Conference Program

Education has always straddled two relatively stable foundational narratives or ethical orientations. While these ethical orientations can be described in a number of ways, together they have to do with the agonistic opposition between the reproduction of knowledge and societal interests of a dominant culture/power versus the freedom to experiment and transform societies. Hannah Arendt (2006) perceived the complexity of this problem in her insistence of both conserving a shared inherited world for children, whilst recognizing the unavoidable natality of educatio—in that all children begin (in) this world anew and will inevitably innovate and change the world. While it is difficult to resolve this relational tension at the heart of education, it remains the case that education scholars have not fully grappled with what this means for a more vibrant and complex educational ethics that is well situated to engage our shared ecological crisis and growing authoritarianism with both courage and joy. One hopeful aspect is that such an ethics must ultimately emerge from educational settings, because ethics lies at the very heart of the discipline and practice of education (Bazzul 2023). No other discipline or field of practice engages ethics as much as education.

This presentation will outline a work in progress that attempts to situate a vital ethics of becoming as a viable alternative for education writ large. Drawing from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1988), along with other sociomaterialist thinkers such as Manuel Delanda and Rosi Braidotti, this presentation outlines a repositioning of an intensive relation ethics in ontological terms. The paper/presentation will first do this by stressing the important opposition between morality and ethics—one that directly applies to the opposition Hannah Arendt outlines—where one is based largely in acts of comparison to an already established code, and the other a much more comprehensive inquiry into how educators might facilitate an enabling ethics of becoming. The presentation elucidates some ethico-ontological concepts from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) such as Bodies without Organs (BwO), planes of consistency, and the articulation of strata to demonstrate that the more-than-human ethics necessary to survive our ecological crisis and bring about a more joyous society is also a question of collectively composing a relational ethical-scape through education. The educator's role is to set the conditions for intensive relations and processes of becoming—a kind of becoming that ultimately cannot be privatized or restricted to human relations. This involves practices of creative composition and identifying strategic assemblages of resistance against forces of domination and control (Delanda 2016). The discipline and practice of education must take seriously its longstanding and important relation to ethics, as it is here that questions of being and becoming are encountered most intensely, comprehensively, and directly. Possibilities for ethical experimentation will be discussed.