ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with possibilities of broader understandings of subjectivity in others unlike oneself and the potential this opens in the age of the Anthropocene and mass species loss. Drawing on a range of starting points including touch, entanglement, listening, attentiveness, slow education, pausing, enchantment and wild pedagogies, the chapter then explores the possibility of intersubjective first-being encounters between humans and the wider natural world, including how such encounters can be encouraged in education. The chapter also explores the ethical possibilities such encounters potentially open up.
The emphasis in this chapter is not on creating a totalising theory of subjectivity. Rather, the focus is on specific first-being encounters, and the possibility of the emergence of radically new, unique subjectivities through such encounters which open potential for more sustainable and democratic ways to be and become in our shared planet. The chapter considers how intersubjective first-being encounters also have potential to be sites of immanent ethical responses. The chapter highlights that a rethinking of education understood as a humanities subject is needed and examines thinking including posthumanist/posthuman, Indigenous and feminist thinking, which breaks down Western boundary-keeping around concepts of subjectivity as well as the boundaries between the human and other/more-than-human.
