A Theoretical Framework for the Critical Posthumanities

Professional Development in Education

Teacher preparation and induction are two notable hallmarks of teacherbecoming commonly presumed to be detached from one another, forcing teacher candidates to transition linearly from one phase to another. Our study challenges this notion through one newly developed teacher residency programme where participating teacher residents are positioned to navigate the simultaneous entanglement of concepts. Using critical posthumanist theories alongside poetic inquiry, this study works at the speculative middles of teacher preparation and induction. We examine a small slice of data from a larger study to zoom into individual interviews with undergraduate teacher residents to explore the question: What does the entanglement of teacher preparation and induction reveal about becoming a teacher? Through our analysis we found that becoming a teacher is (a) fraught with multidimensional relations of obligation; (b) disrupts linear conceptions of space and time; and (c) functions as a co-constitutive property to the production of practices. Furthermore, these findings illuminate ways a critical posthumanist lens might render new questions thinkable for teacher education practice and research. Examining how one residency programme works at the 'speculative middles' of multiple concepts produces an abundance of reverberating implications for expanding a non-linear engagement with research on teacher becoming.

Journal of Sustainable Tourism

Until the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the growth of tourism had confronted many destinations with policy decisions that had impacted regional ecosystems and the quality of life of their resident population. To counter the threats driven by dominant tourism growth models, a number of tourism scholars have called for revisiting the philosophical foundation upon which tourism activities are developed. Informed by debates in philosophy and the wider social sciences, including tourism scholarship, this conceptual paper, therefore, suggests an alternative governance paradigm for tourism destinations, which is articulated in four propositions that reflect a new materialist perspective. These propositions are a monist post-anthropocentric ontology, a participatory epistemology, resilient forms of tourism and participation as methodologies, and social eudaimonia as societal value. The core argument presented in this paper is that the Anthropocene requires tourism destinations to espouse alternative governance approaches drawing from ideas emerging from new materialist scholarship.

Curriculum Perspectives

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 2020

This article takes up and make the case for the study of Covid-19 through the lens of feminist new materialism and asks how this approach might draw out perspectives and insights overlooked by other frameworks. I begin with a brief introduction to Covid-19 followed by an analysis of the virus through the lens of feminist new materialism by drawing on the work of Karan Barad (2003), Rosi Braidoitti (2011), and Jane Bennett (2004). I contend that the interconnected frameworks articulated by each of these theorists provides the basis for a more robust understanding of the viral non-human (Covid 19) and everyday objects (the toilet roll and medical masks) whose agentic power is embedded in larger assemblages of natureculture. This kind of analysis is urgent in light of our current media-saturated, interconnected, highly politicized, and expert-adverse environment.

Education Sciences

An oxymoron is a self-contradicting or incongruous word or group of words as in Lord Byron’s (1788–1824) line from his satirical epic poem Don Juan; “melancholy merriment”, An oxymoron is a rhetorical and epigrammatic device for effect, often revealing paradox. The effect I aim for here is the actualization of affect; affect made relevant and useful for education as a public good. Oxymoroning as an immediate edging of knowledge into experience, hence a way to access a proto subjective level of the affective power of X. The prefix proto indicating the first, original or earliest. I ask how we can become materially identifiable subjects for one another and what would it take to move from a mechanistic approach to education to a more machinic one. It is a view of change that does not steal my powers or affective force away. Furthermore, are the abstractions one attempts to move from imitation to imagination abstract enough? I aim for expansions in our educational rationales for social ...

Education Sciences

This article juxtaposes mentoring with an extended concept of time, arguing against the idea of mentoring as a unilaterally forward-moving progression. We discuss how time and temporality unfold in mentoring in the teaching profession. We further explore how temporality might create different potentialities of hope. Ultimately, we suggest the necessity of destabilising narratives of mentoring as constant and linear improvements. We use an example of an inheritance from the past as an analogy in order to provide a thematic starting point for our discussion. This example supports the exploration of how mentorship programme assignments are experienced as well as how conversations are constantly filtered through time. The article builds on the empirical elements of a study of a mentorship programme to explore potentialities that are of importance in mentorship and education.

Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance

This article explores the risks and potentials of staging vulnerability in community theatre with teenage girls. By drawing on postconstructionist and spatial theories, the article elaborates on how aesthetic spaces emerge when interwoven with spaces of vulnerability. Exploring how vulnerability becomes a generative, or restrictive force, the article debates tensions produced in the process in terms of potentia and potestas. It examines the embeddedness of the drama practice as it both challenges and merges with the local context and the participants' everyday. The article argues that this embeddedness is a prerequisite to turn vulnerability into potentia.

NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research

is intersectional or bullshit", as the independent writer and blogger Flavia Dzodans 1 put it in 2011. With this quote as an overall guideline, this special issue of NORA addresses the question that comes next: intersectionality, yes, but how? The issue was initiated with the intention of cultivating a space for self/reflections upon methodological engagements with and adjustments of intersectionality as a concept and a practice; as a cornerstone in research, critique and activism in a Nordic context. Since the late 1980s, the framework of intersectionality has become overwhelmingly popular (see Figure 1) and has moved with increasing speed across societal domains, theoretical paradigms, academic disciplines and geographical locations. When Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality in 1989, she was drawing on the long legacy of political activism among black women and women of colour in the USA (Crenshaw, 1989). As long ago as 1851, Sojourner Truth summed up the positionality of black women in the USA through the question: "Ain't I a woman?" (Brah & Phoenix, 2004). Crenshaw's intervention formed part of a growing discontent among activists and academics, among these famously The

Sustainability

In this article, we seek to theorize the role of the kindergarten teacher as an agency mobiliser for sustainability through keeping the concept of the child in play, ultimately envisioning the child as a knowledgeable and connectable collective. This implies a non-dialectical politics of multiplicity ready to support and join a creative pluralism of educational organization and teacher roles for sustainability. Comprising friction zones between actual and virtual multiplicities that replace discursive productions of educational policies with enfoldedness, relations between bodies and becomings. This changes the power, position and function of language in and for agency and change. Not through making the child a constructivist change-agent through language but through opening up the possibilities for teachers to explore relations between language and matter, nature and culture and what might be produced collectively and individually. We go via the concepts of agencement expanding on ...

Humanities

In this paper, we consider the major and controversial lexicon of Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ and what an alternative re-working of this concept might look like through the story of Mary Poppins. In playfully exploring the many interesting aspects of Travers’ character, with her classic tale about the vagaries of parenting, we attempt to highlight how reading Mary Poppins through the Deleuzian lens of ‘becoming-woman’ opens up possibilities, not limitations, in terms of feminist perspectives. In initially resisting the ‘Disneyfication’ of Mary Poppins, Travers offered insights and opportunities which we revisit and consider in terms of how this fictional character can significantly disrupt ideas of gender performativity. We endeavour to accentuate how one of its themes not only dismantles the patriarchy in 1910 but also has significant traction in the twenty- first century. We also put forth the idea of Mary Poppins as an icon of post-humanism, a nomadic war machine, with her robotic...

Work, Employment and Society

This article explores the lived experiences of disabled men and women who work in sheltered employment. Specifically, it analyses how the entanglement of sociomaterial practices affects disabled workers’ co-constructions of work and disability. Theoretically grounded in posthumanist performativity theory, the article shows how embodied employment experiences within organisational spaces contribute to the materialisation of disability. Findings emerged from ethnographic participant observations and interviews with management and workers at a sheltered workshop. The data highlight how the entanglement of bodies, space, objects and discourses affects materialisations of disability in ways that appear more inclusive than in mainstream employment. However, these sociomaterial practices remain embedded in a productivity-oriented work logic.

Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2018

Food-tracking apps constitute a major category of the thousands of food-related apps now available. They are promoted as helping users monitor and measure their food consumption to improve their health or to lose weight. In this article, I present six vignettes drawn from interviews with Australian women about their use and non-use of food-tracking apps. The vignettes provide detailed insights into the experiences of these women and their broader sociocultural and biographical contexts. The analysis is based on feminist materialism theoretical perspectives, seeking to identify the relational connections, affective forces, and agential capacities generated in and through the human-app assemblage. The vignettes reveal that affective forces related to the desire to control and manage the body and conform to norms and ideals about good health and body weight inspire people to try food-tracking apps. However, the agential capacities promised by app developers may not be generated even when people have committed hope and effort in using the app. Frustration, disappointment, the fear of becoming too controlled, and annoyance or guilt evoked by the demands of the app can be barriers to continued and successful use. Sociocultural and biographical contexts and relational connections are also central to the capacities of human-app assemblages. Women's ambivalences about using apps as part of efforts to control their body weight are sited within their struggles to conform to accepted ideals of physical appearance but also their awareness that these struggles may be too limiting of their agency. This analysis, therefore, draws attention to what a body can and cannot do as it comes together with food tracking apps.

