Keywords

Introduction

Embodiment has increasingly become a lively and vital current in my pedagogy, research and writing around posthumanising creativity. As I will explain in the early parts of this chapter, I have overtly entangled embodiment, enmeshed with materiality (Barad, 2007) into the notion of dialogue to emphasise that, with multiple others, we create, think and do in many ways that are as influential as words within education (Chappell, 2018, 2021). Flowing through my writing, I have argued that a better understanding and practice of embodiment and materiality could be key to aiding our efforts to creatively respond to the rapid and unpredictable twenty-first century challenges that we are all facing. This is because embodiment and materiality inherently bring with them attention to ethics and care through their proximal focus on bodies and matter. Enmeshed together embodiment and materiality also complement each other in their propensity for ‘bottom-up’ or emergent being, knowing and becoming. In this chapter, couched in the wider drivers of the Creative Ruptions book, I aim to pick up on this flow of arguments from previous research and explore them here together, to more fully articulate my ideas and to draw the reader into ruptive and provocative approaches and activities which create spaces for new emergent educational futures.

Embodiment has been a focus of Western academic study for decades. Hoppner (2018) helpfully delineates work in socio-constructivism which considers embodiment through sociological approaches to the body in relation to social stereotypes and hierarchies. She also discusses phenomenological approaches which focus on mind and body through the study of space, time and lived experience, where rationality is not valued over emotions and affect. Hoppner also explains the emergence of postphenomenological embodiment which challenges the binary between human and other-than-human materiality, and employs Barad’s agential realism to interrogate the material entanglements, not only between mind and body, person and society, but also between humans and other-than-humans. My own work has journeyed through varied approaches to embodiment to seek understanding (e.g. Chappell, 2007, 2021) and has most recently taken a posthuman turn (to be explained below) which also incorporates Barad’s agential realism (Chappell, 2018).

However, many Western researchers working in these fields experience how the theorising and practice of embodiment and materiality are still often denied space and influence within education (Fullagar & Zhao, 2021). Peters (2004) argued that the distinction of soul and mind from the body is rooted as far back as Platonic philosophy’s elevation of the mind over the body, and traces it through Descartes’ divorcing of pure reason and the body into the classic Cartesian mindbody dualism. In 2004, he described it as ‘one of the most trenchant and resistant problems of education in postmodernity’ (p. 14). I would go so far as to say that although, since Peter’s chapter, those of us working in this arena have a stronger heritage, that I agree with his statement even now; we still struggle to gain purchase and application for these ideas within our education systems and curricula. In this chapter, I am therefore aiming to contribute to the efforts of embodiment scholars and practitioners to spotlight the potential impact of these ideas, and to show how as part of practice and research around posthumanising creativity, they can make spaces for the emergence of new educational approaches which are fit to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Posthumanising Creativity for Disrupting and Creating Spaces

Before taking you, the reader, through a brief introduction to my past forays with embodiment and materiality and stepping into the flow to put these into conversation with educational futures, I would like to give you an insight into the wider context of my research into posthumanising creativity. For some time, I have argued that posthumanising creativity is a fruitful means by which creativity can be conceptualised within education, as well as being the vehicle through which to generate new emergent educational futures rather than falling back on visioning futures (Amsler & Facer, 2017).

