Of volcanoes, pedagogies, and possibilities: Towards posthumanist pedagogies of critique

This thesis project is an exploration of the years I spent in the high Andes as a teacher and principal. It is a retrospective autobiographical inquiry that addresses social-material relations entangled in social justice in education. I draw from new materiality/posthumanist theories to question mainstream narratives and practices in education that have traditionally benefited some students to the detriment of others. Through posthumanist theories, which highlight the performative and relational ontology of the world, I have reworked concepts such as memory; redefined autobiography to a posthuman autobiography; and reconceptualized the micropolitics of social justice as a relational, performative, and ethical process. Relational and performative ontologies bring forth the co-constitutive process of educational stories and theory in the explorative writing; I call this method of inquiry storytelling with theory. The educational stories are about futures and food, school buildings and volcanoes, didactic materials and desire, ethics and responsibility, sexual violence and the letter 's', life and death, and simultaneously, they are stories of the continuous and relentless (re)colonization of Mestizo children. The relevance of this exploration and telling of stories lies in the opening they can provide to educators to question not just their educational practice, but the very notion of what it means to educate. These are pedagogies with a political edge that I call posthumanist pedagogies of critique, that open up to what a decolonial pedagogy process might achieve, and possibilities for an educational otherwise.