Sloterdijk's 1999 lecture, known as the Elmau Speech, posited that all existing humanisms, including Heidegger's Fundamental Ontology, were rendered obsolete by the emergence of the so-called new media, and that education faced a similar fate. Taking a step further, the Elmau Speech establishes a connection between post-humanism in the sense of…

Wendy Brown in her book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, outlined the spread of neoliberal logics to every sphere of life. It is hard to imagine challenging such a seemingly ubiquitous force. Indeed, Brown's perspective on neoliberalism conjures the aphorism that 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to…

Diffractive ethnography is a divergent methodology in educational research that seeks to enact posthuman thinking, in particular, the concept of diffraction as a methodological approach, through the application of ethnographic methods. In this paper, we consider how we can rethink the humanistic tendencies of qualitative methodologies in…

The experience of exile greatly impacted on Edward Said's intellectual, literary and political writings. Exile, Said writes, creates a terrible rift between one's self, people, land, language and culture. This paper investigates the condition of exile and how it frames Said's shifting ideas of humanism in a postcolonial world. I argue that Said's…

Contemporary forces of deglobalisation and neo-tribalism have renewed questions about the public role of the humanities. In this essay, I draw on Edward Said's reflections of secular criticism and observe how his problematisations of traditional practices of criticism provide a foundational basis for post-critical criticism. Specifically,…

Bringing together literature from music education, posthumanism, sound studies and ethnomusicology, this article considers what sound 'does' in music education spaces. Within posthumanism, the role of sound, as a manifestation of material-human entanglements, is under-theorised. This article, diffractively plays with the literature and evidence…

What does it mean to teach in higher education (HE) from vantage points that do not privilege human self-interest, but include nonhuman animals as significant subjects of educational practice? This paper addresses human-animal relations as a nascent area of HE pedagogy. It explores premises of, and approaches to post-anthropocentric HE pedagogies…

This paper explores the mystical structure of education as Bildung in medieval theologian and Dominican friar Meister Eckhart's work and the 2010 French film "Of Gods and Men" ("Des Hommes et Des Dieux"). I start this paper with a short introductory sketch of the "Bildung" tradition, in order to situate my discussion…

In this article, Ingrid Andersson discusses the decolonial philosophy of Sylvia Wynter, with a special focus on addressing her concepts of the hybrid human and origin stories. Andersson shows how Wynter's philosophizing about the "being" of being human is premised on an entanglement of nature and culture that is on par with the posthuman…

This single-participant idiographic study examines the implications of a student's identity crisis in the climate classroom through the lens of existential phenomenology. The study analyses the ontological sense-making process of a mixed-race, bisexual female student reckoning with the racial dimensions of climate change during an environmental…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the components of a profound moment. We provisionally defined a profound moment as an experience that intentionally or unintentionally continues to surface in consciousness, has transformed an individual's fundamental perspectives, and been integrated into an individual's life. Participants who…

In this paper, I start from a posthumanist understanding of subjectivity to stress how our ways of relating do not follow from previously formed intentions but emerge in assemblages. The fact that we hold certain theoretical ascriptions does not assure that we will relate in ways that are consistent with them. We might intend to embrace…

The case has been made -- many of the approaches humans employ to address environmental collapse are founded on the very (White, Western, colonial, positivist, capitalist, human supremacist) thinking that advanced planetary degradation in the first place. We know how this story ends. If we continue perpetuating narratives of management, mastery…

This article scrutinises the ontological nature of democracy and the implications that different ontological assumptions might have for educational practice. To achieve this, we use Karen Barad's notion of diffraction to read John Dewey's, Ernesto Laclau's and Barad's theoretical insights through one another. Our starting point is Dewey's famous…

Humanism is a perspective which centers upon human interests and values. It asks learners what they want to be and how they want to be. Recently there have been dominant traditional and technological perspectives to education and this situation causes some problems because these perspectives service to society's expectations, not learners'…