This course will take students into the prominent emerging theories and practices (or ‘theories-practices’) associated with posthumanism and the new materialisms. Such onto-epistemological understandings call binaries into question – theory/practice, matter/discourse, human/nonhuman, etc.) – and challenge the anthropocentrism of critical theory and the cultural turn. Posthumanism and the new materialisms speculate instead on ‘entanglements’ (Barad, 2007) – of the human, the non-human, the more-than-human, and the more-than human (Manning,2016), reconceptualising politics, agency, corporeality, criticality, representation, data, time and more.
The course will introduce students to how those theories-practices have implications for inquiry, knowledge-making, and knowing; how these concepts are being debated, contested and put to work within social science and humanities research, for example through ‘creative-relational inquiry’ and the ‘postqualitative’ inquiry of St. Pierre, Lather, Jackson, Mazzei, Ulmer and others. The course will foreground the posthumanist emphasis on process, on ‘doing’. Throughout we will invite students to bring their own research projects into the theories-practices they are encountering (and the theories-practices into their research projects) in a constant movement of folding and unfolding.
Session 1: Friday 23 April, 10am-12.30pm
Session 2: Friday 30 April, 10am-12.30pm
Session 3: Friday 7 May, 10am-12.30pm
Session 4: Friday 14 May, 10am-12.30pm