ABSTRACT
This edited collection of chapters considers how the political ethics of care (Tronto, 1993, 2003, 2010, 2013) and posthuman/new feminist materialist ethics (Barad, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2017a, b, 2018; Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Despret, 2004, 2015, 2016; Ettinger, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2015, 2020; Haraway, 1992, 1997, 2008, 2016) can be put into conversation with each other and how this may have value for (re)thinking about higher education pedagogies. The common ground of these two approaches is their critique of Enlightenment humanist assumptions, such as the notion of the independent rational human actor as the centre of morality as well as the centrality of the human in moral thought. The political ethics of care and posthumanism are both predicated upon relational ways of understanding the world – that is, entities or humans come into the world through relationships rather than pre-existing them. The contributions to this book consider the various ways in which posthuman and care ethics might open more fruitful ways of reconsidering the ways in which higher education pedagogies are enacted and how they might be differently perceived in the current circumstances in which we, who are working in higher education, find ourselves.
