Nature, Education and Posthumanist thought: A pedagogical perspective on Donna Haraway’s understanding of making kin

In times of ecological crisis new modes of human-nature-relationships are more necessary than ever. However, pedagogical arrangements mostly understand nature as a resource that must be catered to for securing the survival of mankind. Individual entities are called to action, responsibility is placed in the hands of single human beings and Greta Thunberg is attacked by the media for not being able to travel to the US without causing harm to the environment. My talk offers a posthumanist approach to this complex topic. In a first step, I am going to introduces the concept of “making kin” by Donna Haraway enriched with a critical discussion of subjectivity and agency by Judith Butler to unveil the hidden problems of unbroken and individual agency. Making kin describes a process that understands entities besides human beings as equal partners in action and symmetrical parts in networks of agents. Instead of understanding human subject as the only nodes of power, Haraway grasps the social as a string figure in which different knots are equally important for acting, living and dying together. In a second step, I am going to discuss the impacts of such an approach to ecology education and especially pedagogies of revovery. A different understanding of nature, culture and agency emerges from this discussion that allows educators and researchers in the field of education to think from the perspective of a posthumanist point of view. Finally, I am going to connect the different threads and argue for a posthumanist understanding of educational relationships that neither takes the distinction between nature and culture nor the differentiation between passivity and activity for granted.

Bio:
Sebastian Engelmann (Dr. phil, M.A. Applied Ethics, M.A. Education-Culture-Anthropology) is a Post-Doc researcher at the Institute for Education of the University of Tübingen Germany. His main fields of interest are theories of education, history of education and the critical discussion of posthumanist thought in education studies. His more recent publications include Alternative Schooling – European Concepts and New Education (2017), Pädagogik der Sizialen Freiheit (2018) and texts on Forest Bathing (2019).