Posthumanism and Higher Education

Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research

Carol A. Taylor, Annouchka Bayley, Carol A. Taylor, Annouchka Bayley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030146719
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030146726
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book explores ways in which posthumanist and new materialist thinking can be put to work in order to reimagine higher education pedagogy, practice and research. The editors and contributors illuminate how we can move the thinking and doing of higher education out of the humanist cul-de-sac of individualism, binarism and colonialism and away from anthropocentric modes of performative rationality. Based in a reconceptualization of ontology, epistemology and ethics which shifts attention away from the human towards the vitality of matter and the nonhuman, posthumanist and new materialist approaches pose a profound challenge to higher education. In engaging with the theoretical twists and turns of various posthumanisms and new materialisms, this book offers new, experimental and creative ways for academics, practitioners and researchers to do higher education differently. This ground-breaking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of posthumanism and new materialism, as well as those looking to conceptualize higher education as other than performative practice. 

© The Author(s) 2019

Carol A. Taylor and Annouchka Bayley (eds.)Posthumanism and Higher Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14672-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Unfolding: Co-Conspirators, Contemplations, Complications and More

Carol A. Taylor¹

(1)

Department of Education, University of Bath, Bath, UK

Carol A. Taylor

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Un/en/foldingExperimentationRuptureKnowledgeEthico-onto-epistemologyZoe

End Abstract

Unfolding/Enfolding/Folding

What is an introduction? A beginning, a preliminary part, a preamble which leads to the main part. Perhaps. If so, then I want to resist the act of ‘introducing’. I don’t wish to lead you ‘in’ and I certainly don’t want to lead you in a straight line either up or down that fabled hill. I am not the Grand Old Duke of York and would like to eschew any kind of ‘Introduction’ that works to frame and condition your reading. Perhaps then, instead of an introduction, it would be better to invoke an unfolding. Deleuze (2006: 6) says that ‘unfolding is … not the contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold.’ This suggests a re-conception of the inside and outside, the intensive and extensive, linearity and circularity, the up and down, light, colour and texture, the immaterial and material, individuation and differentiation—seeing them not as separate or contrasting aspects of an entity but as produced in continually differentiating relation through their continual movements, mixings and morphings. The fold is ‘entre-deux’—something produced in-between as a difference being differentiated—never something preformed (Deleuze 2006: 11). Although this Unfolding is situated where an Introduction would otherwise go (at the beginning!) and it is likely you will read it (or at least skim it) first, it is un/en/folded together with its various 21 chapters and 3 parts, all of which during this book un/en/fold as deviations, creases and pleats riffing on posthumanism and higher education. It and they aim to make a small gesture toward an alternative ontology—an ontology of differentiation and becoming—which, in de Freitas and Sinclair’s (2012: 143) words, can give rise to possibilities which ‘resist the closure of the enveloping eye.’ The closure, in this case, being the marketized performatives, the accountability metrics, the outcomes reckonings, and the bare, pared down measurement technologies which characterise the ‘accelerated academy’ (Carrigan 2016) of contemporary higher education.

Plung(e)ing-In

So, I invite you, reader, to open the book where you may, dive in where you wish, take the plunge when and as you like. Perhaps you may even want to try un/en/folding yourself with/in this book in a spirit of dancing-with, so that your dancing moves—be they basic step or back spin, chugging or lindy circle, oversway, floating, reverse wave, gliding or sliding—work to choreograph your feet, body, hands, mind, brain with the chapters as they un/en/fold in the way that works best for you. There is no right way to read this book but, however you read it, I hope you find enjoyment, provocation, ideas and imaginings that give you scope for push-back against the panoply of neoliberal measurement technologies that constitute the ‘enveloping eye’ of contemporary Higher Education. If/how/when/whether you take the plunge I wonder how the book’s un/en/foldings—of becomings which are ‘folded within a fold’ (Deleuze 2006: 6) and whose ‘unfold[s are] the continuation or extension of [the fold], the condition of its manifestation’ (Deleuze 2006: 40)—work for you, perhaps in some barely perceptible but nevertheless important ways, to make new modes of thinking and unthinking, doing and undoing, possible. Perhaps you will let me know.

In the meantime, my feet find the breadcrumb path of clues laid down by Clare Hammoor in Chapter 16 who tells of how three chairs and a bottle of water shape the aesthetics of her teaching practices and how, inspired by educational philosopher Maxine Greene’s (1977) notion of ‘wide awakefulness,’ she aims to enact a performative pedagogy of ‘playful instability’ to help promote a cross-culturally responsive understanding of what she calls the ‘fantastic now’, so that we might better attend to the entangled ecologies we ourselves are deeply intertwined within. In Chapter 10, Carolyn Cooke and Laura Colucci-Gray entice my feet with more breadcrumbs, telling of how, in their performative sensory experiments with 18 music student teachers and 30 primary science education students, learning bodies are oriented to their expressive, corporeal and mobile capacities as a means of conjuring up virtual (‘as-if’) worlds. Such pedagogic practice/ings trouble dominant modes of undergraduate and Initial Teacher Education replacing a pedagogy of controlled plans and known outcomes with a pedagogy of feeling-sensing-tasting as pedagogy is un/en/folded with particles of wind, air, water and fire, practices are un/en/folded with organic and inorganic matter(ing)s, and research is un/en/folded with events, occurrences, happenings.

