Posthuman Object Pedagogies: Thinking with Things to Think with Theory for Innovative Educational Research

Educational practices and learning processes are entangled with multitudes of objects but these objects are so often disregarded as mundane background and thingified – positioned as dull, inert matter, unnoticed, and made subserviently serviceable in order that the proper business of educating the human can go on. Such an education, with its orientation to reason, logical argument and the mind, silences objects and produces humans as docile bodies. This article develops posthuman object pedagogies to contest the ontological positioning of objects as inert and dead and, instead, attend to the quiet but powerful work they do (Taylor, 2013, 2017). Using Barad’s (2007) and Haraway’s (2016) posthumanist materialist ontology of what Bennett’s (2010) calls thing-power the article proposes a practice of thinking with things as a means of thinking with theory. We illuminate this practice through four object encounters. The insights from these encounters provide the basis for developing posthuman object pedagogies which re-evaluate understanding of the work objects do as intra-active agencies and in recasting educational research. As four educators at different career stages, we develop posthuman object pedagogies to enable us to do educational research otherwise.