How to expand the boundaries: feminist posthumanist elaborations on change in education

Karin Gunnarsson

doi:10.7577/rerm.4245

Abstract

Change is a vital matter connecting to key educational concerns of teaching and learning and also involves questions of ethics. By deploying a feminist posthumanist framework, this paper elaborates change together with the notions of boundaries and responsibility. This is done by exploring moments from a collaborative research project conducted in a Swedish upper secondary school concerning a teaching unit focusing on equality and norms. The questions guiding the paper are: How is change enacted within the teaching? And, how to unfold the responsibilities the teaching entails? By working within the interplay of empirical enquiry and theoretical elaboration, the paper addresses how a multitude of encounters become involved in enactments of change. Further, it unfolds how change entails both unpredictability and responsibility for teaching and learning. In the concluding notes the ambiguities of change are stressed addressing the call within posthuman ethics of how to expand the boundaries.

Highlights

This paper explores change as a messy and collective matter
I join the feminist posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s (2016, p. 26) articulation on posthuman ethics: Posthuman ethics aims at enacting sustainable modes of relation with multiple human and nonhuman others that enhance one’s ability to renew and expand the boundaries of what transversal and non-unitary subjects can become
Responsibility is articulated as creating relations that afford an ability to “renew and expand the boundaries” of what might become

Summary

Introduction

This paper explores change as a messy and collective matter. To enter the exploration, I join the feminist posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti’s (2016, p. 26) articulation on posthuman ethics: Posthuman ethics aims at enacting sustainable modes of relation with multiple human and nonhuman others that enhance one’s ability to renew and expand the boundaries of what transversal and non-unitary subjects can become.This quotation highlights the responsibilities that come with our relations since they carry a vitality of producing ourselves as well as the world. The question raised in this article, is how to put posthuman ethics to work in the sense of expanding the boundaries of what teaching, classroom and students can become. This raises many questions of how to engage with knowledge content about present conditions of injustice and violence in a way that allows for expanding the boundaries of teaching, students and society in more sustainable ways so as to create transformations towards social change.

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Conclusion