Co-Conspirators, Without Whom

Breadcrumbs. Mmm. Tasty. A different yet equally nourishing metaphor comes from Manning and Massumi (2014: 13) who refer to the ‘commotional complexity of the moment in gyration’ and the relational potential such gyrations release. These gyrations have touched me affectively as I’ve been assembling this book, producing a sort of pleasurable ‘lightness’—an onto-ethico-epistemological joy—that has made the labour of working on/with the book energising, both methodologically and theoretically. Like its predecessor (Taylor and Hughes 2016), materializing this book with authors–co-editor–collaborators has been a joy, a flight, a highline, a refuge, a release, a finding, and a co-e-motional coming-to-treasure. Treasure, that is, as a little something or other you take home, hoard up as a source of succour, or self-protection even, and share with those you trust. Such a notion of ‘treasure’ speaks to the chapters’ blending of serendipities, commitments, passions and knowledges; of their authors’ sharings, findings, tellings and provokings; of the affects, inspire-ations, aerations, bodyings-forth, and human-nonhuman confederations, that can unfurl from posthuman higher education doings. Treasure in this sense offers an antidote to higher education as national trophy (as x-percent of GDP), or public showpiece (those universities named and taking pride in being in the global 100 ‘best’ universities), or royal crown jewels (that unhospitable discourse of social division which equates elite with ‘best’). The authors in this book try hard to work against such performative reductiveness which sees treasure as capital—as pieces of eight, gold coin, swag, plunder or loot. Their attempts at reconfiguring pedagogy, practice and research in posthuman vein make them co-conspirators of difference, without whom … Thanks to each and all.

Measurement

In fortuitous happenstance a few weeks ago I came across Sword’s (2017: ix) words:

We long for ‘air and light and time and space,’ an architecture of possibilities and pleasure; instead, we find ourselves crushed under the weight of expectations and the rubble of our fractured workdays.

and wonder if the longing for ‘lightness’ (and a bit of air and space and time) that this book may offer could work as a sort of inoculation against the ‘grubby scramble’ that Ingold (2011: xiii) characterises as the contemporary competitive marketised academy. Ingold’s comment appears in Chapter 19 (written by Jennifer Charteris and Adele Nye), along with his view that:

The prostitution of scholarship before the twin idols of innovation and competitiveness has reduced once fine traditions of learning to market brands, the pursuit of excellence to a grubby scramble for funding and prestige, and books such as this to outputs whose value is measured by rating and impact rather that by what they might have to contribute to human understanding. (Ingold 2011: xiii)

Such sentiments are echoed by Watermeyer (2019: 6) who speaks of the ‘brutal and discomfiting’ decline of criticality, activism and ‘agency theft’ in the accelerated academy, of how the ‘cognate seductions of neoliberalism’ have eroded academics’ political capital by banishing them to the margins of their institutions, and how entrepreneurial and performance management regimes have instituted a culture of ‘competitive accountability’ which has diminished, even corrupted, academics’ ability to be, act and work as public intellectuals. These sad tales of decline and fall are linked to a sense of how, in Watermeyer’s (2019: 14–17) words, the ‘erosion, depurification or disappearance of the intellectual as a public figure’ consigns academics to perform the role of ‘minor celebrity’ through competitive acts of ‘intellectual exhibitionism’ both on social media and via national accountability regimes such as the UK Research Excellence Framework. Indeed, this refrain has become the major literature of contemporary higher education (Alveson 2013; Brown and Carasso 2013; Cantwell and Kauppinen 2014; Collini 2017; Giroux 2014; Naidoo 2016).

I recognise all of this.

I imagine you do too.

And yet.

I wonder.

I wonder if such a lamentable situation is less a description of a general condition and more a partial perspective capturing a certain sort of melancholia—a euro/western, leftist, white, masculinist melancholia? Perhaps the nostalgia for a better state of being in HE is less about loss and more about a complicated entanglement in which those who were formerly central to shaping a certain sort of (neo-colonialist) discourse about the role of intellectuals in public life now find themselves uncomfortably placed and jostling for position with those ‘others’ who have (always) been peripheralized within the humanist (masculinist) university run on Enlightenment goals of rationality, progress and civilisation. I suggest this because: higher education, historically and contemporaneously, remains riven by exclusi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Unfolding: Co-Conspirators, Contemplations, Complications and More
• Part I. Entangled Pedagogic Provocations
• Part II. Inventive Practice Intra-Ventions
• Part III. Experimental Research Engagements
• Back Matter