Posthumanising creativity positions embodied material dialogues as the driver of the creative process (Chappell, 2018). My understanding of these dialogues is influenced by Bakhtin (1981), with dialogic relationships established as generative of new ways of knowing, being and becoming between all kinds of others. I also find useful Wegerif’s (2010) extension of this thinking. He articulates the importance of dialogic space to conceptualise shared, relational spaces that emerge in dialogues: spaces where people are able to switch perspectives and co-construct each other (Wegerif, 2010), whilst viewing the world from a different perspective (Chappell et al., 2019). Chappell et al. (2012) describe this as the shared process of becoming which is interconnected with the generation of novel outcomes that are in some way valuable to those involved and those around them. In Chappell et al. (2019) we also argued that it is vital to take seriously Bakhtin’s point that dialogue happens between humans and ‘others’, and that we must therefore attend to the participation of other-than-human ‘voices’ in dialogue. We, therefore, go on to couple this with Barad’s (2007) understanding of agency which is not conceived as a human capacity to act. Instead, it is conceived of as a ‘relational performance enacted intra-actively within an entangled assemblage of material and embodied humans and other-than-humans’ where ideas and phenomenon emerge through the intra-action. Here it is important to understand that matter and materiality are not seen as inert objects but as dynamic phenomena. Wegerif et al. (2017, p. 2) argue that ‘dialogism assumes that identities are formed out of and within relationships, not the other way around’. This resonates with Barad’s articulation of intra-action generating new subjectivities and phenomena rather than these pre-existing the intra-action. This all reinforces Braidotti’s (2013) argument that we need to de-centre humans in our endeavours to generate new approaches to existence, resulting in a view of creativity as dispersed amongst humans and other-than-humans with dialogue at the heart of creating new ideas and becomings. When using the term ‘we’ in these discussions, I mean those of us in the West who have been overtly influenced by human rationality; I do not include the many indigenous scholars who have perhaps more wisely developed human–environment–other relationships and, as I discuss later, who I think we should look to more to understand how to rebalance human influence.

Thus conceived, posthumanising creativity can provide a way of defining creativity in education but it can also offer spaces in which to generate new emergent educational futures. Barad (2007) encourages us not to see space as a neutral, objective backdrop against which events happen and reminds us of Lefebvre’s (1991) insistence that space and society are co-constituted. If we see posthumanising creativity, generated by humans and other than humans, as creating living dialogic spaces (Chappell & Craft, 2011) in which we can co-constitute activities, phenomena and ideas, we can follow Barad’s notion that not only space, but time and bodies materialise through intra-action. None of these notions are containers, or linear, or boundaried; they are fluidly entangled and ripe with emergent possibilities. Here the notion of emergence is used to indicate that we do not aim to extrapolate or predict what futures might be, rather to let futures emerge through and from intra-actions as pro-actively open-ended (Boden et al., 2021). This may not always fit with a current policymaker and practitioner approach that dictates fixity and certainty, but my explorations convince me that this is the best way to be responsive to the challenges we face.

It is my hope that, in line with the creative ruptions driver for this book, and as argued as necessary in Chap. 1, what emerges will ultimately burst open the old containers of educational systems, break the lines, go beyond existing boundaries of educational research and practice. This is likely to happen cumulatively as embodied and material endeavours disturb the status quo. These small ruptures can ultimately be accumulated, together with the ruptures from other authors in this book and like-minded colleagues to generate cracks in systems and make change happen.

The Flow of Embodiment and Materiality

Working with the above ideas since 2018, I have found both Braidotti (2013, 2018) and Barad (2007) helpful in exploring embodiment and materiality. Braidotti (2018) articulates embodiment as the mindbody continuum: ‘the embrainment of the body and embodiment of the mind’ (p. 1); the manifestation of each through the other. Connected to this is Barad’s (2007) fundamental argument that material and discourse co-constitute each other. As I describe above, entities are not boundaried and separated. Through their very materiality they are entangled with each other as they intra-act, constantly making emerging subjectivities and phenomena which are shaped by the form, time and space relationships around and within them. Taken together these ideas intriguingly centre the notion of materiality, whilst de-centring the human’s dominant embodiment.

Applying this to empirical research with colleagues has led to various developments. In Chappell et al. (2019), we were able to flow into making a strong connection between matter and meaning within our exploration of science|arts relational processes within school-based pedagogy. We came to understand how to work with assemblages of students-teachers-objects-ideas mindbodies rather than just minds. We were also able to acknowledge the role of emotions, feelings, touch and expression as undertones of interdisciplinary experiences.

Moving into Chappell et al. (2021), we felt more confident to overtly offer a departure point of ‘moving beyond the word’ in Higher Education (HE) curriculum design and pedagogy. We did this to recognise ‘the messy contingency of lived experience, intra-action with and accountability to the other-than-human, and the significance of affect/materiality in both our data and our pedagogical process’ (p. 18). We also earmarked the use of film as a future means to make visible, audible and tangible the inseparability of being from knowing, grounded in embodiment and materiality, and previously underscored by indigenous scholars (e.g. Todd, 2016; Vergès, 2019).

