Com-Posting Experimental Futures: Pragmatists Making (Odd)Kin with New Materialists

Abstract

Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism (and the ways each seems to be and mean more in their juxtaposition and interaction) in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement” (via Vinciane Despret), a state of co-relation that makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world(view) where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed.