The Anthropocene: A Crisis for Education

• In Event: 68.061 - Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 68.061-6 - Critical Posthumanism, the Affective Turn, and Socially Just Pedagogies and Curricula

Abstract

The Anthropocene, according to James Proctor (2013) constitutes a crisis for androcentric/anthropocentric knowledge production (educational) systems. As pedagogues, the crisis of the Anthropocene demands, writes Isabelle Stengers (2015), that we make drastic interventions in the way we teach and in what we teach. The intention of this paper is to investigate the potential of critical posthumanism as a tool for non-anthropocentric knowledge-production, pedagogy and identity formation. Such a perspective, I will argue, provides an essential mapping tool for navigating the heady situation of the Anthropocene as well as the dire implications of the ongoing 6th extinction of biological life that is currently
Stengers (2015), Rosi Braidotti (2013), Haraway (2015), Jussi Parikka (2015) and other
posthuman thinkers suggest that a fundemental shift in reality has occurred, which educational systems still need to take full cognisance of. This entails, I will argue, grappling in classrooms and curricula with what Stengers (2015) terms difficult knowledge about the unhinged socio-economic and environmentally degraded realities that characterise our current geological epoch. This crisis, as Linda Williams (2009) and Andrew Jones (2009) write, entails finding new ways of reconfiguring human subjectivity in relation to the multiple non-human others with which we share the biosphere and on whom our survival depends. To this end the work of Deleuze & Guattari on becoming (1988) provides a valuable resource for circumnavigating some of the shortcomings of anthropocentric knowledge production
systems. Building on the work of Bennett (2010), de Landa (1997, 2002), Barad (2007), Stengers (2015) and others, I will argue for a posthuman and& vibrant materialism in the context of a new pedagogy that spans disciplines of knowledge and erodes the artificial borders between humans, non-human others and the worlds of matter/energy.
In this theoretical paper, I begin by asking what the relevance of a critical posthuman
approach could be to post-qualitative educational methodologies in the Anthropocene. Aside from requiring us to rethink our relationality with our animal kin, Parikka (2015), Bennett (2010) and de Landa (1997, 2002) argue that the contemporary situation demands that we urgently reexamine our relations with materials and modes of energy production as well. These, and other thinkers such as Deleuze and Guattari (1988) strongly urge education institutions to foster transdisciplinary approaches that do away with the often arbitrary and counterproductive divisions between disciplines of knowledge.
Posthuman theory provides pedagogy with a range of possibilities for measuring the relations of interdependence between the human and the non-human world. Wallin (2014), Jones (2009) and economist Gray (1998, 2007) call for a dark pedagogy that erodes anthropocentricism by considering the inhuman timescales of cosmic and evolutionary time as well as the inhuman scales, speeds and destructive consequences of accelerationist human expansion and progress. These critical posthuman perspectives, which draw on and develop the affective & immanent (rather than transcendent) relations first posited by Spinoza, offer a means for forging consolidated pedagogical responses to the rapid erosion of species diversity, cultural erosion and questions of ecological governance that are involved the crisis of the Anthropocene.

Author

• Delphi Carstens