I first engaged with critical posthuman theory in 2015, at Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Summer School at the University of Utrecht. At the time, I was working in teacher training, preparing people for work in schools, colleges and community education, and had become disillusioned with the instrumental and transactional nature of current education systems and practices. I wanted to explore alternative paradigms which accept the complexity of our times, while offering new approaches grounded in an ethics that felt aligned to my own values and beliefs. In this blog post I explore how posthumanism can be put to work in education research and why it is important in our contemporary predicament by exploring three features of posthuman research: non-linearity, slow ontology and relationality.

Why posthumanism?

Since my first visit to Utrecht eight years ago, posthumanism has exploded; not only finding its way into diverse specialisms such as Law, Heritage, Literary Studies, Education and the Sciences, but forging convergences between disciplines and creating new areas of study. Contrary to popular belief, critical posthumanism is not about robots or the merging of humans with machines. It is better understood as a cartographic tool, or a lens through which to see the world; one which acknowledges complexities, and addresses these through appreciating politics of location and the entanglements of issues such as climate change and technological revolution (Braidotti, 2013). The ‘post’ in posthumanism means to go beyond, or after humanism; where humanism has reified the normative white, male, Western, able-bodied, neurotypical, straight version of ‘Man’, creating damaging hierarchies based around a dominant notion of what humanity is, or should be.

‘Contrary to popular belief, critical posthumanism is not about robots or the merging of humans with machines. It … addresses complexities through appreciating politics of location and the entanglements of issues such as climate change and technological revolution.’

The second key tenet of posthumanism is post-anthropocentrism; the decentring of the human and elevation of other species and ecological systems which have been relegated in an exploitative and limiting hierarchy. From familiar species taxonomy diagrams (with humans at the top), to rarely questioned linear evolution stories, the way in which naturalised others are positioned as ‘lesser’ than humans is problematic, yet deeply entrenched through language and classification systems that distance and objectify. Bringing together this posthuman and post-anthropocentric thinking necessitates complex, non-binary practices in educational research. For example, environmental degradation and human suffering are generally entangled (consider the way in which colonialism has always been about exploiting certain types of human being while extracting goods and materials from the earth for profit and gain).

What are the implications for research practice?

Taking account of complex, entangled issues simultaneously requires a turn to methodologies that go beyond the human-centred qualitative methods typically seen in educational research practice. Three features of posthuman research are:

• Non-linearity. The process-led nature of posthuman research emphasises the idea that we are all connected, and part of multiplicities; as a result, the researcher must acknowledge complexity and movement within the systems they are exploring. Posthuman research thus includes not just the human actors within inquiry groupings but the non-human, material and technological agents that influence researcherly activity and the focus of the project. Starting from the assumption that research phenomena are not simply about the actions of human subjects thereby invites new possibilities and understandings. For example, in educational research a non-linear approach takes into account the interactions of policy, material factors (classroom spaces, objects, weather, noise, and so on), language, culture, and many other aspects that form educational assemblages. This can reveal how teaching is impacted by much more than just human subjects interacting in a learning environment.
• Slow ontology. Non-linearity troubles the propensity of qualitative research to have fixed beginning and end points. Jasmine Ulmer (2017) suggests that we work with a slow ontology; slow, not in the sense of working at a more leisurely pace, but as being scholarly in a different way. Working to rhythms of inquiry disrupts usual academic paradigms which focus on speed and efficiency and prioritise outputs over creativity. A slow ontology requires an openness to bodily responses and a need to be comfortable with complexity; also recognising that the rhythm of academia does not reflect the pace of emergence of thought in project participants. One example of working to a slow ontology might be to expand the length of a project outside of arbitrary boundaries relating to funding or publishing. Continuing the work of inquiry beyond these restrictions, in partnership with participants, can be seen as an ethical move which values processes of slow thinking and scholarship; acknowledging that processes of creation and learning do not conform to normative temporalities.
• Relationality. The understanding of learning and discovery as relational, not individual, activity is a fundamental quality of posthuman research. Manning (2016, p. 54) suggests that positing the conditions or terms of research before the exploration or experimentation can ‘[relegate] it to that which already fits within pre-existing schemata of knowledge.’ Creating and thinking together is a productive way of forming new ideas and it is these emerging processes that drive the method, not the predefined linearity of ‘major’ predictable approaches. Methodology here is therefore not employed to create something replicable, or to devise a route-map for future research. Instead, methods such as participatory action research – in which participants and researchers together identify questions and the means to explore them – can facilitate the emergence of contextual and situated knowledge; a process driven by the research community.

Posthumanism incorporates an ethical commitment to forging equitable futures centred around mutuality, relationality and shared predicament. It is about the transformation of pain into knowledge, rather than complaint or negativity, in processes which enhance one’s capacity to affect and be affected by others. This generative approach leads to an emphasis on philosophy as praxis and, as a result, incorporates micro-political moments of activism and wider action for social justice; much needed for our troubling times.

References

Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Polity Press.

Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.

Ulmer, J. (2016). Writing slow ontology. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(3), 201–211. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800416643994