ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors aim to expand thinking around who can and should count as legitimate, credible and viable relational partners in dialogism by commencing a critical conversation with posthumanism. They offer their reading of how ‘the human’ is variously configured by Humanism, dialogism and posthumanism and what these respective versions make intelligible and also as a consequence, effectively dis/allow. The strongest Humanist thread that dialogism picks up and re-weaves, perhaps naturally enough, is the focus on the human as the instrument of knowledge making. The authors present an empirical exploration of how ‘the human’ plays out in terms of dialogism and posthumanism in their respective research fields: namely critical disability studies and place pedagogies. Place pedagogy provided the space to begin rethinking dialogism and the humanist assumptions that have tethered it narrowly to human–human relations rather than to an encompassing relationality that entangles humans with the more-than-human world.
