventional privileging of the human in their enactment of agency and subject matter. The binational groups in which students collaborated crossed national and cultural borders. Student presentations and engaged discussions balanced student-teacher voice disparities in the context of the classroom. Finally, specific experiential assignments encouraged students to establish intra-active material conversations with more-than-human partners that went beyond merely textual relationships. These place-based tasks asked students to explore their own sensory perceptions and intra-actions with/in their more-than-human worlds. In our course, we thus not only expected students to learn how their human classmates across the Atlantic viewed and interacted with(in) their morethan-human worlds, but we also prompted students to learn and communicate with more-than-human beings and cultures in their own situated/place-based contexts, reflecting on their own roles as humans in this intra-connected world. Bozalek writes: ‘posthuman socially just pedagogies […] foreground transdisciplinarity and the importance of including the natural sciences and humanities, as well as more than human others in educational projects’ (2018, p. 397). Our experiential-embodied pedagogy was inspired by the botanist and poet Robin Wall Kimmerer’s collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). Kimmerer is a professor of botany and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer’s writing is influenced by her training as a scientist, as well as by her Indigenous heritage. In our class project, students were asked to intra-act with more-than-human partners/the land where they live, such as the Southeastern US or Northern Germany, respectively, and share their findings by posting on the class Learning Management System (D2L). Students reflected on their experiences in writing and also documented their learning with the help of visual media, such as videos or photographs, thereby acknowledging the agency/ability to witness the more-than-human beings whose voices have been silenced by Western epistemology. Discussing affective witnessing, Richardson and Schankweiler write: ‘if what constitutes the body – any body – is the capacity to affect and be affected, to be webbed in relation to other bodies and to experience the world as it changes, then perhaps nonhuman objects can become bodies that bear witness’ (2019, p. 175; emphasis added).

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  201 In this assignment series, the students’ overall task was to unlearn hurrying (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 233; van der Tuin and Verhoeff, , 2022, pp. 201–202), to pay attention, and to be open to the living world around them. In the following segment are the specific tasks used for the five-week duration of the project: Task No. 1 Week 1 Choose a landscape near where you live (an orchard, park, garden, meadow, forest, river, lake, hill, etc.) Learn the name/s of one or more plants or animals in this landscape (possibly in different languages; Kimmerer, 2013, p. 385). Observe and describe one of the plants or animals in detail. Learn the gifts that one or more of these plants/animals carry (e.g. medicinal uses; the beneficial interactions between people and the land) Sit silently with this plant/animal and their landscape. See, listen, smell, possibly taste or touch it (respectfully and without doing harm) and write down/record your sensory experiences. What are you feeling? (affective witnessing) Taking Kimmerer’s book as your model, tell the (his)story of one of the plants/animals. Describe the dynamic relationship between this plant/this animal/this land and its habitat, including the people.

Task No. 2 Week 2 Taking Kimmerer’s book as your inspiration (‘An Offering’; ‘Allegiance to Gratitude;’ Kimmerer, 2013, p. 311), create and observe/commit to a personal ceremony or daily practice of gratitude and reverence in which you practise respect and reciprocity with the more-than-human world.

Task No. 3 Week 3 Reflect (in writing) on what you eat or take as a gift in other ways. See the guidelines of the Honorable Harvest (Kimmerer, 2013, pp. 183– 185). Consider the lives behind the products you use.

202  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann Task No. 4 Week 4 Learn reciprocity and develop an ethics of care. Reflect in writing or (recorded) speaking on what can you do to care for the land and ‘the nonhuman people’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 319). Are there wounded places where you live? How can they be restored? How do you think climate change has affected and will be further affecting your more-than-human kin and the land where you live in the years to come?

