Omsin Jatuporn (PhD) is an Assistant Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the Department of Educational Foundations and Development at Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is a committee member of the MA and PhD programs in multicultural education and development education. His main interests include critical curriculum studies, cultural politics in education, and ecocritical justice in teacher education. E-mail: omsin.j@cmu.ac.th
Reclaiming Posthuman Roots and Ecological Subjectivity in Curriculum and Knowledge Production in the Mekong Region
Abstract: Building on Braidotti’s notion of critical posthumanism and Barad’s notion of intra-action, this paper foregrounds a theoretical discussion based on phenomenological curriculum inquiry in Chiang Khong district, located on the bank of the Mekong River. The curriculum was constructed through diverse lived experiences where agencies emerge through material conditions of entanglement with Mekong metaphoric ontologies. The Mekong as a space of knowledge production implies a shift from modernist anthropocentric assumptions to ecological subjectivity by embracing the vitality of life as an endless, non-linear, relational, and contextually situated nature-culture continuity. As conceptualized in ecocritical pedagogy, the emerging agencies involved in curriculum goals and practices serve to reconstruct the conceptions of citizenship, from liberal, participatory, associative and (multi)cultural to ecological citizenship. The curriculum is fully embodied in a network of intra-acting influences of human and nonhuman assemblages such as teachers’ collaboration with local intellectuals, community representatives, nature-culture reality, and students’ entanglement with a diverse ecology of knowledges and multiple human and nonhuman actors. Curriculum-as-lived is a temporal-spatial moment which will never happen in the same way since it is improvisational and continually becoming. The curriculum process, however, can be replicated under the leadership of teachers and school principals. Pedagogical practices, such as critical reflection, problem-posing dialogue, and consciousness, empower agencies to work in solidarity with students as agents of change. This should enrich future practices of curriculum inquiry leading to ecological transformation with social justice.
Keywords: posthuman roots, ecological subjectivity, knowledge production, ecocritical pedagogy, Mekong region