Enacting affirmative ethics in education: a materialist/posthumanist framing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018, 2019a), within the field of education. I work empirical material that ‘does’ this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze’s (1988) ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti (2019b), to gain purchase on it. Defined as a relational matter of human and non-human powers of acting in pursuit of affirmative values, affirmative ethics focuses up relations, forces and affects. It poses considerable challenges to a normalised construction of ethics as located solely within a constituted human subject with moral intentionality as its core. Aff..