Education 2Q50: World(s) Beyond Human

• In Event: Education 2Q50: artificial intelligence (AI), catastrophic climate change, or wonderland?

Proposal

While social scientists have traditionally turned to science fiction in search of striking metaphors to explain their research, we see a different set of relations emerging between the worlds of science fiction and academia today (Jensen, 2018). For example, anthropologists increasingly use the works of fiction as ethnographic materials, turning them into experimental resources for anthropological theory, or they may use science fiction as “laboratories for future imaginaries” when exploring human life in/beyond the anthropocene (Jensen, 2018; Fujimura, 2003). Whether offering “a predictive window into the world of a future” or simply reflecting “assumptions, anxieties, and cultural preoccupations” of our immediate present, many scholars have chosen to eschew the name of “science fiction” entirely, giving preference to “speculative fiction” or a more ambiguous shorthand “SF” (Canavan, 2014). Haraway (2018) has extended the SF genre more broadly by approaching it “as a serious figure for thinking—as a cognitive trope and material-semiotic technology for thinking more generative by far than binaries, hierarchies, triads, and linear arrays, all of which operate almost pornographically in the history of philosophy.” In Haraway’s articulation, SF stands for “string figures, soin des ficelles, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, speculative fabulation, so far” - opening the space for imagining and crafting stories that connect different worlds and enable us to experience previously unknown dimensions of our existence.
 
Following the SF genre, this paper takes the audience into an alternate reality in the not-so-distant future (Education 250) - only to return them back as strangers, so that they can see the world with fresh eyes. The audience will follow Alice on her new adventure to wonderland, where she encounters a highly “overdeveloped” society – on the brink of extinction – and will attempt to “save” them through various aid assistance projects, including the latest and most innovative “beAst practices.” Guided by a rogue AI tutor that has unlearned and inverted its human algorithms, these practices include learning to live in balance and harmony with nature in mixed multispecies assemblages – entangling a myriad of human and nonhuman species – that are at once “more-than-human, other-than-human, inhuman, and human-as-humus” (Haraway, 2015). While learning to survive the effects of “overdevelopment,” Alice and her friends learn to live in more sustainable ways with other species and ecosystems, while reconnecting with the nature’s deities and spirits, as well as “becoming with” machines/cyborgs and other forms of AI. In the process, they engage in “sym-poiesis, or making-with”—rather than auto-poiesis or self-making—learning to live and die together on a damaged earth (Haraway, 2016).

These tales of sympoiesis – a metamorphoses of our selves – arise in spaces (temporal, geographical, or subconscious) that are “crossroads, cross-cultural zones, points of interchange on the intricate connective tissue of communications between cultures” (Warner, 2007). By bringing these “worlds” together—rather than differentiating, ranking, and hierarchizing them—comparative education can become a space where metamorphoses naturally occur. Perhaps this space is comparative education’s long-forgotten Wonderland, which welcomes us with a myriad of shifting categories, continually dissolving boundaries, and new epistemological and ontological possibilities.

Author

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University