Helena Pedersen

Is 'the Posthuman' Educable? On the convergence of educational philosophy, animal studies, and posthumanist theory

Formal education in Western society is firmly rooted in humanist ideals. ‘Becoming human’ by cultivating certain cognitive, social, and moral abilities has even symbolised the idea of education as such in Enlightenment philosophical traditions. These ideas are increasingly coming under scrutiny by posthumanist theorists, who are addressing fundamental ontological and epistemological questions about defining an essential ‘human nature’, as well as the elastic boundary work between the human and nonhuman subject. This paper responds to the ongoing discussions on the diverse articulations of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies by investigating possibilities of a shared conceptual framework that allows for a productive dialogue between them. By analysing some of the meanings attached to the notion of posthumanism in education theory and animal studies, the paper begins to identify some instabilities of humanist traditions/ideals of education and explores posthumanist challenges to research on the institutionalised production, mediation, and development of knowledge.

Release the Moths: Critical Animal Studies and the Posthumanist Impulse

Posthumanism and critical animal studies are grounded in different theoretical frameworks and have different orientations and agendas. The present essay works through some dimensions of posthumanist thought together with critical animal studies by exploring ‘the edges’ in certain points of contact between the fields and their material and metaphorical problems and possibilities. My main objective is to begin to develop some of the most productive dimensions of posthumanism in relation to critical animal studies in a call for a critical posthumanist approach to the messy knowledge forms and politics emerging from human/animal relationships by asking the question: Under what conditions does cross-contamination take place between the two fields, and to what effects? The essay proposes two different responses to dealing with issues exposed by the juxtaposition of posthumanism and critical animal studies, and argues that this juxtaposition also accommodates a potential to instigate unexpected processes of knowledge development in both fields.

Follow the Judas sheep : materializing post-qualitative methodology in zooethnographic space

What becomes of education when performed in a slaughterhouse? Drawing on Raunig’s Marxian–Deleuzian treatise on the machine, the article configures the veterinary education curriculum and the animal production system as two symbiotic apparatuses connected by innumerable flows, routes, movements, rhythms, and passages. Using critical posthumanist analyses to work through empirical material from zooethnographic fieldwork in veterinary education, the article maps how human and animal subjectivities are formed along with crisscrossing biochoreographies of pedagogical and animal production rituals in intimate interplay. The article argues that as education becomes materially enclosed in the process of animal slaughter, teaching becomes distributed among human and nonhuman actants, students (and the education researcher) become a collective human component, or prosthesis, of the slaughter apparatus, and pedagogy itself becomes a prosthesis of slaughter. As student affect is recruited in the “educationalization” of violence, students’ expressions of abjection in the slaughterhouse may be configured as an integral and necessary part of, rather than a disturbing side-effect of, slaughter education. At an epistemological level, this indicates that critical posthumanist inquiry accommodates a particular potential to bring forth “the edges” in qualitative education research.

Educational epistemologies and methods in a more-than-human world

This Special Issue asks what can be done in terrains of education and educational research beyond the fantasy of human control. This question presents a repertoire of complex issues. Many of us, ourselves as guest editors included, will not quite know how to let go of our familiar ‘humanist’ concepts, approaches, ontologies, and thoughts, most of which carry the epistemological promise that the world is accessible for us as researchers and possible to understand and conceptualize as a source of endless scientific knowledge production and accumulation: a form of knowledge incrementalism (see Lather & St. Pierre, 2013. As Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre reminds us in her Introduction to this issue, just think about how we as teachers ask our students to identify a ‘gap in knowledge’ in previous research that their thesis is supposed to address). Alternatively, we may seek to rid ourselves of humanism and its epistemic orthodoxies but we do so too considerably and too quickly, and in an intensive search for ‘new’ posthumanist or post-anthropocentric paradigms, force these into our old familiar categories, thereby ending up reproducing the very same thought systems and illusion of control over our research processes (St. Pierre, 2013; cf. Hodgson & Standish, 2009). In particular enlightened moments, we might manage to convince ourselves that we actually have come across something remarkable; some element that shifts our orientation of thought toward a phenomenon, a world, that is different; that accommodates unknown possibilities (or indeed threats, depending on our position and outlook). In a typical hyper-active manner expected by the productivity demands of our universities, we rush ahead to publish volumes of books, articles, conference papers, Special Issues. As guest editors, we are ambivalently aware that this issue adds to this machinery of thought-production. However, reading the contributions as a collective exercise in thinking and critiquing educational epistemologies, we also sense emerging ideas that take on a life beyond the singular articles; ideas that call out for us, insist on our attention. These emerging, collective ideas spark our thinking about education into more insecure territories. Our intention with this guest editorial is to put a spotlight on some shifts and moves they jointly catalyze. Who is the ‘I’ of education (and educational research)? This question has a long history, and is addressed in this issue as an overwhelming subject-fatigue. An early draft of Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre’s introductory contribution—a foundational work for posthumanist educational research—asked what concepts from our familiar, human-centered and empiricist research designs and approaches we will hold on to, in a supposedly post-qualitative, post-anthropocentric scientific landscape? Will we hold on to ‘case studies’? (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’?) To ‘autoethnography’? (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’?) To ‘interviews’? (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’?) To ‘observations’? (‘I’ after ‘I’ after ‘I’?) These exclamations of subject-fatigue resonate exactly with Mark Seem’s introduction to Schizoanalysis and Collectivity in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (2009)1:

