Creating Spaces for Ruptions and Provocations

This chapter lays the ground for how ethical, care-ful (Haraway, When species meet. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008) educational futures might emerge through creative ruptions and how, individually and collectively, the authors are working with Facer’s (Literacy 53, 2019, p. 12) argument that: it is possible to begin to create educational spaces in which the surplus potential of the past, present and future are visible, in which new ideas are generated, in which the experience of living in complex material and planetary systems that decentre the human can be acknowledged. The chapter introduces the ways in which authors create meaningful and productive ruptions—disturbances or commotions—in practice and research thinking, in response to the anthropocentric challenges that we all, human and other-than-human, now face. It will draw the reader into diverse ruptive and provocative approaches that create spaces for emergent futures including the decolonial, new materialist and feminist. These operate creatively through a posthuman lens (e.g. Barad, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press, 2007; Burnard, The power of pluralising creativities: A posthumanist perspective. Brill-I-Sense Publishers, 2024, in production; Harris & Holman Jones, Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 522–530, 2022) and create an ethico-ontological stance for thinking and doing in relation to educational futures. The chapter culminates by describing the three core sections, Creating spaces for ruptions, Dialoguing and Resistings, which exemplify the key themes of the book and expand on their significance to educational futures.