Shared by Iveta Silova
Last year I asked Donna Haraway about her vision for education in the Chthulucene, a timeplace for learning ‘to stay with the trouble’ in this moment of epochal precarity. In our conversation, we discussed a series of questions: What kind of thinking is needed to move beyond the logics of human exceptionalism and neoliberal individualism embedded in the (Western) modernist education paradigm? What thought experiments are necessary to bring into focus much needed education alternatives? How can education nurture a radical ontological transfiguration of our relations with each other, with other species, and with the Earth? What role can education play in the process of ‘becoming-with’ Earth others as we recompose worlds together for the future survival of our planet? Join me in conversation with Donna Haraway to learn about her own education experiences, some memorable moments of ‘becoming-with’ others, and ideas about how to fabulate new education pasts, presents, and futures.
“Education Beyond the Human: A conversation with Donna Haraway” [Interviewed by Iveta Silova in preparation for CIES 2020 “Education Beyond the Human: Toward Sympoiesis”). Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). [Online]. Available: https://vimeo.com/453292469
Thanks for making this video freely available Iveta. It’s a fabulous resource. There is much to respond to in this interview, as Donna makes quite a lot of controversial statements, some of them quite unexpected! I hope others take them up.
I just want to comment on Donna’s response to your question of how education might play a role in ‘becoming with’. Her example, from her tertiary education, was her euphoric experience of ‘becoming-with’ mitochondria. This started with her intense intellectual engagement with a lecture and later, while walking, extended into a sensual, emotional and erotic realisation of how her own body is full of mitochondria, connecting her to the leaves, plants and other beings around her.
Even though Donna managed to bridge the divide between the lecture ‘about’ mitochondria as object, and her subjective experience of being mitochondria, her story made me think about the different ways that the social and the physical sciences reproduce the subject-object divide. It’s this divide that mitigates against our appreciation of ‘becoming-with’ the world.
In the social sciences, we learn about ourselves, so we are both the subjects and objects of learning. But the world beyond the social is absent, and leaves us blind to how human being is also shaped by non-human relations – unaware of how we are always becoming-with the more-than-human in our common worlds.
In the physical sciences we study the world beyond the social, but from an ‘objective’ distance. The Cartesian mind-body split is very much in play when students are positioned as the ‘rational’ human subjects, learning about the material world-as-object ‘out there’. Subjective experience is not part of scientific methodology. So students who do manage to find a way to connect themselves to the world, as Donna did so viscerally after the lecture, must do so on their own.
So what’s the point of this for educators? For those working in the social sciences, the challenge is to bring the world into the social and insert social into the world. For those in the physical sciences, the challenge is to locate ourselves within the world we study – intellectually, emotionally, and sensuously – and to make the experience of being part of the world central to the curriculum.
Whatever the field, I don’t think education can play a role in promoting ‘becoming with’ without doing some serious boundary-blurring – some active common worlding.