Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism

In Animate Literacies Nathan Snaza proposes a new theory of literature and literacy in which he outlines how literacy is both constitutive of the social and used as a means to define the human. Weaving new materialism with feminist, queer, and decolonial thought, Snaza theorizes literacy as a contact zone in which humans, nonhuman animals, and nonvital objects such as chairs and paper all become active participants. In readings of classic literature by Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, James Joyce, Toni Morrison, Mary Shelley, and others, Snaza emphasizes the key roles that affect and sensory experiences play in literacy. Snaza upends common conceptions of literacy and its relation to print media, showing instead how such understandings reinforce dehumanizations linked to dominant imperialist, heterosexist, and capitalist definitions of the human. The path toward disrupting such exclusionary, humanist frameworks, Snaza contends, lies in formulating alternative practices of literacy and literary study that escape disciplined knowledge production.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1356/thumbnail.jp

Posthumanism and Educational Research

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from the new research agendas presented by posthumanism.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1222/thumbnail.jp

Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nonetheless

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The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism

The greatest challenge facing the field of environmentalism includes ontological questions over the human subject and its desensitization from landscapes of experience. In this article the authors draw from field experiences in New York City elementary schools (such as observations of teachers, NYS Scope and Sequence Standards for Social Studies, and the Common Core State Standards) to demonstrate how curricular engagements with nature and the environment are persistently caught within humanist traditions that place agency and action as sovereign to humanness. It uses new materialist ontologies to suggest how hybrid relations among humans, nonhumans, and matter can be read by way of interactions among assemblages and entanglements that are alive, vibrant, and powerful. While much of environmentalism is bound to political action with nature as passive backdrops, the authors suggest that individual and everyday responses to ecological devastation may better reside in our capacity to act creatively, even horizontally, within political ecologies that disrupt theories of vertical domination and conquest

Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nonetheless

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Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies

This edited collection takes up the wild and sudden surge of new materialisms in the field of curriculum studies. New materialisms shift away from the strong focus on discourse associated with the linguistic or cultural turn in theory and toward recent work in the physical and biological sciences; in doing so, they posit ontologies of becoming that re-configure our sense of what a human person is and how that person relates to the more-than-human ecologies in which it is nested. Ignited by an urgency to disrupt the dangers of anthropocentrism and systems of domination in the work of curriculum and pedagogy, this book builds upon the axiom that agency is not a uniquely human capacity but something inherent in all matter. This collection blurs the boundaries of human and non-human, animate and inanimate, to focus on webs of interrelations. Each chapter explores these questions while attending to the ethical, aesthetic, and political tasks of education—both in and out of school contexts. It is essential reading for anyone interested in feminist, queer, anti-racist, ecological, and posthumanist theories and practices of education.https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1236/thumbnail.jp

Toward a Posthuman Education

The text of our manifesto will introduce posthumanism to a curriculum studies audience and propose new directions for curriculum theory and educational research more broadly. Following a description of what is variously called the “posthuman condition” or the “posthuman era,” our manifesto outlines the main theoretical features of posthumanism with particular attention to how it challenges or problematizes the nearly ubiquitous assumptions of humanism. In particular, we focus on how posthumanism responds to the history of Western humanism’s justification and encouragement of colonialism, slavery, the objectification of women, the thoughtless slaughter of non-human animals, and ecological devastation. We dwell on the question of how posthumanism may alter our understanding of the claim “education is political,” since humanism has shaped our very notions of “education” and “politics.” After outlining posthumanist discourse generally, and detailing the conceptual challenges it poses for education, we propose a list of possible new avenues for curriculum studies research opened up by posthumanism

Class Time: Spivak’s Teacherly Turn

This article examines the conceptions of and relations between temporality and materiality as they are articulated in Gayatri Spivak’s “teacherly turn,” especially in Death of a Discipline (2003). It analyzes Spivak’s theorization of classroom practice—in particular in comparative literature—in relation to postcolonial and new materialist politics, demonstrating that she links materiality, attention, and temporality directly to the politics of authority and domination. Beginning with an exploration of the functions of “hope” and “haunting” in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood (1977), the article sketches Spivak’s account of the pedagogical encounter as similarly both haunted and hopeful. It argues that she produces an account of classroom temporality that does not operate according to linear, humanist presuppositions, allowing her to re-configure the humanist politics of comparative literature (and aesthetic education more broadly) in ways that open toward a politics of “planetarity.

Film: March of the Gods

Screening of the film, followed by Q&A with Edward Banchs, researcher for the film. This event is free for conference attendees