Post-humanism and Environmental Education

• Main Authors: Malone, Karen, Young, Tracy, Tran, Chi
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2023
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0308

Posthumanist thinking opens new possibilities for research that informs new imaginaries for teaching and learning in environmental education. Posthumanism attends to decentering the human, by seeking the means to acknowledge and navigate our symbiotic relationship of being in the world with a host of others. A posthumanist perspective therefore takes seriously the need to halt the “anthropological machine,” the constant “production” of absolute dividing lines between humans and the rest of the natural world. Posthumanist theorizing also reflects a philosophical understanding that extends subjectivities beyond the human species by disrupting the dominance of anthropocentric thinking and humancentric ethics in Western imperial thought. Both posthuman and new materialist approaches seek to rework the human subject and disrupt the Cartesian divide by being critical of binaries such as the human/nature, object/subject, divide have emerged. Posthuman and materialist thought in Western imperial thought can be traced back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ historical materialism, Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, Baruch Spinoza’s monism, certain post-phenomenological approaches, animisms, Buddhism, and often neglected “relational knowledges” attributed to First Nations and Indigenous people. The recent work of Deleuze and Guattari and Rosi Braidotti has been influential in making bridges between these past philosophies located in the humanities and the emergence of a “new humanities”—posthumanism. With the advent of the posthuman turn, many deep ecologists, ecofeminists, and non-Western philosophers sought also to disrupt and shake the values and ethical systems within the science and social science disciplines, with a view to shift consensus of default and entrenched environmental worldviews. This new paradigm was seen as critical if humanity was to respond to the ecological atrocities and legacies of Western capitalism. Post-anthropocentrism was argued as an imperative if humans were to counter the ...