Restyling The Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education For Posthuman Times

Curriculum Inquiry
ISSN: 0362-6784 (Print) 1467-873X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcui20
Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher

education for posthuman times
Jamila R. Siddiqui
To cite this article: Jamila R. Siddiqui (2016) Restyling the humanities curriculum
of higher education for posthuman times, Curriculum Inquiry, 46:1, 62-78, DOI:
10.1080/03626784.2015.1133220
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2015.1133220
Published online: 06 Apr 2016.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 76
View related articles
View Crossmark data
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcui20
Download by: [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] Date: 23 April 2016, At: 12:13
CURRICULUM INQUIRY, 2016
VOL. 46, NO. 1, 62 78
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2015.1133220
Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher education for

posthuman times
Jamila R. Siddiqui
University of Wisconsin-Madision, WI, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Downloaded by [Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi] at 12:13 23 April 2016
The future viability of the humanities in higher education has been Higher education; curriculum
broadly debated. Yet, most of these debates are missing an studies; posthumanism;
important consideration. The humanities’ object of study is the humanities; onto-
human, an object that some would argue has been replaced in our epistemology
onto-epistemological systems by the posthuman. In her 2013 book,
The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti addresses and furthers this posthuman
shift by explicating both her critical posthumanism and how the
humanities curriculum can use it to restyle itself in its time of “crisis.”
In this paper, I put Braidotti’s text in conversation with John Dewey’s
1929 Experience and Nature, prompting a reconsideration of the
nature of experience as it manifests in a posthuman vital materialist
form, and how posthuman empiricism may require a return to a new
kind of sense experience; a reconsideration of the embodiment of
subjectivities, and how they are to be articulated in a posthuman
curriculum; and, correspondingly, a reconsideration of how one might
come to enact and experience a “posthuman humanities.” I conclude
that, along with this imperative to restyle the humanities for
posthuman times comes a need to reconfigure the institution of
higher education into an expanded posthuman network, perhaps
one that reaches outside its present bounds.
Crisis rhetoric concerning the state of the humanities in western academe has been
around in many different forms for some time now. Some suggest that the humanities
were “born in crisis” and flourish only in such a state (Harpham, 2011, p. 18). Rhetoric
espousing fears for the disappearance of the humanities from the higher education curric-
ulum persists in present times, but more recently with a special distaste for neoliberalism
and its corporatization of the university (see Di Leo, 2013; Donoghue, 2008; Nussbaum,
2010). Responding to the possible threat of future extinction produced by this outcomes-
minded orientation, proponents espouse that the humanities are still, and will continue to
be, useful. Some argue that the humanities provide a forum for the deep intra- and inter-
personal exploration that soothes the spiritual longing for an answer to the meaning of
life (Kronman, 2007). Others state that the humanities develop the “abilities crucial to the
health of any democracy internally, and to the creation of a decent world culture capable
of constructively addressing the world’s most pressing problems” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 7).
CONTACT Jamila R. Siddiqui jrsiddiqui@wisc.edu
© 2016 the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

RESTYLING THE HUMANITIES CURRICULUM OF HIGHER EDUCATION FOR POSTHUMAN TIMES 63
Attempting to appeal to neoliberal interests, as Jeffrey R. Di Leo (2013) calls for in his plan
to rescue the humanities, Martha Nussbaum further argues that a humanities education
aids innovation, a key to economic profit.
Yet, to some this is just rhetoric without much foundation because statistics do not
consistently support these claims (see American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2015). The
Humanities Indicators Project tells us that funding for academic research in the humani-
ties increased by approximately 50% from 2005 to 2012, that the number of faculty and
departments of humanities have remained relatively the same since 2007 and that while
there has been a decrease in the percentage of undergraduate students receiving degrees
in the humanities, when viewed over the last century, it is not a significantly large
decrease from approximately 10% in 1950 (around the time statistics became available)
down to a stable 6% 8% range during 1983 2013 for core humanities disciplines. The
same report from which these statistics are drawn also tells us that the percentage of
humanities graduate degrees awarded has dropped (4.6% in 1993 to 3.2% in 2013 for
master’s degrees, and 10.5% in 2000 to 8.2% in 2013 for doctoral degrees), and that those
with an undergraduate degree in the humanities have lower median earnings than those
with undergraduate degrees in general. Thus, to use statistics to support the claim that
there is a crisis of the humanities or not is a complicated task.
Quite a range of tactics, from the statistical to the emotionally laden rhetorical, have
been used by those engaging in the debates surrounding the state of the humanities in
higher education. As wide as the range is, though, a deeper, broader point for consider-
ation is being missed in these debates. The onto-epistemological assumptions of the
humanities curriculum perpetuate its humanistic object of study the human. Some say
this “human” is outdated (see, for instance, Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 1991; Hayles, 1999;
Wolfe, 2010), suggesting the curriculum may need to be revised. Stepping aside the statis-
tical, rhetorical and emotional, this paper considers how the “human” of the humanities
has transformed into the posthuman, and what might become of and from a posthuman
humanities.
Posthumanism, existing in various theoretical forms at present, boils down to one core
aspect: a movement beyond human exceptionalism. The idea of the “human” has not dis-
appeared entirely or failed to exist in the first place, as might be the case in some theories
of the non-human (Grusin, 2015). Rather, for posthumanism in its various articulations, the
human is hard to locate because it is no longer exceptional, no longer central. In lieu of
human exceptionality, posthumanism points to a greater acknowledgement of “nonhu-
man” others animals, plants, the planet, technologies, information, etc. and their
equal standing. This equal standing is a byproduct of another acknowledgment: the inter-
connectedness of all human and non-human entities, such that their distinctions, both of
spatial boundaries and of agencies, become challenging. It is a decentralized, complex
posthuman onto-epistemological network, if you will. Note that I use the term “onto-epis-
temology” to capture the inseparability of ontology from epistemology, as I am acknowl-
edging the relational, co-constructed nature of “knowing” and “existence” that is a part of
this posthuman interconnectedness.
Explicating an expanded posthuman onto-epistemology that more accurately reflects
the current posthuman era of mixed ethno-scapes, globalization, advanced capitalism and
advances in science and biotechnologies, Rosi Braidotti proposes a reorganization of the
humanities and its object in her 2013 book, The Posthuman. Guiding her in her pursuits is
the hope for a learning community that “serves the world of today” (p. 11). For Braidotti,
64 JAMILA R. SIDDIQUI
energy should be directed toward this question of pedagogical and curricular relevance to
present times, rather than toward the neoliberal presence in higher education. She suggests
that the crisis rhetoric surrounding the humanities, from Nussbaum and the like, is an inef-
fective attempt to enact change in the present economically intertwined university. The
neoliberal university is here, she says, and we best be getting on our way of working within
this framework. Braidotti suggests we should “move forward into multiple posthuman
futures. We need an active effort to reinvent the academic field of the Humanities in a new
global context and to develop an ethical framework worthy of our posthuman times”
(p. 150). She further exclaims, “the Humanities need to find the inspirational courage to
move beyond an exclusive concern for the human, be it humanistic or anthropocentric
Man, and to embrace more planetary intellectual challenges” (p. 153).
In this essay review, I discuss how Braidotti’s critical posthumanism and her approach
to a posthuman humanities provides a strong theoretical basis for a revised map of the
humanities curriculum. Her map is unique in the way it remains politically engaged with
subjectivities and diverse in its interdisciplinary terrain. Yet, its theory-as-praxis orientation
also glosses over details about the specific armaments with which to move forward when
engaged in a real-life battle over the future of the humanities in higher education. Critics
of Braidotti suggest she has such a heavy focus on theory that it makes it hard for her
readers to find explicit examples of action to take (Herbrechter, 2013; Ferrando, 2014;
Morgan, 2014). While Braidotti’s approach is not entirely void of actionable items, I will
argue that it could be deepened by moving its posthumanism into realms that lie outside
of theory. For this task, I will bring the natural empiricism of John Dewey through his
metaphysical text, Experience and Nature (1929), into conversation with Braidotti’s text.
These two texts may appear, at first, to be quite distant and oddly paired because of
their chronological locations. However, they both prompt a reconsideration of what is to
be studied by academe in light of the complex, relational, networked onto-epistemology
of our present posthuman predicament. Given this, I am compelled to draw from Michel
Serres’s (1995) understanding of contemporaneity and suspend the linear notion of time
that is typical of many historical accounts. Instead, this paper will engage with Braidotti’s
and Dewey’s texts as if they both contribute in the time-space of the contemporary. The
supposed “old” text may have something worthwhile to say to the supposed “new” text,
and vice versa.
By bringing Dewey’s text on metaphysics into relation with Braidotti’s posthumanist
curriculum imperative, Dewey’s line of scholarship begins to suggest some posthumanist
tendencies. Braidotti’s posthumanism updates Dewey’s natural empiricism. Similarly,
Dewey’s natural empiricism complements and deepens Braidotti’s advocacy for a posthu-
man turn in the humanities. They both contribute to advancing each other as well as
advancing an image of what a posthuman humanities might look like, but they are also
not entirely alone.
Posthumanist scholarship has been featured in major curriculum journals like
Curriculum Inquiry (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2015) and the Journal of Curriculum and
Pedagogy (Letts & Sandlin, 2013), and in edited collections such as Nathan Snaza and
John A. Weaver’s 2014 Posthumanism and Educational Research. The frequency with
which the posthuman is being taken up in scholarship over the past five years war-
rants a brief review of the contributions of those curriculum studies scholars who
have joined in this trending discussion before returning to a discussion of Braidotti
and Dewey.
Posthumanism in Curriculum Studies Scholarship

Posthumanism may seem rather radical; however, critiques of humanism’s “human” are
not new. Many critical projects, such as feminism, postcolonialism, antiracism, etc., have
been battling western humanism’s narrow version of the human and its correspondingly
restricted curriculum of what it means to be “human” for quite some time (for example,
Fanon 1952/2008; Irigaray, 1985; Mohanty, 2003; Said, 1978; Wynter, 2003). Yet, as evi-
denced by the undeniable persistence of inequalities and problematic power structures
globally, these projects have yet to fully actualize their emancipatory goals.
Posthumanist curriculum scholars have some insight on the cause of the plight of criti-
cal projects. Snaza and his colleagues (2014) suggest these projects, thus far, have fallen
short in gaining the attention of more than just marginalized populations. Posthumanism,
they claim, provides a solution: “posthumanism pushes intersectionality to the point
where no one no matter their field, interest, or position of power can afford to ignore
these critiques” (p. 41). By instigating a critique of human exceptionality at the level of
speciesism, rather than a critique of dehumanization at the level of humanism, posthu-
manism makes its attack of interest to all beings. The broad stroke of the posthuman solu-
tion also avoids recapitulating the problematic “human” versus “nonhuman” comparative
structure that makes dehumanization possible in our presently humanizing education
(Snaza, 2015). Snaza (2013) explains further:
In conceiving of the human as both an ontological given (a being) and the result of a particu-
lar process of education, education structurally introduces the necessity of intermediate con-
cepts: the less human, the less than fully human. In order to justify the pursuit of
humanization, educators must approach their pupils as not yet or not fully human (otherwise
there would be no need for education). This structural gap between the not yet fully human
animal and the human that is education’s telos allows for dehumanization to become a funda-
mental political fact of modernity. (p. 41)
As critical projects in education attempt to take a step forward, we can see that there is
ample possibility for several steps backward, as well. While the posthuman solution implies
itself to be the ultimately effective approach to moving beyond humanism’s “human”
because of its level of attack, scholars outside of curriculum studies (i.e. Gordon, 1998;
Jackson, 2015) are skeptical of our readiness for the complete abandonment of critical
projects and the possibilities for political mobilization they provide through identity and
subjectivity. Rosi Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, however, provides a compromise in the
possibility of continued political action via retention of subjectivities. I elucidate this part of
her work further in later sections.
There is ample agreement among posthuman scholars that the human should be
“posted,” even if simply as an ethical task (Snaza, 2010), but what becomes of this post-
ing and how it is to be taken up in education is still under construction. Perhaps this is
because it has not been taken up in educational praxis. This is a sign of posthumanist cur-
riculum theory’s youth its youth, correspondingly, being its present weakness. Snaza
and Weaver (2015) note in their introduction to their edited volume, “Given our saturation
in humanism, it is not even remotely possible at the present moment to conceptually or
practically lay out a theory of posthumanist education or outline the contours of a posthu-
manist pedagogy” (p. 3) because the field is presently too deterritorialized.
Yet, we are not without initial attempts at forecasting the manifestations of post-ing
the human in and for education. I review these here, and note that all present speculations
of the who, why, what, where and how of posthuman education seem to conform to none
other than an expansion “outward.”
The Who: The student becomes located at the borderlines of human to non-human and
non-human to non-human. To teach the student means to teach that which is currently
conceptualized as other than or outside of the anthropocentric image. This includes
others such as animals (Goebel, 2013; Morris, 2015; Wallin, 2013), technology (Gough,
2004; Weaver, 2010) and earth (Wallin, 2015), because these outsiders are a part of the
student if not the entire student themselves. These “outsiders” are exceptional, too; The
Why: To educate in the name of social justice, then, would involve a justice not simply for
humans, but a justice for animals and other earthly products, as well (Lukasik, 2013); The
What: Language loses its grip on identity as it gets reconfigured by new materialism into
an assemblage of materialities (de Freitas & Curinga, 2015). Thinking moves beyond repre-
sentational images and into new realms such as sound (Beier, 2013). Beier notes, “sound
art offers an expository example of the way in which the image of homo symbolicum can
be challenged and unheard of lines of becoming new life can form” (p. 25). This must
be utilized in education in order to find a way for it to “enhanc[e] life instead of limiting it”
(p. 25); The Where & How: The clearest articulation to this day of a posthuman curriculum
theory (with pedagogical undertones) is Snaza’s “bewildering education” (2013):
I propose that education be reconceived as a process that leads us—teachers, students,

