Yunkaporta’s 2019 text Sand Talk carves out a language of resistance to the McDonaldisation of Indigenous research. While historic scholarly engagement with Aboriginal culture has overemphasized content, Yunkaporta demonstrates how this has occurred to the exclusion of the processes of Indigenous knowledge transmission and creation. Yet a process view requires engagement with the how not only the what. Such knowledge transmission is discerned in daily lived relationship between land, spirit, and people; binding epistemology to participation in a specific landscape embedded (...) within a living culture. Place-making for Indigenous knowledges requires exploring how Indigenous ways of valuing, knowing and being, shaped by cultural activities on Country, offer new understandings for western metaphysics. -/- Through a close study of Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk this article explores: fractal thinking and the pattern of creation in Indigenous cosmology; the role of custodianship in respectful interaction between living systems; alternative Indigenous understandings of non-linearity, time and transience; the process-panpsychism and animism present in Indigenous perceptions of cosmos as living Country illustrated in the Dreaming and Turnaround creation event; the role of embodied-cognition, haptic- and situated- knowledge in Indigenous science; Indigenous holistic reasoning and the mind-body connection; the relational metaphysic embedded in ritual and yarning practice; the knowledge encoded in place-based totemic mythology, lore, and ritual; and Indigenous understandings of complex systems as adaptive, self-organising and patterned. This article does not offer a process reading of Indigenous thought but rather demonstrates the significant contribution to process metaphysics that may be provided by an Aboriginal Australian perspective. (shrink)

This article begins by accepting that strategic ignorance, or agnotology, underpins academic practice and perpetuates the systemic disadvantage experienced on a global level by non-White and Indige...

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

In this article, we address the limitations of sustainable development as an orienting educational horizon of hope and change, given that mainstream development presumes the possibility of perpetual growth and consumption on a finite planet. Facing these limitations requires us to consider the inherently violent and unsustainable nature of our modern-colonial modes of existence. Thus, we propose a shift from “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it.” We contend that the predicament (...) we face is not primarily rooted in ignorance and thus solvable with more knowledge, nor primarily rooted in immorality and thus solvable with more normative values; rather, it is rooted in denials that stem from harmful desires for and investments in the continuity of the securities and satisfactions promised by modernity-coloniality. Faced with these denials, we emphasize a collective need to “grow up” so that we might “show up” differently to do the work that is needed as we face unprecedented global challenges. (shrink)

Where has all the hilarity gone – and, with it, the ethics of the dark? In this article, I engage with our metaphysical entities of darkness (in Maori, Te Po) and nothingness (Te Kore). Undermining and re-declaring (only to un-declare once again) are more than just pleasurable exercise for my own indigenous group – Maori; they are ethical necessities that keep one’s certainties in check. Whether it is agreeable or uncomfortable, this acknowledgement of those first beings is necessary if we (...) are to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. I then consider one controversial statement about trauma and lend my perverse, indigenous sense to it, reinterpret it and recalibrate it in light of our inherent fallibility as human citizens who are always destabilised by our own metaphysical entities. This drive to undercut ourselves by making our statements contingent on other things, I shall argue, is an ethical one. (shrink)

While Kazimir Malevich is widely known for his suprematist contributions to art, little attention has been granted to his articulated philosophical premise and methodological manifestation concerning the non-objectivity of thought and its relationship to feeling. This paper shows how Suprematist philosophy gives rise to the concept of pedagogical sensing that was first characterized by UNOVIS. Casting Suprematist aspersions on dominant educational practices that seek to reproduce what seemingly ‘is’, a non-objective collapse of all-too-certain frames is replaced by abstract essence. As (...) with the painter, teachers may be correspondingly invited to represent learning without past prejudice, as a creative contemplation in constituted spaces comprised of thoughts and feelings, that are so beautifully manifested through Malevich’s pieces of art and his associated, hitherto unrecognized, suprematist call to arms in education. (shrink)

Where does the object or idea begin, and where does it end as ‘unseen’? There is scope in Maori philosophising to think of the seen object or its idea in various ways, including as materially constituting the self and the rest of the world; as incomplete for a mental representation; as constituted in itself by the unseen ; and as co-constitutional with nothingness and presence. The possibilities of the seen object are several, especially if the concept of ‘seen’ is understood (...) as immediately determined by its other. This paper considers the consequences of the seen and unseen and the illogical in Maori thought for ‘teach-learn’ and in particular for the translation of teach-learn as ‘ako’ in the Maori language. It also discusses some possibilities for the term ‘porangi’, which is often quoted in relation to ‘madness’ but has deeper metaphysical potential that combines the reality of gloom/unseen alongside a heady potential. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘giddying abjection’ and turn it towards unpicking the certainty that ako as teach-learn replicates. Porangi can refer to self-derision, and I take certain statements of mine and destabilise them from their certainty. In that act I hope to show that students and scholars could follow a similar path with their own statements and, in so doing, subject their own utterances to madness. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Despite the reservations of many, digital spaces are useful and are here to stay. Most of us have witnessed that usefulness in action over the last two years, since the outbreak of COVID-19, and ma...

This paper is a response to Troy Richardson’s Terence McLaughlin’s Lecture. In it, I discuss how Richardson provides a unique reading of relationality, drawing together technology studies, Indigenous Education and feminist philosophy of education. Seeking to walk with key ideas he develops, this response also points to a possible limitation in seeing Noddings ethic of care as part of a feminist relational ontology that can help inform new ways of understanding ‘machine learning’. In particular, I introduce the notion of worlding (...) as a way of complementing Richardson’s reading of relationality – a notion that has profound implications for pedagogical practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article invites us to consider the task of education as we face the end of the world as we have known it. The first part of the article gives an overview of global and educational challenges, drawing attention to how formal education has been complicit in the reproduction of historical and systemic violence, as well as unsustainability. This section also offers a distinction between educational approaches that focus on personal empowerment and the mastery of knowledge and skills, and (...) educational approaches that see the role of education in association with the non-coercive re-arrangement of desires and with responsibility before will. The second part of the paper presents a psychoanalytic experiment that attempts to create a space and the dispositions necessary for difficult conversations about the role of education in preparing us all to confront the potential for social and ecological collapse in our lifetime. (shrink)

Where has all the hilarity gone – and, with it, the ethics of the dark? In this article, I engage with our metaphysical entities of darkness and nothingness. Undermining and re-declaring are more than just pleasurable exercise for my own indigenous group – Maori; they are ethical necessities that keep one’s certainties in check. Whether it is agreeable or uncomfortable, this acknowledgement of those first beings is necessary if we are to avoid taking ourselves too seriously. I then consider one (...) controversial statement about trauma and lend my perverse, indigenous sense to it, reinterpret it and recalibrate it in light of our inherent fallibility as human citizens who are always destabilised by our own metaphysical entities. This drive to undercut ourselves by making our statements contingent on other things, I shall argue, is an ethical one. (shrink)