Living and Dying With Buttons: Reconfiguring Education Through Posthumanist Pedagogies

• In Event: Ways of Transforming Human-Animal Relations Through Education and Schooling: Translating Existing Theories Into Practice

Abstract

I am telling a story of a Buttons as a view of new knowledges, where all things are relational, co-producing and interdependent, sympoiesis. Buttons is a rabbit who lived and died with a group of humans as an entangled ecological being in an early childhood centre. The question Buttons death rose was a philosophical one, and a biological one: What would a world be that did not insist on human superiority or dominance and that did not disavow the human’s ecological entanglements? She became posthumanist pedagogy, the means for rejecting humans as the only species capable of producing knowledge, her living-dying-with created openings for other forms/things/objects/beings/phenomenon to be known as knowing subjects. Such ontological thinking allows the troubling of traditional and scientific ways of categorising species, opening up a wealth of educational possibilities, because humans are now decentered as the only possible knowers. We are forced to ask what if boundaries between human and nonhumans no longer had a place in our shared knowledge/s of how schools, school curricula and ways of knowing came into being. Schools could then be a mirror of our ecological, entangled worldviews, as the place where neither biology or geographical texts supported the notion of independent organism in environments. Reconfiguring education through Buttons posthumanist pedagogies allows a shift in paradigms so desperately needed in education.

Author

• Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology