Mattering pedagogy in precarious times of (un)learning

Abstract

This paper considers how feminist new materialist thinking may offer a resource for re-orienting pedagogy and didactics in light of pressing global issues. In this respect, the paper applies feminist new materialist thinking in a somewhat normative agenda. However, pedagogy and didactics are always already normative, or are engaged in practices that play a role in as well doing ‘business as usual’ or in assisting in opening up to various, yet more un-usual ways of relating and being of the world. Pedagogy is a worlding practice, specifically, as it facilitates ways of relating, thinking, sensing, acting, and is involved in the shaping of a ’collective intelligence’. I argue that one fruitful approach may be to focus on entanglements and affects and on finding ways of facilitating a sensing living/being of such entanglements. The paper concludes by introducing affective geology to suggest possible steps towards a transformation of our ways of knowing, sensing, and relating.