researchers, philosophers, etc.—away from being human, or at least away from thinking that
we have any clear idea about what that means. I propose that it lead us away from the stable,
predictable, and cultured world of civilization, of cities, of routine, of politics as we have
known it. Whither it should lead us is—and must be—unknown. (p. 49)
Describing how unknowability may manifest in education, though, appears equally

unknowable, given the slew of vague attempts. However, Snaza (2013) provides one spe-
cific suggestion for this; it can be accomplished by reading various texts and codes to
gain understanding of how “the very idea of ‘the human’ has led us to misrecognize our-
selves and our relations to the world. ‘The human’ becomes a point of departure instead
of a telos” (p. 50).
This departure is the start of a letting go in curriculum and its interlocutors. It is a letting
go of non-fiction as a genre of humanity, where we, instead, grow “an appreciation of the
distinctive ways in which different kinds of fictions both constitute and interrogate the
world [as it] may help us to build pedagogical bridges across the multiplicity of intra- and
interpersonal ‘subjectivity gaps’ with which we are faced in curriculum work” (Gough,
2004, p. 92). Once in the galaxy of fictions (note the multiple), what we make of them and
them of us seems creatively endless an endless expansion outward. A world of fictions
or science fiction, as Noel Gough often enacts in his posthumanist curriculum scholarship,
complicates the material, the structure and the uses of curriculum at present. Perhaps, the
outward expansion may reach so far that someday curriculum might be no longer, as
Rub en Gaztambide-Fernandez (2015) suggests.
In the meantime, educators and educational theorists are grappling with the impend-
ing changes in their institutions, and this should not be overlooked by curriculum studies
scholars. Weaver (2010) takes note of this regarding the university: “If curriculum studies
wishes to remain relevant in the posthuman university we must realign ourselves with the
humanities to understand the ethical dimensions of knowledge and realign with the
biosciences to understand the nature of being” (p. 108). This call for a reorganization of
the disciplines in higher education is echoed by Rosi Braidotti (2013), yet there is a dearth
of other voices at the intersection of posthumanism and curriculum theory in higher edu-
cation. Perhaps as our posthumanity becomes more obvious and more embraced by key
actors in education, more scholars will join. For the time being, we have a text to converse
with here: The Posthuman.
Braidotti’s Critical Posthumanism
‘Life’, in other words, is an acquired taste, an addiction like any other, an open-ended project.
One has to work at it. Life is passing and we do not own it; we just inhabit it, not unlike a
time-share location. (Braidotti, 2013, p. 133)
Just as there are many humanisms that address how to inhabit life, there are many
posthumanisms. Braidotti’s particular strain of “critical posthumanism” draws from post-
structuralism’s reorientation to the subject, the anti-universalism of certain feminisms, the
new forms of universality that emphasize respect for human and non-human forms of life
in feminist spiritualities, ecology and environmentalism’s interconnectedness between all
that lives, and post-colonialism’s delineation of Eurocentrism and the European handling
of the Enlightenment. Additionally, Braidotti is unquestionably inspired by the work of
Gilles Deleuze and F elix Guattari, as evidenced by her use of their concepts of multiplicity,
rhizomatics, becomings, nomadism, virtuality, self-organization, etc. She is similarly influ-
enced by Spinoza’s monistic philosophy.
Most striking in her critical posthumanist approach is Braidotti’s retention of subjectivity
in order to make possible the political and ethical analysis of posthumanism, perhaps an
artifact of her feminist background. Should the subject disappear, as it is claimed to do in
some post-structural solutions to the challenges of humanism’s subject, power structures,
such as advanced capitalism, that intertwine with subjectivity could not be called into ques-
tion regarding their productive or repressive effects. Thus, Braidotti instead calls for new
subjectivities with the intention of a politics of affirmation that “combines critique with crea-
tivity in the pursuit of alternative visions and projects” (p. 54). We must not simply throw
our hands up at complexity when facing its complications of the human and walk away
from all that is subject; instead, we must revise our understanding of subjectivity, such that
it respects complexity while allowing us to monitor and engage with its effects and powers.
Clearly, however, Braidotti does not wish to retain anthropos in this revised subjectivity.
As an alternative to hegemonic anthropocentrism, a Spinozist relational unity or monism
of all matter meets its intelligent self-organizing nature in science and becomes the vitalist
materialism or radical immanence that lays the foundation for an egalitarian posthuman-
ism. Vitalist materialism steps outside of any dualism and entertains only raw cosmic
energy, what Braidotti calls “zoe,” that is the vitalist life force in the matter of materialism.
Matter self-organizes, so it needs no “human agency” to understand, control, predict, or
produce a world separate from that of the human. Human, non-human and world are one
in matter. Subjectivity is expanded from the human into the relations of all living matter.
Braidotti sketches three specific configurations of these relational posthuman figura-
tions: becoming-animal, becoming-earth and becoming-machine. Becoming-animal rep-
resents the middle ground between human and animal that is the constitution of each in
the other, without privileging the human. Becoming-earth represents the monism with
the planet that is the middle ground of all living matter and thus amplifies the scale of the
thinking to be done. Becoming-machine represents a new site of relation between organic
and inorganic matter. When put together, these three layers of becoming present a partial
picture of the ultimate becoming, the unrepresentable disappearance of the self called
“becoming-imperceptible” that Braidotti borrows from Deleuze and Guattari.
Having sketched this map of Braidotti’s critical posthumanism, it is apparent that there are
many possible implications of this posthuman condition for education, as Braidotti has noted.
I explore how Braidotti applies her posthumanism to the humanities curriculum below.
Reviving the Humanities: Braidotti’s Approach