In Chappell et al. (2021), I was able to bring together my thinking on methodological flows to focus on how embodiment and materiality have disrupted pedagogies within HE transdisciplinary intensive courses, growing into a living understanding of Manning’s (2012) bodyworlding in action. I again highlight the possibilities of film as a publishing format that might scale-ably take the reader-engager into new diffractionsFootnote 1 of ideas that are not reliant on words. In Chappell et al. (2023), we were able to bring this mooted new flow to fruition, working with a professional film artist to “forefront moving human bodies, materialities and spatialities edited, cut together and captured in intra-action with those of other-than-humans” and as Fullagar (2021) argues, create possibilities for knowing otherwise. Currently, in Chappell and Hetherington (2023), we have moved into exploring how irresistible young children find natural, material artefacts, and that through their embodied experiences in relationship with these, we might understand children as already-able (Haynes, 2021) and recognise better than adults, the connections, or kinships with things and their mutually affecting relationships (Bennett, 2010).

These are the moving off points for this chapter; stepping into the flow of these ideas to deepen understandings and to see what comes next.

Stepping into the Flow

From here, this chapter steps into the flow of this current to extend thinking and practice around embodiment and materiality within a posthumanising creativity frame, and to consider their significance for emergent educational futures. While my intention here is to spotlight the potential of embodiment and materiality, I ask you to appreciate them as thoroughly entangled with the processes of dialogue, becoming and human decentring that make up the posthumanising creative processes.

I also want to set this in the context of an enlightening realisation that I was helped into by Fullagar and Zhao (2021). They remind us that Indigenous scholars are very clear ‘that the mindbody binary is a Western problem’ (p. 12). How right they are. In the past when disseminating in Western journals, I have often struggled and felt guilty for attempting to include my embodied and material expertise. Although, this has always been somewhat easier when researching dance education because of its inherent forefronting of embodiment and practice. I realise that taking the posthuman turn around 2018 gave me permission to more fully engage with this part of my expertise in scholarly endeavours, for example leading to the inclusion of the movement film in Chappell et al. (2023).

Fullagar and Zhao (2021), alongside influential Indigenous scholars such as Ritenbury et al. (2014), also opened the door for me to confidently consider and give consequence to the heritage of my embodied expertise in ki-awareness from the martial art of Aikido. I practised this martial art intensively between 2001 and 2008 and became ni-dan (second-level blackbelt). Despite discontinuing intensive study when I became pregnant in 2008, the embodiment of ki within, through and in relationship with others continues as part of my ongoing becoming; although tellingly less so within my academic writing. Ohnishi and Ohnishi (2008, p. 175) discuss how ‘when an Eastern philosopher defines Ki, it is a function of life, which permeates through the life of an individual and the life of the universe’. My Aikido ki-awareness emphasised working with this life energy and I have realised that there are enormous parallels between Ki understood in this way and the calls to take the posthuman and new materialist turn. Fullagar and Zhao (2021) also point out that the Chinese notion of body refers not to the physical bodily entity but to a wholistic mind-body-heart; and alerts us to the fact that the Chinese term for body—shenti—身体—traditionally means body thinks-experiences. The call to de-centre humans and to attend to embodied and material intra-actions with other-than-humans is a different means to get to the same place, to protect and where possible enhance the life of the universe through Eastern philosophy, and to do this via understanding the body-mind-experience as inseparable.

For me, in combination, these approaches offer a powerful means to more strongly value embodiment and materiality and to encourage others to do the same, ultimately to cumulatively rupture Western systems of rationality and manifest alternatives. As a precursor to reading the next parts of this chapter I would ask you, what are your embodied and material life practices that you have been unable to find a place for in Western pedagogy and research? These might be practices rooted in your own Indigenous heritage, or those from other cultures with which you find allyship or kinship. How might what you know through them enliven your work with embodiment and materiality? How can you accumulate this with others doing the same?

