Life Lessons: Posthuman Ideas About Life for an Enlivened Social Studies Education (Poster 5)

• In Event: Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Abstract

The word “life” frequently appears throughout social studies education curriculum. From civics lessons that examine “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to Black Lives Matter, from analyzing one’s “financial life” and “social life” in an economics or sociology simulation, to imagining the lives of humans across time and space through geography and history, the concept of life is, paradoxically, everywhere yet officially nowhere in social studies. This paper illustrates how the concept of life lives within social studies in ways readers may not always realize. It uses ideas from posthumanism and the related field of critical life studies to complicate what we mean by life and to support readers in understanding posthumanist perspectives that help students rethink “life as we know, live, and understand it” (Letts & Sandlin, 2013, p. 3).

Whereas it is assumed biology is the study of life (bio + ology), posthumanism upholds a distinction between the word bios, pertaining to human life, and the word zoe, pertaining to non-human life (Braidotti, 2008, 2016; Tarizzo, 2017). Posthumanist thinkers use the bios/zoe hierarchy to explain how white, Eurocentric ways of knowing position particular life through bios as worthy of study (e.g., humans living in Western societies; domesticated animals kept as pets) at the exclusion of zoe, which includes all organic and non-organic living matter in the world and all animals, including humans, especially humans deemed inferior to the modern conception of Western man (Roden, 2015; Snaza & Weaver, 2015). It is with this notion of zoe that this paper demonstrates for readers what is possible when we frame social studies as the study of life as zoe, “a non-human definition of Life as ... a dynamic and generative force” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 86).

Through considering examples of posthuman concepts in social studies education that attend to how the concept of life works in the curriculum, this paper breaks down the distinction between nature and culture and science and social studies to create new possibilities for learning (Gulson & Baker, 2018; de Freitas & Weaver, 2020). The chapter uses new combinations to move curriculum beyond the human exceptionalism that too often defines what counts as life in our curriculum (Bayne, 2018; Wallin, 2017). Such approaches invite students to engage with everything in the world that does not have human life as its main way of being known and understood, allowing students to ask ethical and political questions “beyond the human conditions of existence” (Weinstein & Colebrook, 2017, p. x). This is a stance in social studies curriculum that puts the notion of life back to society, to communities, and to the collective instead of the humanist ideal of a “perfected liberal subject” that considers life in an individual and solitary way devoid of its entanglements with the wider world (Flanagan & Frankjœr, 2020, p. 245).

Author

• Mark Helmsing, George Mason University
  Presenting Author