Abstract
This chapter provides a theoretical-practical introduction to the book and an overview of the book’s contents. Written as an un/en/folding, the chapter discusses the promises, possibilities and pains of posthuman higher education pedagogy, practice and research in relation to a range of key concerns, contestations and imperatives which currently shape the marketized, individualized, performative, accelerated academy. It discusses the challenges and opportunities posthumanism offers in reshaping how higher education pedagogy, practice and research is defined, approached and gets done. It considers the ways in which posthumanist experimentations rupture and reconfigure higher education ‘business-as-usual’. It also ponders the geopolitics of knowledg(e)ing(s) in its engagement with recent criticism of posthumanism’s ‘White episteme’ emerging from Indigenous and decolonizing studies. The chapter suggests that zoe-philia—which posits optimistic, non-anthropocentric, ecologically oriented modes of nonhuman-human being and becoming—offers new understandings of ontology, epistemology and ethics that can be shaped as affirmative, response-able, care-full practices for higher education.
Keywords
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ahenakew, C. (2017). Mapping and complicating conversations about indigenous education. Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education,11(2), 80–91.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. London: Duke University Press.
Alveson, M. (2013). The triumph of emptiness. Consumption, higher education and work organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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), 168–187.
BBC. (2018). A year on from Blue Planet II, BBC one film reveals the devastating consequences of the plastic pollution crisis in our oceans. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2018/drowning-in-plastic.
Benozzo, A., Koro-Ljungberg, M., & Carey, N. (2016). Five or more IKEA customers in search of an author. Qualitative Inquiry,22, 568–580.
Bozalek, V., Braidotti, R., Shefer, T., & Zembylas, M. (Eds.). (2018). Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education. London: Bloomsbury.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2018). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418771486.
Brown, R., & Carasso, H. (2013). Everything for sale: The marketization of UK higher education. London: Routledge/Society for Research into Higher Education.
Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the mountain: An ecology of indigenous education. Skyland, NC: Kivaki Press.
Cantwell, B., & Kauppinen, I. (2014). Academic capitalism in the age of globalization. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
Carrigan, M. (2016). The accelerated academy. Retrieved from http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/18743. Accessed 18 December 2018.
Collini, S. (2017). Speaking of universities. London: Verso.
de Freitas, E., & Sinclair, N. (2012). Diagram, gesture, agency: Theorizing embodiment in the mathematics classroom. Educational Studies in Mathematics,80(1/2), 133–152.
Deleuze, G. (2006). The fold. London: Continuum.
Doel, M. A. (1996). A hundred thousand lines of flight: A machinic introduction to the nomad thought and scrumpled geography of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,14(4), 421–439.
Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and indigenous metissage: Imagining decolonization of aboriginal-canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1–24.
Gabriel, D., & Tate, S. A. (Eds.). (2017). Inside the ivory tower: Narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British academia. London: Trentham Books.
Giroux, H. (2014). Neoliberalism’s war on higher education. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Gray van Heerden, C. (2018). #Itmustallfall, or, pedagogy for a people to come. In V. Bozalek, R. Braidotti, T. Shefer, & M. Zembylas (Eds.), Socially just pedagogies: Posthumanist, feminist and materialist perspectives in higher education. London: Bloomsbury.
Greene, M. (1977). Toward wide-awakeness: An argument for the arts and humanities in education. Issues in Focus,79(1), 119–125.
Haraway, D. (2010). Otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms. In S. Alaimo & S. Hekman (Eds.), Material feminisms (pp. 157–187). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hinton, P., & van der Tuin, I. (2014). Preface. Women: A Cultural Review,25(1), 1–8.
Hinton, P., Mehrabi, T., & Barla, J. (2014). New materialisms/new colonialisms. Position paper for New Materialisms: How Matter Comes to Matter. COST. ISI3017. Retrieved from http://newmaterialism.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Subgroup-Position-Paper-_-New-materialisms_New-Colonialisms.pdf.
Hlavajova, M. (2015, August 26). Critique-as-proposition: Thinking about, with, and through art in our time. Utrecht: University of Utrecht.
Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive. Essays on movement, knowledge and description. New York, NY: Routledge.
Jackson, C., Dempster, S., & Pollard, L. (2015). ‘They just don’t seem to really care, they just think it’s cool to sit there and talk’: Laddism in university teaching-learning contexts. Educational Review,67(3), 300–314.
Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Reconceptualizing qualitative research. Methodologies without methodology. London: Sage.
Lindqvist, S. (1997). Exterminate all the brutes. London: Granta Publications.
Manning, E., & Massumi, B. (2014). Thought in the act: Passages of ecology of experience. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Marginson, S. (2017). Limitations of human capital theory. Studies in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2017.1359823.
Massumi, B. (1988). Translator’s foreword. Pleasure of philosophy. In G. Deleuze & F. Guattari (Eds.), A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Continuum.
Naidoo, R. (2016). The competition fetish in higher education: Varieties, animators and consequences. British Journal of Sociology of Education,37(1), 1–10.
Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood,7(2), 99–112.
Panelli, R. (2010). More-than-human social geographies: Posthuman and other possibilities. Progress in Human Geography, 34(3), 79–87.
Phipps, A. (2018). Reckoning up: Sexual harassment and violence in the neoliberal university. Gender and Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2018.1482413.
Rosiek, J., & Snyder, J. (2018). Narrative inquiry and new materialism: Stories as (not necessarily benign) agents. Qualitative Inquiry, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1778/10074718080748148372846326.
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.
Spinoza, B. (2002). Ethics. London: Everyman.
Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Stewart, K. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies,21(1), 33–47.
Sword, H. (2017). Air and light and time and space: How successful academics write. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tamboukou, M. (2018). The joy of learning: Feminist materialist pedagogies and the freedom of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory,50(9), 868–877.
Taylor, C. A. (2012). Student engagement, practice architectures and phronesis in the student transitions and experiences project. Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education,4(2), 109–125.
Taylor, C. A. (2016a). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthuman research practices for education. In C. A. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 7–36). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Taylor, C. A. (2016b). Close encounters of a critical kind: A diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 201–212.
Taylor, C. A. (2018). Edu-crafting posthumanist adventures in/for higher education: A speculative musing. Parallax,24(3), 371–381.
Taylor, C. A., & Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2016). Posthuman research practices in education. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
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), 4–22.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40.
Van der Tuin, I. (2015). Generational feminism: New materialist introduction to a generative approach. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Watermeyer, R. (2019). Competitive accountability in academic life: The struggle for social impact and public legitimacy. Author’s pre-publication copy.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Taylor, C.A. (2019). Unfolding: Co-Conspirators, Contemplations, Complications and More. In: Taylor, C.A., Bayley, A. (eds) Posthumanism and Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-14671-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-14672-6
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)