Abstract: To address an ethics of refusal in higher education is to wager in the name of future possibles not already governed by the extractive politics of colonial progress and oppressive regimes of knowing and doing. In this essay, Petra Mikulan shows American pragmatism to have always been, in a certain sense, post-Anthropocene in its condition of emergence, bound up with settler colonialism and its extractive geopolitics. However, pragmatism in its speculative trust can also help engage education in thinking of a future that does not belong to a presupposed humanity and its “nature” by dramatizing a certain insistence of educational institutions on maintaining comfort and trust in the “common good.” What is at stake in education facing planetary ecological devastation and intensified racial and social injustices, Mikulan contends, is an ethics of refusal of institutionalized learning, knowing, and doing tout court, particularly if these educational regimes continue to insist on governing what are deemed the only possible (and thus impossible) enactments of education.
Abstract: This discussion begins from the speculation that evaluating formulations of life has become one of the leading prerogatives of "novel" turns to matter, materiality, and the posthuman. However, "moving" with the Other (rather than simply representing them) has proven a difficult task for scholars in education concerned with decolonizing pedagogies by critiquing epistemological and ontological regimes of power disengaged from the interrogation of the metaphysics of race and sex at the center of Western metaphysical foundations of thought. There is an ongoing need for sustained engagement with the assumption of human primacy that runs through the nearly ubiquitous assertions of what Claire Colebrook calls "active vitalism", which is characteristic of humanist approaches to education. In other words, the new conceptualizations of posthumanism only rarely challenge the lingering humanist concept of life itself. In this article, Petra Mikulan and Adam Rudder argue that posthumanist and neo-vitalist materialist approaches to ontology must consider that racism is "vitalist" in the active sense because it begins with bodies (as bounded organisms always autopoetic and self-proximate) and that vitalism is "racist" because it "then" distributes and discriminates racialized bodies according to their function as parts in a whole.