‘[I]t is not enough to weep for our lost landscapes; we have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 327) (biocultural or reciprocal restoration; Kimmerer, 2013, p. 338) How do Indigenous cultures define wealth? (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 381) Find out more about the Indigenous peoples that once lived in Central Georgia. Discover What You Can Give

Students were asked to submit all parts of this project by Week 5 (on D2L, under Discussions, visible to all). This series of experiential assignments, which we hope to develop further in the future, arguably has the potential to establish a phenomenology-based eco-pedagogy. Such an eco-pedagogy would integrate, but ultimately also go beyond, eco-criticism, defined as the engagement with literary and filmic, i.e. human, representations of ‘nature’, and move towards a truly posthumanist and transversal educational methodology, a witnessing that transverses the dichotomy of observer and observed. Together, our class meetings and varied assignments already started to create what Massumi calls affect or ‘the felt quality of a relational field’ (2015, p. 124) composed of human as well as more-than-human participants. In an online course with synchronous and asynchronous digital components and student interactions, such as discussions in weekly Zoom meetings and student collaborations using digital communication tools beyond the classroom, the challenge was to create an embodied, multisensory pedagogy within the abstraction of a virtual classroom. Richardson and Schankweiler point to the simultaneously intimate/bodily and distant/mediated nature of witnessing (2020, p. 242). While participants utilised the technological tools of distance education (such as Zoom, WhatsApp, or chats and email) to communicate, our course was methodologically based on techniques of lived, intra-active engagement, meeting van der Tuin and Verhoeff’s description of

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  203 ‘following’: ‘Here no one is positioned on the riverbank, watching the flow. No one is observing the other at a distance. The advantage of such a position is that following itself can flow, can be flexible, mutual, and collaborative’ (van der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022, p. 102). Like posthumanism, the environmental humanities reject the central dichotomy of the Kantian tradition: the separation of nature, conceptualised as passive and observed, and culture, conceptualised as exclusively human and active, Instead, we embrace the emphasis on sensory experience, situated relationships and entangled co-creating of the ontological, Deleuzian tradition. In Placemaking: A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy, Tara Page notes that ‘our own senses of belonging/placemaking are made and learned’ (2020, p. 161) and also are cultural practices. The tension between the local, proximity, or place on the one hand and, on the other hand, global or cosmopolitan configurations (Heise, 2008, p. 157; Opperman, 2012) has thus clearly started to structure our transversal pedagogy, although we see this as an open-ended exploration that has only just begun. While global warming constitutes a planetary emergency that cannot be addressed on exclusively local or national levels, intervention will also need to occur on many local levels, based on an understanding of our physical embeddedness as humans in situated natural-cultural ecologies. Intra-Cultural Learning In addition to ‘transversal,’ the term ‘transcultural’ has also become a key concept in recent publications in several fields, including in education. Examples include Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney’s anthology, Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (2021) or Roman Bartosch’s Literature, Pedagogy and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology (2019), to name just two helpful contributions. But what does ‘transcultural’ mean exactly? The crossing of cultural boundaries? Between diverse human cultures? Or the questioning of categorical boundaries between human cultures and more-than-human cultures that Donna Haraway’s term natureculture (2003) seems to suggest? Even if we respond affirmatively to the latter question (yes, we do aim to overcome the nature-culture split that has marked Western philosophy and education), do we really want to do away with cultural divergences and conflate all cultural differences? As van der Tuin and Verhoeff (2022, p.140) write, referencing Karen Barad’s work, ‘[o]ntological indeterminacy or the openness to becoming does not mean that boundaries are no longer drawn or that categories are no longer useful’. The challenge, in other words, is to establish an affirmative eco-pedagogy that respects cultural and ontological differences within the natureculture continuum without flattening them out, while at the same time avoiding conventional binary or hierarchical distributions, pejorations and exploitations. The interest of our course lies in exploring the ‘worlding practices’ (Lykke, 2018, p. 334) or varied cultural perspectives espoused by students enrolled at