Holding these questions in mindbody, we now step into the flow around Touch.

Touch

Barad (2012, p. 206), a quantum physicist, begins their interrogations of touch by referring to the ‘sensuality of the flesh, an exchange of warmth, a feeling of pressure, of presence, a proximity of otherness that brings the other nearly as close as oneself’. Perhaps surprisingly, they go on to explain that touch is the primary concern of physicists:

How do particles sense one another? Through direct contact, an ether, action-at-a-distance forces, fields, the exchange of virtual particles? What does the exchange of energy entail? How is a change in motion effected? What is pressure? What is temperature? How does the eye see? How do lenses work?

And they describe this approach as a perturbation of the usual storyline. They continue by asking quantum questions at the level of minutiae. For example, ‘whom and what do we touch when we touch electrons?’ (ibid) and ‘When electrons meet each other halfway when they intra-act with one another, when they touch one another, whom or what do they touch?’ (ibid). I am not a quantum physicist and cannot begin to answer these questions but here I see a colleague from a different discipline asking questions from different angles, at different levels and scales about touch, similar to the notions that I am interested in exploring in education. Focusing on touch from the fleshy sensuous pressures of hands touching to the minutiae of electrons intra-acting, Barad is creating ruptures in physics, asking their peers to consider that touching and sensing is what matter does, indeed what matter is. They do this by arguing that materiality is always already touching and being touched by multiple others, which constitutes us all as mutually dependent.

If we look at how this kind of thinking has been applied to education, we see constant reminders not to see touch humanistically with the human as sense maker of the touching. Sundberg (2013) reinforces this point when she addresses the challenge of accounting for other-than-humans as actors when dealing with anthropocentric environmental issues. However, Sundberg (2013) calls out a reliance purely on posthuman thinking. She demonstrates how in her own work as a citizen and resident of white supremacist settler societies (Canada and the United States), she has not given enough credit to other epistemic knowledge systems. She shows how she is now aiming for what Sami scholar Kuokkanen (2007) calls multi-epistemic literacy, that is, aiming for dialogues between a diversity of epistemic perspectives to enact a pluriversal understanding of the world. I find this encouraging; it offers a precedent to bring my experience and understanding of ki into my academic work and to seek out and learn from indigenous knowledge systems which posthuman and new materialist practices can complement.

As a means to further explore touch in all its various forms, walking in, with and through are fruitful starting points. Sundberg (2013) talks powerfully about what she has learned of walking and walking with, through the Zapitista’s knowledge systems which allow us to ‘make our world in the process of moving through and knowing it’ (Turnbull, 2007, p. 142). She describes the Zapatistas as putting forward an influential body of knowledge grounded in Chiapas ontologies and experiences in Mexican Mayan communities, rooted in the idea that:

Walking…is embodied in the principle of ‘preguntando caminamos’ or ‘asking we walk,’ which suggests that the movement is enacted through a dialogic politics of walking and talking, doing and reflecting. In other words, the path to social change must be walked and talked.

This Zapatista way of becoming then offers a connection-making process with others, both human and other-than-human which is literally grounded and potentially powerful. Where might this take us if we complement it with the understanding of touch that Barad offers on the micro-level of intra-active questions between electrons? Where might we walk and move to if we continue to try to be multi-epistemically literate? We might also explore practices such as Myers’ (2016) experiments with walking and photography to investigate thinking-with plant sentience in Toronto’s High Park. Springgay and Truman (2017) highlight in all of these practices the importance of attending differently. To try to tune into the land, the flora and fauna is not the same as documenting it. This is perhaps similar to the Zapatista’s notion of walking with, learning to respect the multiplicity of life worlds (Sundberg, 2013).

