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Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies
Abstract
This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed posthumanism' because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds.
... Abstract concepts such as posthumanism, companion species, and relationality were not taught as concepts, but planned as sensing activities, for example walking. Sundberg (2014) draws on for example indigenous onto-epistemologies when stating that walking is "the embodied and emplaced movements involved in producing worlds" (p. 39). ...
How can humans transcend their human perceptions and explore more-than-human experiences in arts education events? This question was explored in an iterative process of playful arts-based workshops rooted in posthumanism. Two workshops were organized as ‘walk-shops’ in the local environment and involved various approaches to engage with more-than-human experiences. Each walk-shop evolved from an affirmative response to a previous workshop experience. The paper discusses how these playful continuations can fuel radical imagination and transformation. We argue that workshops can develop iteratively when one actively pays attention to the situated possibilities within the context of the arts education event.
... Editorial: Arts Education in a More-Than-Human World There are many indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies that never parted from the entangled view of the world and if these views are not accounted for, posthumanisms run the risk of becoming yet another form of colonialism (e.g. Kuokkanen, 2000;Sundberg, 2014;Todd, 2016). In this thematic issue we, as guest editors, aim to make space for critical research that takes into account marginalized knowledges. ...
"Once upon a time, in a world where change danced on the horizon like leaves in the wind, there were art teachers, artist-pedagogues, artists, and art educational researchers, who read themselves into the posthumanist theories. Or maybe they engaged with the key ideas of these theories through their colleagues, or from random YouTube videos. Or maybe they ended up following the call of vital materialities, or became attracted by encounters with other-than-human species (clicks of cameras capturing fleeting moments, water droplets dotting on snow, or the whispers of limpets clinging to rocky shores). In any case, something in the world made them think differently their understandings of learning, pedagogies, art practices and research. This resulted in creative experimentation, rigorous rethinking of existing practices, and negotiating ethical responses to the messy, complex entanglements in the more-than-human worlds."
... The major themes demonstrate significant water conflicts abounding the Delta, as a direct result of ontological differences between Western and Indigenous views of water and uneven power relationships set in colonial hierarchies (Wilson & Inkster, 2018). Yet mindful to avoid the universalising of Indigenous ontologies (Laborde & Jackson, 2022;Sundberg, 2014;Todd, 2016) and subsequent epistemic violence in scholarship (Hunt, 2014;Watts, 2013), we acknowledge the specifically located and emplaced Indigenous thought, practices and legal/governance approaches relevant to the Cumberland House Métis community. As such, we do not intend to borrow ideas presented through the stories from the Elders and Knowledge Keepers, but we think with the complexities in the stories to grapple with settler responsibilities for water management within pervasive colonial governance systems (Stein et al., 2023;Wilson & Inkster, 2018). ...
This study critically examines the implications of integrating Indigenous relational worldviews into the water governance framework of the Saskatchewan River Delta. Using a relational theoretical framework and community-based participatory research methodology, both Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous researchers collectively examine the negative impacts of Western water governance policies and practices on the Métis community residing in Cumberland House, located in northeast Saskatchewan, Canada. Through Indigenous traditional water story-sharing methods with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, our focus centres on Indigenous interpretations and ways of knowing the Delta. The community highlighted the pervasive influence of power dynamics and political agendas in the governance of the Delta. As such, we emphasise the necessity of challenging settler colonial systems and structures and reinvigorating Indigenous worldviews for water governance. By doing so, we advocate for the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in their relationship with land and water, thereby promoting the meaningful implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action.
Beyond its distinct geological character, the Anthropocene is also a lived social reality, one whose properties are actively processed and internalized by its members in the form of “reflections from damaged life” (Adorno in Minima Moralia: Reflections from damaged life. Verso, London, 2005). The more immediate its destructive tendencies become, the more anthropocentric climate change disturbs the process of equilibration, prompting a need for reassurance that our ontological security is not threatened by powerful, unstoppable forces. Dewey (The later works. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, pp. 105, 1984) draws attention to the importance of not neglecting the function of this need in “creating ends or consequences” that connect intimately with affectivities embedded deep in the subject and exert a powerful influence over cognitive reasoning. Ultimately, it is the “physical moment” of the experience of ecological collapse that “tells our knowledge that [this] suffering ought not to be, that things should be different” (Adorno in Negative dialectics. Routledge, London, p. 203, 1973), prompting a need to change age-old environmental practices and a desire to think beyond “the given” towards better potentialities. This chapter notes how emerging formulations of environmental and related health crises, as symptoms of ‘wrong life’, provoke new thinking about the moral and political promises of cosmopolitan Europe and the need to extend justice relations to non-human others. Even though this contribution does not deliver a clarification of greentopia, it provides a context, a meta-narrative and political proposals for a real greentopia.
While New Institutional Economics (NIE) has grounded the homo economicus by introducing friction and its costs into economic models, its model of things has remained reductive. Since humans and things are co-constituted, NIE’s critique of the “human” of neoclassical economics is bound to be insufficient and often falls back on the human as atomic agent, whether as profit-maximizer or as biological entity. The complexity of human-thing relations needs to be folded into economic history if it aims to write a truly human story, one that takes seriously the human concerns, costs, and collectivities of economic action and one that centers humans beyond “bare life”. By foregrounding relationality, embodiment, and embeddedness, a feminist posthuman approach can both add new insights to traditional new institutionalist concerns such as bounded rationality and chart new avenues for study. Two case studies illustrate some of the potential and pitfalls of writing a posthuman ancient economy. A first case discusses how different economic subjectivities emerged in Late Republican Italy from a negotiation between villa owners and the specificities of different types of stored crops, namely grain and wine. While “grain thinking” was concerned first and foremost with risk reduction and quantity due to the stored crop’s rapid degradation, the process of fermentation enabled “wine thinking” to emphasize qualitative differences and speculation. A second case considers a blacksmithing toolset curiously abandoned after a fire at the minor center of Podere Marzuolo in Early Imperial Tuscany. It stresses the dual role of tools as both capital and human capital to link to Amartya Sen’s concept of capabilities and hypothesize about the limits to skill development in a context of unequal relations of power and means. While a posthuman ancient economy cannot take the place of macro-economic models, it does ask such modeling exercises to pause and unpack some of their black boxes: the big picture might look different when the multidimensionality of human-thing relations is given its due.
How do adolescent girls interact with nature? Which affordances do they perceive and enact in nature-rich environments? Drawing on outdoor empirical research, which mobilises cultural probes, walking, and semi-structured interviews as key methodological devices, this article provides possible answers to the research questions, as well as further interrogations issued from our analysis. Our research contributes to the field by developing new knowledge on the affordances of nature-rich environments for adolescents, in the context of informal environmental education and outdoor learning experiences. In this study, affordances are understood as ways along which the world comes into presence to human beings, providing contingently relational possibilities for interaction. The findings highlight that these teenagers’ experiences, were potentially transformative, bringing a higher sense of connection with more-than-human realms. They extend knowledge on adolescents’ ways of perceiving and interacting with nature, revealing previously unnoticed affordances, such as listen-ability, the affordances of the weather, and depict-ability.
This edited volume presents a post-humanist reflection on education, mapping the complex transdisciplinary pedagogy and theoretical research while also addressing questions related to marginalised voices, colonial discourses, and the relationship between theory and practice. Exhibiting a re-imagination of education through themed relationalities that can transverse education, this cutting-edge book highlights the importance of matter in educational environments, enriching pedagogies, teacher-student relationships and curricular innovation. Chapters present contributions that explore education through various international contexts and educational sectors, unravelling educational implications with reference to the climate change crisis, migrant children in education, post-pandemic education , feminist activists and other emergent issues. The book examines the ongoing iterations of the entanglement of colonisation, modernity, and humanity with education to propose a possibility of education capable of upholding heterogeneous worlds. Curated with a global perspective on transversal relationalities and offering a unique outlook on posthuman thoughts and actions related to education, this book will be an important reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of philosophy of education, sociology of education, posthuman-ism and new materialism, curriculum studies, and educational research.
Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicles, smart parking, and smart street lighting, such initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. Critics, however, increasingly argue that technologically driven, and efficiency-led approaches to sustainability in the smart city are too simplistic and leave little room for participation and citizen agency despite government efforts to integrate innovative technologies in more equitable ways. This has prompted a growing awareness that a human-centred notion of cities, in which urban space is designed for, and inhabited by, humans only, is no longer tenable. Within the age of the Anthropocene, increasing numbers of scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the entanglements between human and non-human others (including plants, animals, insects, as well as soil, water, and sensors and their data) in urban life. In Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities, renowned researchers and practitioners from urban planning, architecture, environmental humanities, geography, design, arts, and computing critically explore smart cities beyond a human-centred approach. They respond to the complex interrelations between human and non-human others in urban space. Through theory, policy, and practice (past and present), as well as thinking speculatively about how smart cities may evolve in the future, the book makes a timely contribution to lively, contemporary scientific and political debates on what it means to design genuinely sustainable smart cities.
The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two ontological' projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality conceived as an always-emergent assemblage of human and non-humans and troubles the politics that such assemblages imply. The other in ethnographic theory, that foregrounds that we are not only dealing with a shifting ontology, a (re)animated world, but also with multiple ontologies, a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways. Thus, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? I advance the notion of political ontology as a possible venue to explore this question.
