Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality critically reads the intersubjective theories on educational relations and uses a posthuman approach to ascribe agency relationally to humans and nonhumans alike. The book introduces the concept of ‘educational relationality’ and contains examples of nonhuman elements of technology and animals, putting educational relationality and other concepts into context as part of the philosophical investigation. Drawing on educational and posthuman theorists, it answers questions raised in ongoing debates regarding the roles of students and teachers in education, such as the foundations of educational relations and how these can be challenged. The book explores educational relations within the field of philosophy of education. After critically examining intersubjective approaches to theories of educational relations, anthropocentrism and subject-centrism are localized as two problematic aspects. Post-anthropocentrism and intra-relationality are proposed as a theoretical framework, before the book introduces and develops a posthuman theory of educational relations. The analysis is executed through a diffractive reading of intersubjective theories, resulting in five co-concepts: impermanence, uniqueness-as-relationality, proximity, edu-activity, and intelligibility. The analysis provided through educational examples demonstrates the potential of using the proposed theory in everyday practices. Towards a Posthuman Theory of Educational Relationality will be of great interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, early childhood education, research methodology and curriculum studies.

The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and Britain. These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses. Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children.

This book is a useful guide for educators who seek to better engage students in rich, meaningful learning, outlining a clear set of key concepts and principles for relational pedagogy in school classrooms. Emphasising the complex interpersonal encounters that mediate the social, cultural and political dynamics of the school as a shared space, the authors draw attention to the myriad relationships that constitute the social context of the school and the effects these have on teaching, learning and engagement. The relationships between students and teachers directly affect the experience of education, how learning unfolds and overall educational outcomes. Building on scholarly work and school practices, this book argues that relational pedagogy should be at the centre of teaching and learning in schools, in order to drive positive educational change. It further demonstrates the potential of relational pedagogy in the classroom through vignettes and examples from practice to highlight how these concepts can be applied in teaching and school leadership. Presenting a compelling new framework for relational pedagogy, this book will be of interest to teacher educators, postgraduate students of education, policy and school leaders.

This book makes an important contribution to ongoing debates about the epistemological, ethical, ontological and political implications of relational ethics in higher education. By furthering theoretical developments on the ethics of care and critical posthumanism, it speaks to contemporary concerns for more socially just possibilities and enriched understandings of higher education pedagogies. The book considers how the political ethics of care and posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics can be diffracted through each other and how this can have value for thinking about higher education pedagogies. It includes ideas on ethics which push those boundaries that have previously served educational researchers and proposes new ways of conceptualising relational ethics. Chapters consider the entangled connections of the linguistic, social, material, ethical, political and biological in relation to higher education pedagogies. This topical and transdisciplinary book will be of great interest for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of posthuman and care ethics, social justice in education, higher education, and educational theory and policy.

As our ideas of the human have come under increasing challenges – from technological change, from medical advances, from the existential threat of climate crisis, from an ideological decentering of the human, amongst many other things – the 'posthuman' has become an increasingly central topic in the Humanities. Bringing together leading scholars from across the world and a wide range of disciplines, this is the most comprehensive available survey of cutting edge contemporary scholarship on posthumanism in literature, culture and theory. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism explores: - Central critical concepts and approaches, including transhumanism, new materialism and the Anthropocene - Ethical perspectives on ecology, race, gender and disability - Technology, from data and artificial intelligence to medicine and genetics - A wide range of genres and forms, from literary and science fiction, through film, television and music, to comics, video games and social media.

Focusing on the interdependence between human, animal, and machine, posthumanism redefines the meaning of the human being previously assumed in knowledge production. This movement challenges some of the most foundational concepts in educational theory and has implications within educational research, curriculum design and pedagogical interactions. In this volume, a group of international contributors use posthumanist theory to present new modes of institutional collaboration and pedagogical practice. They position posthumanism as a comprehensive theoretical project with connections to philosophy, animal studies, environmentalism, feminism, biology, queer theory and cognition. Researchers and scholars in curriculum studies and philosophy of education will benefit from the new research agendas presented by posthumanism.

This book is a genealogical foregrounding and performance of conceptions of children and their childhoods over time. We acknowledge that children’s lives are embedded in worlds both inside and outside of structured schooling or institutional settings, and that this relationality informs how we think about what it means to be a child living and experiencing childhood. The book maps the field by taking up a cross-disciplinary, genealogical niche to offer both an introduction to theoretical underpinnings of emerging theories and concepts, and to provide hands-on examples of how they might play out. This book positions children and their everyday lived childhoods in the Anthropocene and focuses on the interface of children’s being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary communities and societies. In particular this book examines how the shift towards posthuman and new materialist perspectives continues to challenge dominant developmental, social constructivist and structuralist theoretical approaches in diverse ways, to help us to understand contemporary constructions of childhoods. It recognises that while such dominant approaches have long been shown to limit the complexity of what it means to be a child living in the contemporary world, the traditions of many Eurocentric theories have not addressed the diversity of children’s lives in the majority of countries or in the Global South.