Questioning of the humanities, as we have seen, incites a rhetoric of crisis and concern for
its fate, especially from those within its present bounds. While Braidotti acknowledges this
concern, her love of affirmation and creativity, rather than negativity, shines through in her
claim to a posthuman reorganization as an opportunity to be seized rather than feared.
The present state of flux makes higher education a prime candidate for seizure,
Braidotti suggests. She claims that globalization’s dissolution of the nation leaves the
university curriculum without a reference for national culture and thus without reference
for common academic standards. To Braidotti, this flexible state of the university is, on
the one hand, an opportunity for capitalism to enter higher education and utilize the mar-
ket to determine curricular goals and outcomes. On the other, it is also an opportunity to
look toward the texture of our “radical relationality” (p. 144) for clues that recreate the
learning community such that it reflects and supports socially relevant knowledge. In
other words, this is knowledge of the posthuman kind in a learning community of posthu-
man configuration.
As we have seen, though, Braidotti is not advocating for just any form of posthuman-
ism to enter the humanities curriculum in higher education. She has interest in that post-
human curriculum being quite critical:
I belong to a generation that had a dream. It was and still is the dream of actually constituting
communities of learning: schools, universities, books and curricula, debating societies, theatre,
radio, television and media programmes — and later, websites and computer environments
— that look like the society they both reflect, serve and help to construct. It is the dream of
producing socially relevant knowledge that is attuned to basic principles of social justice, the
respect for human decency and diversity, the rejection of false universalisms; the affirmation
of the positivity of difference; the principles of academic freedom, anti-racism, openness to
others and conviviality. (p. 11)
Braidotti’s social justice-oriented curricular manifesto complements her imperative to

retain subjectivity in order to engage with our multi-faceted “contemporary global cul-
ture” (p. 52) in ways that critique its numerous problematic components: self-centered
individualism stemming from the Eurocentric paradigm and its continued hegemony;
advanced capitalism and its commodification of life forms for economic production; the
significant bio-power exercised in the use of “contemporary death-technologies” (i.e.
drones) during war; and global warming, just to name a handful for illustration. Traditional
humanities have not brought about complete alleviation of these issues, perhaps because
traditional humanities inhabit the space of the unified human subject that does not
adequately capture the “differential mechanisms of distribution of power effects at the

core of subjectivity” (p. 188). Instead, the space of a non-unitary posthuman subject that is
“a complex assemblage of human and non-human, planetary and cosmic, given and man-
ufactured” (p. 159) should be taken up in a restyling of the humanities.
While tracing the problems of our globalized culture via subjectivity can be helpful to
providing a context and reason for an advance beyond the traditional “human” of the
humanities, it is important to note that Braidotti’s subjectivity is not intended solely for
the purposes of negative criticism of power structures. Inspired by her perpetual interest
in affirmation and in Deleuzian creation of the new, for Braidotti subjectivity is also a
means of creativity, continuous transformations and new futures. This, I believe, is where
the productive function of education most easily meets Braidotti’s posthuman theory.
Subjectivities are forms with which we can make sense of the processes and flows of that
complex globalized culture, and through which we can affirm and create more instances
of difference as a positive means of resisting power structures.
Perhaps this all sounds quite utopian, so what might a posthumanly reconfigured
learning community of relational subjectivities, for relational subjectivities, one that
“serves the world of today” (p. 11), in the humanities, actually look like? The new model of
the university suggested by Braidotti is that of a “globalized, technologically mediated
‘multi-versity’” (pp. 179 180) that fuses notions of global and local space via multiple
technologically connected urban spaces, replacing the single university space with one in
which academic and civic are adjectives that apply equally to all spaces. The university as
an institution morphs into a “transfer hub” of sorts, rather than an authority organized
around disciplines and faculty expertise. Being locally specific invites local values (of utility,
sustainability, and the like) into the humanities curriculum as opposed to a prefigured,
transcendent set of values.
This is not simply taking a university curriculum and placing it online or into a digital
framework, as might be taken up in certain strains of digital humanities and digital pedag-
ogies, as well as online universities. Rather, it is a politically loaded reorganization of the
curriculum that aims to provide a forum for the unique knowledges of each locality to net-
work within and without, quite rhizomatically and on their own. It is “moving the activity
of thinking outwards, into the real world, so as to assume accountability for the conditions
that define our location” (p. 178), and prioritizing adjectives like “open” and “public” over
all others. Here, we meet Braidotti’s take on the purpose of higher education, one that,
contrary to her acceptance of the neoliberal presence in the university, is actually quite
anti-neoliberal.
This networked learning community consists of subjectivities that are always already
relational, while at the same time being allowed to be even more so through the techno-
logical network that brings about even more relations. The networked nature of these
relations is also always in constant flux, and therefore the new model of the university is
one that is “a community without steady identity or fixed unity” (p. 181). Here, we see the
dispersed posthuman and its networked curricular and pedagogical objects and practices
as resistance of the neoliberal corporate branding of the university and its curriculum.
Braidotti was able to effectively sketch out some initial maps of what a posthuman
humanities in a posthuman university might look like. Yet, there is clearly more work to
be done and more to be seen by all about how this will unfold. Braidotti’s persistent sub-
jectivity is helpful for its political mobility. Despite this positive benefit, Braidotti too
quickly pushes aside the posthumanisms from science and technology studies that she
labels as “analytic” and too politically neutral in their approach. While I agree that subjec-
tivity is an important component of these analyses that should not be omitted, it should
also be complimented and deepened by a depth of understanding about vital materialism
and the intricacies of its experience in a technologically mediated world that could be pro-
vided by science and technology studies. Both analytic and critical posthumanism need
each other, and should be speaking to one another to deepen and broaden our onto-epis-
temological understandings of the posthuman predicament.
Finally, as a reader I am left wondering about Braidotti’s brief yet notable claim about
her use of empiricism in the argument she puts forth. Clarification and expansion on
her definition and use of empiricism may be useful, as it was not apparent how her
work moved beyond that of theory. To help provide this missing piece and to deepen
Braidotti’s work, I ask John Dewey to enter this conversation. Dewey’s natural empiricism
sets us up for envisioning what a posthuman empiricism might look like, and toward the
end of this essay, I will speculate as to how this might enter the debate about the humani-
ties in a way that complements and expands Braidotti’s theory.
Dewey’s Method: Natural Empiricism

