Written by: Patricia Gibson. Institute of Art, Design + Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland

Abstract: t: Cartography as a posthuman method cultivates the creative and critical mapping of relational encounters between human, non-human and material entities. These empirically grounded accounts render the dynamic, intra-connected and inexhaustible possibilities verifiable in educational research practices. However, the current literature cites a number of examples of cartography mapping but provides no clarity as to how such an analytical practice might come about. In this paper, I design a Diffractive Transversal Framework to guide the cartographies in my research project where 21 interactive media students collectively author a story with(in) Flors the Teacherbot. The purpose of the framework is threefold: to limit the thresholds of encounter in an ethical and sustainable way; the multiperspectival nature of the framework acknowledges material entities; and transdisciplinarity draws from theory traversing multiple disciplines to become philosophically, educationally, and politically driven. A selected cartography charts the qualitative shift in student understandings around knowledge and its creation. Here, the students diffractively analyse how the collective story came about, rather than its meaning, through structured reflective dialogue enacted with(in) Flors. This is a novel approach to research in automated teaching and demonstrates how the method of cartography can be used to analyse digital data from a posthuman perspective.

Keywords: cartography, transversality, diffraction, new materialism, posthuman critical theory, automation

Written by: Marijke Hecht (1) and Christopher C. Jadallah (2). -

(1) The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA. (2) University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Abstract: Science education that provides learners with opportunities for deep and direct engagement with water and water-related processes is critical to address the many threats facing waterways across the globe. Posthumanist, new materialist, and Indigenous perspectives on nature-culture relations offer expansive theoretical frames that can guide educational research and practice to more substantively consider water - and all of its more-than-human entanglements - as an essential actor building more just social-ecological futures. We push for a broadening of approaches to ethnographic data collection that includes accounting for the agency of more-than-human beings. To ground our discussion, we present vignettes from two informal science education programs, each of which conceptually and physically immersed learners in small streams to engage in scientific inquiry and data collection activities that informed ongoing ecological restoration of two watersheds. From these vignettes, we consider how methodological approaches guided and informed by posthumanist, new materialist, and Indigenous perspectives can and should inform research on learning and the design of L/land-based learning environments.

Keywords: water, informal science education, more-than-human, methodology

Written by: Ali R. Blake * 1 , Melita Morales * 2 , Jon M. Wargo 3 , Alex Corbitt 4 , & Joseph Madres 1

*shared first authorship. 1- Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA. 2 - School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA. 3 - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. 4 - State University of New York at Cortland, NY, USA

Abstract: In this paper, we follow the co-constitutive material-participant relationships that propel action in escape room play, particularly how they open and close paths for learning. We focus on how learning is organized in one escape room game, The Author’s Enigma, as intertwined with conversations on play and learning to consider the relational values and ideologies that appear through more-than-human encounters. We contribute a critical (new) materialist draw toward material-participant intra-actions  to notice the production of narrowed messages, as well as openings that lead toward multiplicity. Thinking-with-theory; we take up Ahmed’s (2006) concepts of orientation and disorientation to consider objects’ arrivals and their not-yet-presence. We also move with Barad’s (2003) concept of intra-action, perceiving more-than-human actors as ‘matter-in-the-process-of-becoming’. Following a conch shell as a vibrant material in the ecology of escape, we trace participants and the shell through moments of intra-action across escape play. We detail the communicative forms produced through material intra-actions as both open and closed, while producing resonant logics with players in the room. We discuss implications for: 1) game-based approaches to education; 2) disruption to assimilative lenses for sensing and supporting learning; and 3) valuing particular relational arrangements with materials.

Keywords: orientation, disorientation, intra-action, thinking-with-theory, escape rooms, play, games, posthumanism, materiality

Written by: Hong-An Wu University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, United States of America

Abstract: In this article, I explore the lines of inquiry opened by moments of technological troubles encountered during teaching and learning. Instead of assuming that these moments are obstacles to be overcome, I delve into what these moments imply for educational research on teaching and learning through a posthuman approach. Troubling the figure of the posthuman with regard to the ethos that technologies are revolutionizing education, I argue that we need to pay attention to the labor of caring for technologies, particularly during moments of technological troubles, in order to address the uneven proximity to humanness, subjecthood, and emerging technologies based on intersectional embodiments. With this understanding, I propose a posthumanist methodological approach centered on tracing the care-giving labor for emerging technologies performed by teachers along with students during moments of technological troubles as a potential direction for educational research grappling with the posthuman. Furthermore, I provide an initial foray into using this methodology to count, recount, and account for the labor of caring for emerging technologies during moments of technological troubles across my teaching experiences at a Fab Lab and public library. In so doing, I suggest that we need to further trace the labor of caring for technological troubles to better understand our socio-material co-configurations with our nonhuman companions toward more sustainable and equitable futures in education.

