Critical Posthumanism and Education

Offering a bold reimagining of what education can and must become in complex, precarious times, Critical Posthumanism and Education dismantles familiar binaries – mind/body, human/nature, teacher/learner – to reimagine education for the 21st century.

Drawing on a lineage of philosophers from Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari to Rosi Braidotti, Kay Sidebottom combines critical pedagogy, feminist new materialism, Indigenous epistemologies, and posthuman ethics to expose how modern schooling remains entangled in Eurocentric humanism, cognitive reductionism, and neoliberal control. In resistance to this, she demonstrates how educators can cultivate creative openings, joyful solidarities, and “lines of flight” even within restrictive systems, engaging concepts from the rhizome to nomadic leadership.

Each chapter weaves philosophy together with lived stories, research-creation practices, and practical provocations, showing how teachers, students, materials, technologies, animals, and environments co-produce learning. Readers encounter educators working otherwise: mapping their own power lines, experimenting with art-making, noticing the agency of objects, attending to atmospheres, and embracing difference as generative.

Ultimately the book argues for a posthuman education that is non-linear, embodied, decolonial, ecological, and rooted in ethical responsibility – one that connects the micro-politics of the classroom to planetary futures. In an age of accelerating climate crisis, intense datafication, and profound social inequality, Sidebottom urges us to rethink what counts as knowledge, who gets to be considered human, and how we might create educational spaces capable of transformation.