In my Aikido practice, I spent hours simply breathing, experiencing ki through my tanden (perhaps more familiar to some movement practitioners as their ‘centre’), to find a centredness in myself but also with the wider world. For example, with my senseis Paul Smith (Tetsushinkan Dojo, London) and Minoru Inaba from our home dojo (Shiseikan Dojo, Japan) we spent time walking outside in the Welsh hills, engaging through our centres, breathing into the flow of ki between and amongst us. Still now, I return to this breath work, this tanden awareness at times when I need to focus, to connect and clarify, sometimes in a yoga class, when rehearsing in the dance studio, when engaged in challenging debates with colleagues, when walking in the wind and rain on Dartmoor where I live. I have found myself using breathing, walking and touching exercises not only in my arts teaching where they reside anyway, but also increasingly in traditional Western knowledge delivery-based lecture theatre teaching. I hope that in these encounters, the eighty plus students that I am requested to engage simultaneously, and who are expecting a seated delivery-based lecture, are challenged to understand that we can experience knowledge differently. I ask them to breathe together, to touch palms with the person next to them and with the materials of the room to create a human-lecture theatre relational entity and ask them how this helps them to understand relationality. I ask them to explore Springay and Truman’s Walking Lab (2018) approaches. For example, they offer a walking practice called ‘Walk: touch’ which begins with the instructions (p. 138):

Go on a walk. Feel your feet on the earth. Touch the breeze. Attend to impressions. Caress the thoughts that weigh on you as you amble. Feel the haptic; the corpo-real. Walk in a graveyard if you can find one.

So, my regular teaching now involves experimental combinations of Barad’s work, Aikido ki and walking practices; working towards my students and me becoming more multi-epistemically literate.

This is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is possible if we engage touch as a means to bring alive embodiment and materiality as approaches to engage beyond the human and generate emergent educational futures. Clearly if accumulated together, touch practices in education can contribute to developing new approaches to challenges such as climate change and social justice. My much-valued colleague Katie Natanel writes beautifully in this book (Chap. 12 with Hamza Albakri, Asha Ali and Arthur Dart) about how embodied ecological practices might stretch the space/time of teaching and learning in Higher Education, working for accountability and action through a decolonial feminist ecology. Combining forces together we can rupture the usual story lines, developing multi-epistemic literacy, attuning researchers and students differently to ways of knowing and becoming, and triggering new practices in those who are open to reading and engaging with chapters like ours.

Time

Time is the next turn in the flow that is worthy of consideration to better understand embodiment and materiality. Katie Natanel, Heather Wren and I (Chappell, et al., 2021) previously worked with the notion of slowing down to pay attention to care in HE. There the Anthropocentric challenge on which we were focused was political and gender-based violence. It became apparent that a thoroughly embodied and material engagement was required of us when interacting with student works as varied as grotesque sculptures, stories of Palestinian villages which had been flattened and buried, deaths and abuses portrayed within visual art works, and sexual abuse evoked in a student’s pole dance performance. These were not the kinds of assignments that could be speed read and a neoliberally driven marking grid filled in. Engagement here needed to be slow, and care-ful to ally ourselves with the painful causes within the assignments. Indeed, they stay with us and continue to affect us now.

Since then, I have worked to stay slow where possible in the fast-paced academic world in which we function, trying to allow different ways of doing education to emerge. Morse (2021) points us towards Stengers (2005) arguments for slow science, which push back against a neoliberal knowledge economy within which there is no time for hesitation. Stengers suggests that a slow scientist might find time to consider other knowledge systems such as Gaia and work with these to civilise modern science practices, and in so doing let go of the idea of human dominance. In line with this I would argue for a slowing down of education per se, and a reiteration of Sundberg’s (2013) argument for multi-epistemic literacy to explore how we can better play with time and do education differently. As Facer (2023) argues we need to cultivate our temporal imaginations, in order to foreground their interpersonal, empathetic and critical functions, and to attune ourselves to the myriad timescapes present in any situation.

