ahuman pedagogy
// lecture series (2019-2020, University of Alberta) + edited book (2022, Palgrave MacMillan) co-created with Dr. jan jagodzinski //
Out now! Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene (2022, Palgrave MacMillan)
This book brings together a collection of multi-disciplinary voices to discuss, debate, and devise a series of ahuman pedagogical proposals that aim to address the challenging ecological, political, social, economic, and aesthetic milieu within which education is situated today. Attending to contemporary calls to decenter all-too-human educational research and practice, while also coming to terms with the limits and inheritances through which such calls are made possible in the first place, this book aims to interrogate, but also invent, what the editors call an ahuman pedagogy. Organized in three main sections — Conjuring an Ahuman Pedagogy, Machinic Re/distributions, and Non-pedagogies for Unthought Futures — this multi-disciplinary experiment in ahuman pedagogies for the age of the Anthropocene offers an experimental — albeit always speculative and incomplete — series of pedagogical proposals that work to unthink and counter-actualize educational futures-as-usual.
“What the world needs now, in the Anthropocene, is an Ahuman Pedagogy, one that de-centers the hu-man, and challenges the eco-political and aesthetic situation of education today. This is an important book, because it is a machine of/for change…plug in!”
—Bernd Herzogenrath, Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and editor of Film as Philosophy and Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach
“This is shock therapy for business-as-usual education, and a maze: As one door slams in my face, another one opens next to it. All contributions in this remarkable volume will not appeal to everyone, but they certainly won’t leave anyone unaffected. Together, they redirect education to confront its own premises in impossible times.“
—Helena Pedersen, Department of Pedagogical, Curricular, and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and author of Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education
In 2019/2020, the Lectures on Ahuman Pedagogy speaker series brought together academics, artists and teachers attuned to (non)pedagogical questions that take seriously the changing ecological, political, social, economic and aesthetic milieu within which education is situated today. The pedagogical significance of this lecture series was two-fold:
1/ To recognize that in the era of the (so-called) Anthropocene, both understandings and material conditions of the human are undergoing modification and change. The question of the human is being decentred by, on the one hand, the non-human — the agential role of animals, organisms and anorganic elemental forces — and, on the other hand, the role of automation, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and ‘Big Data’, or what we call here the inhuman. This results in a re-distributed notion of subjectivity along an assemblage that the neologism ahuman represents, and secondly;
2/ In today’s world any research problematic is itself interdisciplinary. The disciplinary collapse of art, media, science, technology, and design is but one example. But, the coming together of art, philosophy and science is another.
In short, this series wagered that now, more than ever, we need educational forms that attend to both this disciplinary dissolve and the conceptual/material transformation of the ‘human,’ what we propose here as a non-pedagogy. A non-pedagogy works towards an outside thought – or that which current educational paradigms are unable to think – so as to mutate, bifurcate and dilate pedagogical possibilities. In this way, a non-pedagogy has the potential to reconfigure education; not just curricular design, not just educational research, and not just disciplines or institutions such as schools, but instead, if taken seriously, a non-pedagogy might produce a tectonic shift adequate to today’s shifting planetary realities by re-launching the question of human subjectivity that has undergirded virtually all educational thought in the West.