204  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann a German university and their counterparts at a college in the US. Such cultural perspectives apply, for instance, when it comes to how students engage with the ‘environment’ or how they perceive its mappings in different textual genres. While our course explores such cultural differences, it of course also aims to avoid cultural stereotyping. In addition to these caveats, it is also important to note, that, as Ursula Heise remarks, ‘the question of globality and difference plays itself out not only at the borders of human communities but also at the interface of human and nonhuman systems’ (2013, p. 638). What seems central to our course, then, is an attempt on the part of students and instructors to engage both in unexpected encounters with diverse human participants and with more-than-human beings and cultures, thereby becoming aware of, witnessing and co-creating the intra-connected affect or, the ‘feel’ of the natural-cultural realm and, as Lykke suggests, becoming engaged in ‘world-making conversations’ (2018, p. 334). We believe, then, that what we have presented here are the beginnings of a kind of eco-pedagogy, a pedagogy inspired by Barad’s concept of ‘intraactivity’. We would like to call this new pedagogy ‘intra-cultural learning’. In his Literature, Pedagogy and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology, Bartosch (2019) aims, as we do, to put the conventional concept of intercultural learning in dialogue with post-anthropocentric philosophy. While Bartosch arrives at the term ‘transcultural’, we additionally put this conceptualisation in dialogue with Barad’s (2007) concept of intra-activity, which is itself based on the work of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. Barad (2007) argues that entities are intra-related in that they do not pre-exist their relations, but are constituted by them (Fraunhofer, 2020). Vivienne Bozalek points out that in posthumanism, difference– whether between human cultures or within the human and more-than-human realm – is ‘not seen as essentialised, foreign, negative, separate, other, lack, less than but rather as affirmative, entangled, indeterminate, as difference within [emphasis added], and as multiplicities’ (2018, p. 397). By proposing the new term ‘intracultural learning’ as inspired by Barad and Bozalek, we then aim to not restrict the term ‘culture’ to human cultures only, but to take the widely used concept and praxis of intercultural learning to the context of not only human but also more-than-human cultures, both seen as ultimately co-extensive and mutually constitutive in the realm of natureculture. Making Sense of Eco-Pedagogical Methods Through Stengers’ Slowing Down, ‘Experts’ and ‘Diplomats’ In our course, knowledge and meaning were continually co-created in multiple place-based and virtual encounters of humans and more-than-human (discursive and material) beings or phenomena, i.e. in the intra-actions of an agential, though ontologically and culturally diverse community. Following the Belgian scientist and posthumanist philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ arguments around ‘experts’ and ‘diplomats’ in her ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’ (2013, originally

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  205 written in 2004), the course explored the climate crisis through film and texts involving human and more-than-human elements that give voice to different others unequally affected by ecological instability. In this section we narrate the importance of unlearning hurrying in an educational context through a focus on slowing down as posthumanist doing. Additionally, we also use Stengers’ (2013) notions of the experts and diplomats to offer nuances to our ecopedagogical approach. The knowledge created did not pre-exist the students’ encounters amongst themselves, their encounters with the films and texts discussed, nor their intra-actions with the land and more-than-human beings. Instead of a pedagogy based on the transmission of a stable, predictable knowledge, we conceptualised our course as an open-ended process, as a staging in Stengers’ sense. In the context of the climate crisis, those traditionally unheard include underrepresented humans as well as other-than-human beings and phenomena. Plays such as Australian playwright Stephen Carleton’s The Turquoise Elephant, novels and short stories, such as selected chapters from US novelist Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future or French writer Philippe Squarzoni’s graphic novel Climate Changed and feature films, such as South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, joined our multimodal, kaleidoscopic (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022, pp. 125–127) classroom. These elements were presented through Stengers’ sense as the diplomats, providing a voice to those threatened by a situation: in the case of the climate crisis, to our planet and its human and more-than-human, biotic and abiotic inhabitants or phenomena. As is well known, Timothy Morton (2013) has referred to the climate crisis as a hyperobject, as a phenomenon of such enormous temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats conventional understanding. Given the long-term nature of the threat that it poses, humans continue to have difficulty identifying climate change as a current threat of primary importance. Our time and attention are occupied by seemingly more urgent, day-to-day issues, economic and other. The unmitigated, continual worsening of the climate crisis, in other words, results from the lack of focus or attention, from our human inability to adequately perceive it as an existential, planetary threat. To address this inability, slowing down our perception, focusing our attention became one of the key themes of our class, co-defining our eco-pedagogical approach. While such slowing down did challenge our pedagogical, outcomes-focused habits as instructors during the first two summers we taught together, we will continue to attempt to make it a reality in future iterations of our course, by reducing the number of texts or assignments, for instance. The second summer we taught the course, we also integrated the experiential series of ‘Kimmerer Assignments’ as discussed, with its overall task of unlearning hurrying, which we also plan to develop further. In her ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’ (2013), Stengers as well is particularly interested in the productive potential of hesitation in a situation or assemblage that – like the climate emergency – does not offer easy moral assessments or answers to an insistent, nagging question,

