Questioning the Ontology of Everything

• In Event: 51.078 - MTCC Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 51.078-9 - Exploring Racialized Factors for Thriving and Surviving in Education

Abstract

Posthumanism calls us to decenter humanity and question the separate existence of any ‘thing’ when our perception of the material world and the material world as it exists are wholly entangled. What might object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2012) mean for various educational disciplines, phenomenology, and for qualitative inquiry as a whole? What does OOO entail for students, specifically those whose physical bodies are historically categorized as alien, Other, less-than human, or like a thing? This conceptual study utilizes an elenctic method to place OOO in dialogue with a diverse set of disciplinary, theoretical, and philosophical texts to explore the need for an ontology of everything in a world whose lurch towards right-wing authoritarianism denies the common humanity of everyone.

Authors

• Timothy Babulski, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, Saint Paul College

• Charity Funfe Tatah Mentan, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Caleb Zilmer, University of Minnesota