Post-Terrorist Pedagogies, a Micro-Materialist Posthumanist Thinking for Classrooms in Troubled Times

• In Event: PhEmaterializing Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract

This paper seeks to ‘take in the reality’ of the classroom in what Rosi Braidotti (2017) calls troubled times that I conceptualize it as postterrorist era. The purpose of this paper is to explore the capacities of threat and terrorism to pedagogical practices. In addressing these capacities, I use posthumanist analysis to propose that threat of terrorism as posthuman thing and as having thing-power (Bennett, 2010) creates potential spaces for action, decision, perception and pedagogy. I consider threat and terrorism as a potential mode of connections in pedagogical practices that in the era of counter-terrorism has added another layer to the affective, material and discursive intra-actions (Barad, 2007) in the classroom.

Drawing upon a pilot research in a secondary school in London, I argue that threat and fear of terrorism operationalises a relational posthuman pedagogy where threat as the new mode of connections draw students and students and teachers encounters into different relations. I argue the PREVENT policy that has been enforced into UK’s schools as a duty since 1 July 2015, with monitoring Muslim students enables generative capacities and fertile space for new genre of racial bullying, mocking routes and racial harassments and therefore new directions to pedagogical practices and schooling experiences. Posthumanist modes of inquiry allow us to recognize the vitality and agency of other beings and materialities and to ask about ‘ontopower’ (Massumi, 2015) as a power-to that creates potentialities and capacities in the pedagogical practices and in relation to threat and counter-terrorism climate particularly.

Data include the entanglements of senses, materials, stories, memories, affective loud voices, body minor gestures, veil, room, chairs, the public, temporality and spatiality that have been emerged during the group interview sessions with three British Muslim secondary schoolgirls.

What I call postterrorist pedagogy as a ‘sense-event’ (Manning, 2007) suggests that threat and terrorism as a posthuman affect has life beyond the human self and is entangled with pedagogical practices. Threat and terrorism as an affective force creates a potentialised and weaponised pedagogical space as one component of affective pedagogical assemblages of classroom. Following the analysis of affect as pedagogy (Hickey-Moody, 2013) that modulate the capacities and folds its own pedagogical forces, I argue that threat can increase and/ or diminish the capacities of certain humans and more-than-human bodies such as teacher, students, friendship, belonging, classroom and pedagogy. Threat operationalises a particular ‘contact zone’ (Stewart, 2007, p. 5) within the pedagogical spaces and practices, where it can become a material, vitalist, relational, embedded and embodied educator that extend the relations of humans and more-than-humans to the wider material and discursive forces. I explore how postterrorist pedagogical spaces and practices produces postterrorist subjectivities and new racialized category of ‘terrorist look-alike’ (Puar, 2014). The significance of this study is in its aim to materialize threat generated in the counter-terrorism climate and its operationalization in the classroom but in entanglement with other beings, humans and more-than-humans.

Author

• Shiva Zarabadi, University College London