Unfazed by the More-Than-Human Face: Renegotiating Progress through Ethical Address

In this paper, I explore and discuss relationships between the human and the more-than-human. I claim this concerns education in two ways. One is regarding the educational possibility of being addressed by the more-than-human, and the other is regarding care for future generations. To make this claim, I express and concretize such relationships through arts-based research in the form of creative writing, including a poem and two pieces of fiction. Starting from the idea that education is imbued with anthropocentric imaginaries and highlighting the more-than-human through the work of Haraway (2008), Curry (2008) and van Dooren (2007, 2009), I bring this idea further by connecting it to Biesta’s (2015b) work on the question of whether what we desire is actually desirable in education. Building on the work of Nisbet (1994) and Dewey (1916), this leads to a discussion of how progress, being central to education, needs to be renegotiated in order to become educational. In conclusion, I posit that, with a miseducated grasp and mastery of the world, human life is led to be continuously unfazed by the more-than-human face. But there is hope.