206  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann namely ‘What am I doing?’ Stengers writes: ‘Giving this insistence a name, cosmos, inventing the reasons, “in the presence of” that which remains deaf to its legitimacy; that is the cosmopolitical proposal’ (2013, pp. 1–4; quote on p. 4). In spite of this emphasis on ‘anaesthesia’ or lack of attention, Stengers – in a move against the epistemological/Enlightenment tradition’s emphasis on human consciousness and will – defines politics as ‘not a matter of individual or collective good will’, but instead as an art. Since ‘art has no ground to demand compliance from what it deals with’, politics is, for Stengers, one of the ‘arts of emerging agreement’ (2013, p. 11). Stengers sees politics as a ‘ritual’ that consists in catalysing ‘a presence which transforms each protagonist’s relations with his or her own knowledge, hopes, fear and memories, and allows the whole to generate what each one would have been unable to produce separately’ (2013, pp. 12–13). We can of course think of teaching as politics in this sense: our class was a weekly ‘ritual’ (Stengers, 2013, pp. 12–13) that catalysed thought, active participation and affect in diverse new relationships that did not pre-exist our continuous encounters and questioned conventional, naturalised and hierarchically structured ontological ‘classifications’ (Van der Tuin and Verhoeff 2022, pp. 47–49). What our course taught us all was not pre-determined from the start, but emerged over the three months of each class that we, as students and instructors, read texts, viewed films, met, discussed, presented and wrote. Students chose the texts and topics they wanted to present on, the human and more-than-human partners they wanted to collaborate with, and the topics and media used for their final projects. Building upon the tradition of Paolo Freire’s celebrated Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) but also adding a post-anthropocentric focus, the critical pedagogy of our course aims to resist dominant discourses and beliefs, including the philosophy and practices of human exceptionalism. Stengers’ ritual as well achieves ‘a power to think and act and resist’ (Stengers, 2013, p. 13) that the parts of the assemblage or gathering of human and more-than-human actants would not have been able to produce without it. Of importance for the pedagogical design of our course, Stengers wrote long before the global COVID-19 health crisis: It is not an ‘objective definition’ of a virus or of a flood [or the climate emergency; our addition] that we need, a detached definition that everybody should accept, but the active participation of all those whose practice engaged in multiple modes ‘with’ the virus or ‘with’ the river [emphasis added] As for the cosmopolitical perspective its question is twofold. How to design the political scene in a way that actively protects it from the fiction that ‘humans of good will decide in the name of the general interest?’ How to turn the virus or the river [or the climate emergency] into a cause for thinking? But also how to design it in such a way that collective thinking has to proceed ‘in the presence of’ those who would otherwise be likely to be disqualified as having idiotically nothing to propose, hindering the ‘common account’? (2013, p. 13)