Both Dewey and Braidotti espouse a non-dualism that attempts to move away from sub-
ject and object distinctions, and present the human as a relational event. Dewey, however,
finds the most meaningful approach to this non-dualism to be one that is grounded in
empiricism. More specifically, he elucidates his method of natural empiricism quite explic-
itly in his text, which I briefly summarize here.
Experience as Relational and Temporal

The crux of Dewey’s metaphysical text, Experience and Nature (1929), is that relationships
between events, not thoughts, are the proper objects of knowledge. To Dewey, every-
thing is an event of history, whether it be thought itself, a theory, a method of inquiry, liv-
ing organisms, the concept of the individual or the self, the subject, the mind, etc. As
events, these objects can disappear or morph just as easily as they appeared. Thus, reality
is entirely temporal. Furthermore, Dewey believes reality is co-constructed in the relations
that these event-objects take up with one another. For example, when a person interacts
with a tree, how that person experiences the tree becomes a part of the tree itself. To
Dewey, the experienced object and the experiencing subject cannot be separated they
are bound together in a relation that precedes their existence.
This relational event-orientation has interesting consequences for the human subject,
an event that has dominated western thought for quite some time, and to which posthu-
manism is a reaction. While many of Dewey’s texts taken up in education are interpreted
as democratic manifestos in pursuit of an opportunity for all individual human subjects to
flourish, this metaphysical text provides a more patient and nuanced take on the human.
To Dewey, nature and human experience are confounded, operating within and for each
other. Yet, their relation is not a Cartesian one in which the human is eternally destined to
be the all-experiencing, all-knowing subject. Whereas Braidotti might attack the Cartesian
“I think, therefore I am” at the level of the “I,” Dewey aims at the action of the “think.” He
notes that living in a world of uncertainty and contingency preconditions a sense of plea-
sure that comes from having a logically coherent human thought that clearly differenti-
ates its subjectivity from its lowly objects of observation. Yet, Dewey does not take this
subjective thought to be the ultimate condition of existence. While he does not deny
the operation of a human subject, the human subject is not given a timeless crown.
The human, like all other events, is not protected from its historical contingency.
Instead, the action of the human subject in thought is simply the present means through
which we engage with primary sense experience.
Simplicity should not be confused with lack of importance, though. We have temporar-
ily enacted the human in the moment, and have put it into interaction with sense experi-
ence via thought reflection on experience. Because, in this interaction, the human is the
means of sensing and reflecting upon experience, the human and the experience become
inseparable. This relational and temporal orientation has the potential to coincide with
the relational and temporal network of the posthuman, but will also find its continuing
tone of human exceptionality to be troubled by posthumanism.
Empiricism as Return to Sense Experience

In Experience and Nature, Dewey pays special attention to one event-object of particular
concern to him what he calls “non-empirical philosophy,” and what I might call theory.
Dewey finds non-empirical philosophy to have little value when compared to empirical
philosophy, which grounds its progressive evolution of meaning-making in sense experi-
ence. Following his metaphysical tenets, he advocates for a method of natural empiricism
that assumes a system of relations between the experienced things or observed objects
and their uptake in theories or hypotheses. In natural empiricism, the experienced things,
or primary objects in nature, as Dewey calls it, lead to hypotheses or theories, which are
secondary objects. These secondary objects are then tested and verified, with their result-
ing, derived meanings becoming a part of, and ultimately changing, the experienced pri-
mary objects. This cycle continues, putting primary objects into temporal relation with the
theoretical abstractions ascertained from and for them, ultimately voiding any superiority
of primary over secondary objects and merging “nature” with “experience.” The act of
returning the theory to the primary experience, rather than to the theory itself, enhances
the experience. Similarly, the act of engaging with the material of primary experience can-
not be separated from the primary experience itself. Here, we see the influence of William
James and his “double-barrelled” definition of experience on Dewey’s thought:
‘Experience’ denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped harvests, the changes of
night and day, spring and autumn, wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared,
longed for; it also denotes the one who plants and reaps, invokes magic or chemistry to aid
him, who is downcast or triumphant. It is ‘double-barrelled’ in that it recognizes in its primary
integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in
an unanalyzed totality. (Dewey, 1929, p. 8)
By recognizing the non-dualistic nature of experience and maintaining a connection with

primary experience, natural empiricism derives theoretical conclusions that, “when they are
referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more signifi-
cant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful” (p. 7). This is
opposed to the fate of non-empirical philosophy which “terminate[s] in rendering the

things of ordinary experience more opaque than they were before, and in depriving them
of having in ‘reality’ even the significance they had previously seemed to have” (p. 7).
Dewey’s Pre-Posthuman Update to Braidotti

