Accountabilities of posthuman research

What constitutes ‘good’ posthuman research? This article offers three dynamics to help assess the value of posthuman-inspired inquiry. We propose that a good posthuman research account should show evidence that the researcher: (1) attended to their own more-than-humanness and made explicit how they interviewed and attuned to the nonhuman things of their inquiry; (2) reassembled resemblings of the posthuman world by inventively weaving and fusing human and nonhuman storylines; and (3) offered analytic insights into the liveliness of posthuman research work as the performativity of difference

Science Fiction and Future Human: Cyborg, Transhuman and Posthuman

Since science and technology are intertwined with literature, a great number of writers have created different depictions under the label of Science Fiction which mostly shows various aspects of future human, life, culture, and society. Science Fiction will be exemplified through a number of notable Science Fiction stories in this paper; afterwards, it will outline various notable critics’ notions about future forms of humans including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman, to examine two goals of immortality and superiority in Science Fiction. In sum, this is a literary review paper which presents an overview on Science Fiction and offers a broad discussion on the transformations including cyborg, transhuman and posthuman to distinguish these concepts from each other: transhuman as a transcended human, posthuman as an obsolete human, and cyborg as a machine ma

Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: posthumanist research practices for education

This chapter provides a theoretical and practical introduction to posthumanism to explore the challenges and opportunities it offers in reshaping how educational research is defined, approached and gets done. The chapter sketches the emergence of posthumanism in relation to the humanist legacy, maps how posthumanism reworks subjectivity, relationally and ethics, and produces new understandings of ontology and epistemology. The chapter considers the implications of posthumanism for educational research methodologies and draws on a recent example to illuminate how posthumanist research practices recast the empirical. The chapter proposes the practice of edu-crafting as a practical approach to doing posthumanist educational research

Posthuman Object Pedagogies: Thinking with Things to Think with Theory for Innovative Educational Research

Educational practices and learning processes are entangled with multitudes of objects but these objects are so often disregarded as mundane background and thingified – positioned as dull, inert matter, unnoticed, and made subserviently serviceable in order that the proper business of educating the human can go on. Such an education, with its orientation to reason, logical argument and the mind, silences objects and produces humans as docile bodies. This article develops posthuman object pedagogies to contest the ontological positioning of objects as inert and dead and, instead, attend to the quiet but powerful work they do (Taylor, 2013, 2017). Using Barad’s (2007) and Haraway’s (2016) posthumanist materialist ontology of what Bennett’s (2010) calls thing-power the article proposes a practice of thinking with things as a means of thinking with theory. We illuminate this practice through four object encounters. The insights from these encounters provide the basis for developing posthuman object pedagogies which re-evaluate understanding of the work objects do as intra-active agencies and in recasting educational research. As four educators at different career stages, we develop posthuman object pedagogies to enable us to do educational research otherwise

Posthuman Object Pedagogies: Thinking with Things to Think with Theory for Innovative Educational Research

Educational practices and learning processes are entangled with multitudes of objects but these objects are so often disregarded as mundane background and thingified – positioned as dull, inert matter, unnoticed, and made subserviently serviceable in order that the proper business of educating the human can go on. Such an education, with its orientation to reason, logical argument and the mind, silences objects and produces humans as docile bodies. This article develops posthuman object pedagogies to contest the ontological positioning of objects as inert and dead and, instead, attend to the quiet but powerful work they do (Taylor, 2013, 2017). Using Barad’s (2007) and Haraway’s (2016) posthumanist materialist ontology of what Bennett’s (2010) calls thing-power the article proposes a practice of thinking with things as a means of thinking with theory. We illuminate this practice through four object encounters. The insights from these encounters provide the basis for developing posthuman object pedagogies which re-evaluate understanding of the work objects do as intra-active agencies and in recasting educational research. As four educators at different career stages, we develop posthuman object pedagogies to enable us to do educational research otherwise

Matter That Embodies:Agentive flesh and working bodies/selves

The post-Cartesian ‘material turn’ in management and organization studies understands that bodies are far more than vehicles that enable work to be undertaken, but are agentive actors in the constitution of work and working selves. This leads to the need for more empirically-derived understanding of the agency of flesh in the performative corporealization of working, embodied selves. We met this challenge through adapting feminist, posthuman research methods for a study of the materialities and materialization of working bodies. The study takes forward Judith Butler’s and Karen Barad’s theories of performativity by reading them through each other, and introducing flesh as an agentive actor in each moment-to-moment move. In paying close attention to the speech of supposedly ‘dumb flesh’ we show how flesh resists its negation and itself imposes control on the worker. We coin the term ‘body/flesh’ and illuminate how bodies are active and agentive, constituting corporeal/izing working selves in somewhat unexpected ways

At Sea:What direction for critical educational research?

In this paper I reflect on the dilemma critical early childhood research finds itself in today. In order to distinguish and distance ourselves from the certainties and seemingly unquestionable truths of post-political, mainstream, ‘normalised’ research and its entanglement with neoliberal agendas and corporate interests, have we rendered ourselves irrelevant in the struggle for social justice that once formed the basis for critical inquiry in our field? What hope can there be to (re-)claim the political in our research, and what new (and old) alliances can we count on

Play Doh Vulvas and Felt Tip Dick Pics: Disrupting Phallocentric Matter(s) in Sex Education

In this paper, we explore our experiences working as team comprised of researchers, teacher, and founder and director of a sex education non-profit organisation, who have formed an intra-activist research and pedagogical assemblage to experiment with relationship and sexuality education (RSE) practices in England’s secondary schools. We draw upon phEmaterialism theory and socially engaged, participatory arts-based research methodologies and pedagogies to explore two examples of arts-based activities that have been developed to de-center humanist, male-dominated, phallocentric, penile-oriented RSE. We also demonstrate how these practices enable educators, researchers, practitioners and students to revalue and rematter feminine genitalia, and resist and refigure unsettling experiences of receiving unsolicited digital dick pics