New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiosity?s Vital Potential (Radical Politics and Education)

This open access book develops a theory of “vital curiosity” as a transdisciplinary force that activates ecological flows of connection across pedagogical spaces, disciplinary bodies, curricular structures, and institutional ontologies. Educational approaches and values are currently being rethought in light of global economic and environmental crises, posing fundamental questions about desire, access, responsibility, ethics, and relationality in teaching and learning. Cala Coats explores curiosity’s vital force as a critical learning disposition and creative process that activates movement and attraction through aesthetic disruptions and embodied connections, propelled through affective ruptures and durational commitments toward affirmative complexity. The chapters follow questions and connections that emerge from embodied encounters in schools, homes, public spaces, and the natural environment, illuminating residual patterns of colonization and commodification across bodies, territories, and knowledge. While this book is rooted in questions of schooling and education, it serves as a proposition to realize curiosity’s vital energy as an affirmative ethico-aesthetic force in any context. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theories, the book puts forward an image of educational life, as it extends from curiosity, as a radical pedagogical practice. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com.

Cala Coats is Associate Professor of Art Education in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, USA.

Derek R. Ford is Assistant Professor of Education Studies at DePauw University, USA. He is the author of Education and the Production of Space (2017) and Communist Study (2016).

Tyson E. Lewis is Professor of Art Education in the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, USA.