Dewey is not what I would consider to be a posthumanist. His metaphysics, as explicated
in Experience and Nature, engages too much with the human subject and too little with
the non-human or interhuman possibilities to be labeled as such. He under-acknowledges
the extent to which his empirical process, as described in the text, contributes to human
exceptionality. There is also a certain Euro-human exceptionality reflected in the lack of
explicit attention to whose theories/hypotheses are being heard, tested, verified and
returned to primary experience (also, whose primary experience?) in the validated mean-
ing-making processes.
Yet, I would consider Dewey’s metaphysics to be pre-posthuman in that several com-
ponents suggest a readiness for a posthuman embrace. Take Dewey’s framework of rela-
tional co-construction and temporal events, for example. Should the event of the human
subject morph into something else say, the event of the cyborg that can be a figure of
the intimacy of humans and technology (Haraway, 1991) then the cyborg may just as
easily inhabit the space of the reflecting subject in Dewey’s iterative feedback loop, having
sense experience that it reflects upon, formulates theories with and returns to sense expe-
rience for purposes of enriching that sense experience. Similarly, if the cyborg’s means of
interaction with sense experience is no longer cognitive thought and morphs into some-
thing else perhaps, exchange of bits and bytes that re-organize themselves upon
exchange, mirroring Braidotti’s self-organization in vital materialism then the framework
still remains. The events of human subject and supreme human thought are simply
expired and replaced with the events of the present time. While Dewey placed exception-
ality on the human subject and its thought at the time of writing his text, this was perhaps
because it was the event of the time. Times have changed, and I would suspect that
Dewey would welcome the event of present times the posthuman into a metaphysi-
cal framework that aligns with the de-centered, relational network of posthumanism, and
that supports the iterative becoming of posthuman open-endedness.
Given all of this, Dewey’s potential contribution to a conversation with Braidotti’s text is
threefold. First, his pre-posthumanism, as we have seen, has integrated the prerequisite
material needed for a conversation about open-ended, relational becoming, this being an
implicit telos in both Dewey’s and Braidotti’s texts. These texts are ready for one another.
Dewey does, however, have a different take on how to go about creating scholarship
regarding relational becoming. Because Dewey would consider the how, or the method,
to be inseparable from the what, or content, Braidotti’s method of scholarship becomes
equally important to examine as her content. Thus, Dewey highlights for us the insepara-
bility of Braidotti’s text from the posthumanism that is actualized from it. Finally, Dewey’s
natural empiricism provides one possible method of inquiry that compliments, and poten-
tially expands, Braidotti’s theoretical approach to advocating for a posthuman shift in the
humanities.
This last contribution is especially important for a successful appeal to the outcomes-
minded stakeholders in the humanities debate who will be asking the question, “what is
the point of posthumanism for my vocational and profit-centered outcomes?” Braidotti

avoids answering this question directly, perhaps because it is hard to predict and trace
the economic impact of a posthuman embrace by the humanities in higher education.
She, instead, opts for a theory of a utopian university in which learning of our posthuman
selves and posthuman values, instead of an overturning of the neoliberal university, will
bring about the change we are seeking through a revolution against neoliberalism. In the
absence of evidence of a direct causal link between posthuman curriculum and economic
profits, I propose that, in light of Dewey’s natural empiricism, we can still provide a differ-
ent kind of evidence, aside from the theoretical evidence Braidotti presents, to begin to
appeal to outcomes-centered stakeholders. We should consider, in response to Dewey’s
charge to non-empirical philosophy, how we can avoid “rendering the things of ordinary
experience more opaque than they were before” (Dewey, 1929, p. 7). After all, opacity is
not going to win a curricular battle for the humanities.

Posthumanism does not need to be bound only to theory. When theory enters these
debates by itself, it becomes too easily pushed aside due to the “abstract” or “arbitrary”
nature that Dewey so strongly rejects and that stakeholders may find irrelevant to their
outcomes. Posthumanism can be visceral, sensory experience. As I type these words,
my ideas flow through the movement of my fingers, which I sense touching the warm
keys of my laptop. I hear the brief click of the keys as this happens, and I see my ideas
in typographic form on the brightly lit computer screen. There is an exchange between
myself and the laptop that is undeniable, such that if I were asked about the location
of this manuscript at present, I would have to attempt a description of the sensory
experience that is the me-laptop becoming, because this sense perception is what feels
“real” and grounded to me. While my sensory experience is not the only form of data I
am interacting with at the moment, it is a primary one for me. Appealing to examples
of sensory experience that illustrate posthumanism is one way to go about meeting
the neoliberal forces where they are at as humans that assume their own exception-
ality and care about their own lives, which happen to be experienced through
their “human senses.” If we are indeed in posthuman times, then a grounding in
sense experience should automatically connect one’s subjectivity to one’s posthuman
embodiment.
An agreement on the undeniability of our posthuman embodiment is the prerequisite
step to the embrace of a posthuman humanities by all stakeholders in higher education
curriculum neoliberal or not. Verification in sense experience, as supplied by Dewey’s
natural empiricism, helps provide evidence that complements the theory and rhetoric cur-
rently circulating in the debate about the humanities. Yet, returning to sense experience
to verify posthuman theory also raises the complication of what sense experience is in
posthuman times. I explore this further next.
Braidotti’s Pre-Empirical Update to Dewey

Braidotti’s posthumanism situates Dewey’s human exceptionalism as a product of his time
by calling for an end to the event of the humanities’ human, which is to be superseded by
the event of the posthuman. This posthuman event brings along with it an acknowledged
change in the texture of experience.
Technology has replaced nature as our new milieu, according to Braidotti:

[We] need to reconceptualize the relation to the technological artefact as something as inti-
mate as close as nature used to be. The technological apparatus is our new ‘milieu’ and this
intimacy is far more complex and generative than the prosthetic, mechanical extension that
modernity had made of it. (p. 83)
Expounding further, “the dualistic distinction nature-culture [as natural givens versus
social constructions] has collapsed and is replaced by complex systems of data-feedback,
interaction and communication transfer” (p. 145). Here, Braidotti is providing a contempo-
rary update to Dewey’s naturalism. No longer is nature the original primary object of the
secondary hypotheses — no longer the a priori element of the biosphere in which we
experience. Nature has been replaced by the flowing of bits, bytes and mechanical forms
of technology through the flesh of the posthuman. Technology “exists” in place of nature.
Or rather, it is nature for the posthuman, because it is the how of experience; put simply, it
is nature-experience in its present iteration.
Posthuman theory invites sense experience to be something it has not been in the past.
Therefore, a posthuman empiricism will take up realms outside that of the human senses
the original material of experience for Dewey. Braidotti effectively alludes to this in her the-
oretical account of posthumanism, but, despite her occasional claim to be empirical, she
does not go as far as to demonstrate the verification of her theory in sense experience, in
the new posthuman iteration of sense experience. Hence, I consider her text to be pre-
empirical in the Deweyian, radical empiricist understanding of empiricism, and we must
look elsewhere for examples of a return to posthuman sense experience from theory.
Finding Zoe: Posthuman Empiricism and Posthuman Subjectivities for a