Australian Journal of Environmental Education

In this paper we explore what decentring the child in posthumanism does to our research practices, to our conceptualisations of and relationalities to the child. Crucially, we explore the imperative for other ways to encounter the child – that pursue a decolonising and de/recentralising agenda. We pursue tentacular lines of enquiry through a series of interwoven stories – some more familiar than others. It is by queering old narratives that new and unexpected stories concerning pedagogical documentation, sustainability and environmental education, and the child’s contaminated connection to ‘nature’ begin to emerge. This paper attempts to mobilise ‘the posthuman child’ as feral, an uncomfortable in-between that invites us to grapple with the disease of life on a damaged planet. Central to our storytelling is recycled, ‘natural’ materials found in a Reggio Emilia kindergarten in Norway. Specifically, cork has guided us; insisting that we take the non-innocence of matter to the heart o...

Journal of Business Ethics, 2021

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human–animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from ...

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2022

For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholars in this field have shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human act...

ACCESS Contemporary Issues in Education, 2020

In this article I consider philosophical inquiry as an ethical enactment for material change. I do so by situating philosophical inquiry as a type of virtuous practice, animated by an ethical determination to generate material difference. I thus place a large degree of theoretical emphasis on the Foucauldian notions of practice, virtue, and enactment as a means to recognize the open-ended, process-based orientation of such work. Through the course of this article I extend my argument to challenge conventional inquiry practices in education as a means to generate different, more immanently situated, effects.

Humanities, 2020

This paper focuses on Charlotte Wood’s 2015 dystopian novel The Natural Way of Things. Set in an unnamed place in the Australian outback, it recounts the story of 10 girls in their late teens and early twenties who are kept prisoners by a mysterious corporate organisation for their sexual involvement with an array of powerful men. The novel’s title invites two main readings: the first, and perhaps more obvious, along gender lines; and the second, which will provide the backbone to my analysis, within the framework of the natural world, the animal kingdom in particular. The Natural Way of Things has been described as a study in contemporary misogyny and the workings of patriarchy. The ingrained sexism of society—the insidious, normalised violence against females, often blamed on them, glossing over male responsibility—is undoubtedly the central topic of Wood’s work. Without losing sight of gender issues, my approach to Wood’s novel is inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman theories o...

Frontiers in Sociology, 2021

The cyborgization of brainbodies with computer hardware and software today ranges in scope from the realization of Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to visions of mind upload to silicon, the latter being targeted toward a transhuman future. Refining posthumanist concepts to formulate a posthumanities perspective, and contrasting those approaches with transhumanist trajectories, I explore the intersectional dimension of realizations and visions of neuro-technological developments, which I name TechnoBrainBodies-in-Cultures. In an intersectional analysis, I investigate the embedding and legitimation of transhumanist visions brought about by neuroscientific research and neuro-technological development based on a concept of modern neurobiological determinism. The conjoined trajectories of BCI research and development and transhumanist visions perpetuate the inscription of intersectional norms, with the concomitant danger of producing discriminatory effects. This culminates in normative c...

The Australian Educational Researcher

The capacity to aspire for young people is significant, as they cannot choose to be what they cannot experience or imagine becoming. Student exchange programmes that expand experiences of STEM may increase opportunities, interests, and participation for rural young people in the STEM subject field. This paper creates a cartography with data created from self-reported Year 10 students’ affective responses to experiences undergone during a three-week rural exchange (RE) programme. Students reported increased feelings of belonging to both school and STEM subjects during and after participating in the RE programme. The data created with students during this study provided a deep insight into the positive affective impact of the experiences undergone. Students’ increased aspirations and motivation to continue in STEM fields were reported as sustained on return to their home rural school.

