Roberto Marchesini is an Italian philosopher and ethologist whose work is significant for the rethinking of animality and human–animal relations. Throughout such important books as Il dio Pan,Il concetto di soglia, Post-human, Intelligenze plurime, Epifania animale, and Etologia filosofica he offers a scathing critique of reductive, mechanistic models of animal behaviour, as well as a positive contribution to zooanthropological and phenomenological methods for understanding animal life. Centred on the dynamic and performative field of interactions and relations in the world, his (...) critical and speculative approach to the cognitive life sciences offers a vision of animals as acting subjects and bearers of culture, whose action and agency is also indispensable to human culture. In tracing the ways in which we share our lives and histories with animals in different contexts of interaction, Marchesini's cutting-edge philosophical ethology also contributes to an overarching philosophical anthropology of the human as the animal that most requires the presence and input of other animals. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of writing the posthuman in educational research. Confronted by our own failures as educational researchers within posthuman and new materialist approaches, it seeks a more radical opening to Lather and St Pierre’s question: ‘If we give up “human” as separate from non-human, how do we exist? … Are we willing to take on this question that is so hard to think but that might enable different lives?’ We do this to enable different lives for the (...) planet in all of its manifestations, including its children of the Anthropocene. We begin with the insistent presence of mud in our deep hanging out in an early learning site and ask: what is mud, what does it do, where can mud lead us in its oozing at Grey Gums Preschool. From these explorations we include a scripted dialogue that was performed at a conference against a background of rolling images of the proliferation of mud’s play with children. We consider this scripted dialogue, and its performance, as data read in relati... (shrink)

Central to the work of Roberto Marchesini is a sustained critical engagement with the sciences of animal behavior. Drawing on veterinary, biological, and philosophical training, he critiques the legacy of Cartesianism that sees animals as machines at the same time as acknowledging the importance of biological knowledge and approaches for understanding animals. Further, he offers his own version of a zooanthropological and posthumanist method for the future of ethology as an interdisciplinary social science founded on shared existence, interaction, and understanding. (...) His reframing of questions around biological and cultural continuity in turn refigures received notions of identity, animality, and the origin of culture itself. (shrink)

Vinciane Despret is a Belgian philosopher whose work proposes new questions and approaches to human–animal relations. Of central importance to her thought is an intellectual and cultural proposal to allow animals to show their agency and to be interesting. In scientific research animals are too often reduced to uninteresting, instinctive machines, whereas other modes of engagement allow us to see the wonderfully surprising, culturally rich, and intelligently inventive lives lived by animals. With genuine curiosity, Despret responds that humans and animals (...) transform one another through daily encounters, and she explores these metamorphoses through the history of philosophy, literature, science, field research, and art. In a playful though serious tone, Despret claims that animals are always more interesting than we give them credit for, and that the achievements of animals are never far from our own. (shrink)