Cite as: Mohandas, S. & Osgood, J. (2025) Feminist Posthumanism and Education. E. Blair & S. Deckman (ed.) The SAGE Encyclopaedia of Education and Gender. London: SAGE Publications. Feminist Posthumanism and Education Sid Mohandas & Jayne Osgood For centuries, pedagogical theories from the West, shaped by European humanism, have positioned education as the practice of 'making humans' (Snaza, 2013). Education is thus viewed in developmentalist terms, aiming to transform the ontologically and epistemically inferior and feral figure of the 'child' into a fully developed 'human.' Feminist posthumanism bubbles up and erupts as part of a broader ecology of practices and traditions (including Black and Indigenous feminisms, anti/decolonial feminisms, poststructural feminisms, queer and trans feminism, disability studies, crip theory, ecofeminism, animal studies, amongst others), contesting the taken-for-granted notion of ‘human’. In this encyclopedia entry, a framing of feminist posthumanism as a rigid, water-tight movement is refused. Instead it is attuned to as intensities that cannot fully be pinned down, produced through flows, collapses, exchanges and eruptions. In line with similar critical and creative scholarly/activist practices, feminist posthumanism questions and rejects the androcentrism and anthropocentrism of European humanism, while proposing to rework understandings of what constitutes ‘human’. At the same time stretching its focus to include others that humanist education has routinely excluded, namely, the nonhumans, other-than-humans, and more-than-humans (Taylor, 2016). Ruptures to the episteme of Man A key contribution of posthumanism in education is that it throws into question the essentialising binary between human and nonhuman that Western humanist education heavily relies on. Feminist posthumanists argue that the separation between humans and nonhumans and the qualities that determine ‘humanness’ are not only shaped by human supremacy, but they are also gendered, raced and classed. The work of Sylvia Wynter (2003) through her genres of Man has been particularly instrumental in enriching feminist posthuman scholarship in education (Truman, 2019), by offering clarity on gendered, raced and classed formulations that overrepresent themselves in neoliberal education and in contemporary society. Braidotti (2013) identifies this humanist ideal in the ostentatious figure of the Vitruvean Man, which centers a rational economic conception of ‘human’. Education scholars employing feminist posthumanist approaches argue that current educational practices, shaped by neoliberalism, have become a prime site for the production and legitimation of this form of human. For example, Kromidas (2019, p.65) writes that the ‘white Western bourgeois child masquerading as universal child is key to reproducing our current hierarchical order by inciting the violence of continual measurement, evaluation and ranking, thereby legitimizing and depoliticizing the “achievement gap”, and condemning Black, brown and poor children’. Feminist posthumanists view present struggles, i.e. mounting social inequalities, genociding wars, and ecological crises, as differing facets of a world that is oriented around and towards the single episteme of ‘Man’ (Wynter, 2003). Braidotti (2013) refers to this posthuman condition as the convergence of post-humanism and post- anthropocentrism, in which it becomes impossible to think, feel and do as we always have, through the logic of individualism and human exceptionalism. Feminist posthumanists alongside those in other critical scholarly fields insist on the need to do education differently, in ways that foster ‘opportunities for learning to live in and engage with the world and acknowledges that we live in a more-than-human world’ (Gough, 2024, p.290) Swellings of other-than-Man worlds However, feminist posthumanist approaches go beyond the refusal of Man, by bringing together critique and creation in productive partnership towards other-than-Man worlds. Without losing its political edge, it opens up possibilities for experimentation and worldly co-production (Renold & Ivinson, 2021), and locates ‘education in doing, becoming and making’ (Ringrose et al., 2018, p.2). In the following sections several key feminist posthumanist concepts are broadly explored.