MACMILLAN Posthumanism and Higher Education: Reimagining Pedagogy, Practice and Research

About the Author Carol A. Taylor is Professor of Higher Education and Gender at the University of Bath, UK. Her research draws on feminist, new materialist and posthumanist approaches to generate experimental methodologies and transdisciplinary theories for exploring gender, space, power and participation in higher education. She co-edits the journal Gender and Education and is an Editorial Board member of Teaching in Higher Education and Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning. Annouchka Bayley is Programme Lead in Creative Education at the Royal College of Art, UK. Her research incorporates posthumanisms and new materialisms for 21st century higher education development; practice-as-research in the academy; and creating new approaches to the practice and critique of contemporary live performance. Product Description This book explores ways in which posthumanist and new materialist thinking can be put to work in order to reimagine higher education pedagogy, practice and research. The editors and contributors illuminate how we can move the thinking and doing of higher education out of the humanist cul-de-sac of individualism, binarism and colonialism and away from anthropocentric modes of performative rationality. Based in a reconceptualization of ontology, epistemology and ethics which shifts attention away from the human towards the vitality of matter and the nonhuman, posthumanist and new materialist approaches pose a profound challenge to higher education. In engaging with the theoretical twists and turns of various posthumanisms and new materialisms, this book offers new, experimental and creative ways for academics, practitioners and researchers to do higher education differently. This ground-breaking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of posthumanism and new materialism, as well as those looking to conceptualize higher education as other than performative practice. Review “This lively, innovative book makes a strong case for how we might, and must, engage multimodally with more-than-human co-students/researchers/pedagogues in Higher Education (HE) … . These carefully assembled writings generate inspiration for researchers and pedagogues who want to work with idea and practices … . This book imbues courage to stay with the trouble, to invent and create spaces for thinking with more-than-human participants in research and pedagogy, and to respond to the call to do HE differently.” (Karen E. Barr, Journal of Posthumanism, Vol. 1 (1), May, 2021)