Sociology of Health & Illness, 2019

This paper is built upon an assumption: that social theory can be generated through a meaningful engagement with a co-researcher group of disabled young people. Our co-researchers are theoretical provocateurs and theorists in their own right who, through their activism and writing, are challenging us to reconsider the meaning of life, death and disability. Their work on our funded Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project has enabled us to consider the promise and potential of humanist and posthuman epistemologies, theories, methodologies, interventions and activisms. The paper introduces the research, the authors of this paper (academics and co-researchers) and then explores three layers of analysis that work the edges of posthuman thinking; sovereign and assembled selves; affects and desires; mourning and affirmation. We conclude by asserting that as a research team we are engaging with a DisHuman approach to theory and activism: one that blends the pragmatics of humanism with posthuman possibilities.

Journal of Ecotourism

The growing debate on the Anthropocene epoch urges a critical reflection on the relationship between human and non-human animals. This paper reflects on the space of animal justice in wildlife sanctuaries from a post-human perspective. Our perspective on wildlife sanctuaries relies on posthumanism and its potential in terms of offering both a new epistemology and a theoretical grounding for an approach to justice that is not anthropocentric. In so doing, we also draw on concepts of animal geography and the sociology of space. In line with posthumanism, we adopt a methodology inspired by pluralism, openness, interdisciplinarity and creativity. Our narrative approach combines a thematic analysis with vignettes and features of narrative analysis. Our findings challenge the perception of wildlife sanctuaries as an ideal 'just' space for wildlife and present a posthuman stance on interaction between human and non-human animals, seeking justice for the latter.

Gender and Education, 2019

This paper explores a teaching practice that considers equality in social studies in a Swedish upper secondary school. The questions explored were: What become produced within the teaching practice? and How to encounter these issues without reproducing them? To explore these questions I put to work a theoretical framework of feminist post-humanism and a participatory methodological approach. This meant that I collaborated with one teacher and participated in planning and teaching activities. The analysis of the teaching practice focuses on three events involving cries, lines and stairs; these events display the complex processes in which norms and categorizations are produced and revealed how both stabilizations and tensions became enacted within the teaching. In the concluding remarks, I further discuss these tensions in terms of troubles and hopes and elaborate on the encounter between social studies curriculum and a feminist posthumanist approach.

Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 2020

This paper explores the teaching practice of norms and equality in an upper secondary school in Sweden focusing on affective dimensions. The teaching and the affective qualities engendered were explored empirically and theoretically with a specific focus on engagements. Inspired by feminist posthumanism, a relational ontology was used to embrace affective dimensions as generative intensities. Using a collaborative ethnography methodology the analysis traces affective qualities within the teaching practice informed by theoretical notions of tensions and choreographies. The analysis shows how the practice of teaching is moulded with affective qualities such as safety, uncertainty, distress, troubles, silences-altogether part of enacting different modes of engagements. This foregrounds how ambiguous engagement unfolds in the teaching of norms and equality. In the concluding remarks, the messiness of affective qualities are discussed highlighting engagement in terms of collective disruptions and inviting a critical and creative sensibility.

Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2022

This paper argues for a postcritical praxis in global citizenship education (GCE) and peace education (PE). The paper begins by critiquing the interlocking fields of GCE and PE as problematically framed around the three key pillars of liberal peace. Then, drawing on postabyssal thinking the paper illustrates that the Western-centricity of liberal peacebuilding is not only colonialist/imperialist but that it is an erasure of the other. The paper argues that in light of this realization epistemological pluralism as a transformative response is wanting. Instead new responses must focus on other ontological possibilities grounded in a postcritical response to postabyssal thought. Before concluding, the paper offers some pedagogic possibilities integrating the ontological for a new postcritical GCE and PE.

From Polarisation to Multispecies Relationships, 2021

'Existential risk' continues to escalate and the crime of 'ecocide' is not yet recognised as part of international law even though it poses a new form of 'genocide'. Politically fragmentation and populism have become the new order driven by capitalism, anthropocentrism, speciesism, nationalism and racism. The case is made that liberalism has progressed too far in undermining collective (cosmopolitan) responsibility. The result is a form of state control and governance that is more closely linked with the nation state and the market than with protecting habitat or the needs of all those who fall outside the mantel of the social contract, such as young people, asylum seekers, the disabled and other sentient beings. The frontiers of justice need to be extended to protect living systems. The concept 'species' is a central concern in relation to the issue of categorization, membership, displacement and decision-making (in terms of state sovereignty, territory, colonization and its implications for human, animal and plant life). As urbanisation encroaches on the wild spaces and displaces other forms of life, relationships that are Anthropocentric need to be re-framed to enable re-generation and sustainable living that is non-anthropocentric.

