Elisabeth Barratt Hacking

This paper adopts a relational justice lens (Miri 2024), understood here as examining inclusion through four interlinked dimensions of redistribution (resources and access), recognition (cultural a...

This article takes off from a project entitled Get Up and Move! which used walking as a methodology to envisage research in higher education beyond the human and outside individual, instrumental and competitive codings. The Get Up and Move! project activated new research possibilities for walking as an attentive, situated, emplaced and embodied practice of posthuman thinking, doing and becoming; it experimented with walking’s posthuman generativity as a relational and processual methodology; and it aimed to be inventive, experimental, less elitist, and more inclusive. The project’s posthuman orientation was inspired by Donna Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis as a human-nonhuman doing-making-thinking-creating together, which is outlined in the first two parts of the article. This remainder of the article conceptually entangles this initial framing with/in a further process of concept-ing, which designates a theoretical-creative-speculative doing with the concept to unfold its ongoing potentialities and push its inventive mobilities. The concept we do our concept-ing with is the concept of the gift. Working from Mauss’s theorisation of the gift, we practice concept-ing as a means to trace new movements, possibilities and imaginaries for walking sympoietically. Our concept-ings pursue van der Tuin and Verhoeff’s (2022, 3) suggestion that concepts are “productive and experimental ‘doings,’ enmeshed in practice rather than fixed, retrospective labels for things.”

Educational practices and learning processes are entangled with a multitude of objects but these objects are often positioned as dull, inert matter, disregarded as mundane, left unnoticed, and made subservient to the proper business of educating. The authors see them a vital intra-acting bodies that help scholars to think differently about pedagogy and research.

This article offers a novel foray into international mindedness and posthuman theory. International mindedness underpins the International Baccalaureate’s aim to achieve a better and more peaceful world. However, in a global context of planetary emergency and widening inequalities, it seems imperative to rethink international mindedness within a posthumanist frame, that is, beyond anthropocentric notions of education that privilege human exceptionalism. The reconceptualization of international mindedness as relational becoming is illuminated through five theoretical propositions which are illustrated empirically using ‘material moments’. Relational becoming rejects mind and body binaries, affirms nonhuman–human assemblages, enables distributed agency, enacts ethics of response-ability and engages with past and present entanglements. ‘Posthumanizing’ international mindedness, through the concept of relational becoming, prompts more nuanced insights into educational privilege, nation-states, globalism and enduring colonialist inheritances.

International Mindedness is an overarching construct related to multilingualism, intercultural understanding and global engagement (Hill, 2012). The concept is central to the International Baccalaureate (IB) and sits at the heart of its education policies and programmes. The aim of this research study was to examine systematically how schools offering International Baccalaureate programmes (so-called IB World Schools) conceptualise, develop, assess and evaluate International Mindedness (IM), and to understand related challenges and problems, with a view to improving practice in schools. Nine case study schools, identified as being strongly engaged with IM, were selected for in-depth scrutiny of their practice and thinking related to IM. Conclusions from this study will also inform on-going debate on other similar global initiatives.