“The Agential Classroom: Tuning to a Posthuman Pedagogy”

In taking the material turn, posthumanism as characterized above and which I calibrate my teaching and work to doesn’t abandon the work done in the linguistic turn or through social constructivism, feminism or post-colonialism, but takes the theories already working through the posts and recalibrates them to the more-than-human. The decentering of the human in both posthumanism and its application to education, then, is not a symbolic move (Pedersen “Is the ‘Posthuman’ Educable?), but an actual recalibration of the way we understand our relation with the world, a recalibration that understands human skin is as porous, as permeable a boundary (Alaimo) as the one Schulz penned in ink. (Re)entangling the material with the discursive, ontology with epistemology, and the human with the nonhuman, posthumanism and posthumanist education as my teaching and work uses them are, Snaza and Weaver argue, “a continuation of the radical democratic, even utopian projects of the twentieth-century … [that] seek not only schools that are less authoritarian and oppressive, but also a global social formation that is not driven by [the] exploitations, dehumanization, and asymmetrical violence.”