Description of European Feminist Materialisms across a diversity of classrooms, and the contribution of these current approaches in thinking and transforming pedagogical praxis. The contributors describe common aims, projects, and futures of the field, and practical teaching and learning examples to put to work in the classroom, including specific assignments, workshop ideas, and questions for discussion
This edited collection is a careful assemblage of papers that have contributed to the maturing field within education studies that works with the feminist implications of the theories and methodologies of posthumanism and new materialism – what we have also called elsewhere ‘PhEmaterialism’. The generative questions for this collection are: what if we locate education in doing and becoming rather than being? And, how does associating education with matter, multiplicity and relationality change how we think about agency, ontology and epistemology? This collection foregrounds cutting edge educational research that works to trouble the binaries between theory and methodology. It demonstrates new forms of feminist ethics and response-ability in research practices, and offers some coherence to this new area of research. This volume will provide a vital reference text for educational researchers and scholars interested in this burgeoning area of theoretically informed methodology and methodologically informed theory. The chapters in this book were originally published as articles in Taylor & Francis journals.
Engaging with feminist new materialism, Toni Ingram reveals the ways in which the school ball (or prom) can be understood as an assemblage of material objects, spaces, practices, ideas and imaginings which contribute to the process of becoming school ball-girl. The ball-girl is not a fixed identity or subject but is an intra-active becoming a dynamic, shifting process where bodies, sexuality and femininities are relationally produced. (Re)conceptualising the school ball-girl as emergent phenomena provides openings for thinking about girls and this schooling practice beyond popular cultural narratives. Building on the social theory of Barad, Bennett, Best, Deleuze and Guattari, this book offers a new perspective on girls, sexuality, gender and schooling, while also exploring the potential of feminist new materialisms for rethinking educational practices and the human subject.
Harnessing the energy of provocative theories generated by recent understandings of the human body, the natural world, and the material world, Material Feminisms presents an entirely new way for feminists to conceive of the question of materiality. In lively and timely essays, an international group of feminist thinkers challenges the assumptions and norms that have previously defined studies about the body. These wide-ranging essays grapple with topics such as the material reality of race, the significance of sexual difference, the impact of disability experience, and the complex interaction between nature and culture in traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina. By insisting on the importance of materiality, this volume breaks new ground in philosophy, feminist theory, cultural studies, science studies, and other fields where the body and nature collide.
For the editors of this collection, new materialisms have always been the entanglement of epistemology, ontology, ethics, and politics. Looking back to the notion of “situated knowledges” (Haraway, 1988) that – among others – “planted the seed for feminist new materialism” (van der Tuin, 2015, 26) – one sees how those (at least) four planes are entangled (Rogowska-Stangret, 2018) in order to bring forth “response-able” (Haraway, 2008) research. New materialism is thus an ethico-onto-epistemological framework (Barad, 2007; Revelles-Benavente, 2018) that by activating its ethico-politics helps to diagnose, infer, and transform gendered, environmental, anthropocentric, social injustices from a multidimensional angle. Social injustices are a driving motivation to pursue research and are the reason why the editors and authors of this Special Issue cannot understand new materialism without feminism (in the lines of eds. Hinton & Teusch, 2015). Contemporary feminist researchers are providing new materialisms with a transversal approach, (Yuval-Davis 1997) that comes from many different disciplines without canonizing back again knowledge creation and production and in hope that they will not enter back into classifixations (van der Tuin, 2015). It is “situated” (Haraway, 1988) research “response-able” (Haraway, 2008) to material-discursive practices that iterate in a dynamic conceptualization of matter.
Arts, Pedagogy and Cultural Resistance brings cultural studies’ perspectives to bear on Arts practices. Each contribution synthesizes creative approaches to philosophy and new materialist understanding of practice to show how human-nonhuman interaction at the core of Arts practice is a critical post human pedagogy. Across fine art, dance, gallery education, film and philosophy, the book contends that certain kinds of Arts practice can be a critical pedagogy in which tactical engagements with community, space, place and materiality become means of not only disrupting dominant discourse but also of making new discourses come to matter. It demonstrates how embodied, located acts of making can materially disrupt cultural hegemony and suggest different ways the world might materialize. It argues that the practice of Arts making is a post human cultural pedagogy in which people become part of a broader assemblage of matter, and all aspects of this network are solidified in objects or processes that are themselves pedagogical. In doing so the book offers a fresh and theoretically engaged perspective on arts as pedagogy.
‘New materialisms’ refers to a broad, contemporary, and significant movement of thought across the social sciences and cultural studies which attempts to (re)turn to, renew, or create alternative philosophies of matter. Such philosophies spring from multiple sources but are in general an attempt to bring the indissolubility of the social and environmental more forcefully into our analytical frames and modes of inquiry and tackle a perceived over-reliance on discourse and language in the so-called post-modern era of philosophy and social science. This movement in thought is underlaid by, and meets up with, the climate and biodiversity crises and the nature of the human condition (and modes of learning or becoming), within the field of environmental education. This volume brings together academics working at differing intersections of environmental education and new materialisms, highlighting tensions, knots, and lines of flight across and for research, practice, and theory. As such this collection draws on multiple interpretations and streams of thought within new materialisms and demonstrates their significance for those engaging with environmental education policy, practice and research. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research.
Introduction : Re-attuning to the Materiality of Education / Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, and Zofia Zaliwska -- Curriculum for New Material, New Empirical Inquiry / Elizabeth St. Pierre -- Playgrounds as Sites of Radical Encounters : A Mapping of Material, Affective, Spatial, and Pedagogical Collisions / Linda Knight -- Bodies, Borders, and the Politics of Attention / Nathan Snaza and Debbie Sonu -- Matter, Movement, and Memory / Elizabeth de Freitas and Francesca Ferrarra -- Meditating with Bees : Weather Bodies and a Pedagogy of Movement / Stephanie Springgay -- The Sound of Silence : The Material Consequences of Scholarship / Walter Gershon -- Intratextual Entanglements : A Multi-participant Investigation into the Generative Potential of Texts / Sarah Truman -- The Zombie in the Room : Using Popular Culture as an Apparatus / Gabe Huddleston -- Moving-Back-Through : A Matter of Research / Zofia Zaliwska -- Life at Large New Materialisms for a (Re)new(ing) Curriculum of Social Studies Education / Mark Helmsing -- A Matter of Power / Kirsten Robbins -- Multiple Materiality Across Distributed Social Media / Paul Eaton -- Moving Toward Practices that Matter /y Nikki Rotas
This book addresses contemporary philosophical issues in higher education and how we can create socially just pedagogies and a socially just university. Providing a forum for thinking through how critical posthumanism, affect theory and feminist new materialisms provide a useful lens for higher education, and shows how these standpoints can benefit methods and practices of learning and teaching. Gross inequalities in higher education continue to affect pedagogical practices across geopolitical contexts and there is a need to consider new theories which call into question the commonplace humanist assumptions currently dominating the discourse around social justice in this context. However scholarship on the affective turn, critical posthumanism and new material feminisms, opens both new possibilities and responsibilities for higher education pedagogies. The approaches of this book also provide imaginative ways of engaging with current dissatisfactions with higher education, from the marketization of education, to issues of racism, discrimination and lack of diversity. Of international relevance, this collection particularly foreground southern contexts and case studies, such as the student activism in South African universities that has sparked a global project of decolonization and social justice in educational institutions. This book is an urgent call to reconceptualize, rethink and reconfigure pedagogies in higher education and the implications for future citizenship and social participation.
