Rethinking community-engaged pedagogy through posthumanist theory

This paper presents research on a posthumanist approach for reframing community-engaged pedagogy. We employ posthumanist theory as a way to examine the educational possibilities of ethically engaging with technologies and materials as a means to build and sustain community partnerships for social justice. This research project employs a diffractive inquiry involving interview encounters with 20 college writing instructors. The posthumanist approach presented in this paper provides a window into understanding how a myriad of human-material assemblages, response-able designs, and affective encounters shape and transform community-engaged pedagogy. In the context of community-engaged writing, the posthumanist approach oftentimes coincides with the use of multiple modes of communication, such as text, image, sound, and video, to foreground marginalized communities and their perspectives. Through allowing for the expression of multiple voices and perspectives, including those of non-human entities, this approach further challenges and disrupts traditional human-centric and dualistic views of community-engaged pedagogy.