Toward an Open Speculative Ethics of Materiality for Education

• In Event: Beyond the Modern: The Ethical Need to Make Matter Matter for Truth in Science Education

Abstract

The emergence of New Materialisms and the ontological turn in education brought with it different approaches to justice-oriented research in education, in part, by attempting to bring the material world into critical theory and philosophy (Milne & Scantlebury, 2019; Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi 2020). As educators and researchers who use these theories, we first questioned the political commitments and possibilities enabled by these emerging materialist theories (which includes sociomaterialisms and neomaterialisms). While attention to ethics was apparent in the work of scholars like Karen Barad (2007), we concluded that a viable politics was still on the horizon for the ‘ontological turn’ in theory and research (see for example Zoe Todd’s (2016) criticism of the ontological turn as neocolonial).

Now some years later, our attention has turned to the question of ethics. Namely, the prospect of an open speculative ethics of materiality that draws from some of the conceptual and methodological innovations of various materialisms, but also long established and ecological vibrant ethical systems such as those practiced by various Indigenous communities for millennia. The authors in this paper have come together to develop some of the details of what a broad ethics of materiality might entail, what it might look like, and how it might be practiced within educational communities. What is apparent to the authors is that basic questions related to the ethical-political possibilities of these various materialist theories still require detailed engagement. As such our paper asks the following questions: What kind of multiplicitous ethics does a turn to materiality offer education? Is it possible to develop inclusive onto-ethical approaches that can remain vibrant and provide the grounds for different ways of living? How do we as a community of educators not give into a kind of theoretical-methodology orthodoxy that limits what students and teachers might think and do (how do we make room for practice and theory other than ‘our own’)? What kind of ethics can provide more pleasure than what is on offer from capitalist-colonial relations? What ethical-political-material practices, frames of thinking, and relations are most relevant when it comes to tackling the major social and ecological crises of our time?

The authors engage these questions first by assuming a multiplicitous definition of ethics. They begin with fundamental questions of ethics and materiality raised by various theorists and educators, drawing from ontological-epistemological frameworks such as the pluriverse, speculative realisms, Indigenous ways of living and knowing, and ‘post’ approaches to ontology and ethics. If ethics is central to the practice of education, then a major revolution in ethics is bound to change education completely and irrevocably.

Authors

• Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina
  Presenting Author

• Shakhnoza Kayumova, University of Massachusetts - Dartmouth
  Presenting Author