Keywords: care, emerging technologies, technological troubles, pedagogy

Written by: Rebecca Digby. Bath Spa University, Bath, England

Abstract: Diffractive methodology is a recently established alternative to the interpretivist approach commonly used in educational research. Unlike epistemological practices grounded in representation, it recognises knowledge making as performative and emergent from difference. This paper offers new insights into diffractive readings in early childhood science education through experimentation with entangled empirical video data, theoretical perspectives and transdisciplinary space. A methodological contribution is made by showing how critical points of difference are created when video footage of shared understandings held by early childhood practitioners encounters existing research on early childhood science education diffractively. These points of difference are made to matter and illuminated as affecting emergent new connections which can reconfigure dominant ways of understanding creativity in early childhood science education. In doing so, children’s creative knowledge making practices in science enquiry are (re)presented as expansive, material knowing which is enacted at once through talk and materials.

Keywords: new materialism, diffraction, early childhood, science education, creativity, videography, transdisciplinary

Written by: Jenny Renlund , Kristiina Kumpulainen, Jenny Byman & Chin Chin Wong

Abstract: This paper examines the child–environment–researcher aesthetic encounters that emerged through a post-qualitative methodological approach called rhizomatic patchworks. Rhizomatic patchworks is an arts-based analytical process grounded in relationality, when posthuman theories and children’s storying provoked the researchers’ material and digital experimenting and thinking, manifesting in visual-textual assemblages through digital art. Drawing from an ethnographic research project on children’s digital storying at a Finnish primary school, we illustrate how the rhizomatic patchworks processes made us attentive to the various ways aesthetic dimensions entwined and became part of the children’s and our own relating with local environments. Aesthetic encounters emerged across intertwining events and modes of children’s storying and the researchers’ theoretical thinking and digital artmaking practices, allowing us to sensuously engage in frictional, troubled, and complex intersections of children’s stories and environments. Our article shows how rhizomatic patchworks can offer educational research creative, transformative and embodied ways to attend materially and digitally to the more-than-human phenomenon of aesthetic encounters in environmental education and discusses the ethical challenges and potentials of this methodological approach.

Keywords: post-qualitative inquiry, methodological approach, rhizomatic patchworks, aesthetic encounters, environmental education, digital art

Written by: Michael Lachney. Michigan State University, East Lansing, United States

Abstract: : Posthumanist educational methodologists, theorists, and researchers tend to reproduce zoocentrism by privileging animals over plants in their scholarship. This comes at a time when disciplines from across the academy are taking “plant turns” by attending to plants’ abilities to sense and communicate, as well as their material relationships, representational significance, and lively entanglements with non-plants. This amounts to a rejection of traditional Western science and philosophy that treat plants as passive forms of life. To encourage this plant turn in posthumanist educational scholarship, I turn toward Anishinaabe-gikendaasowin, plant science, and continental philosophy to help recognize the agencies and behaviors of plants that challenge human exceptionalism. I engage with these knowledge systems through multispecies storytelling about the collaborative design of a library computer science learning environment. Multispecies stories from these collaborations not only show how plants contributed to computer science learning, but also how they affected and were affected by humans, nonhumans, and technologies in the library. These findings have implications for posthumanist educational research and computer science education

Keywords: posthumanism, plant turn, computer science education, zoocentrism, Anishinaabegikendaasowin, plant science, continental philosophy

Written by: Suzanne Smythe, Gwénaëlle André, and Nathalie Sinclair. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada

Abstract: In this article we investigate how automation structures consent for people, and the pedagogies that might expand or reframe consent, both in research contexts and on digital platforms. We do so as researchers involved with adults who attend a bi-weekly drop in “computer support” café, many of whom are new to computers even as their lives are increasingly organized by automated agencies. We think with theories (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) of Indigenous relationalities (Maynard and Simpson 2022), feminist approaches to sexual consent (Consentful Tech Project 2020; Siggy 2021; Ward 2019); and concepts of individuation and technicity (Simondon 1958; 2005) to explore what consent might entail if it returned to its etymological origins of consent, or feeling-with. In keeping with the theory-as-method approach we re-imagine two modes of consent, that of our university’s informed consent protocol for researchers, and the consent protocol for a government sponsored electronic ID. We find that both converge in the logics of corporate platform design that incentivize “epistemologies of ignorance” (Bhatt and MacKenzie 2019). We conclude with speculations upon how con-sent as feeling-with might be re-animated in research methods, design and pedagogy that foreground ethical relationality.

