Abstract
This chapter gives an overview of how the substance ontology of Western philosophy thrives on the power producing Nature/Culture dichotomy, has caused asymmetrical violence, infiltrated everyday language, created academic divisions, produced hierarchical categories and classifications, and underpins colonialism and colonizing notions of relationships – not only between humans and subhumans (e.g., child) but also between humans and more-than-humans (e.g., animals, matter). This chapter shows how critical posthumanism as a navigational tool offers a different relational ontology – more akin to African Indigenous scholarship and ways of living – that reconfigures subjectivity and brings into existence the notions of posthuman child and the sympoietic diffractive teacher (human or nonhuman) – critically urgent notions to consider for education in the Anthropocene.
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Acknowledgement
This work is based on research supported by the National Research Foundation of South Africa [Grant number 98992].
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Murris, K. (2018). Posthuman Child and the Diffractive Teacher: Decolonizing the Nature/Culture Binary. In: Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Malone, K., Barratt Hacking, E. (eds) Research Handbook on Childhoodnature . Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_7-2
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Posthuman Child and the Diffractive Teacher: Decolonizing the Nature/Culture Binary- Published:
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_7-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_7-1