Human rights (education) in a posthuman world: thinking with curriculum inquiry / Simmonds Shan
Abstract
The transformatory potential of human rights education lies in its ability to make visible the material-discursive complexities of human rights. Human rights education can provide a language to interrogate society and how it continues to normalize ways of living and being in the world. However, South Africa’s national curriculum remains “un-critical, monolithic, depoliticized and largely de-contextualised” (Zembylas, 2020:2). This is due to the liberal universalist and humanistic tendencies of human rights (education) in the curriculum. Posthumanism, understood as an opportunity for humanity to re-invent itself, can thus be embraced as one avenue to displace and dispose humanness as the presumed ground or anticipated outcome of education. In my intellectual work, I playfully enact the possibilities of posthumanism to (re)think human rights (education) with curriculum inquiry. I argue for the possibilities vested in posthuman rights as a generative space to reconfigure human rights (education) by shifting subjectivity and relationality. This image of critical posthumanism invigorates an affirmative ethics to create new assemblages in which zoe/geo/techno relations can be generative and enduring in ways that enable the becoming of all life (including pedagogical lives).