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  207 The exacerbating ecological crisis as well as the Covid-19 pandemic have been testimony to the fact that, as Stengers correctly diagnoses, humans will not necessarily decide in the name of the general interest. How do we then heed Stengers’ call and turn the climate emergency into a cause for thinking collectively, engaging and sharing agency with not only humans that have been historically disqualified from active participation in the academic environment and beyond, but also with the climate emergency as a more-than-human phenomenon? In the ‘staging’ (Stengers, 2013) that is our classroom, the relationships in the class – between students, instructors, guest speakers and textual and more-than-textual persons and material phenomena in and beyond the classroom – must become a mental, social and environmental ecology, a sympoietic, egalitarian co-presence. In her ‘Cosmopolitical Proposal’, Stengers distinguishes between experts and diplomats: ‘Experts are the ones whose practice is not threatened by the issue under discussion since what they know is accepted as relevant’. By contrast, diplomats provide a voice for those who are threatened by a decision’ (Stengers, 2013, p. 13). All entities on Planet Earth, human and more-thanhuman, are of course all threatened by the climate crisis, although to unequal degrees. And experts as well can provide a voice, not only for their own expertise, but also for those whom we are unable to hear. Stengers proposes putting not only experts and diplomats, but also those traditionally unheard, ‘into equality’ (2013, p. 15). In our class, we therefore made a conscious effort to include texts that go beyond dominant discourses, including non-Western texts or films from Asia or the global South, such as the Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s novel Fever Dream/Distancia de Rescate, Timothy Morton’s ‘Queer Ecology’, and – as already discussed – Indigenous poet-botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. As always, students who were able to read the text in the original language were encouraged to do so. As Snaza et al. point out, the Enlightenment project, and with it humanist education, are Eurocentric, racist, and patriarchal. Posthumanism on the other hand ‘allies itself with the politico-pedagogical projects of feminism, postcolonialism, anti-racism, and queer activism’ (Snaza et al., 2014, pp. 48–49; see also Braselmann, Glas and Volkmann, 2021). According to Snaza et al, posthumanist education ‘look[s] beyond and outside of dominant Western European philosophies of knowledge to the indigenous, non-Western (non-Northern), non-white, non-masculinist, non-humanist, non-hegemonic ontologies and epistemologies that Western humanism has systematically attacked’ (Snaza et al., 2014, p. 51). Richardson and Schankweiler also present affective witnessing as ‘a concept that makes room for change, for bodies and politics and possibilities that are otherwise obscured, for voices and stories and cultures that might be silenced or oppressed or simply unable to be witnessed otherwise’ (2020, p. 249). It has thus been important to provide our students with a choice of texts that go beyond the limited Western/Northern patriarchal and heterosexist canon. One of the texts assigned for viewing to the whole class, and discussed in a class meeting dedicated exclusively to it in both iterations of our course so far,

208  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann is the film Beasts of the Southern Wild. Co-written by director Benh Zeitlin and screenwriter and playwright Lucy Alibar, the film acts as a diplomat in Stengers’ sense, giving voice to disadvantaged populations living in ‘sacrifice zones’ in industrialised countries or in the so-called Third World (Emmett et al., 2017, p. 18) who are most exposed to the effects of global warming (such as the anthropogenic and human-enhanced destruction of habitat and erasure of traditional ways of life). The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indigenous tribe of Isle de Jean Charles represented in the film, as well as African-American and poor communities along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, are part of the endangered groups who often live in close intimacy and interdependence with their local ecosystems and the land and who are especially vulnerable to the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2013) of global warming and global society’s ineffectiveness at addressing it. Students were able to experience this (previously often unseen) violence through the lives of the characters of the film and the affect created by it. As Richardson and Schankweiler explain, affective witnessing ‘centres encounter, embodiment, affect and intensities of experience’ (2020, p. 237). As ‘diplomats’ in Stengers’ sense, the environmental justice movement, which has its roots in the fight for civil rights (and is closely related to the struggle against ecoracism), explicitly engages with environmental issues as they relate to race, class, and gender, marking a ‘general shift away from a concern for nature in the abstract to a focus on endangered human communities in particular settings’ (Emmett et al., 2017, pp. 17–19). Yet, while other-than-human communities have not traditionally been part of the agenda of the environmental justice movement, truly post-anthropocentric work needs to focus on endangered communities understood as human and more-thanhuman entanglements. Underlining the urgent threat of climate change for human and more-than-human populations, the film clearly achieves this. As the teacher, Miss Bathsheba, says in Beasts of the Southern Wild: ‘Meat, meat, meat. I’m meat, y’all’s ass is meat, everything is part of the buffet of the universe’. She instructs the children: ‘Y’all better think about that, ‘cause any day now, the fabric of the universe is comin’ unraveled. Ice caps gonna melt. Water’s gonna rise, and everything south of the levee is going under. Y’all better learn how to survive now.’ Conclusion Learning to survive as a species or a planetary ecology – or, alternatively, ‘learning to die’ (Scranton, 2015) – could be considered an unacknowledged learning goal of this course. But rather than rushing to foregone conclusions or a teleological perspective, the course first of all tried to establish a productive moment of hesitation in Stenger’s sense, a pause that allowed us to ask the question, ‘What are we doing?’ Following posthumanist philosophy, students were active participants in an arrangement (agencement) of agential, sympoietic and mutually enriching human and more-than-human entities that produced something that we could