From Polarisation to Multispecies Relationships, 2021

This chapter explores some examples of systemic thinking and practice to support re-generative development. By re-generative development we mean developing opportunities that support people and the living systems on which they depend. We need to understand our connectedness and protect people and the environment. Our thinking shapes the material world in which we live. Candace Pert and Susan Greenfield have made these points. This consciousness is about 'both and' thinking that balances individual and collective needs. Keywords Systemic • Regenerate • Development This chapter is informed by conversations with the community engagement agents comprising Norma Romm, Akwasi Arko-Achemfuor, Joyce Karel in South Africa as well as the community facilitators in Australia and Indonesia. The chapter refers to a joint forthcoming joint chapter entitled "Systemic thinking for re-generative development" (Romm & McIntyre-Mills, 2021, forthcoming).

Environmental Communication, 2023

While contemporary ecocidal cultures are premised on a human/nature binary that treats humans as separate from, superior to, and entitled to mastery over nature, this study explores a range of commonly existing imaginaries that unravel the binary and could enable broad systems change. We introduce a deceptively simple freewrite methodology around the foundational concept “nature” to decipher such unravelings in Western/ized settings. Applying this methodology in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, we exhibit how freewrites can improvisationally reveal and engage productive tensions (dialectics) that trouble the binary, support reflexive ecologically centered becoming, and, in some cases, provide ways to eschew the binary altogether. The present study operates from the stubbornly optimistic perspective that our species’ capacity to collectively, even quickly embrace ecocentric meaning systems that trigger massive change should be widely acknowledged and actively encouraged.

Social Sciences

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Social Sciences

What would it look like to honour differences in eating disorder recovery? Recoveries from eating disorders and eating distress are enacted in relation to discursive, material, and affective flows that open and constrain different possibilities for differently embodied people. Yet, the pull toward establishing consensus on “what recovery is” continues to dominate the landscape of both qualitative and quantitative eating disorder recovery work. While researchers from a variety of perspectives, disciplines, and methodological traditions have sought to establish consensus on what recovery “is”, a singular definition remains elusive. Indeed, when researchers continue to adopt the same methodologies—which largely emphasize establishing patterns of sameness—the opportunity to dig into contradictions and tensions that enliven recoveries is missed. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences conducting creative, collaborative, generative research to re-write, re-design, re-draw, and otherw...

Contemporary Political Theory

Many contemporary thinkers of the Anthropocene, who attempt to articulate a non-modern and relational ontology, all too readily dismiss critical theory inherited from the Frankfurt School for being anthropocentric, failing to acknowledge certain basic similarities. Instead, this article argues that the scaffolding of Anthropocene thinking—the recognition of the origins of the contemporary condition of ‘loss of world’ and the hope of ‘living on in the ruins’—share much with earlier critical theorists’ recognition that the Holocaust necessitated a fundamental break with the past. In reading these two sets of literatures together, we suggest we can get a better grasp of the stakes involved in the contemporary crisis of critique, and in the speculative framings enabling alternative futures to come into being.

eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the Tropics

In response to the current age of the Anthropocene, Posthumanist studies explore multispecies' entanglements and encounters in order to move away from the colonial binaries that separate humans from the environment. Adding to these studies, this paper explores the role of mythology in decolonising the Westerncentric strategies of narration. Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle, envision the relationship of the human with other species against the deepening climate crisis, bringing to the fore the often-discounted discourses of cultural myths. In Gun Island, Manasa, the quintessential nagini is a folk deity of fear-based Nature worship from the Bay of Bengal, and an outsider to the established pantheon of Hindu gods. The Yoruba deity, Olokun, and his/her incarnations, move across the three time periods in Tentacle emerging as the saviour of the Caribbean islands. The novels reinterpret and re-evaluate the tropical Indigenous myths to implement alternate approache...

