Conference Program

This contribution argues that a critical transfeminist posthuman approach is essential for educational theory and practice if ecological paradigms are to be adopted in ways that are genuinely democratic and socially transformative. While current educational discourses increasingly invoke inclusion, sustainability, and justice, these concepts often remain rhetorically affirmed while the hierarchical structures that sustain exclusion and domination are left intact.

Building on critical posthuman and transfeminist perspectives, the contribution aims to problematize the humanist-anthropocentric model that has historically universalized a partial figure of the “human” (white, Western, male, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, bourgeois) while relegating other human and non-human entities to subordinate or less-than-human positions. From this perspective, education cannot be understood only as a human-centered process of formation; rather, it must be rethought as a sociomaterial, relational, and ecological field shaped by power, bodies, technologies, spaces, and more-than-human entanglements.

The central claim is that deconstructing hierarchies – between human and non-human, center and margin, expert and learner, normalized and marginalized subjectivities – is a necessary condition for an ecological educational paradigm. However, posthuman and neomaterialist turns in education are not sufficient on their own if they do not explicitly address the power relations, oppressions, and asymmetries (gendered, racialized, classed, ableist, speciesist, colonial) that organize educational institutions and practices. For this reason, a critical transfeminist orientation is crucial: it foregrounds positionality, situated knowledges, and epistemic justice, while exposing the myth of neutrality in educational research and practice.

The presentation therefore proposes an intersectional lens, in which social and environmental justice are inseparable. A critical transfeminist posthuman pedagogy makes it possible to rethink educational relationships beyond a paternalistic view of inclusion and beyond an anthropocentric perspective on sustainability, moving toward non-oppressive, interdependent, and mutualistic forms of coexistence. In this sense, an ecological-posthuman-transfeminist turn in education is not only a matter of environmental content or policy adaptation, but of epistemological, ethical, and political transformation that starts from the materiality of everyday relationships within educational settings.

By connecting posthuman critique, transfeminist epistemologies, and intersectional justice, the contribution offers a framework for reimagining education as a practice of shared vulnerability, distributed agency, and more-than-human responsibility.