LAUSR

Thinking posthumanly – from a post-Enlightenment, critical, new materialist perspective – things, including concepts, become more permeable and topological – they leak and stretch. Freed from limiting notions of agency, things behave. Rivers have established the same legal rights as humans in New Zealand and India, stones have been reported slithering across the desert floor in California, an electrical power grid in the USA has revealed a unique agential dexterity and walls have been spotted walking over mountains in the UK’s Lake District. Thinking with a posthuman partiality, we begin to witness a democracy of objects rather than an anthropocentric dictatorship over inorganic materials. If agency is reworked into an ‘enactment’ as opposed to something that is ‘held’, conceivably humans and other biological organisms are not necessary for agency (or life) to emerge as inorganic material agency erupts from unchoreographed assemblages of spacetimematter(ing). And if cognitive and dermatological boundaries are no longer organ-ised by an Enlightenment prescription, how might pedagogies perform differently and more equitably?