Posthumanist Perspectives on Racialized Life and Human Difference Pedagogy

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.     

劳伦斯与非理性主义

以叔本华、尼采、弗洛伊德为代表的非理性主义是劳伦斯小说创作的思想基础。受叔本华影响,劳伦斯把生存意志作为人物行动的基本动力,这主要表现为向性力和精神占有欲。受尼采影响,劳伦斯赞美躯体,重视生命的内在能量和自我超越性,并与基督教决裂,成为西方基督教道德观的激烈批判者。劳伦斯在性与无意识这两个领域,对弗洛伊德精神分析理论有接受,也有超越。弗洛伊德与劳伦斯都把性、无意识与文明对立起来,但弗洛伊德进行的是否定性研究,强调对其疏导和控制,劳伦斯则认为性与无意识是原初的创造性力量,是生活的源泉,是对抗人之社会化和理性化的正面力量。非理性主义丰富和深化了劳伦斯对现代人心理世界的理解,加强了他的小说的社会批判力量。     

Individuation,vitalism and space in the overseas study tour

Study abroad programs at university are supported as a means to expand university operations beyond the study walls of the institution, and to help students become aware of and cope with the demands of an increasingly interconnected and globalised world. This paper questions the assumptions that underlie the tendencies in contemporary study abroad programs, whose ethos it is argued, at the same time misunderstands and underestimates the potential effects of the study abroad practice. Using a theoretical framework derived from the French philosophy of science of Gilbert Simondon, Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, this paper puts to work fully elaborated and contextualised concepts, which look to change and expand one’s notion of the learning possible due to study abroad programs, beyond experiential change. Simondon’s individuation questions the ways in which particular student agencies and learning characteristics are constructed in study abroad tours, Bachelard’s concept of space questions the reality of precise coordinates and concrete analyses of the study abroad tour itinerary, and Canguilhem’s vitalism puts under pressure ‘the life’ of the tour learnings and effects. This paper will be furnished with empirical evidence taken from a recent overseas tour involving Australian students performing teaching practicums in schools in Penang, Malaysia.