Challenging the bifurcation of nature: women workers’ education through process philosophy

Abstract

ABSTRACT The bifurcation of nature, taken as a gap between the scientific conception and the subjective experience of the world, is according to Alfred North Whitehead, one of the major epistemic fallacies of modernity. This paper draws on insights from Whitehead’s process philosophy to map some analytical trails that the author followed in her work on the archives of women workers’ education. There are three themes that have emerged from this archival research decisively challenging the bifurcation of nature: the power of associations, the coexistence of permanence and flux, and amor mundi, love for the world. In this light, women workers’ education emerges as an assemblage of feelings, cognitive understandings, imaginative enactments and creative forces, wherein nature and culture are inextricably entangled.