Children

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Cambridge Archaeological Journal

This paper explores the potential of posthumanist feminism in archaeology. We find ourselves exhausted in the face of the continuing inequalities in our discipline and the volatile political times we live in, where discrimination and xenophobia, entangled with the patriarchy, create a toxic mix. In the face of this, we draw inspiration from ongoing activism within archaeology and the emergence of posthumanist feminism beyond archaeology. We consider the juxtaposition between activism in the discipline and the lack of engagement with the same issues in our theory. Posthumanist feminism is explored as a way to unite theory and activism. It connects to and builds on existing feminisms but is argued to differ in three ways: first, posthumanist feminism widens the scope of those for whom we should be working to achieve equality; second, it suggests radical shifts in our ontology are necessary to bring about equality; third, it develops an alternative approach to difference. We explore th...

Springer eBooks, 2020

What of this fourth information revolution: the other three being Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud that have decentered 'Man'? We are living through extraordinary times, a phrase that has been said often enough historically. Yet, it is difficult to not think otherwise. Some, like Yann Moulier Boutang (2011), have placed their own twist on this state of affairs following the lead of Foucault. He has called it 'third capitalism' or 'cognitive capitalism' that goes beyond mercantile, industrial, and financial capitalism. Boutang (50-56) provides fifteen separate descriptors, which succinctly map out this phase of capitalism. Such a society has come to be known as a 'the knowledge society.' Boutang follows Foucault when he says that such "capitalism produces knowledge and the living through the production of the population. This production of life can be called 'bio-production.' And the power that has, as its function, the control of this 'bio-production' is called 'biopower'" (56). The full force of such 'biopower' is felt globally as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads hysterically around the globe as governments declare a 'national emergency' and close their borders to stop an invisible invader that has no boundaries; it's a nonhuman agency capable of 'stilling' a capitalist economic system as the stock markets go into a freefall. Conspiracy theories abound as China is accused of bioengineering a synthetic virus in order to destroy global economies; its release in Wuhan was simply an accident! The irony of this global CHAPTER 1

Education Sciences, 2020

This conceptual paper offers a reconsideration of the application of Novakian concept mapping to higher education research by putting to work the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. We ask: what does thinking with Deleuze’s concepts offer researchers interested in concept mapping, and what conceptual, and terminological, obstacles might be created through such a reconceptualization? We have focused on the rhizomatic principles of mapping and tracing in the context of concept mapping. We contend that Deleuze offers a fresh line of flight with the potential to deterritorialise the discourse surrounding concept mapping, thus widening its applicability and increasing its accessibility to researchers who do not necessarily share the same arborescent concept mapping heritage: with its roots in science education. Exploring the overlap between rhizomatics and concept mapping also allows for the reappraisal and blurring of the boundary between structural and post-structural discourses—breaking...

Subjectivity

In this article, we engage feminist theorisations of figurations as “performative images that can be inhabited” (Haraway 1997/2018) to trace some of the figures which are animating stories about climate change and reproduction in Global North contexts. We focus our reading on a handful of texts which circulate around the question of ‘Is it okay to have a child, given our climate conditions and futures?’ Throughout, we consider the relationship between figurations and our subjective becomings in response to environmental devastations. We critique and resist the hegemonic figuring of ‘the human subject’ as rational and unitary (Braidotti 2014), as this figure naturalises the Western social power relations of advanced capitalism, population control and human exceptionalism. Seeking multiplicity, we look for figures and subjective openings which enable us to become response-able to the pain of ecological worlds dying around us (Haraway 2016), including from our disciplinary location of ...

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

In this article, we examine publicness during the pandemic, with a particular focus on the conditions it creates or constricts for engagement, solidarity and collective action. We interrogate the intensive publicness of the crisis to reflect on its assumed and established equation with progressive political possibility – transparency, accountability and democratic procedure. Theoretically, we cut into the contemporary ambiguity of publicness by putting it into conceptual dialogue with the idea of commoning, a notion that speaks to the resources and political consequences of coming together, and publicness not as coexistence and speech acts but as a domain of struggle. By considering the intersection of publicness and commoning, we aim to provide one way of thinking about how and when public revelation can be oriented towards material and political change. We propose three lines of examination: publicness without commoning; publicness with contingent commoning; and commoning without ...