Keywords: Meaningful consent, feeling-with, platform design, automation, digital literacy, theory as method

Written by: Charlotta Hilli & Sofia Jusslin, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

Abstract: The study contributes to the nascent digital academic writing tutoring field by applying posthuman thinking while investigating intimate socio-material relations during a participatory action research project. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021), on-campus academic writing workshops moved online to Zoom, Moodle, and Padlet. We became inspired by Jackson and Mazzei’s thinkingwith-theories and Haraway’s concept of diffraction when inquiring into how and why humans and more-than-humans made a difference in digital academic tutoring. Lively conversations emerged inbetween the research matters (tutor logbooks, embodied experiences, course materialities) and authors by diffracting them with the posthuman cyborg, hybridity, and Didaktik. The posthuman cyborg questioned what, who mattered, and why, pointing to embedded humans and more-than-humans shaping fragmented digital relations. Hybridity brought fluidity and fusions of different educational dimensions (openness/structure, teacher/student) to the study. Didaktik suggested that fluid tutoring structures (curriculum) and institutional politics (study credits) interfered with the teacher-student collaboration. We propose a posthuman relational, fluid, and fragmented framework called a hybrid Didaktik when developing teacher-student collaboration across several digital systems. By inviting materialities alongside human experiences into discussions about digital teaching, new practices sensitive to socio-material and political relations may unfold in higher education.

Keywords: digital academic writing tutoring, the cyborg, hybridity, Didaktik, higher education, socio-material relations, political relations, Zoom, Padlet, Moodle

Written by: Carolyn Cooke, Laura Colucci-Gray, & Pamela Burnard

Abstract: Dominant conceptions of education are strongly framed by narratives of ‘power-over’ materials, context, and processes, especially where digital and technological applications reduce complexities between humans, materials, and environments. The separation of knowledge, tools, and bodies in ‘disciplinary bounded’, ‘copyrighted’, and ‘patented’ spaces create a disconnect from our need for sustainable relationships, whereby the future is not given but ‘in-the-making’ (Haraway 2016).  Drawing on music and science – as examples of distinct disciplines, often siloed and separated in education – this paper advances nuanced understandings of how post human conceptions of ‘thing-power’[1] (the power of all bodies including materials) and ‘making-with’ (whereby everything makes each other capable) contribute to the affective encounters of materialities within the classroom.  By foregrounding the sensing body as a means to touch and be ‘touched’ by the world, we uniquely contribute to methodologies that illuminate the relational intensity of material sensation as part of coming to ‘know’. In doing so, we engage with the performative work of these materialities and re-define the ‘digital’ beyond the delivery of pre-planned learning pathways.

[1] The hyphening of words - such as with ‘power-over’, ‘making-with’ and ‘thing-power’ – is a posthumanist practice which invites new forms of engaging, reseeing, and thinking about the word.

Keywords: transdisciplinarity; vital materialities; thing-power; making-with; relationality; bodies; touch; sensing; temporal diffractive analysis

Written by: T. Elias, Independent Scholar

Abstract: As the world around us becomes increasingly digitized, datafied and commodified, so too does education. Seeking to address these realities, educational researchers are increasingly adopting posthuman perspectives, including sociomaterialism. As a feminist onto-epistemology, sociomaterialism considers both how we shape and are shaped through our ongoing interactions with our social and material worlds. Adopting this perspective brings into question many of the assumptions embedded within traditional methodologies and challenges educational researchers to adopt approaches that address the indirect, messy and interwoven nature of our technological, social and economic realms. This article argues that, as an explicitly posthuman approach to research, situational analysis is well suited to grappling with these sociomaterial complexities. It then presents an exemplar in which situational analysis was used to study open education’s relationships with scale from a sociomaterial perspective. Drawing from this exemplar, it argues that situational analysis offers a methodological “structured flexibility” with the power to open up silences by making the hidden visible, supporting collaborative research and enabling a form of “crystallization” in increasingly sociomaterial ways.

Keywords: situational analysis; educational research; open education; digital education; silence; sociomaterialism; posthumanism