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  209 not have fully foreseen when we started out. Bozalek writes: ‘In posthuman socially just pedagogies, it is not possible to know beforehand what will happen in encounters’ (2018, p. 398). Rather than through the optical metaphor of reflection, our pedagogy can best be summed up as a pedagogy of diffraction (van der Tuin and Verhoeff, 2022, pp. 74–77), an ongoing ‘production of difference patterns in the world, not just of the same reflected – displaced – elsewhere’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 268). In the end, our class achieved the goal of bearing witness as part of an entangled naturalcultural, human and more-than-human mesh. As Brianna Burke notes, the climate crisis constitutes ‘a loss so profound that it is beyond mere words; instead, it must be witnessed’ (Burke, 2019, p. 2; emphasis in original). The embodied, non-hierarchical and dynamic relationality between human and other-than-human participants that we explored in our class adds both climate trauma (Kaplan, 2016) and non-hierarchical co-witnessing to academic discussions of affective witnessing, beyond the latter field’s (or testimony/memory/trauma studies’) traditional subject-object divide between the human witness and the human-centred witnessed event. In the context of the climate crisis, Richardson speaks of ‘pretrauma’, i.e. of ‘the traumatic imagining of future catastrophe […] [i]n contrast to classical accounts of trauma as concerned with […] past events’ (2018, p. 2). While we can expect the violence of climate events to increase in the future, such events, at this point already, no longer lie exclusively in the future. Global warming is indeed, as Richardson agrees, ‘a catastrophe from the future, one that both has and has not yet arrived’ (2018, p. 3). Rather than establishing futile anthropocentric epistemological mastery as its primary pedagogical goal, the class bore witness to situated experiences and created co-presence in egalitarian encounters, beyond national and ontological/species lines. Students invented an indeterminate space of human non-control, taking the time to pause and acknowledge, on a cognitive and an affective level, the enormity of our common, human and more-than-human vulnerability and loss. While we might all find ourselves at different stages of the process of grieving (denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) as human individuals where the ongoing destruction of our planet’s ecosystems is concerned, maybe the best thing we can hope for, not only as a class, but as a kindred, entangled human and more-than-human community, is a sense of paying attention, together. We thank Melanie DeVore, Uwe Küchler, Roman Bartosch and Ricardo Römhild for their guest lectures. References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Bartosch, R. (2019) Literature, Pedagogy and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

