REIMAGINING EDUCATION THROUGH POSTHUMAN PHILOSOPHY: MUSIC, EMBODIMENT AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN LEARNING

Abstract

Education has traditionally been organised around human-centred assumptions that position the autonomous learner, rational cognition and individual achievement at the centre of knowledge production. Such assumptions are increasingly challenged by ecological crises, artificial intelligence, digital technologies, multispecies relations and emerging understandings of material agency. Posthuman philosophy provides an alternative framework for reconsidering education as a relational process involving humans, technologies, bodies, environments, materials and other living beings. This conceptual paper examines the educational significance of music, embodiment and more-than-human learning within contemporary posthuman thought. Drawing on recent scholarship in posthumanism, new materialism, ecological education, embodied learning and music education, the paper argues that learning should not be understood exclusively as the acquisition of information by autonomous human subjects. Rather, learning emerges through embodied encounters among people, sounds, instruments, spaces, technologies, cultural practices and ecological environments. Music is particularly significant because musical experience involves listening, movement, affect, materiality, temporal coordination and relational participation. The paper develops a conceptual posthuman music-pedagogy framework based on relationality, embodiment, material agency, ecological attentiveness and ethical reciprocity. It argues that such an approach can contribute to educational practices that move beyond human mastery toward participation, care and coexistence. Posthuman music education therefore offers possibilities for developing learners who are critically aware of technological mediation, environmentally responsive and capable of understanding knowledge as an emergent process of human and more-than-human relations.