I have been able to achieve this to some extent in three areas of my practice recently. Two opportunities arose during my University of Exeter study leave where I was released from teaching for six months to focus on research. I was able to spend time on an extended writing project with my colleague Lindsay Hetherington (Chappell & Hetherington, 2023), focused on research into the creative pedagogies which support cutting-edge digital STEAM practice in school education for Oceans Literacy. We experienced what felt like the luxury of working in education research in a way that honoured Barad’s idea of spacetimemattering. This meant that we did not, and could not, proceed in a linear march from start to finish in our thinking or writing. Instead, Lindsay especially explores time as a crucial dimension of the ‘messy mixture’: the natural, cultural, technological assemblage with/in which school pupils are learning in a non-linear spatio-temporal space. Whilst I cannot offer full details here, I point you towards our explorations of how time connects to living dialogic space in this context including understanding of how varied experiences of time within augmented and virtual reality create a balance between transience and stability in learning. This resonates with Hackett and Somerville’s (2017) arguments that schooling should not be a linear sequence. It should be positively disrupted and childhood learning enhanced through creative practices that play with time, in a way that children are likely to recognise from their everyday lives.

Second, during my study leave, I was able to work with a film artist, Leonie Hampton, to integrate a professional movement-based film into a peer-reviewed academic article (Chappell et al., 2023). The article focuses on explorations of creativity, transdisciplinarity, materiality and spatiality in HE pedagogy, particularly SciCulture intensive courses. We introduced the Kinasphere film (QR Code 1), which you can watch here https://vimeo.com/788222550 or scan QR code:

A screenshot of the Q R code 1 of Kinasphere film.

QR Code 1 Kinasphere film QR code

to forefront moving human bodies and materialities and to take the opportunity to play with time in provocations that go beyond words (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1
A photograph captures one man and two women performing dance movements to demonstrate the kinasphere, which represents the range of motion around a joint, often visualized as a sphere.

Still from Kinasphere

Full size image

Christiansen (2019) analyses the modulation of temporal experience in film and how films can make posthuman arguments about how human beings experience time. This can occur through how audio-visual relationships materialise, in our case sound is juxtaposed against visuals to jar the viewer/engager’s understanding of time. We also experimented with changing the other-than-human site specifically to take us back and forth in time and to leave trails of expectation as to what might have continued to happen in the times and places we leave behind. Overall, the aim in the film is that time is experienced slowly at first and with increasing speed towards the middle, ending with a sense of journeying time. In recognition that this is a new learning area for many of us, we offer those who read/engage with the article a series of provocations to help to access the filmic dimensions that we are playing with (Chappell et al., 2023). You may want to explore these yourselves.

The third opportunity has arisen during my teaching at the Danish National School of Performing Arts in Copenhagen where I have been able to share these ideas in a slower two-year full-time, small cohort MFA in Dance and Participation programme. For 12 years, I have taught the students twice in their programme cycle and have been seeding ideas about slower, postqualitative approaches into their practice and research since around 2018. These students are usually mid-career dance artists with a plethora of embodied experience, which makes for very fertile ground to the extent that they have also shown me how to slow down and understand how to ‘play’ with time. This is beautifully exampled in the work of Sonia Ntova, a 2020 graduating student. Sonia focused on the intersections between unconventional choreographic tools and pedagogy with the aim of shifting learning from mind to body-centred. She achieved this through exploring the multiplicity of the relational body within the learning process in different environments. Influenced by a range of feminist, and posthuman ideas, Sonia produced The Book of the Nomadic School of Moving Thought as an activator (Ntova, 2020: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/ceen/ or scan QR code) (QR Code 2).

A screenshot of the Q R code 2 of Ntova ceen blog.

QR Code 2 Ntova ceen blog

Within this Sonia considers time in many ways—below is an example exercise from the book (Fig. 2.2):

Fig. 2.2
A chart titled Let Your Boring Self Die featuring design, interpretation, and performance. It explores time as sounds, with time flowing slower further from Earth's center. Time as space, an essence of silence, and a sensory journey. Elements, objects, environment, people, and galaxies are depicted.

Let your boring self die from the Nomadic School of Moving Thought

Full size image

I would thoroughly recommend trying out Sonia’s ideas to begin or to extend your own playing with time. Sonia’s experiments and the other examples above resonate with Braidotti’s (2019) claims for the potential of creative imagination within posthuman work to engage with continuous, flowing, and multidirectional non-linear time. As Morse (2021) picks up, the importance of a temporal flow is that the embodied, embedded and situated present is always in motion. There are benefits from understanding and practising this as we look for different educational futures to emerge as we respond to anthropocentric challenges, such as the intensification of fast academia fueled by the neoliberal marketisation of education.