210  Hedwig Fraunhofer and Laurenz Volkmann Bartosch, R. (2022) ‘Dying to Learn: Teaching human-animal studies in an age of extinction.’ In A. Hübner, M. Gerrit, P. Edlich and M. Moss (Eds.) Multispecies Futures: New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies. Berlin: Neofelis. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2011) dir. B. Zeitlin, USA. Bozalek, V. (2018) ‘Socially Just Pedagogies’. In R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (Eds.) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury.. Braselmann, S., Glas, K. and Volkmann, L. (2021) ‘Ecology, Cultural Awareness, AntiRacism and Critical Thinking: Integrating Multiple Perspectives in Foreign Language Teaching.’ Ecozon@, 12(1). doi: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2021.12.1.3961 Burke, B. (2019) ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild and Indigenous Communities in the Age of the Sixth Extinction’. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 6(1), pp. 65–85. doi: 10.5250/resilience.6.1.0061 Cooke, S. and Denney, P. (2021) Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives. London: Bloomsbury. Emmett, R. S., David, E. and Nye, D. E. (2017) The Environmental Humanities: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraunhofer, H. (2020) Biopolitics, Materiality and Meaning in Modern European Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Haraway, D. (1997) Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_Onco Mouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2003) The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Heise, U. (2008) Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. Heise, U. (2013) ‘Globality, Difference and the International Turn in Ecocriticism,’ PMLA, 128(3), pp. 636–643. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23489300 (Accessed 7 October 2022). Kaplan, E. A. (2016) Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kimmerer, R. Wall (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions. Lykke, N. (2010) Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing. New York and London: Routledge. Lykke, N. (2011) ‘This Discipline which Is Not One: Feminist Studies as a PostDiscipline.’ In R. Buikema, G. Griffin and Lykke N. (Eds.) Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research: Researching Differently. New York: Routledge. Lykke, N. (2018) ‘Postdisciplinarity’. In R. Braidotti and M. Hlavajova (Eds).) Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury. Massumi, B. (2015) Politics of Affect. Cambridge UK and Malden MA: Polity. Morton, T. (2010) ‘Guest Column: Queer Ecology’, PMLA, 125(2), pp. 273–282. Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nixon, R. (2013) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Oppermann, S. (2012) ‘Transnationalization of Ecocriticism’. Anglia, 130(3), pp. 401–419. Page, T. (2020) Placemaking: A New Materialist Theory of Pedagogy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Transcultural Eco-Pedagogy Meets Posthumanist Philosophy  211 Richardson, M. (2018) ‘Climate Trauma, or the Affects of the Catastrophe to Come’. Environmental Humanities, 10(1), pp. 1–19. doi: 10.1215/22011919-4385444 Richardson, M. and Schankweiler, K. (2019) ‘Affective Witnessing’. In J. Slaby and C. von Scheve (Eds.) Affective Societies: Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge. Richardson, M. and Schankweiler, K. (2020) ‘Introduction: Affective Witnessing as Theory and Practice’. Parallax, 26(3) (special issue on Affective Witnessing), pp. 235–250. doi: 10.1080/13534645.2021.1883301 Scranton, R. (2015) Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization. San Francisco: City Lights. Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M. B., Rotas, N., Sandlin, J., Wallin, J. and Weaver, J. (2014) ‘Toward a Posthumanist Education’. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), pp. 39–55. Stengers, I. (2013) ‘The Cosmopolitical Proposal’. Balkanexpress, 13 September 2013 Available at: https://balkanexpresss.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/stengersthecosmopolitcal-proposal.pdf (Accessed 2 October 2022). Van der Tuin, I. and Verhoeff, N. (2022) Critical Concepts for the Humanities. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Index

affect 4, 6, 8, 10–12, 39, 43, 44, 48–50, 59, 60, 65, 88, 93, 96, 115, 127, 132, 138, 140, 166, 167, 183, 195, 200; affective attachments 181, 182, 185, 189; affective intra-­actions 4; affective refusals 90, 91, 93, 95; affective witnessing 207, 208 agential cuts 2, 6, 72, 76, 80, 89, 124 Agential realism 6, 27, 71, 73–77, 79, 89, 140, 151, 152 Ahmed, S. 91, 92, 95, 108, 168 Alaimo, S. 2, 6, 72, 81, 82, 104 anthropocene 182, 198 anthrobscene 7, 112, 113 assemblages 1, 2, 8, 10–12, 43, 94, 109, 140; carbon assemblage 191, 194; heterogeneous assemblage 169; human/non-­human assemblages 41, 86, 126; racializing assemblages 8; rhizomatic assemblages 168 Barad, K. 2–9, 21, 26, 41, 58, 60–62, 71, 73–75, 86–89, 93–96, 102–106, 126, 140–142, 146, 149, 151, 152, 158, 162, 203, 204 becoming 27, 32, 39, 40–49, 55, 58–61, 65, 66, 74, 86, 93, 114, 123, 125, 126, 132, 142, 144, 150, 152, 155, 164, 166, 204; becoming-­citizen 50, 51; becoming-­literate 24; becoming-­ otherwise 94–96; nomadic-­ subjectivity-­becomings 93 Berlant, L. 5, 56, 182 Bohr, N. 73, 204 Bozalek, V. 12, 123, 127, 132, 199, 200, 204, 209 Braidotti, R. 1, 2, 40, 60, 64, 108, 114, 132, 163, 169

