Three Conceptions of Futurity and Responsibility in Posthumanist Educational Research

• In Event: Posthumanist Philosophy and Educational Research: A Review of Analytic and Axiological Features

Abstract

Objective. Posthumanist scholars approach inquiry as immanent participation in an ongoing process of collective ontological becoming. Within this immersive and emergent understanding of inquiry, responsible research involves moving between ways of knowing that shape us as knowing subjects, have specific affective, material, and institutional consequences, and enable and constrain possibilities for future relation. Adopting terminology already present in the field, we will call these emergent consequences futurities. This paper identifies three primary ways the relation between research and futurity is being conceptualized.

Theoretical Framework: The most common account of futurities found in posthumanist research involves a general celebration of liberation from existing onto-epistemic constraints and a promise of a relational openness and possibility for innovation. For example, St. Pierre, Jackson, & Mazzei (2016) write:

We have ample evidence that the existence we’ve created is not ethical…It is curiosity about what might be possible that enables us to imagine and create a different, more ethical existence. (p. 102)

A second account of futurities calls for research that sensitizes readers/audience to specific affects that provide leads to new relational possibilities. According to Greg Seigsworth and Melissa Gregg (2010), this kind of attention to affective qualities can provide “illumination upon the ‘not yet’ of a body’s doing, casting a line along the hopeful (though also fearful) cusp of an emergent futurity…” (p. 4).

A third relation to futurities involves commitments to specific reconstructions of ethical/political possibilities. Fikile Nxumalo (2021) illustrates this in her speculative research on the education of Black children. She writes:

Pedagogical and research practices that carefully attend to the relationality of Black life therefore hold potential for making visible and materializing Black futurity…I am interested in possibilities for imagining and noticing Black relational subjectivities in affirmative ways. (p. 1196)

Data Sources: Published educational research influenced by posthumanist philosophy will serve as this paper’s data.

Substantiated Conclusions: In the end, all three of these relations to futurity seem necessary and none on their own is a sufficient condition for bringing ameliorative new possibilities into being. The first underscores a need to avoid naturalizing the outcomes of our inquiry by finding value in the open-ended relational possibility. Open-ended possibility alone, however, is not inherently ethical. The second relation to futurity looks for affective leads to possible, as yet unimagined, worlds. Affect alone, however, does not necessarily lead to amelioration. The third relation to futurity risks commitment to a specific axiology which can guide the protean movement of inquiry and world making. Particular visions of futurity, however, need to be revisable, lest they become relational cul-de-sacs.

Scholarly Significance: When these three relations to research responsibility come together, posthumanist education scholarship promises a practice of inquiry that does not just describe the world, nor even merely critique the world, but offers a means of metaphysically remaking the world. At its best, it is an approach to inquiry that avoids the hubris of imperial foundationalist knowledge projects, while contributing concretely and substantively to amelioration of the most pressing ethical and political matters of our time.

Author

• Jerry L. Rosiek, University of Oregon