1st Edition
Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies
This book makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of relational ethics in higher education. By furthering theoretical developments on the ethics of care and critical posthumanism, it speaks to contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and enriched understandings of higher education pedagogies.
The book considers how the political ethics of care and posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics can be diffracted through each other and how this can have value for thinking about higher education pedagogies. It includes ideas on ethics which push those boundaries that have previously served educational researchers and proposes new ways of conceptualising relational ethics. Chapters consider the entangled connections of the linguistic, social, material, ethical, political and biological in relation to higher education pedagogies.
This topical and transdisciplinary book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of posthuman and care ethics, social justice in education, higher education, and educational theory and policy.
Introduction. 1. Caring as methodology: Reading Natalie Jeremijenko and Vinciane Despret diffractively. 2. Towards a ‘response-able’ pedagogy across higher education institutions in post-apartheid South Africa: An ethico-political analysis. 3. Learning and teaching in every moment: A posthuman critical pedagogy of care. 4. Relation(al) matters – ‘Carriance’ as onto-epistemological grounding for ethical subjectivity and a humane pedagogical practicing. 5. Aesthetic wit[h]nessing and the political ethics of care: Generating solidarity and trust in pedagogical encounters. 6. Immanent ethics and transgressive phantasmagoria as models for socially just pedagogies. 7. Slowing Down With Nonhuman Matter: The Contribution Of Feminist New Materialism To Slow Scholarship. 8. Care ethics in a project of re-imagining scholarship in/through a feminist decolonial classroom. 9. Response-able digital storytelling to reimagine higher education: Classroom practices. 10. The ethics and politics of care: Relationality, responsibility, and hope in post-secondary art education. Afterword. Response-ability and Responsibility: Using Feminist New Materialisms and Care Ethics to Cope With Impatience in Higher Education.
Biography
Vivienne Bozalek is an Honorary Professor in the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa and Emerita Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa..
Michalinos Zembylas is Professor of Educational Theory and Curriculum Studies at the Open University of Cyprus and Honorary Professor, Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.
Joan C. Tronto is Professor Emerita at City University of New York and the University of Minnesota, USA.
"This collection is a timely and nurturing gift to those struggling to keep care alive within increasingly deteriorating conditions of work, relations, and values in Higher Education. As we also face a more-than-human crisis threatening the already uncertain futures of people, societies and ecologies on this planet, developing a shared ground between a politics of care, critical pedagogies and posthumanist thought has never felt more vital. The generous interventions gathered in this volume offer rich conceptual propositions as well as inspiring experiences and stories from the ground, to stimulate new ways for teaching and scholarship, for learning practices and methodologies, that acknowledge and support the relational webs of care on which we all depend."
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, UK and author of Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds
"This book rigorously addresses from different contemporary scholarships one of the highest challanges of our time, one of our most pressing philosophical and feminist concerns: the issue of care."
Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, philosopher, training psychoanayst (WAP, NLS, TAICP), author of The Matrixial Borderspace
"Care carries a weight, a responsibility. It is both worry and attunement to. It is caru – anxiety, sorrow, grief. It is karo – lament– and kara – trouble. Care, in this volume, risks this multilayering of sense, grappling with the uneasiness of a way of teaching that refuses to claim in advance how the living and learning happens. This is its wager: dwell in the cultivation of difference and respond to the tensions it reveals. Be in the lament, stay with the trouble. Be moved, be carried. This is what education needs today – that we become participants in a process that changes us, that attunes us to what exceeds us and the increasingly limited accounts of what else knowing can be."
Erin Manning, Professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, Concordia University, Canada
