Education in a Posthuman Age

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1_EITN_2019_EDITORIAL.pdf

Abstract

This Special Issue of Education in the North – Education in a Posthuman Age – comes at a timely moment in the evolution of posthuman thinking in education. The global environmental crisis and the struggles experienced by people around the world to meet basic needs, calls for greater alignment of socio-environmental problems with the theories and practices of education.  For those readers who may be unfamiliar with the field of post-humanist thinking, we turn to Karin Murris (2016, p. xi) for an introduction:

“all earth dwellers are mutually entangled and always becoming, always intra-acting with everything else […]. There is no prior existence of individuals with properties, competencies, a voice, agency, etc. Individuals materialise and come into being through relationships; and so does meaning”.

Taking a radical departure from conventional ideas of humans and nature, the post-humanist focus is on relationships of interdependency between all ‘earth dwellers’ that is, humans, other living species and nonhumans (including materials and machines). In this view, what is commonly referred to as ‘nature’, cannot be reduced to mere objects of study, or something ‘out there’, detached from those who study it. In a similar way, the Earth, as the Planet hosting all forms of life and matter is not construed as an inert physical space, but it comes into being as a process of ongoing material and energy transformations.

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