carbon cultures 11, 181–191, 194 chthulucene 75, 109 citizenship 4, 38–46, 48–50; posthuman citizenship 47 climate justice 11, 181 creativity 12, 124, 130–132, 185, 199 curation↔calibration 73, 77, 80, 82 decoloniality 4, 8, 21, 22, 26, 29, 33, 43, 95, 96, 129, 130 de la Bellacasa, P. 17, 123 De la Cadena 3, 21–23, 32 Deleuze, G. 9, 56, 92, 93, 103, 105– 108, 114, 115, 132, 140, 142, 151, 157, 164, 167 Derrida, J. 106 diffraction 1, 5, 6, 73–77, 79–82, 102, 106, 107, 116, 127 dyschronia 109, 110 ecocidal capitalism 11 eco-­critical 12, 98, 200 ecological justice 11 eco-­pedagogy 199, 203, 204 entangled kin 5, 61–63 Halberstam, J. 7, 110, 111 Haraway, D. 1, 4–7, 60, 63, 65, 73, 83, 102, 104, 109, 127, 143, 203 hooks, b. 104, 105, 166, 173, 174 intra-­action 4, 5, 7, 41, 44, 58, 59, 74–77, 80, 82, 88, 89, 94, 95, 126, 140, 143, 151, 154, 157, 162, 173, 204 irruption 7, 101, 102, 105–110 kinshipping 5

Index  213 Lather, P. 1 making kin 5, 66, 127 Massumi, B. 59, 185, 197, 202 materialities 5, 6, 12, 55, 59, 94, 129, 130, 132, 141, 149, 154, 158, 167 multiplicity 1, 3, 6, 9, 116, 142, 160, 172, 174 Neoliberalism 104, 109, 124, 138, 139 Niccolini, A. 5, 9 ontocide 31 Pedagogy 6, 8, 11, 42, 49, 59, 77, 80, 113, 125, 132, 137, 142, 149, 150, 151, 156, 158; caring pedagogy 50; critical pedagogy 27, 106; intra-­active pedagogy 76, 94; response-­able pedagogy 96 postfeminism 139 posthumanism 3, 4, 6, 19, 20–22, 25–27, 30, 34, 38, 48, 72, 74, 85, 140, 158, 161, 197, 103, 203, 204, 207; posthuman convergence 1, 2 praxis 6, 50, 71–73, 77, 79, 80, 82, 105, 114, 115, 123–125, 127, 132, 133, 145, 162, 163, 167–169

race 3, 19–22, 30, 40, 74, 89, 92, 104, 110, 183, 185 relationality 8, 26, 44, 50, 56, 61, 66, 91, 94, 110, 114, 123, 124, 127, 129, 131, 133, 152, 171, 185, 198, 200 Renold, E.J. 6, 8, 137 response-­able 8, 30, 31, 88, 95, 96, 123, 124, 132, 133, 137, 141–143, 146 rhizome 93, 150, 151, 166 Ringrose, J. 8, 131, 137, 139, 142 Snaza, N. 11, 71, 89, 94, 96, 113, 115, 197, 207 spacetimemattering 2, 74, 75, 77, 82, 110, 126 Stengers, I. 11, 12, 204–208 Stewart, K. 5, 6, 56 string figuring 5 Taguchi, L. 6, 73, 76, 77, 81, 94 Taylor, C. 81, 89, 127, 163, 172 temporality 110 toxic positivity 7, 110, 115 transversality 199, 200 Tsing, A. 2, 93, 102, 164, 169 Yusoff, K. 10, 104 Zarabadi, S. 86, 93, 94