What is at Stake? Posthumanist Theory and Anti-Racist Curriculum Studies

• In Event: Reimagining Curriculum Through Posthuman and Dialogic Ethics

Abstract

Posthumanist scholarship has been working to move in/through/beyond the notion of the human, but to what end? What does the posthumanist work with/against the human do, and for whom? This paper explores how posthumanist scholarship can work in service of anti-racism but do so in ways that recognizes the work of Black scholarly interventions on expanding notions of the human and the complex socio-political and material work around what it has historically meant to be human. This paper works with feminist new materialism (e.g., Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2019), Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, and various critical Black scholars (e.g., McKittrick, 2006 & 2021; Sharpe, 2016). What does it mean to be human in the posts, and how do we move beyond Man in ways that do not reinscribe the very Western onto-epistemes that brought it to fruition?

Authors

• Robert Helfenbein, Mercer University

• Thomas F Albright, Georgia State University