A growing body of research incorporates children’s perspectives into the research process. If we are to take children’s perspectives seriously in education research, research methodologies must be capable of addressing issues that matter to children. This article engages in a theoretical discussion that considers how a posthuman research methodology can support such an effort. Piaget’s early and lesser known qualitative studies on children’s conception of the world are re-read along with Karen Barad’s posthuman theory, using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. (...) Through a plastic reading of Piaget and Barad, I consider how a posthuman theoretical framework might contribute to research seeking to access children’s perspectives. Before concluding, I reflect on some ethical concerns regarding posthuman research in education. (shrink)

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to (...) rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to... (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

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)

ABSTRACT The 17th Biennial INPE Meeting was scheduled to take place from 28 to 31 July 2020 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Of course, there is something ironic about convening a conference on the environment and sustainability that would require presenters to utilize unsustainable modes of transport in order to participate. As it turned out, because of the outbreak and rapid global spread of a new Corona virus, the conference was cancelled and replaced by an online event held (...) on 7 and 8 November 2020, both premieres in the history of INPE. The essays collected in this Special Issue will hopefully contribute towards the unmasking and undoing of the various kinds of denialism that have held us in its grip and that continues to thwart attempts to establish a sane and morally sustainable set of relationships between us, human beings, and other animals and the animate and inanimate environment. (shrink)

Drawing on the aesthetic theory of Jacques Rancière and the Lacanian conception of lack, this paper offers an intervention into the notion of subjectivity which can be applied in critical studies of education. Critiquing the progressive and knowledge-oriented ideology of neoliberal systems, Rancière depicts a world in which politics turns out to delimit the subject’s perceptual experience and in this way, argues that what remains out of this ideological demarcation is susceptible to a challenge of the social order on which (...) an ideology is based. While Rancière presents a meticulous reading of current pedagogic institutions, Lacan provides us with a definition of subject having the capacity to challenge the delimiting social order. The latter is achieved by theorising a subject inflicted by a double lack, realised both at the subjective and objective levels. This double negativity gives rise to the emergence of desire in the subject which in Lacan is the source of emancipation as it makes the subject not be satisfied by a given achievement, hence replacing one desire after another. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)