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This inquiry-manifesto conjures a perspective on educational research as a process of dis-identification from mainstream materialist language as a settler colonialist invention. Our intention is to catalyze collective aspirations and catharsis of desires for a more-than-human and more humane ethics of languaging research. We focus on pedagogical moves inspired by “el mundo surdo” (Anzaldúa, 2009) to dis-invent and reconstitute academic inquiry in the aftermath of posthumanist inquiries’ manifold interventions (e.g., Barad, 2003; Wynter, 2003; Braidotti, 2019; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). By twisting conventional paradigms of procedural empiricism and writing, we forge an entropic space for developing an inquiry that extends the dreamworld into the awakened life of teaching and research processes. Accordingly, we leverage our lived experiences as educators working with what Anzaldúa conceptualized as “magical knowledge” (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015, p. 45) to cut across the rational/logical aspects of teaching and research to bring spirituality and intuition to bear in academic work.
As citizens of “el mundo surdo,” we attune to relationality and connection as paramount principles of educational futures redesigned through the post-anthropocentric pedagogies. These pedagogies are helpful to those who wish to return teaching and inquiry to a sphere where excluded traditions and spirituality are celebrated. To that end, we build with Sousa Santos’ (2015) concept of “pluriversality”— the acknowledgment of coexistence through the radical recognition of diverse worldviews, cosmologies and ways of knowing not taken as false or wrong but contingent. The ancestral theories and knowledges handed down to us through mundane, ceremonial, or mystical events take us to study the world in full cognizance of a strange world that “studies us back” as it responds to what our bodies exude as scholarship, a dirty word among marginalized peoples who have been othered by academic inquiries (Smith, 2013).
The operationalization of magical knowledge we aim to articulate in this presentation confronts as much as it can potentially illuminate the limitations and the trade-offs of anthropocentrism, requiring that conjurers-inquirers cultivate a spirit of intellectual openness, curiosity, and inclusivity upholding pluriversality as an end goal (Santos, 2015). As such, this paper explores what magical knowledge might do for post-materialist inquiry that grounds itself in the experience of reality (Beauregard et al., 2014). Accordingly, we envision a framework that combines spirituality, ethics, and diverse approaches to inquiry not moved by anthropocentrism. Wee explore ways to break free from traditional biases to embrace a holistic perspective in which our inquiries can focus on understanding and valuing the interests of all species, acknowledging our interconnectedness with and dependence on the environment, thereby encouraging us to imagine ways of transcending narrow views of identity, cultural biases, and historical limitations imposed by a human-centered way of thinking premised on dominance and exploitation of nature (Kopnina et al., 2018). From the mundo surdo, we conjure this inquiry-manifesto as an invitation and a challenge to those who share a deep connection with it and who long to think-feel the possibilities of transcending our focus on the human and what it understands by “language.”