Critical Pedagogies for a Postliterate Age: Towards a Posthuman Humanities?
Channel: Cultural, Social and Political Thought, UVic
Date: 2021-04-07

A virtual panel organized by the CSPT Graduate Colloquium.

"Critical Pedagogies for a Postliterate Age: Towards a Posthuman Humanities?"

Featuring Anthony Gavin, Kristen Lewis, Janine Wulz, and Mark Zion.

0:00:00 Opening remarks, Anthony Gavin
0:12:40 "Authority and Pedagogy," Kristen Lewis
0:30:30 "The Neoliberal University," Janine Wulz
0:47:05 Closing remarks, Mark Zion
0:57:19 Discussion

Remote teaching has been the norm for over a year now. Meanwhile, the university has promised a return to physical classrooms in September, with all talk of a “return to normal” having long since faded into a distant past memory. The aim of this panel is not to center digital adaptation strategies and academic “best practices,” but instead, to highlight the myriad ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed already existing deep-lying fissures in the neoliberal university. We seek potentially transformative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to critical pedagogical theory and practice.

This comes at a moment when “postliteracy” has become a buzzword in library science and pedagogy studies. The “post-” in ‘postliteracy’ has a double meaning. On the one hand, it refers to the new basic literacy (or “hyper-literacy”) skills that so-called “digital natives” have adapted in response to novel forms of hypertextual and interactive media. On the other hand, it refers to the decline of “traditional literacy,” of the medium of the book and other associated forms of print media. Literacy is what enables us to think critically in the world(s) that we live in, to step outside of ourselves and perceive our situations as embedded within a broader sphere of social relations. According to Paolo Freire, it is this critical capacity that makes us “human.” The concept of “postliteracy” thus expresses a double tension, insofar as it denotes both the dehumanizing aspects and the incipient “posthuman” tendencies that are contained within this trend. This relates to the dual frustration that humanities educators have felt during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, there is the frustration that the traditional humanities disciplines have been recruited into a dehumanizing pedagogical praxis, one which exceeds the novel conditions introduced by the pandemic but has doubtlessly been accelerated by it. On the other hand, there is the frustration that the humanities seemingly cannot be imagined as anything more, as a pedagogical praxis which responds to the conjunction of “postliterate” and “dehumanizing” with the disjunctive synthesis of “postliterate” and “humanizing.”