English Studies, 2020

This article focuses on N. K. Jemisin's triple-Hugo-award-winning epic trilogy Broken Earth (2015-2017), using the strategically powerful perspectives of trauma studies and the discourses around the figure of the posthuman, and paying special attention to issues of ethics and the notion of the Anthropocene. It is contended that the main issues at play in the Broken Earth trilogy are the representation of structural oppression against a marginalized minority and the foregrounding of the possible consequences of extreme exploitation of the environment. The article argues that Jemisin's work draws a connection between the subjugation and exploitation of certain groups and of nature, framing both as traumatic phenomena. Yet, the story allows for a possibility of regeneration in the promotion of a posthuman form of ethics. In short, as this article attempts to prove, the Broken Earth series considers the past, interprets the present and offers a cautionary tale about a the future that makes a strong case for the hopeful practice of posthuman ethics.

Public Relations Inquiry, 2020

This article theorises the interplay between public diplomacy and populism. Building on Baudrillard's simulacra, we advance the hybridity approach to soft power statecraft by analysing a cultural shift in US presidential public diplomacy. Using discourse analysis, we uncover how, rather than aiding the building of relationship with foreign publics, Donald Trump has brought to the field cultural codes alien to public diplomacy, imploding the meanings central to the endogenous norms of diplomacy and turning towards an agonistic relational dynamic with foreign publics. This article reveals how digitalisation affords the expansion of Donald Trump's populist style, and makes the populist cultural shift highly visible on his Twitter. To reveal this dynamic in granular detail, we propose 'kayfabe' as an epistemic lens for the interpretation of the populist style in the conduct of Trump's 'simulated public diplomacy', a defining feature of the current US global leadership. As well as considering socialities re-shaping relational dynamics, this article unpacks tensions stemming from the expansion of populist style into presidential public diplomacy. Finally, we reflect on the epistemic crisis of US public diplomacy within the strategic landscape of political uncertainties associated with the proliferation of populism in the field.

Journal of Posthuman Studies, 2022

This article presents a brief mapping of Martin Heidegger’s theory of Dasein within the critical posthumanism framework. Adopting a cartographic analysis, it maps some similarities and differences between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and critical posthumanism. It relies especially on Braidotti’s posthumanist arguments and theories to explain both the relational and transversal features of Dasein (in the posthumanist framework) and the weak anthropocentrist ones (in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology). In this paradigm, the Heideggerian concept of Dasein is situated both beyond and between classical humanism and weak anthropocentrism, given that Heidegger is deconstructing the metaphysical dialectic of binary oppositions (between human and animal), while remaining anchored in some type of weak anthropocentrism. Relying on a posthumanist and post-anthropocentrist methodology, the posthuman convergence twists the existential inquiry of Dasein and opens up a vitalist–materialist and i...

Literator: Journal of literary criticism, comparative linguistics and literary studies, 2023

In 'n land sonder voëls (2019) is die laaste roman van die bekroonde skrywer Harry Kalmer. Dit het kort voor sy heengaan op 26 Julie 2019 verskyn. In die lig hiervan kan die roman ook gelees word as 'n afskeid van 'n (eie) lewe en die traumatiese worsteling in die aangesig van die skrywer se naderende dood. In sy resensie van die roman beklemtoon Amid (2019): Kalmer se besinnings oor die aftakeling van die menslike liggaam, van oud word en die dood. Van rou en smart en verlies. Sy optekening van vrees. Sy besinning oor 'n lewe …. 'That which makes us human': posthumanism and affect in In 'n land sonder voëls (Harry Kalmer). This article is an investigation into the way in which the theoretical frameworks of posthumanism and affect theory manifest in In 'n land sonder voëls (Harry Kalmer) with an emphasis on the relationship between the two theoretical thought patterns. The point of departure is the question that emerges in the story: What is it that typifies our humanity in the light of mortality and loss? Aspects that emerge from this are onomastics, the placement of a human being as person-in-the-world, the inexorable exploration of the body, and unavoidable loss and trauma. The connection between the past and words or stories is prominent, and is found as a leitmotif, throughout the novel. Contribution: This article contributes to research on posthumanism and affect and the relationship between the two theoretical thought patterns by exploring the application in Harry Kalmer's novel In a country without birds. It demonstrates how mortality and loss manifest in the novel and constitute humanity. The article further posits a view on human nature concerning onomastics, the body in/and space, memory and the connection between the past and words or stories.