Unfolding: Co-Conspirators, Contemplations, Complications and More

This chapter provides a theoretical-practical introduction to the book and an overview of the book’s contents. Written as an un/en/folding, the chapter discusses the promises, possibilities and pains of posthuman higher education pedagogy, practice and research in relation to a range of key concerns, contestations and imperatives which currently shape the marketized, individualized, performative, accelerated academy. It discusses the challenges and opportunities posthumanism offers in reshaping how higher education pedagogy, practice and research is defined, approached and gets done. It considers the ways in which posthumanist experimentations rupture and reconfigure higher education ‘business-as-usual’. It also ponders the geopolitics of knowledg(e)ing(s) in its engagement with recent criticism of posthumanism’s ‘White episteme’ emerging from Indigenous and decolonizing studies. The chapter suggests that zoe-philia—which posits optimistic, non-anthropocentric, ecologically oriented modes of nonhuman-human being and becoming—offers new understandings of ontology, epistemology and ethics that can be shaped as affirmative, response-able, care-full practices for higher education.