Education Policymaking for Social Change: A Post-Humanist Intervention:

The humanist tradition in Western education systems is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny by posthumanist scholars, arguing that Enlightenment humanism accommodates a number of serious shortcomings such as being essentialist, exclusive, and unable to meet its own criteria of value pluralism, tolerance, and equity for all. This article formulates some challenges posed to formal education by posthumanist theory, addressing international education policymaking for social change. Based on an analysis of a number of education policy documents produced by UNESCO, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, it elicits five pervasive ideas about the relationship between education and social change that are frequently appearing in contemporary rhetoric of education policymaking: ‘the knowledge society’; ‘the democratic society’; ‘the multicultural society’; ‘the globalized society’ and ‘the sustainable society’. Inspired by critical discourse analysis, the article identifies a number of research questions focused on each of these five ideas and explores possible responses, inflected by a range of recent cross-disciplinary posthumanist scholarship, that deconstruct conventional assumptions about the idea of education in general and of education policymaking in particular. It concludes with a discussion of what subject positions and repertoires are, or are not, allowed to emerge in education policymaking for social change.

Critical Animal Pedagogies: Re-learning Our Relations with Animal Others

Our relations with animals permeate human social life, culture and education. These relations are asymmetrically imbued with power. Although not always explicitly acknowledged, animals are displayed, classified, studied and represented, as well as confined, manipulated, consumed and killed; in a multitude of forms in education, and in other sectors of society. Asymmetric power relations, through which students are implicitly or explicitly taught to utilise, dominate or control other species, permeate not only the use of animals as dissection “specimens” in school laboratories or as food served in the school canteen, but also non-invasive human–animal pedagogical situations such as animal-assisted interventions (AAI), some versions of outdoor education, study visits to zoos and farms, and so on. These situations communicate messages of animals’ instrumental position in human society and their endless accessibility for human purposes (Pedersen, 2010), often under the guise of harmonious interspecies coexistence. As will be made clear throughout our chapter, we view such messages as deeply problematic and counter-productive to any liberatory educational project. How, then, should we teach and learn about animals, and what is the appropriate place of animals in education? Is there an alternative education; a critical animal pedagogy that opens other knowledges of human–animal relations? Put differently, what does education become when humans are not regarded as the only subjects?

Education, animals, and the commodity form

What would biocommodities say if they could teach? This article investigates what kind of work education performs in biocommoditization processes. It makes two contributions to scholarship on commoditization. First, it integrates education into Marxs formula for the circulation of capital through the commodity form. Second, it provides a case study of veterinary education to develop Helmreichs ‘unfinished worksheet’ of biocommoditization, that is, the adaptation of Marxs formula to biocapital accumulation (B–C–B′). With the material embeddedness of veterinary education in the animal commodity form as an empirical example viewed through a synthesis of Marxist and posthumanist analyses, this article works through each component of Helmreichs B–C–B′ chain (animal material, animal commodity, animal capital), with particular attention to its interplay with educational practice. In the end, education emerges as a vitalizing guide among other organic and inorganic actants that channel student traffic into the animal economy. This channeling of student traffic is, however, complicated by an element of indeterminacy always already accompanying the education process as well as the transformation of biomaterial into capital.

Critical Carnist Studies. Review of Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press, 2010. 205 pp.

Critical Carnist Studies. Review of Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. San Francisco: Conari Press, 2010. 205 pp.