Why Posthumanism? Why Social Studies? Why Strange?

Timothy Monreal is an assistant professor of learning and instruction at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Bretton A. Varga is an assistant professor of history–social science at California State University, Chico. Rebecca C. Christ is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Florida International University.

They are the editors of Towards a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies.

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We cannot solve contemporary problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

—Rosi Braidotti, 2019

As veteran social studies teachers, and now teacher educators, we take seriously the responsibility to foster (more) just relationships with/in the world(s) around us. This work calls on us to both challenge and interrogate the inhumaneness that contaminates our current relationships and to also reimagine how intensities and encounters with the more-than-human world are registered, understood, and (re)articulated. Despite the pressing need to un/learn current conceptions of in-human/ness, influential (social studies) scholars (e.g. Busey & Walker, 2017; King & Chandler, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2003; Rodriguez & Swalwell, 2021; Vickery & Duncan, 2020) remind us that too often social studies has failed to critically live up to this task.

Toward such ends, we are of shared mind that posthumanism offers the field—and praxis—of social studies a strange(r) and fertile pathway to (re)working our (e.g., human) relationship to everything surrounding us. Thus, a central argument in our upcoming book is that embracing a posthuman approach to social studies allows for a material, emergent, and stranger way of thinking across, over, under, and through contemporary issues (e.g., ecological catastrophe, land dispossession, acts of in-human/ness targeting LGBTQ+ communities, anti-Blackness, and disaster capitalism). While our understanding of posthumanism is underwritten by a range of intra-disciplinary concepts and perspectives (e.g., Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, Vital Materialism, Environmentalism) we find the following tenets as productive starting points:

1. Posthumanism is a response to human exceptionalism and works to disrupt the notion that individual humans are the center of all existence. From the perspective of social studies (teacher) educators, we believe that posthumanism (re)focuses our attention onto ways in which relationships between humans and other-than-humans (will) continue to impact the future arc of history and (in)justice (see also Monreal & Varga, 2021).
2. Posthumanism challenges traditional binaries and divisive classifications (e.g., mind and body, nature and culture, human and more-than-human) that have been used to mis/understand our world(s).
3. Posthumanism is multidisciplinary in its efforts to rupture understandings of the role humans play in the more-than-human world.
4. Posthumanism acknowledges that the category of “human” is imbued with subjectivities and is/has not (been) deployed equitably. For example, the ranking and hierarchization of human(ness) has and continues to be used to buttress anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, anti-Transgender attitudes, and… and… and…

In sum, we believe that in rethinking the exceptionality that works to prioritize some bodies over others, teachers and students can extricate social studies instruction, curriculum, and pedagogy in ways that bring into focus the relationality of all non/life forms and ways of be(com)ing. While some of these terms and ideas may be initially unfamiliar to practitioners, scholars, and students, our own (classroom) experiences have demonstrated that most are receptive to the potential of such complex concepts. At different points in our careers, we have seen and written about how students and teachers use (visual) primary sources, counter-cartography, thinking with theory, literacy practices, popular media, and even ghosts/hauntings, to bring posthumanism into the (social studies) classroom. Like the opening epigraph attests, we aim to challenge ourselves and other educators to think past/through the “familiar” frameworks that unfortunately keep delivering “familiar” results. We are buoyed and inspired by colleagues, classroom teachers, and scholars who have put these ideas in direct conversation with social studies education. To name but a few, Asilia Franklin-Phipps discusses how Black art can be a visual disruption to curricular normalizations of Black abjectness, inhumanity, and less-than-human status. Morgan Tate and Amelia Wheeler share the idea of vibrant kintography to propel students toward participatory understandings of (their relationship to) matter in the social studies classroom, while Alexandra Page outlines the opportunities, indeterminacies, and strangenesses of grid poetry to reimagine classroom curriculum and space. As Peter Nelson shows the power of strange(r) storytelling, nomadic textual encounters, and dark ecology to (re)present the climate crisis, Sandra Schmidt, Eric Estes, and Isabel Gomez tether posthumanism to queer TikTok(kers). Erin Adams thinks through how posthumanism offers (re)new(ed) insights for economics and civics and Browning Neddau (Potawatomi) offers ways that Indigenous survivance is represented and articulated through materialities (e.g., beads and beadings). And as a final example, Timothy Monreal created a lesson centering Aztec/Mexica philosophy and posthumanism for social studies classrooms.

We are absolutely ecstatic to have helped create an edited volume, Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies, that houses and extends curriculum, praxis, research, and conceptual lines of thinking and doing social studies differently. The collection is orientated in a way meant to foster imagination, deliberation, and bewilderment; it is our sincere hope that such conversations help construct (post/more-than/other-than) human futurities that are more ethical, just, and strange(r).

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Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

Edited by Bretton A. Varga, Timothy Monreal, and Rebecca C. Christ

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References

Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31–61

Busey, C. L., & Walker, I. (2017). A dream and a bus: Black critical patriotism in elementary social studies standards. Theory & Research in Social Education, 45(4), 1–33.

King, L. J., & Chandler, P. T. (2016). From non-racism to anti-racism in social studies teacher education: Social studies and racial pedagogical content knowledge. In A. R. Crowe & A. Cuenca (Eds.), Rethinking social studies teacher education in the twenty-first century (pp. 3–21). Springer.

Ladson-Billings, G. (Ed.) (2003). Critical race theory perspectives on the social studies: The profession, policies, and curriculum. Information Age Publishing.

Rodriguez, N. N., & Swalwell, K. (2021). Social studies for a better world: An anti-oppressive approach for elementary educators. W. W. Norton & Company.

Monreal, T., & Varga, B. A. (2021). Non/Human (un/en)tanglements: Practitioner-based engagements with post-humanism, multiculturalism, and visual materials. In C. Clark, K. J. Fasching-Varner, I. Jackson, N. A. Marrun, & K. J. Tobin (Eds.), Multicultural curriculum transformation in Social Studies and Civic Education (pp. 265–284). Lexington Books.

Vickery, A. E., & Duncan, K. E. (2020). Lifting the veil. In A. Hawkman & S. Shear, Marking the “invisible”: Articulation whiteness in social studies education (pp. xiii–xxiii). Information Age Publishing.

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Photo by ROMAN ODINTSOV