Unfolding Subjectivities in Education

The social worlds of education are deeply intertwined with accelerating technological change today. The perception of rapid and unexpected changes in the sociomaterial elements that enact pedagogical dispositifs (Foucault, 1980; Massa, 1986) (times, spaces, bodies, discourses) runs false myths in the educational field. These contradictions, if not taken seriously, hinder the opportunity for rethinking and repositioning of the Humanities, which is essential to provide scholars and practitioners with critical tools capable of coping with the high levels of technological mediation and the complex structure of the globalized world in which we are living and educating today. What subjectivity do we want to form during these times and despite these times? What material-discursive devices do we choose to perform to this purpose? In the contribution I will explore the opportunity to overcome the myth of an abstract, universal and elitist subject, built on categories inherited from Humanism. Such perceptions reiterate an anachronistic, if not deceptive, image of human beings as sovereign, as a measure of all things, as perfectly functional physical body, modeled on the ideals of white masculinity, normality, youth and health (Braidotti, 2014). Answering these questions also requires moving away from an overly praised immateriality, for which everything is virtual flux and human beings can transcend themselves as they relate to machines and new technologies, aligned with transhumanist fantasy. Therefore, pedagogy, to respond to contemporary challenges, needs to re-think a theory of subjectivity that is both materialistic and relational, natural and cultural, so that education can collectively potentiate and provide of alternative becoming (Deleuze, 1999). There is thus an urgency in education for a vision of the subject worthy of the present: as an integrated corporeity and embodied subjectivity, located in precise places and effect of the concatenations of which it is a part and which it contributes to creating.