Posthuman Humanities
The vitalist materialism of Braidotti’s posthumanism suggests that matter self-organizes
and there is no need for an agentic subject to intervene. However, it is the business of aca-
deme to intervene. Academe’s scholarly, curricular and instructional structures require
zoe, or the raw cosmic life force in matter, to present itself in forms that can be learned
and manipulated by the agents of higher education. Thus, visions of a “posthuman
humanities” must address the expansion of sense experience in posthuman empiricism,
as well as the formations of posthuman subjectivities, and what all of this may mean for
the present agents of higher education.
Posthuman Empiricism
As I ponder what I would turn to in order to verify a posthuman theory, I find myself over-
whelmed by what would become an interdisciplinary task of grand scale. Not only would I
be drawing from disciplines that more frequently engage with anthropos, such as psychol-
ogy, biology and even education, but also the post-anthropos, or the life force in forms
beyond that of the human, known in Braidotti’s terms as zoe. Braidotti alludes to the inter-
disciplinary scope that spans an approach to the post-anthropocentric posthuman: “sci-
ence and technology studies, new media and digital culture, environmentalism and earth
sciences, bio-genetics, neuroscience and robotics, evolutionary theory, critical legal theory,
primatology, animal rights and science fiction” (p. 58). I am sure there are many more
disciplines to add to the list, which brings me to the question: Where is zoe and how does
a posthuman empiricism go about finding it?
Adrian Mackenzie (2010), admittedly not a self-identified posthumanist, has attempted
to answer this question by applying William James’s radical empiricism and his focus on
conjunctive transitions to the “wirelessness” of our technological intimacies in network
configurations. Expecting to find a definition of posthuman sense experience somewhere
in Mackenzie’s text, I instead found a commitment to describing the intermediate compo-
nent of networked connections, or the process of becoming or transitioning from one
thing or state to the next. Perhaps then, it can be concluded that posthuman sense experi-
ence has a quality of movement or change, supporting the inseparability of the how of the
experience from the experience itself. One step forward, yet I am still dissatisfied. Is
change or movement the telos of posthuman vital matter? Perhaps so, but more evidence,
likely in forms that exist outside of the text, is needed.

I long for a method of finding the zoe of posthumanism in sense experience without
having to revert back to cognitive thought as a means and linguistic description as its repre-
sentation. Braidotti agrees: “The collapse of the nature-culture divide requires that we need
to devise a new vocabulary, with new figurations to refer to the elements of our posthuman
embodied and embedded subjectivity” (p. 82). Yet, she does not go much further than sug-
gesting we must be imaginative in our approaches for finding this vocabulary. While
Braidotti’s theory remains a strong pre-empirical, theoretical platform from which we can
launch forward into other realms of experience, the other realms remain yet to be eluci-
dated in a revised academic, scholarly form. This is greatly needed if our onto-epistemologi-
cal approaches are to keep up with our posthuman predicaments. Posthuman theory is ripe
for an empirical return to posthuman experience, and the posthuman humanities have the
chance to define the scope of this in academe. If they take up that chance, I would argue
they have found part of their relevance to posthuman times, as advocated for by Braidotti.
Posthuman Subjectivities
Finding zoe in experience is not divorced from another task a posthuman humanities
must take up if it is to retain subjectivities as political agents: locate and articulate those
subjectivities amidst the innumerable forms and anti-forms that a posthuman embodi-
ment might inhabit, as zoe becomes the new object of study in the posthuman humani-
ties. This is not an easy task. Zoe consists of multiple forces “that do not coincide with the
human, let alone with consciousness” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 138), and embodies any posthu-
man subject in a manner that does not contain, but relates outward “with an ‘outside’
that is cosmic and infinite” (p. 138).
Orientation to the outward and the beyond, consistent with the tendencies of posthu-
manist curriculum studies scholarship thus far, is quite useful for a curriculum attempting
to enact the creative function of Braidotti’s posthuman subjectivities. Movement toward
the new, even making movement the new, will no doubt bring about the proliferation of
differences that can unsettle the old.
However, orientation to the outward complicates the articulation of subjectivities for
the purposes of being critical of the power effects flowing through and between them.
This is especially so in the posthuman humanities, which remain within the discourses
and requirements of articulation and expression within the institution of higher education.
I worry that the containment of the posthuman humanities in academe, especially of the
critical posthuman humanities that Braidotti advocates, will reify the structures that it is
attempting to resist. A posthuman identity, for instance, is still an identity one that
might require a different kind of intervention in order to break free.
Posthuman Humanities
Locating zoe in sense experience and among posthuman subjectivities, in all its difficulties
and abstractions, posits a challenge to the spatialization of a posthuman humanities. Brai-
dotti uses the term “posthuman humanities” to describe what the humanities might
become should they embrace our posthuman predicament. She does not, however, use
the term “posthumanities,” and I cannot help but wonder why. “Posthuman humanities”
implies a division between the humanities content (of the posthuman) and process
(of the humanities, as it has always been). As we learn from Dewey, the process of
scholarly engagement, or the experiencing, can influence the experienced content. Might
a posthuman humanities not reinscribe some of the humanist structures that posthuman-
ism is attempting to move away from? In this sense, a posthuman humanities is only partly
moving into posthumanism. I am not convinced that a truly posthuman curriculum needs,
or is even able, to reside within the present curricular and pedagogical bounds of the
humanities in higher education. The institution of higher education, as Braidotti notes,
needs to be reconfigured into a posthuman network. Only when a fully relational, tempo-
ral and networked system is enacted in higher education would we arrive at the possibility
of actualizing a complete posthuman curriculum.
Thus, I turn Braidotti’s question back to her does a posthuman humanities “serve the
world of today?” Perhaps, given the sketches of posthumanism in education at present,
the humanities need to evolve out of themselves in order to live their fullest potential for
relational complexity. Braidotti successfully avoids the crisis rhetoric that has pervaded
the debate about the humanities, but she has brought about a new kind of crisis. How
might the humanities restyle themselves outside of their own lines?
Perhaps such a restyling will require more than simply stretching the curricular bound-
aries of the humanities through a newfound interdisciplinarianism. It may demand a radi-
cal blurring of the curriculum and pedagogy of higher education, underscoring the
inseparability of the posthuman from the experience of posthumanism and its multifari-
ous, ever-changing practice. Such a blurring sets the stage for generating a posthumanities
that is an unbounded process of movement and ongoing emergence, rather than a post-
human’s content to be learned or had as object or subject of study. Opportunity abounds
for those in the humanities who are ready to join in this open-ended, emergent process
offered by an embrace of our posthuman network.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Jamila Siddiqui is a PhD candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. She also advises at the Center for Educational Opportunity. Her current research
interests include posthumanism, higher education, digital humanities and digital pedagogy.
ORCID
Jamila R. Siddiqui http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0390-9397
References
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2015). The state of the humanities: Higher education 2015.
Retrieved from http://www.humanitiesindicators.org/binaries/pdf/HI_HigherEd2015.pdf
Beier, J. (2013). Dis-organ-izing the subject: Thinking with sound. Journal of Curriculum and Peda-
gogy, 10(1), 23 25.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.
de Freitas, E., & Curinga, M. (2015). New materialist approaches to the study of language and identity:
Assembling the posthuman subject. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(3), 249 265.