Moving on

This chapter has stepped into the flow of my experience of embodiment and materiality and teased out their significance through discussions around touch and time. This has all been offered within an understanding of creativity as posthumanising and as driven by embodied dialogue—as a process that is capable of both spurring on teaching and learning to develop new ways of educating. As I said in the introduction, Barad (2007) encourages us not to see space as a neutral backdrop and calls upon Lefebvre’s insistence that space and society are co-constituted. I hope I have shared here how embodiment and materiality, through a focus on touch and time, are also co-constituted through their entangled intra-actions. Space, time and touch are not boundaried or constituted through binaries. In this last section of the chapter, I want to draw out how we can now position this in relation to creating ruptions and spaces for new educational futures.

I am pulling together the practice-based examples of my own smaller ruptions and offering them to you as flowing provocations from this chapter. I have argued alongside other posthuman and Indigenous scholars that the mindbody split is a Western problem that we in the West need to overcome. This realisation has provided a precedent to combine my posthuman philosophising with prior knowledge of embodiment and materiality through ki awareness. How can you overcome this problem? How can you find small ways to bring your embodied and material life practices, that have previously been denied access, into your pedagogy and research? My response to these questions has led me to consider how attention to touch can perturb the usual story line of disciplines including education. And I argue that if we can understand touch through multi-epistemic literacy, honouring Indigenous and arts-based epistemologies alongside postqualitative and posthuman Western ideas, we can trigger new practices which de-centre humans and start to develop a human/other-than-humanly entangled response to the twenty-first-century challenges we face. Where is touch in your teaching and research? How might attention to it extend your professional, not just personal, becomings in multi-epistemic ways (through walking practices, embodied learning dialogues with other-than-humans)?

My work to overcome the problem has also led me to consider the affordances of understanding time as non-linear, and slower so that as educators we can fully engage with the affective elements of teaching and learning around potent topics such as political violence; and so that we can fully engage with the potentials of AR and VR technologies in formal schooling and the deepened focus and time that that takes; how we can use arts media such as film and dance/movement practices to play with time in education. Which Anthropocentric problems are most urgent for you? How can you positively engage with technologies as other-than-human allies to play with time and generate new perspectives in relation to these? Where are visual, movement and film-based endeavours in your practices, and how could they be more influential to change-driven learning and researching? In my experience, responding to these kinds of questions requires a constant alertness to what has gone before; whilst attending and attuning to multiple ways of being and becoming. The global challenges that we keep responsively turning towards in education are fast changing. I hope what I offer here provides some means to match their ability to morph and intensify, with intra-active approaches to education that make responsive use of all our combined energies.

As Boden et al. (2021) state in their exploration of posthuman change, and as resonates with our citation of Facer (2019) in this book’s introduction, posthumanising creative change is not about futures to be envisioned in a linear progression but is about emergent phenomena that unfold through their exploration. In relation to creating ruptions, my aim is that by offering my examples here regarding touch and time, that they are not only picked up and experimented with by you, the reader/engager, but that we can also connect our endeavours together to create emergent change. The fissures and cracks from my posthuman practices will accumulate with those from other chapters in this book working from feminist, decolonising, Indigenous and new materialistic perspectives to name a few, and with colleagues in the wider field to co-rupture and start to breach the system. Engaging in posthuman practices can feel isolating against the power of the neoliberal HE machine, and yet I take strength from Fullagar and Zhao’s (2021) statement that the mindbody binary is a specifically Western problem; there are cultures and paradigms that we are often already part of, that are not weighed with this issue. In interrogating embodiment and materiality in this chapter, where previously I could only see my influence as a small, isolated disturbance within a sea of rationality, I can now see much greater potential in accumulating smaller ruptures into bigger breaches. Perhaps this is because we—humans and other-than-humans—are all materially co-constituted and, in that lies our power for change.