Unsettling Ontologies: Ecological Posthumanist Pedagogies in Environmental Education

• In Event: Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy

Abstract

Objectives: This conceptual and pedagogical paper challenges humans as an exceptional animal, and seeks to imagine an ontological and pedagogical shift where we no longer continue to rehearse the division of cultural and natural worlds. It will introduce an ecological posthumanist pedagogy that takes seriously the need to stop the anthropological machine, and contests the production of absolute dividing lines between humans and other worldly matter. It recognises the porosity and fragility of all matter and objects - not to collapse categories of subject/object, human/nonhuman entirely into each other but to bring to attention to the leakiness and fluidity of what has been viewed most often as distinct and bounded categories.

Theoretical framework and perspectives: ‘[P]osthumanism doesn't presume the separateness of any-“thing”. Let alone the alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans apart’ (Barad 2007, p. 136). The theoretical framework of ecological posthumanism I am using contests the arrogance of anthropocentric/humanist approaches – by enabling a shared sense of a collective common world (Smith, 2013). By acknowledging the unlikely and uneasy ties that bind us to multiple ‘others’ in a web of complex intra-species and kin relations, this perspective reveals humans are no longer the only acting subject. Drawing on Haraway’s notion of kin, Massey’s concept of “throwntogetherness” or “being worldly with” other, and Nancy’s communal ontology of “beings in common” and “sensing bodies” I theorise well known concepts in environmental education, thereby shifting the heroic story focused on human endeavours and seeking to develop an ecological ethic-onto-epistemology: we are off the world, not outside of it.

Modes of Inquiry: This paper explores a number of child-animal projects where I have engaged with the conceptual and methodological inquiry of sensing ecologically through bodies with kin whom we share lives (Rautio, 2017). By embarking on a posthumanist ecological pedagogy, a way of sharing being ‘animal’ sensing it through bodies – is to explore an intelligence beyond ‘human intelligence’ that is often only inscribed through cultural norms of discursive practices. In a posthumanist ecological community we have always been ‘beings in common’ bodies being sensed ecologically. By interrogating differently these child-animal narratives as human/nonhuman assemblages, by drawing on the shared fields of science, social sciences, ecological and geographical ways of being with data, I am opening up possibilities for noticing and attending to questions that support a reconsideration for alternative trans-species theorising for a transformative environmental education.

Scholarly Significance: I will be arguing business-as-usual humanist pedagogies that are entrenched in twentieth century Cartesian divides of the human-nature will not be adequate to address the complexity of 21st century ecological challenges. As an unsettling ontology that disrupts a persistent ‘humanist’ paradigm the concept of the Anthropocene allows new conversations to happen around human-dominated global change, human exceptionalism and the nature/culture divide. A theory of ecological posthumanism brings to the field of environmental education a way to consider how to engage pedagogically with the awkward kin relations we find ourselves in at this time of the Anthropocene.

Author

• Karen Malone, University of Western Sydney Australia