Dewey, J. (1929). Experience and nature. New York: W. W. Norton.
Di Leo, J. (2013). Corporate humanities in higher education: Moving beyond the neoliberal academy.
New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Donoghue, F. (2008). The last professors: The corporate university and the fate of the humanities.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin white masks. London: Pluto. (Original work published 1952).
Ferrando, F. (2014). [Review of the book The posthuman, by R. Braidotti]. Plurilogue. Retrieved from
http://www.plurilogue.com/2014/01/rosi-braidotti-posthuman.html
Gaztambide-Fernandez, R. (2015). Thinking beyond the human. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(3), 245 248.
Goebel, J. (2013). Toward an enfleshed pedagogy. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 21 23.
Gordon, L. (1998). African-American philosophy: Theory, politics, and pedagogy. Philosophy of Educa-
tion, 39 46.
Gough, N. (2004). Narrative experiments: Manifesting cyborgs in curriculum history. Counterpoints,
158, 89 108.
Grusin, R. (2015). Introduction. In R. Grusin (Ed.), The nonhuman turn (pp. vii xxix). Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late
twentieth century. In D. J. Haraway (Ed.). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature
(pp. 149 181). New York: Routledge.
Harpham, G. (2011). The humanities and the dream of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informat-
ics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Herbrechter, S. (2013). The roar on the other side of silence… or, what’s left of the humanities? Cul-
ture Machine, 1 13.
Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one. (C. Porter & C. Burke, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Jackson, Z. (2015). Outer worlds: The persistence of race in movement “beyond the human.” GLQ: A
Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21(2 3), 215 218.
Kronman, A. (2007). Education’s end: Why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of
life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Letts, W., & Sandlin, J. (2013). Editors’ introduction: Glass walls, cages, and paws a “brood of
researchers” engages a posthumanist politics of sight. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1),
1 3.
Lukasik, J. (2013). ZooCrit: An introduction and “the beginning”. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy,
10(1), 4 10.
Mackenzie, A. (2010). Wirelessness: Radical empiricism in network cultures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mohanty, C. T. (2003). Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Morgan, M. (2014). [Review of the book The posthuman, by R. Braidotti]. Sociology, 48(1), 203 204.
Morris, M. (2015). Posthumanist education and animal interiority. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds.), Post-
humanism and educational research (pp. 43 55). New York: Routledge.
Nussbaum, M. (2010). Not for profit: Why democracy needs the humanities. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Serres, M., & Latour, B. (1995). Conversations on science, culture, and time. (Roxanne Lapidus, Trans.).
Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Snaza, N. (2010). Thirteen theses on the question of state in curriculum studies. In E. Makewski (Ed.).
Curriculum studies handbook: The next moment (pp. 43 56). New York: Routledge.
Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 38 54.
Snaza, N. (2015). Toward a genealogy of educational humanism. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds.), Post-
humanism and educational research (pp. 17 29). New York: Routledge.
Snaza, N., Appelbaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., … Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a
posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39 55.
Snaza, N., & Weaver, J. (2015). Introduction: Education and the posthumanist turn. In N. Snaza & J.
Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and educational research. New York: Routledge.

Wallin, J. (2013). One hundred trillion anomals take the stand. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10
(1), 11 13.
Wallin, J. (2015). Dark posthumanism, unthinking education, and ecology at the end of the anthropo-
cene. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and educational research (pp. 134 147).
New York: Routledge.
Weaver, J. (2010). Educating the posthuman: Biosciences, fiction, and curriculum studies. Rotterdam:
Sense.
Wolfe, C. (2010). What is posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human,
after man, its overrepresentation an argument. New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257 337.

Restyling The Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education For Posthuman Times

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Restyling The Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education For Posthuman Times

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Curriculum Inquiry

ISSN: 0362-6784 (Print) 1467-873X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcui20

Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2015.1133220

Published online: 06 Apr 2016.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

Restyling the humanities curriculum of higher education for

CONTACT Jamila R. Siddiqui jrsiddiqui@wisc.edu

© 2016 the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education

Posthumanism in Curriculum Studies Scholarship

I propose that education be reconceived as a process that leads us—teachers, students,

Describing how unknowability may manifest in education, though, appears equally

Braidotti’s Critical Posthumanism

Reviving the Humanities: Braidotti’s Approach

Braidotti’s social justice-oriented curricular manifesto complements her imperative to

adequately capture the “differential mechanisms of distribution of power effects at the

Dewey’s Method: Natural Empiricism

Experience as Relational and Temporal

Empiricism as Return to Sense Experience

By recognizing the non-dualistic nature of experience and maintaining a connection with

opposed to the fate of non-empirical philosophy which “terminate[s] in rendering the

Dewey’s Pre-Posthuman Update to Braidotti

the point of posthumanism for my vocational and proﬁt-centered outcomes?” Braidotti

not going to win a curricular battle for the humanities.

Braidotti’s Pre-Empirical Update to Dewey

Technology has replaced nature as our new milieu, according to Braidotti:

Finding Zoe: Posthuman Empiricism and Posthuman Subjectivities for a

likely in forms that exist outside of the text, is needed.

Assembling the posthuman subject. Curriculum Inquiry, 45(3), 249 265.

Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and educational research. New York: Routledge.

You might also like