Vitalism and Voice: Toward a Pedagogy for Eco-Ethical Communication

• In Event: 15.059 - Fairmont Royal York Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.059-8 - Toward Pedagogies for Eco-Ethical Becoming: International Collaborations for Eco-Justice Education

Abstract

This paper begins from questions about how to encourage "voice" in our students through the pedagogical and curricular choices that we make as teachers, in particular voice that speaks up or advocates for the more than human world (Peeples & Depoe, 2014). What are the rhetorical or communication choices that we make as teachers that either offer space for such advocacy or shut it down? These questions are considered in an exploration of new materialist feminist interest in non-human "vitalism," ethics, and current communication theory.
Traditionally, materialism in social theory became synonymous with the analysis of extractive economic systems focused primarily on human concerns. New materialist theories shift the idea of materialism to a focus on matter, the living and non-living material all around us. Generated in the relationality of the material world, vast networks of non-human matter express vibrant and vital forms of energy, agency, or creativity around, through and in us. In this sense a post-humanist and non-rationalist vision of creativity and ethics is emerging that allows for a more ecologically sane and sustainable vision of human interactions with the more than human world (Bennett, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010; Braidotti, 2013).
Drawing from a similar analysis of generative relationality, pedagogy as a teaching learning relationship can be understood to have similar unpredictable effects (or a "vitality" of its own). What gets communicated by the teacher is never a simple transfer of information. Rather, there are always unpredictable effects, differences created as students bring their own interests, background and questions to the process of meaning making or interpretation. Thus, we define education as the willingness and necessity to bring specific ethical questions to this generative pedagogical process as a means toward well-being (Martusewicz, 2001), even as we recognize that, due to this generative process, we will never reach final conclusions. In this sense, ethics is, as Luce Irigaray argues, excessive, always overflowing expected boundaries (Irigaray, 1993). "It cannot be fixed, frozen or fully accounted for" (Smith, 2001, p. 184). Further, ethics "entails recognizing that we cannot occupy another's place…the ethical subject emerges in a relation that inscribes difference as well as similarity at her very heart" (Smith, p. 185).
In this paper, we put these ideas in conversation with theorists who have also begun to rethink communication to take account of such generative effects within ecological relationships, arguing that communication is always a political and ethical problem (Peters, 1999; Tschida, 2014; Carbaugh, 2014). Education should be understood as preparing students to enter into healthy membership in their communities (Berry, 2017). Entering into community encompasses interacting with vital non-human matter, requiring a change in how we conceive of meaning (Peters, 2015), knowledge, and thus education.
Advocacy or voice that recognizes the vitality of the living (and non-living) world around us is only possible as such ethical questions, discernment, and choices are brought to the fore in pedagogical relationships. Strategies of communication within EcoJustice approaches work to engage such complex questions, encouraging the development of eco-ethical voice and action.

Authors

• Agnes Krynski, Eastern Michigan University

• Rebecca A Martusewicz, Eastern Michigan University