What does “we-with” do to the politics of posthuman pedagogical “data“?
Shared by ALICIA FLYNN
What does “we-with” do to the politics of posthuman pedagogical “data“? Inquiring-with a group of multi-age humans from “Manna High” in urban settler-colonial Melbourne, overtime we become a pedagogic-research assemblage that is sympoietically (Haraway, 2016) or intra-actively (Barad, 2007) co-constituting with the more-than-human “Bluestone Creek” community. Due to these lively encounters, to thinking-with this data and to collegial conversations with my doctoral supervisor, John Quay, we came to understand this assemblage as “we-with”. Affrica Taylor (2017, p. 1448) writes ‘learning “with” nonhuman others rather than “about” them and “on their behalf” offers an alternative to stewardship pedagogies’ and all human-centred education. Learning-with entirely shifts the agential, affective forces of more-than-human relations and recalibrates the onto-epistemologies to account for learning as an always more-than-human, lateral assembly of situated bodies. But what do understanding these bodies as always “we-with”— “Anja-with”, “Duck-with”, “Rock-with”, “Alicia-with”—do to the politics of pedagogies and practices? Does “we-with” help mobilise the material-discursive redistribution of agencies?
References
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461.