Sensing Bodies Ecologically: Theorizing Onto-Epistemological Entanglements With/in an Emerging Theory of Ecological Posthumanism

• In Event: Ontology and Becoming: The Challenge of New Theory to Educational Research and Practice

Abstract

Objectives
This conceptual paper challenges humans as exempt and exceptional to the ecology of the planet, and seeks to imagine a paradigmatic and pedagogical shift where we no longer continue to rehearse the division of cultural and natural worlds. It explores the adoption of a posthumanist ethic. A ‘posthuman ethics’ unlike a deep ecological ethic urges us to experience the principle of ‘no-oness’ in our shared view of subjectivity, by acknowledging the ties that bind us to multiple ‘others’ in a web of complex interspecies interrelations (Bradotti. 2013).
Theoretical framework and perspectives
The theory of ecological posthumanism I am wrestling with and exploring in my educational work and present in this paper, contests the arrogance of anthropocentric/humanist approaches – by enabling a shared sense of a collective common world. Kay Andersen (2014, p. 3) states this focus on “challenging the idea that humans occupy a separate and privileged place among other beings has been the central goal of post-humanist agenda”, with critical posthumanists taking on the task of challenging well established humanist discourses that “separates and elevates humans from the natural world”. Its contests a ‘human/nature dualism’. This dualism not only strips humans of all of their own ‘natural’ dimensions – that we are an animal and part of nature, but also installs the idea that other nonhuman animals and things are not comparable to humans – they don’t have emotions, attachments, there are no human likeness.
Modes of Inquiry
The method of analysis explores engaging with child-animal-bodies through a pedagogy of ecological communities, practices becoming with, where all who is in the world have a stake. Haraway (2016) refers to these ‘becomings with’ as ‘worldlings’ – the way in which earthlings/living beings/entities/forces make and remake the world affecting each other she urges us to join forces with other species – my notion of a pedagogy of ecological communities is a coming together of all things – a recognition we are nature. I engage with the concept of sensing ecologically through bodies as method, kin who share lives (Rautio, 2014; 2017). I follow my dog Poppy who is not being human, and Birdy my granddaughter who is not being a dog – yet they are sharing being ‘animal’ sensing it through their bodies – an intelligence beyond ‘human intelligence’ that is often only inscribed through cultural norms of discursive practices.
Scholarly Significance
By reimagining materiality as a shared agency I seek to extend what Braidotti states as the intricate web of interrelations that mark the contemporary subjects’ relationship to their multiple ecologies, the natural, the social. A feature of this new ontological perspective is that “it shifts from conceptions of objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces, and instead sees human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as relational” (Bradiotti 2013) and that these onto-epistemological entanglements operate in unpredictable ways, illustrated through child-dog-bodies playing in natural spaces.

Author

• Karen Malone, University of Western Sydney