Toward a Stranger and More Posthuman Social Studies

2023 AERA Division B Curriculum Studies Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

Posthumanism has seen a surge across the humanities and offers a unique perspective, seeking to illuminate the role that more-than-human actors (e.g., affect, artifacts, objects, flora, fauna, other materials) play in the human experience . This book challenges the field of social studies education to think differently about the precarious status of the world (i.e., climate crisis, ongoing fights for racial equity, and Indigenous sovereignty). By cultivating a greater sense of attunement to the more-than-human, educators and scholars can foster more ethical ways of teaching, learning, researching, being, and becoming. In an effort to push the boundaries of what constitutes social studies, chapter authors engage with a wide range of disciplines and offer unique perspectives from various locations across the globe. This volume asks: How can thinking with posthumanism disrupt normative approaches to social studies education and research in ways that promote imaginativeness, speculation, and nonconformity? How can a posthumanist lens be used to interrogate neoliberal, systemic, and oppressive conditions that reproduce and perpetuate in-humanness?

Book Features:

• ● A collection of essays that explore the phenomenon of posthuman approaches to social studies scholarship.
• ● Contributions by many prominent social studies education scholars representing seven countries—Canada, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
• ● A foreword by Boni Wozolek and an afterword by Nathan Snaza, both of who have made significant contributions to critical posthumanism in education.
• ● Provocation chapters that push readers’ thinking about the various ways that posthumanism connects to teaching and learning social studies.
• ● Images of more-than-human entanglements (i.e., artwork, photography, poetry).

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

“At the intersections of posthumanisms and social studies unfold important dialogues that attend to ontoepistemological multiplicities—a critical consideration of the many bodies, beings, and imaginations of ‘the social’ that form and inform emergent ways of being, knowing, and doing that are co-constituted therein…. Within these bloomspaces of possibility, this volume addresses how knowledges and beings are de- and re-territorialized through the toppling of monuments, racialization, sacred energies, technologies, the arts, sexualities, and literatures, to name a few. The authors ask readers to consider what it might mean to not only approach social studies from a posthuman lens but what it might mean to teach a posthuman social studies.”
—From the Foreword by Boni Wozolek, assistant professor, Penn State Abington

“Bretton A. Varga, Timothy Monreal, and Rebecca C. Christ provide an indispensable guide to posthumanism in social studies education, essential reading for anyone interested in posthuman framings/orientations in this field. The chapters not only show what ‘posthuman social studies’ means, but also how embracing posthumanism can help social studies educators and researchers enact a more just vision and praxis for humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans in the world.”
—Michalinos Zembylas, professor, Open University of Cyprus

“Varga, Monreal, and Christ curate a lively collection of chapters and short provocations that beg us to consider the ‘social’ of social studies in our more-than-human world. The authors illustrate that while all bodies co-create realities, truths, knowledges, and relationalities, not all bodies are one and the same in this powered world. The book is full of poignant, timely narratives crafted to demonstrate how the past, present, and future are all entangled. The result: each reader must consider how pedagogies matter in the becoming of our strange world.”
—Candace R. Kuby, professor, University of Missouri

Contents

Foreword: Becoming Posthuman Social Studies Boni Wozolek  xi

Acknowledgments  xvii

Introduction: Be(com)ing Strange(r): Toward a Posthuman Social Studies Bretton A. Varga, Timothy Monreal, and Rebecca C. Christ  1

1.  Life Lessons: Posthuman Ideas About Life for an Enlivened Social Studies Education  11
Mark E. Helmsing

2.  A Thousand Deaths: Current Events and Racial Reproductions of the Dead and Dying  23
Asilia Franklin-Phipps

3.  Unsettling the “Social” in Social Studies  35
Cathryn van Kessel

4.  Toppling the (Hu)Man: Posthumanism and the Mattering of Historical Spaces  38
Francisco A. Medina, Karen Zaino, and Debbie Sonu

5.  Lives in/of Things  51
Sandra J. Schmidt

6.  Cities as Pedagogues: Materiality in Paris’s Public Sphere as a Teacher of Consciousness  54
Avner Segall

7.  Mattering the Research  68
Jelena Aleksic

8.  Set in Stone?: Social Studies Teacher Candidates’ Conceptions of Matter  71
Morgan P. Tate and Amelia H. Wheeler

9.  Following for the Community  81
Polina Golovátina-Mora

10.  “I’m a Monster Now”: The Construction of Spacetimemattering Through Intra-Action in Childhood  83
Fernando Guzmán-Simón and Alejandra Pacheco-Costa

11.  Arboreal Methodologies: The Promise of Getting Lost (With Feminist New Materialism and Indigenous Ontologies) for Social Studies  93
Jayne Osgood and Suzanne Axelsson

12.  Into the Sea: A Fictive Speculation on How to Cope at the End of the World  110
Peter M. Nelson

13.  Not as Strange as Dying: Reimagining U.S. Social Studies as Place-Based and Decolonialized  121
Janice Kroeger and Christine Widrig

14.  Possibilities for Knowing Differently With a More-Than-Human Ladybird-Pedagogue  133
Karen E. Barr and Hannah Seat

15.  (In)Separatable: Social Studies With/out the Human  136
Sarah B. Shear

16.  The (Self/Re)generating Sacred Energy Called Teotl: Using Nahua Philosophy to Introduce Posthumanist Thinking  139
Timothy Monreal and Jesús Tirado

17.  Beading Shkodé  149
Browning Neddeau

18.  Re/Membering Ethical Relationality: Re/Telling Stories of Dis/citizenship as Lived  151
Muna Saleh

19.  Nonhuman Alliances  163
Polina Golovátina-Mora

20.  Youth Are Already Queer: Agentive Possibilities Among Queer TikTok Creators  165
Sandra J. Schmidt, Eric Estes, and Isabel Gomez

21.  Any/bodies: Posthumanism and Economics Education  179
Erin C. Adams

22.  Indeterminacy and Strangeness in the Posthuman Classroom: Thinking Toward Possibility  191
Alexandra L. Page

23.  Embracing Strangeness, but Not Becoming Strangers  194
Alexander S. Butler

Afterword: Afterwards, Nathan Snaza  205

Appendix: Guiding Concepts  211

Endnotes  217

Index  227

About the Editors and Contributors  236

2023 AERA Division B Curriculum Studies Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

2023 AESA Critics’ Choice Book Award